Definitions and Spaces

It dawned on me this morning that there really are a very few types of spaces we generally occupy in the real world i.e. home, school, shop, club et cetera. It begins to make sense that we determinedly create such known comfortable areas in Second Life. This doesn't seem to be the result of our imaginations being limited, but of a world mold being pushed on the Second Life environment.

For instance, there is only one iteration of the world. A sim can support duplicate, even triplicate, ground structures so that there could be three levels of Taber accomodating Tudor Village, D'amyal Etklor and Ravenglass Rentals respectively. Occasional holes in the middle and upper land masses allows flight passage between "worlds." Landmarks are labeled per "world" with their Z coords beginning at that ground level.

It's no more strain on the hardware than running two or three sims on multi dual core CPU systems is now. But I fear the idea, the concept, would never pass the boardroom at LL. It's not normal. People wouldn't adjust to it. Users aren't capable of understanding that a digital world allows us to define spaces we never imagined in the real world. It makes me wonder what Philip means by "better."

We don't think twice about IMing while we're supposedly having an intimate face-to-face conversation with another av. It's not the "same thing," I'm told, as the utter disrespect of answering a cell phone call in the middle of a real life conversation. It's just normal; it's expected.

But suggest to a crowd of people that it would be neat to run two SL clients and have Khamon logged into one dancing in a club and chatting with his friends while, at the same time, being logged into another client sitting in a meeting talking with business partners about purchasing a block of estate sims, and you'll get one of two reactions. Blank stares are pretty common; so is the phrase "no, that would be too confusing for the average user."

Yeah, stupid users just will never adjust to new concepts of spacial dimensions and classifications, much less an expanded sense of self. I don't buy that for a minute. People have no problem getting used to flying, to zooming camera views, to producing building material out of thin air, to relying on a very unrealistic economic model, et cetera et cetera. It seems more like the steady, determined work of people fighting for the cause of purposely limiting such things, forcing users into the mold of functioning, thinking, and interpreting life in SL exactly as they do in the real world.

Such a cause doesn't exist does it? Noone at LL would support it if it did would they? Of course not; that's just silly. So why is the world of Second Life so rigidly maintained just exactly as much like the real world as can possible? Does anyone know?

In counterexample, I would like to point out the hordes of imitators of "The Port".

Oh, wait.

Now, I'm hardly a major supporter of realism, and I'm among the first to say SL should make the "Earthlike" elements an option, not a hardcoded requirement... but there's a reason why people like to be somewhere kind of like "home"; it's what humans are wired up for.

It's what adults are wired up for... No, it's what most adults are wired up for. That doesn't make it what all humans are wired up for.

Given that the anatomy of human beings is more or less optimal for locomotion on a planet's surface with a gravity close to 1 G, I beg to differ.

I can get all the realistic high resolution 3D accurate physics stuff I need just waking up and getting through my morning cup of coffee.

The one big grid, with 2 dimensions and a partial third idea is boring and limited. It wouldn't be so bad if the system could do a good job of this, but it can't.

People don't want to wade through physical space in the real world, that's why they make cars and supersonic planes and radios and TVs and the internet.

Wasting a computer's ability to do cool stuff that it can do well on trying to do a half-way job of emulating physical reality is just silly.

Because LL's business model centers around ownership of server technology, economic mechanisms, and virtual "land" they want everyone to buy from one source?


Actually, that and something else.

Much of the thinking behind LL leads to discussions about Snow Crash and the metaverse. My opinion is the metaverse, as expressed in that book, does not work in practice.

Now, before you all get out the pitchforks and torches, give me a moment to explain! I don't think it works purely in the sense not all perceptions are created equal. I know I'm sounding like a broken record at this point (especially after the last posting), but the concept of forced singularity (forum, dev team, world) is not facilitative to the creation of any "open" virtual world.


A simple example. Suppose I want to build a starship. But wait, there aren't any space-based sims! Great, let me create one... oh, I can't! llSetPos only goes up to 512/768m, and I can't change the ground color! So let me make a black box to emulate space... but wait! What if they have the draw distance down?

Now, the concept of "altering reality" is completely lost on that kind of system in favor of compromises - which the system does not always bear. I coded some lovely little hacks into Primmies that, come 1.7, were totally broken because the system was moving in a different direction.

Resultant need? Separability. Niche behavior. Quite like the internet, really.


But that ain't happening without a complete overhaul. Or a new product.

aol basicaly did everything the web does now.

if aol had had the foresight, they would have owned the www. but instead they kept to a closed system. and now people think of yahoo and google when they think about the www.

Dude. I love that analogy.

If one wanted to create a nice spacey sci-fi world, one might want to be able to define solar systems, and galaxies. and set different planet's gravitational fields, and atmospheric compositions.

Instead we get a world where people pay on the basis of "owning" a certain amount of space, yet the effects of what they do in their space extend beyond the virtual space they paid to control.

So nobody gets to have a space that's what they choose, they not only can't pick what color sun they have, they can't even rent a plot of land while pretending they are buying it without having to see their neighbors signs and have their own plot of land discolored by their neighbors pink glowing neon sign.

Meanwhile they whole system is bogged down by having to calculate how far typed words can be seen, as if they were sound waves - slowing everything down and requiring people to use scripted chat repeaters to get text retransmitted around their land if it's farther than chat text normally goes.

It's all databases and software, yet people who own a sim can't access a database that shows everything on their sim, where it is, what is is, when it got there, etc.

a lot of people think about aol when they think about the www.

i know, they ask me how to send email on aol, and i say "i don't know, isnt't there a button that says "email", and they say, oh, yeah, there is.

I'm of the opinion that your average user is perfectly capable of understanding and adjusting to a lot more than "visionaries" give them credit for. They merely aren't necessarily interested in doing so, and needn't necessarily come to the same conclusions that you do ... that doesn't make them less intelligent than you, it simply makes them different than you.

It's a fallacy to assume that just because an idea is outside the mainstream, it is necessarily better than the mainstream (or conversely, that failure of the mainstream to embrace it implies inferiority on others' part). The flaw may just as easily be within your idea.

The rest of the world is under no obligation to share your values and goals, and that's perfectly fine for the most part. Your idea may be outside the mainstream, not because it's so far above people or outside their experiences that they don't/can't get it, but merely because it produces a world that most people do not actually want to occupy.

Might get a better idea of what people want to occupy if they had a choice, a real choice between present and existing alternatives, not just a choice between an attempt to partially replicate some aspects of a hundreds of year old flat world concept and and a program that strives to present an interface that makes full use of the flexiblity that stems from the fact that it's digital, it's software, it's not a world constrained by the laws of physics, it's magic.

I'll take magic over mundane reality anytime.

The first part seems to using the word space to refer not to things which might be in different spatial locations but the pertinent distinction between them is not where they are located but rather what social function they serve.

When you progress to what sim's can do, you seem to me to suggest that different purposes or functions need to have distinct physical representations in the simulation.

I think it might be more straightforward to have some buttons or such to select which aspect of the pseudo-reality one wishes to experience at the moment rather than having one have to find a hole to fly through and, upon arriving, having to see the bottom of the next level up overhead instead of seeing what the person who paid for the storage space and processor capacity paid for a visitor to see.

You're trapped in three-dimensional thinking. There's no reason simulated space needs to preserve euclidean geometry.

There's no technical reason the south edge of Abbots couldn't be connected to the north edge of Sandbox Island, or even the east edge of Caldbeck, or any other combination of edges that doesn't "overlap" sims. There's certainly no reason the north and south edges of Rue dAlliez couldn't be connected, and similarly the east and west edges, making the island a pocket universe... after all, it already is.

Similarly, there's no reason any opaque prim (opaque to avoid having to deal with optical effects OpenGL would be hard-pressed to render) couldn't be topologically logically connected to any equal-sized opaque prim in the world, so that when a physical object (that fits) passes through a face of the prim it comes out of the corresponding face of its counterpart.

There's no reason that dimensions need to remain constant. There's no reason one couldn't define an opaque prim such that the interior was larger than the exterior.

If you're going to play games with space, why stop with three dimensions?

No, and in fact a much earlier story, _True Names_ by Vernor Vinge, seems to describe the way Second Life has turned out much better. It's a pity you can't simulate the Other Plane's geometry as well as its scenery.

In that case, attempting to use a less-euclidean SL to implement it will fail. Someone else may have a better idea that DOES work, but so long as we're stuck in euclidean space-time in SL nobody will ever know.

Y'know, I got to thinking about my Snow Crash comment and realized it wasn't 100% accurate. I keep moving straight to the ends with debate, completely avoiding the means.

The concept of "The Street" - a hodgepodge of areas all stuffed together into one defined three-dimensional worldspace - is something that might actually be necessary in the beginnings of this sort of world. This is similar to the way usenets, early billboards, and so forth were a necessary evolutionary step for the internet. I say this because, from a purely marketing and connectivity level, the one world would function as a crutch and hub to others until they have a chance to form their own networks.


Over time, however, this needs to develop into a more open, distributed system that all parties can access - similar to a web browser for 3D content. Compare this to a limited, structured world where changes might break others' work.


My baseline argument being, not all ideas of reality are created equal. Second Life forces a mold and rigid structuring onto its residents. Do people want that? Some, sure. But until it is able to encompass all niches, as something like Google or the internet itself has been able to, I simply will not agree that "people just don't want [otherwise]."

The problem with trying to emulate or recreate Snowcrash is that Stephenson obviously based "The World" on his view of the Internet. At the time, that was his logging onto The Well and chatting on their forums. That was the 'Net circa, what, 1990 or 1991; that was even before the web was born, when there were maybe four ISP's across the nation, when dialing into BBS's was common. It's a very centralized view of networks and a very centralized, proprietary way for the Internet to work.

The modern Internet is a different beast -- maybe not in underlying hardware, but certainly in functionality. The modern internet is a hodgepodge of open systems, closed systems, and in cases like Second Life a mix of the two.

The modern Internet could never function like "The World" did, with one server grid owned and operated by one company. Stephenson's view of the Internet cerca Snowcrash didn't have Linux, Apache, VRML, Perl, broadband cable services, SMS messaging, and the like. He extrapolated his views from a dial-up service and tacked on virtual reality.

It's sad that people keep looking at a fifteen-plus year old novel for ways to use modern technology when there a lot more recent novels -- Accelerando is my current favorite -- we should be looking at. Showcrash, as an inspiration, was a good thing, but it's far from being a Road Map To The Future; and it's a terrible road map to follow now when it only covers roads we've already traveled.

Seriously, Snowcrash was wrong. The ostracized "Gargoyles" within it have been replaced and welcomed into society, we call them teenagers: people who are comfortable living both in the real world and in a digital world -- chatting on the phone, taking photographs with a phone, listening to an iPod, playing a Gameboy -- at the same time. Gargoyles were wrong, The World was wrong, Stephenson was wrong, and I'm sure he would be the first to admit it. In fact, he's alwready said that the data haven in Cryptonomicon is an outmoded concept now that people can carry gigabytes of data in their pockets. I'm confident he'd question the sanity of trying to recreate The World based on the vague network protocols he outlined in his fiction.

I dare you to say that to someone in a wheelchair. In fact, you win that dare, because you just did! The human body may be optimally built to walk a 1G planet, but the human brain is wired for a heck of a lot more. The human brain is an adaptable system that can drive, fly, and even find itself walking on places with 1/10th of a G. Don't discount what can be done because of what's been done in the past.

Garry's Mod for Half Life 2 can do kind of what you're talking about. I've built a boat in GMod with a camera that allowed me to walk around as my av, or I could switch to the boat and see from it's POV as it zoomed through the lake.

Allowing us to put a "camera" on an a build and see things from its POV would not be impossible in Second Life, but it would ruin the immersion of a lot of people whose brain are betgter evolved for the 20th century.

Sure thing. But neither can you deny that most people are comfortable with Earthlike environs and thus, the smart money is on MAKING Earthlike environs if you're looking to do this as a business as opposed to a bold new experiment in virtual spaces.

Which, again, I'm not opposed to bold new experiments; I like to do bold new experiments! I just find the original poster's surprise utterly surprising in and of itself. One the one hand, people can adapt to the strangest things; on the other hand, why do so many people feel cold in a snow sim?

Khamon is complaining that LL has engineered SL around an expectation of Earth-like land. I'm saying it's the smart way to start, even though I dearly wish to go beyond this. See the difference?

I see what you're saying and I do see the difference, but I disagree with both. Look at cellphones for instance, one of the largest uses of cellphones is text messaging. That defies every paradigm established by the telephone industry in the last 100 years. Khamon is right, if people wanted an "Earth-like land" we wouldn't be able to generate prims from thin air, fly around the world, or teleport.

The Lindens want an "Earth-like land", but their users... The Furs, Gorians, futurists like me, people who play Star Wars Galaxies or World of Warcraft, everyone who argued for point-to-point teleporting, and even little green men who build trees want something beyond Earth-like. They want hyper-Earth-like.

Which is why I keep bringing up _True Names_: because while it was published in 1981 (three years before _Neuromancer_, which is usually credited with "inventing cyberspace", and it gets many details wrong, the Other Plane it describes feels a lot more like a "Virtual Reality Internet" than Snow Crash, Neuromancer, or most other novels that feature a 3d world.

I think a better reason for not doing this right now is that each person looking through a "camera" would cause almost as much server load, network traffic, and lag as a concurrently logged in alt.

Speaking only for myself, I'm only asking for the tools to build the environment. The risk and cost of actually doing so would then be mine, just as the risk and cost of implementing Khamon's and Jarod's dreams would be theirs.

Which, if you've followed my own postings on the subject (no reason you would have, but if you had) I agree. I want to be able to get crazy and wild and creative too; I am not disagreeing.

I just think Khamon's surprise that LL went for what they did surprising in itself; the tone seems very "how could they miss making it wide-open", when, well... as obtuse as the SL interface is, LL often seems to err on the "eglitarian" side at the cost of limiting possibilities.