geekycoder 's List: Virtual World

• Protecting privacy poses some challenges to the goals of interoperability because large parts of the metaverse might end up to be shared reality only to a community of trusted peers.
• virtual worlds can play an important role in creating new ways for people to form meaningful relationships with each other across boundaries of culture and geography.

• “Immersive 3D is going to completely change the way global cultures interact”

   

  Joshua also talked about how creativity was key to his interest in virtual worlds. Joshua first got interested in virtual worlds through Star Wars Galaxies when Raph Koster was promoting the notion that content in SWG should be driven by the community. Joshua pointed out in 2003 many people in SWG were so passionately involved in creating content that they never followed the quests. Although since Raph’s departure from Sony Online this is no longer the trajectory of SWG.

   

  

   

  I asked Joshua to talk about how he first became inspired by the potential of virtual worlds.

•  Philip >  Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab, in his keynote address at the >  Managing Virtual Distance >  conference held by the Institute for International Research in The Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, CA., made a number of points on how 3D immersive platforms like Second Life can facilitate inter-cultural communication in new ways. >

   

  He pointed to the rich communicative capabilities of the immersive environment that provide opportunities for people to cross barriers of language and culture in ways a 2D web site cannot. He gave the example of how opaque a 2D Korean web site was to a non Korean speaking visitor when compared with the experience of visiting a Korean sim in Second Life (picture above)
• Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab, in his keynote address at the Managing Virtual Distance conference held by the Institute for International Research in The Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, CA., made a number of points on how 3D immersive platforms like Second Life can facilitate inter-cultural communication in new ways.

• “Only Open Will Win”

   

  

   

  Philip Rosedale also emphasized the importance of open sourcing the Second Life server technology to ensure the growth of a global community and reaffirmed his commitment to this.
• Schmilsson noted that among other infrastructure challenges in Africa, “40 countries on the African continent do not have reliable Internet access. Thus, they are not a part of our conversations here. This is a major problem.” The conversation that followed covered a number of the hotly debated issues around the role of technology in situations where food, water, clothing and medicine are pressing needs.

• Who/what will be the future competition to the SL - based metaverse?

   

  As you probably know, there are lots of alternatives to second life under development, but I continue to believe that ultimately Trevor Smith of Ogoglio has it right: the metaverse is not going to take off until we have widely available web 3.D development tools in the hands of tens of thousands of website designers. When that happens we will each be building our own little corners of the metaverse and supporting them on our desktop computers. Communications protocols will govern how we move between these worlds and what we can take with us.

• focused my attention on players who seemed to be weaving the following five virtual world threads together.

   

  1) social networks 2) user generation 3) open source/standards 4) 3D immersive 5) social gaming

• also spoke to Ginsu Yoon, from Linden Lab. Linden Lab has been making interoperability and the movement to create open standards for virtual worlds a priority. But as Ginsu Yoon spoke from the podium on Linden Lab’s expansive vision for a 3D internet and podcasts will be available on the VWF site, I did not do an individual interview with him. But we spoke a couple of times. And I ran by Ginsu the direction of my thinking.

   

  The essence of these chats was that the interoperability of virtual worlds would not come from top down from a “standards committee.” Rather standards of interoperability would be worked out from the bottom up by people coming together to actually work on the architecture, e.g. in groups like the Architecture Working Group that is attended by OpenSim, IBM, and many others.
• Right now we’ve got an opportunity to re-engineer and add scale to things. Second Life’s biggest flaw is that you can’t have an event with 5000 people in it. The grid just collapses and you can’t get all those people into a reasonable contiguous area. Whereas for OpenSim we can actually write a customized server that will actually support that by degrading certain things like physics. You degrade that down to a very low quality of physics. You turn off scripting, that kind of thing. You can customize a server to do something like that and Open Sim’s got the potential that hey Linden Lab can use it too and take advantage of these things.
• Things did get a little snippy on the Visionary Panel. Kaneva, Areae, Makena, HiPiHi, Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, and The Multiverse Network were all represented and in fine form. But disagreement erupted (a polite war of the worlds) around the role of 3D in the future of online social networking/gaming environments. Raph Koster creator of Metaplace gamely and very convincingly challenged the absolute preeminence of 3D. But, in my view, at this conference at least, the potential of the open and rich immersive 3D environments exemplified by Second Life and HiPiHi stole the show.
• online, immersive, collaborative 3D virtual environments like Second Life

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• Playboy Magazine is entering the virtual world of Second Life. No word yet on what form Playboy’s presence there will take, but it would seem to be the perfect place for them. After all, constructing a sexy avatar for yourself is just an extreme version of the airbrushing that often goes on in the pages of higher-end skin mags like Playboy. The possibilities, of course, are very interesting: in-world girlie mag to compete with Marilyn Murphy’s Players?