more platforms. The only question is when they are going to be scalable and how they are going to get to production status. You can imagine pretty easily streaming a view of Second Life, like you stream any kind of video. What you do on your iPhone, or all sorts of mobile devices. That is certainly possible. It's possible to do and even have an interactive view as well. And those things are certainly things that we are interested in the future. But it's not sort of the core of where we think we develop toward the leading edge. It's doable.
I don't know if anybody warned you before you came in, but sometimes you only get to ask one or two questions, so I just keep talking.
It goes back to the earlier questions that you asked about: What has to be done for broader adoption of these kinds of technologies in general?
Some of these things are things that we can do. Some of these things are things that we ... just depend on the general enhancement of the computing ecosystem.
Remember, this company was founded, as many startups are founded, on the idea that you're throwing the football to where you think the receiver is going to be. At that time, there wasn't enough broadband penetration or computing power available at all to run any kind of satisfactory experience in Second Life. But the founders here, the early folks here said "look that's coming at a certain point, so we need to develop toward that point" which was relatively further out.
That technology infrastructure point as come in some. But it's got more to come in as we develop our technology out towards it. There's a great deal of things that need to happen in the general computing infrastructure for Second Life, for immersive environments, for 3D environments, online in general to become really broad consumer experiences.
One example is the input devices. It's sort of laughable to me. We all do it, even myself. People just sort of assume that what exists now is the way things are always going to work. One of the things that is so fundamentally obvious, but people don't want to think towards, or plan towards, is the fact that your interaction with the computing environment is not always going to be about a monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse. I understand that the majority of computing history we've had a monitor and a keyboard, but although if you think about the evolution of monitors over 20 or 30 years, there's been a significant (muddled) But keyboards had a sea change when they introduced the mouse. And the mouse and touchpads, and variations on a theme. But there's going to continue to be leaps in the kinds of input devices that you have.
You do envision a point where maybe it's not quite so embedded in the human existence of plugging a cable into your head to interact with your computer, but you will have more natural interactions, in terms of gestural interface and the kinds of things that lend themselves very well to interacting in a 3d environment. You know, I am talking about things that you've already seen and heard about outside of our sphere of influence, really, but Minority Report-type interfaces , 3d cameras that capture both color and distance so you can use your hands to move objects on a screen, brainwave devices, I think you may have seen some of those on YouTube. People putting the cap on their heads and thinking "Left! Left" to make their avatar, their cursor go left..
There's experimentation with that stuff out there. It might seem very far off, but we've all been around here long enough to see how fast the computing industry evolves. And those kinds of things are in
Comments
Such a long article and no mention of gray textures or objects that appear only after you've flown past them. Six years or more of Second Life and still the claim that used to be on the secondlife.com site "the world appears before you turn to it", has not been fulfilled.
When internet speeds increase to a certain point, won't that eliminate the advantage offered by the use of Second Life prims, enabling the use of meshes instead? Meshes which can be made in programs outside of the Second Life viewer, thus eliminating the need for Second Life builders, i.e., prim builders?
@Chuck - Speeds won't eliminate the advantage because a) less streaming content is always better ... especially in areas where providers start throttling service, and b) prims could be much more complex than what is currently offered. Prims are more like CAD data (e.g. Pro/E); meshes are what you get from a non-CAD 3D modeler (e.g. 3DSMax). As someone who uses both professionally, I'd personally be pleased if they improved the prim tools (e.g. allow builders to draw profiles for extrusions). However, as someone who knows that the platform could benefit from greater support from the broader 3D community, I'm supportive of an importer.
That said, Linden Lab has already broached the subject of both upgrading the prim modeling tools and allowing the import of mesh files. The issue wasn't which to do, but which should take priority. I believe mesh import won.
Why would business people want to use Second Life as a collaborative tool, when there are so many easy to use conferencing and collaborative tools that are specifically designed for the task at hand?
The Second Life system itself is too unreliable for business meetings. Just ask any player (er.. resident) about server and database downtime or client (on your PC) crashes.
The avatar is an extra layer of complexity that business people don't need. The learning curve is steep, and not everyone masters 3D navigation quickly, if at all.
A meeting of avatars is like going to a business meeting where each person has to operate a puppet, and can only communicate with the others through that puppet's actions.
If this works, I'm going to open a puppet supply house targeted at the Fortune 500.
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