the next level in 3d multiuser: second life.
i just returned from the lovely snow sprint where i also met christian scholz from com.lounge. Christian is recently very much involved in creating stuff for second life, which is the reason why i met him. We are involved in one of those many second life projects ;-)
Besides the usual 3d multiuser stuff, I have not seen anything useful in second life yet and i m convinced that a lot of things in there happen because of the hype of the topic. Anyway, what i wanted to say about second life: It looks crap and i was shocked about the limits in programming it but there is one thing which makes second life to something special:
As much as i know, it is one of the first 3d multiuser environments which can be modeled and built from within. The way how play and editing mode interact is awesome. I know there must have been things like this before, but actually second life is what cms systems or blogs were to the web. Machines which create machines. Know what i mean? Second life demonstrates the next level of 3d multiuser environments. I am very much convinced that second life will run for a while and has a lot of power.
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” It looks crap” -> well it also depends on your graphics adapter.
“i was shocked about the limits in programming ” -> ACK, the possibility of having a car as a hat is no good stuff…
I also think the SL economy will see a bubble burst soon.
if SL continues current state of innovation (e.g. open source…) i can see no bubble ;-)
update:
i had sex on SL two days ago. it was hilarious.
well, sure they make source open, but don’t forget about the business model. people paying fees for being there, fees on the land, etc… on the other hand linden has to fight with capacities (servers, power). at the moment the SL economy is growing, but what happens if they fall in a regression?
SL is a microcosm… it’s like ebay.. people should make money and Linden is cashing in. But you re right… i also think they have to have a big innovation step next, otherwise things get boring and people will stay in their first life ;-)
I think it depends on how much you dive into the community (maybe the right one). I am there now for 1 year and I cannot say it’s boring. There are limitations for sure but the interesting thing for me and others is to try to work around them.
And things will improve of course. Look at the web in the beginning, there wasn’t much you can do there either. Now it looks different.
For me it definitely feels like the beginning of the web as there’s still so much things you can experiment with and which nobody might have done before.
Of course there needs to be innovation and they are working on it but otoh they are also quite busy in keeping it stable with the recent growth rates. And that’s not always easy as it’s a grown and unique system, thus not many experiences might have been collected in the time before (at least in that scale).
Regarding the boringness factor we will see. There are those people who are directly hooked from the first time they enter and then there are those who don’t know what to do with themselves in SL (and they usually complain about gfx ;-).
Which will probably always be the case.
For me it’s definitely the creativity I can live in there and some good SL friends/developer community.
(and of course Second Life is not the last one of those platforms, even the Open Source Community of SL is working right now on a more open system called OpenGrid/OpenSim :-).
i am currently on a conference on business informatics. 3 out of 3 keynotes mentioned second life. this made me feel uncomftabel.
the concepts of wester captialism are ported to second life in every detail. it starts with bying land and ends in the adidas store.
on thinking about it, i have to admit - thats why it works.