Mitch Kapor closed out the SL5B birthday celebrations today to a packed sim breathlessly awaiting Philip’s new hair, or at least details of how to be a disruptive platform and win a prize.
I somehow picture this group out in California that gets together over vegetarian sushi and compares vitamin regimens, all of them hoping to hang on just long enough to witness the Singularity.
Mitch is one of those folks who moves his chess pieces around the board, or around the boards - sitting on them, forming them, and acting as both a formal and informal mentor to the kids who wanna grow up to be just like him.
So when Mitch speaks, you wonder how he’s putting all the little pieces together across platforms and domain insight, between devices and code, 3D cameras and hard wiring virtual worlds to your eyeballs or brainwaves.
The Future Extending from the Past
Mitch painted a picture of the future by first calling it disruptive innovation because it will force the innovation of existing social and economic social patterns. The Internet will change irrevocably as it goes 3D, overcoming as well the tyranny of geography.
In painting a picture of the future of Second Life and 3D worlds, Mitch reminded us of the idealism that was the foundation of SL, and that Philip’s idealism in forming the platform was greeted with initial skepticism by everyone other than the residents.
“We bring all of ourselves to it, we bring the good, the bad and the ugly. What we choose to do with the possibilities is extremely important.”
Mitch pointed out the growth in the use of Second Life for a wider number of uses, for example in education, architecture (city planners, integration with real life), work with brain waves in Japan, and music.
He particularly highlighted the use of Second Life for social causes and not-for-profit: the use of SL by the disabled, awareness-building and fund-raising activities, (for example cystic fibrosis and the non-profit commons), and protests and activism.
Life on the frontier however is challenging, he pointed out.
“When we have a new technology platform and new techno ecosystem it always starts out in a frontier condition…My experience is that it brings out both the most and the least noble in us. My point about the frontier condition however is that…there’s nothing fundamentally new about this condition.”
For example, in 1994, the Internet had been available just to researchers and then government began opening it up. This gave rise to stereotyping and prejudice. The technical ecosystems was at a stage when dreams are played out yet which gave rise to stereotypes. The same has happened to Second Life, he maintained. He then encouraged residents to, well, basically to stop whining and start acting like the grown-ups that the platform has become.
We are no longer on the frontier
The pioneer era in SL is beginning to draw to a close, he said. We’re at the beginning of a transition. The early adopters were outsiders, people with nothing left to lose with a dream - those were the ones who settled the west, and it’s the way Second Life has been settled.
Mitch points out that pioneers find themselves in an arduous environment. In fact, it’s too difficult for most people, only the hardy will survive. It’s unavoidable that there would be a high attrition rate in the early years. Those who stay do so because they bond. This gives the environment its charm and its character. But charm and character are yesteryear concepts. Because charm and character are eroded as people bring pragmatism to virtual worlds.
Pragmatic adoption will be fueled not just by business but by all kinds of other sectors, whether in education, architecture, or not-for-profit. It is simply valuable for these groups to use a virtual world, which will cause a challenge for those who feel that there is less novelty, and in some senses less freedom.
“It is always an uneasy transition for the pioneers, and I think we’re going to go through that again. It has to be opened up it has to be made easier to use. There are some things which have to happen. There are some things that Linden Lab has to do….to allow the potential of the platform to unfold…to improve ease of use, ease of learning.”
Changes to the technical platform and governance needs to evolve and move to a more decentralized structure. Announcements of this decentralization will come from Linden Lab in the coming days, weeks and months.
Increasing Emotional Bandwidth
Mitch’s personal interest is on increasing the emotional bandwidth. The addition of voice to Second Life, for example, increased emotional bandwidth. Mitch believes that the next stage is in increasing avatar expression.
The first new development Mitch highlighted was the creation of realistic avatars based on photographs. The ability to take 2D photos and turn them into realistic 3D models.
Mitch then previewed his 3D camera, positioning it as a cheap-and-ready motion capture system which I previously covered. There was nothing new to this - he played the same video that’s been running on youTube for some time. In Mitch’s view, the ability to cross real expression with virtual expression will bring a new range and depth to Second Life and virtual worlds.
Mitch showed snippets of the following video in world:
As I’ve said earlier, it’s not the viewer or the world that will drive the next frontier of innovation, it’s the devices.
The Big Announcement
Mitch announced the creation of an annual award for achievement which exemplifies the mission of Second Life. The prize will be $10,000, with judges drawn from a cross-section of communities including residents. This annual prize has as its motivation a desire to draw attention to ways in which Second Life is being used to improve the human condition.
Mitch was silent, however, on the topic of Philip’s hair.
The line about voice is what made the most sense, Philip or Mitch doesnt like to type, so he had to have voice, so it was forced on us.
SL are losing customers for one reason and one reason only, they do NOT listen to what the customers want.
Any business without a good customer service record will fail.
I asked Blondin 4 times if there would be a video stream as promised. I was completely ignored,
That was not a suprise, it is what LL do, if they dont like the question, it is ignored.
no customer service will eventually mean no customers.
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Thanks for posting this summary. I was unable to attend in avatar owing to the fact that SL can’t scale for these types of events, and the audio archive’s server was down when I tried to access it. However, I would like to say that I generally agree with his vision of the 3D Internet — except for Second Life being a part of it.
Taking the early adopted/Internet analogy (which I’ve seen Kapor use before) Second Life is kind of like the Gopher protocol — useful if you can figure it out, but hardly the technology that will drive the masses past the knee of the curve on that bell chart you have above.
Re: “I somehow picture this group out in California that gets together over vegetarian sushi and compares vitamin regimens, all of them hoping to hang on just long enough to witness the Singularity.”
Thanks for giving me such a hard laugh for the day — no, for the month ROFL.
Thanks for the entertaining write-up- I had to attend several RL meetings today and there was no way I could have snuck off to log into SL!
I’ve had my first email address in early 1993 and my first browser was Lynx, which was text-only! Boy, have we come a loooong way!
OK, stay, bond, but don’t whine.
Sounds a lot like, “Give us your money and shut up.”
Pragmatism = real-world businesses and corporations, education, and charities.
Charm and character(or “yesteryear concepts” which will be eroded) = us.
(And don’t whine about it.)
And we, the early adapters, are going to become “uneasy” about our new role as yesteryear concepts, whose charm and character is no longer wanted or needed. It ain’t gonna be fun for us.
But - there are some things Linden Lab just has to do, sorry.
Have I got that about right so far? (Bearing in mind I haven’t listened to the speech.)
OK, moving on, announcements in decentralization will be coming in the next days, weeks, months - one after another after another, apparently.
What does “decentralization” mean? All I can think it means is the increasing loss of our center. Our center is LL, doing anything at all for us.
I tend to interpret that to mean, every step of this decentralization will be one less connection between us and LL, and one less thing LL feels responsible for doing to run this world.
Do I have that anywhere near right?
So in a nutshell, it’s shut up, stop whining and get out of our way to bigger and better things than the the concerns of you, the regular old residents who aren’t real-world corporations, educators, or charities.
(And by the way, we are going to remove services, one after another, and you won’t get them unless you give us 25,000 U.S. dollars to be in the corporate Enterprise level.)
BUT - buy my nifty new camera, and let me demonstrate how great it is!
Do I have all this right? Yes? No?
Kind of makes me wonder what we are here for then, if we are yesterday’s news they must turn away from now, and we are supposed to learn our new place.
Oh yeah - our MONEY. And our presence as audience for all those corporations.
And I guess many of us will still stick around for that, until they succeed in finally making it not just painful, but totally pointless.
I think I would call this Mitch’s official “So long suckers, and thanks for all the fish” speech.
coco
[…] Posted by Sansarya Great line from Dusan Writer’s blog about the keynote: "He then encouraged residents to, well, basically to stop whining and start […]
Sadly, that is one way of interpreting it.
It echoed Philip’s quote about early users: “The early users of Second Life are simply people who have a lot of time”
http://dusanwriter.com/?p=265
Whether Philip got that from Mitch or Mitch from Philip, they’ve all gone religious on us about adoption curves.
The US West was largely settled by railways, mining companies and the US Cavalry. All operated on concessions and orders from the government. The first thing any rugged Western individualists did was not to gaze at the far horizon but sit down and write a town charter and elect a sheriff.
The supreme individualism of the Western tradition exists only in the mind of deeply unread people. One of the LL’s problems is that they’re good at churning out speeches that sound good at first hearing, but end up being so much bumph.
There was nothing in the Kapor speech that could not equally have been said by a 90s dotcommer immediately before the cash. Th escape from time and space didn’t mean anything then and it doesn’t mean anything now.
The true dotcommer escape was from corporate responsibility and that is still the case.
Thank you for the summary and graphics. I look forward to the text transcript, too.
I am optimistic about Kapor’s claim that Second Life “needs to evolve and move to a more decentralized structure. Announcements of this decentralization will come from Linden Lab….” I hope this means that Second Life will not be solely housed and served by LL servers. There must be alternative way to lease, buy or otherwise operate Second Life space, and also manage risk [backups, failovers] in proportion to costs. In other words, some users won’t use SL until they have the control that they need to protect their vital interests.
Compare it to a web server. Some need, or feel that they need, their own. Others are comfortable with renting services. Some know that they *must* have a backup, failsafe plan that will keep their SL space operational, while others can afford to live with a less expensive, but less reliable SL space.
@ Mooncaine - I think that’s their intention. It really won’t come as a big surprise, they’re prototyping it already with IBM. And while IBM has interests in their own grid behind a firewall, they have a greater interest in selling the consulting services that would arise if SL let people host their own grids. Integration with back-end databases in a firewall-protected environment is the way it’s headed.
@ Alberik - the one thing, however, that we can say for the Lab is that unlike the dot-commers and 99% of today’s social web 2.0 sites, at least they’re making real money and not simply dreaming that if they ‘aggregate eyeballs’ that some day they’ll ‘monetize it’. They’re already monetizing it, and Mitch’s speech was, in my opinion, an attempt to let the community that helped them accomplish this know that they now have bigger fish to fry.
The gold has run out in them thar hills, they’re after oil now.
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I thought Mitch’s speech was excellent. I loved the reasoning about voice. We really fought very very hard for voice. For those who are old enough in SL, you might remember the truly early days where we were using skype or gtalk to get by an SL with had only text. It is so cool that LL has listened to customers
Evidently there is a chase for better fidelity. The education community is responsible for a significant chunk of revenue to LL so it makes sense that LL listens to them at times. The ’stay the course’ part sounded a little negative to me. I think LL is well aware that competitors are raising their heads out there and there is a quiet exploration of other ‘new’ frontiers such as project wonderland.
@ Dusan: Thanks for pointing out IBM’s interest in the back end. I hadn’t really thought of that. Makes sense, and is smart, I think.
When asked by educators about SL, I can list quite a few advantages to using SL for some teaching purposes, but I always point out 2 huge flaws: you can’t back up the content you create on your own storage devices, and you are utterly reliant on LL’s servers to be up and accessible to you. That’s a problem for many universities, because you can’t run SL classes to schedule if you can’t assure that SL will be ready when you’ve planned to teach within it. One can only regard it as an optional or supplemental tool, realizing that it might not be there when one takes one’s students online to meet there.
And if your content might be removed merely because of a DMCA claim, without warning, that’s also a problem for universities, and corporate training, too. You can’t have someone yanking your content like that and disrupting your teaching schedules. So having an SL space that can be open only to internal users, with secure access, can help promote the “3D platform” notion, whereas the centralized LL service currently can’t provide these needs reliably.
Well written Dusan. The one thing he touched on that scared the hell out of me;
“Changes to the technical platform and governance needs to evolve and move to a more decentralized structure. Announcements of this decentralization will come from Linden Lab in the coming days, weeks and months.”
Joseph Stalin would be so proud.
Cat
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Didn’t take more than a day to get a sense of how many of these comments are being addressed: interoperability between openSim and SL achieved. Meaning:
@mooncaine - ability to host your own sim, use the avatar identity system of SL, move content back and forth but then have a place to store it and back it up (I assume), and be responsible on your own for grid stability. (Always better to have an IT person close at hand to blame rather than a faceless group in California).
@ Moriz - this opens more options for educators, I suppose. I wonder however whether 3D cameras and realistic avatars go very far in the education domain or whether those are more business oriented? Frankly, I think I’d find it a little creepy if my avatar looked like me, but I’d have to try it I guess to see.
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Shorter version of Kapor’s speech: The first wave of Second Life, drawing to a close, involved freaky early adopters using SL in bizarre ways. The mainstrem will bring in businesses, museums, colleges, government, etc.
Even shorter version: Let’s get all those messy people out of SL, and populate it by institutions.
What LL will find when they’ve kicked all the people out of SL is that, well, there’s nobody left using it.
Mitch Wagner
@ Mitch - or maybe the freaks are on OpenSim with the ability to teleport back to the main Grid to take a class or go to work in their collaborative 3D offices?
Hmmm….or maybe it’s the other way around - the freaks will be on mainland and all the money will be on OpenSim behind a firewall with the ability to teleport to mainland once they’ve clocked out from work or school at the end of the day?
How confusing. All I want to know is, if Philip teleports from SL to OpenSim, can they refuse entry unless he gets better hair?
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