The road not taken: Will anyone miss it?

This really is a question - and an important one. Please bear with me...


Some wonderful revelations have been discussed today.

Weather! I was thrilled to tears, to see that on the near horizon.

And Speedtree - a dramatic step forward for the metaverse naturalist, should it come in Q4 or whenever it may; making for a FAR more compelling world.

Sculpties. WOW! The potential of these alone is stunning. On the practical side, these will reduce prim requirements, cut textures to one where once there may have been several on several prims - they will unlock imagination. Can't say enough good things about them.



But one lingering question nags me, in the back of my mind.

In building such a wonderful, beautiful First World on the grid, are we letting something wildly magical about the Metaverse slip away?


Consider as follows:

Let's say things were taken far more slowly. It would be many years before computing power caught up, before bandwidth caught up to this.

But if there were a more universal basis - say, a texturable mesh that could do *everything* well, without building in special features - trees, objects, weather... wouldn't that allow the door to be open for more?

Taking a veeery long step back and looking at our world, it is one of avatars walking on terra firma, where there is gravity and seas and vehicles and so on and so forth. One cannot easily break that model, and that model is strengthening.

And I understand why this is so.

Yet think of it this way. I'm one of the believers: I think the metaverse will become an important part of the human experience, eventually reaching 100's of millions, perhaps touching the lives of billions indirectly.

In twenty years, where will the decisions made today take us? Ohhh yes, what we decide today will matter deep into the future. Look at the automobile engine; look at the Intel processor. What Was Done strongly influences the shape of the future.

I get the sense that the decisions made lately will steer us toward incredible beauty, one that will favour my immediate concerns greatly.

But perhaps in doing so, we've steered away from some of the wilder metaversal spaces; the abstract vastnesses free of earthbound imaginings entirely.

Something to think about.



Two roads diverged in a digital wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the metaverse.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a virtual world, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

- with apologies to Frost...

You have given me something to think about, Desmond, but I need to add a question and it is not critical of your nice post. Why does the "new internet" require identity/age verification, from a date mining Republican affliated company, when the old internet is chugging along just fine without such nonsense?

I really don't think that Al Gore would approve of what Linden Labs is trying to do with his creation.

I did not realize that the author of the poem that was based on and the author of "A Foolish Guide to Second Life" are one and the same.

*sigh* Don't get me started.

Dunno. You based your sims on a RL aesthetic and you have a three month waiting list. Try a gravity-free blobby liquid abstract vastness theme sim next time around and see how your rentals do.

In reality, when it comes to virtual reality, people prefer to be grounded in reality. That's just the reality of it all.

Stop thinking so much and welcome the kick-ass cloud formations.

In our dreams.

Ah yes. It is sad that I will not be here to see what path will indeed be taken. But currently the one I see ahead is no longer worth my time or attention. I had such grand dreams about what SL might grow into one day - the possibilities of a game, largely created by its inhabitants, changing not only the face of gaming, but of the Internet itself - and possibly even more. And now I only see the vast potential being slowly eaten away by SL turning more and more into a sad, shadow of RL with more and more "governmental" (read LL) control & regulation, privacy invasion and classism as the world is seperated into those who are willing to give up their RL privacy and those who are not.

I wish those who will be staying well, and hope that some small part of SL's potential will eventually be realized.

But if you leave now, you will miss Speedtree, whatever that is.

When there are (genuinely) millions of SL users it will be viable to create a little corner of the grid where everyone is a constantly shifting blob of liquid metal swimming in seas of geometry.

It can't happen without the mass appeal of familiar settings, romanticised version of real places and ourselves. Because people like oceans, beaches, hills, houses with roofs and windows on them. And while futurists will scoff and roll their eyes at the missed opportunity, they might want to consider that it's this very"mundane" application of virtual reality that is growing the whole concept for everyone. That includes those who yearn for some idealised abstract vision of the metaverse. The choice is between having your island of "pure virtuality" surrounded by an ocean of "everyday dross", or having no island at all.

If for every 100 regular Joes and Janes who sign up, you get one more person who dreams of the virtual blob life of abstract awesomeness, then it's only a matter of time before you'll get a community that will work with that. And if it's a successful community, people will look to it... Wheat doesn't grow without chaff.

Until then, I'd like to make the point, that if there's something more tiresomely predictable than people choosing to make their VR experience an idealised "real" one, it's other people telling them how tiresomely predictable that is

Isn't that what prims are?

seriously though - trying to be everything for everyone leaves you becoming nothing for nobody - you're doomed to mediocrity. Meshes - that includes prims - need different topologies to suit different needs. That's what we have, and I think it works quite fine.

Sculpties - a kind of mesh import - were long overdue, and I welcome them. They will vastly improve the look of our world.

Speedtree - well I wouldn't bank on Speedtree showing up anytime soon. It's been announced since 2005, supposedly showing up in fourth quarter of that year. It's two years later, nothing yet

And seriously, a tree generator shouldn't be THAT hard. I've seen two separate ones developed for the software package I use for 3d rendering over the years. Just a bit of fractal generation, and you can texture the fractal generated bits (trunk, branches, leaves). Something like that would actually make things easier for plant creators in SL - because the things that make them great are the custom textures, anyway.

LL has been pretty serious about keeping the door open for everyone to create content - and sculpties are no exception - whereas something heavily proprietary like Speedtree may be harder to implement. Just saying

I think we'll see Havok 4 and Mono before we'll see Speedtree

From: someone

In building such a wonderful, beautiful First World on the grid, are we letting something wildly magical about the Metaverse slip away?



No. I welcome the changes. Something I forgot to add:

You have complete control over the sky settings - take a look at Torley's stream for how she's played with them. Not only that, they can be saved out and traded/sold - so again, it is opening new markets, not closing them.

The market is changing yes... and change is scary. But change is not a bad thing.

to paraphrase Heraclitus - you can never step twice in the same river.

To stop changing, stop innovating, is the death of SL. The past is bittersweet but one must look to the future, and the future must change. I embrace these changes, I'm very happy for them

Yes, I am excited too about the recent additonal features that have been announced. Atmospheric rendering and sculpted prims alone could change the look of SL entireley (for the better) and I for one support LLabs commitment to keep pushing new feature in the face of endless outcry and negativity from the majoirty of their customer base. Personally I would rather live in a buggy world with pink fluffy clouds and a buggy world without.

I hope they make the supernova smaller .. er, I mean sun

I agree. Your idealised "real" homes add beauty and value to SL. I like the fact that for a few dollars I can have my own little piece of pristine beachfront property and put one of your gorgeous houses at the shore edge.

When I'm in the mood for something more existential, I turn myself into a glowing blue orb to watch the sunrise.

Or your own wild grid on your basement Linux, which you then connect up to the main grid with a nice bridge (or fanciful wormhole, say).

There's no doubt that many decisions that happen in these times will affect how everything works for generations to come. I tend to think that it would be on a more granular level- but I'm having trouble coming up with examples right now. Maybe I've got some blind spots in my perception here. I think it's very important to keep thinking along these lines, and to keep our philosophical minds alert and ready for action.

Anyway, things do always change and morph. And pockets of different ways of seeing and doing things can infect larger areas at times. I think those 2 forked roads might have some cross-links further on.

-Fo

Mmm... yeah, you got a point.

I guess there's just no pleasing me, is there?


*pops tab on generic beer can*

*makes pleh!-face but takes a swig anyway, tasting teh aluminum*


little fluffy clouds... oooh...

With the tools we have, we already have the ability to take SL places and directions no-one imagined, but people don't usually imagine very far from home (even though they think they do).

I don't think that it matters a whole lot what the basic physical/visual arctitecture is here so much as what we choose to do with it. I have seen hints in some things already existing in our world of great unimagined possibilities. I do not think that it is so much that early design decisions define the course of a technology, but that those early design decisions cause us to limit our perceptions of the possibilities.

It's not so much the technological limits that keep something going in a certain direction - it's the self-imposed limits we place on our own imaginations that do so.

Well, there is pleasing you...your initial post about the news to another forum was filled with excitement. Then you got philisophical about it. It just proves you are a complex, creative and very human avatar.

A wonderfully thought provoking post, as always, Desmond.

With every iteration of Second Life, something is lost and something is gained. When I look back on the video footage from Beta that was used in Philip's first CNN piece from 2004, I remember that the early SL of 2003/2004 might have seemed so magical, but really, it was UGLY. The people and the community and the friendships are always what make an era of Second Life magical to each of us.

Second Life is definitely improving aestetically, the question is, is it improving as a whole, and I think they're two different questions.

"Two roads diverge in a wood...
...I took neither. I hacked my own way through the *&#$ing shrubs!"

Regards,

-Flip

One only needs to go to the Galactica Sim, fly up to 600 meters, and gaze down to see that not everyone in SL are staying rooted to the ground.

Flipper, Please kill the Hasselcrotch! It is one reality I can't bear to look at!

It's the limits that are imposed on the SL world that enable it to grow.

Like Ace Albion says the familiar settings (and ease of creation) bring in users. Users provide resources for development and push content creators to create. There are platforms that are more like you describe, but they progress more slowly as the people using them have different goals they work towards and create disparate systems.

Look around you though... science fiction has regularly suggested cyberspace would be something of a ghetto for the whole and looking at SL in this context I think it fits well: rows of unoccupied, identifit houses sit next to piles of giant coins; in the distance there's a slight hum from a flying saucer someone's crashed into a sim border and left there; a wooden plank on a pile of junk flaps in the breeze by a shop masquerading as a military bunker.

Abstract environments are possible in SL, if not facilitated by it, and even using the standard viewer it's possible to perceive the structure of the world-content in different ways. If SL is to become a standard base for virtual worlds, as web technologies have for two-dimensional content, then I feel a lot of it's success may depend on it's openness to hacking (the good type) and people develop new systems around the core SL system functionality.

Philip likes to refer to SL as the web of virtual worlds. If that's true then I can't see them having a problem with people piggybacking new systems of display on top of their system - like the Flash plugin does, for example. If things reach this level and the userbase continues to grow I'd expect the technologies in place would enable you to float through the mataverse how you'd like, much like it's possible with the web today.

Aye, knowing which road to take... all i know is in SL the flying is faster than walking. So the low road probably won't get to Scottland before the 'high' one <grin>.

Yet none of the above mentioned 'changes' compare at all to the introduction of voice. (strangely unmentioned)

I've been to the 'voice grid' and you want to talk about an unrecognizable SL? It's right around the freaking corner.

What keeps me coming back to SL is that this is ultimatly a human endevor. That and the eventual integration of SL with 3dprinters. No other one thing IMO has as much potential to open the minds of ppl worldwide.

so dispite the recent draconian/stazi curveballs LL has been tossing about (next i won't be allow to smoke a joint while playing SL) i keep draggin my silly butt back to figure out how and where to begin to clean up the mess.

did i just lose everyone? ->next thread...

The "universal mesh" is the protocol, isn't it?

Don't like the limitation of prims, terrain, avatars, sky, sculpties, etc. ?

Add a new data type to the protocol, a new packet definition to the message template.