Second Life

New Second Life 2.0 Viewer Not Yet in View

Update: Linden Lab has now confirmed through their own blog that the screen shots posted by Tateru will be VERY different from the actual viewer.

“What we ship later this year will be very different from what appeared in that post. We’ll share a sneak peek of the “real” Viewer 2009 later in the year, with plenty of time to receive and incorporate feedback before the final iteration ships.”

Tateru has posted screen shots of the “Second Life Web 2.0″ viewer, which has kicked off a flurry of comments both on Massively and elsewhere. Tateru DOES call it an “early build” but the phrase “not entirely set in stone” makes it sound like this is a few tweaks from complete.

I have to say - when I first saw them, my heart sank, my jaw dropped, and I felt like I was stuck in one of those animation freezes you sometimes get when the lag is bad.

second life 2.0 viewer

I asked senior sources at the Lab, however, for comment, to confirm how close the interface design was to “final” and the response was as follows:

“That was an early version of ‘Viewer 2009′ and the project has progressed dramatically since then.”

So, I’m going to take it that this was more of a prototype/experiment than actual interface. The only good things I could see in the whole exercise was a bit of thought around renaming buttons, and a few neat ideas for tear off menus and maybe some different hierarchies.

Otherwise, if the new viewer comes anywhere close to what Tateru posted, then I’m building my own.

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