Second Life

[Sky]

I've been meaning to post about Second Life for a while. All the techphiles, whether actual technical people or not...ok, none of them are actually IT people. All the gadget-loving numbnuts in the library world always jump on whatever buzzword or cool device that comes out. That's where I learn most of the stupid internet TWO POINT OH crap, meebo and zippy and glarble (not to be confused with the superior whaaaaaagaaaarbl).

So about a year ago I heard one particularly useless employee of another library talking about her second life presence. I instantly conjured up an image of flying, waving penii and chuckled. She's always into the TWO POINT OH garbage.

But now it's getting bigger. My fiancee just forwarded me this from some librarian listmail:

UIUC GSLIS and Alliance Library System are pleased to offer a series of non-credit continuing education courses for librarians, educators, and others interested in libraries, museums, learning and teaching in virtual worlds such as Second Life. 

Classes available include:  Second Life 101, Second Life 102, Virtual World Librarianship, Setting Up an Educational Presence in Second Life, Working with a Class in Second Life, Setting up your Library or Museum in Second Life: An Applied Approach, Instructional Tools For Second Life, and a seminar on Virtual Worlds and Libraries seminar.

Courses meet for 4-6 weeks and everyone is welcome!

And people wonder why I'm a luddite.

[Ingmar]

I dunno, this strikes me as one of those things something like Second Life *could* be useful for, if only it wasn't full of flying penii and furries and Prokofy Neva.

[raydeen]

The educational organization I work for has been experimenting with Second Life as a virtual classroom. I haven't really seen it in action yet, but the stupid bell goes off in my head when I hear about it. This same organization just 'gifted' one of the smaller schools with iPod Touches for 'educational' purposes. All the teachers and students already have Mac laptops. The principal wanted to know how to hook the iPod up to the SmartBoard so that the teachers could use it to show videos. I figured out how to hook it up to the digital projector but I can't for the life of me think of one good educational idea or reason to have the things. They already have laptops. What do they need the iPod for? Just one more digital distraction.

[Venkman]

This is one of those things that will work for the people who like SL. The UI is still far too clunky to support your average person. That is one of the big things keeping SL from becoming more than a fringe pursuit of academics and some parts of the counterculture. I swear the game continues to get talked about through on/off strong PR and the collective wishes of the Snow Crash readerbase.

I can't tell you how often I hear someone pitch some crap about "moving your entire organization to meetings in SL". Yea, that's technically possible, but we're talking the CD trays as cupholders crowd here, the folks that can't find their Mailbox because they're in the wrong screen on Outlook.

[Hawkbit]

Yeah, I've been bitching about this at work for months. 

Our system here in Columbus, Ohio has been offering a class or two on SL for about 9months now.  I told people at my branch what a bunch of bullshit it is, and that people actually taking the class are going to be offended the first time something sexual happens. 

Then again, as Sky said, it's all about 2.0 here too.  We just finished a 25 part web2.0 internal class (for employees only) to get people used to it.  It's fucking sad how many people got into it, like their fucking blog is going to save a rainforest or some shit.  OMG I'm on twitter!!?!!!  Now everyone at work uses it... for the next 12 months till the next fad comes along. 

/sigh

[K9]

I know that a friend of mine doing a JMC masters is working on a project to use Second Life as a virtual conferencing tool.

Personally I think Second Life is an ugly aberration.

[Slyfeind]

What I find interesting is how Second Life, as clunky as it is, gets more attention as a "mainstream" virtual world this way. It would be far easier for companies to hold meetings in World of Warcraft, just because the learning curve is much simpler. But Second Life is getting this attention because...why? Because of the screenshots? Open-endedness? Is it all about marketting? Could WoW be marketted as an online meeting place for non-gamer companies?

[Raph]

The educational world is HUGELY into SL. They tend to need:

a) realtime chat
b) voice chat
c) slideshows
d) privacy
e) scriptability for varied needs
f) free
g) no infrastructure setup

Name another virtual world where they get that?

[Ratman_tf]

The educational world is HUGELY into SL. They tend to need:

a) realtime chat
b) voice chat
c) slideshows
d) privacy
e) scriptability for varied needs
f) free
g) no infrastructure setup

Name another virtual world where they get that?

But why would they need a 3-D environment with avatars? That sounds like the kind of stuff that an integrated chat client could provide.

And the usability barrier. Huge issue. Are the people doing these meetings going to be able to do any of that stuff in Second Life on their very own? Better call the IT guy when your presentation starts morphing into penguins and you can't figure out what you did wrong.

And good luck keeping everyone on task when they hear that next door some furries are fucking robots.

[Raph]

1) There aren't any 2d environments that offer all the above (yet, bc Metaplace already offers most of that).
2) A lot of the academic uses do involve 3d visualization
3) Academics already use distance tech a LOT -- they all adopted Skype early, and they all use distance learning software, chat, etc, a lot.

[TripleDES]

IMO that "game" needs to be rewritten from scratch, taking their current ideas and implement them correctly and fixed. That and a cutting edge graphics engine.

[Numtini]

Well yes, someplace that actually went through with ipods for the teachers might actually go for SL, you can't dismiss idiocy. That must have been something in a principal's magazine or conference because our outgoing one wanted to buy all the teacher's iPhones. And don't get me started on the smartboards, ours lies unused attached to a $4k laptop running at the equivilent of 100mhz due to all the spyware on it and multiple AVs that didn't get rid of it. (I'm town IT, I'm not allowed to deal with that, that requires an academic ID critter and she outsources everything to our local version of geeksquad.)

I've known several people in SL who had academic land from the Lindens and it always amounted to the same thing, they filled out some paperwork and got free land to build their personal stuff on. The last I heard Linden was cracking down on it, but LL is like the Kremlin and the political winds change quickly. And due to some very large price increases, there's a massive land sell off/abandonment so maybe they're retasking it to generate PR? While there may be interest, I think this is like the corporate interest. People build things, Linden publicizes them, and then they lie unused and abandoned.

I don't think there's anything particularly special about SL other than it going after this market and being a place where someone can create a branded local area. (Ie, unlike WOW, there's an IBM logo.) Most of what Raph cites above was far better implemented in THERE.com. Except THERE.com didn't take the same angle on doing PR and it didn't have the same libertarian viewpoint towards intellectual property, illegal gambling, and deviant sex.

[raydeen]

Now Smartboards are quite effective teaching tools if for no other reason that the teacher can do a one time set up for a fairly interactive lesson for multiple classes. One teacher is using his in a way that invokes the look and feel of the big CNN video board and it's cool enough that the kids are actually paying attention as he's using it and they can come up and interact with the lesson as well. Just about every classroom in the three schools where I work has them and they get used constantly.

[Falconeer]

Second Life deserves all the mainstream attention of the world. In fact it's the opposite: I don't get all the "meh.." about it. It's pretty awesome, it will be in the internet history books hundred years from now, it's the closest thing to the old idea of cyberspace, it lets you do things you couldn't do anywhere else, it works, and finally it represents what all web browsers will probably look like 15 years from now.

didn't take the same angle on doing PR and it didn't have the same libertarian viewpoint towards intellectual property, illegal gambling, and deviant sex.

Bingo. THERE was a game. Secon Life lets you browse a parallel world, very similar to the real world, while waiting for the two to intersect, for good.

[Sky]

 

If you need to talk to me about something, pick up the fucking phone or drop me an email. If you need to meet, one of us will drive and meet, I fuckin' hate meetings where it's not everyone in the same room, so you can gauge the intangibles. I don't mind a little tech, but there is such a vested interest in building tech into so much shit that doesn't need it. We have about a dozen ways to do interoffice communication, and training on all of them, but I will walk over to your office to talk to you. I find technology very overrated, stuff like voice mail and email, sure. The rest, bah.

I find it very irresponsible for people in the public sector to be blowing money on stuff like that. While there might be a bit of marginal utility, it's certainly not worth much money or time. I think it's way more responsible to sit squarely behind the tech curve and let things get worked out before you adopt them. Fuck, ipods weren't very good until the fifth gen or so.

Told you I'm a luddite  My Director loves hearing my take on technical meetings, because I tend to be a good bullshit/trend detector. Although she's on fucking facebook and twitter now, too. When she asks me what I need for a technical budget, I tell her to buy more books. It's a library. Not a library TWO POINT OH (srsly, that's what they call them now).

[Venkman]

As a footnote of progress, yea, SL will be in the history books, but it is not going to be the future of cyberspace. It's whoever makes a better one. LL has had five and a half years to rip apart and rebuild to lower the barrier of entry, but they'd rather the niche audience for which SL continues to appeal do all the work. And that audience is not interested in designing a UI and world with mass appeal. This makes it perfect for people predisposed to learning new things, but completely inappropriate to corporations, where the difference between "disinterested lowest common denominator" and "tech savvy" is much broader.

I also disagree with the assertion that this will be the future of browsing (though a few years back I did think the same). The problem is that SL is replete with too much simulcrum, too many restrictions in the game based on literally translating real world conditions. It's like Neo in the Matrix before he unlocked his inner Chi. You go into SL, you see a ground plane with builds and people walking around. Disclosure (with Michael Douglas) was a fun movie, but ultimately a for-fun-only representation at odds with how an actual database would be represented.

That's why I can't see corporate meetings in SL or anything like it take off. Great, so instead of whipping out Cisco Telepresence or even ooVoo with a whiteboard and shared Powerpoint, I'm going to log into a virtual avatar to sit in a virtual chair to watch a Powerpoint projected onto a virtual wall? Even in a next-gen graphics engine and a perfectly wonderful client with three keystrokes between logging in and watching the show, where exactly is the net gain?

Only sci-fi movies need to visually depict data on screen.

My own vision of future data interaction is more in line with depictions like The Last Mortal Man or Mindstar Rising. In my future, you're brain merely filters the aggregate knowledge of everyone jacked into the same p2p network, and you end up just "knowing" a thing at the moment you need to.

[raydeen]

I'd be into SL if only to piss off and annoy. And I'm not usually like that. I need an Aqualung avatar and a Rick Astley avatar depending on my mood.

[Numtini]

I agree. I don't think SL is more than a blip and I'm actually an active player and have been for the last two years. It has its benefits, it supports some interesting RP communities, but for the most part it's the smut that's drawing people in. The whole virtual world concept is very limited for presenting and exchanging information. It's like a corporation flying their boardmembers somewhere for a meeting and hosting it in the form of a bunch of sketches rather than sitting around a corporate meeting room.

I would disagree with Darniaq that Linden is catering to their niche, I just think they are so incompetent that they can't advance things very far. They've tried repeatedly to sell it to corporations, added feature for that market, and get almost nowhere. The effect is the same, but I don't think anyone who isn't a regular participant in SLreally gets how dysfunctional a company SL is. These guys are beyond amateur hour.

[HaemishM]

I would disagree with Darniaq that Linden is catering to their niche, I just think they are so incompetent that they can't advance things very far. They've tried repeatedly to sell it to corporations, added feature for that market, and get almost nowhere. The effect is the same, but I don't think anyone who isn't a regular participant in SLreally gets how dysfunctional a company SL is. These guys are beyond amateur hour.

This. The chucklefucks running Linden Labs have a great concept, and NO FUCKING IDEA how to manage, design, maintain or update the thing, and they have really shitty ideas for "monetizing" it. Their architecture is beyond weak, their UI drives me batshit insane (and I'm a guy who specializes in learning UI's), their server technology is balls, their client technology is busted balls. Linden is Vanguard-levels of amateur hour, only they get some people so hot and bothered that they have managed to make money - having pr0n helps.

[Merusk]

I saw a story a month or two ago about how corporate sponsors were beginning to drop out of SL, finally.  I don't recall if it was here or NPR.

Basically, the companies who bought-in to the buillshit finally realized that there was not going to be this rush of millions to SL like happend with the web.  So the 1-2 guys they had maintaining their full-time virtual store were using up valuable dollars that could be paid to actual, productive employees.   Axe them, toss the money at the webstore or bonuses and everyone except LL is happy.

Sl is overrated because it's stupid. As we've realized and integrated e-mail, the web, cell and texting into our daily lives the realization came that we don't need stupid little avatars running around doing all of this for us.  It's much easier to browse to that page, type that e-mail or whatever yourself instead of telling a little avatar to do it.   If you really need to see a face, there's  <-- Those avatars for the web boards, webcams, and Pics for text and e-mail.

[Mrbloodworth]

The educational world is HUGELY into SL. They tend to need:

a) realtime chat
b) voice chat
c) slideshows
d) privacy
e) scriptability for varied needs
f) free
g) no infrastructure setup

Name another virtual world where they get that?

Multiverse Quite a number of others too (i just don't recall them right now, some are not related to "games" and for industrial simulation/training), i recently did a proposal on platforms to use when my company was considering bidding on a new project in military simulation and/or internal corporate virtual meeting space. Multiverse meets your requirements in varying degrees.

Second life is the worst choice for such things. Considering most clients, and install requirements. AKA: Second life runs like ass on business/military supplied machines. Gaming machines, different story (still ass, depending where you go).

[tazelbain]

Multiverse looks dead.  A bunch of demo.  But no one ever did anything with it.  And now things hold while they develop a flash client.

[Mrbloodworth]

Multiverse looks dead.  A bunch of demo.  But no one ever did anything with it.  And now things hold while they develop a flash client.

Publicly. Multiverse has the potential to be privately run and served off the "network" they have, you won't find them using the client or search. I know of 2 government projects using it.

Off-Network: Same as Internal, but Multiverse provides you a custom installation of the master server that you operate within your organization's firewall. This solution provides ultimate security because the entire process occurs within your secure firewalled network. Your world is not on the Multiverse Network; your customer database is totally separate from the Multiverse master database.

[WindupAtheist]

Sl is overrated because it's stupid. As we've realized and integrated e-mail, the web, cell and texting into our daily lives the realization came that we don't need stupid little avatars running around doing all of this for us.

This. Exactly this.

I'm sorry Gibson fans, but "cyberspace" is someplace to kill orcs and talk dirty, and it's never really going any further than that.

[Slyfeind]

Sl is overrated because it's stupid. As we've realized and integrated e-mail, the web, cell and texting into our daily lives the realization came that we don't need stupid little avatars running around doing all of this for us.

This. Exactly this.

I'm sorry Gibson fans, but "cyberspace" is someplace to kill orcs and talk dirty, and it's never really going any further than that.

Dude! Checking e-mail with an avatar in a virtual neighborhood and a little virtual mailbox may take ten times the effort, but it's IN THREE DEE!!!

[Ghambit]

The educational world is HUGELY into SL. They tend to need:

a) realtime chat
b) voice chat
c) slideshows
d) privacy
e) scriptability for varied needs
f) free
g) no infrastructure setup

Name another virtual world where they get that?

http://evo.caltech.edu/evoGate/index.jsp   <---kicks ass

IMO, Augmented Reality will be the next real iteration of this tech.  The only thing that needs to occur is lowering the cost of the display technology and getting portable computing to the masses.  Once that happens, people will be free to go about their business unencumbered by their desks... along with experiencing a semi-virtual world overlayed onto something real, rather than getting lost in something unreal.  Add in 3d web navigation and ur done.

[Mrbloodworth]

The educational world is HUGELY into SL. They tend to need:

a) realtime chat
b) voice chat
c) slideshows
d) privacy
e) scriptability for varied needs
f) free
g) no infrastructure setup

Name another virtual world where they get that?

http://evo.caltech.edu/evoGate/index.jsp   <---kicks ass

IMO, Augmented Reality will be the next real iteration of this tech.  The only thing that needs to occur is lowering the cost of the display technology and getting portable computing to the masses.  Once that happens, people will be free to go about their business unencumbered by their desks... along with experiencing a semi-virtual world overlayed onto something real, rather than getting lost in something unreal.  Add in 3d web navigation and ur done.

java.... ICK. Thanks though, had not seen this.

[Ratman_tf]

Sl is overrated because it's stupid. As we've realized and integrated e-mail, the web, cell and texting into our daily lives the realization came that we don't need stupid little avatars running around doing all of this for us.

This. Exactly this.

I'm sorry Gibson fans, but "cyberspace" is someplace to kill orcs and talk dirty, and it's never really going any further than that.

Dude! Checking e-mail with an avatar in a virtual neighborhood and a little virtual mailbox may take ten times the effort, but it's IN THREE DEE!!!

[Ratman_tf]

I would disagree with Darniaq that Linden is catering to their niche, I just think they are so incompetent that they can't advance things very far. They've tried repeatedly to sell it to corporations, added feature for that market, and get almost nowhere. The effect is the same, but I don't think anyone who isn't a regular participant in SLreally gets how dysfunctional a company SL is. These guys are beyond amateur hour.

This. The chucklefucks running Linden Labs have a great concept, and NO FUCKING IDEA how to manage, design, maintain or update the thing, and they have really shitty ideas for "monetizing" it. Their architecture is beyond weak, their UI drives me batshit insane (and I'm a guy who specializes in learning UI's), their server technology is balls, their client technology is busted balls. Linden is Vanguard-levels of amateur hour, only they get some people so hot and bothered that they have managed to make money - having pr0n helps.

I think without the pr0n, SL would have vaporized long ago.

[sidereal]

Yes, SL has become a weird mix of furries and librarians.

[raydeen]

That made my day. I remember when that came out for the PC there was a huge outcry as it didn't support Super VGA or VESA out of the box (or something like that) and they had to release a patch to support THOUSANDS of colors (32,767). Of course I don't know if any video card back then would have handled it or looked like anything but a total mess. I remember trying to play anything with a pallet above 256 would sloooooow down to a slideshow. But then 3DFX came along and we all lived happily ever after.

[Venkman]

It's always a sign of a post that was just too damned long when every post that follows talks about the various parts of it. Just throwing that out, because I want to win! 

[Furiously]

I'm suspect in this conversation. As I am currently running a money making (about a dollar a day) business in SL. But I am looking at some of the things companies outside of linden labs are doing.

Realxtend.org is probably the most interesting. In terms of modernizing the client.
Makehuman.org also has some potential to change a lot of things.

I think Linden Labs is still aiming for large corporations and that might explain why they are being such a conservative company while their user base is so...liberal.

[Numtini]

I think the real problem with most of these open source things is that there's no way to have a semi-stable currency without a single owner game. And I really don't think we would see nearly the same number of user creations without the financial rewards--even if they only amount to more than paying tier for more than a few dozen people.

[TripleDES]

I think Linden Labs is still aiming for large corporations and that might explain why they are being such a conservative company while their user base is so...liberal.

The things I've seen when I was playing that game with W-Hat (back when they still had a semblence of being related to SA) were anything but liberal. SL is just a bunch of basement dwelling transsexual whiny faggots.