#SecondLife Gets a Mobile App

Hamlet breaks the news this morning as does Jo Yardley. See: Official Second Life App for Mobile Finally Here: Full 3D Experience on Tablets Via OnLive Cloud Streaming Could Herald New Era of Second Life and Second Life goes Mobile.

You can comment in the SL Forum here: Second Life goes mobile! 

You can get the app from OnLive™. You get 20 minutes for free (read on for more details). After that it costs about US$2.50/hour. It runs on Android 3.2 and later, PC, Mac, and something called OnLive Game System.  The next video is just interesting SL-wise and not OnLive related.

The OnLive app provides a full Second Life™ experience on mobile devices. I’ve been playing with OnLive games since I was invited to participate in the coming announcement. In general it works pretty well on my Galaxy S4, which is so yesterday… right 🙂

Oddly I cannot get to the SLGO.OnLive.com with my S4. I can type in the URL or touch the link on their site and I get redirected.

OnLive is putting desktop games into our phones and tablets. The idea is not a new one: render images on cloud servers then compress and  send them to the devices. NVIDIA makes special video cards just for such cloud based tasks. NIVIDIA’s idea is one really big GPU with multiple users. That is probably what OnLive is doing.

In 2012 OnLive™ was getting a bad rap for the performance their system was providing. See: OnLive lost: how the paradise of streaming games was undone by one man’s ego. The article is unflattering and those without an understanding of human nature may see Perlman, former OnLive CEO, as an evil corporate dictator rather than the practical ruthless manager businesses need to survive. Whatever the nature of Perlman, the company survived. Whether Perlman is a well balanced individual… we would need to get him on a couch to decide.

If you have OnLive already or are just signing up, login and then search for SL GO. If you use up your free 20 minutes, you will no longer see SL GO listed. You need to purchase minutes to see it.

OnLive 2014-10 Games Page

OnLive 2014-10 Games Page

Getting There

I’ve tried getting to SL GO with my S4 via OnLive. That did not work well. As I say below, the site was too slow this morning. Touch a button and wait seconds for it to respond. I was impatient and that caused me problems as touches stacked up and responded in bursts. I even checked my S4 to see if I had something sucking up CPU cycles, I didn’t. …and yes they have an app for checking that.

So, I went to the OnLive site on my desktop, used the Google Play link, and installed the OnLive app SL Go from there. Much easier. 

5 thoughts on “#SecondLife Gets a Mobile App

  1. “OnLive is having to maintain some high-end servers and burn bandwidth. I’m surprised they have it down this low.”

    Really? I know you mentioned their other services, but considering they’re offering games like Witcher 2, Borderlands and hundreds of other games all for $9.99 a month, and have a $14.99 a month offering for games we’ve purchased from places like Steam that they’ll stream over the cloud…how’s it surprising Second Life for $3 an hour is “down this low”?

    I get it that operating the Second Life client is different than Witcher 2, or multiplayer games on OnLive. Second Life is constantly downloading stuff and writing to disk, it streams music and each client has to know about tens of other avatars about, it loads shared media webpages and does some other exceptional things that escape me right now, but does this different really create the gulf between $3/hour and $10/month?

    Surprised that you think this price point is low, I’m not sure what compared to. It’s insanely high even compared to OnLive’s other services.

      • Or you know, as a consumer, just opt out.

        But I was wondering how you arrived at being surprised that the price was “this low”. Guess you don’t want to discuss that, no biggie.

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