Yesterday I had a chance to attend an online meeting at the Architecture Island in Second Life on the issue of scale in the Virtual World. + Full Report
This was the first meeting I have ever attended in Second Life, and to be completely honest I still have problems even sitting down. Let's just say that I am still learning how to use my avatar.
Clumsiness aside, it was an interesting discussion about the scaling of objects, including architecture, in Second Life. Objects in Second Life are a larger scale mainly because as you move around the spaces you are watching your avatar from a camera on top of his, her, or its head. The subsequent scalar illusion makes that most avatars are about one and a half times larger the size of a typical human. How do you then use Second Life as a tool to create prototypes for real projects? The group decided to create a universal standard to help that transition.
But the most interesting conversations happened when the participants where questioning the very idea of scale and even built environment in Second Life. Do you need things to be scaled correctly if through clever camera manipulations you can inhabit a small model as well as you can a full-scale version?
On the issue of the future of the virtual world(s) some people were saying how it will begin to look more and more like the cities that we are used to. Except that they would be inhabited completely differently, as a digital representation of your space but connecting you to information and, as mentioned before in Archinect, as a way to augment your Real Life. It seems that even when anything is possible people still seek that which is familiar. I would have to agree that it is nice to be able to interact space in ways that you can relate to, after all we have enough globfrag in the 2D virtual world, I could not imagine how it would be if on top of learning to digest the new information you also had to learn how to negotiate your space all over again.
Overall it was an interesting meeting, I was a little surprised no one was using SL's new voice capability, but instead everything was typed (good way to keep a transcribe though). What will the virtual future look like?
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6 Comments
Simulating 'spaces' for a communication medium in an information world is backwards. Representation of communication can be reduced to any dimension and mediums, and offering a 3-dimensional space currently does not have much advantages over 2-dimensional spaces in terms of describing a communication session.
There are perhaps some merits to Second Life, as it can describe an aspect of social interaction in real life by positioning an avatar relative to the positions of other avatars. However, it is still way off from a true spatial experience.
Perhaps it depends on all the minute gestures that you can do in such 3-dimensional 'space', but until it can get subtle enough that things can really get varied, we are still better off reading "LOL", instead of watching the same facial expression over and over again representing "LOL".
Pak-Kei Mak, Does not a 3-dimensional space however provide an advantage if what you are communicating about is 3-dimensional? The strength behind SL, or any other Metaverse for that matter, is not just about providing an environment in which to communicate, it's a place on which to talk about the environment and in most cases how to improve that environment - whether it be a model of New York City or Nike's latest sneaker. Furthermore, as time passes, with more and more real life data being channeled real time into these worlds, the implications for simulations and prototyping of reality are immense!
Coming from an extensive MMORPG and Online FPS games, there is a very strange sense of scale and the idea of space that ultimately begins to become familiar with the environment in which we are established. The point in many of these games environment's is not to appear "realistic", but on the contrary, it is to appear "unreal" (title of one very famous and exceptional FPS). It is this Unreal dimension which allows the players of these games to begin perceiving space outside the every day realm of living and architecture that is consequence to the rules of matter and gravity. Instead it provides you with the possibilities of co-existing in various locations and defying rules of everyday architecture. Games such as Prey are exceptional examples of what designers in architecture can do in terms of co-existing in various locations, gravity shifting, etc...
and it is these unreal environments that ultimately re-define how communication affects us and the consequences of communication in these unreal spaces. trace memory is used as a language of communication in some instances as well as color, fog, tagging, etc (such as the old example of tagging in Counter Strike) All of these forms of communications, be it specific types of rocket fire, spell casts methodology, time warps and time loops, co-existing spacial environments and dualities in itself become forms of communication that when placed in dialogs with the environments that inhabit these performances, new grounds for communication begin to unfold.
how is that paper thin mezzanine supported?
I want to take a seat back from the theories and just look at it.
I think, back to the superficial level, my first impression on SL is... man, it's ugly. Even though it's just a visual thing, the freedom of being able to fly or teleport just does not seem appealing. Besides, I guess I'm not the type who wants to sit in front of the computer all day long. At least when you are playing Counterstrike or WoW, you are not feasting your eyes with amateur 3-d models. And yes, in those games, all these subtle details such as gravity-defying moves and unreal spaces are crucial as a form of communication. However, it is very hard to feel it in crudely-built spaces such as Second Life. I feel that I am inside a giant foam massing model. And there is hardly any life anywhere. It's not as lively as Linden Labs had heralded.
Some of you may be right about more and more 'real' data will get into the world as we build it, however, what is the point of having a simulation of the whole world? Except the probably short-lived fantasy of being able to do something you are not allowed to do in the same space, I doubt anyone would say flying a real plane is less exciting than flying a virtual plane in Flight Simulator. Of course, there is much less pressure, much less mundanity required by real life, and there is more experimentation, but it is also much less rewarding, and lacks a lot of realism still.
And that's the debate between the real and the virtual.
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
Steve Jobs.
I guess for me, metaverses will allow a larger cross section of people in this world to see the implications of their actions. It's not about more and more information, but the ability metaverses have, in turn, to render this information in a manner that is just as intuitive as 'Reality' is, to the average human brain(software), to understand and navigate. If we are able to bring a larger picture of the facts to a larger spectrum of the population, we can in turn empower this larger population to do something about it. I almost see the possibility of a sustainable future solely contingent on bringing the average citizen of the world further into the equation of trying to find a solution. As Eric S. Raymond states "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"…the eyes, however, in this case need to know what they are looking for, before they can suggest a solution.
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