Second Life 2.0: A sneak peek at the new user-interface [updated]
by Tateru Nino 
Jun 12th 2009 at 9:00AM
Filed under: Screenshots, News items, Opinion, Second Life, Hands-on, Virtual worlds
This week we managed to get a look at an early build of what calls itself Second Life 2.0 – though the final version numbering is up for grabs and it could wind up being called 1.24 or 1.25 yet but Linden Lab has been amending their Second Life trademarks to allow "2" to be added. The only really major changes in 2.0 revolve around the user-interface that interactive design agency Big Spaceship has been working on for the last 6-8 months.
And quite a change it is. We're under no illusions that the new user-interface is entirely set in stone. A few parts are confusing, and it has a ton of rough edges and little quirks. It's fascinating to see the direction that it's going in, however.
Firstly, the menus have been renamed. The new ones are (in order) Me, Communicate, World, Help, Geek, Debug and Develop. Click below for a larger view.
The Geek, Debug and Develop menus are mostly broken out of the current Advanced menu, with a couple extras moved into them, making the overall basic-user menus a whole lot cleaner.
You'll also note that the top bar is heavily reworked, featuring a button for teleporting home, and a teleport history (more about that feature in a minute).
If you look closely on the right, you'll see three new buttons for pop-out tabs.
The top button pops the currently selected tab out (or back in again). The next one is an unusual, but interesting friends-interface. The third accesses landmarks and a persistent teleport history, the latter definitely taking the prize for best new feature.
Popping out the friends tab, gives access to multiple additional friends-lists and associated buttons, each in its own compartment that can be folded and unfolded. If you want handy access to specific subsets of your friends-list (and if your friends-list is of any real size, you probably do) this looks like a really handy way of managing it.
The version we saw comes with three skins, none of which are the 'Silver' skin that's an option in the current viewers. The default is the traditional blue and grey skin that we're all familiar with.
The second skin is called 'Sketch', and is primarily monochrome whites and greys, with buttons that feel hand-drawn.
The third will probably please the gamer or goth in your life. It's called '2009' and looks for all the world like the 'Obsidian' skin in Valve's Steam client (and strongly reminiscent of most digital-delivery game downloaders, actually). Blacks and greys are the theme here. While you can only make out most of the icons as silhouettes in this skin, we assume that's just an early glitch.
What about those pie-shaped context menus? They're gone. They've been replaced with simple, yet functional ordinary sub-treed pop-up menus. Fast, clean and usable, definitely, but we've still got a soft spot for the old pie menu, if only someone had poured a little more polish on them.
All in all, the new interface is useful, even enhancing, though the top bar is a bit of a space-hog, and nothing at all has happened to the bottom bar... yet. That could come down in a future iteration.
It's useful, but it feels stale, a bit dry and utilitarian. It does the job, but it isn't anything special to look at, neither inviting nor repelling. While it seems unusual that a big agency would get brought in to produce something bland, there is also something to be said for a user-interface that doesn't distract the eye from the actual environment – which is, after all, technically the point.
There's also a separate project consisting of a brand-new, fluffy, easy-to-use, fire-and-forget downloader/installer that's been in development through the first half of the year, and we're expecting Linden Lab to announce both of these during the inevitable speeches and press-releases at Second Life's sixth anniversary later this month.
UPDATES:
Many of you have asked, how we got a hold of the new viewer. Well, if you dig deeply enough into the tangle that is the SL knowledge-base and the SL Wiki, you'll find a lot of information, including a publicly accessible web-server where every new internal viewer-build is uploaded, the moment it is complete. We've been watching that site (and about a dozen others) for almost two years.
It's a bit of a scary place to hang out, really. The new viewer builds can sometimes do terrible things to your system.
Surprisingly, the Lab's removed the 2.0 builds (and only the 2.0 builds) from that server. Which is odd. We've never known the Lab to remove brand new builds (or, technically, any builds) from there before, even when they were made public. So, what's so special about 2.0?
The Lab acknowledges that the new 2.0 viewer is the Viewer 2009 of which it spoke earlier. We probably should have mentioned that during the initial writeup, but the Lab seemed to have lost sight of the 2009 branding. There seems to be some branding confusion inside the Lab, as various groups there don't seem to be sure whether the new viewer is called Second Life 2.0, Viewer 2.0, or Viewer 2009. Dig deep enough and you'll find examples of all of these.
Linden Lab seems to have made the choice to jump from 1.24 or 1.25 to 2.0 for this viewer, and to amend its trademark registrations to allow them to cover Second Life 2. If the folks at the Lab are not going with Second Life 2 or Second Life 2009, then they seem to be wasting a whole lot of effort.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
Peter Stindberg said on 9:36AM 6-12-2009
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Teleport History is already part of the regular viewer, only not as easily accessible but part of the normal menu?
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aki.shichiroji said on 9:44AM 6-12-2009
To a certain degree? You get the SLURL you TPed from in your local chat... but the usefulness for that is limited when the fact is sometimes you've TPed in to a spammy area.... why scroll all the way up to the link when you cuold just hit 'back', or select a previous location from a pulldown menu?
Mudbeed said on 9:13AM 6-12-2009
Hey,
I am sorry... but this is stupid. They have spent 6-8 months and most of the difference is the way they titled the top menu bars?
I like the extras in the Friendslist and Inventory... but the top menu bars makes me think that Big Spaceship has their heads up their asses. C'mon they are supposed to make it more user friendly, I thought.
Ok well most newbs are used to the average top of a browser (you know.. File, Edit, View...etc.)
So then they change it to a super unintuitive group of names... for what?
Me, Communicate, World, Help, Geek, Debug and Develop?
W/e it doesn't really matter.
SL 2.0?
This is like SL 0.9 plus a couple needed features making it SL 1.0 again.
F*cking Lindens..... jeeze....everything they have done this last year makes me pissed...
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aki.shichiroji said on 9:42AM 6-12-2009
As long as they haven't changed the hotkeys around too much, i'm not too bothered by the top menu change, to be honest. As long as they're not still hiding things.
I like the fact they're adding Friend categorization. It will help vastly for those who have large lists of mixed individuals for whom various visibility & object permissions are set.
Also, a context menu instead of the pie menu is supposed to be a little more intuitive, so i'd be interested to see how much better or worse it does work for content creators in practice.
What DOES bother me though is that the context menu *yet again* is missing the fundamentals for content creators to get started working within two clicks.
In my (almost) three years of SL, i have NEVER ONCE hit 'Gestures' on the pie menu with the intent of actually using Gestures, and have great difficulty seeing the need for immediate UI access to that menu. But i use 'edit' every day, dozens of times every hour. To deliberately hide that again after having dealt with this in a JIRA is rather frustrating.
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Tateru Nino said on 9:45AM 6-12-2009
The menu is contextually sensitive. It pops up quite different options depending on exactly what you're right clicking on.
aki.shichiroji said on 9:55AM 6-12-2009
Is there any ETA to your knowledge when this '2.0' will be released for candidacy?
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Tateru Nino said on 10:03AM 6-12-2009
Linden Lab have previously announced "around November" for the User-Interface refit. Our guess is that they're still on track for that.
Phoenix Psaltery said on 10:10AM 6-12-2009
I like the idea of multi-friends lists. It'd be nice if they were renamable, i.e. "Close Friends," "Acquaintances," "Business Contacts."
Teleport history is already available on some of the third party viewers, notably the GreenLife Emerald viewer.
P2
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Melissa Yeuxdoux said on 6:53PM 6-12-2009
Or maybe even multiple tags rather than a multiple directories (do they allow a hierarchy of those?)...
Loki said on 10:14AM 6-12-2009
I was hoping for something a little bit more innovating. It should not be a case of just adding new features to the UI but thinking about how we use and look into SL.
Though it's hard to gage how different the experience is from this short sneak peek.
I Personally would like to see a UI that has two modes, one for the beginners and casual world users, and one for the hardcore builders and doers.
I'd like the UI to be intuitive, know when to disappear, and when to reappear.
I'd like a better system for storing inventory that is'nt too complex.
I want to be able to build my Viewer around the community im so involved with in SL....
Maybe these are things they are tackling... will have to wait and see.
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Tateru Nino said on 10:17AM 6-12-2009
Well, there's some of that. There's a Tools menu which (and you may have seen this behavior before) doesn't appear until you go into edit mode. Almost none of the options or actions in that menu are useful if you're *not* in edit mode. Except there are a few (like the display of property lines and banlines) that you'd not expect to be hidden away outside of edit-mode.
Loki said on 10:26AM 6-12-2009
What i mean is like, the chunky top netbrowser style bar dissapearing unless you mouse close to the top. My perfect SL viewer would allow me to just see the world and not have all the buttons at the bottom or top.
So far there is nothing to suggest anyone outside of LL has been doing this reskin job... :-p
Doubledown Tandino said on 10:15AM 6-12-2009
New viewer looks awesome. LOTS of changes.
I felt the need to comment though, because I have a distaste for the term "Second Life 2.0"
Massively... you have a FAR reach in the technology, virtual world industry scene.... using the poor-fitting term "Second Life 2.0" is going to stick with people.
There's many reasons why the term "Second Life 2.0" doesn't match this situation...but furthermore, it's going to annoy the hell out of all of us as this new viewer approaches and everyone in SL is saying "SL 2.0 is coming SL 2.0 is coming!!"
I can tell it's gonna be a term that really irks and bothers some people, and I have a feeling that since massively has used the term, it's going to catch on.
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Tateru Nino said on 10:29AM 6-12-2009
I got the term from the viewer itself. It is Second Life 2.0.0. Plus there's the work with the trademarks to allow for a "2" (or a "two") to be added to the existing Second Life trademark registrations.
We're thinking that it is pretty clear that Second Life 2 is the Lab's intentional choice.
Eris said on 10:31AM 6-12-2009
To be fair to them, the UI graphics will probably be the last elements they add, best to get the features in place before making the button graphics for them.
I had my own attempt at SL UI design in the wake of Dusan Writer's UI competition. Didn't get very far with it, realising I had better things to do with my time, but I sympathise with their plight. You want to make what's there much better without alienating existing users. My faltering attempts are still online (tho' not for much longer) if anyone's curious : http://gallery.me.com/nautilina#100047&view=mosaic&bgcolor=dkgrey&sel=0
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Doubledown Tandino said on 10:47AM 6-12-2009
Thanks @Tateru re comment 12 and 13.
So it IS actually Linden Lab that is about to make the gross marketing error in calling their next step "Second Life 2.0"
Shame they're about to do this... because it's completely the wrong (and counterproductive) terminology.
... but then again LL has always distorted words and terms.... hasn't it ALWAYS turned around and bit them in the ass? ("opensim" should have been "voidsim", "residents" is always a butchered term as well.)
... i dunno, i just get very annoyed when something get named something, and I know it's going to stick as the term... and it's just as-a-matter-a-fact THE WRONG TERM to use for describing their new product.
(consider you walk into a CD music store.... when your favorite band is placed in the "pop" section of a music store... doesn't it make you want to walk out of the store not buying anything because it's obvious, they don't know anything about music. Well... I haven't purchased anything at Sam Goody for over 20 years because of that)
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sseraph said on 12:14AM 7-07-2009
I would expect SL 2.0 to have radically improved internal server side characteristics and to expose new capabilities like more videos usable at once without parcel restrictions or allowing prim size to be up to 50 m in any dimension. Calling something 2.0 that is mainly just new GUI on the same old capability and performance is annoying to say the least.
Ari Blackthorne said on 10:48AM 6-12-2009
I like what I'm seeing.
What I like is the "plain, bland, utilitiarian" look of it.
Just like you said, Tateru: the interface should more or less disappear and allow the content to be the focus. But at the same time, make the tools accessible and easy to use with as little effort as possible.
I have couple "Magick" huds in-world.
One is plain as hell. Just a blue rectangle with boring-looking buttons. The other is artistically stunning - looking like a scroll and a lot of artistic work went into it. Definitely eye-candy. And it's a miserable job of actually using it because it's too hard to read the button names and know 'ehere' you are on it.
Keep the eye-candy. Give me function and as effortless-as-possible access to the tools.
Thus, what I see here is on the right track the way I see it.
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obo said on 5:58PM 6-12-2009
Honestly, I was hoping the killer UI feature would be a fully user-modifable base UI.
What MMO at this point doesn't have a heavily user-skinnable interface? Other than through homebrewed clients - which are waaaay outside the scope of most SL users - why won't Linden let users change the base UI?
Considering the sort of UI options WoW users offer each other, what do you think SL users - people who are obviously more interested in creating content than users of other MMOs/VWs - could create?
Ann Otoole said on 11:25AM 6-12-2009
Where is the most frequently used right click option for edit?
Pretty damning evidence that LL is going to remove build in the future and only their 500 dollah a year GSP sycophants will be allowed to do business and create content in second life.
You as a reporter need to ask them this question daily until they reveal the truth.
"Are you going to end User Generated Content in Second Life?"
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