It''s been a hectic week for our 3d startup - a gut wrenching roller coaster ride.
After many months hard work we finally did our big 3d scenes launch with lots to do - managing the tricky migration, cleaning up the post-launch bugs (not done yet!), acting on user reactions, jump starting creators and getting the word out to the blogger community for their reviews and feedback ...
The team pose for a snapshot with our strategic partners, Anshe Chung & Guntram Graef
So how did it go?
Good, bad and ugly - User feedback
We were nervous before the launch.
It was a big change, and we know change isn't always easy for people, especially when it concerns something many love already "as is" - the beta before (some classed it as more of an alpha) had 3d avatars but in a flat 2d backdrop.
One of the most popular scenes post launch
The morning after community reaction was overall positive, which let us breathe a little sigh of relief (at least at first):
Hannygirl: "this is the best thing that ever happened to frenzoo !! (in my opinion)"
Stylite: "this 3d scene is a good improvement. And to my surprise, it didn't eat up any more of my GPU power than I had expected before the 3d scenes aired...I think it's a success "
Being able to do more, have fun in interactive and more immersive environments seemed to strike a chord with the audience.
However whilst the overall feeling was positive, we got a lot of specific negative feedback about the avatars not looking as good which upset many of our most hardcore fans, in particular with the new lighting, texture and 3d camera angles:
AngelKiano: "I like the 3D scenes, but.. according to me... avatar's face looks strange..and the avatar's legs look so much shorter!!!
"
KowaiM: "The eyes seem strange in general. It looks how to say? Messy. ):0 Um, yea the nose looks weird too..."
There was one particularly distressing post from an active user nom nom nom =3 that brought it home:
"when you take pictures they don't look very good there's not as much light and they just look weird. i realized that i really really miss how it was before. i thought this would be awesomeness!!! x3 but i really do not like it so i'm gonna leave this site"
That woke us all up! So the first couple days after the launch we we dropped everything to concentrate on fine-tuning the camera, angle and lighting settings and get our avatars looking better again.
BEFORE: Camera set too high. Legs appear short. Lighting setting too dull.
AFTER: Camera adjusts to be more horizontal closer up, and lighting enhanced.
To our relief, people loved our fine-tuned avatar settings much better:
Lo_specchio: "Thank you very much for fixing the camera angle and changing it to horizontal and also for adding back the close zoom! I would be very glad if we could leave the camera angle that way"
Pikabo: "The angles are much, much better!! It helped a lot with the "big head, short leg" look!"
One other negative aspect was (and still is) the increased loading times to bring up the scenes and slow down and crashes as memory is used up. That part frustrated me a lot, and no doubt others as well. We're making some fundamental changes to how we handle chat and scenes in the coming weeks which will help, although I suspect it's going to be an ongoing effort to get stability and speed up. Did I mention I hate crashes?
We also noticed after launch people were confused how to edit their scenes - which was a worry as it was something unique and interesting in our new product.
Old way
1/ Left click the item (its hotspot)
2/ Move your mouse to where you want it to go
3/ Left click again to put down the item
So we made a little tweak that seemed to make all the difference, and we noticed more people getting into the home arrangement groove.
New way
1/ Left click and drag the item where you want it to go
2/ Release the left mouse button to put down the item
I_eat_cookies: "This is so much less complicated! Thanks a lot!"
Home arrangement in the new scenes.
So overall people are happy with the change, we are attracting more users and keeping them more interested - although still a long ways to go. The stats seem to reflect this - post launch we noticed a good pickup in chat traffic (Sunday was our biggest day ever) which implies people are enjoying the new interactive 3d scenes a lot more, and we've noticed revenue starting to pick up also.
Mixed blogger reactions
I spent a few days before launch trying to come up with our release messaging for the experienced virtual world bloggers. It wasn't easy! In the end I decided on a headline that would emphasize us being the first real browser offering in the UGC 3d world space. I did a lot of research to find any other web based virtual worlds with full 3d creation, and could find none except for arguably Metaplace, but that did not have the ability to zoom or change angles and in my mind wasn't a true 3d environment and was more akin to 2.5D world like Habbo (I got one respected blogger questioning that, and understand his different take).
Once the launch was sent out to everyone I was relieved and appreciative it was covered in several virtual world sites:
"Frenzoo Launches 3D Online World With UGC" - Worlds In Motion
"Virtual Beach Resort - 3D scenes launch" - Virtual Style Divas
"Frenzoo Update: New Currency, Language, Dev Support" - Virtual World News
"Having fun on 3D scenes" - Monoartiztics Blog
"Frenzoo Launches Web's First 3D Online World with UGC" - PRLog
"Frenzoo included on ArianeB's virtual world list" - ArianeB list
"World of 3D chat and creation in your browser" - Hiperia3D
"3DアバターのFrenzoo、空間編集機能を実装" - SecondTimes.net
"Frenzoo | La red social 3D más Fashion" - Seetio
Coverage from SecondTimes.net (Frenzoo has many languages including Japanese)
Much was straight reporting, some good comments from bloggers and tweets:
"... you can also create your own content in Frenzoo and sell it through their shop. It looks promising!" -Gwyneth Llewelyn
However there was also skeptical or negative reaction from some bloggers including Dusan Writer, an experienced hand in the virtual world space:
"Frenzoo Launches Web's First 3D Online World with UGC. 3D Chat with Style. http://ow.ly/V4Eq - um, FIRST?? Ah, Web-based they mean still."
Key point being not making it as clear enough the release was that it was "web" based, and making it too boastful. Reflecting a few days later, even though we're naturally proud of being the first to be able to make complicated 3D UGC vw work in the browser, Dusans view is understandable. It's not easy to work out what message would generate interest and impact to get coverage in the right spirit. It's something to learn from and put together better for next time.
I also started an interesting thread on a very popular Second Life forum, SLUniverse. Frankly, the feedback from this audience was mixed and on balance, harsh, viewing the product as a juvenile world with little depth. Compared to Second Life itself, that is accurate and very much "by design" - our audience tends to be younger and less hardcore technical than Second Life users, and we want to emphasize accessibility and entertainment in 3d over complex control and power ("creative fun without frustration")- something I believe strongly in for virtual worlds to gain more mass adoption beyond early adopters - I'm always reminded of YoVille for a great example of this.
There was confusion and questioning our lack of free walking and open movement, instead going with a simpler avatar spots system (which I think is better suited for our target):
There were also comments about being similar to SimsIMVU which I think misses the different direction we've taken with easy and online UGC creation tools - but it brings home the point we need to emphasize and highlight our own path better. Especially for new users - so this was helpful.
The thread also was useful to bring out some areas to improve around registration process, tweaking the profiles to appear less "young" and "girly" to be acceptable to more ages and genders, and improving the starting scenes - things we're confronting in coming days and weeks.
Chicken and Egg - creator content
Ah the classic problem of creator based sites... the notorious killer of UGC startups:
You need users to get creators interested, and you need creator content to get users interested. Repeat.
Not much fun if we launch this great tech and 3d marketplace if it's empty for users!
Thankfully we had and have a few factors on our side to make this fight easier for us:
1/ Supporting fairly comprehensive 3d importing from the get go - Max, Collada for Blender, Maya, Sketchup etc. Animations, pose points, interactive objects, scenes, trigger words, we started with a fairly complete set (albeit without much documentation or tutorials), which helps eliminate the most obvious initial barrier.
2/ Anshe Chung and her crew of ninja modelers would jump in from day 1 and produce lots of quality products to get things started in the shop, so users had something to get started with.
My avatar relaxing in a comfortable luxury townhouse, made by Anshe.
3/ We already had a group of talented fashion creators on the site who love designing and bringing out new items (our clothing shop has 1000s of great creations now). It has been something fun and challenging to make the jump into 3d, furniture and scenes. These guys have really gone in head first, learning Blender and having a lot of fun putting up their items. It's inspiring to see how fast they are learning and starting to make items
Talented fashion designer Vera takes the jump into 3d creation - leopard skin TV anyone?
Even with these 3 factors, I know its going to be a hard slog over coming weeks and months to get to critical mass. It isn't easy to bring on board new creators to a platform they may not have heard of before, and it takes time and effort to build functionality and trust, which is what we have to do. Responding quickly to creator inquiries and helping them step by step is going to be important.
We're also putting together tutorials, special programs and other initiatives to try and accelerate the process, and I'm confident things will start to pick up steam..we're off to a solid start.
Where to from here?
Now the cat is out of the hat, what next? Rather than deciding that ourselves we put the simple question to our user base:
"What 3d feature would you like us to add next?"
The results were conclusive, the most important feature is to get multi-avatar scenes, and then allow creation of furniture and scene items in our online tool (right now we only support native 3d uploading for scenes and scene items).
This type of feedback helps incredibly for planning, there is nothing like a reality check from real users to remind you of what's important.
So, there is how our launch went, warts and all.
It's refreshing to kick off the new year with our new beta. Its shaping up as an exciting ride to build it out and navigate the inevitable twists and turns as it grows.
ps - I know this was a long post, if you read this far, thanks!
but really that's not the main thing, it's to enjoy getting involved and bouncing around ideas..
