Too much reality, too little virtual.

There IS one that makes sense. The current one. To me.

I'm surprised you picked this one small thing out of my post when I felt it somewhat off the point, but I'll elaborate: when I come into any virtual world, I accept the rules I find as the rules of that world. My immersion is only broken when something that breaks the rules of that world comes into play. An SL example would be the current physics system. The general intent appears to be to replicate Earthlike physics and when things happen at variance with that (the problems cars have crossing sims or getting hung up on small objects, or the broken-ness of joints and hinges) - and THAT breaks my immersion all to hell.

"Ah!" but you say. "But I would prefer it to be another way, I dislike the way it is now." As you have said, more or less. And I reply "Nothing wrong with that, but don't break SL for me, either." Also, given the commercial nature of SL, the wishes of the majority of paying customers will overrule those of either of us.

In short, I'm not disagreeing with you (because I believe the more options, the better) so much as saying that I don't believe enabling SL to achieve the highest heights of the unearthly and surreal is high-priority, nor do I believe the current state of affairs to be immersion breaking for most people.

I do find it silly, but I find a lot of stuff silly without believing it shouldn't exist, or even disliking it; I'm prone to silly on a regular basis. In the specific case, chopping down trees for my virtual plywood would be entertaining to me for a day or so, and then I'd be back to manipulating prims by will alone, 'cause I rather enjoy doing that.

One point is that just because something exists in the world, doesn't mean a person recreating it in SL has access to it, or has even seen it in reality. I am touched when I see people with great big mansions and all the trimmings - even though it isn't what I want, those people are grabbing hold of their dreams in a virtual way. Because things change all the time, those same mansion-dwellers might change their dreams, in part based of what they see in SL. I'm an artist, but most people here aren't - they might become good builders or they might prefer to buy the work of others - however, the things that are built here will turn about and start influencing things in reality, presently.

Aliasi, I think my last post may have seemed or been a bit contentious in tone, and I want to apologize. I don't' mean to be difficult. Sometimes real world irritability finds it way in here, due to simple things like needing to get off the computer and take a walk or eat. That's what happened, and I'm sorry to be messing up this thread at the moment on that basis.

It would hurt them if focusing on that caused them to neglect the more mainstream (and in demand) features, yes.

Non-coherent rant follows:

Interesting isn't it. Its somethign I've thought about a lot since being in SL, the psychology that drives people to make their ideal real world home in a virtual world where they could have anything.
What really gets me is AV's. So you are steered toward a fairly regular biped, so thats fine but its what people do with that. You see some AV's that look like really attractive people, that figures you're in a world where you look like you want so why not look beautiful? Then you get AV's that look like you can imagine the person looks like in RL they look very mundane, but you gotta respecct that the person wants to portray themselves. What I find fascinating is the the number of AV's that are meant to look like beautiful people but look like hideous plastic surgery mistakes (apologies if this applies to you, though if it does you probably think it doesnt so thats ok). Could go into my theories as to why but I'm no psychologist. Are there any psychologists in SL? I would suspect so and if youre reading this it would be ascinating to do a study of how people prtray themselves in SL.
To the original point about comparing SL to the point in the fine art scene before photography, thats possible but I think what were seeing in SL is a continuation of postmodernism, where weve seen all these crazy ideas and taken them in and they just dont really go anywhere, take modern painting for example, there's no groundbreaking futurists, cubists or impressionists, cos its been done. It's like ducamp's urinal (drop artistic reference to appear to know what I'm talking about) its a one shot gag and once its been done, to use it again refers to the original.
As a thought though we are all posting on this forum in a very prescribed human way. We need some people to post by just headbutting the keyboard, or pasting random parts of google searches.
I'll shut up now...

Nah, it's cool. I do it too.

Just remember, at all times, I ultimately think the intent behind your idea is right, I just don't think you're going to get it anytime soon until (a) the server software is publically released or (b) you make your own, and I think that's probably the right way to go about things. Fix the asset server, then make the scene from Labyrinth that's right out of Escher's "Relativity" possible.

Yes, no question there. Scarcity in the economic sense is pervasive. Resources applied in one fashion might have been applied in a different fashion.

However, nothing is as simple as it would be nice things to be.

Devoting resources towards something like real-time interactive modeling clay operated by force feedback sensor gloves would divert resources that could have been applied in other areas, but what if the world's sculptors discovered this and started to put it to use?

Money spent in some other fashion at the appropriate time could have been invested in Apple stock. Was it a bad investment to buy some Apple stock when a person might have felt it would be better to invest in something more conservative with a higher probability of a lower but more secure return on investment?

The return on resource application is not predictable.

Linden Research, Inc.might well benefit both itself, it's investors, and all the current users by trying not to serve the mainstream majority in a low risk manner but instead taking a chance and "going for the gold".

In short because this is a reality created and used by humans, and thus it will be a reflection of things that are funadmentally human.

Not everyone thinks cubism and abstract art are good things, and even after photgrpahy, a whole school of painting deadicated themsleves to photoreal reproduction. Not everything has to be abstract to be art, and environments do not need to be green strands of numbers on a black background to be virtual.

For some people SL is simply a way to reproduce things in virtual life that you do not, cannot, or would not have in RL. For some people this might be as simple as having a tatoo, whereas others need to walk around as robotic deathmachines, and all points in between.

Some people in Sl will never find a need for the enviroment to be abstract just because its virtual. The more remote and wired things are, the less likey they are to appeal to our inborn sense of correctness.

Picasso is a brilliant artist, but I would not want to be a painting of his. We spend a frew minutes looking at picasso, and we spend hours in a virtual environment, I think it stands to reason we will see more familiarity in an enviroment than in a painting.

i wholly agree, i wish i had a linden dollar for every bathroom, kitchen, etc i've seen, ditto to buildings with all 6 walls and proportions so 'realistic' that no secondlife camera can do anything but make it a torturous nightmare.

we realized years ago that in a virtual world you don't need a roof over your head, or walls to keep out the wind and rain.

there are aesthetics to having them, to be sure, but a giant tulip makes as good a house in SL as a newbie cabin, etc...

the real limitation is peoples creativity, or lack thereof

Yeah that about sums up my feelings too. If I wanted to experience weird stuff I would just take some LDS and not worry about SL.

Well said. I have often wondered what SL would be like if when I first landed back in beta if perhaps there were not hills, trees, and grass. just a plain grid for those who lived there to create from nothing. Since its land based ppl have indeed created what is familar. I still thnk two grids would be nice for us adults. One for the strict commercial types and one for the artistic types.

Think 3D SL does not need to be land based at all. Just create it.



Mar

Anyone whose post includes the sentence, 'a physics-violating multidimensional excersion into the world of causality' is definitely asking to be labelled a 'smarty pants'.

If you look back through my post, you will see that any suggestions of how we might spark an artistic revolution in the 3rd and 4th dimension are conspicuous by their absence. You can take this to mean that, for all my fancy talk I am not as smart as I like to think I am. But I would like to think that sooner or later, we will take virtual reality into realms almost unimaginable today.

This seems to be a path that most new artforms follow. First, they copy the familiar. I have already mentioned the art movement that used to paint landscapes as close to what is now called photorealism as possible. Another example would be films. The first films to actually tell a story (and not just show a train travelling along the track) looked exactly like theatre. There was one fixed camera position, as if you were an audience in the theatre. But after a while the film-makers added tools that theatre-driven stories could not possibly include. Editing, visual effects, tracking, panning and steady-cam shots. Upon the theatrical foundations of lighting, sound, performance and props a whole new narrative language was built.

In the same way that there is still a place for theatre, I believe there shall also be a place for environments that are based on 1st life experiences. Indeed, these are likely to dominate for some time, if the fuss over the artistic direction that Zelda: The Wind Waker took is any indication. But I would also love to see online worlds deliver experiences I have never seen before. Designing a house in the style of Escher, or creating an avatar in the style of Picasso should not be considered bold and original, that's just copying familiar artforms.

I wish I could say exactly how this revolution will happen, but like I said, for all my smart talk I am not a particularly creative person. Perhaps it will ocurr because of an accidental discovery, like when the French film-maker George Mellies happened to film a car travelling on the road, but jammed his camera while filming. After he fixed the problem, the car had gone and he filmed a bus instead. When he watched the film, he saw a car magically transform into a bus, and thus was born the world of visual effects.

It's the fate of the human condition that our minds are capable of imagining so much and yet constrained to do so little by the fact that they are incased in a big bag of sea water. But no longer. The virtual world is the natural habitat for the human mind, a place where the environment shapes itself to the whim of imagination, not where imagination is shackled by the realities of physics. We have only just begun to glimpse what online worlds are really capable of.

PS, thanks to everyone who gave me directions to some artistic creations and lands already in SL.

OMG now I am concerned. Am I a beautiful woman....or a nightmarish plastic surgery mistake?