After Second Life, Can Virtual Worlds Get a Reboot?

[Ceka Cianci]

I was reading this while i was looking around the net today and thought it was kind of cool article...

it goes a little into the fututre of virtual worlds that are not too far off..but also talks a little about how SL and worlds like it can be used for healing..plus some other things..

just thought it was kind of neat and interesting and thought i would share..

 

After Second Life, Can Virtual Worlds Get a Reboot?

Jacki Morie, a virtual world designer in telehealth care, thinks they can. Morie is a Senior Scientist and Project Director for the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies (USC ICT).

Diane Mehta: Some people think virtual worlds are passé.

Jacki Morie: The Second Life phenomenon gave virtual worlds a bad name; it was too early to make a business out of it in any large-scale sense. But Minecraft is a virtual world. It’s digital LEGOs if you will, but it’s a space for kids to exercise their imagination and to connect with others to also want to build and create things. And it’s the biggest phenomenon today. “Virtual worlds” may end up needing another name, but Minecraft is a game-changer.

No one has been creative enough to think beyond what’s already out there. Some businesses got into virtual worlds early on, at the top of the hype cycle, and got disappointed and left. Virtual worlds still aren’t ready for a full monetization plan, though they’re getting close.

First we need to look at them critically to figure out what kinds of advances they can offer us. You can use virtual worlds in education, in delivery services, or as an advanced form of telehealthcare that offers so much more than videoconferencing. Virtual worlds can give us social connectivity, built-in support groups, and ways to avoid ever being alone again.

Mehta: What’s missing in human interaction that you’re getting to in these digital worlds?

Morie: One thing tech has led us to consider is what some people consider a sense of isolation. We’re “alone together” as Sherry Turkle says in her latest book. In virtual worlds, however, you are not alone together, you are really, truly together—connected by these bodily representations caused avatars.

There is a fundamentally positive aspect to this kind of connectedness we have not yet leveraged to the extent we can. But children are already figuring it out. There are about 2 billion accounts registered for the 100 or so virtual worlds in use today. Children age 5-15 own at least half of those accounts—they’re using these worlds for entertainment, social connection, and learning. And that’s because the physical world “roaming radius” we grant them has shrunk to less than a block. In the 1950s, you played with everyone on your street. Now the only chance kids have for free exploration without a parent hanging around is in these virtual worlds.

Mehta: How will virtual worlds fit into the ways businesses work?

Morie: We think of the web today as very interactive—flat screens that allow us to do things. But the newest virtual worlds and next generation of web browsers are going to be fully 3D enabled. This is an opportunity for businesses waiting to happen. New virtual worlds can be accessed via a web browser, rather than a downloaded program. It’s only a matter of time (months, not years) before we have these things available on our iPads and Smart Phones. Already the main action/interaction is really on mobile devices. This trend is going to continue to grow.

Mehta: You designed a virtual healing space for returning soldiers. How did that get started?

Morie: When the U. S. Army funded the creation of ICT USC in 1999, they were looking for ways to leverage the kind of engagement that Hollywood was able to get—and apply that to better training for the army. I started making virtual training environments that could were more cognitively real, in that they could evoke in soldiers a sense of unease and fear that could make training more realistic.

Then things started bubbling up for me from what I would consider non-connected areas—different domains. I’ll think: “That’s happening here and it could really connect with that.” These leaps of faith—of space and distance and domains—connect to how I approach something. Then I always have a What if? What if I built Iraqi village and we used it for healing instead of for training? Or I put in artificial intelligence (AI) characters as villagers? What if we use this for healing to repair some of the damage done by people going into these conflicts?

So I brought vet to this space to answer my What if ? and teleported him to the desert that overlooked a little village. He wasn’t there 10 seconds. I added some non-threatening AI villagers, shopkeepers, mothers and sons, an old man going to a mosque and a tea shop, and went in with this vet’s avatar and my avatar. But he said, “This is so real I’d never let a vet walk through here without a therapist by their side.” That was the catalyst that prompted me to think virtual worlds could be psychological healing spaces. I wanted to create something realistic, so I started with a relatively low-hanging fruit known as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.

Mehta: How did you actually design the world?

Morie: We started by gathering pictures of the types of environments we wanted to build—we looked at ski lodges, hunting lodges, Native American motifs, and a military ski lodge in Alaska that had been part of the army for years, and built idea books. Then we used Second Life to build structures inside the virtual world—which requires that you use its proprietary in-world creation tools, but we could have easily built it in a 3D modeling program such as Maya, Unity, or 3D Studio Max.

First we did a lot of texturing for how we wanted everything to look: the pictures hung on the wall and the rugs on floor were all done in Photoshop. Then we got busy creating assets and wrote scripts to make sure the objects in the world interacted with people in the ways we wanted. Basically we envisioned it, collected ideas, had brainstorming meetings, and said to ourselves, what if we did this? Can we put a labyrinth in there? How do we get an avatar to walk a labyrinth anyway?

Mehta: What do you do in your spare time to keep your creativity going?

Morie: I create a lot of art—some computer assemblage, some physical assemblage art. I also do creative writing and am working on a book that looks at the uses of virtual worlds for NASA’s long-duration space flight missions. I study neuroscience, raise ducks, garden, cook, and grow a lot of our own vegetables. I have an extended family I’ve brought to live with us in big old house we’re renovating. It helps with my “what if”—if the floors are rotten, how do I fix them? It takes creativity to make the house what it was in its heyday.

I also like to travel in really exotic locations like Easter Island; Canyon De Chelly in the heart of the Navajo nation; and Western China’s Dunhuang, where there are 500 incredible painted Buddhist caves from the old Silk Road days. I like to open myself out to all kinds of experiences—but they have to have heart. Then they all become part of a vast ocean of ideas I can pull from when I want to create something new.

[Ceka Cianci]

i also ran passed one of Phillip Rosedales projects called  High Fidelity..

which is heading into the next generation of virtual worlds..

 

i really got a kick out of the introduction panel they have on the left side of this page..

click the play buttons under thier images..i was cracking up lol

http://highfidelity.io/

[Charly Muggins]

Second Life is now a milestone on the Internet Highway.

The future is communities of individuals who communicate with each other.

Not individuals who create things.

Which is what Second Life was set up to be.

And which it was, and still is, fairly successful at.

Except it has no growth potential.

And therefore no commercial future.

Kids put away lego before they meet adolescence.

Except the obsessives.

Second Life is the same.

A place for building castles in the air.

And dressing up dollies to play princess in them.

(Opinion simplified so even the more intellectually challenged forumites might understand it.)

[KarenMichelle Lane]

OMG -  "Doing it with Objects"  comment is still stuck in my mind.

The personality sound bites are to funny.

Thank you for the link Ceka

[Ceka Cianci]

just found a video of Phillip talking about the project..

i really miss his excitement  around here..

just compare it to Rods hehehe

he's on a high and it's so cool to listen to him get excited about this stuff..

i remember how he used to talk about second life like this..

 

can't wait to see it working..

 

also a link to more videos from their site..

http://www.youtube.com/HighFidelityio

[KarenMichelle Lane]

That was a fun and interesting video. Phillip is clearly talking about extending the reality of our existence further into the Virtual medium. This is so exciting.

As a side note, I used to be a counselor here in SL after being trained in the Guiding Lights Program. Most of my practice time ended up  helping my clients to understand that their "reality" always came into SL with them. The solution to many issues of trust among virtual acquaintances, friends and lovers revolved around:

1) Knowing that the every day "tells" we all use without even thinking about it were absent in this virtual world. The tells being, real eye contact, body dynamics, pheromones, tics, posturing, touch - and with the advent of voice the tone of your conversational style became possible but the  other "tells" were still missing.

2) You could overcome this lack of feedback or reinforcement by learning to express yourself more fully with your "chatted" conversations and to be sure in your vocal communications.

In the absence of these "tells", we tend to project what we want to see, hear, feel into a chatted conversation.

Back to the future; I look forward to being able to mirror my "tells" in the avatar experience automatically as a part of the hook up to these future worlds.

 

[Ceka Cianci]

---

KarenMichelle Lane wrote:

OMG -

 "Doing it with Objects" 

 comment is still stuck in my mind.

The personality sound bites are to funny.

Thank you for the link

Ceka

---

hehehe at first i didn't know what was going on..i thought it triggered some sort of spam add or something..

then  that guy started talking about Phillip with that voice and i started to crack up..because it's  what i should have expected in a strange sort of way hehehehe

 

i think it's gonna be pretty cool..He was my fav CEO here..but i understand why he went onto other things..

as he sort of said..from the gap of what we can do to what we want to do is so big..

so he keeps trying to find ways to close that gap..that comes from new ventures into  new areas to imporve on the old..

i hope he never stops =)

 

[Charly Muggins]

---

KarenMichelle Lane wrote:

The tells being, real eye contact, body dynamics, pheromones, tics, posturing, touch - and with the advent of voice the tone of your conversational style became possible but the  other "tells" were still missing.

 

---

Most people are good at the obvious tells in rl.

Few are really good at the non-obvious ones.

It takes real insight to understand the subtle online versions of them.

It helps to have teleempathically-enabled mirror neurons.

I call it being epsychic.

But it's a bit like x-ray vision.

Because it helps you see through people.

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

---

Charly Muggins wrote:

Second Life is now a milestone on the Internet Highway.

The future is communities of individuals who communicate with each other.

Not individuals who create things.

Which is what Second Life was set up to be.

And which it was, and still is, fairly successful at.

Except it has no growth potential.

And therefore no commercial future.

Kids put away lego before they meet adolescence.

Except the obsessives.

Second Life is the same.

A place for building castles in the air.

And dressing up dollies to play princess in them.

(Opinion simplified so even the more intellectually challenged forumites might understand it.)

---

Yes, most kids put away their Legos when they reach adolescence. By then they're too busy setting up their little lunch table cliques to determine who's "cool" and who isn't and to find fault with and pass notes about those who they feel to be beneath themselves.

Fortunately, most of them grow out of that too.

[Charly Muggins]

---

Theresa Tennyson wrote:

 

Yes, most kids put away their Legos when they reach adolescence. By then they're too busy setting up their little lunch table cliques to determine who's "cool" and who isn't and to find fault with and pass notes about those who they feel to be beneath themselves.

Fortunately, most of them grow out of that too.

---

Unless they become bankers.

Or journalists.

[Perrie Juran]

---

Charly Muggins wrote:

---

Theresa Tennyson wrote:

 

Yes, most kids put away their Legos when they reach adolescence. By then they're too busy setting up their little lunch table cliques to determine who's "cool" and who isn't and to find fault with and pass notes about those who they feel to be beneath themselves.

Fortunately, most of them grow out of that too.

---

Unless they become bankers.

Or journalists.

---

Or even worse, Politicians.

[Kenbro Utu]

---

Ceka Cianci wrote:

i also ran passed one of Phillip Rosedales projects called  High Fidelity..

which is heading into the next generation of virtual worlds..

 

i really got a kick out of the introduction panel they have on the left side of this page..

click the play buttons under thier images..i was cracking up lol

http://highfidelity.io/

---

The Threads

We work in labcoats. Starched and ironed.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

---

Conifer Dada wrote:

 

Full range of reasonably simple creation tools, including for mesh.

---

But according to Philip there won't be any mesh at all!

[Ceka Cianci]

---

Conifer Dada wrote:

A future virtual world that does what SL set out to do, but better, needs to have:

Super-realistic graphics and motion.

High reliability.

Full range of reasonably simple creation tools, including for mesh.

Freedom to for people to do, say or create whatever they like, within reasonable bounds.

To be available, at a basic level, either free or very cheap, with premium options that give worthwhile added benefits.

---

 

this is what i got from the home page..

 

 

The Idea

We're building a new virtual world enabling rich avatar interactions driven by sensor-equipped hardware, simulated and served by devices (phones, tablets and laptops/desktops) contributed by end-users.

 

The Matter

Voxels. We're making a strategic bet that rich computer rendering is heading there. Imagine an experience with cubes of many different sizes, with the ability to scale them down to a seamless molecular fabric. Now imagine these building blocks manifesting complex physical properties.

Finally, imagine that world extending visibly to vanishing points like our world does today, enabling you to see your house, your neighborhood, distant mountains, and other planets in the sky. We believe computing power and network transmission speeds are evolving to make such a world possible, represented by a sparse voxel octree data structure.

 

 

The Engine

A new kind of cloud. We're building a coordination system enabling millions of people to contribute their devices and share them to simulate the virtual world.

If we can successfully build this collective cloud, we think we can enable audience sizes for shared experiences that are orders of magnitude largerthan what is possible today. Imagine contributing your computer to a project like SETI, but instead having it simulate part of the virtual world, and earning virtual world currency in exchange for helping to power the grid.

 

 The Fetish

Speed. We hate latency. and think it's both imperative and possible to have a lot less of it in the world we're building.

We believe that if the latency between avatars (the time between when you do or say something and when others see or hear it) can be kept very brief, magic will happen. We think richly rendered avatars capturing head movements, eye movements, and body language offer much more compelling person-to-person interaction possibilities that the poorly-lit, awkwardly-framed facsimiles of ourselves we share through videoconferencing today.

The Threads

We work in labcoats. Starched and ironed

[Coby Foden]

---

Kwakkelde Kwak wrote:

 

But according to Philip there won't be any mesh at all!

---

Right, I have understood so too that everything is built by using voxels.

I wonder what programs can create Voxels?

 

 

P.S.

If anybody does not know what are Voxels here is one link explaining them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel

[Deej Kasshiki]

That voxel tech sounds like one hell of a stretch, graphics-wise, for the capabilities of mobile devices, even if using distributed computing as Philip envisions. It's all very intriguing though. I really hope they can pull it off.

Oh, and is that Torley's voice in those audio clips that play for each team member?

[Ceka Cianci]

the dots on that page  has a link at the bottom that says..what are these dots and goes to this video..

so i'm guessing this is their voxels..

and while i was there i found some really cool voxel videos as well..

 

[Charly Muggins]

---

Ceka Cianci wrote:

 

The Truth

We want you to give us lots of bucks so we can play games on really monster hardware.

But it won't work on your pathetic little machines.

---

FIFY!

[X3aV]

If anyone has a pathetic little machine, they are playing the wrong games.

[ImaTest1488314069]

---

X3aV wrote:

If anyone has a pathetic little machine, they are playing the wrong games.

---

How would you know this?

Rather, what is it you base your opinion on?

Also, why do you get to decide what games are right or wrong for others?

[0og]

I wasn't that impressed with the avatars when I joined. They're really lagging behind in that department. The content creators are having to make whole mesh avatars or parts of as a work around for improvement. However it's not good when you see three women standing around with the same mesh face or body or even on a daily bases. The whole idea is to be unique and different not look the same. I don't know if the avatars have been improved upon since SL started but really they need to step our avatars up to a whole new level. Skin spikes and skin flaps and skin dips isn't progress. Stagnated.

[X3aV]

---

ImaTest wrote:

---

X3aV wrote:

If anyone has a pathetic little machine, they are playing the wrong games.

---

How would you know this?

Rather, what is it you base your opinion on?

Also, why do you get to decide what games are right or wrong for others?

---

I base my opinion on: those who cannot play a game because of thier own limitations have no right to complain about the game. The game works perfectly well for those who have the machines to handle it.

Would we listen to Pinto drivers complaining that they cannot compete in the Indy500? No, we would laugh at them or ignore them as fools.

[Dillon Levenque]

I did actually read your whole post but one thing jumped out at me halfway through so I saved it. In the discussion of young people using virtual worlds (I'm assuming she meant Minecraft from the things said earlier; I've never seen it myself) she said: "And that’s because the physical world “roaming radius” we grant them has shrunk to less than a block. In the 1950s, you played with everyone on your street. Now the only chance kids have for free exploration without a parent hanging around is in these virtual worlds"

That might actually be a true statement. I am personally acquainted with people who were kids in the 1950s. I even remember being told about a book that was quite popular in those days but which actually was a protest against the over-protective parents of the 1950s! an interesting modern-day review of the book .

I've believed for years that modern parents are FAR to invested in their children's day-to-day lives. I don't think it's healthy for either party but it is most unhealthy for the children, in my opinion. I have a great reluctance to suggest that a child should spend time logged into a computer as opposed to being out in the yard playing tag or something, but if Minecraft gives them a way to connect with other kids without their parents helicoptering over their heads, maybe the psychological benefit outweighs the physical loss.

 

[Penny Patton]

---

Charly Muggins wrote:

Second Life is now a milestone on the Internet Highway.

The future is communities of individuals who communicate with each other.

Not individuals who create things.

Which is what Second Life was set up to be.

And which it was, and still is, fairly successful at.

Except it has no growth potential.

And therefore no commercial future.

Kids put away lego before they meet adolescence.

Except the obsessives.

Second Life is the same.

A place for building castles in the air.

And dressing up dollies to play princess in them.

(Opinion simplified so even the more intellectually challenged forumites might understand it.)

---

 As a social environment, it's wanting on every level. Profiles are poorly thought out, with social aspects that are only half developed then left to rot on the vine. It's difficult to connect with or collaborate with people in SL. You can do it, but you're constantly working against the tools LL provides, rather than being enabled by them.

 As a creativity tool it's absurdly broken. LL has never hired artists to help develop the SL tool set, and it shows in the fact that every single tool, from the appearance editor right up to materials, is outright broken in one way or another. Most of SL's performance issues, the laggy mess that leaves people wondering why SL runs so poorly when AAA videogames with top of the line graphics run smoothly, are due primarily to LL's lack of expertise in creating content tools.

 Then there's the lack of interactivity. Basic interactivity mechanics which have been present in 3D environments since the 90's are entirely missing from SL, leaving it  a "look but don't touch" experience where you can crawl around the creations people fill SL with, but there's no engagement, nothing to interact with and draw people in beyond the visual presentation.

 In short, SL is, in fact, not very successful at what it does best and that's the whole problem.

[Coby Foden]

---

Penny Patton wrote:

 

LL has never hired artists to help develop the SL tool set, ...

---

They are looking for a Lead Artist.

http://lindenlab.com/careers

I wonder will that Lead Artist do anything in SL as the job overview says:

"Overview:

The Lead Artist will collaborate with production teams to establish and prototype visuals for multiple new products and games. "

 

"New products"... hum... :smileyindifferent: