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Limited understanding of what it means to be a virtual citizen

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Limited understanding of what it means to be a virtual citizen

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Virtual citizenship in itself is difficult to describe, but often involves an identity or appearance much different than one's real-world appearance and that identity 'living' within these virtual platforms. Individuals that take up this so called citizenship within a platform are some of the most regular and committed users and are also very easy to alienate through lack of communication and sudden changes that break their 'homes'.

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Less important than WHY 3D?, but it doesn't help:
- Big commitment to try it out
- Overwhelming, e.g., locomotion for non-gamers
- Accessibility: computer, bandwidth, headphones, goggles
- Accessiblity to partners (metaverse friends, ALL lilypad teammates)
- Tools: Lilypad work tools: asynchronous text, screenshare, co-browse, shared persistent docs. Metaverse create/share tools: combine, video
- Audio - headsets are a pain
- Synchronous use only (it could be async with persistent spaces, but is not in current practice)
- Not integrated with Web (search, social, sharing w/others via link)

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i.e., Why Use It? (attraction dominates over friction at this scale)
- Why are 3d social presence and shared persistent spatial awareness a win in 3d, as opposed to 2d?
- We don't have a complex answer, and we need a clear, simple, and self-evidently demonstrable one.

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I use my mobile phone for 99% of my job that does not require a compiler. Same goes for my outside work life.

Our mobile presence was inadequate and we supported only about 20% of our staff (No iPhones)

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Asynchronous apps seem to almost always beat synchronous apps in terms of engagement and user growth

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Asynchronous apps seem to almost always beat synchronous apps in terms of engagement and user growth

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Insufficient tech to deal with toxic users

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Insufficient tech to deal with toxic users

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We had a number and they drove new people away

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Target Audience Not Sufficiently Early Adopters

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Target Audience Not Sufficiently Early Adopters

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As shown by older hardware, etc.

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Too soon to give up. How was this marketed?

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Both Lilypad and High Fidelity were unfinished products when they were released. We made a lot of promises regarding both products and expected people to stay just by virtue of our promises and not of the product itself.

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Interactive Day Breaks were so fun (esp. Pictionary!) but maybe didn't fit the 'weWork' model for broader adoption/participation

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HiFi events: expensive to create + promote

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HiFi events: expensive to create + promote

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Larger HiFi events (Bingo, avatar contest, tomb tour) were expensive to create, promote and maintain.

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All the successful virtual worlds are toys, and we didn't change that

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All the successful virtual worlds are toys, and we didn't change that

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Nobody has created a successful product around a "serious" virtual worlds which would become mission critical for real world problem.
either second life or minecraft or... they are all games / social games.
- The mainstream perception of virtual world is that it s a toy

In truth, there are many real virtual world use cases with beneficial outcome in the real world
such as : training and education (flight simulator doh!)
But nothing that scaled beyond being an interesting tool for a limited group of people.

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I'm not convinced we failed. We just gave up.

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Entering app stores with user reviews (Oculus and Steam) as a beta leads to low app ratings because users expect a full product.  When you are live on these stores, you are live, and user scores count.  This must be taken into account in any future app store plans (iOS or GP).  We must have a soft launch period in smaller regions in order to ensure a successful worldwide launch.

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Our priorities change, almost daily. From what features to support to which platforms. We jump around constantly and without focus. When "everything is a priority" nothing is a priority.

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Having a solid Mac client for HiFi is a fairly recent development. HiFi adoption may have suffered from initial hw requirements.

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I'm not entirely serious. However, the meme driven surreal juvenile role-playing playground experience is what makes VRChat notable and fun. We could have had those users, if we had catered more toward video creators and streamers, even if their content was juvenile and offensive. Keep VR Weird!

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product quality.

There is a massive "what good looks like" base of reference in today's interactive marketplace.

We didn't define what good looks like in comparison.

We did however define what good SOUNDS like!!!

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Target audience malignment. It might have been a miss to not present lilypad as the virtual 'wework'/'digital classroom' to every startup / education community available to us. But, we are only just now putting the finishing touches and integrating the one critical "in-product' feature (screen share) that would have enabled the complete product loop of 'Get in, share content, communicate' for both startup and education customers. It's an unfortunate conflict between grand-vision behind funding and a simple product opportunity - adoption takes time.

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Value proposition isn't clear with regards to upending current habits and building new ones. When asking users to change what is currently working for them, you must have an offering that is better, more novel, more useful, more practical or cheaper than what is working for them already

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"And then what?" Without understanding what to do and how to do it, users come to this place and look around with no reason to come back. They don't understand what to do, or why?

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"And then what?" Without prompts, users become confused or bored. It's a very small userbase that can just loiter without activity, incentive or motivation. Users need/want to feel useful to contribute to something. They need their time investment to feel like it's leading to something more. What we think 'more' means doesn't matter to the user and we can't convince them in our vision if the experience doesn't align directly with that vision.

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If your core experience requires 3rd party tools for 85% of the experience, something might not be right - (create/avatar). High Fidelity required users to LEAVE their product in order to use their product, not stay and be immersed in thoughtfully crafted creation tools. Every off-ramp you give the user is going to be taken as a way out, and there is no on-ramp back in.

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So many (too many) poorly designed / not polished features. If the core experience is "get in, suit up, create and hangout together" then nothing else matters until that core experience is polished and everyone can use it from within the product. 10% of the early adopters/hackers/technofiends are willing to accept it. 90% of users know what bad experiences feel like and they'll not stand for it. There are way too many good experiences they could be having instead.

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There's no hook of any game-type interaction. Even a tutorial which had challenges and rewards of some kind would likely improve the perception of the system by the average user

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High Fidelity: Inconsistent  operational focus

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High Fidelity: Inconsistent  operational focus

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Features: We add features as MVP then push on to next feature without 'honing' them, increasing technical debt

Understandable conflict with current business cultural imperative for instant gratification (Underestimate complexity)

Bugs

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Lilypad didn't get a chance - should it be considered a failure?

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Lilypad didn't get a chance - should it be considered a failure?

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The project was a secret. It remained private. Our website doesn't show a clear use case for it.

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High Fidelity: Employee turnover and subsequent loss of institutional || corporate memory

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High Fidelity: Employee turnover and subsequent loss of institutional || corporate memory

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High Fidelity: Inconsistent  strategic focus

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High Fidelity: Inconsistent  strategic focus

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Products

Platforms

Audience

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HiFi: We were never able to answer this to users who came in to world. Do we build, do we just look around, do we talk to strangers? None of these had any staying power. Come in and get some "HFC" from a tree just for showing up? Great!! But what does that mean????

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Plus, it seems impossible to make something that was built for a fully immersive experience with HMDs, to be compelling in desktop mode.  Confuses the possible use cases, too.

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Too Difficult to use, and lacking functionality.

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Too Difficult to use, and lacking functionality.

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I have friends and family that would love to use our product, but they are stopped at our barriers to entry:  how to host a server?  How to create an environment?   How to do the NECESSARY things they can now do in zoom/slack/google?

screenshare
file share
text chat

Until we also have those basic tools, it's easy to see why our users don't stick around.

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High Fidelity: Not compelling to viewers who might want to know more before coming in

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High Fidelity: Not compelling to viewers who might want to know more before coming in

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High Fidelity isn't interesting to look at or watch on video. I'm not talking only about the UI (although it is a culprit), but the actual world and its happenings. Users can't do anything that translates as "fun" or "useful" to someone watching a stream or video of it. We haven't facilitated creativity.

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Focusing on usability is actively discouraged in this company. "It works if you do these ten confusing steps, so move on to the next thing" has been the order of the day. Bringing up polish and usability issues often results in a lot of huffing and puffing about "wasting time". We need to fix this in our culture if we want wide adoption for anything we ever make.

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Hifi was made for "hackers" by "hackers"

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Hifi was made for "hackers" by "hackers"

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But at some point, we needed the cool kids who had no idea what any of this was about.  But just like with Lilypad, as soon as things felt like we were on the verge of getting them right, we gave up because they weren't working fast enough.  That's just not how anything works in the real or virtual world.

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Nothing felt permanent. Teams would make really cool domains for holidays or presentations and then they would be gone. There was no sense of growth over time, progression of what early domains looked like compared to later ones (like early webpages vs. modern). No history.

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HiFi: We've never really had any tools to actually create with

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HiFi: We've never really had any tools to actually create with

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To make anything you had to use other apps and bring things in

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Lilypad: Not enough of a game for gamers and too game-like for non-gamers

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Lilypad: Not enough of a game for gamers and too game-like for non-gamers

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It's dead in here! Why would I want to come back!? This is tied in with the asynchronous issue because we can bring 200 people in at once to play Bingo and they will have an amazing experience but when they come back individually, it's empty.

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The interface, while feature rich, needs a friendlier UI.  I'm not suggesting we had too many features, but our presentation was way off.

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You have to be there to experience what happened. No way to capture the moment and review later. Unless planned like a presentation

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Slack is a great example where I can pop in,check updates and put my phone away.

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Even with existing domains, without users it wasn't fun. If I want to chat, there are plenty of places I can do that without the need to be completely active

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Nobody on Minecraft makes a penny creating stuff. Majority create to share with friends. Streamers make money from people watching and advertisement

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Create tools are too difficult for anyone but developers

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HF and LP: We were not accessible from many of the most common devices (Iphones, low end pcs) and even if we were (Android) the features were lacking.

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I can't imagine my mother being able to access hf.  She is able to share photos and talk to me on FB messenger.  Growth will have to come from more than just the 15-25 demographic

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HF - little understanding the culture and needs of the userbase it was fostering.

Lilypad - while cool has a very limited toolkit. A much richer feature set is needed to be taken seriously.

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Hifi does not have a good way for people to share the experience outside of the userbase in a way that encourages the community to grow.

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Hifi does not empower creators or users to easily do things they couldn't do before.

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The product is really versatile, and users seem to have a hard time understanding exactly why they would want it, or what they would use it for. Too many choices.

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Microphone check 1-2
what is this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhcmzBgJVgg