Philip Rosedale confirmed at the recent Second Life Community Convention that the ability to import mesh objects (a standard format for 3D objects) into Second Life is a go, and will be rolled out in public Beta by the end of the year – bets are on a late September launch. In discussions with Philip Rosedale, I started to sense that there may be a wider expectation (by him at least) of where mesh imports could take us.

But to give a glimpse of what mesh “looks like”, here’s a little preview of what’s possible:

I’ve written at length about mesh (and have probably been writing about it since I started blogging). Most recently I wrote that some of the strategic value of mesh imports rely not on the ability to IMPORT, but rather the ability to EXPORT value:

As realities merge and send back both data and media – whether a “build” in Second Life influencing a physical world artefact (think Brooklyn is Watching on steroids), or a machinima, I suspect that the multi-disciplinary talents that are ONLY facilitated in a rich, collaborative world will start to have a larger voice in the larger digital landscape that includes augmented reality, 3D Web sites and other macro trends.

The “walls” that Philip speaks of aren’t just about walls to usage, they’re about building a bridge across that moat so that the deep lessons and talents, the new possibilities offered in richly immersive worlds help to shape the wider digital landscape as well. Content being created in Second Life won’t just inspire those inside it, but will contribute to a wider grammar of experiences that is the new language of our lives online.

See, my theory goes something like this:

- In a world where everyone can build a model in Google Sketch-Up or, with patience, learn to build in Blender or another 3D development tool, there are still very few ways that you can actually interact with what you create in the presence of other people without highly specialized skills (building, say, a little Unity3D application).

- The ability to create content in Second Life is what defines it. While Philip might be talking about experiences as the key focus for attracting new users and sustaining the platform, there wouldn’t be any experiences at all if it wasn’t for the ability to rez a prim.

- So, with the ability to import mesh models, people will finally have a way to walk around, invite friends, and interact with their creations.

- But the tools of Second Life also allow data to flow in and out of the world. This opens up the possibility that you could import, for example, a mirror version of a physical location and then stream data out from the virtual replica to the actual space. This has all kinds of implications for augmented reality, mash-ups with mobile applications and other innovations.

- Prim-based content is not easy to link to other variations of the same objects. Let’s say you design a new pair of shoes. And let’s say you’d love to display a 3D version of those shoes on a Web site (using Papervision, Unity3D or WebGL) – it’s incredibly difficult to export the prims (which I assume, of course, you fully own and have created), optimize the resulting mesh, and then republish as an OBJ file.

- By creating an easier flow of 3D objects, I can see a time soon when you take a brief tour of a 3D build in Unity3D (with no other avatars present), view a virtual mall on a Web site with the product in 3D, and then log-in to Second Life where you interact with other avatars and can help to shape the environment.

Heritage Key is doing something similar on OpenSim.

It’s the Economy, Stupid
But there’s a challenge.

Because as much as I’m delighted by the idea of mesh, the efficiencies it will create, and the quality of content that will be the end result, I’m also highly anxious about the in-world experience and economy.

One thing to note is that mesh actually falls under the oversight of the Linden in charge of “products” – things which generate revenue for Linden Lab. This has me wondering whether the import costs for mesh, as a revenue stream to the Lab, also create a ‘trip wire’ of sorts to at least balance out the cost/value equation between mesh-based and prim-based objects.

There’s a very valid concern that the introduction of mesh will result in a flood of new content yanked from 3D repositories and that this content, because of its quality and efficiency (mesh helps to reduce lag because it reduces the number of vertices needed for a wide range of ‘builds’).
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As you may know, Linden Lab has made a significant shift in viewer development through Project Snowstorm. Rather than the viewer being developed in a separate code repository from the open source initiatives, it will be the main repository for all future Lab efforts.

OK, but what does this mean for you, the Resident of Second Life? With a more open process for improving the Second Life experience, you can play a role too! It makes sense to solicit feedback from Residents, after all….they know the Viewer and can probably suggest a hundred improvements.

Well not to worry. Oz Linden needs your help, as he said at the recent Second Life Community Convention (emphasis added, and on video near the end of the session):

“I want everyone in this room to consider themselves to be a stakeholder. I want everyone in Second Life to consider themselves a stakeholder. And I want you to (voice rising) SHOW UP. I’m also going to assist that you’re civil about it frankly. I want productive, useful input, and if I GET productive, useful input we promise we will use it. We have office hours multiple times a week. SHOW UP.

Show up with something intelligent to say. Show up with something that you’ve actually thought about. Don’t show up and tell me we want Viewer 1.0 back. We’re not going back, we’re going forward to the future. We’re going to find new and better solutions to all the problems we’ve got together.

No flaming. Just come and do the job!

If we don’t do what you need done and you haven’t told us what it is in a way we can understand and use, then you’re at fault too.

Please help.”

So there you go – an invitation to DO YOUR JOB (on a platform many of you pay to be on, but you didn’t think you needed to simply pay MONEY did you?)
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At last week’s community convention I had a chance to sit down with Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab founder and recently returned CEO of the company that runs Second Life. What was supposed to be a quick 15 minute catch up turned into close to an hour of discussion and, oddly enough, it was me who cut the chat short feeling like I was monopolizing his time just an hour or so ahead of the Viewer 2.0 presentation and his flight back home to be with his family.

Now, I’m a horrible note taker and, frankly, having criticized Philip in the past for malapropisms and odd claims in interviews, quotes would be taken out of context anyways. (Philip has variously compared Second Life to a terrarium and a business meeting with no eye contact, but I now realize that in the context of chatting with him that he makes an oddly perfect sense). Besides which, the meeting was never set up as a formal interview and was more of a “let’s get caught up” kind of thing. So the following captures the spirit more than the fine print of the discussion.

One on One with Philip Rosedale
Philip Rosedale creates reality.

And I don’t mean that with Second Life he’s created a world.

What I mean is that he shapes reality itself and can do in actuality what most of us log in to Second Life to experience: the creation of that strange loop I’ve written about, the one where what seems distinct and separate (virtuality) feeds back on itself and we discover that our avatar is inside us, we’re inside our avatar, and there actually IS no separation between computer and self, pixel and atom.

With Philip you come away with the distinct sensation that he sort of experiences through you what the rest of us experience through an avatar. The world isn’t so much created as bent: the passion to make something (a company, a world, a prim) is usurped by his ability to bend the future simply by the act of envisioning what it will become, selecting the slices of that vision that more closely match your own disposition and gently gliding you towards it.
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More to come on the Second Life Community Convention….but first a copy of my presentation slides as I’ve had a few requests:

To watch the presentation (the slides might not make sense without it) you can view an archive of the live stream which is split in two parts: the first part includes Philip’s keynote and my presentation starts at about 2:30:00, and the second part which is the remainder of my rambling.

SLSteam?
While I’ve got you – Philip mentioned that Second Life will soon have regular (weekly) updates to the main viewer and that these would be “shipped” using an auto-updater. Does anyone have an opinion on whether using something like Steam makes sense as an alternate distribution platform for Second Life and its updates?

More thoughts to follow on my SLCC experience. I feel like I have a month’s worth of blogging because of it. And for those who I met at SLCC let me say what an insanely amazing pleasure it was.

I feel like I owe Philip an apology. He’s been commenting in a few places on his absence from SLCC this year, including this blog:

SLCC is incredibly important to me, and right now I need to be there more than ever. However, my family is very important to me as well. I’m leaving to drive to Yosemite literally that morning, on a trip that has been planned for over 6 months. If the SLCC organizers want to check with my schedule before planning the event, we can make sure I can be there.

Family is important. Downtime is critical. Yosemite is supposed to be really spiffy and it’s off the Grid, which is where you should be on vacation.

Now I don’t think the SLCC organizers felt that he was part of the picture when they set the date – so that’s kind of an unfair comment, as if they intentionally set a date without checking in with him. At the time, Philip wasn’t playing an active role in the Lab and so there was no need.
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It sometimes feels to me like there are two types of users in Second Life: the single dots, and the multi-dots.

I remember the early days of Second Life – the map was a friend and a mystery. As I wandered the Grid, I’d use the map not because the geography that it showed seemed particularly relevant – I mean, most sims on the map look like a random collection of squares and squiggles and don’t tell you much about what’s there before you arrive. But the presence of green dots became a sort of pulse-taker of activity on the Grid.

The presence of single dots confused me – why would someone just sit there in SL and not move? What were they doing? In retrospect, it seems like an odd question, but I honestly didn’t realize at first how many people sit in their favorite spot and just chat with each other across virtual distance. And I didn’t understand how powerful the experience of building was until I first rezzed a prim.

So you have your single dots – people who are established in their own communities and use private and group chat to talk to others. And the users who come into SL to create, and like to do it on their own, and find some quiet corner to rez prims.

But Second Life is primarily a social platform – a multi-dot world, not unlike Facebook, say, with its myriad groups (Facebook groups are, in my opinion, even more borked than SL – there’s something about how they’re constructed that seems to make group conversations and sharing tiresome, but then I hate FB in general).

Recently, we’ve been working on client projects and have been starting to use the RegAPI a bit more – setting up pages through which new users can register, and then directing them to a build in-world. Chris Collins, formerly on the Enterprise team, and now on his own with a company called Tipodean, has been a great help with this and has some spiffy code that was really helpful.

But I can’t help thinking that in the focus on bringing in new users, Linden Lab could derive significant value if they would work on providing some tools and code focused on bringing in new groups of users, rather than worrying about those single users who knock on the front door out of sheer curiosity (and of whom 95% or whatever give up).
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There’s power in your avatar.

In my recent post about MyWorld, a new mirror world social gaming platform, Metacam Oh commented that without avatars it isn’t a game changer for the metaverse. Now, I’d argue that the metaverse is more broadly defined – it includes mirror worlds, augmented reality, and life logging. And so while MyWorld may not rattle the cages of World of Warcraft or Second Life, it will be a game-changer for “places” online in which users interact with each other.

But Metacam is right that there is something significant about participating in a virtual space with an avatar. They provide a sense of presence, allow us to explore different identities, and are an intuitive interface for relating with other people (and throw a dance or, um, sex bed animation into the picture and you can carry that relationship to unexpected levels of engagement).

Avatars as Repositories
I’ve often thought that there’s a deeper potential for avatars, which relates to the information and content that we ‘embed’ in our virtual personas. With avatars as proxies for our physical selves (whether they look anything like us or not) they contain signals for identity, are the ‘container’ for rich content (our inventories), facilitate social connections with other people, and can be used to tag ownership of spatial content.

The avatar is, in addition to its expressive properties, a wallet of sorts. Or perhaps a better term is a repository.

There’s something intuitive about maintaining social relationships through avatars, for example. Unlike what’s called an avatar on a social network (usually consisting of a tiny photo of ourselves or a cartoon symbol), an avatar in a virtual world is easier to remember and is more richly expressive of personality. When I SEE someone in a virtual world, the act of seeing them makes it easier to associate them with a personality, interests, a way of talking and sometimes a voice.

While inventory may be a borked mess in Second Life, there’s still something strangely intuitive about the concept behind it. Different types of content are created and stored differently and can be sorted and searched in a wider number of ways.

And our avatars allow signaling of intent for a number of functions: through our avatar, we can signal copy/mod/transfer, change land parcel controls, set up groups and apply permissions and roles, and accomplish a whole range of things which are more intuitively executed and which create a web, of sorts, between our avatars and objects, other people, and land.

I can’t think of many environments online where the role of “self” is the primary signaling and containing device for so many relationships, so much content, and so many interconnections between data.

Clean, Well-Lit Places
Years ago, one of the most influential things I remember reading was an interview of Eben Moglen by Tish Shute. The post opened my eyes to the challenges of privacy and identity online, and helped to shape my understanding of what we should demand of online systems.

Moglen proposed that our ability to turn on and off elements of our identity should be partly triggered by how we feel about the spaces we enter, especially as the virtual world becomes more ubiquitous and the ownership of worlds becomes less clear. He proposes that:

It has got to tell you what the rules are of the space where you are it has to give you an opportunity to make an informed consent about what is going to happen given those rules. It has got to give you an opportunity to know those things in an automatic sort of way so I can set up my avatar to say, you know what, I don’t go to places where I am on video camera all the time. Self, if you are about to walk into a room where there are video cameras on all the time just don’t walk through that door. So I don’t have to sign up and click yes on 27 agreements, I have got an avatar that doesn’t go into places that aren’t clean and well lit.

Moglen painted a picture in which our avatars can easily become ensnared in a Web of information, whether by the design of platform owners (often referred to as “stickiness”) or inadvertently, as in the example above:

We don’t want that to happen to people. We understood when the Soviet Empire decayed that all over it were places where people felt trapped in webs of surveillance and betrayal and interaction that had a kind of sinister feeling even if there is no Gulag and there is no shooting…But we are aware that these webs of knowledge about us are beginning to control us because our digital persona is subject to leverage and to being interfered with in ways that matter.

In this view, current code can create traps in which because avatar identity and transparency can’t be as finely managed as he proposes, and because the environments into which we move our avatars also don’t provide markers as to the levels of privacy (and the ability to ‘opt out’), there is the very real possibility of ending up in a position where our digital representations are trapped. He argues that this isn’t that much different from the real world ’surveillance society’ (I’d extend the analogy to ‘dead end jobs’ and being ‘trapped in a marriage’) nonetheless, we can leave a marriage or leave a job, but in the digital domain there are often traces of ourselves that we can’t pack up and take with us, much like the example of the Facebook page where we can’t easily back up our photo file and ship of a copy to your friends list.
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With Second Life in a state of, hmmm, flux I guess is a word, the upcoming Community Convention to be held in Boston next weekend strikes me as an important time to network, share notes, and get a sense of what’s next for the metaverse.

Last year, I called SLCC a giant support group (see 3:30) and it doesn’t feel so much different as we head into this year’s event:

Last year, Linden Lab owned the main stage, with keynote presentations by M and Philip, and then Tom Hale. The Lab provided book-ends that helped to shape an understanding of where they were at and where they were headed. (Whether where they were headed ended up being where they arrived is, of course, another story). So I was actually kind of excited to see that Philip would open SLCC with a keynote.

He doesn’t have a more critical audience: if you’ve signed up for SLCC you’re an evangelist, a power user, a fan, or are at least passionate about what Second Life is or could be. So to learn that Philip won’t be attending in person strikes me as an astonishing decision.
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Project MyWorld will be a game changer for the metaverse: a virtual world that mirrors the real world and a platform for social gaming that could easily be the new go-to destination for the Farmville crowd.

And Project MyWorld is clearly taking aim at Facebook:

“Project: MyWorld is the “Placebook” for a next generation of social games.

Project: MyWorld turns the real world into a 3D social gaming experience. Project: MyWorld is a platform for creating a virtual version of the real world and combining it with 3D online gaming and social networks and media.”

I was fortunate enough to have a sneak peek of MyWorld just under two years ago and I remember thinking that if they could pull off what they had planned, they could radically change how we socialize online.

A Procedural World

The technology behind the platform is inspiring and ingenious. By procedurally generating  the content, MyWorld is able to give users the ability to navigate through an entire country without needing to download asset-heavy models and textures.

Building this kind of environment using standard game development and modeling techniques would create a file that would be too large for even server-side rendering. But by procedurally generating the displayed content, MyWorld is able to create an exact replica of, to start, the UK.

Every building, roadway and landscape element is generated by algorithm. No 3D models – everything created on the fly by generating the environment from map rather than model data.
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