There was an interesting post on Massively called  “Is Linden Lab wasting its time on the existing Second Life population? Then John Carter pointed me to some of @DaleInnis ’s posts related to Linden Labs “futzing around with the world”  that also got me thinking (good stuff, follow some of her links)

This is an old problem that many companies have. How do you keep current customers happy when expanding out to reach even more people? You have enthusiasts that help build and market your product that you don’t want to alienate. At the same time you see the competition in your rear view mirror and your product has not caught on like it might.

For Second Life, I’m right in the middle. I’ve been a part of different communities for years. I love art and music and creativity that is so easily expressed there. I love the coming together of minds and discussions on philosophy and psychology (I can talk all day about augmentalist and immersionists). I spend money. The fact you can run a business there and make money is a very powerful feature.

At the same time, in real life, I’m one of those techies or corporate guys that often gets a bad rap in SL. I see so much potential for many of the Second Life technologies to do much more than they do today. It could reach many more people and businesses than it does in its current incarnation. For businesses and education, I see a lot of money that can be saved for people, schools and companies (and money that can be made by virtual world companies). And I’m tired of what sometimes seems to be the continuous focus on the wrong problems, coming at least in part, from the SL community itself. It makes real progress sooooo slow.

So, for now, I’ll just keep using Second Life for fun. Someday I’ll start pushing for it to be used to solve real world problems but at this pace, it is years away.

P.S. Yes, I know there are many examples of virtual worlds  being used in business and there is a lot of enthusiasm for education and training. IMHO, the vector is just not the steep. I also know there are many other Virtual Worlds – I hope the competition triggers a change.

When I was at school at the University of Florida, I was big into both mechanical engineering and computing. In my senior year,  I worked on a hand control for robotics that gave force feedback.  When the robot arm was lifting 500 lbs, it would feel like five lbs to me. When it lifted 1000, it would feel like 10. You could also make it work the other way. Consider a tiny robotic arm for surgery. Bump up against some delicate tissue and it would feel like a pound to the doctor.

In some ways, this was a simple example of “Augmented Reality” so when I read Robert Rice’s blog today I was glad to see some enthusiasm for the future.  Some technologies have longer paths and this has historically been one of them.  Check out his post on “Is it too early for augmented reality”

Being kind of a virtual world guy, one of the videos I like is this combination of  Second Life and the real world done bye Georgia Tech:

I also liked this new Coke commercial I found from Robert’s blog:

Its no secret I’m keen on the potential for Virtual Worlds.  Today, there is enough there to keep me hooked but I don’t think that is true for most people.  Even for me, it leaves a lot to be desired.  Here are some things I want:

Sports simulations!  I’m watching the Florida/Kentucky game now.  I’d love for 3D avatars to be playing in my 3D world doing the same thing the real players are doing.  Let me watch the game from any angle, fly above the field and hang out virtually with my friends.

Engine mechanics.  Really, I want to bring in my own 3D objects.  In my case, I have an old 82 Corvette I work with.  I hang out with some other Corvette folks on line and sometimes get their advice but doing this online can be hard. It sure would be nice to have my engine in-world and have online friends point to the part I need to fix. My son is into the old Volkswagen beetles.  It would be fun to mock up his designs in-world.

Working Virutal World objects.  Sure, we have a few of these now. We have “TV”s, and drivable cars, and sailboats but most are poor imitations of real world devices. The script I can put on my in-world object is nothing compared to the program I can put on my computer, PDA, or even my cell phone.

Real, virtual economy.  Second Life has kind of tapped into the potential. I want to be able to buy and sell services.  I want to be able to buy and sell virtual stuff. Going to the dentist might be hard, but there is no reason I can’t meet with a lawyer, or configure a car before I buy it (Yes, I know some of this has been done but it is still too primitive).  When I buy my Winnebago and start traveling the country, I want to be able to work in a virtual world like I never left.

Virtual World/Software Integration.  When I create a PPT slides, its a pain to take them to a Virtual World. In the old days, we built models. People could come in and watch you work. They could see as your design takes shape and make comments. You could work together.  Now its a solitary job.  Maybe they can look over your sholder as you sit at your computer.  When I do any kind of 3D design on the computer, I want people to be able to walk into my virtual office and see what I am doing just like they could when I was building real 3D models.

I gave a little background on where Second Life is coming from in terms of content creation. Now, let me point you to today’s debate.

If you have an issue with Second Life, you can use their JIRA system to report it. Its a great way for having open communications with the people working on the system. For my last blog, someone mentioned being able to import obj files. This is an old Wavefront technology that comes up a lot with 3D graphics systems and its use in Second Life comes up a lot:  http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1110

Now I don’t want to get too hung up on obj right now. There are other formats as well and this is just a tiny piece of the big debate. Lets come back to that later.

  Recently  Qarl Linden (creator of the sculpted prim) posted a JIRA to discuss what people wanted more, Mesh import or more inworld tools.  You can access the JIRAS here:

Work on Meshes

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-1494

Work on Inworld Tools

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-1495

Essentially there are three groups in this argument but this a bit like saying there are only 4 types of life forms-  animals, plants, fungi, and protists – look ant any one group and you will see many subgroups and there are those that are in multiple groups.

Technologists

Our first  group of content creators are those interested in Second Life providing support for much more advanced and detailed forms of geometric representation. For many of these people, this means supporting meshes, kind of a surface defined by a bunch of points (not too much unlike sculpties).  Like there are many types of animals in the animal kingdom, there are other solutions too. Some like having more analytics (more prim types like cylinders, cones, etc.). Some want booleans (ability to subtract one prim from another). There are other solutions too which I’ll talk about later.  but the the basic idea is kind of the same. Prims and scupties are way too limited and we need more expressive formats in Second Life.

Community Builders

The second group is focused more on the community than the technology. If SL supported more advanced geometry, how would current residents create them? There is the problem. If you remember, this is a minor problem with sculpties. What will happen with an even better ways to represent geometry? Would it be a barrier to current resident builders?  In-world building in Second Life is a special thing. Why would we want to force content creators out of second Life in order to create?

Capitalists/Economists

A third group are those focused on the economics. Many content creators sell their creations. CopyBot problems created a community outcry as others could copy and resell someone else design. Imagine the potential economic impact if either more advanced objects can be created or the huge amount of existing 3D geometry could be easily imported into Second Life. For many, an understanding of the economic impact followed by a plan to avoid economic problems must be addressed first. How do we protect these people’s intellectual property?

Now I have some opinions on all this.  I’ll talk more about that next blog.

There is a big debate going on in Second Life® ….  Ok, there is always a big debate going on in Second Life but this one is important  :-) . It is about Second Life content creators and what tools and technologies should be supported in the future.

One of the reasons for success in second life is that “residents” can create their own content. SL supports a set of primitive geometry types such as cube, cones, tori, cylinders and spheres. You can skew or shape or hollow these primitives, give them textures, and combine them to create some really cool designs.  Here’s a video that might help:

Now those of us in the CAD world know that this is nice but pretty limited. You can’t subtract geometry (take away a cylinder in a cube to create a hole). You can’t do too much freeform work. This was addressed a little bit with the creation of “sculpted prims” which allow you to create a kind of freeform surface by specifying a grid of points.

Sculpted prims (sculpties) looked like they had a lot of potential and do solve a lot of problems. Sculpties are different from other prims in that they can’t be created with the existing tools.  The root of today’s debate starts here (well, at least one of them.) A number of software developers created tools to create the sculpties (including myself, see Math Sculptor) or added functionality to existing tools like Blender to help in creating them. 

On one hand, this was good.  The folks at Linden labs don’t have unlimited resources. With the Linden’s creating a standard, all the creative resources of the development community could be brought to bear. There was an explosion of creative and innovative tools for SL sculpties.

On the other hand this was bad. You now had to leave SL to take advantage of sculpties (there are a few in-world tools but they can be limited).  Some of these tools cost money making it harder for the individual builder to compete against a bigger more well funded organization. Or, to compete, the builder would need to learn these external tools, some quite complicated.

In the end, most people found the negatives about sculpties were not that bad. Today, you can still create impressive builds without them and the people that absolutely needed a solution to the original analytical prims had one.  Part of what has reduced the debates is that that Sculpties still have a many limitations.

It is today’s discussion on the next set of improvements for content creators that is triggering today’s far more substantial debate.  More on this next post.