Jerry Paffendorf comments on the Metaverse 2.0 post:
[…] I’ve been banging the metaverse and Second Life meets Google Earth drum for a while and have the opportunity to talk about it at Where 2.0 coming up real soon. The talk is called “Second Life and Google Earth Mashups: Virtual Worlds Meet Geospace.” Great discussion here. It’s all going in the talk! :) Now I’m perfectly happy to be your avatar for that, ha, so speak through me. What else do you think I should be saying there?
One thing that occured to me is that while we know exactly what the Earth looks like, we are still a long way off from knowing what the best of all possible virtual worlds is, from a user perspective. Though we may not know what the answer is yet, we are definitely beginning to agree on the questions we need to ask in order to find out.
[In the rest of the post I list some of those questions that have been asked recently, and ask whether the answers might not depend on personal preferences.]
(Caveat: Some or all of this may already have been covered in the metaverse roadmap summit, which I only read up on cursorily. If so, please call me on it.)
Questions that have been asked recently: How much Gaussian curvature? (positive = sphere, 0 = plane, negative = hyperbolic) What kind of topology? (regular like a grid, clustered or loopy) Centralized like MySpace or distributed like web servers? Libertarian or authoritarian when it comes to trust? These questions concern some fundamental parameters for virtual worlds, and I’m sure there are many more such questions — together, they might define a kind of taxonomy of possible worlds, of which a subset is viable, of which a further subset is actually built, and of which a final subset achieves a critical mass of popularity.
For Google Earth, some of these parameters are already fixed. But even different virtual Earths can have different answers to those other questions if/when they become metaverses.
Perhaps niche metaverse formats will develop, just as with community sites on the web for likeminded people today. Perhaps it turns out different people have different tastes in metaverses, just as they have different tastes in music. Or perhaps one’s metaversal preference will come to have more political overtones — esoteric and abstract vs. anti-intellectual; prone to producing commonses and thus the opportunity to learn positive sum games, or not; where cells have lots of neighbors, or few; where penalties for misbehaviour are harsh, or lenient.
Maybe metaverses will evolve to meet their users’ needs over time (or needs may change). Second Life appears to be doing this with their constant point upgrades. In this case, those metaverses that can adapt the fastest will thrive, which gives the advantage to the best-written underlying code.
> Perhaps niche metaverse formats will develop, just as with community sites on the web for likeminded people today. Perhaps it turns out different people have different tastes in metaverses, just as they have different tastes in music.
Boy do they ever. Ren Reynolds took a stab at some over-arching categories on Terra Nova with his Four Worlds Theory: game, social, and civic virtual worlds, with the real world being the fourth, and how each needs to be governed and controlled differently (so like game worlds often by the game developer, social worlds often by the population using the system, civic worlds often (sometimes?) by real world governments, depending on their purpose). There are serious challenges here involving how people agree to different rules and terms of service.
> Maybe metaverses will evolve to meet their users’ needs over time (or needs may change). Second Life appears to be doing this with their constant point upgrades. In this case, those metaverses that can adapt the fastest will thrive, which gives the advantage to the best-written underlying code.
Second Life definitely is changing and opening up. Check back in on the Open Croquet project too, that free and open source P2P 3D operating system. Mark Wallace at 3pointD just pointed out they’ve got some avatar creation upgrades including pulling in some avs straight from Second Life. Better art like that will get them more attention, and people are also making the new attempts to organize development around it. A group called Qwak has ambitions to : “…enable a rich ecosystem of interlinked Croquet spaces, that is as easy to navigate and extend as today’s web.” If Croquet development took off, it could adapt to user’s wants very, very quickly.
Croquet architects Julian Lombardi and David Smith were at the Metaverse Roadmap Summit, and their demo stole the show (Robert Scoble’s write-up). When asked about importing 3D from other programs, the answer was, “Sure. You’ll even be able to build with Sketchup from within Croquet, then drag your 3D build right out into the world and walk around in it.”
Erm…OK! Sounds good to me :). So maybe what’ll happen is that something like Croquet will rip all the terrain and 3D data from something like Google Earth, and there’s your avatar-based mirror world. Croquet lets you create portals into other worlds on the fly (literally like walking through a door and being in another world, even wearing another avatar and experiencing different physics if you want), so you can already see flat space mashed with hyperspace.
Just a few thoughts. Also had an idea for how a simple 3D MySpace map might work, but no time to type it out right now.
Thanks Jerry for that very interesting primer.