OUseful Info

Which World for 3D Webbing?

A recent TechCrunch post that included a Casual Immersive Worlds Comparison Chart set the cat amongst the pigeons (again) on the question of - you guessed it - educators' use of Second Life... Here's one example - the latest post in ding-dong between Peter Miller and Scott Wilson: Now I'm in the wrong metaverse... :-)

Regular readers have probably guessed that I'm not much of a fan of Second Life (e.g. So That's What Second Life's for...) but maybe that's just because it's not one of "my" discovered toys and I'm not trying to evangelise it in anyway, (a bit like with Compendium...).

Or maybe it's because I see people putting resource and effort into it because they fell for media hype, without really thinking about what they're trying to achieve? Chat with avatars, rather than video or plain text is about all I can see in it...! ;-) (so why not stick with video and morph things around a bit, augmented reality style, like fix8 does! (It even works with standard IM clients, I think? You do need a webcam though...))

A couple of weeks ago, I posted this into a course team conference where Second Life was mentioned:

Second Life will be interesting over the next few weeks; gambling has just been outlawed in world, and whilst the repercussions may not be so much that areas of SL get cleaned up, the authoritarian and "arbitrary" way that Linden Lab imposed the changes may have knock-on effects...

[How is it, by the way, that institutions are set against services like Google docs and Netvibes "because they might disappear" and do not apply the same argument to Second Life - which consumes way more effort and is not the most open of environments?]

Of course, of the millions of registered SL users, most never make it off the orientation island...

Just by the by - IBM are doing a lot with virtual worlds. They also just brought out a set of 'guidelines' for IBMers who go into virtual worlds...

Virtual worlds possibly are important for education - but Second Life as a relatively early stage single provider may not be the best place to go to... although experience gained in there may well prove valuable in the longer term...

3 or 4 months ago a lot of education people got a heads-up about social networking in MySpace, which arguably helped set up/made possible the current educational buzz/interest that is currently happening around Facebook.

SL arguably got the current wave of interest in online, non-gameplay (ie not MMORPG) 3d environments going, supported in no small part by a mainstream media who didn't look elsewhere and don't like MMORPGs (Entropia universe is gaining ground and World of Warcraft is huge)...

But I suspect there's going to be whole raft of rivals arriving online *if* 3d chat environment/social meeting space worlds continue to appear to be attractive....

I'm also guessing SL will be surpassed in terms of interest and engagement if the technology supports it (bandwidth, graphics and so on).

Microsoft (Silverlight), Adobe (Air) and Google (Gears was a start but only a small one) are all exploring technologies that support increasingly rich interfaces and/or allow web/desktop synching and offline use of what are apparently online apps; and vice versa - Google Earth enterprise now works via a browser for example, and Microsoft Virtual Earth already works in a Windows browser environment.

These new approaches may provide the platform basis for a more usable 3d web experience; i.e. the next generation of 3D web browsing.

So here are what I think are interesting ;-)

• Open Croquet - "a powerful open source software development environment for the creation and large-scale distributed deployment of multi-user virtual 3D applications and metaverses that are (1) persistent (2) deeply collaborative, (3) interconnected and (4) interoperable. The Croquet architecture supports synchronous communication, collaboration, resource sharing and computation among large numbers of users on multiple platforms and multiple devices."

  What I like about Open Croquet is that the worlds run on your own machine, and you can then hook them into other worlds running on other people's machines, peer-to-peer style.
  



• Multiverse - "Multiverse lets you to build an MMOG or virtual world for less money and in less time than ever before. Multiverse technology is scalable, extensible, and highly customizable, enabling you to build your world with its own unique look and feel, gameplay, and mechanics. ... Download our client, server, tools, starter assets, and sample worlds for free and start building your world today!"

  The twist with Multiverse is that users are provided with a single client (a 3D world browser, in effect) that can be used to connect to any world in the Multiverse, err, multiverse.

It's worth remembering too that the IT heavyweights are looking at this sort of technology, as in the case of Sun Microsystems' MKK30 Virtual Workplace.

And Google and Microsoft may both end up there, after a fashion, with their respective "Earth" products... (for example, check out Model Vision, a live map showing recent uploads to the Google Earth 3D model Sketchup Warehouse).

PS the ultimate, of course, would be an avatar that works across all virtual worlds...

Posted by ajh59 at August 8, 2007 12:00 PM