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Interview with Mitch Kapor, concentrating on gestural interfaces for Second Life
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Linden Lab wants to end support for Panther - I say yes please.
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Yet another tool for creating sculpties.
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Some really, really lovely images.
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Virtual Worlds London call for papers
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A new release of the best client of the lot.
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Step by step introduction to making sculpted prims in-world.
Back in October, Daniel Schiappa of Microsoft noted that Microsoft’s virtual world play would come within a year - or it wouldn’t come at all. And, at last month’s Gartner Symposium IPXPO, the company’s chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie gave a strong indication that the latter is true.
However, that doesn’t mean that Microsoft is out of the virtual space at all. As Virtual World News reports, the company is very interested in one particular aspect of virtual worlds: Mirror worlds.
Mirror worlds are an attempt to recreate the real world in virtual space. Imagine the next-generation of Google Maps, which might allow you to wander through a photorealistic virtual London. By contrast, virtual worlds like Second Life take the opposite approach: the only attempts to model reality are created by users themselves.
The level of user interaction with a mirror world is, of necessity, also more limited. While Second Life might allow me to recreate London with the face of Big Ben changed to a bright yellow smiley, a mirror world could only every allow this kind of change as a temporary event. The point of them is that they reflect reality, permanently.
Mundie describes his companies interest in mirror worlds this way:
“Today there’s the physical world we all live in, and then there’s people experimenting with virtual reality type things like Second Life and other stuff. I personally don’t think that that kind of things is going to get huge traction. What I do think is the combination of sophisticated displays and direct manipulation and the ability to have the real world presented in a 3D environment as a navigation metaphor, such a you can move freely between things that you would do if you were in the physical world and doing some of the same things, whether it’s going shopping, meeting friends, or whatever. You’re doing it within a 3D virtual world, but that world is just a model of the actual world. That’s going to be quite interesting.
We’ve looked at moving in this direction. Some of the photosynth technology [a tool that allows users to turn photos into immersive environments] that we’ve released over the last year and a half, I think is a precursor to allowing everybody to participate in the process of sifting up a representation of different levels of the physical world and then using them as part of the computing paradigm.”
Ultimately, mirror worlds are the equivalent of the walled gardens which service providers attempted to foist on “their” customers during the early years of the Internet. Mirror worlds attempt to make the virtual experience familiar, which is to try to control the user’s experience.
Instead of allowing the imagination its full play, mirror worlds force users to use their imaginations in other ways, seeking what amount to virtual temporary autonomous zones within the world. As in reality, anyone wanting an alternative has to learn to live in the cracks between places, rather than within the mainstream.
Can user-created virtual worlds and mirror worlds coexist? To a certain degree, yes. However, one thing that the development of the public Internet has taught us is that, given the choice, users will gravitate towards sites which give them the opportunity for deep involvement, rather than a more linear, tied approach.
Microsoft missed the boat over user-generated content. Now, it seems, it is likely to miss the boat over virtual worlds, too.
Tags: craig mundie, Microsoft, mirror worlds, Second Life, Virtual Worlds
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Millions of Us spending lots of money to show that virtual worlds have decent ROI.
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Yowzah! Some truly amazing lighting effects in SL.
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An utterly brilliant post from Tateru on the recent Linden Lab trademark kerfuffle. The change to ToS to support trademark claims is stupid, short-sighted, and probably unenforceable. You’d think that Linden Lab had learned about unenforceable ToS…
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Second great blog post of the day from Tateru - this time on abuse reports, and the lack of response to them.
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Some great tips on how to get your store to the top of the search rankings.
I don’t think that Linden Lab meant to create quite such a blogstorm with its announcement of the inSL logo programme, but there’s no doubt that this is exactly what it’s done. With some bloggers talking about three day strikes, and many others echoing the message that Linden Lab has overstepped the mark, it’s pretty clear that this is a mess - and one which the Lab will have to deal with.
As I’ve pointed out, the reality of the situation is actually pretty uncontroversial. The licensing programme itself is just about ensuring that companies can advertise their presence in SL without having to use Linden Lab’s trademarks, which is the kind of thing that gives the average business lawyer hives.
However, the way it’s been expressed has lead many people to believe that they will have to adopt onerous conditions whenever they even mention Second Life. Again, as I’ve pointed out, this is largely not true: unless your business name or web site name uses one of the Linden trademarks in it, you’ll probably have to do precisely nothing different. Publications with “Second Life” in the title will probably need to adopt appropriate disclaimers. No one will be able to attempt to use Linden trademarks to suggest they’re associated with the Lab. As Ciaran Laval has pointed out, this is exactly the same rules as any other trademark.
Clearly, Linden Lab communicated this badly. But that’s not enough to explain how bad this is looking for them. Why are so many people willing to believe that Linden Lab actually wants to kick the hundreds of bloggers, writers, and content creators who contribute to Second Life’s success in the teeth?
The answer lies in the complete dearth of proper community relations management and an utter failure to have any kind of real blogger engagement programme. This is something that’s been building for months - and to anyone who’s been following the progress of the Lab, it’s no surprise.
For a company based on building communities, Linden Lab is surprisingly opaque. Partly, this is down to a failure to develop its sense of what its community is since the days when Philip Rosedale could hold “town halls” with the reasonable expectation that everyone in-world could attend without the servers falling over. The original way that Linden Lab communicated with its customers was in-world - but that only works for a few people at a time, and utterly fails with an active community in the hundreds of thousands.
(As an aside, I suspect that this is why Linden Lab spends such a lot of its time working with small groups in-world, such as the Second Life Architecture Working Group. Small groups work in-world. The problem is, of course, that it’s all too easy to see such groups as “feted inner cores” and assume the Lab doesn’t care about anyone else.)
Nothing has replaced in-world meetings as the core part of Linden Lab’s communications programme. While the company has a blog, it is mostly formulaic corporate comms with a dash of hints and tips. It has grown well beyond the point where a single blog is enough - every senior executive should have a blog, and communicate things which impact their area directly. With the Linden blog, you never feel like you’re talking to a person - which is the point of blogging.
Worse still is the apparent lack of a real community/blogger engagement programme. For a company like Linden Lab, blogger engagement is probably the most important kind of PR. And while individual Lindens often appear happy to talk about their specific area, no one appears to be doing this job for Linden Lab as a whole. This is shown by the fact that, 48 hours after this issue started brewing, there is no clarification or response from Linden Lab over the issue.
Good blogger relations - heck, just good old fashioned PR work - could have nipped this one in bud. That hasn’t happened, and it’s now getting to the point when a minor clarification may no longer be enough to stop the damage.
So where does Linden Lab go next? The first thing it needs to sort out is this mess, which it can do by officially clarifying things. If its lawyers can’t agree on a form of words which express the simple fact that you don’t need to follow every instance of “Second Life” on your blog with “TM” then it should fire its lawyers. Other companies’ legal teams manage this daily.
Second, it needs to start a serious blogger outreach programme, to ensure that it gets feedback from some of the most vocal members of its community - people who’s work influences thousands of opinions. And blogger engagement means listening as much as talking - something that should never be forgotten.
Finally, it needs to start being a more marketing-focussed company. So far in its short life, it has mostly been a technology development team: marketing was really a “pig in lipstick” role. The techies delivered the product: the marketers worked out how to market it. Now, it needs to learn the real lesson of marketing - put customers first, including in your development process. And that means learning a lot more about the community, who are, after all, its customers.
UPDATE: Grace McDunnough has some sensible advice for Linden Lab on how to handle a passionate user base.
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Digado points out the mistakes that Mercedes made when bringing it’s luxury brand to Second Life: it removed one of the key elements of the luxury.
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Vint Falken’s review of Myrl, the new social network for virtual worlds.
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Nicky Ree on the experience of having designs stolen in Second Life, and how the DMCA notification system in world is less than ideal.