Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life, go back to the company which he left in 2010 to take her on the path of the metaverse and defeat, the new David against the giant Goliath, Facebook (now called Meta) and the other big names in technology, who also want to mortgage the future of online digital relationships.
In 2003 Rosedale was the co-creator of one of the first widely distributed virtual worlds, born even before Facebook was founded, and which for a certain period the future was considered social media. All over the world, including Italy, the idea had spread that the future of online interaction would not be the Web or mobile phones, but the use of computers with a three-dimensional social network similar to a video game, in which the interactions did not have a specific purpose. And this had led companies and public bodies and institutions to the race to purchase virtual spaces on Second Life to be ready for the arrival of crowds of users in a new version of the race to the Web, which, however, has never actually been realized for Second Life. Is that even today it is repeating itself, for example on Earth 2.
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How Second Life works
Unlike a game that has goals to achieve, Second Life offers an environment in which to spend time without doing anything but socializing, and possibly buy or sell virtual items. To do this, the company founded by Rosedale, the Linden Lab, allowed and allows you to buy digital land on which to build buildings or buy them from makers, as well as clothes, accessories, vehicles and other things that could be exchanged with an economy based on Linden Dollars, which the company allows to buy and sell with real dollars.
The business model it has allowed to Second Life to survive so far with the accounts in surplus, is that of the rental of virtual land and the taxation on the exchange of Linden Dollars. From the million and a little more active users in the golden age, today there are a few hundred thousand surviving subscribers, who continue to use Second Life with different purposes: from communities of enthusiasts to subcultures that do cosplay or role-playing games, up to the curious who simply want to interact in a virtual environment, moreover safe even during the pandemic. Over the years, many university professors and researchers from around the world have also exploited Second Life as a virtual place for meetings and near-presence meetings.
Building the metaverse
Rosedale returns with the role of strategic consultant and the goal is to transform the old idea of three-dimensional and virtual social Second Life in a real metaverse. And he has clear ideas about what might work and what doesn’t.
The battlefield opened by Facebook, which has now become Meta Platforms precisely to underline the goal of wanting to play a different game in an immersive virtual reality environment, is still to be defined. Many companies are investing billions of dollars to try to build systems based on augmented or virtual reality that can attract people: in addition to Meta, also Microsoft, Nvidia and numerous startups and video game companies such as Epic Games of Fortnite or Roblox, they are looking for the key to creating a metaverse that works.
The same Apple, according to numerous rumors, it should present an augmented reality device that could be used by producers of virtual environments or by Apple itself to create a metaverse.
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Business models
Second Life, despite being among the first companies to create something like a metaverse, is the classic David versus Goliath versus giants like Facebook and its 3.5 billion active users each month (Second Life claims to have approximately one million active users in all). However, Rosedale believes that the big business model, based basically in the track user behavior to send targeted advertisements, is unsuitable for the immersive platforms of the future.
“I think there is a genuine, even existential risk associated with the way users are tracked by traditional social networks”, he told the Wall Street Journal. The metaverse of the future will not be based on advertising, but on other business models that are better than those that monetize users.
A series of developers and the patents that the creator had taken away with him also return together with Rosedale, in addition to the funding from High Fidelity, the investment firm he founded in 2013 and which specializes in video and audio virtual reality experiences. The biggest problem it faces though is demographic: most of today’s social 3D users, from Minecraft a Fortnite, a Roblox, or the great video games for consoles and computers, were not yet born when Second Life was founded, they are not familiar with that kind of experience or even completely ignore its existence.
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