Metaverse Continued: "Build Your Own Grid"

As Second Life continues to grow, I can't help but look at the number of sims on the map. It's getting quite... stifling, really. Almost an information overload.

While this is a good thing in its own way, what will happen when we have tens of thousands of sims clustered on the grid? Finding somewhere will be rather... "interesting" to say the least.



But what if we could build our own grid, custom-tailored to our wants and needs?

No, I'm not talking about buying a bunch of sims like Anshe. Rather, what if we could take existing sims and "connect them" at the client level? Essentially, make our own grid with places we enjoy visiting all connected to one another for our client only.


Tangible Bookmarks

Instead of just the main grid map, what if we could construct a "bookmarks" grid - a listing of our favorite places all connected to one another. Making a physical connection might require some client-side code revision (to connect sim edges smoothly) - but as far as I know, the handoff software is already there.

Mix and Match

So the idea goes, if you want a club right next to your home sim - do it! Want to put all of the sandboxen in a neat little cluster? Fine. Want to connect yourself to Seacliff, Montmatre, Numbkulla, and the Fairchang Islands all at once? Sure. The possibilities are potentially endless.

But this would detract from the feeling of "Place" that the Grid has

That's the catch. People would potentially pop into a sim, flying off in a random direction, and disappear into the ether. Advertising campaigns would be grossly fragmented, since there would be no rhyme or reason to telehub placement anymore. Handoff technology would need to be strengthened to take a connection from any sim as rapidly or faster than teleports work now. There's a definite catch involved.



Regardless, this is food for thought. What do you all think?

I think it would be very difficult to do this based on what I know about how rendering and system events work across sim lines. I'm not an expert, but I think, working from what I've read, that the current grid is optimized to limit calculations based on objects within one sim and within the sims that directly bound that sim. If anyone could create a boundary, this would ruin that optimization.

I'd actually rather have different "planets" we could go to, to break up the simulation some. They could have different night skies and even different physics properties, e.g. gravity, air density (wind), basic color of light, very different flora, ground cover, etc. I would pay a premium to be able to build on Mars, or Titan.

Making large-scale distinctions like these would help make it a lot easier to remember where a sim or individual location was, I think, as well as really broadening the possibilities of SL.

neko

I've always just figured when there are tens of thousands of sims on the grid, every product, event, location and avatar would be googleable. Then it would only be a matter of point-to-point teleporting there.

I can also imagine sim clusters banding together to form large and small cities with good googlecred.

Only, I hope it's not google... I hope its an inspired SL resident that figures out the best way to search this space.

Supposedly Hiro was working on that. Perhaps he'll chime in.

I think it will be Google that does it, though. Web on a Prim will mean you can list events in a useful manner in a metacrawler like Google. So...

Ehhh, good idea, but I don't like it.

It would severly fragment the reality and confuse many a people.

I.e.:

"How do I get to De Boom?"

"Well I simply just fly to my left."

---

"Follow me to Ahern!" *Person flys then dissapears suddenly at the sim border being instantly transfered to Ahern where they appear out of no where on the border*

"Wait, what?" *rather new person left confused*

---

Even *I* would get rather confused at this, lets say I set it so that flying North from Morris would put me in Natoma instead of Ahern. Now my brain has to completely rethink the location of these places, and still keep in mind that this is not what everyone sees.

Also what would happen if someone gives you a landmark to a sim thats placed where a different sim is on your map? Like what if someone gives me a landmark to Ahern, does that show up where *my* Ahern is? What if I've deleted Ahern completely off of my map?

What about tracking other users? Suddenly instead of flying a given path to get somewhere I'd be entering into a twisty maze of where my map locations lead me.

Even with P2P teleportation it becomes a bit confusing to the mind (or my mind atleast).

While it does make it a more personal experience, it kinda becomes "too personal", the shared view of reality becomes broken into a singular experience of location. A bit like having Paris France be right outside my door, and yours as well, but our own houses being no where near eachother and us suddenly appearing to the French out of no where.