Second Life in your browser: a new initiative from Linden Lab – Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld

For the Lab, the move towards browser-based accessibility to Second Life is based on addressing a number of long-term pain points in using the platform: The fact that it continues to require fairly high-end computer hardware to experience it at its very best – and roughly 50% of the existing user base do not have such hardware at their disposal. The fact that it requires a dedicated viewer to be downloaded and installed by new users as a part of the sign-up process. The fact that the viewer has a sprawling and complex UI which can be both hard to master by new users. Offering a browser-based / streaming solution can overcome these issues – and that is the point of what is being called Project Zero: to allow those on low-spec systems experience SL as if they were using a gaming rig with a high-end GPU, whilst offering incoming new users direct access to coming in-world via a URL within the sign-up workflow.