As you may already know from the buzz back in April when the project kicked off (just prior to Kingdon's hiring as freshly minted CEO of Linden Lab), the global interactive design firm Vectorform was contracted by Linden Lab to undertake the Landmarks and Navigation project, essentially completely reworking the way landmarks (a kind of virtual-environment version of Web bookmarks/favorites) are handled in Second Life.
The project adds a new user-interface element to the screen that applies Web-style browsing semantics (forward/back/location) to virtual environment positions. Vectorform say that they recently submitted a beta of the modification to Linden Lab and are awaiting QA (Quality Assurance) feedback.
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We're a little dubious as to whether the change will make handling navigation in the virtual environment more or less intuitive. Based on the designs we've seen so far, we're inclined to think less, but we'd rather reserve judgement until we have had a chance to get our hands on a build of the software and try it out for ourselves. Certainly the addition of a teleport history that is persistent across sessions is not unwelcome.
Unfortunately as is so often the case, by the time the code is in the hands of the users, things will be more or less set in stone, so even if it doesn't work as well as what is presently available, we expect the new system to be retained. Once everything's been bought and paid for, integrated and run through QA, it tends to become rather difficult to give up, or to alter substantively.
We'll just have to wait and see how it works out.
While Vectorform have been described as an "award-winning" firm (not least by company president and co-founder Kurt Steckling and by Linden Lab's new CEO Mark Kingdon), they hastened to assure us that the description is inaccurate, and that the firm has as-yet received no such awards, and that any statements to the contrary may be "outdated information." [Vectorform has subsequently contacted us to let us know that this was based on poor information that we had received]
Vectorform was unwilling to confirm that any future work is planned with Linden Lab.
