The Caffeinated Penguin

Posted By matt on July 17, 2008

For those of you too young to remember, in the early 1990's:

(1) The world wide web was a fad, and services like NNTP and Gopher were here to stay.

(2) TCP/IP itself was a passing fad (even Microsoft said so).

Enter Second Life.

At first, I was dismissive. Sure, they're doing some neat stuff – creator-owned content and all that, but fundamentally it is controlled by one company, and is therefore inherently limited. World of Warcraft, for example, is loads of fun to play (or so folks tell me), but I wouldn't really call it “infrastructure”.

Then I saw OpenSimulator – a BSD licensed Second Life compatible server.

But surely, says you, Linden Labs will sue them and shut it down, right?

I don't think so, considering that partnered with IBM, and have successfully teleported an avatar from one world to another.

At this point, it is no longer an application – it is infrastructure with an embodied application.

To be clear, think of it like this. It is not World of Warcraft, it is LiveJournal.

What is the difference? Well, WoW is pretty much a self-contained world – it is the end all and be all of its existence. LiveJournal, on the other hand, is a whole pile of webservers plus all the backend data storage, and all the code which makes it work. But, it speaks a standard protocol and we hit it using a random web browser. Sure, it is owned by a company, but effectively you are paying them for hosting. Similarly, as long as there is a common protocol, a multitude of clients would be able to connect to this 3D server. How is this infrastructure? Well, you're not paying for the application per se. I can take my stuff off of LJ and move it somewhere else, and I will still have a blog. Folks are here for something else – community, the extra bits which LJ provides, the hosting, etc.

Similarly, this is what Second Life is, or will be in the future – hosting, a community, etc. Other people will set up servers to serve these 3D worlds. Collectively, they will be known as something – I will borrow from Neal Stephenson (who, as I hear it, inspired the folks at Linden Labs as well), and we will call it the Metaverse.

So, share this with me.

You will log in to your client, and pop into existence wherever you like (think “my home page” on the web). And then you will do… what? Anything you want. What do you do on the web? You will do it here – and more. You will teleport to your power company and walk in and pay your bills. You will go over to YouTube and watch movies. You will look at LOLCats and read blogs.

Why not just use the web? Well, many folks will. After all, it works. But, there will be other things – you will interact with people as you do this. See your friends. Have a work conference? You'll go to a meeting room and share a whiteboard and applications. Think this is farfetched? Project wonderland is doing it:

The types of collaborations that can happen within the space include audio communication, live desktop applications of all kinds

Now, the biggest potential is the unknown. Who would have guessed that icanhascheezburger would have been so popular? I sure wouldn't, but I visit it daily. This infrastructure will allow for.. whatever folks do with it.

As such, there will be jobs available for those with skills. Just as folks now need websites designed and built, they will need these spaces designed and built. Artists and 3D modelers will be in increasing demand, but so will programmers. All of these objects will have behaviors and such, and that will need to be written.

It is not without challenges, of course. I mean, I would expect to need to change the default behavior of servers to be that your agent (avatar, if you like) data will actually be stored on your computer, and only be teleported into the server when you connect to it – as opposed to the current model of your agent being stored on someone else's server. Otherwise, the server wouldn't know what you looked like. The same is true of objects and such.

Of course, copyright will be a problem. Folks are going to try to fix it with various copy restrictions which will be honored by the server, but once you buy something, it is expected that you'll be able to move it off the server and use it in isolation on your computer (I expect that your computer will be a nonpersistent node on this network – essentially where you “start” before connecting to other places, and can use things you own or have built). So, if you can get it off, you can have a server which doesn't respect “do not copy”, and therefore make as many copies as you like. However, as with previous instances of human history, copyright will rule. This is all software, and if you steal my software, it (likely) violates copyright.

Problems, for sure, but all solvable.

So, where does this leave me?

Well, I'm playing with it. I think it's really neat technology to begin with, and I want to develop a skillset related to it. However, I reiterate – it is not an end in and of itself, it is a vehicle. In my case, I plan on using it to compensate for physical distance. Specifically:

- My civil rights (gun rights) work.

- Gaming. (RPGs and tabletop miniatures games.). I don't expect to actually implement rules, I plan on implementing objects – dice, miniatures, etc. Want to play Stargrunt? Digital armies which you pick up and move on the tabletop, rolling digital dice.

Thoughts?

Category: LJ Import
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