Lease Fee Recurring Payment Program Authorization Form: Fill & Download for Free

Second Life is a visually contiguous 3D virtual world with user-created content where each user is represented by their own personalised avatar, developed by the Californian company Linden Lab, which launched in beta in 2003 and continues to be operated at a profit — which was actually reached before Facebook! Boasting about a million active users (there are always fluctuations in the exact number) and a vast landscape, its main feature is — and has always been — the ability for users to create their own content (as opposed to having a team of designers and developers at the company to do the whole work). Most of the tools for developing that content (which includes not only the 3D modelling but also programming/scripting for interaction, both within the virtual world and with external services on the Web) are included in the free and open-source Second Life Viewer, therefore not requiring anything else to develop new content. You can think of the viewer as a 3D browser, and it’s available for Windows, macOS and Linux. The basic tools require some moderate talent and a bit of experimenting, and leverage on the concept of geometrical ‘primitives’ (cubes, spheres, cylinders, cones, torii, and so forth) which can be resized and twisted around and ‘glued’ together to pretty much build everything you can imagine.A few tools are required to design more complex content, such as full meshes (not using ‘primitives’ but rather 3D meshes made by professional artists on applications such as Maya or Blender) or animations, and all primitive surfaces can be ‘covered’ not only with solid colours but with whatever textures you wish (and such textures can also include advanced effects, such as bump maps).The level of possible customisation is extended to one’s own avatar, and talented fashion designers (other users, not the company developers!) are constantly launching new avatar customisations, from clothes and shoes to completely fantastic avatar shapes, ranging from the photo-realistic to the cuteness of cartoons.Second Life is often described as ‘an open-ended social 3D virtual world with its own economy’. This requires a bit of explanation:Open-ended means that there are no set ‘goals’ or ‘accomplishments’ for you to do — unlike a game — and, in that sense, it’s just like giving people a platform for writing a blog: what you do with it is up to you. The blog platform’s developer will not tell you how to write your blog, how many visitors you will need to attract, what are the best SEO techniques, how much you should charge for ads, and so forth; they will just give you the raw tool, and it’s up to you to define your own metrics. This is plain, simple, common sense, and applies to a lot of Internet-based services. Similarly, you can ‘use’ YouTube, either simply to view things others have uploaded (and Google does not tell you what you should view, how many videos per hour you should watch, etc.), or, alternatively, you can choose to create your own content and upload it to YouTube for others to view — but, again, Google will not tell you how to do your video in order to attract more views, or what ‘success level’ is expected from someone who uses YouTube as a platform to make money out of it (via ads, sponsoring, or any other means). In neither case, there are ‘no rules’ about how to engage your audience — should you allow comments or not, should you respond to those comments or even challenge your audience to comment, should you engage in one-to-one conversations with your audience; all those rules are defined only by you and nobody else.Second Life brings that concept into a shared 3D world. You pretty much define what you wish to do with it; nobody ‘demands’ you to do X instead of Y, or evaluate your skills or talents in any way. Just like there are a vast variety of blogs, on all sorts of topics, or different YouTube channels, each with its unique characteristic as defined by their authors (and not the platform developers!), in Second Life, you’re not ‘constrained’ to follow anyone’s expectations on how to use the platform for your own purpose. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of blogs written by users of Second Life — known as ‘residents’ — talking about their experiences, desires, or expectations about Second Life. Sometimes it seems as if they are talking about completely different environments — simply because that’s how they choose to use the platform.Because of that, new Second Life users will often feel ‘lost’, since the answer to the question ‘And now, what shall I do?’ is, ultimately, ‘Whatever you want’.Obviously, there are lots of guidelines and suggestions and lifestyles around, to give people an idea of what they can do (in the same way that there are guides about how to do SEO on your blog), but nobody is required to follow those guides and ideas. And, naturally enough, there are Terms of Service and Community Rules (like on any shared platform) which limit to an extent what you are allowed to do, although, compared to many platforms, the creators of Second Life are notoriously open-minded about its restrictions (much of that comes from having a vibrant community of people around the world who have different cultures and social rules from those that are popular in California or even in the United States). This can sometimes shock newcomers discovering areas where ‘naked avatars’ are not only allowed, but encouraged; while other areas are far stricter — but such restrictions are imposed by the owners of such areas, not by the company itself.Naturally enough, Second Life has to comply with regulations around the world, and things like hate speech or any form of criminal activity are obviously strictly forbidden.Social 3D virtual world is a designation that attempted to set Second Life (and other platforms with similar concepts) apart from other kinds of virtual worlds; the best-known example are 3D computer games. While the technology may seem similar from the perspective of the user, the purpose is completely different. Similarly, virtual worlds are also used for education, academic research, simulation, and many other less-well-known purposes. Second Life, by contrast, focuses on the socialisation aspect; it could be argued that the ‘main goal’ of Second Life was to allow people to virtually interact with each other inside the same 3D shared environment. How they ‘interact’ is up to each one of them. But this definition is by no means exhaustive or even universally accepted; for example, some people use Second Life as a channel for their creativity and have little interest in ‘socialisation’; others are more interested in the economic aspect of the platform, and use Second Life as a distribution tool of their content for a profit.In other words, Second Life is not a game, but you can create games using Second Life. In the 2D world, the analogy is the web browser: by itself, a browser is just a viewer of HTML content, it is not ‘a game’ per se, but certainly millions of people use a browser to play online games.The economic aspect of Second Life is better explained with an analogy with the 2D World-Wide Web and how it works: suppose you wish to create your own e-commerce solution to sell your own products and services. You can obviously do it on your own computer, but how do you reach out for other users interested in reading what you have written? Well, the typical solution is hosting the software that runs your blog on a hosting provider. These are specialised companies with lots of servers running in a data centre (or several data centres spread around the world) — a tremendously expensive operation to run since it involves acquiring all that hardware, paying for the power costs (including for air conditioning), and connecting the data centre to the rest of the Internet with big, fat, broadband connections; and, finally, hiring a team of system and network administrators to smoothly run the whole operation.What they do next is to divide the overall costs by the number of users they can accommodate with their infrastructure. But not all users are the same: some want more disk space, some want more CPU or memory, some want more bandwidth. Thus, each user will get a slightly different slice of the actual resources they use; and they will pay accordingly.Finally, you can install the e-commerce solution on the slice you’ve just leased from the hosting provider, and start selling your own products; part of the revenue will pay for your work, but another part will allow you to pay for the overall hosting costs. If you have more products to sell, or more customers, you might need to increase the available hosting space (more disk space, more CPU, more memory, more bandwidth…); you’ll get more revenue but have also to pay for higher hosting costs.With the 3D virtual world of Second Life, Linden Lab has come up with a similar strategy: they host the servers running the simulator software, which can be shared by different users. While viewing the available content on those simulators is free, actually placing content to be viewed by others is a paid service — that’s how Linden Lab pays for their infrastructure, by leasing parts of it to interested customers.Now, why would someone want to pay for having their 3D content online? This is similar to the question ‘why would I be willing to pay a hosting provider for my website?’ If you’re running your own blog, or a site with your personal collection of food recipes, it might not make much sense to have to ‘pay’ for hosting such content — nevertheless, millions of people do that every day (never forget that, although you can certainly write your blog on a ‘free’ platform such as Facebook or even Twitter, your ‘payment’ in this case is giving those companies full access to your profiling data…). Similarly, many Second Life users are willing to pay to Linden Lab a small fee to host their content, simply because they want others to view it; there might be no ‘reason’ to do so except the desire to show your content for others to enjoy it (just like a personal blog).But, similar to how people set up e-commerce solutions on the Web to sell their products or services, you can do the same in Second Life as well. Your content and your services (for instance, your DJ skills!) can be placed in Second Life for others to buy. Suppose that you have designed an incredible airplane, using your highly advanced 3D modeling skills, and create a very sophisticated software solution that will allow the airplane to fly around the virtual world of Second Life, shoot its guns with lots of complex special effects, and roar its engines with convincing sounds. Such a creation takes lots and lots of hours to develop. You might give it away for free, of course (and many people do so!), but you might also allow others to pay you for a copy of your content. This is similar to what happens on many online 3D warehouses out there on the World-Wide Web, where artists, creators and designers submit their designs for others to buy for (usually) small fees. Or, if you prefer a different analogy, consider all those websites with stock images or video, where the creators sell you a license to use those images or video in your own content for a licensing fee.Does that mean that people can actually make money out of Second Life? Oh yes — they most certainly can! It’s worth mentioning that becoming a proficient Second Life content creator is not necessarily easy or accessible to everyone. In other words: while certainly anyone can create their content and offer it for sale on Second Life, it is far more likely that professional content creators will be able to design much more realistic or interesting content for prospective consumers than people who have just wandered into Second Life by accident and learned how to ‘glue’ a cube and a sphere together. This is not to diminish the ability of amateurs to come up with very good designs (many people in Second Life found out, often to their own surprise, that they had actually a talent for designing 3D content — they just never had the chance to use a tool that allowed them to do so easily, nor the guarantee of an ‘audience’ willing to appreciate one’s work and perhaps even be willing to pay for a copy of that content); it’s just a fair warning to explain that the most awesome content in Second Life — the content that sells — is usually done by people who are professional 3D modelers in ‘real life’ and that do that kind of work for, say, computer game companies, special effects for the movie industry, and so forth. Many of those people, in their spare time, have already been publishing their content on the web, on those 3D warehouses, and thus draw an additional income from licensing their content to third parties; ‘transitioning’ to Second Life was something they did in order to potentially get many more customers.You see, in the real world, very few people would be willing to spend, say, US$ 1, for a license fee to a 3D model of a dress. Why should you? What can you do with that? It’s just a file in your disk, what purpose does it serve? (If it were just a picture of a dress, you might have some uses for it — say, to illustrate an article on a blog or a post on your Instagram timeline; but a 3D model of a dress is pretty much useless for the vast majority of people out there.)In effect, potential ‘customers’ of such content are, in general, other content creators that require doing things professionally for their own customers. Suppose that you have a tall order for designing the next photo-realistic first-person-shooter. You might have to spend several weeks designing the ‘main’ characters of the game, to the tiniest detail. But such a game will probably have ‘extras’ as well — characters which will be short-lived, showing up as cannon fodder for a few seconds, never needing to be used again. There will be a need for many of those as well, but doing many different secondary characters takes a lot of time. So, professional game content developers may simply license the content from other designers instead. If you can just pay a US$ 1 fee for a full dress which you can reuse in your game, well, that will certainly be much, much cheaper than designing the dress yourself — because it would take hours, not seconds, and when you’re being paid by the hour, you’ll have to cut corners. 3D-modelling a new dress from scratch might take far longer than searching on the web for an already-finished 3D model that fits your specifications perfectly.Those who sell licenses to the US$ 1 dress are also making money. Sure enough, they will have spent many, many hours doing that work; but the nice thing about digital content is that you can make an infinite amount of copies of it. In other words, if that US$ 1 3D model of a dress is used by, say, a thousand customers, then you’ll very likely made a profit out of the time spent modelling that dress.The problem, of course, is knowing in advance what content will be licensed by a thousand customers, or what will just have a handful of potential customers. The only way to figure that out is to experiment, spend a lot of time developing a large portfolio with all that you know how to do, and see what sells more. With luck, you’ll figure out what kind of content your buyers prefer. But because your target audience is necessary small — how many game designers in the world will need to buy new 3D models of a dress every year? — there is certainly a very low limit on the chances of drawing a reasonable income out of this kind of work.Enter Second Life. It’s mostly an environment where people are not professional 3D content designers; a decade ago or so, I had figured out that content designers were outnumbered 1:10 by non-designers, who would only consume content but not produce it themselves; today, I’d wildly guess that the ratio is much, much higher — perhaps more like 1:100 or even more. No matter what the actual, real ratio is, the point is that there are far more potential consumers than producers of content. Among the million or so users of Second Life, all are potential consumers (and only a few are producers). In other words, in the real life, the number of people potentially interested in acquiring a license for a 3D model of a dress is very small, because it is something worthless for the vast majority of people — except for a very few who work in the 3D content production industry. But in Second Life, everybody is a 3D content consumer. Sure, you can get ‘freebies’ (lots of them, actually) to dress your avatar, and, with some talent, you might even look reasonably well; but you have the alternative of spending US$ 1 to get a brand new dress, designed by a professional using the latest techniques, and which will look so much better. US$ 1 is something that every person in Second Life is willing to spend (compared to what they have already invested in their computer to access Second Life as well as on their Internet connection, US$ 1 is nothing). Suddenly, that US$ 1 3D model of a dress that, sold in a website, would only attract a few customers (with luck, a thousand…), becomes an item inside a virtual world that can have some appeal for hundreds of thousands of users. The potential return on the investment in time designing such a 3D model of a dress is huge!Now, obviously nobody will sell a million copies of their 3D model of a dress (not even hundreds of thousands of copies!), mostly for three reasons: first, that specific dress might not be appealing to everyone — people have different tastes, after all, and they dress up their avatars according to their preferences. A woman’s dress, after all, will theoretically just appeal, at most, to half the population of Second Life (assuming that the distribution of males to females is 50/50, which is not necessarily true). The second reason is that 3D models of dresses suffer from the same fate as ‘real’ dresses: fashion trends! Even if that particular dress model is appealing to you this year, next year it will very likely be ‘out of fashion’ — and this is very hard to predict (just like in real life). The challenge, thus, is to be able to sell enough copies of that dress model in the shortest possible time; and that means reaching out to the largest number of people; that, in turn, requires good marketing and advertising skills (which is something that not all content designers necessarily have!). With a bit of luck, sure, you might have a tremendous success — like in the real world, Second Life is full of fashionistas, writing on their fashion blogs, with lots of followers, and if your dress catches their attention, it’s likely that it will sell much more. But there are no guarantees that this will actually happen; the best you can count with is that Second Life has way more potential customers of 3D digital content than the ‘real’ world.And the third reason is that there is a lot of competition. Even though it’s true that the number of professional 3D content designers is very small compared to the vast multitudes of potential consumers, there is a sufficiently high number of designers that ferociously compete among themselves. Each of them will have enough skills to develop the ‘latest and greatest’ design; each will have the ability, the talent, and the fashion sense to develop ‘the next best’ dress. They will imitate each other and offer similar content; they will also take inspiration from ‘real world’ fashion (but all of them will do that!); and they will fight to catch the attention of the fashionistas and influencers out there. There are really lots of ways to do that, and certainly there are very creative ways of marketing your products to potential consumers, but the truth is that it’s lonely at the top: several hundreds of top-notch content creators aggressively fight for their market share, competing with each other; and that means that selling a US$ 1 model of a dress a thousand times is not necessarily ‘guaranteed’ from the start. The good news, though, is that it’s far more likely to be able to sell a thousand copies of a dress, cash in, and immediately move on to work on the next dress — not unlike ‘real world’ fashion houses, fashion designers in Second Life come up with hundreds of designs every year (if not thousands!), and their virtual shops rival ‘real’ shops in the diversity of their offerings. And, every now and then, they will have to change everything, as new fashion trends begin and old ones fade into oblivion, or some new advanced modelling technique is introduced by Linden Lab in the viewer, allowing new creations with additional features (or more realism), and this means that ‘obsolete’ avatar clothing will not sell any more — perhaps not even for US$ 1 — and has to be replaced, as quickly as possible, for ‘new’ models.Where do content creators put their content up for sale? Although there is an official web-based marketplace, most content is offered on virtual shops (modelled just like their real-life counterparts). These virtual shops, of course, occupy space, and that means their owners have to pay a fee to Second Life’s operator, Linden Lab, to lease that space. That’s how Linden Lab makes money: by offering ‘virtual space’ — implemented on their servers — for leasing. Again, you can think of it as ‘3D content hosting’, similar to Web hosting; a ‘virtual shop’ is just a 3D version of a Web-based online shop, and follows similar rules.An interesting aspect of Second Life’s business model is that, unlike Web space, the lease of virtual space uses a real state metaphor. When discussing how much you’re going to pay for hosting a web-based e-commerce solution, you discuss things such as disk space, available CPU and memory, and bandwidth: these are precise, objective technical designations. The web hosting companies assume that anyone setting up a web-hosted solution are aware of these technical terms and that they make sense for their clients — mostly because ‘that’s the way it has always been’. There are a few variations, with a bit more abstraction, such as paying for the number of visitors, or page views; or even eventually linking the fee to the overall number of pages, or even the number of products shown for sale.However, when talking about virtual worlds, it’s much harder to know how exactly a certain object depends on technical parameters such as CPU, memory or disk space. What is obvious is that, the more complex the scene, the more objects it contains, the higher the quality of the textures, the more it should consume in resources. So, Linden Lab thought that a good abstraction would be to lease ‘virtual real estate’. Instead of measuring things with CPU cycles or bytes, they use square metres of space. Each server — or, more precisely, each simulator — is always the same size, namely it’s a square of 256 metres by 256 metres; the squares are known as regions, and if you have several regions under your account, you own an estate.You can opt to lease ‘virtual land’ wholesale from Linden Lab, or, alternatively, sub-lease it from other users who pay the whole fee. A whole region has the ability to display a certain amount of objects, known as land capacity — at the time of writing, 20,000 — which is another abstract measurement of how many objects can be placed on a region. In ancient times, it was easier to calculate things, because Second Life would only allow objects created by primitives (which were the only available ‘building blocks’), e.g. the cubes, cylinders, spheres mentioned before. Each of these primitives would have a basic unit cost of 1. Of course, the more complex the object, the more primitives you would use, and the larger the space you would need to lease to display it publicly; content creators became quite ingenuous in figuring out ways of building complex objects with the least amount of primitives, so that you could have more objects on your place.These days, most content is fully meshed with textures using materials and other special effects (such as animated meshes); what Linden Lab did was to create a formula based on the complexity of the meshed object and calculate the number of ‘primitive equivalents’ (PE) that such an object would require, or, more precisely, the calculations measure the overall impact that the object has in terms of resource consumption of the underlying server, and the formula uses as a baseline the amount of resource consumption of a basic primitive. As you might imagine, that formula gets updated frequently, and meshed objects uploaded today may have a completely different land impact than the same object, uploaded years ago.From the perspective of the user, it’s rather quite simple: add the land impact for each object you wish to place inside a region, and see if the total is below 20,000. If yes, you’re fine — they will all fit. If not, you’ll have to make choices, what should stay and what should remain (you cannot place further objects once the region is ‘full’).Just for the sake of completeness, at the time of writing, the Knowledge Base article mentioned above shows that currently there are three different offerings, each with a different amount of land capacity and consequently different pricing. There is a setup fee of US$349 and a recurring monthly fee of US$229. Again, that’s for a whole region; you might be able to lease bits of a region according to your needs and tastes from other users who own regions wholesale and sublease them (for a small profit).As you can see, the costs are considerably higher than web space hosting!Last but not least: you’re not required to spend money to enjoy Second Life — just like you don’t pay just to view web pages on the Internet. Not only Second Life is free to join, but there is quite a lot of free content (known as freebies) for you to start. Also, you don’t pay for creating content using primitives; you only pay a small fee to Linden Lab if you wish to upload textures, meshes, sound bytes, or animations (this is mostly to prevent abuse).