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

[Giu1i0 Pri5c0]

I see your points. I am sure SL is not the last word in metaverse
engineering but just one of the first steps, and at some point the
best ideas and practices of today's baby metaverses will merge into
robust and extensible implementations based on open standards.
However, SL is probably the first really successful example of
metaverse and is playing the important role of getting more and more
people familiar with the concept and willing to spend time in a
metaverse. This (and the media attention it spans) is a necessary
prerequisite for significant investments and R&D efforts.
I am now settled in SL as a resident. I will not have the time to
become an expert, so I purchased a prefab avatar instead of trying to
learn how to build one. I bought a first land parcel in Boreal and
will buy a prefab warehouse to put there.
G.


On 12/11/05, Jef Allbright <jef at jefallbright.net> wrote:
> 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.
>
> Related links:
>
> Croquet Project http://www.www.opencroquet.org
> Multiverse http://www.multiverse.net
> Terra Nova http://terranova.blogs.com
>
> - Jef
> http://www.jefallbright.net
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