HAIL – an idea for Second Life

Some time ago I was invited by Dusan Writer to help judge his Second Life Viewer Interface Competition (no, I don’t really know why Dusan asked me either!) and it took me a little time to decide whether I wanted to help judge the competition or enter it myself.  In the end I decided to be a judge since I knew I probably wouldn’t have time to put together my own entry – however the competition entries were inspiring (and occasionally frustrating) enough that I threw some ideas together afterwards anyway.  I didn’t code anything, just made a few Photoshop mock-ups meant to illustrate a couple of ideas – and I never got very far with it.  This all happened long before Viewer 2.0 appeared and fucked-up the UI even more (sorry LL, not a fan!) and it’s now probably quite irrelevant – but there was one idea I had that I still think would really add something to Second Life.  I called it ‘Hail’ for no real reason other than I couldn’t think of anything better at the time…

Hail (verb)
1 [ trans. ] call out to to attract attention : the crew hailed a fishing boat
2 [ trans. ] acclaim enthusiastically : he has been hailed as the new James Dean
3 [ intrans. ] have one’s home or origins in (a place) : he hails from Pittsburgh

Basically Hail was conceived as an in-world SL-specific equivalent of Twitter – a way to send a short message to a group of your friends within Second Life about something you just discovered or wanted to share within SL – but with a difference.  Second Life has one enormous advantage over Twitter – teleportation.  In SL we can move around the world in just a few seconds by teleporting from point to point across the grid.  We can also invite other avatars to teleport to join us in our current location, we can share landmarks and we can track each other across the map (assuming permission) although these functions are clumsily integrated in the current UI.

The idea was to merge teleportation with a Twitter-like group-messaging function so it not only becomes incredibly fun and useful it also becomes something quite unique to Second Life.  All of the basic functionality already exists in SL, it just needs to be pulled together into a usable whole – a way to immediately alert a group of your contacts or friends to a place or an event and then teleport them to that place or event immediately with a single click.

To make Hail really useful Second Life first has to have a way to sort your inworld Contacts into different user-defined groups – for example, separate lists for close friends, business contacts and role-playing acquaintances.  How it might work…

You’d click the Hail button (I showed it fixed to the top-left of the screen) and the ‘Send Hail’ panel would appear.  First you’d choose the group of contacts you want to Hail (the illustration shows ‘Everyone’ selected) then type in your message.  At any point of your message you can embed a teleport link into the text – you can choose from 3 different types of teleport link:

1. HOME : a fixed teleportation link to your Home location

2. ME : a dynamic link directly to you which updates as you move around the grid

3. HERE : a fixed teleportation link to your current location

You could preview the Hail before you send it and, if you’re happy with it, hit the ‘Send’ button to have it immediately delivered to all of the avatars in the contact group who are currently online.  The illustrations shows the teleport link being embedded into the message as a word but it might be quicker and easier to have it appear in the final Hail message as a separate button alongside the message.  I’ve also forgotten to include a ‘Cancel’ button to abandon the whole process so take that as read.  :-)

When you receive a Hail it also slides onscreen at the same position (so we’ll need a way of indicating incoming Hails if you’re busy prepping an outgoing one) and you have a few options:

Clicking on the attribution button (“Philip Linden just said…”) would open the Profile for that Resident.  Clicking on the embedded teleport link would instantly teleport you to that grid location.  Clicking ‘Reply’ would open a standard IM panel for you to reply to the sender.  I think maybe it makes more sense to limit replies to the sender but maybe it should turn into a Group Chat instead, although there are privacy issues with that?  Clicking ‘Shhh!’ blocks any more incoming Hails from that Resident for the rest of your current session (maybe a keyboard shortcut could change this to ‘Block’ button for really annoying Hailers?).  Or you could just close the Hail and carry on – maybe they should timeout too after a user-defined period?  There would also need to be a way to recall previously received Hails, maybe limited to the current session only?

That’s basically it, a simple enough idea that I think would really work in Second Life and could be a lot of fun.  It could be a great way to gather small (or maybe large) groups of people together in a few seconds – for an instant party or to attend an Event or just to check-out something new in SL  There are, as always, potential problems too – for example what about commercial (mis)use for promoting events or products?  There are currently user-controlled options linked to each Contact we have — you can give permission to map-track, edit objects or see online status on a person by person basis — so  maybe an option to allow/disallow Hailing would be appropriate too?

All the main functions of Hail are already up and running in SL, they’d just need to be glued together differently to form the feature – and I’m sure it’s much easier to say that than it is to code it!  Finally, I’m really not stuck on the name ‘Hail’ so if anyone thinks of anything better feel free to let me know…