Scenecaster, a 3D engine that allows users to create 3D scenes and publish them for friends, lacks a lot compared to virtual worlds but has some lessons for how content will need to not only be increasingly interoperable, but taggable and searchable as well.

I’ve posted at length about the opening of the ‘membrane’ as Castranova called it. I recognize that I’m excluding the true MMORPGs (by which I mean virtual worlds constructed as games, although even these, I think, have increasingly thin membranes). The reality is that synthetic worlds will become ubiquitous..perhaps moreso than the Net itself, as overlays on real space pull the metaverse into the physical world around us, while also offering immersive environments.

In thinking of the membrane, a lot of attention focuses on issues related to identity and to commerce. If the membrane disappears, does the concept of anonymity disappear with it? How do we handle age verification if we’re trying to protect the membrane (which tends to include preserving separate avatar identities)? And when commerce starts spilling back-and-forth between the ‘real’ and virtual, who’s controlling the economies and currencies of these synthetic worlds – ones in which larger numbers of people will make increasingly larger sums of money?

But I’ve also recently posted about my disappointment with the SL vision for the future – one that seems increasingly driven by the idea that SL is a platform for connectivity, one in which user-generated content needs to increasingly take a back seat as the economy of prims (an endless supply) gets gobbled up by the larger concept and economy of islands. The island economy is booming – but once it TOO becomes a commodity, then Linden will be left scratching its head for a broader tool set, or resign itself to being a metaverse ISP, one that ends up competing with other synthetic worlds that offer newer combinations of prim commodification schemes or island (server) rentals.

Linden is relying on its residents, as it always has, to define the potentialities of the space – but with increasingly large communities in Asia and elsewhere (Twinity?) exploiting the potentials of synthetic worlds, Linden will need to either create creative partnerships or enable its residents with deeper and more robust tools to help them expand the capabilities of SL.

When worlds like Entropia actively and successfully create partnerships and alliances and the best SL can come up with is that it’s in discussions with IBM on portable avatars, it can leave a sinking feeling that the Lindens are living on their own little island.

So along comes Scenecaster – not a great application. Fun, sort of – but really not much different than a good home design program. A sort of baby Maya, maybe, with objects pre-built and environments fairly easy to make. (I suspect Metaplace will blow a cannon into Scenecaster’s side).

But what’s fascinating about Scenecaster is that the objects and scenes easily link into third-party APIs. Have a look at this:

What’s interesting is that the object, in this case a stool, is tagged to search results from Google, eBay and Amazon. This is one of the things that’s attracting academia to initiatives like Croquet – the ability to link virtual spaces into shared reference pools. They may not want to link objects out to eBay, but they MAY want to link out to class Web sites, Medline, or Google Scholar.

Linden promises that Web pages in SL are coming – not soon enough, perhaps. For users to be able to tag their content and then have those tags link out to external APIs would be powerful. It might also provide the sort of branding platform that corporations need to be convinced of an ROI beyond user visits or views. Linking from object tags to a Facebook, eBay, Amazon, or proprietary API can create the sort of cross linkages and traffic that companies need to justify their investment in empty stores and inefficient billboards.

Finally, the idea of building the infrastructure beyond simply descriptive tagging of objects to include a more robust platform for visualizing and finding content seems to me to be something that the so-called leader of virtual worlds should take on…time to move beyond making sure that SL looks pretty (Windlight) or that avatars fall realistically (HAVOK) and deal with fundamentals: stabilize the platform, yes, but also enable users with a set of tools that stretches our imaginations over how information is mapped, and convince us that 3D worlds can go beyond the ‘flat’ results of Google to give us astonishing new ways of viewing and linking information.

Imagine: a cloud tag, like you see on the side bar of this blog, but in 3 dimensions. The clouds can be toggled, and if ON, when you hover over an object a cloud is formed in 3D space, showing inter-related content and concepts. These cloud tags could be clicked to bring up an Amazon API, a SLURL, a classified, a Wikepidia entry. And imagine that the SL map is both geographic and conceptual.

Others are cobbling together versions of this vision, including the users of SL. It will be interesting to see who are the leaders and who are the followers in maximizing the potentials of their platforms.