Reuter's closes it's SL Bureau

Pontiac and Nissan both offered well-built driving courses. If sim crossings in vehicles actually worked they might have succeeded as race venues. But SL vehicles don't work well enough for that to be a big draw.

Pontiac (as well as another car company you didn't mention, Scion) also tried to build communities about people interested in car customization. Scion actually gave you the base textures for the cars they sold so you could download them out-world, go wild with your graphics tools, and re-upload them. It didn't take off, but at least that was a worthy effort.

Tactile sensory feedback is nice for some applications, and of course that's been around for about two decades. I don't miss it in SL at all -- visual is powerful enough, especially with a little stereo sound.

I do online shopping for groceries, books, clothes, toys, etc. I certainly DO wish I had a way to browse virtual aisles in 3D. Second Life is not a powerful enough platform for that, though. I want all the search capabilities and 2D niceties, but SL is just painful to to get to do anything remotely like that. As far as SL as a business platform, SL lacks too many 2D, collaboration, and integration features. And the Voice feature sucks, turns out. I've tried to hold meetings here. And SL is too unreliable as a service.

The potential has always been there, but they can't quite pull it off. It will come eventualy (and maybe soon) from LL. or someone else.

You don't even necessarily have to have avatars and other "players" and a community for this technology to succeed. The multiplayer social angle is critical for some applications of immersive 3D virtual experiences, and is also a great driver for things in general. (And sex of course has driven many technologies, so it's a natural part of the human condition that it appears in places like Second Life.) Some 3D applications aren't about interacting with people, though. And if it is with people, sometimes it's fun to be a thundercloud or a bunny or a supermodel or whatever, but for most "non-game" applications, I think people would like to be represented as themselves, realistically. Certainly in business settings.

I've been programming computers for going-on four decades, been privileged to work at some of the famous computer labs, and have seen it all. (I've been on the net since the beginnings in the 1970s.) Nowadays I wish I had a 3D desktop / file browser on my computer, so I could fly around the directories (hierarchical, tagged, whatever). And I use Google Earth all the time. I get annoyed when the SL movement controls don't work on any web page that has pictures on it. So I think 3D interfaces are compelling. Two years ago I thought that such things were pointless and maybe stupid, and Second Life has totally changed my mind about all that.

BTW, here's another fun example of where user interfaces might be going soon: http://oblong.com/

I think there are still plenty of promotional opportunities for corporations to use Second Life from LL on the main grid. But these are all based around games and game-like experiences, focused on people and social networking. And SL is pretty much up to that. But the main attraction is as a fantasy world where you can meet all kinds of random people, and everyone is empowered with a simple 3D modelling tool for expressing art that they've never had before. Understanding that is the challenge that LL has always faced.

Mostly, they just seem to be thrashing around trying to find their next target audience, and I don't see very many credible things coming from the sectors (eg. educational, bio/medical) that they've recently been courting. The platform is just too underpowered for most of that, compared to the 2D web. I don't think LL has ever understood what they actually have, what different sectors need, and where to go. (Which is odd, and perhaps says something really negative about their corporate culture. Because although some of their upper management frequently seems to be morons, I know some really smart people that work there.)

As for Reuters leaving...that's just indicative of LL's general failure to create a money-making platform based on micropayments, their failure to figure out how to help people do marketing here, their poor track record on service reliability, and the end of the hype bubble. The only shocking part is that Reuters would make a decision to pull out, rather than pull back, given the cost of a sim and some part-time personnel. Well, I guess Reuters is about big money, and this doesn't look like it has anything to do with big money. I'd count it as a setback...mainly it's about the definitive end of the hype ride, for those who weren't clear on the concept yet. In a few years the landscape will be different - we'll see what LL does in the next while. It signals a new era, to be sure.

Some people mentioned 3D shopping, I hate to tell you this but you can now buy commercial 3D printers and scanners. They are hugely expensive, and work in odd little sections of this foam like material. And I mean 30,000 for a 3D printer only has merit if you are a physical designer colaborating across the globe. But as we all know, technology and price point always meet eye to eye at some point.

There will be no need for tedious prim by prim anything, you simply 3D scan most objects, and voila. Instant perfect virtual copy. So with that technology now in use, and the rise of huge bandwidth and CPY speed. I am pretty sure in 10 years the web will be totally unrecognisable to what we are using today.

It won't be a Secondlife sort of reality, but it will definately not be flat and 2D. Evenin Japan now, there are 3D laptops on the market that need absolutely no special glasses or anything to see their images. They just project two images at the same time, and somehow when you stand directly infront of it your brain seems to put them back together. So exciting yes, but all sorts of technologies are the reason that the web won't be staying 2D, as some had questioned.