Welcome to the Second Life Forums Archive

These forums are CLOSED. Please visit the new forums HERE

Immersion

Prokofy Neva
Virtualtor
Join date: 28 Sep 2004
Posts: 3,698
05-28-2005 11:42
I've read this post here in this thread three times front and back. No where in there is a stitch of a word that says anything about TSO experience serving as a "corrective".

Here's what you said:

From: someone
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.


It's just a smackdown, pure and simple, and a condescending one at that, so please don't backtrack on it by making up stuff.

When you strip away all the fancy talk about "hurdles" (which have to do with all kinds of tekkie things having to do with servers, "interest lists" etc etc) you're faced with this: a screen with glowing green dots on it, which represents people, and them doing stuff, and having to get along. That's it.

From: someone
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.


Ardith, who are you to decide what SL is or isn't? Speaking on behalf of what group? With what authority? That's the root of the problem. Your persistent belief that you speak with authority, with rights, on behalf of some group or grouplet.

Possibly you do? Then let's hear how that works.

I sure don't believe that. There are times when I see I do speak on behalf of newbs or non-tekkies in a general sort of way, but I'm certainly not so short-sighted as to think my perception is any kind of "truth". I merely submit it to the discussion and am often surprised to find that -- as blaze explained -- what seems like utter common sense "normal" stuff to me is perceived as some kind of oddity.

No, I don't suffer from any "utterly parochial and insular viewpoint," I am quite aware that SL is open-ended, 3-D, streaming, and unlimited with possibilities...except where it is obstructed by people with "utterly parochial and insular viewpoints" ROFL -- like the anti-commerce stuff.

I'm merely bringing in some points from TSO, full stop. They could still apply. And I just explained, duh, that when I use the word "social" I don't mean just SOCIALIZING but the society, the world, the way groups function and interact.

I don't have to "acknowledge" anything, Ardith, YOUR refusal to acknowledge that there is more to this world than meets your eye is YOUR failing.

It's a tekkie-based world that would benefit HUGELY from some input from non-tekkie types. And by that I mean not just those in the computer graphic arts who are artists on the Internet and on computers and PSP jockeys. I mean people from all walks of life and from all kinds of perspective.

And there is no "vitriolic hatred" of the tekkie wiki crowd, but just a report on what some of them are like, and what their attitudes are like. They don't brook dissent often, and are INCREDIBLY touchy about any criticism. They seem to believe it's their God-given right to be the advance-guard and the dissenters, but in fact some of them are more conservative than anybody.

SL might have been developed "with them in mind" (ugh, talk about parochial and insular!!!!) but that was just the beta era. What, the ENTIRE metaverse is supposed to be created, run, and staffed only by arrogant tekkie types? Ugh. and WHY? Isn't there room in the metaverse, just like the regular universe, for all kinds of people?

Ardith, what I've done is challenge your flippant and abrupt smackdown of TSO and your flippant and abrupt smackdown of me personally, and just of the general non-tekkie point of view. Try to understand that in this context. It's not a personal insult, it is not even an effort to rehearse the considerable baggage you bring to this thread from other threads, it's just a debate about the metaverse. Try to refrain from using it as yet another venue for a personal smackdown.
_____________________
Rent stalls and walls for $25-$50/week 25-50 prims from Ravenglass Rentals, the mall alternative.
Olmy Seraph
Valued Member
Join date: 1 Nov 2004
Posts: 502
05-28-2005 11:47
Once again, a discussion about an interesting topic has devolved into a meta-discussion about the discussion. Time to unsubscribe from this thread.
_____________________
Some people are like Slinkies... not really good for anything, but they sure bring a smile to your face when you push them down the stairs.
Prokofy Neva
Virtualtor
Join date: 28 Sep 2004
Posts: 3,698
05-28-2005 12:00
From: someone
Once again, a discussion about an interesting topic has devolved into a meta-discussion about the discussion. Time to unsubscribe from this thread.


I totally agree, Olmy. And my first contribution to the discussion, as you can see, was cogent and thoughtful and contained no personal attacks, no sidetracks, and no snarkiness. It was just a contribution about TSO and it's grappling with putting people into neighbourhoods. It contained no "discussion about the discussion" or anything of the time.

Then please note what happened next -- it's instructive.

That in turn engendered the usual forum smackdown from someone who not only had to bring baggage from other threads -- and is a regular in rushing over to do that everywhere against me -- but had to then smack at TSO and let us all know once again that it is "primitive".

Then I replied to that as an effort to prevent that constant smacking and denigration and try to get people to see what was valuable about TSO -

-- getting groups of strangers to work together on common projects by making it easy for them to do so and providing incentives to do so
--- providing rewards, not punishments for such cooperation (i.e. in SL, if you group your land, you merely risk having it stolen by another officer or being voted out of the land you paid for-- this risk is now being finally addressed in the next patch hopefully)
-- providing ease of transition -- which of course it could do as a non--custom-content and non-streaming environment, but maybe there are some ways in which could be revisited for SL
-- providing top 100 lists that enabled people to have feedback on how they were doing with the incentives -- top 100 lists included ratings lists of those with most positive, i.e. most friendship balloons, and most negative, i.e. most gloves, or enemy challenges.

People do tend to show repugnance for TSO as a way of socially bonding and letting everyone know they are technologically superior or more savvy. Ok, fine, whatever. But I do think you can grab some of these experiments and look at them and ask and brainstorm where they could be put in SL in some fashion.

Nobody has yet come up with a good formula to get groups together to join forces, tier, and dollars to cooperate on land. I try this myself in rentals groups, with moderate success, but it takes hundreds of people trying this. Some projects get started by groups of very tightly-knit and like-minded people who go through shared quests and leveling and killing of monsters together, whether monsters in a game-within-game or monsters in the meta-game of reputations here which involves creating monsters of people like me who challenge received wisdom.

What;s the good of having portals here and portals there if they go nowhere, with nobody to cooperate in them?
_____________________
Rent stalls and walls for $25-$50/week 25-50 prims from Ravenglass Rentals, the mall alternative.
StoneSelf Karuna
His Grace
Join date: 13 Jun 2004
Posts: 1,955
05-28-2005 13:29
From: Khamon Fate
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.
it would be cool if there was a continent that allowed this to see what could come of it.
_____________________
AIDS IS NOT OVER. people are still getting aids. people are still living with aids. people are still dying from aids. please help me raise money for hiv/aids services and research. you can help by making a donation here: http://www.aidslifecycle.org/1409 .
Seth Kanahoe
political fugue artist
Join date: 30 Jan 2005
Posts: 1,220
05-28-2005 20:12
From: Olmy Seraph
Once again, a discussion about an interesting topic has devolved into a meta-discussion about the discussion. Time to unsubscribe from this thread.


Agreed. I'm fucking done with these forums until people become more interested in discussing ideas and less interested in discussing themselves.
Seth Kanahoe
political fugue artist
Join date: 30 Jan 2005
Posts: 1,220
05-28-2005 20:19
From: Olmy Seraph
Once again, a discussion about an interesting topic has devolved into a meta-discussion about the discussion. Time to unsubscribe from this thread.


Agreed. I'm fucking done with these forums until people become more interested in discussing ideas and less interested in discussing themselves.

Between that and the Lindens and their "feebs and choads".... :rolleyes:
Seth Kanahoe
political fugue artist
Join date: 30 Jan 2005
Posts: 1,220
05-28-2005 20:20
From: Olmy Seraph
Once again, a discussion about an interesting topic has devolved into a meta-discussion about the discussion. Time to unsubscribe from this thread.


Agreed. I'm about done with these forums until people become more interested in discussing ideas and less interested in discussing themselves.
Ellie Edo
Registered User
Join date: 13 Mar 2005
Posts: 1,425
05-28-2005 20:40
As I proposed elsewhere, lets have a new Forum called
"Criticism Re Alternate Posting-styles"
All the egomaniacs who insist on posting about postings instead of the topic can be told to "take it outside" and just get on over there.

ie - "could you please take this disagreement to the C.R.A.P. forum"

This massive and relentless self-absorption is utterly tedious, and disrespectful to those who want a discussion of the issues instead.
Gwyneth Llewelyn
Winking Loudmouth
Join date: 31 Jul 2004
Posts: 1,336
Surreal landscapes
05-29-2005 03:32
Back to topic - I must admit that I found the concept proposed by Khamon Fate intriguing, but confusing. Intriguing in the sense that it would, technologically thinking, be appealing to see how far we could go with this idea - a "surreal landscape". Confusing because we're human beings after all and used to a certain mind's image of what a "world" should be.

SL has some sort of gravity (although we are able to fly and objects are not subject to it, unless they're set to "physical" :) ), a day-and-night cycle (although it's much faster), wind, a continuous landscape with trees and birds chirping on them. While through our building we can insert "fantastic" elements in that landscape, we cannot use "surreal" elements.

I'm pretty sure this is deliberate. Surrealism is something which is very hard to understand for a large number of people (just think of the decades of art discussion around that topic!). We're far better off with "realism" with a touch of fantasy - which, in current mainstream literature, is called "magical realism". This is the current, literary trend, and it's what we have in Second Life as a world. There is no question about the amount of "appeal" a "fantastic, but realistic" world has - if it weren't like that, we wouldn't be growing at the rate we grow!

Now imagine we'd have things like "portals", "wormholes", and an overall sensation that nothing in SL resembles reality. You sit on a chair, and suddenly you're in another room, with a different group of people. You stand up, and you don't return to the place where you started from. You open a door to your bedroom, and are suddenly in a sunny beach; but when you go into the water, you appear stark naked in the middle of the Welcome Area. And the next day you log in, all these connections are different and new for you to relearn them.

These "extreme" examples show what happens on a surreal world - you can't take anything for granted, ever. Your mind never finds an "anchor point" - somewhere where you can "go" for a sense of "certainty", that things will "behave" according to what you expect them to behave. This, as said, is not for the weak of mind - or, more likely, is not for the vast majority of human beings.

I'm sorry that I sound so negative against this "thought experiment". I must admit I'm a bit conservative in my relationship with art forms, and I'm glad that surrealism is slowly fading out from the mainstream art, and being slowly replaced by "magical realism". I was a bit tired to watch movies where these concepts were exploited, or view pictures (or even whole rooms!) in museums which I couldn't get a grab on, much less understand. Whereas I admit that some surreal literature is fascinating to read, it also needs much more effort to understand, to a point where you cannot be sure that there is a "message" at all in it. So, I'm glad that this fad is dying out. And I certainly wouldn't enjoy a surreal SL as much as a fantastic one - and, according to the current world population - I would say that most current residents would not like the idea (remember, they don't read the forums :) ).

Immersion is hard on a fantastic world, but possible. It would be impossible to many in a surreal world - only a very few would accept the concept.

Although I would certainly visit a surreal sub-continent in SL (I'm all for experimenting with radical changes, in controlled environments!) and I'm intrigued how you could integrate both a surreal and a fantastic world in the same platform. So I don't dismiss the idea at all! I just think it's one of those things that would only be enjoyable to a small minority.
_____________________

Seth Kanahoe
political fugue artist
Join date: 30 Jan 2005
Posts: 1,220
05-29-2005 04:39
Frankly, the word "surreal" isn't a good choice - it's pejorative and loaded. The explicit definition of the word is "a distorted or nightmarish dream state," "a nightmarish or hallucinogenic world," "a death experience or subconscious state expressed in random, non-sequential juxtapositions of images," "unrealistic expectations or perspectives", and "a condition of irrationality or enslavement to the subconscious id."

"Surreal" does not fit the on-topic parts of this discussion, and I see nothing of Dali, Duchamp, or others in what's been proposed.

I read Khamon and the others to mean - and I certainly meant to convey this myself - that SL can give us the opportunity to discover alternate perspectives or environmental contexts that have their own rational, coherent, congruent logic. No longer compelled by physical conditions, we might discover some new, but no less human way of ordering living space, movement, and the way we use them.

It's also worth noting that one person's "anchor point" is another person's dead weight; while I expressed some reservations earlier about the ability of most people to adapt quickly to such environments, I don't think you can generalize to the extent that you have. The reaction of the whole community will not be so monolithic, and more may embrace these ideas over time.

On the other hand, I think you've very expertly outlined the initial majority reaction to such experiments, and in that sense it was a very good post.

The idea of starting small and experimental appeals to me, as does the idea of trying integrate the real, the deliberately fantastic, and the alternatively real.
Seth Kanahoe
political fugue artist
Join date: 30 Jan 2005
Posts: 1,220
05-29-2005 04:47
Frankly, I don't think the word "surreal" is a good choice - it's pejorative and loaded. The explicit definition of the word is "a distorted or nightmarish dream state," "a nightmarish or hallucinogenic world," "a death experience or subconscious state expressed in random, non-sequential juxtapositions of images," "unrealistic expectations or perspectives", and "a condition of irrationality or enslavement to the subconscious id."

I don't agree that "surreal" fits the on-topic parts of this discussion, and I see nothing of Dali, Duchamp, or nightmares of the mind in what's been proposed.

I read Khamon and the others to mean - and I certainly meant to convey this myself - that SL can give us the opportunity to discover alternate perspectives or environmental contexts that have their own rational, coherent, congruent logic. No longer compelled by physical conditions, we might discover some new, but no less human way of ordering living space, movement, and the way we use them.

It's also worth noting that one person's "anchor point" is another person's dead weight; while I expressed some reservations earlier about the ability of most people to adapt quickly to such environments, I don't think you can generalize our need for common contexts to the extent that you have. The reaction of the whole community will not be so monolithic, and more may embrace these ideas over time.

On the other hand, I think you've very expertly outlined the initial majority reaction to such experiments, and in that sense it was an excellent post.

The idea of starting small and experimental appeals to me, as does the idea of trying integrate the real, the deliberately fantastic, and the alternatively real.
Gwyneth Llewelyn
Winking Loudmouth
Join date: 31 Jul 2004
Posts: 1,336
05-29-2005 06:55
I feel I must apologise for the usage of the word "surrealism".

I meant "surrealism" in the artistic sense, Seth, not in any other way - Dali and Magritte being the examples that come to mind. There is an interesting article on the Wikipedia about "Surrealism as an artistic movement": to expose psychological truth by stripping ordinary objects of their normal significance, in order to create a compelling image that was beyond ordinary formal organization, in order to evoke empathy from the viewer.

I didn't mean anything "pejorative" and "loaded" with that usage of the word and I certainly never thought of applying anything "negative" to the word. You describe it pretty well in positive terms:
From: Seth Kanahoe
SL can give us the opportunity to discover alternate perspectives or environmental contexts that have their own rational, coherent, congruent logic. No longer compelled by physical conditions, we might discover some new, but no less human way of ordering living space, movement, and the way we use them.

That is also the "positive" usage of surrealism that I'm familiar with, from the times I had to study a bit of Art History - I never encountered the "negative" and "pejorative" definition before your post, and was surprised by it. I'm sure that most of my artisticly inclined RL friends would completely disagree with applying any negative meaning to what was a major artistical (and philosophic) movement of the 20th century. I was only taught by them (and by my teachers) the positive meaning, which you so clearly described.

Thus, I withdraw my usage of the word "surreal" if it's not clear to everybody what it means, and abide by your own definition, which I find perfectly fitting into the context. I certainly don't want to use any sort of "labels" that can convey a negative meaning to some, when that was clearly not my intention, and I have to apologise for having done so.

Having said so, and since we're discussing something that doesn't exist in SL as yet, and thus being difficult to pinpoint the "reaction" that the residents can have to something that hasn't been tried yet, the only comments I made were related to RL reactions to this type of "alternate perspectives or environmental contexts", as done by other art forms - mostly paintings and literature, but also music, movies, and (apparently, according to the Wikipedia) even TV shows. As you know, this artistic movement was one of many sadly seldom understood and rarely accepted beyond the artistic circle which proposed it (still, if it weren't for it, we wouldn't have the Guggenheim museums...). Human nature being about the same, in RL and SL, I would expect the same reactions to occur - a vast majority would react the same way to "alternative perspectives and environmental contexts" as they react to it on existing RL art forms.

Thus my "generalization" - if this movement has lost the ability to capture a wide audience in RL, I fail to understand why it should have some success in doing the same in SL. We are still the same human beings, after all.

Nevertheless, SL encourages making experiences. If we don't try "alternative perspectives and environmental contexts" in SL ever, we cannot be sure that they won't be accepted. So, I think we should try! Lack of success iRL does not imply automatically the same lack of success in SL - we should experiment first, and try to reach some conclusions later. It was argued that the biggest drawback of this artistic movement was the lack of empathy it created on the part of the viewer. We could argue that this happened because paintings, sculptures, books, or even movies, do not have an "immersive" component as strong as SL. If we could bring these concepts inside SL, and experience them immersively (instead of watching the "object" from afar), perhaps this could give the astonishing result of enabling empathy with the viewer - because the experience in SL is so different.

Just imagining that this could actually happen would be a dream for the advocates of this artistic movement, and, for SL, something completely extraordinary! In that sense, not doing it would be losing an incredible opportunity. I say, we try it :)
_____________________

SuezanneC Baskerville
Forums Rock!
Join date: 22 Dec 2003
Posts: 14,229
05-29-2005 09:21
A system that allows greater control over the treatment of virtual space does not preclude the display of the normal SL environment.

Having the ability to treat space and movement in a more flexible manner does not imply that one has to use this ability to create annoying chaotic virtual environments.

Wanting to keep the entire SL world, including all the parts of that one does not pay for, limited to a crude representation of "flat earth" surface and a small distance above, with some exceptions, but only the exceptions we already have and are familiar with, instead of allowing other people to use the storage space and processor time they pay for in the manner they choose, displays, in my view, an excessive emphasis on the importance of one's own desires for restriction and familiarity and a lack of respect for other people's wishes and desires.
_____________________
-

So long to these forums, the vBulletin forums that used to be at forums.secondlife.com. I will miss them.

I can be found on the web by searching for "SuezanneC Baskerville", or go to

http://www.google.com/profiles/suezanne

-

http://lindenlab.tribe.net/ created on 11/19/03.

Members: Ben, Catherine, Colin, Cory, Dan, Doug, Jim, Philip, Phoenix, Richard,
Robin, and Ryan

-
Prokofy Neva
Virtualtor
Join date: 28 Sep 2004
Posts: 3,698
05-29-2005 09:43
Surrealism in the RL art movement can "work" precisely because it has elements of the ordinary, a mundane, tree-lined street with streetlamps juxtaposed with the fantastic, night and day at the same time, a man's head with an apple, etc. It's not so utterly removed as to be abstract, it is composed of the mundane, which anchors and sets up the fantastic.

I agree that SL seems more like "magic realism" in that the fantastic elements are embedded more in easier-to-grasp, and often pastoral elements. I was just reading about Chagall yesterday, and found that in his day, he was considered the only odd one of his kind in St. Petersburg, although of course when we think of him in France, we think of him as being influenced or influencing schools of art like Impressionism. All he did was remove gravity, and put in flying, like a dream, but the rest of the elements are all out of Vitebsk peasant life. And he conceived of these images not only because of urbanization but due to living in a world where all values were turned upside down and freed from their moorings with the Stalin purges, i.e. the murder of his teacher.

Far from conceiving of SL as a space where a tiny experimental avance garde are trying in vain to create an imaginative world in the face of a bastion of conservative resistance, I think most people in SL have *already* accepted an incredible amount of dislodgement from the ordinary moordings and even an entire "re-evaluation of values" if you look at the prominence of certain social movements (but that's another topic). They *already* live in the fantastic and surreal at times and don't blink.

Teleportation creates something already roughly like the portals being described and it's only a matter of it working faster and better and removing the "fill-up line" as a visual for movement across space on the screen to have the seamlessness of the portals create the illusion better. Yet, it *already* takes place.

Example: I log in under water and climb up a mountain and see someone building an Asian home on a mountain. I TP out to a customer service call then sit on a castle porch while a man describes his construction of garden gnomes for sale and another man with unicorn-type horns and orange skin in Bermuda shorts talks about telehubs at the Moth Temple in Iris, inspired as a kind of replica of a famous Japanese temple....we gaze up the river at a store selling fantastic battle gear and dragon avatars and across the way at a quaint Italianate threater performing RL and original material.

I fly back over out of telehub over a classical building and more bizarre RL and SL juxtapositions and fly over a large dam and wait for some visitors and one arrives and says the dance machine on the wall disguised as a painting of Picasso's "Dances" reminds him of his high school girlfriend, and I say "Do you mean Gloria Inexcelsis Deo?" and we lounge on some furniture in pre-set animated poses of thoughtful languor before I teleport to a hill to talk to a guy with green hair who is making a giant box, next to a woman's box in which you can sit and have the illusion you are gazing across expanses of a sunset beach.

Another TP and a European man is showing me his newly built home and shop with a Klimt reproduction on the wall and he claims nobody ever recognizes Klimit. I mention "The Kiss" and he hasn't heard of it, he shows me another painting called "The Kiss" by another artist, and I explain in the US, Klimt's "Kiss" is so common as to be in practically every picture frameshop. I reach through the "portal" in the game out to a Dutch museum portal, snag the repro and bring it into the game within seconds to show him the picture I mean.

Then over to see 400 burning flame prims scattered all over the mountainside and 3 houses by a griefer with a griefing-type name who is already banned from the game....then TP'ing into a completely RL-replica house down to the knick-knacks on the mantel but with the soundtrack on heavy metal Goth...over to a Japanese teahouse on a sandy island...talking to someone with an island casino in a basin who tries to deal me in a hand...then over to a giant purple tree house to set a door to sale in a Celtic tower...landing for a moment on a railroad bridge and then flying over a gleaming white tile-and-wire modernist construction serving as a Linden home...to land in a welcome area by a man with wings and gleaming bracelets...and a woman dressed as a chicken...I return for a moment to fix a tenant's land edit and linger on a suburban street with palm trees next to a building half black, half white, with strange vehicles like "Spy v. Spy".

Well, I could go on, but you get the idea. *It's already like that.* The costuming of avatars and the borrowing of RL architectural styles and trinkets and mixing and matching them are the way most people enter the "fantastic" and there's a good deal more of it than you might think by the stereotype that SL is "all about picket fences".

Yes, you could dislodge people further into a kind of lucid dreaming and someone will set up all the jarring experiences and most of the people will be the passive consumer. The point is people will find their moorings any how and it won't be conservatism but organic nature, try as you may, you cannot eliminate it from cyberspace.
_____________________
Rent stalls and walls for $25-$50/week 25-50 prims from Ravenglass Rentals, the mall alternative.
Seth Kanahoe
political fugue artist
Join date: 30 Jan 2005
Posts: 1,220
05-29-2005 14:35
From: Gwyneth Llewelyn
I feel I must apologise for the usage of the word "surrealism".
I meant "surrealism" in the artistic sense.... I never encountered the "negative" and "pejorative" definition before your post.... It was argued that the biggest drawback of this artistic movement was the lack of empathy it created on the part of the viewer. We could argue that this happened because paintings, sculptures, books, or even movies, do not have an "immersive" component as strong as SL. If we could bring these concepts inside SL, and experience them immersively (instead of watching the "object" from afar), perhaps this could give the astonishing result of enabling empathy with the viewer - because the experience in SL is so different.


No need at all to apologize. I thought your post was challenging and very worthwhile. I see now that you were defining the surreal in the sense of artistry and schools of expression, whereas I was defining the idea in a psychological sense. Both definitions are valid, and that's why communication is so important, and can be a cast-iron b---- sometimes.

Your last point above is exactly what I would argue - We cannot really know how most people would react, simply because of the immersive quality of SL over time. The time element is important, I think, because it offers the opportunity to disengage carefully and comfortably from RL-grounded perspectives. I don't know whether SL immersion is sufficient to overcome the "view from afar" problem you've outlined, but I believe it's possible, and for that reason, the ideas in this thread ought to be attempted.

Certainly common experience and many, many controlled studies have indicated that more senses, engaged more immersively, are more effective in modifying patterns of behavior. It seems to me that SL, as a deliberately immersive medium, ought to be taken to some of its logical ends.
Gwyneth Llewelyn
Winking Loudmouth
Join date: 31 Jul 2004
Posts: 1,336
05-29-2005 17:50
The only "fear" about this suggestion is, IMHO, how many man-hours of developing manpower LL would need to invest in this, and how much it would be used by the community overall.

There are a few "surreal" examples in SL - the one I usually give is the Temple of Moon (by Moon Adamant) in Kafiri. It's a tiny home below water, where it snows, and the flowers bloom, although it's too deep underwater to have proper sunlight; the ground floor is not a nice "floor texture", but elements from a Klimt painting. The walls are pure light, and the door, while existant, does not close properly, thus having no function. On the walls are not paintings - but poems, mostly over pictures taken by satelites and telescopes. A tree grows inside the house, not outside. And instead of putting up decorations on the walls or ceilings, it's the package which is used as decoration.

It's certainly intriguing :) Moon Adamant is also tired of a SL where houses look like houses, and even have working kitchens and bathrooms, although avatars don't have any bodily functions. I agree that reality is annoying and that we could do so much more in SL if we weren't "constrained" by so many "limiting factors".

Then again I also think we should balance things out. How many "Temples of Moon" are there? How many would be willing to live in them? How many, encountering a landscape of similar houses, and understanding that those were the norm (because "normal houses", well, they simply show a lack of imagination...) rather than the exception, would be willing to join SL and stay there, paying their monthly land usage fees? That's also a problem with some sorts of contemporary art - if it's only appealing to a small community, how can artists survive, when the majority still prefers to get prints of non-modern art to hang up on their walls?

Difficult choices for a virtual world :) As said, perhaps all this can be accomplished by just a few changes in the server software (ie. disable gravity; change sky texture; etc.), and, for a prospective renter of a private sim, you would have the option of changing all this in advance. SL's community is so creative that I would certainly love to see what they could come up with to build without any constrains!
_____________________

Ingrid Ingersoll
Archived
Join date: 10 Aug 2004
Posts: 4,601
05-30-2005 07:03
From: Seth Kanahoe
I read Khamon and the others to mean - and I certainly meant to convey this myself - that SL can give us the opportunity to discover alternate perspectives or environmental contexts that have their own rational, coherent, congruent logic. No longer compelled by physical conditions, we might discover some new, but no less human way of ordering living space, movement, and the way we use them.



I always end up building in a way that fits the environment where I have land. Perhaps others do as well. I think if LL decided to have sims without land or water, sims that were simply virtual space, we would see more people experimenting with what they create in that environment. Imagine no prims.. just particles... or something else... ???
_____________________
Jon Marlin
Builder, Coder, RL & SL
Join date: 10 Mar 2005
Posts: 297
05-30-2005 07:24
The Croquet project (http://www.opencroquet.org) has this concept of portals, which you can both see through and go through. In fact, you can even edit things which exist in a different "space" through a portal.

- Jon
Traxx Hathor
Architect
Join date: 11 Oct 2004
Posts: 422
05-30-2005 19:33
Seth Kanahoe:
From: someone
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.


Seth, you might see more novel interaction, particularly of the 'intertwining builds' variety. While there's room for realistic builds in attractive sims like Boardman and Taber and the new island communitites, I'd prefer my own sandbox to be non-flatland. The proposed idea would give novel spatial connectivity between various private sandboxes and other high-creativity locations.

Many of us are already comfortable with non-flatland thinking and programming. My first experiment would be a version of the gallery/museum I'm currently building for a client. Since the gallery/museum is designed around traffic flow -- the experience of the visitor -- a version of this build would be an ideal experiment in novel connectivity. Followup experiment -- make it recursive. : )

Game development in SL could use the proposed capability. Creative control over spatial connectivity would help a team offer disparate locations just as major games like Guild Wars offer strikingly varied locales. If you take a look at Numbakulla, you'll see how they mangaged to shoehorn an amazing amount of explorable area into one sim. A non-flatland game world could be even more interesting if spatial connectivity could be reconfigured in response to events in the game. Of course improved server performance and Havok2 are essential prerequisites for SL games with any degree of intensity, excitement and challenge.
Prokofy Neva
Virtualtor
Join date: 28 Sep 2004
Posts: 3,698
05-31-2005 08:42
From: someone
The proposed idea would give novel spatial connectivity between various private sandboxes and other high-creativity locations.



Gated communities.
_____________________
Rent stalls and walls for $25-$50/week 25-50 prims from Ravenglass Rentals, the mall alternative.
Shack Dougall
self become: Object new
Join date: 9 Aug 2004
Posts: 1,028
05-31-2005 08:53
From: Traxx Hathor

Game development in SL could use the proposed capability. Creative control over spatial connectivity would help a team offer disparate locations just as major games like Guild Wars offer strikingly varied locales. If you take a look at Numbakulla, you'll see how they mangaged to shoehorn an amazing amount of explorable area into one sim. A non-flatland game world could be even more interesting if spatial connectivity could be reconfigured in response to events in the game. Of course improved server performance and Havok2 are essential prerequisites for SL games with any degree of intensity, excitement and challenge.


It really is amazing what they accomplished in Numbakulla. Until you've been playing a while and finally grok the geography, it seems *HUGE*. Quite a feat to accomplish in only one sim. Forced walking really adds to this as well as layering levels of the build on top and around each other.

It would be really useful if we could just get spatial connectivity between different points on a single plot of land. So that for example, you walk across the west edge of the lot though a jump point and smoothly reappear on the east side, but 100m above.
_____________________
Prim Composer for 3dsMax
-- complete offline builder for prims and sculpties in 3ds Max
http://liferain.com/downloads/primcomposer/

Hierarchical Prim Archive (HPA)
-- HPA is is a fully-documented, platform-independent specification for storing and transferring builds between Second Life-compatible platforms and tools.
https://liferain.com/projects/hpa
Lefty Belvedere
Lefty Belvedere
Join date: 11 Oct 2004
Posts: 276
06-01-2005 23:17
From: Khamon Fate
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?


wow, take a week off and this is what i come back to! cool :)

[On Phantasizing Space...]

This idea is as old as the human. Time, space, awareness, limits, possibilities. It's all fun and games really. We like to push the limits on what we can possibly wrap our heads around. But we've had limited success imagining worlds where space is messed around with. We generally find it intriguing at first but start to wonder why we feel like we're floating alone in the cold of space even though we're experiencing so much... It might be because our bathroom's server has crashed, the living room's server is laggy and the back porch's server is still booting. Numbakulla is cool because they accomplished a lot inside of a box instead of asking why they have to work inside that box.

I think the real clincher is not in the chat about bending space, altering perception and all that speculative air. It's really about working within limits... As a species, we have far too many of them to keep track of not to mention the limits we currently have in technology.

[On Communication Limitation....]

Right now, with a fairly straight-forward grid consisting of communicating servers, we've stretched the limits of what we can get a grip on with 99.9% accuracy and efficiency. We're already taking random bits in RAM, shoving it back and fourth through a matrix of flakey gold, chopping it up into equal pieces, stuffing it into packages, transmitting it through hundreds of miles of metal (repeat several times) gathering it all up into a temporary string of data, arranging based on coordinates, all to produce simple colors and sounds by changing the colors as fast as crystals can change forms. There are lots of people keeping tabs on all of this, too..

Think about that for a second. Isn't that about as much space-bending as we can handle for right now? If you think having one foot in server 1 will benefit the other foot in server 2, you have to think about how all of that is, in some form or another, already happening. By chopping up a building in Sl we'd really only be adding a metaphoric chop on top of everything. We're simply limited by the current speeds at which we can piss off electrons in metal.

The RL situations we often use as reference for cool ideas, sci-fi, poli-sci or not, simply don’t' work in the electrical world... If we could increase the rate at which we could push data through a tiny hole, we'd be running 1,000,000,000,000 avis on a single ginormous (love that word) server we called second life! No need for space-bending tp doorways.

The grid is about working with current limits... our current math machine can't work fast enough so we use more than one machine. Putting the machines further apart and making them look next door doesn't help things in the long run. It doesn't do anything for bandwidth or for organization and communication. the two machines still have to talk to each other at an acceptable rate. This is the root reason we're currently limited to prims and 10m in distance...

[Why?]

Yes it would be fun to see people walking upside-down on the same set of stairs you're walking right side-up on and knowing that the hallway you're in right now doesn’t' really connect. ... really, it never did. We're simply taking, like the original post said, two pieces of information which has no real world correlation to each other, and stitching them together at the metaphoric door jams so they look like one piece. Non of this brings harmony to SL any more than it would cause the fabric of SL to become unraveled. We are, after all, already dealing with one big pile of metaphors... bend them in any way you like but it's still a tool for us to communicate and experience over long distances. Without the current ability to feel presence over long distances, seeing presence is still the only way to do it.

[It IS Interesting]

I too would like SL to be able to offer some fantastic interactive acid trip down-with-reality style with gravity, time and space all messed around with, but it's no solution to any SL problems. We all feel the pain of computing and communication limits, but we've already tried breaking things into more pieces and it simply isn't the answer we're looking for.

Creating a space sim or vacuum sim will only make people build houses upside own and make you feel like you're floating in a dream. It will be nice to visit, you might even get some work done in it, but it won't solve any SL problems or any telecommunication problems. Just make everyone feel more disconnected than they already feel in SL if everyone has to have group meetings on couches that don't feel like real couches.

I didn’t' mean for this to get so long :) i haven’t posted in a while!


~Lefty
1 2