Second Life

Second Life 2.0: Video of Tom Hale Demo of New Viewer

Tom Hale gave a tour of the new viewer for Second Life, to be launched in the coming months, although finished his chat with the footnote (his speech was highly footnoted) that it has changed since the screen shot and will be different than he presented.

But still, it gives us a pretty good sense of the design methodology, which includes:

- A browser-type navigation bar with “back” functions so that you can retrace your steps in world, and locations are treated like URLs in a nav bar (SLURLs), including bookmarks etc.
- A right hand panel which opens and closes like a drawer. I couldn’t help thinking of the interface for Z-Brush when I saw this. It promises “no more panel proliferation”. The ‘most used’ features of the viewer are incorporated into the drawer.
- Bottom menu is the most frequently used things in Second Life – gestures, camera controls, chat etc.

Now, I just thought I’d pop up a screen shot of the winning entry from the UI contest that I held some time ago, the winner of which was Rheta Shan who is no longer with us. I’m not saying there are similarities, but it’s interesting to look back on the approaches the contestants took (read the full post here).

The lower menu bar and panel was slightly reminiscent of her approach:

UI contest screen shot second life

Do check out her full entry.

After the jump is T Linden’s presentation of the new viewer:

Again, big thanks to HVX Silverstar for getting these videos up!

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