The road not taken: Will anyone miss it?

Hi AJ, is that a 3dprinter product? Did you make it? Details?

the supernova is kinda growing on me

actually, after the initial shock, it's actually more realistic, and I think it's going to look better once Windlight is implemented.

I was watching a sunset yesterday and thought the same thing. I've seen many similar sunsets in RL, especially in places like Key West.

Anytime I'm tempted to second guess where SL is going, I remind myself that none of us is sitting in the offices of LL and none of us are able to read the minds of Philip and Cory. The closest we ever come to really knowing where the future holds is by reading in-between the lines of Cory's white papers:

2003 - at the start of SL
http://lindenlab.com/whitepapers/Escaping_Guilded_Cage_Ondrejka.pdf

2005 - two years into SL
http://lindenlab.com/whitepapers/Changing_Realities_Ondrejka.pdf


I understand there is a 2007 white paper in progress right now that will give us all a glimpse of the vision where SL is headed....

There is so much we don't know and so much we don't see, we only see our little corner of SL and how we as individuals want to use it. There does seem to be a plan and all we get to do is go along for the ride (if we choose.) Those that have decided that this is the future and they want to be a part of building it, will adapt their businesses and entertainment activities as SL changes. Those that can't live with the changes will find other forms of amusement.

I'll close with another poem:

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

-- Robert Frost

Well said and I'm with you on the 3D printer integration - that to me is the big way that SL links RL and SL in a paradigm shifting way.

As a Sun God worshipper, I am most pleased.

I don't even think the Providers can predict where it will go. Things change rapidly,a lot is dependant on the users themselves, what they do with the Game/Service/Platform as it stands, and what it evolves into, along with Uncle Phil's visions. It's a crapshoot. We can all just join hands and walk off the cliff together.

It's the first piece of modelling clay home craft I found on image search.

straps down and puts on my goggles, gives a sigh and smiles, and looks at that road of change, and revs the engine on my harley........

I suppose the abstract spaces may come someday.

But there's other things, almost... strangely absent.

One of the greatest ironies of the grid as it is today: no electricity or magnetism!

(and I won't complain about not having nuclear fission or fusion for obvious reasons I guess)

I suppose scripting covers it. But not quite in that gritty physicality sort of way.

Also sadly missing is a place to get a decent cheeseburger.

I think that's universal

I would love to see the laws of physics incorporated into SL slowly over time. Magnetism, electricity... oh yes. The possibilities.

Des, I think the things that you are finding absent are so for a reason. Projects on that scale pretty much require a sim where the immersion can be totally controlled. There are a limited number of people who can afford to dedicate a sim to just doing something abstract and cool, as you know there are costs involved. I think those abstract spaces are still possible - just think of what NASA might do with a sim! But by and large, normal people (meaning not large corporations) have to find a way to cover the costs on their sim. In the same way you have to weigh the factors of considering an Orientation Island. Groups like Bedazzle used to do really fabulous projects that would stay in SL for limited amounts of time - the space station with a club inside comes to mind as being one. Not only does an abstract space need someone with a sim to play with, it also needs a creator with a vision and passion for the project. And then it needs an audience that finds the content compelling enough to want to go and visit.

So, I think that all the possibilities exist for the abstract spaces and always will. It comes down to a matter of someone having the resources, the vision and the ability to create environments that a visitor finds compelling. In the same way that Desmond had a resource of a sim, had a vision of a 19th century community and can bring that intangible commodity of creating an environment that people desire to partake of.

Ahhhhh Desmond, to be successful a startup must choose a thing to do and focus on that one thing. The name of LL's verse is "Second Life", thus declaring from the get-go its direct descent from real life. And what they have created has a magic to it, so I think we should enjoy their chosen path for as far as it takes us.

We must leave the more daring worlds to come to "Singularity" or whatever the eventual, abstract, truly virtual descendent of today's games turns out to be called. And look forward to that being REALLY wild, since it will have the luxury of starting out with that sole focus!

I've done abstract spaces over my 512m lot. And, to be honest, I wasn't overly passionate about it at the time either. AFAIK only one resident other than me saw it.

The issue here isn't so much what it's possible to do as much as what is catered for. I've written basic speed-tree type scripts in SL (I'm sure many people have - it's qujite basic), for instance; they're easy on the renderer but high on prims. If the underlying structure of the system was different I could quite easily distribute them, but as it is few people would be interested because they eat up your prim limit.

This is all marketing though, if LL has any intentions other than making money what they're concentrating on is nothing like that.

As the residents of SL define the world, it really is no surprise that abstract spaces are rarely to be found. It is in our nature to gravitate towards the familiar, towards what we know. People fear what they do not recognize or do not understand (insert ubiquitous reference to role of religion here) thus we create spaces in our digital world that reflect what we know and where people are most comfortable. Surrealism has followed the same path in SL; when I was new in SL, the mainland was far more littered with surreal projects than it is now. One of my fondest early memories is of being at Schwan’s Punany Club dancing one night and someone (I think it might have been Jonquille) was cruising around the club on a flying toilet. It was delightfully surreal and cemented forever my mind as one of the reasons I love SL. Over the years, however, the surreal of SL has been beaten to death by people who wanted SL to be a carbon copy of RL. People who built things that deviated from the expected norm were criticized by their neighbors for junking up the landscape. It takes a brave soul to create a space that will have neighboring land owners bitching because it’s too “funky.” I think it is not that those spaces can’t exist in SL, but that the tolerance for them is not very high.

snip

Ya know, some of the most *incredible* personalities in SL have been in the abstract.

AJ in particular; it's almost alien to interact with an arcane, highly technological sphere hovering in my oh-so-Victorian English garden outside of West Trade, hunting for tulips sooooo long ago. It actually *worked*... his form made sense in context. I could almost hear the oiled brass gears spinning!

Others have been stunningly amazing in their oddity or complexity.

Davan Camus & Horg Neurocam, in rectangles that presented dozens of conservative, business-suited human forms at high speed, flickering on each surface, with a reassuring message: yes we ARE human, you can trust us!

Bloody brilliant. I even went aboard the 'office' with NO fear of transdimensional or temporal displacement... Their current forms (DEVO power-dome hat and suit, and insectile miner, respectively) are almost sane by comparison to those...

Art Laxness. Ye gods, when an unassuming .5m plywood cube starts talking to you, if that's not reason enough to freak and *completely* unhinge from reality, I don't know what is! Ah, I'll take it easy on the path cuts on your kind, okay? And no more hollows...

Perhaps our limitations DO define us. I for one, go around in little more than prim glasses and an otherwise noobish avatar a 19th century waistcoat and trews from Silver Rose but otherwise... just avatar settings. The glasses are an affectation that mimics the real (I am nearsighted), and also an inside reminder (to myself) that they are quite possibly tinted rosy. And a walk AO, that's it.

Alright. I'm about two amaretto magaritas south of a full deck at the moment, so I'm going to stop now.




"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel..."

There you go sir.... if they'd been PanGalactic GargleBlasters there'd be a high probability you wouldn't be having these thoughts.

It's been pointed out we need the familiar. We are a gravity bound species. This gives us an up. It's common knowledge astronauts in training in zero-g and divers when they lose the light get disorientated.

Whilst the passenger of a fairground ride may enjoy this interlude, they have the certainty it will stop soon and 'normality' returned. There's reassurance there. For the rider who is trapped on the unstoppable ride, fear sets in. Danger is assumed. Yes we need the familiar.

Gravity gives us the up. From this one dimension we have devised, observed and calibrated the second and third. We have in-depth debates and arguments about the fourth. Is it SecondLife?

There are many who have difficulty grasping the unusual. They are sometimes fascinated, sometimes frightened and sometimes they stay. But just some.

I took my fiancee to a desolate sim last night. Someone's put a lot of work into it. Some superdetailed structures peppered through a vast space. We went into a house, a 19th or 20th century wooden ramshackle house without carpets or curtains. There was a dirty mattress on the floor, dimly lit from the broken window. Newspapers strewn across the floor ..... the dirty, dirty mattress .... an ash tray .... a cigarette ..... smouldering.

My fiancee suddenly felt physically sick and we had to TP out.

Pixels ... tiny little pieces of light on a two dimension screen. Powerful or what?

There's no earthly way of knowing
Which direction we are going!
There's no knowing where we're rowing,
Or which way the river's flowing!
Not a speck of light is showing,
So the danger must be growing,
For the rowers keep on rowing,
And they're certainly not showing
Any signs that they are slowing...

Nice Pie, did you write that?

Nope, Roald Dahl did, sung from the lips of Gene Wilder portraying Willy Wonka in the original (not that I have anything against Johhny Depp, but he just didn't SING enough), but seems completely apprapo to the SL for which I've come to develop a Madonna/Whore complex, in a non-ageplaying sorta way.

That is one of my all time favorite movies, "Pure Imagination' is such a wonderfu song. I love Johnny Depp, but I won't even watch his version, there will be only 1 Willy wonka for me.

If anyone knows of a gravity-free blobby liquid abstract vastness theme sim anywhere -- or something similar -- please let me know, sounds like a good place for an experimental music club!

Seriously though I appreciate what the original poster is saying. It doesn't seem like an either/or question to me though -- even if we continue to simulate RL more and more closely in most parts of the metaverse, that won't stop others from eventually creating spaces with wilder rules. And if people prefer these new spaces, the population will eventually migrate there anyway...



Johnvon
Vibration Institute

Now I have this mental image of blobby multicolored clear liquid orbs.. combining and separating... changing colors... floating and moving around... with sculpties should not be a hard thing to script...