Second Life Founder Returns To Revamp His Original Metaverse

An anonymous reader shares a report: The metaverse isn't a new concept. Not only did Neal Stephenson coin the idea in 1992, but some of us were literally living in virtual spaces with virtual currency and virtual storefronts nearly 20 years ago. The virtual place many people went back then was Second Life. Philip Rosedale, Second Life's founder, has decided to task a core team to work on evolving Second Life now that the metaverse has become a buzzword yet again. His hopes are that developing community-focused worlds like Second Life will solve some metaverse problems that aren't necessarily being solved in VR headsets... yet. After Second Life, Rosedale became focused on VR technology in 2013, co-founding a company called High Fidelity that promised high-end, low-latency VR. But High Fidelity started to pivot from VR to other technologies over the last few years, focusing on spatial audio most recently. In 2019, Rosedale published a goodbye of sorts to VR, stating that VR hadn't reached a form that was good enough for most people to want to use. Talking with him over Google Meet in 2022, he still feels that way, calling VR headsets a blindfold to the real world that only some people feel comfortable enough to use. Rosedale thinks VR headsets could hit an iPhone moment, but maybe not for another few years. In the meantime, he's shifting focus to a metaverse platform that doesn't require headsets: namely, Second Life. He isn't the only person to feel this way: Even VR/AR software companies like Spatial have recently pivoted away from VR headsets as a way to reach more people.

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