Linden Lab VP, platforms & technology: Joe Miller

Dan Farber: Joe, thanks for joining me

Joe Miller: It's my pleasure, Dan. Thanks for having me.

Dan Farber: Linden Lab isn't as well known as the world that it creates, which is Second Life, and I'm curious about the basic technology behind Second Life that brings 3-D worlds actually to life.

Joe Miller: The technologies that we've brought together over a five-year period of development--we just celebrated, in world, our fifth anniversary, this is not something we created overnight--is a collection of advanced technologies from grid computing, to compression technologies, to streaming technologies, to VoIP technologies, that allow people to communicate effectively with one another. We've pulled this together in a way that creates an immersive experience for individuals, enterprises, and educators where they can create a place to go on the web in 3-D and experience that fully.

Dan Farber: Do you find that the corporations are actually using this environment for collaborative sessions?

Joe Miller: Indeed. In fact over 30% of our current customer base are enterprise customers. We're using it for a variety of purposes and use cases but indeed meetings, internal meetings, collaborative sessions with distributed workforces, people that are around the world that otherwise would have to get on airplanes to visit one another, are using Second Life to have those meetings and collaborate very effectively.

Dan Farber: So it's a cheap alternative to something like Cisco's TelePresence?

Joe Miller: Very much less expensive than Cisco's TelePresence offering and certainly highly immersive. People who have used both models find the Second Life immersion experience, once you get over the hump of learning how to use it, to be quite compelling compared to a traditional.

Dan Farber: I know you have a bunch of enterprise customers, Sun, and many others who have Second Life presence, but it seems to me like it's more of a commercial for them than it is a real practical use case.

Joe Miller: Quite the contrary. Many brands, many large companies, have come in to do consumer-based marketing of their product services or their brands if you will. Frankly, many other companies, large companies and IBM is a classic example, are using Second Life for employee on-boarding. They were using it before that. They were actually using it as an effective recruiting and candidate-sourcing tool.

Dan Farber: You're introducing voice into this 3-D environment.

Joe Miller: Yes.

Dan Farber: I'm really interested in how you can do all those things with such a rich, immersive environment and not have huge performance lags and crashes, because there are so many variables in terms of the machines that are accessing Second Life.

Joe Miller: In the case of our introduction of voice, which we did one year ago today, roughly. We've now had over 8 billion minutes of voice consumed by Second Life users and we're doing over a billion a month on a monthly run rate right now. It looks like we'll do close to 20-22 billion minutes over the next year. We decided to design the voice overlay, which by the way works in a very interesting way. If you want to speak to one other person or a group of 10 other people you just walk your avatar up to that group and if you have a headset with a mic on you just begin speaking. You don't have to turn on anything. You don't have to run secondary apps. You don't have to press any additional buttons. You share your voice in a group and they hear that voice coming from your location relative to your avatar's 3-D positional voice, which is very effective--much more effective than sitting on a conference call where all the voices are sort of superimposed on one another. In this case you can actually carry on a highly effective conference room conversation with 10, 15, 20 people simultaneously and not have it consume more bandwidth than talking to a single person.

Dan Farber: What are some of the challenges to building a service like Second Life compared to a more traditional website?

Joe Miller: There are many and we've spent five years learning about them. We are now at a point where we are hosting tens of thousands, close to 100,000 people, simultaneously in the world. That in itself is a significant challenge. This is not like most traditional multi-player games where the worlds are sharded into smaller groups, smaller clusters of game players. This is one world that everyone can contribute and participate in collaboratively.

The challenge really is in handling user-generated content in a way that doesn't degrade the experience for others. We provide a very rich set of building tools that can be used to build objects of all kinds. In fact, everything that you see in Second Life was ultimately created by the users, not by us, but by the users of Second Life. Those objects can further be scripted. We have a full, rich scripting language that allows you to imbue those objects with characteristics, interactivity, and so forth. We put very few constraints on how those scripts are constructed, how the objects are built. To be able to host the range, it's now close to 250 terabytes of content that our users create, is an ongoing daily challenge. Our users are far more creative with the applications for Second Life than we ever imagined we could offer them. We really are providing them with an open-ended platform for their imagination, for their creativity, and they've done things with the platform that we couldn't have imagined.

Dan Farber: How do you from going off the rails then?

Joe Miller: We do go off the rails, quite frankly, [laughing] and when we do we study those vectors, we study those behavioral conditions, and we look at both technical and non-technical solutions to the problem. We've made great strides over the last year in actually significantly improving our reliability. Our uptime percentages, our overall system performance, have leveled out dramatically.

Dan Farber: What is your uptime at this point?

Joe Miller: We have a target of 99.7 and we've been able to maintain that uptime ratio over the last several months. I believe the last two quarters we have approached our goal.

Dan Farber: You talked a little about being open and flexible, and as I understand, you've recently open-sourced the client code for the service and you're working on an open standard so that different worlds can talk to each other. I guess that's called open simulation? Could you give us a little bit more detail on this open-sim and open-source?

Joe Miller: Sure. We realized very early on in our pursuit of this dream that it was really only going to be relevant to a much larger audience if we could help stimulate dramatic growth of the industry broadly. More importantly, as a smaller company--we're about 250 folks, of which about half are focused on engineering the technology itself, the product. We wanted to invite many more people--software professionals, hobbyists, individuals--that are interested participants in this space to help shape the next wave of growth of virtual worlds broadly. We thought the best way to do that was to take our core technology for the client side, which, by the way, embodies all the protocols that we use to communicate with our back end. They're transparently documented in that code. It's very easy, by studying the client, to see how you might create the beginnings of an alternate simulator on the back end as well, which is how “open-sim” came about.

Dan Farber: So really you're creating your own competitors?

Joe Miller: We're creating a richer fabric of alternatives, which is exactly what we wanted to do.

Dan Farber: Where do you see Second Life going in terms of, we talked a little bit about the fact that this is kind of the beginning of the 3-D world. How to you see it going forward? Do you see Second Life going to 100 million users and I don't know how many acres you have today, virtual acres…

Joe Miller: We actually have about 700, the equivalent of 700 miles, square miles of land represented by the grid today. It's about 28,000, going on 29,000, individual CPUs that simulate a region of land that is 16 meters square. So again the technical architecture for the entire grid is inherently unbounded. We can continue to add land without bounds. We are not bounded by a sphere, the world can grow geometrically, and we can add many more elements of land over time and indeed that's how we're growing.

Dan Farber: Joe, thank you very much for speaking with me.

Joe Miller: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Dan Farber: I've been speaking with Joe Miller, who is the vice president of platforms and technology development at Linden Lab. For CIO sessions, I'm Dan Farber. Thanks for watching.