Immersion

Are we willing to redefine immersion as a sense of place rather than an actual place? We do emerse ourselves in what appears to be a contiguous world of Second Life but is actually our client's representation of combined data streams from various dislocated servers. It's okay because it's transparent; we preceive a single large space.

If our future client accomodates p2p teleport, (the servers already do), and associated scripting commands, we can construct buildings that exist in pieces scattered across different sims. Scripted doorways will stream data from their counterpart so that we see the "adjoining" room and will port us there seamlessly when we walk through them. We'll be able to accomodate several dozen people in a club because as they move from room to room, they'll be moving from sim to sim.

Shops and clubs and such will have entrances in several locations around The Grid, but appear to be, and function as, a central location for the owner to maintain.

Are we willing to redefine our concept of immersion to this extent? Or will we remain three dimensional thinkers in a four dimensional environment? Come to think of it, we don't even call it 4D do we?

What was just said?

Dan Simmons used this concept in his Hyperion Cantos novels. Human civilization relied upon spacial portals for transportation. At first it was just for long distance travel between star systems, but eventually it came to be used for connecting the rooms of a house, even on the same world. The very rich built houses where each room was on a different planet. One rich bastard had a bathroom that was a raft floating on an ocean world, the only human artifact on the entire planet.

Architecturally, this is like having a web page made of frames, and each frame is served by a different web server. If done well, it is easy for the user to integrate in it her head into a single, coherent experience. If done poorly, you'll bang your head on the mis-aligned doorways.

Only those who look within and find little to feel proud of need to reference the least common denominator to achieve relative superiority.

I think it's a process which evolves when new tools are available to us. By coming here there is an underlying willingness to embrace a different mindset. However, the natural instinct is to use what we already know (i.e. rl structures) rather than learn a new method in the attempt to achieve success in the new environment. The greatest long term success will most likely go to those with the greatest adaptability in applying opportunities as they are presented.

Did Margaret just dis Monty Python??

I would love to see a more flexible model of space employed here. A virtual world like a bunch of Trekian holodecks linked on separate ships, buildings that span continents, geography that changes at my will, land on ringworlds and Dyson spheres, all this sort of stuff sounds great to me.

If I want to see normal looking up down left right front back space I can just turn the monitor off and look around the room.

Did I miss something? I don't see Whata Fool saying that anywhere.
Did she/he edit it out of his post?
I'm missing out on the action here, it seems lol.

It's in his sig.

It wouldn't look that different. When you look through windows, doorways, portals, gates, holes, archways etc the space you see through each may not match with what you see through another. Nor with the "outside world" if that is where you are.

I think probably, except for special effects, one might avoid exposing any space discontinuities directly to the eye, but normally frame them with structures in this way. This would reduce disorientation, so that our RL instincts be not too offended. Offend them too much, and the scene could become visually incomprehensible. At least until very considerable relearning had occurred.

Thanks Nolan.
Forgot those. I keep em switched off. Doesn't everybody? Or am I missing a whole subculture of frequently changing signature messages? Avatars too?

I just looked at signatures for the first time.
Sheesh, there some pretty rude, arrogant and patronising stuff about, isn't there?
And it keeps repeating in your face. Not a subculture I want to participate in.
Very unpleasant.
I think I'll definitely turn them right off again.

Ellie, I didn't say anything suggesting I was only talking about views changing at portals.

Of course things can only look so different to the human visual system, we would still have the same visual processing mechanism in the brain and the images would still be converted into a two-d representation for display on the monitor.

When I look around my room, I don't see furniture on the ceiling, with people sitting upside down. I could in a virtual environment that didn't try to reproduce only familar boring Euclidean flatworld Earth.

Eliminating travel time by allowing teleport from any point to another doesn't make things look different - but it eliminates the role of location from many decisions, and that is a big change from normal space.

Getting rid of the mandatory ground, sky, and clouds, all of which I have seen plenty of in the real world, would look a little different than what Sl has now.

Would we maintain a baseline for convenient reference, communication, and context? If so, what would it be? Would a baseline be a technical factor or a social factor? or a combination?

Or would we cut loose completely from concepts like ground, sky, or room?

Frankly, with all the ski-chalet wannabe architecture in SL, I kinda wonder how tough it'll be for a lot of people to cut loose.

Would we maintain a baseline for convenient reference, communication, and context? If so, what would it be? Would a baseline be a technical factor or a social factor? or a combination?

Or would we cut loose completely from concepts like ground, sky, or room? If so, would this cut us loose from certain patterns of social relationships? Or perceptions?

Frankly, with all the ski-chalet wannabe architecture in SL, I kinda wonder how tough it'll be for a lot of people to cut loose.

> Shops and clubs and such will have entrances in several locations around The Grid, but appear to be, and function as, a central location for the owner to maintain.

Omg, what a cool idea!

Azelda

Actually... you know what you could do if you owned a shop? What you do is: you pick somewhere popular, and add a portal. Now you exactly copy the view of one side of the portal into your shop. Now noone can see your portal Now, you just leave these portals all over the place, and voila! lots of customers.

Portal spamming!

Azelda

To combat portal spamming (I like that concept!), among many other uses:

Multiple limited-function avatars ingame and under your control, all at the same time - kind of like fingers or arms of your one, full-functioned avatar. An avatar gets portal spammed? You quit him/her and start another in another "place".

I believe Greg Bear had something like this in mind with the Axis City dwellers in Eon.

I wonder if our minds will be particularly effective in working in a complex medium building virtual constructs which we can not invision clear paralells to the real world?

I've come to believe the reason we model the real world in secondlife so much isn't because we're un-original, it's just that our brains are pretty puny and they need a reference point in order to do anything coherent.

Yes, blaze, I think the habits of proximity will die very hard. In many cultures, the face-to-face meeting experience in the bazaar or in the central courtyard of the home are the basic building blocks of civilization. In many cultures, you cannot complete business over the telephone or on the Internet event, but you need that f2f meeting, most likely to be able to read facial expressions and hear tone of voice.

Will Wright did a lot of thinking about this issue of geographical proximity in making The Sims Online. People here laugh at TSO as being primitive tool-wise and visa-a-vis player custom content, but in other ways it was more sophisticated in terms of grappling with some of these issues early on.

The teleportation system there worked faster and without glitches more because each city was all on one server or shard, and you couldn't transfer between the cities without logging out and logging into your new character on that city, and there were only 3 avatars per account (but an unlimited number of accounts were possible). So people kept their main home, vacation homes, experiment homes, etc. Inside one server or city, however, there was for a time the idea that you could make a neighbourhood without being contiguous. One of the goals of the game was to get people collected into a neighbourhood, let's say 60 sims or avatars, and then that would make your neighbourhood's name show up on the map, and then you'd have more visitors to your shops, entertainment, etc. and that would give you more lot points (like dwell in SL) and then you'd move up the top 100 list.

If you were on one hood on one physical (virtual) area of the server, or just an unamed patch of land (all land was easily accessible and cost exactly the same wherever it was), you could pick up that entire lot and all its furnishings, job objects, etc. and move the entire household to a new neighbourhood at the touch of a button. You'd then have to find a proximate square, however, in the new area to be next to your friends. For a time the game devs played with the idea of making a neighbourhood anybody who just filled in a menu to have the same name, but it ended up being too hard to code or something, I guess, and they wound up just having the selection on a menu of proximity. Like you'd move into this one peninsula and you'd see you had the choice of 10 neighbourhoods to chose from, and could chose to affiliate with the one you liked best in terms of "niche". People sometimes warred to get people into their hood and got mad at hold-outs who remained independents. Or they created fake hoods to harass like "Death Becomes You" with lots of bars named "Skull and Bones" etc.

Some groups like SimArts managed to get their 60 homes and shops together and thrive and stay on the map and others died out, the map would constantly change and it's interesting to go and see what's on there today, 2 years after its start, some are still there.

In SL, I wonder, given the problems in crossing sim seams we now have, and the draw on resources that teleportation must indicate, whether it makes sense technically to have a house made up of 12 bits on 12 sims. Why would you need to do that? Just to walk around a bad build? What are the resource use consequences of hundreds of people constructing their castles in the air in this fashion out of bits and bobs of various servers? Is it just hard-wired human psychology that made the devs lay out everything with proximity, or is it the RL equivalent of bricks being a heavy object, so you tend to make them, and build the house, in the same area?

I also continue to wonder about niches. Everyone swears by them. I'd like to see how they do living in them. It's easy to dream about niches when they feel like an apposition or opposition to everything you see around you that you want to "get away from" like Tringo or mass culture. But once holed up with your niche-buddies on a sim, or simlet made out of pieces, are you going to start pecking each others' eyes out? Are you going to discover that everyone in one niche, whether, say, furries or robot-makers, is going to prove deadly dull? In RL, the world went through a lot of trouble to overcome all those ethnic divisions that were pre-set with geographical proximity, and preset by physical geographical divisions -- and now we're all going to reconfigure them again?

I think it is the ultimately irony that after creating the Global Village that Marshall McLuhan first talked about, and creating the means to instantly teleport and talk to a facsimile of a human being, all you'll be doing is recreating the harsh divisions and stratifications of RL society that it once had at the dawn of time or the Dark Ages. So maybe you won't have divisions like "all blacks" and "all whites" but you'll have "all furries" or "all robot-makers" and that will make a corporatist, fascistic society when you zoom out and look at the whole thing -- it will be easy prey for totalitarians.

It is not that TSO was more sophisticated, but that it was so primitive that it wasn't prone to the same problems as SL. Because TSO uses isometric 3D, objects in TSO are basically just a set of images which can be transferred relatively quickly. Furthermore, much of the content is used repetitiously, and need not be streamed constantly. In SL, most objects are unique and consist of image and texture data as well as the data describing the 3D shape of the object. Not to mention the fact that SL is a far more open environment for creation than TSO.

Though certainly your experience in TSO is sometimes valuable in identifying where SL lags behind and where it must be improved, the hurdles which LL must overcome are significantly greater than those which Maxis/Wil had to overcome, as they limited their world to faux-3D and greatly restricted the object creation process.

Khamon, what a cool topic

I think the idea of bending and twisting space/sense of place is something that would appeal only to a limited user base who are able to immerse and leave the constraints of RL behind. Looking around SL, it is already difficult to do (I reference things like houses with bathrooms and kitches in SL, where we have no need of such things.) An awful lot of people prefer the comfort of what is known and create spaces in SL that reflect RL sensibilities, understandable when dealing with a virtual world that takes one far away from the comfort zone at times.

I am sorry to be so pessimistic about the ability to immerse into pure imagination of the general population, but I have a hard enough time seeing SL gaining mass acceptance in the near future. Long term, 10 years from now, maybe. Kids growing up today are joining society already digitally primed, which is not the case for most people over 30, so the user acceptance for worlds like SL in another 10 years will be vastly different. I think the ability to delve into pure fantasy and immerse into a completely foreign landscape will change, but at present time the general population can't let go of vitual kitchens and the need for a comfort zone. Right now, SL is a special place for special people who are willing (mostly) to venture into the future and just imagine.

SL is already changing at a rapid pace. If you strip away the drama and attack threads, you start to see the residents finally taking the mantle of resposibility for fixing our percieved problems in the world. People are discussing how to fix events, how to deal with the needs of business advertising, how to deal with zoning issues. People are trying new projects, new continents; some of those things will fail and some will be wild successes. All will be a learning experince for us. We, as residents, are finally cutting the apron strings and learning to manage our world without looking to mommy and daddy at LL to solve all our problems. It is an exciting thing to watch and an exciting time to be a resident here.

This from the other thread in this forum:

"I'm unsure why we can't have everything. Environmental templates for those who feel comfortable in them: sea, sand, hills and sky much as SL is now. And the tools to build separate but accessible environments for others - the degree of accessibility left up to the person who owns/builds. In the second instance, I'm not sure there's even a need for familiar "earthly" templates; see Khamon Fate's "Immersion" thread. Nieghborhoods and niches might take on different aspects, becoming more voluntary, and less compulsive.

I can see where it may be a matter of development and cost versus benefit, but beyond that very common business consideration is what?"

In other words, beyond familiar business and resource questions, why not create a virtual medium in which many choices - some familiar and some not - are possible, and conjoined?

No, I disagree. My point isn't that it was *technologically* more sophisticated my point is that the game inventor and some of the game devs and the beta testers were more sophisticated in thinking about the *social aspects of the game* and promoting cooperation and society in ways that LL and SL have not because they've chosen to focus on the technological platform and applications and the custom content more than the social side, and by "social side" I don't just mean socializing at clubs and Tringo, I mean the ways in which societies get constructed.

Of course TSO has a more primitive structure with its isometric world, we all get that. We all get that. And of course, without streaming, without custom content, they're free to do stuff like pick up an entire lot, house, furniture, etc. and move it around. But that's just my point. Because they let some of that technological side of things remain primitive and easy to manipulate, they developed the social/anthropological/civilizational side of things more -- and I'm not saying the result is a success, given all the sidetrips they took to allowing all kinds of malicious and questionable things to flourish like totalitarian wannabees, but it is all interesting as an experiment, and one in which a lot of attention was paid to how you get groups of strangers on the Internet to come together, and work on things together, cooperate, enhance each other's work, etc.

Try to get beyond the fixation with the technology, the graphics, the streaming, etc. -- the hard side of it -- and look at the soft side too.

I utterly disagree with your claim that TSO and Will Wright's work in TSO especially and all of our experiences in TSO have nothing whatsoever to offer to SL. I find that a near-sighted, parochial attitude to take. Again, it harps and fixates on the tekkie side of things and obsesses about things like 2-D or 3-D or content kings when in fact we're talking about the human heart. It really is about that, too. How you get people to live together and cooperate together.

I'll you one thing: you don't gain that cooperation by constantly privileging the tekkie point of view over the non-tekkie, and by constantly assuming that everyone who comes along with a new experience or fresh take on things is to be coralled and killed.

The fact is there are some lessons from TSO that could well be applied in SL once the doors of perception are opened.

Unfortunately, that's not what SL is and it's not what a lot of us people want. You often treat TSO and SL as if they're two sides of the same coin, and that is an utterly parochial and insular viewpoint. SL is about far more than socializing, and your refusal to acknowledge that is your greatest failing. You disparage the techi-wiki crowd, and you express a vitriolic bigotry towards the technologically minded members of the community. However. they have as much a right to use SL as you especially since SL was developed with them in mind.



My claim? Please read what was said, Prokofy. I explicitly said that TSO provides insight into what needs to be corrected here in SL. That is the antithesis of what you just claim I said.