Second Life is one of the biggest, if not the biggest user-generated virtual world. With tens of thousands of players spending time and money in the world at any given moment, it’s not surprising that there would be demand for a more immersive way to interact with it. This week, the developers behind Second Life officially updated the game with Oculus Rift DK2 support.
Linden Lab, developer of Second Life, added support for the Rift DK1 (Oculus’ first VR headset development kit) earlier this year. Prior to that, an unofficial ‘viewer’—the software used to access Second Life—called CtrlAltStudio had also added DK1 support.
This week Linden Lab announced that the official Second Life viewer now has Oculus Rift DK2 support, allowing players to access the world with the higher resolution, better performance, and more comfortable positional tracking offered by the updated development kit.
Activating the Rift is as easy as grabbing the newest build of the official viewer (that’s version 3.7.18.295296, for those keeping track) and hitting the ‘Toggle HMD Mode’ button in the ‘Me’ menu.
In my brief testing, this instantly popped Second Life from my main monitor into the DK2, complete with rotational and positional tracking, including a version of the interface that’s been adapted for viewing through the Rift. Players can go to first-person view by pressing ‘M’.
The developer notes that there are still some bugs to be worked out and say that they’re waiting on updates from Oculus before they can be fixed:
“Unfortunately, though, there are still some bugs impacting the experience, which we won’t be able to fix until we receive the next SDK from Oculus Rift. Because Second Life uses OpenGL in its browser, we cannot support direct mode in the Rift until Oculus releases a version of the SDK that supports that.”
CtrlAltStudio, which maintains an unofficial Second Life viewer and initially beat Linden Lab to DK1 and DK2 support, added a basic VR interface to their viewer at the beginning of September.
Second Life is a free-to-play MMO virtual world which consists almost entirely of user-generated content. Since 2003, Second Life has seen $3.2 billion worth of transactions for digital goods within the virtual world, according to Linden Lab. The company hosts a special Oculus Rift section of their ‘Destination Guide’ to help users find places within Second Life that are “particularly compelling” to use with the VR headset.
