Has Second Life in 2007 raised or lowered your expectations for the Metaverse?
Since the big hype in October of last year those who have been watching the Virtual World of Second Life have seen the hype come and go. But what have we learned from the most successful metaverse up to now? Has it raised or lowered your expectations for a social virtual world?
Answers (8)
Dave E.
Co-founder & CEO at Tagwhat
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My expectations have grown dramatically. Despite its limitations today, the metaverse constitutes a dramatic transformation in how we will communicate in the future. I consider it the medium that will ultimately render the concept of physical distance to be largely irrelevant as a barrier to business, socialization, and cohesion. I've started a business VRWorkplace to bring the metaverse to the enterprise for workplace use. Based on the challenges I experienced first hand running a global IT outsourcing function, I am striving to introduce the metaverse as a way to bring people together for collaboration, cohesion, and socialization. It is only a matter of time before the lines between reality and virtuality in this context are blurred, enriching our lives considerably. As for Second Life, it is by no means perfect, but it is a wonderful venue in which to experiment and learn about how the metaverse, relationships, and behaviors work. Please contact me if I can be of any assistance. I started up a LinkedIn Virtual Worlds group, if you're interested in networking along these lines.
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Andy B.
Leader, mentor, team builder
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Definitely raised.
SL proves it is not a toy anymore, if not with anything more then with amount of money spent in its world every day. This does not attest to it being useful though - people pay for MMORPGs which provide just entertainment. So I was quite skeptical because I never was a gamer and this aspect of Second Life never appealed to me.
Now I think metaverses could indeed be useful in business, currently mostly as meeting and advertising platforms. Future usefulness of SL and other similar platforms will come, IMHO, manly from integrating in-world objects to external systems thus providing new metaphors for actions and data currently presented via web pages.
There is some technical development required before that will happen (mainly in the area of security of interfaces, transaction security, ability to run worlds totally inside corporate intranets etc.), but it will surely occur. SL is the early proving ground for those concepts and, I think, we see now the phase when the future players of the metaverse world establish their initial positions.
Mike H.
Director of Sales Engineering at Message Systems
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Having spent some time looking at Second Life and also recently re-read SnowCrash and Neuromancer, I'd say it has changed my expectations.
I don't see the technology moving in the direction that these pioneering books showed us a vision of: an immersive metaverse that connected us to a world-wide metaverse of interconnected systems.
Instead I find myself with one key expectation: the future lies in a non-immersive network of independent nodes. The next stage of growth in Second Life or its successor lies in an open platform, one where individuals can build a server and connect it into the grid.
There will be a future for companies like Linden Labs, but instead of being the gatekeepers they will be the equivalent of Network Solutions, facilitating the addition of new nodes, managing addressing and providing hosting.
Pauline R.
Deciphering social media for business and education
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Being a listed developer and having worked in Second Life for over a year I have got used to the hype. However, my expectations continue to rise for this environment. If we accept that we are on the edge of new developments we also accept that the ride won't always be smooth.
What I have found is that over the past year there has been a continuously growing awareness of Second Life and what it is about and I'm also getting asked to deliver more presentations about the environment. Whilst there are some sceptical responses on the whole the reactions that I have had are very positive.
Whatever the problems along the way, this is the road we are all going down, fasten your belt and enjoy the ride!
Neither. However, some of the recent cross-platform initiatives have me thinking that the convergence between online 3D data and offline 3D CAD formats will be delayed. Second Life's parametric/procedural modeling system isn't sufficient for the development of most tangible products and there doesn't appear to be any effort to improve the underlying modeling system or offer a replacement. Additionally, discussions centering around avatar portability (including geometry) seem premature. I still see a "grid of grids" system (whether Croquet or something else is the underlying structure), but the data exchange discussions so far aren't turning out the way I'd hoped.
I do, however, suspect that most of what I discussed in a blog entry a couple of years ago (linked below) will be upon us more quickly than many are aware (second link below). That prediction didn't necessarily focus on rapid manufacturing applications, but that has been part of my expectation for a transreality "grid of grids" metaverse, in general. So fab-on-demand from virtual data won't hit the mainstream as soon as I'd like. Oh well. We're still mostly on track to meet my expectations for the intangible side of the equation (see third link). Maybe when the 3D data converges, the fabbers will have hit the prosumer market.
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Sheridan L.
Financial Services and Insurance ADM2 PM
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I am an MMORPG player, in addition to being a software development project manager.
From a Project Manager standpoint I agree that Second Life and Linden Labs will end up being more of a platform & tools designer than a content developer. At a certain point the tools will mature to the point that the customers can develop their own content. The tools aspect excites me because the more people who experience the use of these tools to create content the more the "Online Experience" will be enhanced.
From a gamer standpoint, Second Life was an interesting oddity at best. I'm not active in the community, but watch the development of the platform/environment in hopes of picking out some of the best jewels and using them as examples for what I hope to see in future mmorpgs.
Second Life in general has raised my expectations of what is still to come regardless of the hype around it.
Since I joined it the potential was obvious in all sorts of areas, be it education, collaboration, marketing, community building, creativity and so on.
And when I see what Linden Lab is working on right now, namely opening up the Second Life Grid to be based on an open protocol and to enable 3rd parties to host their own sims this seems even one step further as many social networks go today (link attached).
Right now of course many people are a bit sceptical about Second Life but this has been the same for the web back then. People who use Second Life are everything but sceptical. They see the future.
Many people might also be disappointed by what Second Life in their opinion failed to deliver but this is also mainly due to their lack of researching and experiencing it before starting a project. I am mostly talking about failed marketing efforts here of course. Once people understand that virtual worlds are a conversational medium they will adapt.
So all in all people need a bit of time to wrap their heads around this new thing but in the end we all will profit from it.
