When it comes to whether business will adopt Second Life instead of, say, Protosphere or Forterra’s OLIVE, we can talk feature sets and look at nice shiny corporate builds all day, but as I proposed yesterday, the advantage that Linden Lab has over all of the competition isn’t what THEY can do, but rather what content creators can accomplish. The challenge, I proposed, is whether the Lab can engage, support and build an ecosystem of developers who collectively will be able to build a marketplace of ideas, applications, content, and services. Whether the Lab can pull this off is partly dependent on how well they address policy issues such as content protection and seller registries, and partly on whether the tools they launch both work, and allow the kind of creative exploration that leads to game changers.
One of the game changers will be the MediaAPI. But there are others that have already hit the Grid, including HTTP-IN, something that I think is an overlooked improvement other than as, perhaps, a faster way for things like vendors to operate. The lack of static IP addresses is also an issue, but I’m not a coder and I understand you can work around it.
HTTP-IN allows Web sites to communicate with in-world prims and speeds up the protocols and increases the capacity from previous ways of accomplishing Web-to-world communication. When combined with the forthcoming MediaAPI, HTTP-IN will provide some pretty mind-boggling opportunities for data visualization and transmedia content, including the dynamic transport of data from Web to world and back again. I imaging a day when a build in Second Life will display content from Web pages with which we can directly interact. Let’s say you update a sales spread sheet in world, in real time, with your entire sales team present. As you update the spread sheet, the data is communicated out to a Web site which keeps track of and displays the data, while at the same time the data communicates with in-world prims to create a living landscape of moving, shifting prims that truly let you “walk through the data”.
The whole thing reminds me of Keystone’s work on reflective architecture, which was one of my early and more profound discoveries in Second Life.
Now, Hamlet at New World Notes brings us an example of how HTTP-IN was used by OpenSource Obscure to create a dynamic building in Second Life whose composition is controlled by Web-side inputs:
“The HTML part is quite trivial: the user makes her choices in the webpage, and a form transmits those values to a LSL scripted object in Second Life by using the recent HTTP-in functions. This scripted object works like a main controller. After it receives the values from the webpage, it elaborates them and sends appropriate commands to Chromutate structures, components and sub-controllers. Those are scripted objects too, and will change prim properties or rez stuff according to the commands.”
To me, this isn’t eye candy. This is a sneak peek into the future, one in which projects like Reflective Architecture and Chromutate will be extended, with the inclusion of the MediaAPI, to include not only prims that change based on user inputs from either in-world or the Web – those same prims will soon DISPLAY content…a Web site, an input form, a video, a piece of Flash, with the ability to interact directly with the content, creating a loop of input and change that’s one step closer to being able to truly walk through the Web.
Single companies do not make profession. There were 2-3 web3d tech companies that kept going as “themselves” after 1999 bubble one. They were funded, and treid to do it ALL themselves, from creative. to service, to production for all clients.
needless to ay, even if i mentioned their names, very few on this blog reader list would know who they were.
If every designer had to work for Adobe what communications industry would there be…… oh wait, that seems to be the future.;)
Cube – not sure I follow (aside from the history lesson, of course).
I’m saying that it WON’T take a single company – Forterra and Protosphere are vulnerable because they’re stand-alone, although I’m sure they partner with 3D companies etc. And Linden Lab isn’t today’s Adobe – but it needs an ecosystem of companies if things like Nebraska are to succeed.
Or are we agreeing? Sometimes I just don’t know what to make of you hahaha.
yes. i was agreeing with you. and no Linden isnt adobe, but adobe now wants to be linden;) or at least follow in it’s SAS biz plan.
funny thing is that 99% of those companies plans fail right away, and we can only hope the 1% that seem to take over, WILL fail sometime.;)
this thread is a bit tough to follow, but here are a couple of thoughts:
1. I tend to think of VR platforms as operating systems. we all know the history of the big 4 OS’s that dominate today: Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac.(forget about midrange and mainframes for now)
2. Applications are written for a specific operating system. In some cases, certain applications have versions that are written for more than one operating system, but each version is a little bit different.
3. Global Transaction processing, as an example, passes data between applications that run on various operating systems, but in each case, there are “handlers” that enable transaction hand-offs
4. In some cases, these “handlers” do translations, in other cases they simply “wrap” the native transaction in such a way that next application in the chain can work with the transaction
5. Industry has demonstrated a historical path for systems integration and cross-platform data handling. It is a model that may not be a panacea of efficiency, but it is understood and accepted.
6. as a result of sufficient systems integration, we find that various industries gravitate towards certain operating systems and the applications that run on these systems.
7. What we have not seen, at least in the 2 decades that I have been paying attention, is the successful delivery and broad acceptance of an Uber OS that replace all others. lots of reasons for this, but it is the case. it took Linux a decade to find an enterprise class production niche,and it is still one of 4 major OS’s.
8. If VR platforms are the equivalent of OS’s in my model, I figure it is safe to say that “in the beginning” we will see lots of OS’s. Some will make it mainstream, others will not. Over time, we will see the emergence of a handful of Enterprise OS’s that run all the “applications”(i.e. VR-based functionality)
9. We can fight this future, or we can take the path of least resistance and focus our energies on delivering VR based functionality to businesses
I don’t claim to have all the answers, or to be “right”, but this is my opinion as of 11:50am EST on 10/2/2009.