Facebook-like metaverse potential disaster says Second Life creator Philip Rosedale

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Nikkei Asia | Ken Koyanagi | Mar 18, 2022

Second l ife - Facebook-like metaverse potential disaster says Second Life creator Philip Rosedale

Philip Rosedale says technology is not yet ready for 3D immersive VR

TOKYO -- "Metaverse" has become a buzzword in tech, business and beyond since Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of his company from Facebook to Meta Platforms last October, signaling a new focus on creating a virtual world where people can "live" in the form of avatars.

But what is effectively a kind of metaverse has actually been available to consumers for nearly two decades -- ever since Linden Lab of San Francisco launched its Second Life platform in 2003.

Philip Rosedale, the inventor of Second Life and founder of Linden Lab, has a vision for the metaverse that contrasts sharply with Zuckerberg's plans. Now an adviser to Linden, he shared his views with Nikkei in a recent interview. Edited excerpts follow.

Q: How do you view Zuckerberg's version of the metaverse?

A: I have two observations. One is that we are not technologically ready yet for the 3D metaverse for virtual reality headsets. [The] technology does not yet exist. The second thing I would say, more specifically about Meta, is that the business model Facebook has historically used, based on a very sophisticated kind of advertising involving behavioral targeting with a lot of surveillance and personal data, is not a safe model to apply to the metaverse.

If you imagine putting people as avatars into a virtual world with that kind of surveillance and behavior modification going on, it would be extremely dangerous for everyone. In my opinion it simply cannot be allowed to happen.

See: 7 Ways the Metaverse is Changing Enterprises

Second Life is proof, at least for a certain size of audience, that you do not have to rely on that kind of business model and that you can create a virtual world where people have privacy.

Second Life's business model is based on fees. There are two kinds of fees. One is, if you choose to own a piece of land in Second Life, which is about the size of Los Angeles, you have to pay a monthly fee of about $20 per acre. The second type of fee is charged, when you sell some virtual merchandise to other people, on listing and transactions. It is like a single-digit percentage of the value traded. Not as large as Apple's App Store.

And you know what? Second Life is making more annual revenue per active user than Facebook or YouTube does. That shows a metaverse does not require the Facebook-like business model. But if Meta chooses to apply the Facebook model to its metaverses, that would be a terrible thing, even an existential threat.

Q: What do you mean when you say that technology is not ready yet?

A: One thing that sets a metaverse apart from the conventional internet is that it always has other people there. When you go to a conventional website to do shopping or to read news, there is nobody else there with you. You cannot look to your left or right and see other people. In a metaverse, experiences that we would like to realize there, like a college classroom or a live music event, require us to enable hundreds or even thousands of people to be there near each other with sight and sound of each other. And that is very difficult technology.

See: Meta reveals it’s built one of the world’s fastest supercomputers to power the metaverse

We at High Fidelity have worked on spatial audio for the last 10 years and today we can enable a couple of hundred people, or a little more than that, to share the same space with sound. But having a bunch of people visibly standing around at an event, looking interesting enough that you would want to walk up and talk to them, it is not technologically possible yet. There have to be advances in cloud computing, rendering and a number of other things to make that possible. I think it will happen in the next five years.

And VR headsets, they are more like 10 years away. Those are in a very early stage. Today they are very uncomfortable. Actually we do not have the scientific approach to fix the dizziness we feel when we wear the headsets. The problem is that any time you move in VR but your head or actual body is not moving, eventually it makes you sick. And it tends to make women somewhat sicker than men and that is a terrible problem if you are trying to create a social experience.

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