Too much reality, too little virtual.

In virtual reality, we need not be constrained by the laws of physics, the straight-jacket of reality. So why is it, that, apart from very few exceptions, Second Life offers either a replica of Las Vegas or any suburban town you care to mention?

I'm probably being a bit hypocritical writing this thread, since I have not really built anything in SL. Honestly, if SL were populated by people like me it would be a dull, empty place indeed. Luckily, there are truly creative people in this world, and because of them, people like me can enjoy a vibrant and creative online world.

But, still, I do feel that Second Life neglects the virtual part of virtual reality. Nowhere is this more aparrent than at Ice Dragon's Theme Park. I don't want to knock it, I have had a great time there with my friends but....bumpy slides? Roller coasters? I can get that in reality, thanks. How's about some physics-violating multidimensional excersion into the world of causality? And houses. In reality they are four walls and a roof because the laws of physics place constraints on what we can do. But in a virtual world, would it be impossible to create houses like those hallucinatory paintings of MC Escher, something that you walk in and smile because it completely overturned all expectations?

It's interesting to note that artistic endevours like surrealism, cubism, came about when photography was invented. Before this happened, artists tried to paint photorealistically. Because the photograph could produce photorealistic scenes with a fraction of the effort, the art world responded by representing reality in a way that photography could not match.

I would say that videogaming is at the prephotography stage. The industry is obsessed with reality, something that is mistaken for the real thing is a good thing. I would like to think that once we have pulled-off photorealism, once Second Life places us in a field and My God It's Real!! we will sit back and think, 'what now? If paintings used the two dimensional medium of the canvas to create cubism and impressionism, what kind of abstract, surrealist movements can we invent, using the third and fourth dimensions of online worlds?'

Generally speaking, I believe where we're at is a launching pad. Heck, I love the "ordinary". Why? 'Cuz what's esoteric and bizarre to most is mundane and banal for me. I've already been there.

You really cast some fascinating parallels about the development of technology. It's easier to start with some clearly-defined limits and open things up, instead of leaving things outright ambiguous and confusing to most, especially those who have a hard enough time getting their computer to work with SL. Who would have known creative workarounds like making prims out of hair would have grown so popular? And a lot of the "hacks" and Resident innovations, some of which have influenced LL's own development?

I've seen some Escheresque builds. Keith Extraordinaire made fab ones. But as you allude to, we're confined to a model of gravity that, apart from major exceptions like flying, is similar and familiar.

Once we can establish more of what's been done and known in this online world, surely we'll see more surreality. But there are many voices involved, and many travels in many directions simultaneously. I'm actually looking forward to "art movements" within SL; things that couldn't have existed without it, that've emerged in here.

One example that I hope will be a great plateau for future creativity is the beautiful introduction of ripple water in 1.8. Fantastico, the water looks more realistic. Now what can we do? Waves? Lava? How about making it a Resi-appliable shader to objects? Stretch out the parameters so it looks like a damn kewl, flexible plasma field that's more organic yet alien than the looped texture animations we currently use for such effects?

What else is there?

Dammit, Extropia, you're right. I'm gonna trash all my old builds, dig out my stash of Owlsley LSD and get building.

Dear Smarty Pants

The majority of us aren't intellectuals. We don't have time to think about fancy things like cubism. If you want cubism then go into the sandbox. You'll see lots of lovely wooden cubes in there. I'm sure you'll be able to ponder over the anarchy that they represent for many hours. But personally, a cube could never make me smile.

"Girls just wanna have fun." Some guys too.

I don't think Ice Dragons Park is the right place to put it up as the average Second Life build, you should go out and explore.
There is already amazing builds to see in Second Life and in my opinion things made that are pure art for me. Drop me a line in SL and i will send you some landmarks.
Many sims (Phobos Posthuman City, APOLLO... i shouldnt type names because there are too many but i mean lots and lots) are so beautiful i had my avatar sitting there camming around for hours, feeling humble because people with skills like that spare the time to create this piece of world for us.

Leave the park, Extropia, go explore and you will find what you thought wasn't here.

Starax, your prims definatly make me smile, you're one of the above i so much admire!

I did see a cube that made me smile!

In the beginning was the Cube, and the Cube was good.

When television was first developed, it was owned by radio networks. They used it to televise radio announcers reading the same stuff they had done on radio, or musicians playing the same stuff they had done on radio. It was all the radio people knew how to do. They saw TV as an educational, informative, cultural or news media.

They say television was first kick-started as a different medium by Milton Berle, who used it to dress up like a woman for laughs. Uncle Miltie saw the revolutionary opportunity of TV as a visual medium for mass entertainment, for laughs, for exploring visual oddities.

As SL evolves, we will see more experimentation with implementations other than photo-realism, just as Uncle Milty explored TV. Time will tell how much of a recurring market there is for it.

Meanwhile, I perceive a lot of popularity (judging by traffic figures) for immersive fantasy experiences, such as the Elven worlds and the Gorean worlds, that are not practicable in real life. That the surroundings in these worlds are photo-realistic does not make them less imaginative; it simply demands that one realize that creativity can be in the enablement of interaction as well as visual surround.

Do you think it would be fun to live or be many hours a day in a surreal environment?

I think real life reality (and the environment) is what many people are comfortable living in. It's probably just the way we grew up on this planet.

When you dream about a nice place, you probably dream of a lovely caribbean island... or some lovely mountains... or any other place on earth. But I think it's rare to dream about some cold, crystal-formed place (like superman's home planet) as the place-I-wanna-be. Yeah, it's nice, it's nice to visit, see, whatever, but you wouldn't want to see that every day. At least most ppl wouldn't.

When the first baby borns in SL and grows up in SL (or any virtual world), maybe things will change.


Though I can agree with one thing: buildings could be more progressive, yes... But it again, depends on whether you see SL ground as fantasy for people, or a totally virtual, maybe even unhumane world. For many, it's their fantasies -- with big houses, castles, etc. I might never have a castle in RL, but I can live in one in SL. That's something!

I live in a 200 meter tall tree.

I've seen towers of crystal, floating temples, active volcanos...

Let me see... I see avatars that are incadecent energy... Tiny animals...


What on earth are you TALKING about? I see normal so rarly that I'm surprised when it shows up!

Later...

go checkout RacerX's Beer Eats Boats Bait shop in Fujin

that'll learn ya

Okay Torley. I admit, that cube made me smile too.

The scene is probably my fave build of Stella's. For me, that scene was a metaphor for Stella's abilities in here. She went from being able to make a cube to being able to make an entire figure. It's positive message to anybody else who thinks that they can't become a good builder in SL.

We can only get better. (Assuming we keep off the crack, or avoid hitting fast moving objects with our heads)

I agree with the gist of Extropia's post.

There are threads that touch on very similar ideas already.

Some people will say that we need familiarity in order to suit the human perceptual system that evolved or was designed to perceive things on the earth's surface.

Some people will say "Look around, here's this wild build, you must be blind!"

Someone will say "I have already overcome the limitations you mention through the use of scripted attachments."

Someone will say it's a matter of the limitations of current technology.

I read comic books as a child and science fiction as an adult along with a few science and art books . I want to be able to make and see things inspired from them, not just the boring old world around me.

Flying is great, but I want more. I want to be able to orbit things, I want some kind of depiction of the rubber sheet model of the universe one sees, with objects having gravitational fields, and for the virtual environment to not be a little flat two and a half dimensional grid with a fixed connection between the servers and the virtual regions, but instead be at least a full three dimensional space with the ability to define
galaxies and solar systems and travel within this space in ways that defy physics and look cool. I'd also like deformable objects that would enable things like melting clocks and building statues from virtual modeling clay.

The Rolling Stones have some pertinent lyrics, "You can't alway get what you want,", and "I can't get no satisfaction."

Yeah, me too Sue. If I had my way, the whole of Second Life would look like the Burning Life event all year round. But so many people in SL just want to make their ideal home. That's probably what Second Life does best. The building tools build architecture really well.

So we could say that Second Life is getting what it has been designed for. Buildings.

Extropia , I actually wrote a blog entitled "Stairway to the Nest" back in October that addressed this issue:

http://secondslog.blogspot.com/2005/10/stairway-to-nest.html

It's all about getting the user's state-of-mind into the game. It *IS* ironic that in a world where you can literally do ANYTHING, people seem to be attracted to small suburban homes (or in my case, a city like the one I live in.) But creating a context that convinces the user that "THIS IS REAL" is a critical first step before you can wow them with the surreal.

For example, if you want your audience to feel the sensation of unlimited flight, you need to give them a context they can recognize, including a sense of UP. Some surreal, empty space, or Escher's upside down room fails to provide the orientation needed. Instead, you must give the user trees and rooftops over which they can soar.

So, perhaps the builds you are looking for already exist somewhere on the backburner of SL. Ahead of their time, these builds fail to attract the engaged attention of the average user who is still starstruck by the fact that he can fly over his suburban cottage.

In conclusion ... what you are asking for will come, but in baby steps.

For me personally, creating a replica of something RL is the most difficult thing to build, and it's always what gets my attention in other peoples' builds. The shading, the attention to detail, those are the things that usually catch my attention.

Creating realistic looking items in a virtual world is difficult, but it's a goal that any human can appreciate the affect from, because we've all seen the real items. A coffee cup with a very light steam coming off the top and a chip on lip of the cup still remains one of my favorite SL items, because the builder (who I wish I could credit, instead of [Nobody]) had such an eye for detail and realism.

Recreating RL items in SL doesn't neccessarily stem from a lack of imagination or inability to think outside the box, it often stems from the sheer challenge of getting those tiny details down. It's a lot harder than you'd think. And the pieces that are the most well done will often get overlooked because they're so real we don't notice the work that went into it. There's supposed to be a shadow there, so our gaze skims right over it.

One of these days, though, I will try and create Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending A Staircase in prims. Maybe for next year's Burning Life.

It won't do me any personal good after I am dead. I don't really expect to be around much longer than 20 more years. We don't have limitless time to see the changes we want to see.


Please get the lead out, everyone around the world working on cool stuff.

Disclaimer: I don't play an artist on TV, but I am one (at least, my education is in that area).

While I'm all in favor of freedom from strict adherence to reality, I don't think that pursuing an arbitrarily unrealistic, abstract world is a particularly desirable goal for most of us.

Unreality/surreality/whatever as a general rule is recognizable mainly by its contrast with reality. That is, we don't know what it IS, exactly, but we know what it ISN'T. And what it isn't, by no coincidence, amounts to precisely the stuff we are most likely to understand.

As such (like all examples of what I'll loosely call "fiction", it's on a spectrum of comprehensibility, with pure mundanity on one end, and complete incoherence and chaos on the other. People have different levels of tolerance of that sort of thing, but ultimately what it means is that you are getting further and further away, not only from what people demonstrably do understand, but probably also what they can understand.

There's a point of diminishing returns beyond which you are decreasingly likely to enable people to do anything interesting, but you are increasingly likely to impede their ability to comprehend and function in their environment. It's not a fixed point, nor is it the same for each person, but it probably exists for everyone.

That point is probably rather fuzzy, even for an individual person, and going past it is certainly possible, but I doubt anyone wants to inhabit such a realm on a regular basis.

I will also note that photorealism/naturalism in art (even fine art) persists as one of the most popular and accessible forms to this day, even in the face of this newfangled photography thing, while experiments like cubism and dadaism have tended to fall by the wayside (beyond the scope of the individual artist drawing on an established technique or style) after a relatively short period.

There's a reason for that, quite independent of any sort of hypthetical conspiracy by practitioners of the established paradigm, or inertia or failure of the unwashed masses to embrace the holy guiding vision that us artists are graced or cursed to reveal. More likely, it has to do with the fact that people experimenting on the fringes of reality are ... well ... on the fringes of reality. By definition, most people are not, have no particular desire to be, and (by definition of "fringe" never will be.

There's not much that's particularly telling about movements in the art world, anyway (compared to anything else, that is). For every part "interesting new philosophy" that goes into their development and ascendance, there's at least one part "adolescent rebellion and rejection of what is currently dominant", and one part "novelty factor/fashionableness".

In short: If you want a far less mundane virtual reality, your best bet is to wait for private servers, then do whatever you want with yours. But have the grace to not act surprised when most people favor more comprehensible environments.

Edit: Any incomprehensibility/unrealism/surrealism/dadaism/cubism/sexism/ismism in the above is the result of lack of sleep, and not a deliberate stylistic choice on the part of the author. Now I'm going to go take a nap.

We have an environment and engine here that is, to a fair degree, intent on simulating the experience of being a person in another world - not a floating viewpoint in virtual space. Avatars, by default, look like people. We walk, run, jump. Even flight looks like what would happen in the real world if you could suddenly fly, and teleporting is really like taking the bus or something - it's a quick way of moving between widely different areas but you don't use it every minute. There's an extensive physics engine, built in currency etc etc etc.

Given that the environment is like this I think it's foolish to abandon all of the references and possibilities that can be drawn from First Life and played with in Second Life, preferring some sort of Miro world - as if it would be better, since we have letters, to make up our own languages and write in those, ignoring everything that already exists. (Yes, I know, I'm wildly exaggerating the point being made here, I'm doing it for effect, shh.) That doesn't mean keeping things strictly as they would be in the real world, but then who does that completely anyway? Some people might find it immensely refreshing to have a house and kids and not be bothered by bills and vomit, a fantasy in itself. Playing with pre-existing concepts is not unimaginative - one gains much more information through context. Also, as Jonquille says, creating realistic or near-realistic objects is a lot more challenging than building giant dominoes.

A system that let's you do it all, or as much as technically possible, allows for people who want to reproduce the view out their window do so.

A system that allows as much flexibility as possible in what you can create on-screen doesn't impede those who want to see a real looking world.

A system designed only to stay close to reproducing reality does prevent those who want something different from being able to do it as easily as could be and with a good a results.

Imagine that a sim was a true cube instead of a plane segment and a partially effective half of a vertical dimension.

If you could assign gravtaitional constants to all sides of the sim you could get effects that would be of value in space simulation and those who just want the place to act weird.

But assign a gravity of zero to all but one and you have the same kind of gravity we have now.

Design it the way we have now, with no options about gravity control, and all you've done is deny a part of the customer base options they might enjoy.

But Second Life, high ideals aside, is a commercial entity. The majority of people want certain things, so LL spends their time making the software do those things... Stasticly, I'm sure far more people care about, say, being able to build a detailed house on their land (Which involves, increasingly, more and more resources, skills, tools, and abilities as time goes on and standards get higher) than care about being able to build at a 90 degree angle to their neighbor.

Further, if you get too wild, you begin to alienate those who don't want this sort of reality. I would find living in a giant cube rather disconcerting.

In the end, SL will go where the market wants it, for the most part... But "the market" is not "me". And the market is actually pretty conservative, as a rule (not in the political sense), particularly when money is on the line.

If LL could ease up the camera controls and let us turn avatars on their sides without the need for vehicles, I'd love to make a build ala Escher's Relativity or ALP's Version

Eh, I believe millions now living will never die, and I don't mean in the Jehovah's Witness sense, but I'm a crazy futurist like that.

In any case. I intend to live forever or die trying. Either way, I win!


As for the thread topic... I concur fully with the "RL is trickier than you think". Which is not to say I don't care for the fantastic, given I live on a floating crystal island in SL. But I think versimilitude is of far greater importance than either full-out surrealism or exact imitation of reality. Define a "world" with rules, and make it so those rules are not only consistent, but seem to be the most natural thing in that place.

In this sense, some of the things claimed to be "immersion breaking" in SL bother me not at all; creating prims out of nothing is natural here. Something that breaks this rule actually throws me further out of SL than keeping to it (which is one reason I thought the idea of "two user interfaces", with one involving actually chopping down trees to make wood to build stuff or something like that for "newbies", was really quite silly).

It turns out to be much more difficult to produce some sorts of surreal spaces in 3d than it is in 2d. When one sees an Escher print, one is only viewing the world from a single vantage point. It's very easy to imagine walking around inside without thinking about it too much, but for most of them there are serious problems with realising them in 3d. Many of them only work from the one vantage point, and need either weird bendy stuff or gaps, or some other weirdnesses.

Working out what ought to happen when you look round the corner is often very difficult. Fitting it into standard 3d space (which is what SL gives us) may be impossible to do in a satisfactory way.

I guess my point is that it is often very hard to make a surreal space that is "consistent". That is, it makes sense enough that a model can be built, or you can tell a computer what to show you when an avatar is allowed in to look around. If you let an avatar into many of those Escher pictures, it would very quickly find bits of scaffolding and backstage jiggery-pokery.

I would love to see tools to allow us to explore non standard spaces here in SL. Croquet's portals seem like a good idea, and there's this demo for computer graphics in curved spaces (try the hyperbolic ones). 4d would be cool (and even harder to build in...) too.

You don't understand the idea, apparently. Instead of selecting an in-world creative process that seems silly to you, try to figure out a different one that would make sense.

Trying to interpret other's attempts to express an idea in a way that makes sense is more productive than sticking with a rigid misinterpretation that doesn't make sense.

Dance animations are silly, pretending to walk on fake land is silly, the whole thing is silly.

Would in-world modeling clay worked using sensor gloves be silly? If it is silly, would the fact that some people liked it and used it hurt those who don't?