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HUNTER WALK: Thanks everybody for coming.
I want to introduce two speakers today, Philip
Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka from Linden Lab.
And, I guess, got five or six years ago now, when I first
met these guys, somebody had told me they're working on
something pretty cool.
And I went and--
they were originally located in Hayes Valley, up in San
Francisco, and, literally, in a garage.
It was a garage that was almost still being used.
Because there was an auto body shop next door and the fumes
would come in.
And to the other side was a corset shop that served--
Dark Garden, they had fetish wear and
other types of things.
And this was around like 2000, 2001, so there wasn't a whole
lot of technology, especially consumer technology innovation
going on at the time.
But both Philip and Cory had a really audacious vision of a
world that users would build.
And, again, if you remember, this is sort of before
blogging, and podcasting, and everything caught on.
So if you were talking user-created content, people
would think like bad MP3 files from mp3.com.
And, why would anybody ever want to do that?
And, nobody can create anything of interest.
And so then, when I started to look at what they were doing,
of course, I immediately signed up.
And had the honor and privilege of working with them
for a number of years, before I came over to Google.
And so, I think, late 2004 Philip and Cory came and gave
us a little bit of a peek inside of Second Life, which
is a fully user-created virtual world, built,
programmed, sculpted, designed, and lived in, by now
over 150,000 people in 91 countries.
Between the size, acreage, and gross domestic product, I
think it's larger than Monaco.
And Luxembourg is next.
So we figure it's only another five years until they get a
TLD for URLs.
And then eventually a UN seat.
So, thank you, Philip and Cory, for coming and filling
us in on the development of this world
over the last years.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Thank you.
Thank you, Hunter.
So, we'll, I hope, in Google and Linden Lab style, we'll
make this fun.
We're certainly not going to show any slides.
We're just going to goof around in Second Life.
Cory is the great architectural brain behind
Second Life's technology, behind its scripting language,
behind the team, everything else.
And, on top of that, he's like the fastest
builder in Second Life.
So, we'll do this fun thing of, I can try to keep your
attention, and talk about the company, and how
successful we are.
And then Cory can attempt to distract
you by making dominoes.
Yeah, we're-- as Cory's going to say, unfortunately today,
although we love Google, we don't love Google enough to
delay a system upgrade.
So we're actually not really in the main grid, right now,
as we call it in Second Life.
We're doing a database upgrade right now.
So, we didn't want to change this.
Because we'd already scheduled it, and wanted to
come down and chat.
And so Cory is alone.
So, the only difference about the real Second Life, is that
there's always a ton of people hanging around, gawking at
what you're doing, which is kind of part of
the magic of it.
But, anyways, how many people here have used Second Life, or
have an account, or sort of know?
So, a few.
So, like Hunter said, the basic idea with Second Life
was-- and it wasn't something that was possible until five
or six years ago to even really start working on--
it was this radical idea that, well, what if you could create
a 3D immersive environment that looked as
good as a video game?
That was tactile, and visceral, and exciting, and
sexy, funny to be in?
But had the, of course, very web-like and very compelling
property that everything in it was built by you?
And, in fact, the method of building would be the method
of living, that you would just do things there, in the same
way that you do them in the real world?
You could touch things.
You could sculpt things.
You could paint things.
You could just build.
You could make stuff.
And so we started the company with this vision, what would
it take technologically to build an environment in which
you could make things, and make really cool things?
And so, the basic capabilities discussion of Second Life is,
as you can see, we've got a physics engine that's
simulating the whole world.
Everybody sees the same thing.
That physics is happening on the
servers, not on the clients.
There's a scripting language, there's a little script that's
inside every one of those dominoes, because I bet
they're going to set themselves
back up in a minute.
And the dominoes are basically programmed to set themselves
back up after a second.
See that?
And the scripting language, which Cory actually wrote the
syntax for, is a big part of the system.
So he can actually code the behaviors in
each of those objects.
They live in each of those objects.
The world of Second Life itself, as you can imagine, is
a huge server farm.
Because it takes a lot of machines to simulate all the
stuff that people make.
So just as a basic, for those who haven't heard of Second
Life, Cory is standing in one server machine right now.
The whole world of Second Life is, at present, about 2,000
CPU cores, running about 30,000 acres of real estate
with about 10 million user-created objects, of which
that domino would be an example of one.
The world is inconceivably large.
That is to say, the rate at which we're adding new
servers, the rate at which people are buying new land in
it, exceeds, vastly, the rate at which you, as an
individual, could walk around and see all the
stuff that's happening.
So its event horizon, if you will, is kind of expanding
outward at this point.
We passed that point a few months ago.
As Hunter said, there's about 150,000 people living in here.
There's about 5,500 people online in the evening,
max-concurrency.
People are doing things like taking pictures.
Cory can show you, all those little red dots are actually--
there's a photo blogging service that a third party set
up, it's called slpics.
And we're just--
very Google style--
we're just taking the feed from those guys.
And putting those pictures up.
But these are actually live pictures that are coming out
of Second Life, as people are just taking snapshots of
what's going on.
So, again, just to give you an idea of scale, 2,000 machines,
a gigabyte per second at peak.
So very, very large server deployment.
5,000 people in there.
About 20,000 people a day using Second Life.
And then the most amazing thing is, if you give people
the ability to make things, obviously, they're going to
value those things.
And in some cases, want to buy and sell them from each other.
One of the important things we did, right from the beginning,
was we allowed everybody to own their own
intellectual property.
So, when you build a rocket like that, it
really belongs to you.
You can mark it as being created by you.
You can sell it to somebody for a certain price.
That's cool.
I haven't seen that.
Is it going to blow up?
Or--?
CORY ONDREJKA: No, [INAUDIBLE].
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Short attention span theater when
you're in Second Life.
Everything needs to explode, or have a firework, or you
know, your mania for entertainment is even so
greater than real life.
Because it can be.
So all these things that Cory is doing are all examples of
this stuff.
But the most amazing thing is, if you bought one of those
fireworks--
and we can go on one of the catalog sites, and look right
now for one-- if you bought a firework like that, it might
cost you 250 Linden dollars, which would be about $1, OK,
to buy that firework.
So you might ask yourself,--
[LAUGHTER]
PHILIP ROSEDALE: --are these guys just crazy, or does this
stuff really work?
So, the answer to the really works question-- and that's
kind of the update from late 2004, when we were here--
is it works in a big way.
Users buy and sell objects like that firework from each
other at a rate of, at this point, about
$5 million a month.
And that's climbing like 25% a month.
There's about 4 million transactions.
The average transaction size is around $1.
In the last 30 days,-- you talk about, is this Costco?
Is this ten lucky people selling people all the things
they buy in here?--
in the last 30 days, there were 180,000 distinct objects
that were bought by those people.
So what you have here is, you have a vast creative
environment in which you can make anything, combined with a
property, and rights, and transactional currency system
that lets people buy and sell things from each other very,
very easily.
The other piece of this, if you're wondering, so, can you
can you build a real living on that?
If there's $5 million a month in transactions--
bear in mind, this is not money that we're making.
This is $5 million in transactions between
individuals in Second Life--
the way that works is--
Oh, that's weird.
Are you drawing with that?
CORY ONDREJKA: No, I'm just drawing by [INAUDIBLE].
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Oh, it's Starax's stuff, right?
Yeah.
One of the most prolific creators of objects in Second
Life is the guy who made the wand that Cory can probably
show us, it's in his hand.
And this magic wand, basically, does things.
It's this wand of many strange things.
So, as Corey does stuff, it just sort of follows along and
does strange things.
Like if he says, listen or something, it'll
make a giant ear.
And it's just incredibly weird.
Watch this, Santa.
[LAUGHTER]
PHILIP ROSEDALE: It really brings home the whole--
CORY ONDREJKA: [INAUDIBLE].
PHILIP ROSEDALE: $5 million in Santas, every month.
So the way people make money--
so, let me wax on a couple of the aspects of this.
So people are basically, as I said, they're buying and
selling things to the tune of about $5 million a month.
This enables a substantial number, thousands of people,
to make, at this point, significant amounts of money
with sort of hundreds, low hundreds of people who would
tell you this is their full time job.
This is all they do in Second Life.
Now, those people come from all over the world.
So, one of the things that's so profound about Second Life
is, you can kind of imagine like--
Cory, do you have the [UNINTELLIGIBLE]--
look at that, he's just like, he knows me,
he melded with me--
so, check this gun out, right?
So this is like the coolest gun you can
get in Second Life.
It was built by a graduate student up in Seattle.
And that student has gone to college, basically, on the
revenues that he's made from selling this weapon.
We're trying to hire him right now.
Don't you.
[LAUGHTER]
PHILIP ROSEDALE: The gun that he made there costs about $5,
it's about 1000 Linden dollars or 1200 Linden dollars, it's
about $5 apiece.
Now, just stop for a moment and consider something.
All it takes to make money in Second Life is, basically, a
PayPal account.
I can describe it more.
I'll stop for questions, and we'll start
talking about stuff.
There's a currency exchange system where you, basically,
take the Linden dollars that you've charged for the gun
you've sold, and you can sell those Linden dollars to
somebody else on the currency exchange.
And, with a PayPal account or a wire transfer, you can get
the money back from what you're doing.
What this means is that some kid, in some faraway country
where the cost of living is a tenth, or whatever, what it is
here, can basically, sheerly on the basis of his or her
intellectual horsepower, can build a gun that competes with
the gun that Cory had on.
All that's necessary is cleverness.
All that's necessary is intellectual skill, diligence,
working with people inworld, as necessary, to get the thing
marketed or whatever.
But none of this requires shipping, tariffs, H1B visas,
or anything else.
And so your international kid out there can, basically, sell
a $5-a-pop gun to what is nominally, at this point at
least, a domestic US or North American audience that's
willing to pay $5.
So if you think about that, it makes you think, wow, how fast
can something like this grow?
So we've created a pure intellectual palate or a
canvas for people to do things.
And we've actually created a way for the ones who want to,
to monetize that.
So that's kind of a basic overview.
You can see Cory is--
as you can also imagine, some of the big businesses in
Second Life are clothing.
You can see how dressed up Cory is there.
The market for tattoos, and skins, and sunglasses, and
clothes, and rings, and earrings is huge.
Each one I said there is like multiple hundreds of thousands
of dollars a month in objects sales.
And a lot of this is stuff nobody really knows yet.
That's why it's fun to come talk to you guys.
This is changing very rapidly.
People are building content very rapidly.
A couple of years ago, this was all basically just dirt.
We started in 2003 with 16 simulators online.
And there's 2,000 simulators online today.
The other thing-- let's see, about the mechanism, what
haven't I told you? --is you basically buy
real estate from us.
You give us money to basically rack a new
server, if you will.
And that server just comes up wherever you
want it on the map.
And you're able to then develop the land.
So, for example, the woman who's making the most money in
Second Life is a woman who lives in Germany who is our
little Rockefeller.
And she's making probably $175,000 or so a year.
Basically, developing real estate for people, building
houses and then reselling those houses to them, that
real estate, at a higher price.
So, she has an immense business doing that.
So just like in the real world, it pays to be in real
estate, even in Second Life.
Touch a little bit on demographic.
It's really the earlier adopter crowd.
A lot of people see Second Life and they think, OK, it's
a bunch of IT nerds that are doing that.
And, yeah, indeed we were, the people who built it.
But if you look at the--
[LAUGHTER]
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Wow.
--if you look at the demographic
today, it's 43% female.
The average age is 32.
The age distribution looks just like the
US population curve.
There's a smooth descent to 67 years old.
There's lots of people in their 50s, 60s, and 70s using
Second Life.
I mentioned international.
It's about 25% international.
So we believe that the people that are using it, and coming
in, and doing things in here are
pretty much just everybody.
Anybody that has a clever idea, entrepreneurial, enjoys
the community that's evolving around all this.
So that's probably a good overview.
And I'll look to you guys--
all this stuff is sort of baffling.
So, in terms of having a good conversation and going farther
on this stuff, what do you want to know about?
And I'll kind of keep going.
AUDIENCE: What are the parameters for creating an
object in Second Life?
I know the clothing, the textures and so forth,
[UNINTELLIGIBLE]
scripting, what is the package that is an
object in this stuff?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Yes, we will take a look at that.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
PHILIP ROSEDALE: The question is, what are the parameters?
How do objects work?
How do actions on objects work?
Clothing is easy to understand.
But how about something like a gun?
How does that actually work?
Cory can show us here by taking a look at this gun in
more detail.
The gun itself is made of basic primitives that are
glued together to form a larger object.
And then there are scripts which can be, essentially,
dragged into each of those parts of the gun.
The scripting language itself is, basically, event-driven.
It's a sort of a C-style language that let's you
respond to events.
So something like "on res" means, when the thing gets
made, do this.
And then there'll be something "link message" means, some
other object, talk to it.
There's messages for "on click" when you click on
something, and then when you let up on it.
So it's--
I don't know, Cory, I don't know what language it would be
the most like?
CORY ONDREJKA: It's a very C-like [INAUDIBLE].
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Yeah, it's pretty easy to modify things.
Obviously, to do great work in it requires that you be a
great programmer, just like anybody else.
But to go in and modify what noise your little squeaky toy
makes when you squeeze it in Second Life, that's really
actually pretty easy.
And rapid modification, people riffing on each other's ideas,
is definitely a big part of the power of Second Life we
were just talking about.
So, yeah, that's basically kind of a rough overview.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: Why didn't use a standard scripting
language like Lua?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Yeah, a standard scripting
language like Lua?
I don't know, Cory you want to--?
CORY ONDREJKA: The reason we didn't was because we didn't
want to have thousands of people writing physical
simulations and scripts working together.
And we looked at the state of the art in
2000 on sandbox languages.
The amount of work to beat one of the existing sandbox
languages into submission was very comparable to the amount
of building one from scratch.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: There were also issues like garbage
collection.
And then--
Do you want to talk about--?
We're working on the next generation of this.
CORY ONDREJKA: Yes, what we're doing right now, actually, is
we're switching over to Mono.
So, Mono, if you know that, it's the opensource.net
implementation.
Where we are right now on that is the current scripting
language is compiling to the Common Language Runtime.
And we're basically in final testing on that.
And that gives us pretty significant speed up.
And ultimately lets people start writing
in other CLR languages.
So our goal is to move now to a more
standards-based approach.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: I should also say, just for those who don't
know, our whole system and everything has been built on a
lot of open source components.
The servers are all Linux based.
The code running on them is just C++.
We have clients for Linux, Mac, and Windows.
We use a bunch of standards-based
stuff wherever we can.
The complexity, though, of what we've done is
extraordinarily high.
There's a tremendous amount of code interfaces, modules,
conceptualizations in here.
And some of this stuff, there just wasn't anything out there
yet for us to really re-use.
Who's next?
What's next?
What else can we talk about?
AUDIENCE: Collisions, [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Collisions between physical objects?
AUDIENCE: No, I mean [INAUDIBLE PHRASE].
collisions ultimately get [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE].
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Right.
So one of the coolest things about this, and one of the key
architectural pieces that we worked together on-- by the
way, my background, Cory and I both are the two senior
technical guys at the company.
I was the CTO, and before that the VP of media systems at
RealNetworks.
My background is physics.
So I worked on programming, on networking
codex, stuff like that.
Cory has a very wide background, but most recently,
before Linden Lab, was working on gaming technology, so
networking 3-D, stuff like that.
One of the neat things that we did, to answer your question,
is we built a simulation environment in which the
servers contain all the simulation, so they're
authoritative.
And then they, in a terse manner, update all the clients
with the same information.
So what's so cool about the dominoes example is, there's
basically a rigid body physics engine-- we use Havok as one
of the components of that, for rigid body collisions--
that's handling the collisions of those dominoes.
And then what's so cool about that is that if there's
multiple people sitting inworld--
and, again, I apologize we can't be sitting in the main
grid right now, which sucks--
when there are multiple people sitting in there, they all see
those dominoes contact and fall at exactly the same time.
Because basically the server is authoritatively sending
that information.
The clients are essentially kind of locally predicting it
a little bit, so that it looks smooth.
Again there's just a--
we're really good as a development team-- there's
just kind of a ghastly amount of work that's gone into this.
It's, as Hunter said, it's a five year project now.
AUDIENCE: What about the predictive
aspect on the clients?
Is that [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Do things rewind on the client?
Do they get the deja vue?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Well, sometimes you can have an
inconsistency between the prediction state of the client
and what's happening on the server.
And when the server gets the new data, sends you new data,
it updates, so rubberbanding, or that kind of snapping back
happens sometimes, yeah.
But we've done a pretty good job of eliminating that.
The other thing that's really cool is that
our simulation is--
and this is the thing we can't show you, Cory is just
standing on one simulator.
But when there are multiple ones connected together, you
can't see the boundaries.
So we've done all the edge-crossing behavior, and
continuing the physics simulation from one machine
onto another machine.
We've done all that work.
And that's a tremendous amount of work.
It's a big peer-connected network, essentially, the
2,000 CPUs that I mentioned.
And each of them is running a physics simulation, and a
scripting simulation, and a weather simulation.
AUDIENCE: [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]
there's no server boundaries, actually, the servers are all
one world [UNINTELLIGIBLE]?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: All one world, yeah.
There's no shards in Second Life.
So, if you think about Second Life--
people always talk about World of Warcraft, everybody knows
World of Warcraft with 5 million people in there, not
only is it--
does not have the sort of capability
that we've built here.
But we are probably, I don't know, about as big as a single
World of Warcraft shard, right now.
So, from the standpoint of people being inworld at the
same time, we're like the biggest in the world, or we're
very close.
We're actually, EVE Online, for those who geek out on
games, has--
they've actually done a really nice job with a single world,
they have like 20,000 people or something inworld at once.
But the point is that the big online environments, they're
amplified by content, by complex behavior, by people
being able to form communities.
You have to have all that stuff happening in a
contiguous space.
And so, right from the beginning, the whole idea was
that the network was all these machines.
And it was all going to be connected together.
And everything was going to be visible from everybody else.
And that's what's driven a lot of economic competition that
drives that big $5 million a month I talked about.
All that stuff is driven by the fact that
it's all in one world.
You can walk somewhere and bust out something cool that
you've built and show it to somebody else.
You don't have to worry about boundaries of any kind.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: What kind of security issues have you run
into, having all these user [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Lots.
So, yeah.
The question is, what kind of security
issues have we run into?
And the answer is, there's like, boy, we could talk about
that for an hour.
CORY ONDREJKA: The important thing--
The really important thing is the architecture is set up so
there's very little action at a distance.
So while you may be able to, say confuse Havok, and cause
the physics engine to take down an individual machine,
there are 2,000 simulators, that's 125 square
kilometers of space.
So if there's one machine that crashes and then comes back
up, it isn't a tremendous impact.
The most interesting attacks have been
self-replicating attacks.
The scripting language allows self-replication, so we have
the expected grey goo attacks.
And, basically, there we respond by giving residents a
lot of local control, by--
we have what we now call the space lasers that allow us to
go to orbit and nuke the site from orbit, because it's the
only way to be sure.
[LAUGHTER]
CORY ONDREJKA: And, so, we have ways responding to that.
And the sort of traditional game response would be to nerf
those features-- nerfing meaning, when the game creator
decides, hey, that's a really cool feature,
we'll take it away.
And we decided we're not going to do that.
Because there are too many cool things you can do with
self-replication.
And it's a useful feature to have. So, while there
certainly are security issues, the scripting language is very
heavily sandboxed.
Everything's happening on the server side.
So it's a lot harder to cheat us than games
that trust the client.
We have an amazingly dumb client, because we streaming
everything.
Even all the content isn't on the client most of the time.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Yeah, the simple thing--
the other thing about security is rights
management and control.
Because everything is happening on the server, you
don't have this ability to go like cleverly hack your World
of Warcraft client, and steal money from the other guy.
You can't do that, because everything is happening at a
central server.
So we're as immune to those attacks as you guys are, in
the sense that you're maintaining central databases.
If you screw that up, people can hack in.
But if you do a good job, it's possible to fully protect it.
So, like the scripting language, when Cory is opening
those scripts, that script, the actual source code of the
script is only on the server.
And it will only send it to you to look at it if you have
the correct rights for it.
So, on things like that, we can reasonably preserve
rights, so people can sell stuff.
And there's not just rampant copying.
Having said that, there's a rich debate, and, in fact, a
real pragmatic usage case in Second Life that makes it
better than the real world, in that people do
tend to share things.
It's a very open, sharing-based environment.
And you can choose to have all the objects you've got set
fully permissive, so you give them to people.
We believe that this is better than the real
world in a lot of ways.
And a lot of the people that are here live here.
And they live here because they make friends here, and
they can build things, and they can externalize their
thoughts here in ways that in the real world you just can't.
So, we don't see this as a game.
We see it as a platform that is, in many ways, better than
the real world.
And everything, so far, indicates it's kind of
growing that way.
AUDIENCE: [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Right.
So, the quality graphics, why don't the
graphics look better?
CORY ONDREJKA: Part of it is that because we're
not on the main grid.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Yeah, so part of it is content quality.
We're not on the main grid, hanging around in some of the
most carefully built spaces that are generating lots of
that commerce I'm talking about.
Those spaces are quite amazing.
People are able to do local lighting shadows and things
like that on their own, essentially, as light maps,
and shadow maps, and things like that.
But probably the biggest thing you're talking about is, where
are the lights and where are the shadows?
And you look at a graphics engine?
The triangle count per scene here is, typically, a good
fraction of a million, so it's a very high density scene.
The challenge--
we could speak to this, again, for hours-- but probably the
biggest thing in our system is that we're not able-- well,
we're working on this, but-- the challenge with Second Life
is, because everything is editable, you can't pre-light.
So you can't pre-light, pre-compute the scene.
So you can't set up some of the easy tricks that you can
use to make a scene in the unreal engine look better.
Having said that, technology is on our side.
This stuff will look exactly like the unreal engine, it'll
catch everybody else.
Because GPU technology is moving toward everything being
dynamic, and all CG effects and others running in real
time, without regard for the content set.
We're not there today.
So, with us, you see us having to strike a trade-off between
a lot of editable objects and a lot
less lighting, basically.
I'm being real simple there.
Come and see us afterwards.
We can go on and on about all the little other things that
are good or bad.
AUDIENCE: What's your minimum graphics config?
And what's your user-base's actual config?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Yeah, most of our users probably have a
little bit--
a good deal better than our min spec.
Our minimum spec today is like a gigahertz
machine and a GeForce2.
Second Life life runs really slow under that configuration.
It will run on a Mac.
Cory is running it on a Mac here.
This is not a particularly great machine.
It will run on a G4 or a PowerBook, but horribly.
CORY ONDREJKA: [INAUDIBLE] one of the new Macs [INAUDIBLE].
PHILIP ROSEDALE: On an Intel-a-tosh--
is that only our word, or do other people say Intel-a-tosh?
Apple probably doesn't think that's funny.
On one of those machines, it actually runs great.
Just for everybody to know, Apple's going to have a nice
renaissance here of reasonably fast machines now.
The Intel chips are competitive now with PCs, in
terms of graphics.
The base configuration that our users have is probably
more like a GeForce FX or something like that.
Any modern PC, though, that was bought in the last year
and a half is going to run Second Life at full speed.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: [UNINTELLIGIBLE] on the server, and it's being
dynamically [UNINTELLIGIBLE] you have a bandwidth problem
[UNINTELLIGIBLE]?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: You know, five years ago we would have
been out of business.
Bandwidth is so cheap today, as you guys well know, that
it's a negligible cost to us.
But we run at an average of about 80 or 90 kilobytes per
second to each client that is online.
So, again, that's about a gigabyte per second of peak
egress right now at heavy traffic times.
But a gigabyte per second today is
virtually free, so it's--
CORY ONDREJKA: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE].
PHILIP ROSEDALE: 84, so 84 kilobytes per second, on
average, then it will peak up to several hundred.
But yeah, it's a lot of bandwidth.
That's definitely one of the sea changes that we're taking
advantage of, the ability to just cavalierly use quite a
bit of bandwidth.
AUDIENCE: I came in late so forgive me if this has already
been covered, but I'm wondering if the way this
thing works is you've downloaded the models to our
clients and what you're streaming
[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: No.
So, the big, challenge, the big trick for us was that we
didn't do that.
We're actually streaming the model information.
We're, essentially, streaming the vertex information.
The way that we're doing that, though, is very, very clever.
We're streaming the vertices, and the textures, and the
sounds, and everything else in real time.
That was our big kind of mission of the company, was to
take an environment and make it so that
the download which--
our download is 20 meg.
And there's 10 million user-created objects inworld,
and about 15 terrabytes of user-created data that are in
Second Life.
So our whole challenge was to send none of that information
down beforehand.
And we also believe that, if you look back on something
like the Sims or something like that, really interesting
people are only going to get interested in an environment
in which there's that unpredictability that comes
from there not being a fixed monopoly set, so to speak, or
piece set, Lego set of things.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]
clients dumb, you made a calculation that if the world
got rich enough it would become impractical if you
download the models [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] so you
decided that [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]
that way you can remain fairly confident that it's
[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE].
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Well, we struck an in
between, where it's--
technically, to stream the vertices for one of these
typical scenes would be unfeasible.
So what we did was, we came up with some very clever ways to,
essentially, use these sculptable building blocks--
which you haven't seen yet--
where you can twist, and manipulate,
and stretch an object.
So we're using a kind of a constructive,
solid geometry model.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: We're streaming the textures as we
catch them, optimistically.
But, again, there's 15 terrabytes of data.
If we shipped this thing to you in a box, it would be on
2,000 DVDS.
AUDIENCE: How big is the cache on clients?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Up to a gig, 250 meg to a gig, you can set
it yourself.
I think it tries to use as much as we can.
AUDIENCE: Can you import things by having a
hierarchical model?
For instance, those dominoes are all replicas of one
another, and then the dots and dominoes are replicas, that
way you wouldn't have to transmit all the vertices of
all the objects.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Yeah, that's stuff that we're--
some small pieces that we've done and
more stuff we're doing.
So we're building hierarchical models and optimized stuff.
Cory is smiling because one of my big design decisions at the
beginning was, let's try not try and do that.
It's just crazy.
We can't do hierarchies.
But--
CORY ONDREJKA: It's one of the very few
blunders we made, actually.
AUDIENCE: Not having a hierarchy?
Yeah, it seems like--
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Yeah, one of the only things--
the coolest thing that you can't quite do yet in Second
Life is you can't have like a big jointed monster.
You can, if you want to really work at it, but
it's terribly hard.
So we need to add that kind of hierarchy.
But that stuff, we understand how to do that.
We have a great-- we have a pretty good size team.
AUDIENCE: So, do people find everything just by browsing?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: No.
Yeah, it's great.
Here we go.
Oh.
The finders probably not up.
Oh, you have to type something.
But go to classifieds, or whatever.
CORY ONDREJKA: The classifieds aren't going to
be up on this grid.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: OK, so this is an example of this.
Basically, what we let people do is list content places,
people, objects going forward, in common listings that you
can get to.
We do things like sorting by traffic.
That's pretty cool.
That's how many people have come to that location.
We also allow people to pay for classified ads.
And we actually let them bid for placement.
So they bid for how high they're going to be in the
classified ad listings.
That itself is a big and growing
business, so it's pretty--
I think that search and discovery of content is one of
the key assets that we're building here,
on top of the state.
I mean, obviously, there's 10 million objects in here, it's
already a big search problem.
AUDIENCE: [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: What we've built into the system is the
ability for you to set objects on a quite granular level, as
to whether you want them to be editable, resellable,
transferable.
Cory's worked a lot on that.
CORY ONDREJKA: Yeah, basically, as the creator, you
have a lot of control over what rights you want to have,
both in the object, as it sits there in the world, and the
rights once they're transferred to whoever takes
the object or purchases the object.
One thing that we've done is--
it's sort of like for sale.
One of the things we've said is, the creator can either
say, you can't resell this item, or they can say, you
can't copy this item.
But you can't restrain both.
And that's been a point of quite a bit of contention with
our creators.
Because, certainly, especially a year or two ago, when we
were making a lot of these decisions, the really early
creators were very much creating, a lot of them, in a
very artistic sense.
And so they wanted moral rights.
They wanted to say, look, I've made this thing, we'll never
let anybody change it or modify it.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: One of the guys we've consulted with a
lot in thinking about this has been Lawrence Lessig, who is a
big thinker about intellectual property rights, and how they
do, or don't, grow a society.
And so, it's a huge debate.
And it's a very rich topic that we take really seriously.
And, like Cory said, we do little things to try and--
our motivation is to get people to be as nice and as
sharing as possible.
There's a guy inworld, for example, who has created a
creative commons licensing machine that will actually
affix a creative commons license with the appropriate
licensing text to any object that you create.
And so, I think, we're going to see a lot of higher level
branding and licensing schemes emerging that sort of lean on
the basic low level features that are in the system that
allow you to set rights controls.
But it's a really big topic.
It's like a good question.
AUDIENCE: If it's being streamed to a client, how do
you prevent someone from stealing a texture and vending
it and selling it again?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: You can steal a texture.
There's nothing-- we can't prevent that.
CORY ONDREJKA: We're very careful about using
[INAUDIBLE PHRASE]
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Yeah, exactly.
CORY ONDREJKA: [INAUDIBLE] is not a client
[INAUDIBLE PHRASE].
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Yeah, yeah.
You can copy textures.
You can copy vertices.
So the physical appearance of objects--
in the same sense that an MP3 stream could be re-recorded--
are going to be fairly easy to--
[CHUCKLES]
are going to be fairly easy to steal.
We could get the geometry of Cory's spaghetti monster here
pretty easily.
But, as I said earlier, sophisticated things, like the
scripting that's attached to it, is harder to get.
And then, in general, there's a lot of social practice
emerging around what happens to you if you steal
things all the time.
And I think what we're going to see, and we're already
seeing in Second Life, is stuff like seal programs, and
groups, and stuff that are outing people who are being
what they regard as abusive.
Governance is a huge issue here.
What we have is essentially a little replica of the real
world, and an opportunity to re-do things
in a different way.
And so you see a lot of experimentation around that.
Broadly, Second Life is pretty anarchic,
compared to the real world.
But, as its growing, there are little pockets of order, where
people are establishing zoning, and governance, and
local rules.
I think there's going to be a fascinating debate around
courts emerging.
It's a longer topic, but people are going to start
deciding who they want to let on their land.
And using black lists or white lists on property.
And as you see that congealing, in the larger
systems, you're going to essentially have early
nations, or early [? a fine ?] communities that are emerging
and excluding each other, so.
CORY ONDREJKA: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Yeah, we had a guy-- gosh, great example of
how far-- you want to know, how far you can go with the
scripting language?
We had a guy who basically built--
what is it?
RSA?
CORY ONDREJKA: [INAUDIBLE]
cryptographically signed [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE].
PHILIP ROSEDALE: So, he basically made a thing, if you
were two avatars--
now bear in mind, you're two avatars in Second Life, you
don't know each other's real identities, right?
But you want to do business together.
You want to, say, you're going to sell cars.
One of you is going to build the dealership, and pay the
land cost. The other one's going to design the cars.
And you're going to split the money fifty-fifty.
Again, this is $5 million a month in subject here.
So how do you come up with a business contract?
Well, there was this guy who basically wrote, in our
scripting language, a thing where you two avatars could
walk up, agree on a document, click a button, and have it
crypto-signed, give you back a token that you could use to
recover that document, in an authoritative way, later on,
and say, this is what we agreed to.
So that's an example of how far you can go with this stuff
and with the language that we built.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: Where is real money floating into you, apart from
sales of land?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: So, we make our money, essentially, right
now, from--
the largest share of our revenues is from land use
fees, which is essentially recurring fees for land.
So we sort of charge property tax.
You could almost think of it like a hosting fee for the
land that's inworld.
So we sell people real estate that essentially covers the
cost of the servers, as we're putting them on.
We basically auction it off, where there's contention
between people as to who wants what space.
And then we charge you according to the amount of
land you have inworld.
So if you have an acre of land in Second Life, which is a
pretty good size space, you'll pay us about $25 a month,
recurring, for that acre of land.
So it's a great business, even from the beginning, for us.
AUDIENCE: Back to [INAUDIBLE PHRASE].
First of all, I'm not one to [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]
but other people [INAUDIBLE PHRASE].
but what do [UNINTELLIGIBLE] creative reference?
[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]
different avatar [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]
limbs or stuff like that [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]
without knowing?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: The first--
CORY ONDREJKA: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Right, kinetic energy is dangerous.
You can be hurt by flying objects in Second Life.
But, let me back up and say one thing, though.
Whether you can be hurt or killed by flying objects, so
to speak, is a consensual act in Second Life.
But it's kind of neat, because it's based on the rights of
the landholder.
So what I mean by this is, can you be killed in Second Life?
Well, no, not in most places.
But, let's say you're walking into a western bar, right?
And you walk into this western bar, and up at the top of your
screen you see this little heart icon come on- which we
don't have on right now.
That heart icon means that, in this place, you can be killed
by kinetic velocity.
And so it's kind of cool.
So, what it basically means is weapons now work.
And being killed basically means you are sent--
you are taken away from that space, and you're sent to
wherever home is for you, which is only one
place in the world.
So it's kind of a nuisance.
It's a nuisance to be killed.
You can't lose anything, obviously, in Second Life,
because this is real, this is people's real
lives, and real content.
But we just do that as a kind of and in between.
So, consensually, if you agree that the area you're in is
deadly, that if the landowner sets it that way, in other
words, you consent by going there, you can get killed.
But it doesn't mean you lose anything.
You don't lose any property.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Oh, right, yes, yes, exactly.
Wouldn't that be fun?
But, at this point, there is no way to take an avatar, and
beat them, and knock parts off of them, no.
But we think that's funny.
I mean if everybody--
if everyone's adults, and agrees, why not?
And, in fact, we're working on stuff like that right now.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]
censorship issues, and internet [UNINTELLIGIBLE]?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: So, yeah, what sort of parental controls
do we have?
So, what we do-- and we've done this electively--
is if you're 13 to 18--
and you have self-identifying--
and I'll go on notice, say why there's some
real teeth to that--
if you're 13 to 18 years old, we put you into a continent,
basically, off to the distant one side or the other, I won't
tell you which, where basically there are only 13 to
17 year olds in that continent.
And, like Whyville, or some of the other teen communities, we
vigorously encourage the teens to report anyone who appears
to be an adult.
So what that does is, because you can't speak teen, that
basically means that, in terms of protecting teens from
adults, an adult's time to live in the teen grid is very,
very short.
Similarly, we encourage adults to report people that they
believe may be underage that are in what we call the main
grid, which is where everybody else is.
And, in cases where we find reports and it looks likely
that someone's underage, we demand proof of identity,
proof of age, faxed documents, things like that.
So, we're actually pretty aggressive about doing that.
We don't have to do that.
We can let everybody in over 13 with parental permission.
But we think that it's the right thing to do.
Maybe we'll get so big that it will be difficult to do that,
or that'll be handled by users, or something.
But today that's what we're doing.
So the parental controls are pretty effective.
There's a place for teenagers, and they tend to get sent
there if they're--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]
control of that teenager?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Yes, so in an exception to the usual kind of
control, we do try and look for adult content
and things like that.
But, again, that's not highly scalable.
We'll have to figure out ways to have that done by users and
other people helping us.
But you can monitor what people are putting in their
pockets, and what they're putting in the world, and take
a look at it.
AUDIENCE: Anything goes?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: On the main grid anything goes.
However, whole regions can be marked as mature, or PG, so
you can electively not see stuff that's in mature regions
if you don't want to.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: How do you deal with the transition from one
community to the other due to aging?
[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]
there, and now suddenly you're 18, you get booted to the
other continent.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: We have a birthday party ritual where we
set you free and put you in the main grid.
CORY ONDREJKA: You turn into a--
PHILIP ROSEDALE: I haven't been to one of these things
inworld but I really want to go.
It sounds like a cool rite of passage.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: Can you talk about the cornfield?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: The cornfield?
It's so great.
I was talking to a very well known internet CEO the other
day who told me that when he first walked into Second Life
for the first time, he was sent to the cornfield
immediately.
So the cornfield is a penal colony.
If you get in trouble in Second Life--
and I think, again, the cornfield is probably a
non-scalable, little amusing idea but-- what happens today
is you can get suspended in Second Life for a couple days,
or seven days, and then you can get kicked out.
You actually get put up in front of a citizen board for
review if you're going to get kicked out.
The cornfield is this weird purgatory where we'll
sometimes send people to cool off.
And you can't get out of it.
And it's absolutely hilarious.
We have a very small content development team.
Part of our magic is we don't develop any content, right?
But they occasionally get to stretch their arms a little
bit and have fun.
And so it's this cornfield with an old 1950s tractor you
can ride around.
It's just a huge cornfield.
And then right in the middle of it there's an old black and
white television that plays some of those recidivism, like
1950s black and white, like, you need to be
good to society Johnny.
And it's just this--
CORY ONDREJKA: Johnny knows about lying.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Oh, Johnny knows about lying?
It'll kill you, it's so funny.
And it just plays forever, Also--
Cory didn't show--
you can stream live music and live video into
Second Life as well.
And so there are movie theaters.
There's live music.
Live music is one of the big phenomena right
now in Second Life.
If you think about it, this is a micro example of why what
we're doing is so cool, right?
You can go and show up in a nightclub in Second Life,
stand on stage in your avatar, and, basically, play with
SHOUTcast live music that your piping out of your studio
directly into Second Life.
If you haven't tried this in Second Life, as an observer,
it is a really eerie experience.
Because you're sitting there with your avatar, sitting
around and chit chatting with people next to you at the cafe
table, and like I'll walk in--
there is a little advantage to being me, we all have the same
name, I'm Philip Linden, Cory is Cory Linden.
I'll walk in, and the performer will look at me.
And then he'll be like, oh, Philip Linden in the house.
It's just weird, super weird thing, where you're walking in
as an avatar, but they're actually live.
People buy CDs from each other, leave tips, and just
generally, you can raise as large an audience in Second
Life on a Friday night-- and live music is one of the--
unfortunately the main grid is not up, we can't look up all
the listings.
There's live music every night.
And there's 50 or 100 people will be at one of those shows.
And that's the same as what you'd get on you Polk Street
in San Francisco.
So it's a really interesting phenomena.
And you can ask people for money.
You can get tips in Linden dollars.
And you can sell CDs.
So that's a really--
CORY ONDREJKA: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE].
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Oh, I didn't know that.
Homeless guy moved into his apartment.
CORY ONDREJKA: One of our residents was staying with
friends, because he had lost his place, and he was
effectively homeless.
And they showed him Second Life.
And he's a pretty decent musician.
So he started playing live music.
Put out a tip jar.
Said, I'm trying to raise money to actually get an
apartment again and gather enough money to move back into
an apartment.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Yeah, there's stories like that-- it's
really a fun place to work.
And not just because we have an unusual internal culture, I
think, in some of the same ways Google does.
But also just because what we're working on is so neat.
You get stories like this all the time.
There was a guy on Slashdot the other day, who said, I'm
an IT engineer, in a country in which the
unemployment rate is 25%.
But he said that, about half of my income is Second Life.
So I'm about halfway done with this problem.
It's pretty interesting.
AUDIENCE: How much of the interactions and
chats do you log?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: As little as we can.
We keep a short term--
CORY ONDREJKA: [INAUDIBLE] temporarily.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Yeah, temporarily we keep
everything.
We see financial transactions, and
chat, and instant messages.
That would be for if somebody really gets in trouble.
If there's a warrant, or a federal you know, something
like that happening.
I don't even think we've had to do that, yet.
But we keep a short trailing record of text,
and then it's gone.
But, again, pragmatically, the world is so huge, and the data
volume is so large, none of this stuff
lives on a real database.
We use MySQL for central storage of
some of these assets.
But the actual simulator machines themselves, they're
in memory data systems. We don't even attempt to use a
real database.
The transaction rate would be vastly beyond, even now, what
you could do, I think, with anything that's out there.
AUDIENCE: You mentioned there's an exchange rate
between Linden dollars and real dollars?
How does currency get into the system, and
how do you keep it--
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Can you show us the page?
Or is it up?
So, we're like the Federal Reserve.
We, basically, manage the money supply.
That's a long conversation.
But, in essence, we act with the goal of stabilizing the
money supply.
We don't actually make money from the currency.
Although we charge a percentage on currency
exchange transactions.
So we do make a revenue that way.
But we, basically, manage, like Alan
Greenspan, the market.
And our target of management is to keep that upper line as
stable as possible.
And you can see, over the last month, the variance is between
270 and 281 or so.
So the currency is actually quite stable.
Again, the volume is high.
There was about $800,000 transaction,
I think, last month.
So, it's already a fairly stable market.
There are speculators.
There are day traders in our currency.
So there's lots of people in there trading.
But, per economic theory, that's actually a good thing.
You actually want multiple day traders fighting each other.
AUDIENCE: When it comes to the browser [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
networking capabilities [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]
server [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]?
CORY ONDREJKA: Yes.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Yeah, we've already got most of that done.
So, there's a lot of--
CORY ONDREJKA: Yeah, we're also integrating Firefox, or,
more correctly, we're integrating the Gecko Core
from Mozilla.
That's in testing right now.
So, that's going to, obviously, let us bridge into,
pretty much, well, all of the web.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Yeah, so you'll be able to manipulate
objects inworld that have web surfaces on them, basically.
They're connected to the web.
We already do XLM-PC and email bi-directionally today from
the-- or XLM out and email in, or email out and
XLM in from the web.
So that's how people do stuff like, you can make an object
in Second Life where you can click the button and have it
change something on your website.
You talk to a web database.
What else?
You had another one.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Yes, so we've been approached
by pretty much everybody.
This thing has kind of taken off in the last few months.
Our mission, though, is to maintain a level playing field
and a level platform.
So we, as a company, won't do a deal pretty much with
anybody for almost any conceivable reason.
And advertising is a great example of that.
So we're encouraging people to build advertising syndicates
and systems inworld.
But if you talk about putting billboards inworld, we'll
never do that.
We've been approached by people who are interested in
doing that.
But we just tell them, well, you have to buy land.
So, if you're an advertiser, and you want to buy real
estate, and put billboards on it.
Hey, good for you.
It's on the website.
You can buy land, or by land from another user.
There's actually a group of users who built a thing called
MetaAdverse that's actually a fully automated system where
you can get billboards, and bus signs, and stuff from
them, put them on your land.
And there's thousands of people who have. And then they
actually display ads when people walk by the billboard.
You can see when an avatar walks by.
And they actually charge the advertiser, give some of the
money to the landowner, in much the same way, I guess,
Google does with AdWords.
AUDIENCE: Can you automatically measure
something [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Yes, you can see everything.
You can see the name of the avatar that's walking by you
if you're a billboard.
So you can record who probably saw your
advertisement very easily.
CORY ONDREJKA: And you know where they're looking.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: And you know--
yeah, that's right.
You can tell where they're looking.
So, yeah, you can see if they're looking, spot on, if
you're a billboard.
AUDIENCE: [UNINTELLIGIBLE] demographics [UNINTELLIGIBLE]?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: No, obviously.
Yeah.
I guess, not totally obviously.
But heck no.
We would never let anybody see each other's demographic
information, or anything else they didn't want to expose.
AUDIENCE: How can you spread across countries
[UNINTELLIGIBLE]
US focused [UNINTELLIGIBLE]?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Well, it's mostly US right now.
We haven't localized the client to full
double-byte, yet.
So, as a result--
or even European languages.
So well, we have the chat system.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
CORY ONDREJKA: We're double-byte, but we haven't
localized the client.
We haven't done [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE].
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Right, So, we expect and hope that this will
really take off in Asia, as we're able
to start doing that--
which will be soon--
but, today, it's mostly a European and North American
phenomenon.
The UK is our big number two outside of the United States.
We always say that bad weather, good broadband, and
oppressive regimes--
[LAUGHTER]
PHILIP ROSEDALE: --are really good reasons to people use
Second Life.
You laugh, but Second Life competes with the real world.
If you look at who we're competing with, we're just
competing with discretionary time.
It's really interesting.
And you see patterns of that.
In the United States--
I'm going to be at PC Forum--
what is it?
Next week?
And talking about this.
And I did an analysis that we had never done before, where I
looked at how many people per 1,000 people in metro areas
use Second Life.
And it's totally like--
Seattle?
0.5, one of the highest numbers in the country, right?
Terrible weather, good broadband.
It's really interesting.
There's sort of a pattern on that.
Los Angeles and New York, lowest level of use.
Now, part of that can be that those are huge metro areas,
with larger populations that don't have
computers and stuff.
But still it's a fascinating statistic.
Big difference between different areas.
AUDIENCE: How many IRS regulations do you run into,
if people are making [UNINTELLIGIBLE]?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: So, IRS regulations,
what do we run into?
Well, first of all, just like eBay, or anything else, if
you're drawing money from us, if you're transferring
currency, you're getting a wire transfer
in your bank account.
That's an income event.
You have to deal with that.
So, first of all, the problem is on you, as a person who is
making money, in the same way that it is if you're using
eBay to make money.
Having said that, though, we reach out to the different
regulators and government folks and tell them about what
we're doing.
But, frankly, the stuff is so early and so different that a
lot of them are just kind of, uhhh, I don't know
what to tell you.
But a lot of this stuff is just new territory, in terms
of what the rulings will be.
But, I think, with respect to making money, it's
fundamentally your problem.
Because there's an income event anytime you're
taking money out.
So it's now incumbent on you, as an individual, to justify
what costs were or anything else when
you do your tax return.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: Do you foresee a time when the IRS might
[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Right.
People talk about that a lot.
I really think that will be a long ways off.
I mean, where is the property?
People do have discussions about that.
But I would suspect that it's going to be one of those
things where the governmental regulations to that will be,
hopefully, relatively consistent with rates of
fastest progress.
It's so hard to imagine a regulatory scheme by which you
would measure the value of your assets in Second Life.
But we haven't been approached by anybody talking about that.
But it is an interesting intellectual question.
AUDIENCE: How much money did Cory spend during this demo?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: How much money did Cory
spend during this--?
None, he didn't buy anything.
CORY ONDREJKA: The magic wand is about $30.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: 30 Linden dollars?
CORY ONDREJKA: $30.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Is it really?
Holy moly.
CORY ONDREJKA: [INAUDIBLE].
PHILIP ROSEDALE: So $30 times two.
That's a lot of money.
Starax's wand is probably the coolest single thing you can
own in Second Life, so $30 apiece.
Seriously, we had a user conference.
And we had a bunch of our users there.
And then we had a bunch of lawyers there, because we did
the state of play conference in New York.
And one of the attention getting things, I think, we
said a couple times was, look, you guys, most the people in
the audience that are doing businesses in Second Life,
they make more than you.
So just keep that in mind as we start.
It's really profitable, right now, because it's an early
stage market, where people are kind of
plowing the dark, right?
They're moving into the unknown.
They're building all this new stuff that nobody's ever seen.
So the opportunity is enormous.
And that's part of the pioneering feeling that
permeates Second Life and brings people in so quickly.
AUDIENCE: How many of those wands have actually been sold?
CORY ONDREJKA: Many.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: I would guess, I mean, we look at--
do you know?
CORY ONDREJKA: I don't know how many, but
I know it's a lot.
Because you keep bumping into people inworld, and you just
see them playing with the wand [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE].
PHILIP ROSEDALE: We have a way to know that.
Like I said, it's probably thousands.
And like I said, that gun we looked at, that's similarly
fancy and cool, it's probably in the 5,000 to 10,000 range
now, maybe a bit more.
And, like I said, the really amazing diversity question,
how is Second Life different than real life?
Again, let me say this, this is a world.
This is a tiny little town, right?
With 150,000 people, 20,000 people a day, 5,000 people out
on the street, so to speak, at night.
In the last month, people have purchased
180,000 distinct things.
So you go through this town and you'd count all the
purchasable things.
And there's 180,000 of them.
HUNTER WALK: [UNINTELLIGIBLE] two more questions.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: OK, two more questions.
AUDIENCE: So, I'm guessing that every user builds a
little and buys a little.
But you can split them up into people who mostly build and
mostly consume.
What's the population like?
How does that break down?
CORY ONDREJKA: In the trailing seven days, 75% percent of
people have made something from scratch.
And that's with the demographic that has a median
age of 36, that's 50% female by use,
it's astounding, actually.
AUDIENCE: Can you count how many--?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Let me add to that, though.
So there's playing around and making things, and then
there's active production.
We've also watched the rate of active production as a
fraction of the audience, as a fraction of
the total user base.
We estimate, if you looked at Second Life about a year ago
you-- one of the statistics you can look at is the number
of buyers and number of sellers in a cohort.
You can say, how many people sold and
how many people bought?
That number, today, is about 75% percent buyers and 25%
percent sellers.
So another way of looking at it, statistically, suggests
that about 25% of the population is creating content
for about 75%.
So we're still very young by that metric.
Let me go to-- you had a question, because we haven't
heard from you.
AUDIENCE: What happens when the person who makes the magic
wand-- what if he thinks of another object he wants to add
to the wand?
What happens to everybody who's already bought the wand?
CORY ONDREJKA: So, what he does is he actually records
everybody who bought it.
And he directly mails you, in the system, updates.
So, part of the reason he's been so successful is
everybody who has the wand is talking about, oh, I got the
update toda.
And now it does cows, or whatever.
Because remember, the point of the wand is the wand is
basically an emoticon equivalent for
a 3D virtual world.
You hold the wand while you're sitting around chatting, and
all these random things appear.
Because all it's doing is parsing chat text.
So, I wasn't using it that way.
But if you're actually having a conversation, it's basically
like you're getting this sort of emoticon equivalents around
you all the time.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: So, that's one of the powers as well, is
that you have objects they can update themselves dynamically.
So--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE] it's not really
built into the system--
PHILIP ROSEDALE: No, he built the system and we--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
CORY ONDREJKA: --scripting language [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Yeah, no, we haven't built in a fancy
update your version thing, yet.
But we could.
It's just lots more code.
It's already a lot of code, so--
We'll be here to hang around.
I know we're--
I think, Hunter's going to tell us we're out of time.
And thanks everybody for coming.
It was great.
Thanks for your time.
[APPLAUSE]