[extropy-chat] Re: Any Second Life users?

Sun Dec 11 18:18:38 UTC 2005

On 12/11/05, Jay Dugger <jay.dugger at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Second Life becomes more and more interesting. Any other user here?
>
> Jef Allbright (Jef Ambassador) and I (William Hauptmann) both have
> accounts. I think he has a premium account. I do not.

Virtual spaces for social interaction and collaboration will, in my
opinion, provide a second home, if not a second life, for many of us
in the near future.

It appears that Linden Labs' Second Life is the current leader in
terms of an actual virtual world, rather than the several very popular
MMORPGs that are more about playing a game.

I am currently quite disappointed, however, with the implementation
and some of the policies of Second Life.  I joined around April 2005
and was at first very excited with the apparent potential.  I invested
in a significant amount of virtual land in a nice location (seaside
view, near a telehub) and created an attractive and functional
building for a futurist museum that would mirror the themes of my
website, but in more interactive and immersive ways.  For this project
to be effective, it depended on the promised "HTML on a prim" and
effective linking of in-world content with my web content as well as
reliable performance of the simulator (which was down when I tried to
log on this morning.)

Unfortunately, my sunk costs and ongoing "tier" payments are going to
waste due to lack of delivery and lack of an effective plan for these
and other promised features.  Worse, Linden Labs released an "upgrade"
several weeks ago that dropped promised improvements and weakened
reliability and performance which still hasn't recovered. It remains
quite clear that Linden Labs do not have the staff nor the project
management skills to deliver what they have been promising.

Meanwhile, the efforts and ingenuity of the residents continue to
drive growth of goods and entertainment.  There are a few individuals
who actually make a real-world living from their Second Life
businesses.  Also, events such as the Thinkers meetings, Future Salons
bringing people together to interact with Cory Doctorow, Thomas
Barnett, (Doug Englebart was scheduled for this month but canceled due
to illness), can be very worthwhile.  Lizbeth, my SO in RL as well as
in SL, has hosted many weekend Show & Tell events which typically draw
about a dozen presenters with their latest technological and artistic
creations for an audience of twenty or thirty.

I've experienced the benefits of the virtual environment and found it
to be a qualitative step above text-based interaction, even realtime
such as IRC.  I imagine and look forward to the time when it will be
most natural to call a meeting with participants from around the
world, and I'll be able to pop up an image, graph, or a selection from
a book or web-site over my head to illustrate the point I'm trying to
make verbally--and see the audience's reactions, responses,  and
feedback in realtime.  I'd like to be able to share a white board,
edit concept maps or argument maps together, and be able to run a 3D
simulation together as naturally as holding a conversation.

I don't think we're going to get there with Second Life in its current
form.  One of the biggest limitations, it appears to me, is that in
order to protect intellectual property, *everything* runs on the
single simulator for each region.  For this reason, the architecture
doesn't support distributed processing, plugins, or user-modifications
to the client, and I think this will turn out to be SLs fatal
weakness, unless they open it up.  Long-promised HTML on a prim, the
Mono VM for executing scripts, an updated physics engine (currently
using Havok 1, while Havok 2 is already obsolete) are all example of
this eventually fatal development bottleneck.