VW08: Business Guys Debate the Future, one take
Dusan Writer has a take on the panel I was on, casting it as Metaplace vs Linden Lab — though to my mind that leaves out the contributions of Mike Wilson of Makena and Corey Bridges of Multiverse. That’s because Dusan is interested mostly int he clash of philosophies about where virtual worlds are going:
But it leaves a question: are virtual worlds places? Or will the technologies that enable 3D spaces become so ubiquitous that we’ll stop thinking of them as distinct places? Because in Raph’s view, the tools and technologies to create 3D artefacts, the system for managing your avatar and identity should be EXPRESSION-agnostic. In other words, we should have the tools for creating content and then be able to seamlessly publish that content to cell phones, browsers, Flash, separate clients – whatever, it’s not the viewer, it’s in the engine from which content is derived and creating standards and tools for expressing the content from that engine.
FWIW, virtual worlds are definitely “places” in my mind. But to me, clients and devices are merely windows that look onto that place. That doesn’t preclude rich 3d “windows” — I merely happen to think that multihead, flexibly represented VWs is the future. I would swap the word “engine” for “server” perhaps, or “world.”
5 Responses to “VW08: Business Guys Debate the Future, one take”
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Raph,
I just wanted to quickly mention that I liked what you had to say on the panel yesterday.
What I appreciated most was that at times I felt as if you were the more down to earth panelist. That’s not to say we don’t need enthusiasts and dreamers, but as someone who’s been dabbling in virtual worlds and gaming since MUD/Moo days it seems odd to me that the perception is this is a new magic bullet that will quickly take over the internet.
Maybe I’m just becoming more of a curmudgeon.
I should give Corey and Mike their due, they were wonderful participants on the panel. I’d say they were somewhere in the middle of the spectrum on whether virtual worlds get built from the world out, or the Web in…maybe another way of saying it?
I think there’s room at all ends of the spectrum. On the one end, flexible representations of the worlds, or places, and on the other worlds that are inflexible on purpose – because they are specific to a type of tool requirement for example – architectural or urban prototyping come to mind.
If you’re looking purely at which stream will lead to mass consumer adoption, I’m with you on “worlds everywhere”. If you’re looking at enterprise applications, I think it will be like much of technology – specific applications for different needs, some of them closed and task-specific and some of them adaptations of open source/standardized protocols that were first taken for a trial run in the consumer ‘space’ (ick, I hate that word, sound like a VC).
What I find intriguing however about looking at the future of virtual worlds is whether we’ll ever become unshackled from the mental model where a world is by definition a space in which there’s a metaphor of land (or outer space, sure), or in which avatar presence is handled differently.
I agree with your take on Snow Crash. How horribly 1992. And it imagines that the geography of the metaverse is a lot like the geography of the real world. But I’m not sure that the future promise of the metaverse will arrive until we create new models for representation that I haven’t seen yet, other than in very vague hints or extrapolations from other areas, or maybe in some of the art or protoypes being built in places like SL or, I assume, by the alpha kids in MP.
Is it a world if the avatar doesn’t look like a “being”? If I’m wandering around Google Earth and can see the presence of other people yet they don’t have avatars, does that mean it isn’t a virtual world?
When I look at something like Photosynth, I see some kind of hint of how if we can think of information and objects in some new way…rich information artefacts, each of which a portal to something else (by the way, this is something that excites me about Metaplace if I understand it right), and which aren’t displayed because of their relationship to “land” but because of their place in a hierarchy of meaning. Then maybe Ginsu’s idea about the importance of devices starts to make sense.
Maybe not Snow Crash, maybe more Minority Report with the gloves but you’re in a world? Or what was that Mike Douglas movie? The Net?
Thanks for sharing your perspectives on the panel. I’ll side with Jon and say you really helped keep it lively (oops, no reference to Google implied) and engaging. I walked away energized and excited about the potential of the industry.
Some SL avatars are growing smaller by as much as 80% in order to violate the default scaling and to vastly increase the amount of usable space experienced in things such as dogfighting aircraft or sailing (real world transpositions.) This trivial mod reflects deeper levels of abandonment of real world cues by the sort of cultural “speciation” that continues in VW’s. WOW is not a comprehensible culture to the uninitiated, and the barriers to acceptance are maintained by the builders of the cultures there. The same confronts users in navigating the SL interface itself (as a first order barrier) as well as the hundreds of specialized societies living there. These barriers only grow until the level of abstraction is total, and unpredictable at this point. Accessing and participating in digital societies will have only the humanity behind the avatars as a common ground; the rest of our common experience is being dispensed with quickly. Digital anthropology has currency, even a commercial one, finally!
I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but there would seem to be some crossover with what you’re discussing. In that the devices/software used to access ‘The One Machine’/virtual worlds is not the important thing, its the data/environment being accessed and how we interact with it.
Extrapolating from this I can see the lines between ‘The One Machine’/virtual worlds and the ‘real’ world will blur until virtual worlds are an accepted and expected part of our everyday lives.
Great link Mandrill – I’d seen that but forgot about it.
And I agree on data/environment. I think my broader question is whether we’re thinking of virtual worlds/MMOs in the “right way” if we’re trying to spot where the next stream of innovation will come from. Even within the play/narrative space, Spore maybe hints at procedurally-generated narrative (although it’s still bolted on top of traditional game types). Photosynth – procedurally generated spaces from real world artefacts.
Mixed reality – devices, real/virtual cross-over spaces, even hints in something like Brooklyn is Watching, a gallery/virtual gallery art space crossover.
It’s me really – my imagination is limited so what I imagine is that I haven’t seen the breakthrough that will help me get out of the mind traps of how we’ll navigate through shared social spaces with each other – because whenever I think “space” I always come up with real world analogies.