Cobalt leading to Croquet is the future IMHO and pretty much kills all the arguments I have read here. I will admit it is a paradigm shift but one that is long overdue.

Our kids will look at us in pity because of what we called a “browser.”

As for OpenSim- as I stated on another blog, “a step in the right direction, on broken feet.” Great for Second Life and drinkers of that Koolaid, but not scalable for the 3d web.

For DigitalFemme:
“I wonder if ExitReality will change the way mainstream views virtual worlds?”
Already I have witnessed this beginning to happen. Many of the students and enthusiasts of the 3d web give this a major “Wow” factor. The one button click to 3d a 2d webpage wins many (as I see on your website). Dean Jones and Danny Stefanic have done a great job with ExitReality.

Also as a builder for Vivaty/ExitReality, I am sure you know of the functionality that the tech they are built off of supports and why this puts them way ahead of SL.

For those SL “yes men” ignore this comment as you have the current standards for 3d on the web. Keep thinking that SL is doing something “revolutionary and new”, the open 3d web will continue to pass you by as you wait for this closed garden to set the foundation for the Metaverse. The captain of your ship is lost or lying, research for yourself.

Remember to support our Open Metaverse!

Second Life is pure fantasy, it is either for 47 years old Star Wars who never grow up, or spotty nerds that can develop Final Fantasy avatars of themselves to attracts the ‘Ladies’.
Most of the businesses that are based in Second Life, are only in there to test the waters, incase SL becomes the mother of all Virtual Worlds.

At least Second Life has more life in it then the truly dreadful Lively. But it still lacks that little something extra to become the true ‘Daddy’.

Check out the Company Sentinel Ave – and watch their interesting video that mixes live media with 3D Models on an Earth based platform.
This mix of virtual and reality is where I believe the biggest winner in this Virtual World Battle will succeed.

Either way, it’s a different approach than what Lively is going for. SL brings a whole world, Lively is just a bunch of individual chat rooms.

Second Life won big when lively came out and flopped as just another IMVU ripoff.

Second Life is where I want to invest my money when the time comes too.

I think there is a case to say that the mainstream audience just doesn’t have the patience to get fully ‘immersed’ into Second Life but the fun for me is the user created content and the fact I can buy/sell/share that content with others and pretty much randomly explore. Sure, I have a bunch of SL friends I keep in touch with but for me, the social side is just bonus, not the reason I keep returning to SL. It’s the virtual *world* bit about SL that’s so engrossing, its it’s holisticness and it’s ability to allow me to explore in so many ways.

If I was to socialise online then there’s already a whole heap of great 2D products available. I really can’t see why I would want to have a 2.5D virtual *apartment* just for chatting.

Call me a cynic but the whole 2.5D is not really about socialising or communication it’s about real world commerce and marketing.
2.5D has come about because marketers and big businesses haven’t got the skills to sell their real world products in a fully immersive world. They badly want to get in on the next technological advance but on their own terms. Sadly, I think this maybe what most people are tuned to accept and so I don’t see these 2.5D sites going away any time soon.

However, I don’t think any of the current batch of virtual worlds/apartments is any threat at all to the kind of people that regularly visit SL. It’s my belief that these people by and large want/have less involvement with the real world. I have a hectic work and social life in the real world and find SL a good place to hide and chill out from it all. I’m sure there are those in remote locations or with mobility issues that have the opposite problem and use SL to ‘get out and about’, if only virtually.

Even OpenSim is still a very long way off threatening SL. If it has any hope of taking over it will need rock solid micro-payments and intellectual property rights which I think will be much, much more difficult to deal with in an open environment. I also think OpenSim will be more like a 1.5 Life than a 2nd Life as the micro payments will more likely require much stricter evidence of identity and therefore eroding at another of SL’s drawing points, it’s relative anonymity.

Second Life is in a very unique position. None of the other systems can currently match feature for feature what Second Life has to offer. I have no doubt that other environments will be more suitable for other people and other tasks and maybe the mainstream will choose one of those but I think for the short and possibly medium term, for a total immersion style virtual world, like someone else mentioned earlier, the biggest threat to Second Life is Second Life itself.

The use cases for browser based worlds at the moment are fairly narrow. Something like the SL client however has a wide number of uses. Typically i’ll have six or so windows open in SL when working (including perhaps the mozilla browser compiled into the client) but still be completely present and responsive to whoever i am talking to (as well as some trickle IM conversations. If someone is present with me in SL and can see me, they know I am paying attention to them, or if not them, they can infer from where i’m looking what I am paying attention to.

In a browser, once you tab out of one page into another – all other tabs do not have your attention. This is a huge problem for browser based worlds, and can be seen often in lively rooms, full of people but empty of interaction – everyone’s AFK (away from the keyboard, or window more likely.)

When the strongest use case for virtual worlds is collaboration and communication, it makes sense to bring the web into the world rather than the world into the web. I think many folk reading this post – if asked to remember exactly what was on all their tabs/windows in their browser – would be hard pressed to recall them all without peeking. If one of those windows contained someone you were talking to previously waving their arms about madly for your attention…. would you even know?

You can only share the web and true uninterupted communication in a monolithic client – the browser itself is bloated enough already with all the things we expect it to do, and should probably not be required to support rich virtual worlds just yet – for both technical reasons and more importantly, because the user interface of browsers is a poor environment for virtual presence.

In some ways trying to predict this industry today is like trying to pick a winner in search in 1996. At the time, people were in a tizzy about who would win: Alta Vista? Yahoo? Web Crawler? Hotbot? The fact of the matter is no one knew then, as no one knows now. No one predicted Google in 1996 and had you mentioned it everyone would have shut you down in a clamor of jargon citing “first-mover advantage”, “network effects”, and “Yahoo’s insurmountable lead”. Oh how times of changed. Yet, none of that banter mattered, because Google came along and caused a disruptive shift. Which of us uses Excite or Lycos for search now?

I’m not saying that debating this isn’t worth our time. It is always valuable to have open dialog about competitive strengths and weaknesses. Personally, I love it. But we need to take all these comments with a BIG grain of salt because the industry hasn’t matured and won’t for several years. Virtual worlds don’t have to compete yet for customers because the customer sphere is still growing and their needs are constantly evolving. Many of your questions about mainstream uses of virtual worlds are valid because many of those cases haven’t been established yet or are still in fledgling phases. Once mainstream customer needs become more defined, THEN we’ll have a battle royale on our hands.

I, for one, am optimistic about this space because, as Alex mentioned, virtual worlds are a more native way for us to interpret information because we live in 3D! In a way, every human communication mechanism developed before virtual worlds is less compelling because it only gives us a slice of the perceptive capabilities we were all born with. Imagine if we started human history with virtual worlds, and I told you today about an invention I had that was made out of “paper” and had “words” written on it. I’d tell you that you could “imagine” things by reading these “words”, but you’d never really see these places, hear the sounds I described, or interact with the characters. You’d probably think I was insane because that would be so much more limited than the virtual world you’d been living with since ancient times. Maybe that’s why our kids today are reading less and spending more time in virtual spaces?

Sorry, that’s just a silly example, to underscore the point that we have yet to see how things shake out. Web-based browsers may be the killer technological edge virtual worlds need in the end – or ten years from now they may look an awful lot like Compuserve does today.

On the other hand, browser based 3D worlds such as SceneCaster and Vivaty are fully integrated with Facebook and offer a way to connect and embed the 3D world experience anywhere on the Web, including blogs and social networks. According to Adonomics, SceneCaster has over 1.9 million users. Whoa! And, I think they only lauched six or eight months ago. I think it took SL about 2 years to get to 2 million users.

Bottom line: integrate with the web, embed online, connect to existing social networking infrastructure. My dollars are on apps like SceneCaster rather than SL.

SL isn’t not necessarily great for online education. Because of your point,
“Remember, not everyone wants to create, script, explore.”
It depends on what we want students to learn. In our jargon that’s called learning outcomes.
Let’s look at what the majority of ppl using SL for education are actually using it for. They meet. They talk in audio or text. I’m guessing that can be done much more easily, accessibly and perhaps effectively in a web VW.

Some do use SL to do more than that, however few have exploited the affordances of SL to any measurably valuable learning outcome. One measure I use is time on tasks that lead to learning something. Spending 80% of your time “with the technology” to learn about literature, leaves you 20% to expend on the the literature. I’m oversimplifying to make a point. What few reports we have of student experiences using SL in learning, all say the same thing. Technology was hard, I spend a gazillion hours with it.

We need more educational assessment and evaluation of vw’s for learning and to better articulate learning and the role of various technologies in learning. What are students actually doing? With what, how and why?
I’m not a naysayer, only observing with a critical eye with the desire to do it better.

5 Years ago I remember tuning into 5 on 5 Counter-Strike matches with hundreds of other people. The exact details are a bit fuzzy right now, as is the name of the software but so many people are focused on re-inventing the wheel when all they have to do is look at the “gaming” technology through a different set of eyes. When people talk about the web they should be looking at the gaming industry as a mecca for early adopters and some of the best and brightest programming and design minds in the world. Instead most people can’t get past the miss-perception that it’s just a bunch of geeks playing 3d dungeons and dragons.

Look at Skype’s success and compare it to what Team Speak was doing for years. Look at flash intros and streaming music on websites, then compare that to the early versions on gaming guild sites in the late 90s.

BTW – the idea of webcams for the virtual world is a great one and I think would go a long way towards bringing in the general populace. Something for them to watch and explore without having to deal with learning a complex interface, etc.

The biggest obstacle to virtual worlds success and the associated technology is that the average user doesn’t have any clue what virtual worlds are or how advanced the technology already is.

The other obstacle facing Virtual Worlds is the question of – “what now?” Virtual worlds are still approached and designed with a game concept in mind. For them to go mainstream this has to change – a shift which is occurring.

Enjoying the discourse. Make sure to select the Virtual Worlds link on the right hand side when you review it. I write on a number of topics so it can make it slightly more difficult to find the relevant material.

On another side note, it’s a year old now, but I wrote my Honors Thesis on MMOGs and the relevance of virtual environments. It’s long, but what you might find the most interesting is some of the included respondent data: http://www.alex...0-%20Thesis.pdf

It’s far from scientific – but it gets into relational benefits etc.

When I visualize virtual worlds and mentally explore their value there are two ways that help me relate to it’s value.

The first is the Star Trek Holodeck. Virtual Worlds are the foundation for this type of technology and while not as immersive, a lot of the interactive technology is already their in MMOGs.

The second is ala Resident Evil and Star Wars – The holo-projector/conference room.

As early adopters, I don’t think we are as connected with the viewpoint of the general consumer as we would like to think. Because we see value in something, doesn’t mean the average consumer will (hell, I’m still shocked that the concept behind webvan didn’t make it). All I’m saying, is sometimes we need to take our heads outta the kool aid and look around… truly look around and see how the average consumer utilizes these technologies and applications that we “love”. And on this one, I think the consumer’s have spoken. Mass adoption isn’t happening and won’t… doesn’t mean there aren’t amazing uses for the tech, but mass adoption (imo) won’t happen. When people tried e-mail, they were hooked, getting them to try it was a struggle but once they did they saw the value. Millions of people have tried this thanks to the awareness in the press… the majority of which have since abandoned it…