Five barriers to mainstream virtual world use (and how we dealt with them)

Last week we launched WebFlock. It is by far our most ambitious effort ever to reach the masses with many different types of custom virtual world experiences.

We have learned many lessons over the past three years, chiefly among them has been consumer behavior as it relates to virtual world use. As we set out last year to develop WebFlock, there were key technical and design issues that we knew had to be addressed in our product if it is to break through to consumers. Here are five of them:

1. Computing power

Only a minority of the Internet population has computer hardware powerful enough to have an optimal experience in virtual worlds like Second Life. Based on our informal research, it could very well be less than 5%.

Better hardware will make its way into the wild and, trust me, we’re ready to flip those switches when it happens. To reach the mass Internet audience today, however, we chose to target 3-4 year old hardware for the WebFlock engine.

This is quite the opposite approach taken by virtual world and MMO platforms that target new hardware with their designs and then degrade the quality of the experience for those with lesser specs. Aside from the technical complexities it introduces, this approach carries a risk of undermining one of the key features of virtual worlds which is uniformly representing the shared space to all users.

We decided to standardize on 3-4 year old computing technology, also assuming little or no dedicated 3d processing capability.

2. Sign-up Forms

One of the greatest barriers to having the masses experiment with virtual worlds is the dreadful sign-up form. Virtual worlds are a unique interaction for many consumers and so they are often best understood through experience. As I’ve blogged before, sign up forms must die, especially sign up forms that restrict a users ability to understand the website they are browsing.

Because of the seamless technology decisions we’ve made with WebFlock, anyone that lands on a web page can instantly be immersed in a virtual world with a basic avatar and user name. From there, they can choose the pace and degree to which they commit their personal information with the site.

3. Immersiveness

When confronted with the need to support 3-4 year old computers, many of the competing web-based platforms resort to a single camera perspective using a single isometric (2.5d) renderer.

We wanted something more immersive and flexible, so we incorporated multiple rendering systems that range from 2d up to 3d to best cater to a variety of social and gaming experiences within WebFlock. The added flexibility of multiple views is great because it takes the manual work out of camera control that exists in some 3d environments and it greatly expands the possibilities for a variety of interaction types.

4. Software installation

There are certainly ways to make software installation easy for consumers through plugins and in-browser setup, but based on our experiences it had to be even easier than that.

Downloading and installing software takes time, it may require special computer privileges (particularly in the case of shared family computers or corporate IT environments), and for many consumers it’s simply the fear of causing harm to their computer resulting in future hassles.

For these and many other reasons, we decided it was important to target Adobe Flash, which is the only standard web browser solution that can render virtual worlds for over 90% of web browsers without any additional software installation.

5. Network access and speed

Too often when a consumer commits to installing virtual world software they are immediately disappointed to find that they have yet another step — downloading all of the content. This can take minutes up to hours depending on connection speed. We decided that WebFlock had to load within seconds of landing on a web page so we chose to use progressive download as users around the world.

We also have needed to address access through corporate and ISP firewalls, which we have found to be restrictive of most virtual worlds. Firewalls can be tricky so we have a few mechanisms designed into WebFlock for getting through them and will probably continue to evolve this feature set for quite some time.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 11:49 am and is filed under webflock. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.