So how would SL be the next internet??

You're still talking about the present, crawling stage of 3-D, Kitty. I'm looking at the future. I didn't say anything about reading the information on a prim, for instance. From the future's point of view, 3-D is in it's early infancy, just like the web was when hyperlinks started to be used. Styles followed that, and then HTML, etc. The web of those days was vastly different to the web we see today. Security was non-existant, for instance (your griefers). You can't look at SL and fit the future 3-D operations into it, except on a very basic level.

That still wouldn't tell how the fit feels, what the fabric is like, what the quality is like or if it actually looks anything like how it does on the screen.

Companies are interested in selling you goods, that doesn't necessarily mean being honest and not making things seem more appealing than they are.

Case in point, I really don't like mail order catalogues (not for clothes anyway) but fell into the trap of "40€ discount on your first order". One of the things I ordered was a coat, it didn't look nearly as nice as in the in retrospect obviously enhanced picture (and that's a real picture, not even a computer-generated look-alike). Worse than that the stitching was quite poor with loose threads all over. A blouse fit perfect but one seam just kept scraping and felt anything but comfortable.

In the end I sent everything back for a refund and decided my original opinion of mail-order for things such as clothing was accurate: it's deceptive and doesn't even come close to a RL store experience where you can actually try something on.

Terminology is irrelevant though, the fact that I used the word "prim" doesn't change anything. I could have said the more generic "A texture applied to a 3D face" and that's something that will still be the case 15 years from now.

Not always. I've bought a number of items of clothing online now, and I've generally been very happy with them.

My "Dark Side/Cookies" T-shirt, for example. Or pretty much any T shirt. We all know how T shirts look and feel.

My son bought an expensive Scott E-vest, the thing that holds every bit of personal electronics known to man. It turned out to be exactly as advertised, or even better.

Clothing from names I've come to know and trust. Land's End, Pendleton.

I LOVE shopping online, and I will love it more when the "does it fit?" problem is solved. You don't have to fight traffic, look for a parking space, catch someone else's cold germs, paw through racks, try on item after item in a changing room, get sore feet.

As opposed to the annoying high pressured avatars that sometimes won't let you shop in peace?

I wonder if we would be able to re-shape ourselves to fit the clothes we order in the 3D world. THAT would be cool.

Sorry. I'm just old fashioned I guess. I don't mind the occasional convenience offered by the internet, but I still enjoy the Real World with all it pitfalls and problems. I enjoy that trip tp macy's, or to he mall. I like getting out of my house every day, I still enjoy a Sunday drive to nowhere. I actually did essentially buy my car online, I at least picked out the exact car from a particular dealer. But I still had to actuall drive the car, feel how it handled, was I comfortable in it. That can never be duplicated by a computer.

I'll pick and choose what new fangled gadgets to embrace when I need them. But there will always be a Luddite inside of me.

Well, the fact that it costs a chunk of change to buy a sim does not mean it's totally different than setting up a website on the old fashioned 2D web.

Lots of people rent server space from a hosting company, which to me is analogous to renting a parcel on a sim, but many larger businesses with more stringent needs (i.e. e-commerce and such) purchase dedicated servers which cost more or less the same as what a sim purchase and tier costs in Second Life.

P2

I does change things, actually. You are still thinking in the present. You are projecting the present into the future by assuming that information will be on a face, and that the words will be just as unclear as they are now on. That's a mistaken view, imo.

What I mentioned earlier is a sort of parallel. The web came into being with the hyperlink and the protocols behind it. There was no page or text formatting any kind. Then styles were added, which gave very limited formatting, and then HTML came along, which is the basis of most of today's formatted web pages. Then other things came along, such as Flash, streaming media, and so on. Back at the start, it would have been very difficult to envisage how web pages and sites would look, and how versatile they would be, even 5 years down the road. There is no reason to suppose that the 3-D environment that we have now is the way it's going to be in the future. We are just at the beginning of its evolution. There's a long way to go, protocols have to be developed, security has to be developed, and so on, but we're on the road to a 3-D online world that, imo, will be the online future.

Saw this on one of the tech blogs today:

http://smart-machines.blogspot.com/2008/05/second-life-enters-real-life-with.html

AR in Second Life brings some very interesting possibilities...

- Jon

Only 3 things a "3D Internet" would have to do to complete the illusion: Touch, taste & Smell.

We can already 'see', 'hear', and manipulate objects.

Add the other 3 and we'd have a total immersion.

Altho- there are some places & things I dont think we'd want to be smelling or tasting.

A very far cry indeed, and it's not even teleportation - it's the replication of a particle, and the orginal particle needs to be destroyed to do it. "Beam my up Scotty", is a year or two away yet

This is why the "3D web" will probably never take off and why people don't stick around SL much. There is nothing that can replace the feel of another person, the drivability of a car, the feel of cloths and so on.

I don't see most people wanting a 3D web. SL started in 2001 and all it can muster is 60,000 online in which a small percentage of that as individual users. It has over 12million "accounts" but no where near 12 million users. The amount of active users seems to not go much above 1.5mill and out of that 1.5mill is alts and bots in there taking away at least half of that into individual users.

People go to the internet to make things easier. 3D is not easier. Just aswell go to a store and see it for yourself. Even my 11 year old daughter is bored with 3D worlds. Going out in the REAL world is a lot more fun for her. Interacting with real people and such. She would much rather be playing with her friends in the REAL world than online in a 3D world. 3D parks are nothing like real parks no matter how well designed.

When the time comes when people would rather be in a 3D world is when humanity fails all together. The thought of us all sitting in home in a outfit made to replicate touch, taste and feel is just not the way life should be lived in my opinion.

Just imagine the problems that would have to be overcome. If a store became 3D with avatars and stuff all a person has to do to protest something is block the store. Imagine large stores like Amazon that have thousands of people visiting at any one time. Now imagine your local real Wal Mart with 10,000 people there at the sametime.... They would have to spend millions on servers to divide all that traffic into smaller online 3D stores. They would have to have hundreds of replicated stores. That is when online shopping becomes just as hard as shopping in real life and defeats the purpose.

What Phil Deakins fails to realize is HE is not going to be the ONLY one trying to use the service to get help. One, two, twenty live store employes are not going to be able to handle the 10,000+ users all at he sametime in a popular store. Hiring hundreds of people to be avatars for help is not going to work.

I shop online so I don't have to deal with people in a store. I do not want a 3D store with other people wondering around in it and virtual sales people hastling me. 2D is fine. The only advantage I find in internet shopping is price anyway. I don't go to Amazon.com to LOOK for books to buy, I go there to BUY the book I already know I want because it is cheaper than the local book store.

And just imagine walking around a virtual store. You would be getting solicited from other avatars from anything form virtual sex to competing stores. What a mess I forsee there. Would you want your kids walking around in a place like that? Just the cost of having live security staff in every store....

Nope, just don't see the point of it. 3D worlds should be for entertainment, education and maybe for business use like IBM is trying. I think there will be a lot of problems with IBM's plans though. There will be a new wave of employee complaints/lawsuits of harassment and discrimination of their avatar. Not to mention I think there will be people that refuse to have a "avatar" in the first place. If IBM made avatars a requirment of the company...... Sheesh.

Let's revisit this topic 10 years from now - then we'll see whose vision was correct

LOL - in ten years most of the western sea-board of the United sates won't have access to electricity (and possibly water), let alone an all-inclusive 3D web experience. In that world the Luddites are gonna start looking pretty sophisticated.

LOL - in ten years most of the western sea-board of the United States won't have access to electricity (and possibly water), let alone an all-inclusive 3D web experience. In that world the Luddites are gonna start looking pretty sophisticated.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/secondlife.com

Pretty much sums it up.

This one sums it down:

http://taterunino.net/last60days400.png

I see the internet going all 3D, instead of 2D images (lets use porn as an example here)

by the time the first couple of 3D porn sites appear graphics will be photo-realistic and very acurate, instead of all these 2D images and videos we will be able to move/pan around.

saem with shopping sites, instead of the images being 2D they will be 3D and u will be able to examine the product you are going to buy

at first it will only be large companies, then things will get cheaper.
i think it will start out just being 3D images within websites (much like we have 2day, only images are 3D) then things will start 2 connect up.

One of the main issues in SL is limited bandwidth, copper wires can only carry so much data so fast.

in about 2 weeks will mark a milestone in internet tech as we are getting our first fibre optics installed (its the road that NTL first did broadband), soon fibre optics will be every day and broadband in 3 - 5 years will seem like 56k dialup does now.

As with graphics when DX11 gets launched there will be direct access to the graphics API, so graphics will be faster and more focused (like things in the distance will have less rendering priority

in about 10 years everyone will be online and offline apps/games will be practicly none existant, i guess we will still have single player games, but it will all be online and played much as SL is now

everyone will eventually have the same (or near same) internet speed, broadband and dialup will be things of the past

I went through the 5 stages of grieving yesterday in Fred Meyers, trying to find the goddamned peanut butter.

Alexa is a joke.

That's lost on me.

Just sayin it would have been easier to find it online. I must have searched every aisle up and down for 45 minutes until I finally broke down and asked a worker; she pointed me in the right direction, and by golly if I didn't finally find it in the last possible place: next to the wine.

The five stages of grief are something like: Denial ("The peanut butter CAN'T be too hard to find!", Anger ("Goddammit, where's the peanut butter?!", Bargaining ("OK, God, I'll walk 2 times around this aisle, and You'll show it to me," Depression ("I'm so frickin sad that I can't find it," and Acceptance ("I guess I wasn't meant to find it..."

Believe me, it was traumatic.

lol. yeah - walking the aisles in rl isn't particularly good when you know where things are, let alone when you don't. That's why I'd like to do it in a 3D envornment and in my chair.

My parents fall under that catagory.

My dad still cant work a Mouse. The most simplest of computer stuff is lost on him, like Google. I caught him trying to type a web address into Google Earth and again on the Home Page where you type the search terms.

His way of thinking was "I dont need to learn how to use a computer", but now that his retirement, medical, and other benefits require registering on a website, he's lost. He's still of the mindset "Computers are just a passing fad".

My mother is a little better, but not by much. Rather than take pics off her camera's card, she just buys another card.

Both of them still dont use an ATM. They have the card.... somewhere, totally unused.

From someone who first logged into the "Internet" when it was just white text on a black background, when an online game was a MUD on dial-up -- again just parsing text on a per-turn basis -- and seeing what has happened in my short life span with technology, I have no problem seeing the potential behind 3D environments. If you can't see the potential for 3D apps on the net, or even it's spawn, total immersion with 3-dimensional experience of real senses, then in my opinion you are being short-sighted. My hope is that I get to see it in my lifetime, as there is no doubt it will happen.