Second Life and Immersion

- I'm breaking this post up into several posts, to make it easier to read. -

Immersion and SecondLife

Whenever I read an interview with Phillip Rosedale, or comments he's made regarding SecondLife, almost invariably he will describe it as an immersive virtual world, or speak of how it is Linden Lab's intent to improve the experience of immersion within SecondLife.

There has been talk of SL evolving to the point of realistic graphics, talk of realistic collision detection between avatars and the prim attachments of others. The reasoning given for not allowing avatars to simply pass through each other has been "immersion".

But has all that fallen by the wayside?

Proper collision detection between avatars and attachments has been spoken of for years now, yet nothing has come of it even after the introduction of Havok 4. Worse yet, collision detection between avatars and their environments seems to have been ignored entirely. (Have you ever attempted to crawl through an air vent, or under a low ceiling in SL? You can't, "crawling" only plays an animation and does not affect your avatar's collision box.)

Collision detection is also an issue with vehicles, much moreso than many might realize. As I understand it, the 31 prim limit for vehicles is due, at least in part, to the fact that the collision detection is kept intact for reach individual prim. If that is indeed the case then if residents were able to create their own vehicle bounding boxes of 1-31 prims, independent of the number of prims used in the vehicle itself, we could have vehicles made from far more prims. As it is, vehicles are so low-prim that they are forced to look incredibly crude compared to the rest of the environment. All the moreso if one wishes to include more passengers.

One way around this has been to include a vehicle attachment worn by the avatar, but nothing breaks immersion quite like stepping out of one's car, with the car body attached to their pelvis.

Scale is very important to both design and immersion, and yet the simple idea of adding any sort of height indicator to the avatar editing window has been ignored. A Jira issue specifically requesting this has been languishing, unassigned, for some time now. Even the avatar height attribute remains out of scale to inworld measurement. Most people have no idea how tall their avatars are, the average height seeming to hover around 7 feet tall, over 2 metres!

A lack of intuitive control over how the camera follows an avatar further compounds the problem. It is nearly impossible to navigate realistically scaled builds outside of mouselook, and going into mouselook sacrifices some of the functionality of the default SL camera view. (Try clicking on an object set to have an avatar automatically sit when clicked, in mouselook it does not work. Right-click is also gone.) As such, builds in SL tend to be scaled far larger than even our oversized avatars, complete with oversized furniture.

The default avatars are another factor in this problem, and remain so even more than 5 years since SL's debut. Ruth is perhaps the shortest, at 1.93 metres, or about 6'4". The classic default avatars are about 6'8", or 2.04 metres. The new default avatars remain in about that range. The slider height scale lends itself towards larger avatars, as 50 on the height slider will leave you with a 6'6" avatar. The tallest avatars top out at around 2.5 metres, or around 8 feet tall. To put this all in perspective, the average American is only 5'10", or 1.78 metres.

To make matters worse, this has been the case for so long that many are now unwilling to even accept that their avatars are so tall, claiming that since everyone is it's not a problem and that "short avatars" should make themselves taller. However, in the end this makes it impossible for anyone to have a truly tall avatar. You can only be "average" or "short". Some of the uglier side effects of this includes avatars of merely 6 feet or shorter to find themselves accused of being ageplayers, subjected to unwarranted bans and abuse reports from the ignorant.

From a design and immersion perspective, it is a worst case scenario.

Windlight was welcomed for the clear visual improvement it brought to SL. Improved lighting, much more detailed skies, and far more control over one's environment.

However, Windlight has remained unfinished since it was brought to the standard SL viewer. At this time it is still impossible for one to set their own Windlight viewer defaults. It is impossible for estate owners to set their own region windlight defaults. It is impossible to trade Windlight settings as inventory, which was promised way back when Windlight was first announced oh-so-long ago.

The original Windlight demo videos included weather footage. It has always been unclear whether or not it was ever LL's intent to introduce weather to SL, but doing so could be a great boon to immersion.

The lack of a dedicated client AO seems to be a major hit against immersion, though many might not realize it. Simply put, scripted AO attachments put a lot of strain on simulators, while at the same time being incredibly common. From an immersion standpoint, they are necessary, especially given how poor the default animations are. Given, Linden Lab has announced that they intend to replace at least the default walk animations, but it's been 5 years and replacing the walk animation still does not solve the problem with SL's dependence scripted AOs. Removing that dependence with a client based AO would help SL run much better, or at the very least allow those script cycles to be put to better use.

SL mouth movement is coming in the latest RC it would seem, from the looks of it linked directly to voice. Residents should really be given more control over that, such as the ability to work it into an AO, gestures, have the option to play mouth movements with specific sound clips, etcetera.

Increased control over facial expressions and hand poses/animations would be fantastic, too, and is long overdue in an environment with such emphasis on the avatar.

The SL avatar is perhaps a resident's most important connection to SL. It is the resident's primary outlet of self expression, and quite literally the face we present to the virtual world. And yet, it has gone through 5 years with neglect to very basic aspects.

The basic avatar mesh is not suited to the even just the range of body types one can attempt through the editing sliders. Push too much towards larger muscles, breasts, bellies, etcetera and the problems quickly become apparent. A wider range of body types could be better offered through a small selection of mesh body types, and the ability to modify them as we currently do the single male or female avatar mesh.

The addition of an improved avatar mesh or multiple meshes would not even require the removal of the original male/female mesh selection. Rather, allow users to select the mesh they prefere at any given time, so that they can continue to make use of all the existing avatar based content in SL.

New avatar meshes could also make use of an improved texture template, making it easier to create seamless skin and clothing textures, as well as being able to place different textures on each arm.

Avatars have also long been confined to more or less symmetrical human body shapes. The request that we might be able to easily hide all or part of the avatar mesh to create non-symmetrical, non-human avatars without resorting to the poor kludge of invisiprims or animation tricks has, despite being one of the most popular requests on Jira, only recently seem to come under even consideration from Linden Lab. In fact, this request was closed at least once, questioning that the community actually wanted the feature.

From a design standpoint, this feature is about as important as being able to apply our own avatar textures. Being able to hide parts of the avatar mesh, or all of it if necessary, without ugly invisiprim and animation problems will open up considerable potential for new and unique avatar possibilities.

Furthermore, it is high time Linden Lab has improved the basic avatar skin. Sure, using the tattoo layer allows those with texture skills to create our own custom skin textures, but there is no reason that all of the existing avatar skin layers, including the freckles and makeup layers, could not be improved where a great looking base avatar skin could be created using the avatar editing sliders.

Additional clothing/tattoo layers, and attachment points (such as the neck, and the ability to attach multiple attachments to a single point) would also help SL immensely.

Further control over the prims we place in our environment, and how others are able, or unable, to interact with them would also be a huge boon to immersion in SL. No-sit/no-click attributes could be invaluable within SL.

Many environments within SL use prim/texture effects to create light beams, water effects, etcetera.

Navigating these areas and interacting with other parts of the environment can be hampered by these effects, even as they greatly improve the visual experience. If one could move through these areas without accidentally clicking on light beams, or accidentally sitting on objects that wind up removing them from the environment, or simply breaking immersion, that would be another great improvement for the SL experience.

Prims used for effects and such also tend to play poorly with the camera. Standing near some light beams tends to throw the camera into a fit as it tries to decide whether it wants to be in front of, or behind the prims. There currently seems to be no way to prevent this, though perhaps it could be made a prim attribute, whether or not a prim affects the camera at all.

Being able to walk into a teleport beam, and have it deposit you elsewhere in a sim, or possibly even in another sim, would increase the immersive experience.

SL is filled with prim base HUD attachments, and yet it has remained impossible to create full screen HUD attachments that do not interfere with how one interacts with their environment. When I first came to SL way back in 2005, one of the first things I discovered was a HUD attachment someone made which acted as a filter. Wearing it, everything was covered in what appeared to be a low quality film grain, animated at that. It gave the effect of being in an old movie, or a horror based videogame. However, wearing this attachment prevents you from clicking on anything inworld, making the idea regrettably useless for practical applications, and further hurting the immersive experience.

Getting back to the camera for a moment, there is a surprisingly lack of features there. For basic use, it's great. Being able to cam around with the mouse, that works wonderfully. No complaints, really. It's when you take even a step or two beyond basic use that it begins to fall short.

SL has some nifty little rendering options, and the field of view can be controlled via ctrl+8/9/0 to good effect. The problem is, there is no practical way to make use of these features as they cannot be scripted, even via attachment (which might be the best way of handling it to avoid abuse).

These effects have been in SL since at least 2005 when I joined, possibly all the way back to the beginning...and yet they've been left unusable for content, like some vestigial organs. Combined with Windlight effects, and HUD texture filters, such options would be an incredible boost to what content creators are able to achieve visually.

Maps:

SL is also long overdue on giving content creators more control over specular maps to apply "shiney" to prims and avatars, and bump maps to add detail to their creations. There's no reason to remove the basic specular/bump-map tools, but more advanced creators should be given access to more advanced tools.

Shadows:

Shadows are coming to SL, and that's awesome. For those able to take advantage of them, it will be an incredible boost to immersion, and the overal visual experience of SL. Better yet, many of those (but certainly not all) who have been using early builds of the shadow client seem to be reporting that they're seeing little drop in performance from the addition.

Of course, only the sun and the moon are currently casting shadows, but hopefully in the future local light sources might also be included. Maybe only select light sources as chosen by the person creating them?

Now, this certainly doesn't cover everything. These are just many of the big issues I've run into, and have been hoping to see some improvement, any improvement at all, on as far back as when I'd first started getting into SL.

I'm not one to say there's been no improvement with SL over the years. There's certainly a lot of rough edges, and some serious problems which have yet to be addressed, but at the same time there's been significant improvement as far as visuals and stability that is sometimes overlooked in the face of more immediate concerns.

And yet, many of these issues I want to draw attention to here are matters of basic functionality. Things the average user might not even stop to think about, but we take for granted when it's there. And in the case of virtual environments, much of this has been part of the standard feature set for videogames and the like since the mid to late 90's right up to the present.

Some of these features might take some significant effort to implement. Others could probably be in the next released SL viewer with minimal effort. Few of these are the sort of thing that would be able to garner much attention or votes on the Jira, but that does not mean they are unimportant.

All together they would go a very long way towards drawing more positive attention to SL with a variety of demographics, including casual users, gamers, developers, and corporate users.

Below I've included some choice Jira requests which really deserve a closer look, regardless of the number of votes they have.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-5097
- The long existing problem with light bleed in SL.

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-6713
- Request to use 1-bit alpha channels to help reduce the alpha-sorting problem.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-7253
- Height Indicator for the SL avatar editing window.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-224
- llGetLinkPrimitiveParams function

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1793
- Fix hand animations

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-268
- Tradeable Windlight skies

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-268
- Muteable animation priority

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-386
- Client-based AO

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-212
- llTeleportAgent

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-812
- Avatar Alpha Channel (imported to the internal Jira)

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-1151
- Avatar Collision Box and Crouching

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-2418
- No-sit prims (Would like no-click prims too, k-thx!)

Thanks much. Hope this makes for interesting reading for some. Maybe sparks some ideas, discussion, suggestions, and corrections. Also hope this is in the right forum, if not then mea culpa!

-Edit-

Speaking of, I managed to post this in Technical Issues when I meant to post it in the forum above it, Feature Suggestions. Go me!