the five- and ten-year range of the future. We're very, very likely to become part of a mass-computing experience. And those are things to think about in terms of how important is it going to be to have an immersive environment.
Industry Standard: I heard Craig Mundie of Microsoft speak at MIT two months ago. And he said that they had looked at Second Life, and the way they saw it was user-created objects and spaces. He said that their vision seems to be based on 3D constructs of reality and applications off of that. Would you care to comment on that?
Yoon: I am certainly not going to argue, mostly because of ignorance, but I certainly wouldn't argue to whatever the record of Microsoft research has in terms of predicting the future, and being able to productize around it. That's a difficult task for any of us as technologists.
What I would say thought, is that there has been a long-standing debate, a theoretical debate in the field of virtual worlds. And sometimes the name of it has changed over time. But I'd say 25 or 30 years or so, people have been talking about, trying to design a way to operate in this kind of 3D computing environment, immersive computing environment. And there's been a long-standing divide between the augmentationists and the immersionists.
The augmentationists, which I think is what you are describing Craig Mundie as, is someone who talks about having this computing environment to augment your life, really be part of the way of the way you interact with real-world environments. So there's a whiteboard there, and I have computing overlay over here, and it says what I see is somebody else and we're in the virtual space together that way.
That's versus the immersive perspective, or sometimes it's called the synthetic perspective, where there's an entire environment that's completely composed of these user-created or computer-generated objects. Whether they're created by users or by companies is kind of irrelevant. That's the immersionist perspective. It's the idea of the difference between Minority Report and the Matrix. You take two movies, and one you're living in this computing environment where Tom Cruise is running past ads that speak to him. That's augmentationist. Where in the Matrix, you're entirely in an environment that is completely, has no relationship to the real-world environment.
You can't settle this argument by talking about it. You know it has been going on for 25 years. There are two things though, that I could say that I could point out in favor of the immersionist view. One is, look, if you are talking about online environments where users and companies have created the vast majority of the content and all of the content that is in that online environment has value that is determined by people's use of it? They use it with respect to their real lives, but it exists in this online environment.
You know, that's a pretty fair description of the World Wide Web. The Web isn't interesting because "oh, I go on this website and it relates to this desk I am standing next to." No. It's completely about that online environment. Basically, all of the online computing history to date really fits the immersionist version.
What fits the augmentation theory I suppose is the spread of mobile devices and such. But that's kind of a cheap reach right now. You are not really using your mobile devices to you know make a computing environment around you, it's just to connect with people. But maybe that's the technology development in the sort of the immersionist camp.
But the rise of mobile computing vs. the rise of the online Web, they're both very significant, they both have a great deal of economic and social meaning over the last 20
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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