I was reading an article about YetAnotherVCFinancedVirtualWorld. Like so many others, it emphasized social networks hybridized with game play. It was a bit smarter in emphasizing entertainment instead of the virtual economy. It indicated why social bonding environments should be the focus.
I agree. But bowling isn't the most common social experience.
The social experience most common in most cultures and most amenable to immersion technologies is
.... worship.
Build Worlds of Worship (TM).
There is enormous potential. The business model isn't even difficult.
The problem of the metaverse mavens is like the early VRMLers, they are too fond of theory but not very good observers of the mundane or the extraordinarily common. Being overfocused on wealth they miss the opportunities for service from which follows a good life and a fair living.
Build churches not in Second Life (too much noise), but in privately hosted worlds financed by donations and sponsored by real world churches and organizations. Create a new generation of temples, synagogues, cathedrals and even the small wooden house of worship. Invite ministers, invite parishioners, invite the Pope. Be sure to make them every bit as formal and dramatic as the real worlds houses. Invest them with beautiful music, stirring sermons, lessons from life and even the private confessional. Give people places to pray.
See what difference it makes when the houses of the holy come to the wild wild web.
Who Am I?
- Len Bullard
- Toney, Alabama, United States
- Software Engineer, Systems Analyst, XML/X3D/VRML97 Designer, Consultant, Musician, Composer, Writer
Friday, August 24, 2007
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Reconsidering Second Life
Even as Second Life is experiencing a backlash from the web community, X3D/VRML is being pushed forward by individual developers and institutions which means that all media and corporate hype aside, X3D/VRML maintains its place as the pioneering technology for 3D on the web. Despite the awards given to the metaverse pundits, the investments made by major corporations and the funding from the investment community, money and artificial hype stimulants cannot create anything more than a flash in the pan interest on the web. It takes genuine openness and access to the technology itself proving that a content community alone cannot do it either. Linden Labs made critical mistakes:
1. Allowing false history to develop in the SL blogs. This is fatal mistake. The essence of what the web is is a document repository for preserving memory. Anyone could check dates and facts. That robbed any SL-led 3D movement of credibility.
2. Taking the same wounding tactic that many other technologists did including VRML: overpromising results. Castronova has a long way to go to really understanding virtual systems as economies. Virtual means virtual: Chuck E Cheese tokens devalue fast when the stage puppets quit being a novelty and the pizza is still bad pizza.
3. Failing to use standard technologies. This wouldn't be fatal but it means there is no amplification through orthogonal applications. X3D works for virtual worlds but it also works for medical technologies. This is how standards justify the title. They work in niches large and small. In this case, VR is an application of 3D on the web.
4. Failing to understand that the costs of 3D content ownership are high given the talent and time required, then absorbing all of those costs of hosting while failing to pick up the profits from authoring. Thus, Electric Sheep makes money. LL loses money. That's a terrible business plan.
5. Bringing in too many newbies and allowing them to be credited as experts. In the open news articles that allow comments, these people get beaten up for their lack of depth and that also robs them of credibility.
The problem will be as stated before if the falling fortunes of the virtual world/server farm builders rolls back over the entire web 3D market, baby and bathwater. It depends on the numbers. Meanwhile, companies are discovering the Web3D people were right about the need for public companies to host private worlds and to resist doing private business in public phone booths. If enough skilled experts are hired into these companies to create, develop and maintain these worlds, and these companies select the unencumbered open technologies for 3D that reduce costs rather than creating client-server systems at the OpenGL layer (reinventing an expensive wheel), this may augur well for the web 3D market. Otherwise costs will create another cascading collapse of the market.
This is a good time for the authors and other 3D professionals to take a hard cold look at their skills and toolkits and expand them to include the open technologies that can be blended in to the professional database platform frameworks, and to have dreams of other than cyberspace, to think in terms of specific uses of visualization systems such as complexity assessment modeling. Virtual worlds are here to stay but like so many other hosted environments, the business plan has to be based on sustainable revenues because the investors are running out of patience.
1. Allowing false history to develop in the SL blogs. This is fatal mistake. The essence of what the web is is a document repository for preserving memory. Anyone could check dates and facts. That robbed any SL-led 3D movement of credibility.
2. Taking the same wounding tactic that many other technologists did including VRML: overpromising results. Castronova has a long way to go to really understanding virtual systems as economies. Virtual means virtual: Chuck E Cheese tokens devalue fast when the stage puppets quit being a novelty and the pizza is still bad pizza.
3. Failing to use standard technologies. This wouldn't be fatal but it means there is no amplification through orthogonal applications. X3D works for virtual worlds but it also works for medical technologies. This is how standards justify the title. They work in niches large and small. In this case, VR is an application of 3D on the web.
4. Failing to understand that the costs of 3D content ownership are high given the talent and time required, then absorbing all of those costs of hosting while failing to pick up the profits from authoring. Thus, Electric Sheep makes money. LL loses money. That's a terrible business plan.
5. Bringing in too many newbies and allowing them to be credited as experts. In the open news articles that allow comments, these people get beaten up for their lack of depth and that also robs them of credibility.
The problem will be as stated before if the falling fortunes of the virtual world/server farm builders rolls back over the entire web 3D market, baby and bathwater. It depends on the numbers. Meanwhile, companies are discovering the Web3D people were right about the need for public companies to host private worlds and to resist doing private business in public phone booths. If enough skilled experts are hired into these companies to create, develop and maintain these worlds, and these companies select the unencumbered open technologies for 3D that reduce costs rather than creating client-server systems at the OpenGL layer (reinventing an expensive wheel), this may augur well for the web 3D market. Otherwise costs will create another cascading collapse of the market.
This is a good time for the authors and other 3D professionals to take a hard cold look at their skills and toolkits and expand them to include the open technologies that can be blended in to the professional database platform frameworks, and to have dreams of other than cyberspace, to think in terms of specific uses of visualization systems such as complexity assessment modeling. Virtual worlds are here to stay but like so many other hosted environments, the business plan has to be based on sustainable revenues because the investors are running out of patience.
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