f13.net

The TOS Is Falling!  Or Not.

Submitted by CmdrSlack.
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Various sites are reporting that there has been a decision in the latest (and most publicized) lawsuit against Linden Labs. For those who aren’t in the loop, Linden Labs is the creator of Second Life, a virtual world client known around these parts for its contingent of furries and other perverts. The lawsuit, Bragg v. Linden Lab, et. al., was filed by a Pennsylvania attorney who was banned from the service for exploiting SL’s web server to purchase virtual land at a highly discounted price. His suit alleged that the Second Life Terms of Service were unconscionable at best and that by freezing and ultimately banning his account, Linden Lab was in breach of its contract with him. The original complaint, as filed in Chester County, PA, is available here (warning: PDF).

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To clarify, Linden Research and Philip Rosedale, the CEO of Linden, have publically and repeatedly said that players own the virtual property that they buy or create in the game. These public statements are in conflict with their TOS and the actions they took against Marc Bragg for abusing their land auction system, which included seizing all his land (including the land he had bought legitimately) without recompensation and freezing his account which included a certain amount of money that he could not withdraw. Hence the lawsuit by Marc Bragg (who also happens to be a lawyer) accusing Linden of defrauding him of his property, both real and virtual.

I'm very torn about this. On the one hand, this guy sounds like a scumbag who was an exploiter. Worse, he was an exploiter in a "game" where real money can get involved.

But, what they did was draconian. I think their best argument would be "it's a virtual world and we're the virtual federal government. What he did was the equivalent of a real life gangster making illegal real estate bills. So we seized his property and put him in lockup (banned his account)"

Ya, but since real U.S. money is involved, why open the door to Gov'n police-ing our precious worlds?

Second Life again places the MMO industry in jeopardy with questionable business practices.   Just what this industry needed...   federal judges ruling on anything related to gaming property rights, TOS disputes, and a companies ability/ right to police their game.

This may not spill over beyond their game, but precedents that are set, will be used by every scumbag farming/ spamming outfit from now until eternity.

Well, the real issue is LLs attempts to equate virtual goods with real money. That sort of thing is just bound to end up in front of the supreme court. What happens when a bug destroys and Item you paid $100 for? How could they ever shut down a server? What if LL goes out of business? Are land-owners in-game owed money? What if a Dev owns land on his server, but knows an upcoming patch will increase the number of available plots on the server... So he sells off all his land on ebay prior to the patch. Is that insider trading? It's all very hairy, and if I were an MMO company I would stay as far away from Real Money=Virtual money as possible

Oddly enough, another part of the SL TOS indicates that none of your virtual stuff has any actual value.  The current motion order doesn't address that specific clause, but following the logic the court used in invalidating the arbitration clause, it's arguable that they'd do the same for that clause.  My guess is that if this case goes forward and doesn't settle, we'll see that clause tested as well.  The way it looks right now, given LL's campaign of "make money in SL," they're going to be hard pressed to justify that.  Granted, if the business realities exception was argued, it may save them...any sort of monetized virtual world would be subject to software/hardware failures.  Expecting them to then indemnify everyone for the money paid into the service would be pretty harsh from their perspective.  I still think it's a non-winner for them, but it's possible, I guess.

LL only claims you can make money in SL, not that the virtual goods are worth money. It's why some people think it's a borderline Ponzi scheme. In reality, it's just more proof that anything is for sale.

As to this case, I'm just pissed I can't root for anyone. I mean, come on, PR leaching self-inflated company vs exploiting lawyer?! My gods, read that again: "exploiting lawyer". It's so self-redundant it's almost a singularity.

(oh, err, no offense Slack ;) )

Right, but you make money via your virtual stuff being worth something.  Or at least, via extracting value from your worthless virtual stuff.  Since I make older, more experienced attorneys laugh with my theories on things like unconscionability, I'd say that their public representations via their PR moves and Philip Rosedale bar them from asserting that the virtual stuff has no value.  The fancy term is "estoppel" and most lawyers (seem to) think nobody but law students and bar exam takers think about it.

I dunno... I still think this sort of thing will be a really big deal in the future. It's inevitable that MMO's (or some future incarnation of MMOs) will be the dominate source of entertainment within the next 50 to 100 years. When that happens, and it's preferable to own a virtual boat to a real boat, people are going to start demanding a "bill of rights" of sorts. I think I will see it within my lifetime. What if a "Microsoft" of MMO's develops? And getting banned from their network means you lose access to everyone you know? Or maybe even your job? If I was banned from using MS Netmeeting, I'd be in serious trouble at work...

If you mean that everything will be done in some kind of metaverse, that'd be different than what we have now.  What we have now are paid services that have rather draconian license agreements for accessing them. As more business is done electronically and the risks for the public and society as a whole increase, we'll likely see more liability attributed to software developers. In the case of some kind of metaverse where everything takes place, my sense is that you'll simply have a system like the internet is now -- if you can purchase access, you're good. I highly doubt that one MMO title will ever rise to that level. Any true metaverse will require that there be an open standard (like HTML/XML) to which everyone adheres.

Right now, none of your crap from virtual world A is portable to virtual world B (no matter what Anshe Chung is trying to do with cross-investing between SL nad Project Entropia). There are no open standards for virtual world clients and there is no effective transport between them. If being banned from WoW MCXLIV means that you lose your job, I certainly hope it is because you work for Blizzard. Otherwise, I just don't see a single game platform replacing what is essentially a semi-public utility like the Internet.

Player "bills of rights" are nifty concepts, but I don't think they're that realistic. As long as proprietary game servers exist, the providers of those services should rightfully maintain absolute control over them. The last thing the magic circle crowd would want is government involvement in friggin' games. Until we're all permanently plugged into some virtual world network while soaking in nutrient baths, I don't think it's going to be the issue that some make it out to be.

[mole]

Seems like a good time to bring up IBM's work on metaverses, and specifically their Move from SL to Torque (http://eightbar.co.uk/2007/05/08/the-ibm-innovate-quick-internal-metaverse-project/).

[/mole]

PS: I would have brought this up for discussion last month, but the whole Sigil thing and Raph's interview would have eclisped it!

The guy who wrote that needs to go back and proofread for grammar and punctuation. 2 glaring errors in the first 4 sentences  :|

I am not someone who picks on other peoples grammer (neither should I :-D) but I could not get past the first sentence.

Does anyone know how EULAs work for international customers?

I live in Sweden, and as far as I have found out the EULA (example: EQ2) isnt binding in any way.
As long as the company agrees to provide a service for me (the subsciption) while I live here in
Sweden they are to conform to Swedish/EU law and can just forget the whole buisness of me
agreeing to take up any issues with them in CA or anywhere else they managed to have laws
re-written to suit them.

In short, they can forget the whole EULA and start studying swedish consumer law if they want to
try to ban me or cut off the service/change the service as long as they sell the product here
(such as game boxes). The customers rights here overrides any claim they have in an EULA since
the national law > made-up legal mumbo jumbo written in the US.

I don't think that any local law would come down anywhere but with the company in 99% of the ban/change of service cases.

You are paying to use assets on their hardware which they have the right to turn off at any point. The most you will get in your favor is a ruling that they are required to pro-rate a refund of any time you have paid for that you are no longer allowed to use.

Uhh, guys, that is a personal blog--give the guy a break :P

Actually they are providing a service to me, sold in this country and thereby are forced to follow the law regarding my rights as a subscriber and customer. That their hardware is located on the dark side of the moon is beside the question. As long as they sell the game itself here in a box they are bound by this. If they only sell downloads it is another thing. At least this is the version Ive been given by friends who work with legal stuff.

Anyone know if an EULA have actually been tried outside the US for example?

The box might be sold to you in some physical form in your country, but the subscription (past the free month or whatever that came with the box) and associated services are not.  So if that's the criteria, I'm pretty sure you're still borked as far as your account goes.  (According to your legal friends Swedish law still protects your box, though.  For whatever that's worth.)

(edit) Also, Second Life (the subject of the original article) is not sold in a box as far as I know.  It's all downloaded.

But, at the same time, Gambling via the internet is still illegal in areas where gambling is illegal... even if the content provider is in another country. Didn't they just pass a law regarding that?

What about buying Plat in EQ2 with real money on the exchange server... then blowing it all on the Goblin lotto machine they have? Or, winning a bunch and selling it for profit on the exchange servers... How long can stuff like that go under the radar before the justice department catches on? Isn't getting a rare Fabled drop and then selling it for cash just like winning at slots? I don't really see how its all that different.

Slots require less camping.

They had to go around the whole "who's law applies" thing and make the law such that it was illegal for credit card companies to electronically deliver or accept money from gambling sites if the owner of the credit card resided in the US, instead of trying to declaim internet gambling itself as illegal.

Smart move actually, since there was no precedent and valid arguments both ways for where the gambling actually occurs, while it's obvious where the address of a particular person lives.

This is interesting and I look forward to the day that Torque is borged into Lotus Notes.

I think his question more fundamentally asks how do you determine what a gambling site is?  My credit card company still accepts charges from Sony even though I can gold with cash, gamble and win gold in game and then sell that gold for cash.  So, is EQ2 a gambling site?

Were someone to point this out to the proper authorities, they might just classify it as such.

Otherwise, there's a HUGE loophole for poker & gambling sites right there.  "You're not using USD.. you're using plinko chips that you can sell to other players!"

Is that "borged" as in "assimilated" or "borged" as in "making a square peg fit into a round hole"?

Wasn't really paying attention to any of this until you said this.  The whole concept of things like SL is to me what MySpace and SMS texting is to others.  I just don't get it.  While I finally got my head around why a company might be keen to encourage its employess to keep blogs and wikis and profile pages because of social networking and knowledge sharing (thanks to an IBM seminar day I attended not so long ago), I still don't get the SL 3D virtual world model in terms of business applications.  It still strikes me as gimmicky. 

It is somewhat of a gimmick, even the guys doing the work at IBM would probably tell you that. The thing about this gimmick is that IBM especially is trying to find a way to make people who are generally uncomfortable dealing with the 'modern' communications tools of email, IM, SMS and such things comfortable in some form of electronic communication. There still are people who work more effectively in an environment where they interact with people "face to face". Their hope is to create a place with the advantages of both worlds combined.

Video conferencing 4tw.

IBM are becoming seriously guilty of trying to hijack any passing bandwagon at the moment.  Don't get me wrong, I think some of what they're doing in terms of IM and advances in other areas of collaborative software is great but I nearly walked out of the room in disgust when I found out that they'd rebranded "Quickplace" as "Quickr".  I felt like I was Macready watching a decapitated human head grow spider legs and walk away.  If only I'd had a flamethrower to hand!

I'm glad it's not just me who feels the whole SL thing is a little gimmicky though.

I'm of mixxed minds here--I think the potential is mindboggling, but currently implementations are completely gimmicky.

By nature, human beings are 3-dimensional entities, and technology still presents information 2D (or in many cases 1D--text for example). Integration of our current information presentation technologies into a 3D "holding medium" and the flexibilities that allows the technology in the future could be pretty freaking spectacular.

I've got most of the IBM team coming up for a boot camp next week, and I'll try to get the skinny on their long term plans, and let you guys know what I can (that's not ::nda:: )

Second Life IS gimmicky, in that the tech to do what they want is really only in the nascent stages right now. And their implementation is horribly gimpy, with way too much lag, primitive graphics and obtuse interface to reach critical mass in the mass market.

But it's a start.

There are information processing products on the market (some of which cost SERIOUS bucks) designed to give CEO's "dashboard indicators" of the progress and state of their companies--spreadsheets, balance reports, sales numbers, and hundreds of other tidbits all go into "at a glance" GUI's on a desktop that the CEO can read to get a feel for what's up and look for trouble spots.

Once we get three or four (or more) generations into integrating the tools of the "company peons" into a visualization medium that anyone can (relatively) intuitively view, in 3D, and make that information not only available to many, but also have this medium used as the primary communications toolset for the company itself, it's going to be a pretty interesting way to do business...and I think (hope?) that's what IBM is actually looking at here long term.

I think they are.  I certainly get that impression from the latest incarnation of Lotus products.  (This is the point where I say that I'm a freelance Lotus Notes consultant and this is the point where I duck to avoid the rotten veg and/or bricks being hurled my way).  It took me quite a while to get my head around the corporate application of social networking tools but I'm getting there slowly. 

Last night I had a chat about the potential of 3D "worlds" and yeah, I'm beginning to see it.  We considered the nature of a forum like this where you can see the names of people browsing the boards at the top/bottom of the screen but there's no easy way to initiate a conversation with them.  A 3D world can provide a more visual way of seeing people standing at a "noticeboard" or whatever and also a more immediate way of interacting with those people, allowing you to virtually meet others with similar interests as yourself. 

The downside is that I'm from the UK and we don't start conversations with strangers.  :-P


I'd be very interested in this.  Also be interested to know who you've got coming up! :D

I know I say this everytime some bit of near-future tech strikes me as a little too gimmicky, but I really do get an early-nineties "Virtual reality is the future!" vibe here.  A three-dimensional virtual world is, in terms of business applications, just a chat client.  No more, and no less.  Not only in overall purpose, but likely in terms of interface.  At least to a much larger extent than people think.

You're at the noticeboard, and you need to get to the meeting hall for a virtual conference.  You're certainly not going to spend five minutes of company time walking or flying there.  You're going to bring up a drop-down menu (or whatever) so you can zap yourself there instantly.  And since we already have this menu of locations, why not list the number of avatars present at each one next to the name?  So now the average user is logging into the company's virtual world and what they end up looking at is...

Meeting Hall (12)
Noticeboard (7)
The Lab (2)
Brainstorming Club (6)
Human Resources (4)

Or as I like to call it, a bog-standard text chatroom selection interface.  And... I mean... have you guys ever played an MMO before?  You spend half your time staring at a little text chat box at the bottom of the screen, sorting through the reams of color-coded local chat, global chat, guild chat, party chat, and whispers that all are made neccessary by the fact that an avatar can only be in one place at a time, but may need to talk to others in many different places all at once.

Let me repeat that again:  An avatar can only be in one place at a time, but may need to talk to others in many different places all at once.  So now instead of employees sending faceless instant messages, you have employee avatars sending faceless tells.  Unless you disable tells and force them to meet up, at which point they get tired of trying to coordinate their virtual movements and  all log out to just use the phone instead.

And that guy who isn't too tech savvy?  The one who isn't quite comfortable with email and instant messages?  The only computer game he knows about is Solitaire, and his fucking brains will explode if you even try explaining the term "virtual world" to him.

Go to a lot of business meetings do you WUA?

Sometimes there just isn't a lot of reason to be there in person but calling in just doesn't get you that participation cred.  Plus it can be a pain in the but if you have to go to another plant on the campus or 10 or 15 minutes down to road just to nod off in the corner in case something comes up or they get around to some item your concerned with.

I could see virtually attending meetings as become a pretty standard practice.  We pretty much already do that what with screen sharing, and net meeting and conference calls and etc...

Log in, hit the menu drop down for 'conference room 4' and you're there.

Explain how dicking around with avatars and virtual spaces offers an advantage over just putting everyone's face up on the screen, giving them voice chat, and letting them display media at will.


Yeah, you're there reading a small text chat window while a large portion of the screen is pointlessly occupied by a display of avatars sitting in virtual chairs.  Useful.

The more I think about it, the more it sounds like just so much empty techie-masturbation for people who used to read a lot of cyberpunk novels and somehow think giving people avatars is the end-all and be-all of user interface.

You are only focusing on the meeting/conference portion of the concept, and verbal communication within that context--and that's not at all where the technology can/should go.

Here's just one very basic example I can come up with off the top of my head where a 3D world can help to alleviate communications difficulties:

The CEO of a company is sitting in his hotel after flying from Seattle to Japan, getting ready for the meeting the next day with the parent company. Some subtle but very important changes have been made by the process team to the assembly line in the new manufacturing plant that increases quality by 10% while also decreasing total on stock inventory by 18%, and when the team manager updates the numbers in his spreadsheet, the dynamic model of the entire assembly line is automatically updated to demonstrate (visually) the productivity/efficiency increase zones within the plant.

Knowing the parent company is concerned about the new carbon budget law going into effect just prior to the new plant opening, the the CEO opens up the Emissions/Waste product GUI on the simulation and runs a 365x24 speed quickrun of the assembly plant simulation, which dumps out the updated total product, waste product, and emissions reports with the new changes from the process team and the data import from the new law text, and quickly requests multi-day, month, and year 3D graphs to demonstrate impact.

Since line safety, personnel requirement and efficiency checks are automatically part of the simulation, he immediately gets visual 3D focus zones of additional personnel requirements to supervise the line modifications, and by clicking on each zone he can get a comparison between FTE availability for line supervisors, the current overtime saturation reports from existing plants, and next year's projected budget for personnel to confirm that the additional employee requirements are within budget.

He exports these to Crystal Reports and dumps them directly to the local (Japanese) quick print shop, and has the end product delivered to the meeting hall, since the parent company hasn't yet adopted the "new fangled" tech to display the simulation in real time.

That's just one totally made up and extremely simplistic benefit of having multiple information stores integrated into a virtual 3D world.

Is it feasible? Not this month. But I could do it, with Torque, at a prototype level, in probably 3-6 months by myself (if it was my primary job of course).

Moral of the story: Instead of a single human (the CEO in this case) having to have the brain power to build integrated pictures in their head of an incredibly diverse combination of data sets from completely different sources, let the computer do the work, and present the information in a format that is intuitively accepted.

EDIT: While I (literally) made this scenario up in response to the thread, some of the technology already exists in unusual ways.

For example, just from the work a company named Valador did for NASA a year and a half ago, they can already stream telemetry data from their billion dollar simulators directly into Torque, and then network this data set across any "normal" media (internet, wireless, satellite) to any laptop that can receive the data, and has the client. At that point, they can have "multi-player" interaction via the standard Torque networking to control cameras, manipulate the simulation backward and forward in time, and use it as a collaborative medium for discussing problems/issue scenarios in real time.

Something like: a shuttle mission when something has gone wrong and the shuttle pilots aren't able to get a firm grasp of the issue until they can explore the simulation from any angle and see what's going on with that pesky attitude control jet. This technology already exists--they'ed just need a place on the shuttle to store a laptop safely during launch.

I can see the merit of the systems you describe, but then that's not really the sort of thing I think of when I hear terms like "Second Life" and "metaverse" bandied about.  It's also substantially different than the sort of "avatars at the noticeboard" communicative uses a few people were talking about.

So yeah, if you think a communication medium "isn't where this technology should go" then we basically agree.

I came up with the "avatar at the noticeboard" because it's a first step into trying to get to grips with the why a company might want to invest in the technology. I'm a sceptic but I can't be close minded about it all because it could potentially become a new marketspace for me.  While the examples Stephen offers are good, I'm still working on why less technology based companies (e.g. an investment management company) would want to use it.  In discussion with people in the office, the idea of doing virtual tours of sites in different countries came up.  As a communication technology, the noticeboard was a simplistic example but if the right tools were developed (along the sandbox creation tools in Second Life) then 3D models (be they process models, prototype models, organisational models) become more viable. 

But I don't know how many companies would be willing to spend money on an infrastructure to do this when, as you point out, there is no significant benefit over video conferencing and other collaborative communication methods.  It just seems gimmicky at best.  I have the same problem with the idea of corporate blogs - something else that IBM have embraced into their culture.  I can see the benefits for knowledge sharing and collaboration but I can't see most companies endorsing this behaviour as a useful and efficient use of company time. 

Yeah, you obviously haven't been to any meetings in a real company.  That's what they do now with people physically in the room.  I'm thinking there is a fundamental flaw with your argument because you can apply the same logic to current meetings and yet even though the tech has been around to 'virtually' attend meetings for a dozen years even the most tech savvy company flies people across the country for 'face time' at great expense.

I can't see it being of use to most companies. People will either want the face time or they will be comfortable enough with technology to do IM based virtual meetings.

Even if you wanted to use avatars, something like IMVU would be far more useful than a "virtual world."

On the original TOS stuff. From reading stuff about conscionability it seems like there might be some case for saying that the one sidedness of the TOS of a company providing a $15/month entertainment service may be perfectly acceptable, but the same might not be acceptable to something involving thousands of dollars?

You keep assuming the chat box is going to stay around. It isn't. Most groups of people who play Second Life or any other MMO do not use the text chat for much of anything. MMO's are coming standard with voice chat included.

I'm not saying you don't have a point, because you do. But the MMO shit we are dealing with now is rocks and pointy sticks primitive. We are at fetus stage in the use of MMO's or really any online service as a communication tool.

Not looking forward to the avatar-based meetings.  I like to keep my yap shut in teleconferences, too.

I always thought people liked "facetime" because they liked flying around on the company dime.  I need to know how this can help me avoid driving in to the office.  As it stands, I really don't need to be here for any technical reason, it's just that my boss' boss is one of those old-fashioned types.  If having a 3D avatar will convince him I don't really need to make that commute, then I say bring it on.

There will always be people physically traveling to meetings.  At least until you can slip on some kind of ubertech neural-interface VR headset and literally think you're in the same room with everyone, and probably still even then.  People attach value to physical personal interaction well above it's strict efficiency as a means of exchanging information.


But text chat and/or voice chat would completely supplant 'face time' if only someone would give everyone little avatars to walk around with while they do it, right?


No, you're right.  My only real point was that adding avatars doesn't change whatever the communications medium may be, it just gives the user something else to look at while they use it.

Personally I'd much rather have everyone attending the virtual meeting just point a webcam at themselves.  At least then one can read facial expressions, and be sure nobody is blabbing on their cellphone instead of paying attention.  In a metaverse-style system you wouldn't know whether the guy behind that attentive-looking avatar was hanging on your every word, or fucking his girlfriend on the desk while you prattled in the background.


The "avatar at the noticeboard" was useful as a point of discussion.  I wasn't trying to single you out with that quote.

Maybe it'll make business people realize that half the meetings they call are fucking useless and half the people at even the good meetings are useless as well?

LOL!  Dream on.  More to the point that they'll have more meetings to discuss how best to use this new meeting tool and ways that it can effectively increase productive throughput in a blue-sky scenario while parking any real issues about the actualities of leveraging a mutual face to face contact methodology.  There'll be steering groups and pilot schemes made up of all the useless people in a vain attempt to make them seem like they have a purposeful existence.

The main reason this 3D "virtual world" technology will get adopted by the average more-money-than-sense corporation will be as mundane as there never being enough meeting rooms and never one available when they want one.

That is entirely believable.

Haemish is spot on here--it's so new no one really knows what really can, and more importantly, should be done with it.

Unfortunately I can't talk about too much, but they've got some pretty damned impressive stuff done already, and some very interesting ideas coming down the pike. I can say that while sure, virtual meetings have been done "playing around", but that's not where they are going with this at all.

Some of it is just plain guesswork though--for example while it's easy to say "see a spreadsheet in 3D"--what does that actually mean? I've been trying to figure that out the last 3 days myself, and I'm not smart enough of a human dynamics person to figure out what would be a "better" way to view a spreadsheet myself.

Personally, I think it's going to take more than just tech geeks like me to figure out better information analysis/visualization/assimilation techniques, including quite a bit of research into how the eye/brain/thought process actually works.

To compare this concept against something I do know however--I can tell you right now that if I had a virtual world simulation in my heads up display when I was a pilot, and still be able to see outside, I would have been able to achieve literally orders of magnitude more while flying. It would have to be amazingly carefully engineered, but being able to use color, shape, and time based predictive visual indicators while flying would have been a hell of a lot easier than a cross check of 40 different instruments that all provided information with different displays and mechanisms. One of a combat (or non-combat) pilot's most difficult challenges is not getting task saturated, and a large part of the task load is analyzing information---anything that can help this out at all makes things easier, and I honestly see this principle applying to controlling companies as well.

You are still essentially turning a quarterly report into PieChartQuest.  I'm not at all trying to say that it won't be adopted, but the value is -- from my perspective -- similar to the value of a corporate IM client over email.  We still use email in spite of the fact that I can go so far as to paste funny pictures into my Sametime client and even have it read me the IMs in a robot voice.

Now, virtual meeting rooms, that's probably it.  Right now all we have is WebEx.  If we can convert some of these conference rooms into offices for management, we will have a license for PieChartQuest version 0.9, I predict.

Absolutly. This is part of what I was getting at in the 'beyond keyboard and mouse' segment in the Gen. Disc. thread about the MS touchscreen. 


Hm.. what'd you fly, and what kind of 'virtual world simulation' are you talking about here?  HUDs (so far as I know) display airspeed, alt, angle vs ground, n/s direction, etc.  I'm trying to envision what you'd overlay instead of that.


This whole discussion also has me wondering when all the bluetooth-bug people are going to start asking for monitors attached to the headpieces.  Then we can all walk around looking like that guy from DS-9 while talking to the air and tapping out on our wireless keypad.  The death of the cubicle at last.. but it means we all sit in a 10x20 room in our lone company-supplied chair with 15-20 other people.

I can think of a lot of things that would be geat.. all you have to do is look to video games.

How about a virtual glide path for landings? A radar-created green wireframe overlay with height figures to make the ground maneuvering safer and more accurate? Targeting with prioritization and friend-foe based false colors for ground targeting? Maybe even relayed from a base station? visually overlayed attack or maneuver vectors and aiming prediction? I can think of a ton of information that would be helpful, all provided by overlay.

Aviation-specific, these things are possible now but are not implemented due to cost.

Bhodi hit on a lot of them.

I was an HC-130 (Special Ops) driver for several years, flying extreme low level on NVG's. Even with the limited capability of the NVG hud (it was literally a big chunk of cable that transmitted light via individual optic fibers to reflect onto the interior of the ocular), it would have been incredibly useful to have additional information of all sorts--from threat warning to mission planning to simple flightpath (we had a "fly this direction" dot, but that was it).

Yes and no on the cost by the way--sadly, quite a big issue with aircraft technology integration is simple "good old boy" syndrome. The guys that are running the projects, and ultimately paying the R&D bills were at best active pilots on aircraft that are 30+ years old, and don't want to let "some damn computer do their flying for them".

Besides "lawn dart" (it had one engine, and if it flamed out you became one), the most common nickname for the F-16 by those that don't fly it is 'electic jet'--which is meant in an insulting manner.

I got to go to a military version of E3 a couple of years ago, and the various aircraft developers really do want to make some damned cool stuff, but it's hard to get the older generation generals to understand the benefits in many ways--much like it will be to get the old school exec management types to adopt VW/3D tech ideas like these.

I guess I was thinking about commercial aviation.  Not that I have been following it much.  The "I did it without computers, uphill both ways" thing makes plenty of sense.

Even commercial a lot of pilots, especially the ones who are captains on the big birds who have decades of experience, get a little antsy about flying planes with too many bells and whistles. Airbus has historically huge problems selling larger planes to the U.S. market because of their joystick vs. the standard yoke flight controls making experienced older pilots uncomfortable.

What I have found from my military carreer in the SOF community is that typically when more technology is implemented into an environment where the operators are used to using older technology that more problems occur than are solved.  The siple solution is to just train new operators.  That will take years.  After a new group of operators is trained and the old ones phased out, the technology you are attempting to implement is already out of date.

Solution.

Slow integration of new technology.  Whether the concept comes from games or not, implementing components of it slowly is the only real key to success.

As mentioned before, the more features that are added, the more that can go wrong.  If you want to create a navigation system similar to the ones used in games like BF2142 or other games, then you will have to try to "replace" systems, not just add to them.

Anyways, interesting topic.

This was my thought as well.  It's one of the reasons NASA uses Processors, etc that are - in some cases - decades behind the bleeding edge.  It's better to be reliable, durable and proven accurate than to blow-up because of a processing bug.   

Not to mention, the more tech you introduce, the more likely something vital is blown-off in combat.  Similar logic is put into weapon design. The fewer moving parts, the better. 

Easier in the private sector.

Or if we have a notable war.

Competition, Japan and gunpowder, and the like.