Sorry SecondLife
Ok, I admit, I have forgotten all about SecondLife, Linden Dollars and avatars in my recent research on social media.
In a class called collaboration at Uni three years ago I visited another 3D-world, and today (after being ticked off by a colleague) i joined SecondLife and now officially have an avatar called TigerOfNorway Riddler (why do you have to choose last name on your avatar, and why on earth do I need to type the choosen last name when logging in??) and I did some quick discoveries listed below.
People. What stroke me first was that there was actually quite a few people (yeah yeah, avatars, or what ever) in there. And I have heard that some Norwegian companies are establishing themselves there, but could not find them – how are you navigating this anyway? Eventually I found a way to search, but at first it gave me only web page hits. I learned to teleport after about four minutes.
Content and learning. My colleague said that content is moving away from gaming (if it ever was there) and more towards big and small companies establishing themself there, running electronic meetings in there, and sharing content in there. I have not had the time to discover this properly yet, but will eventually. My biggest question though, is how this will ever compete with Google + Wikipedia – there is no way I can see more content quicker in SL, then I can by searching and reading Wikipedia. Maybe the learning and illustration example will do the trick here but is that really enough?
Avatars. Not long ago, I saw something about us designing computers to more or less replace humans, rather than augment them. I think the entire SecondLife smells of this life replacement a little bit and is still skeptical. Compared to video conference where people is unable to do anything but look either at you when they talk and they expierience you looking down on them or the other way around (see “the problem with video conferencing“) however, I believe avatars actually improve collaboration, avareness and the conference expierience.
The world loads slowly. Last time I visited a 3D world was at University as stated above. My expirience then was reduced by the fact that it loaded slowly. And so did SL today. I was sitting at work at relatively proper lines, but still things moved slowly and lagged a lot. I also had trouble zooming on details. This bugged me quickly.
Now that was four cents from me. Hopefully I will overcome some of these on my next visit. Until then, I stick to Vyew, Skype and MOSS 2007. Any comments to my SL opinions? How is secondlife going to be really useful and take on?
Best regards,
TigerOfNorway Riddler
Newbie in SL
Filed under: On collaboration, On entrepreneurship, On social media | 2 Comments
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In my opinion Second Life is merely a hype, just like all those that came before it. My first venture into a non-game 3D virtual world were with the first of its kind, namely ActiveWorlds in 1995, which is actually still running! While awesome at the time it wasn’t really useful for much, and the crux is that since then not much have really improved when it comes to actual user-value in these worlds.
However despite this they have all been important, because each generation of such worlds provides experiences and furthers knowledge that helps improve them towards something that can be truly world changing in the future. As far as I have gathered, Second Life’s most important contribution to this development is their real-life experiments with “real” virtual-money, the infamous Linden Dollars.
While this experiment with an independent economic system are absolutely crucial to the success of further development and commercialization in this space, virtual worlds are still a work in progress. One day a virtual world will definitively take the world by storm, but I am very certain that it won’t happen soon and even more so that it won’t be Second Life.
Another wannabe of note however is the Sony Playstation@Home world available with the new PS3. It is beautifully rendered and fairly responsive too, and there are tons of people running around. Chatting is a bit awkward for those relying on the game-controller of course, but I simply love the in-world games ranging from chess and checkers to a virtual bowling alley, and of course dancing! I’m almost ashamed to say that I’ve spent more time playing Chess in Playstation@Home than I have on the full-blown console games I’ve bought!
ActiveWorlds! That was it! Thanks for reminding me of that more dreadful exprience and adding the “real” virtual money element.