Do Electric Sheep dream for Avatars ?

The Electric Sheep Company, perhaps the world’s largest content design company for virtual world platforms, has big plans beyond its high-profile CSI:NY experience in Second Life that includes more movie and television mash-ups, possible widgets, and a viewer for mobile phones.

Giff Constable, VP of Electric Sheep’s software unit primarily responsible for the OnRez viewer, revealed some of his electric dreams at last week’s Virtual Worlds Forum in London.

Constable also addressed public controversy over the OnRez viewer software, and described the viewer’s future capabilities.

Second Life residents had expressed concern that the OnRez viewer, while enabling a much slicker and easier 3D experience for new residents, may also attempt to limit users’ ability to access the wider community and economy.

Constable emphasized that the OnRez viewer hides no functionality, but focuses on the new user.

“When you design a product, you have to chose a customer, a focus – we focused on the new user. We didn’t focus on the power user,” Constable said.

Constable said he had a list of features the company would like to implement in the viewer such as a skinning system to support multiple looks with the viewer, and third party plug in systems.

“We would also like to create a power user browser. We have a team of builders and scripters, and as you can imagine their wish-list of features is massive,” Constable said. “It’s a smaller audience, but its an interesting one. It may be that we create that – or we enable someone else to create one that fits those requirements,” Constable said.

After years of resident grumbling, Linden Lab announced recently it would improve the Second Life search engine by introducing Google search. Electric Sheep’s OnRez search engine beat them to the punch, but Constable is happy about the improvement.
“We’ve been dying for search to be improved in Second Life. People make do with it because they have to. In my opinion it was facilitating the economy, but it was also holding it back. I am very pleased that Linden Lab are rolling out the new search system. I’m very intrigued to work with it and potentially create some interesting mash-ups.”
Constable said OnRez’s search strategy is still being developed. The firm decided not to launch and instead took a step back to determine what would be right for the community.
The OnRez project has a much wider remit than purely improving Second Life’s interface and graphical user experience. There are wider goals to improve some key social tools, Constable says.
“One of the areas I’m very interested in, is the group tools. They are so problematic on so many levels. That’s definitely one of our next focuses. We also need to make sure that’s available to everyone, no matter what viewer they are using.”

“The way I look at it, we need to create information services and everything is a window into them. I don’t care if it’s a phone, a Web site or a viewer, and I don’t care which viewer it is.