Now would be a good time for Google and Python users to start thinking about building their own virtual worlds. I’m still inclined toward Amazon, but Google and Python already have a killer tool set that could be used to create a virtual world:
Google Gears, Google Base, or SQLite — for inventory and/or avatar management, which would facilitate cross-world travels.
The pieces are falling into place. I think the last big software hurdle that needs to be overcome is someone designing a 3D widgets that will eventually make designing virtual worlds as simple (if a bit uniform) as throwing together a desktop application. Once that’s accomplished…well…it’ll be on to 4D worlds.
Not much has caught my eye recently in the world of personal world hosting, so I’m going to comment on Mitch Kapor’s Metanomics interview from last Friday. I’m not even going to comment on everything, just one specific concept Mr. Kapor mentioned. During the interview, he said that Second Life was largely overkill if someone wanted to have a small meeting at a business. I found this very interesting and somewhat inspiring to know that someone at Second Life understands that huge, monolithic worlds are often overkill for smaller, personal, and private activities.
Does a class need all of Second Life to work? No, that’s why classes are typically taught in rooms, not cafeterias and breezeways.
Does a small group of RPG gamers need the whole of Second Life to stage their campaigns? No, and smaller games like Never Winter Nights prove this.
Do small businesses need to have to put up with the inherent lag, asset server issues, and terms of service gotchas just to have a meeting? No, and thankfully, Mr. Kapor was smart enough to say that to the public.
I think we’re finally rounding a corner where we’ll soon see software that embodies and empowers the Basement Pirate ideals. I can’t wait!
While looking through the Scratch forums, I came across a post at Mick’s Blog about a game called ROBLOX. I need to look at it closer, but it looks pretty interesting on the surface, kind of a self-started version of LEGO Universe.
I was helping my mom chat with my sister and her family tonight. They were using Skype to chat via web cam, which is something that I not only still find to be flaky but also feels like being in an old AT&T commercial. As they were talking, the new baby began to kick and wave her arms. When she did that, one of the talks I listened to Friday at the Life 2.0 events came to mind.
The talk was on immersion, and how out avatars leave a lot to be desired when it comes to body language, gestures, etc. It was an interesting talk, but ultimately what it boiled down to was that to be fully expressive, out avatars need to be as fully human as possible. This is not something with which I’m comfortable agreeing.
Avatars have the opportunity to be super-human, and trying to make them as human as possible limits the full potential of the medium. I’m all for making avatars more customizable, but not for the purpose of making them more human, and especially not with out a better means of controlling the avatar than my keyboard. And not when there are perfectly suitable alternatives that already work.
This isn’t a fully gestated thought/opinion just yet, please don’t take this as the end of my mental masticating.
I haven’t had much to say about 3D worlds lately, because my head has been occupying 2D space. I’ve been looking at a few pieces of software that make designing objects in 2D space easy, interactive, and fairly intuitive:
The major downside to a lot of these pieces of software is that they’re not networked, which is why OLPCities and Squeak are ultimately better projects if we’re talking about the future of social software and virtual worlds (which is what this blog is all about). Still, I like these programs, especially Phun and Scratch right now, because they’re easy to use to get a simple interface thrown together. If Scratch had a way to download text from the Internet, it’s LEGO-like scripting system would be perfect, far better than Yahoo! Pipes.
What got me into looking at these systems this weekend was an article/video I read/saw called Administrative Debris. What if a person could whip up their own interfaces on the fly. You wouldn’t be stuck with a designer’s idea of how it should work, of how your work flowed, instead you could take a Wacom tablet and design your own work space. If you needed an RSS ticker, draw one in the corner. If you wanted a button that launched a program, draw one where you will remember it. The computer would no longer be about icons and folders paths, it would be a space you could refine until you were comfortable with it.
(And, no, I won’t go bake anyone a pie. I’ve done enough scripting and gluing programs together with Perl, Visual Basic .NET, and various API’s to know that while one day it will be possible to sketch an interface, I’m not naive enough to imagine it’ll either require zero thought or be any replacement for engineers on the back end of things.)
That’s essentially the same philosophy I see driving the driving the Basement Pirate concept. The world you build won’t be a world you’re “most comfortable” in; it’ll be the world you, your friends, your family, etc. have built to be exactly what you want it to be. So, while I’ve taken a step back lately, pondering how all this works in 2D, I’ve also been seeing how it could work once technology reaches a point where it’s cheap and feasible to do this in 3D.
Looks like Prokofy has the Basement Pirate spirit after all: “I’m glad Scoble isn’t in the Google party. My respect for him only soars. Scoble, make your own damn party. Anywhere, just pick a bar there.” At least in real life.
I really don’t mean for this to sound like an attack, but after having lots and lots of disagreements with Prokofy about why I want my own, personal sim to run at home, or at my choice of hosts, it just strikes me as being somewhere between irritating and funny to see her applauding Scoble for apparently espousing the same ideal.
Make3D looks pretty darn interesting. Forget having to build your own world, you’ll just need a bunch of pictures of where you want to live. This officially makes thinks like Google’s SketchUp too much effort. Plus, even if Make3D is a bust, PhotoSynth is still here as a backup. But check out Make3D in action:
The other day, I made kind of a brash statement. I admit it’s brash. I even admit it’s probably wrong. However, until someone shows me different, I stand by my statement.
Today when I was rambling about my statement to Khamon said, “Or Google.” My reply was that Google was trying to steal Second Life’s market share, but Amazon was working more on my end of the field. Amazon’s web services, as they are now, and not counting the Mechanical Turk, are exactly what you’d need on the back-end to run a virtual world. S3 is the kind of storage system you’d need for a super-scaling asset server. Electric Cloud is what you’d need to run a sim, either permanently or as a sim you could turn off and on. SimpleDB is just enough of a fast scaling database to handle things like friends lists, inventory, or instant messaging. The only thing really missing is a front-end client, but those are a dime-a-dozen these days.
Google, with both Android and Gears, strikes me as a company who wants to leverage their “we know everything, in 3D” business into something that’s always with you. One day you won’t go to Google, you’ll be wearing Google. Amazon, on the other hand, is doing what Zero and Icehouse spent most of 2007 talking about: they’re getting their scaling ducks in a row. It will not surprise me if before long some one sticks an OpenSim client in front of Amazon, and starts selling private estates.
That’s my theory anyway. Personally, I’m not a big fan of Amazon’s services, because I know how to install Apache and MySQL, but the Silicon Valley buzz around their services is really too much to ignore.