Second Life

“Leave Our Internet Alone, Second Life,” Beg Social Software Observers

Second Life is a threat to the preservation of the reality-based Internet, according to one poster over on Corante.

“I’ve spent about six hours in Second Life, and that’s enough time to know that I want no part of it, and I’m dedicated to keeping it from infecting the rest of the web. I consider myself an activist for the preservation of a reality-based internet”

Actually, this is a highly engaging and thought-provoking discussion (reality-based Internet activist notwithstanding). What a *shock* to discover Prokofy Neva over there stirring up reactions.

Hearing the skeptics view is first a good reminder of how seriously weak Second Life’s positioning is to the wider world. Its deeper potential and the clearly demonstrated current uses for things like rapid prototyping, education, and collaboration were clearly unknown to the group who kept insisting that Second Life is a game. The snarkiest of the bunch strongly advocated for IRC:

As I’ve said earlier, the visual information is phoney, the physical interaction is a sham, and it all distracts and interferes with the real information that is transmitted. In IRC, the visual element is usually missing, but it’s always possible to post a picture on the web and post the url in the chat. It’s crude compared to Second Life, but it’s REAL. I like seeing what the person I’m talking to looks like; I’m not interested in seeing a pixilated puppet that looks like Wile E Coyote.

IRC???? Oh dear lord.
They further claim that IBM’s involvement in virtual worlds is simply participation in a costume party whose intent is to sell gaming chips. Such a well informed group.

Project Bluegrass anyone? Portable avatars? IBMs interests go far deeper…they’re betting significantly on the metaverse as the next technology that, well, is going to need a technology partner. (Meanwhile, over at Cisco, they’re telepresencing from golf-themed conference rooms).

There were, however, far more astute observations, including a provocative posting on the use of the 3D Internet for accessing information:

I would strongly disagree with parts of this statement. First, the cursor as we know it is dated. The mouse/cursor interface was built for a single person and a flat page for which it is indeed terrifically well suited. But the cursor is limiting for other types of interaction such as collaborative tasks and any other types of data management or data exploration that go beyond the 2D screen. Full body video tracking, gesture tracking, and physical interfaces like Jeff Han’s Multi-Touch Interaction surfaces begin to imagine richer, more collaborative, and physical ways of controlling multiple cursors at once- concepts that will come in handy in future immersive worlds… http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/index.html

As the amount of videos, essays, research, and other user generated content continues to grow, how will users, engineers, and researchers possibly still use the traditional mouse/cursor to find what they are looking for much less to work together to build the next space ship to Mars? Surely the single-user mouse/cursor can only be understood as a great way to navigate certain types of information, not all types of information.

Recommended read…in particular for the marketing department over at Linden Labs, who needs to do some serious work on explaining away the costume ball/gaming imagery. And by the way, shouldn’t a Linden be patrolling the blogs and posting? Their cone of silence is part of what leaves them stuttering when the latest negative press report hits the nightly news.

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