Thus far this year I have given my opinions about the top ten priorities for open standards and open source in 2008. With this post I’m going to continue the series and give my ideas for virtual worlds like Second Life, Active Worlds, and so forth.
First let me say I really love this technology, but there is a real range of capabilities in the different products. If I throw in the top online multiplayer games, there’s even more good stuff that I would love to mix and match into what I would consider my dream virtual world.
This list is my personal view and does not reflect any official statement from the folks in IBM who work on virtual worlds and drive our business there. Think of these as my opinions as a user, a private citizen, if you will, of the virtual world universe. Your requirements and needs for virtual worlds, if you have any, will necessarily cause you to have a different list from mine. Please share your ideas in the comments.
In my opinion, in 2008 the top virtual worlds should
- Provide full support on the Apple Macintosh as well as Microsoft Windows, and the top Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Novell, if possible. Anything that is Windows-only is a complete non-starter in my book. I might look at it to see what it does, but I won’t commit to it as a platform for serious work.
- Provide better and more reliable support for a broader range of graphics adapters and drivers. To put it bluntly, on any machine on which I can run World of Warcraft, I should be able to run my virtual world.
- Work to allow instant messaging between virtual worlds. I am “Nigel Paravane” in Second Life and I’m happy to provide that information on sutor.com or Facebook, for example, so that messages can be routed to me when I am in or out of that world.
- Challenge the personal and business social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Plaxo to connect people and provided filtered information about them from within the virtual world. I would term most current popular virtual worlds as “mini self-contained social networks” and they need to either become full blown ones or become alternative interfaces to existing full ones.
- For those worlds that permit in-world construction of objects, provide an offline mode where objects can be created and edited, and a way to replicate the objects between the offline and online environments.
- Increase the number of avatars that can be present within a virtual geographical region and still be fully functional to something suitable for a conference or small concert. That is, I need to be able to get 500 avatars in the same area and not have the system crash or become so slow as to be useless.
- Allow very flexible use of the web and multimedia streams within the world. Any fancy thing I can do on a web page, I should be able to build into an object that I can view while immersed in the virtual world. The need to jump from being inside the world to being in a browser should be eliminated.
Last Time: “Ten challenges and priorities for free and open source in 2008″
Also See from June, 2007:
- #1. My virtual world requirements – The basics
- #2. My virtual world requirements – Good AI
- #3. My virtual world requirements – World-to-world scenarios
- #4. My virtual world requirements – Multiple platforms for clients
A good list Bob, though I would make a few amendments.
3. add encourage XMPP use. tbh, I don’t understand why SL didn’t use this in the first place (did they?)
remove 4, not sure how they can join virtual worlds, unless they follow my 8th point
7. add encourage media streams that can be viewed on all platforms, atm, trying to play quicktime streams is a royal pain.
What I would want to add (though I can understand not many would want it, and unlikely to get to this year)
8. decentralisation, take virtual worlds to the REST level – where anyone can host a world with a basic web server, where avatars and objects are URLs… 3d communities could “hang at” real social sites
Do you foresee the usual 2 software development streams — the ‘academic’, which in the past gave us BSD Unix, and the ‘commercial’, which gave us ATT Unix ?
I presume that the academics develop software for the purpose of distribution of knowledge, and the commercials develop software for the purpose of solving their clients’ problems with the hope of making a profit.
Are we to the point where Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese universities … the new economic powerhouses … will challenge University of California and MIT, in the race for visibility ?
And which corporations ? Is is the ‘usual suspects’ … IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Google, ATT and so on … but ‘gone east’ to the new opportunities in China ?
Interesting times, for all.
Bob, I haven’t yet tried any VWs, but there are a couple of things that I would want before I did:
* Standardized interface between worlds, so they become more open–both to each other and to the outside world
* Ability to use third party clients (probably also requires some kind of standardized interface), including those under free software licenses such as the GPL. Published specification, so that client-builders aren’t banging their heads on their desks.
* Cross-platform is essential: Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD support.
* Some kind of privacy facility: if I have a family or business meeting, I don’t want outsiders joining or monitoring it. Nor do I want everything I do to be publicly accessible. Nor do I want to spend time constructing a building and then have someone else set off programatic “bombs” and destroy it.
* Reading about SL over the past year or so, it seems that there is a kind of proximity that is similar to earth proximity. I would expect that we would go beyond that and make all locations close by all others, even if they aren’t part of the visual scenery at a location. Perhaps the best metaphor for what I’m describing is for each location to be a separate planet, with its own scenery and topography, and other locations being nearby in various directions in 3D space within a solar system, a cluster of solar systems, and finally a galaxy of solar clusters. Of course the actual implementation could use any metaphor once the concept is there: it isn’t meatspace, so don’t keep the same limitations–experiment with other ways to solve proximity versus local scenery versus interlocation transportation.
* Virtual economy: now that we know that commercial transactions are desirable in VWs, any world should have clean interfaces with PayPal, Checkout, and other reputable payment systems, probably with some kind of escrow system to slow down the scammers.
I’ve been watching OpenCroquet to see when it will mature enough for general use. I’m interested in the whole Smalltalk thing anyway.
The major challenge for social networks both 2D and 3D, text and other, is to enable members to control the behaviors of other members.
A social network is just a representation of the web.
Sad but so: in any population not culled, the entire range of social behaviors will manifest. The harsh lesson of civilized history is that walled gardens exist because we need them, want them, and will trade freedoms to leaders who build and maintain them. The web and and its representation in virtual worlds are no different in any significant way.
Raph Koster has a link to “My Tiny Life”. Recommended reading.