BusinessWeek has an excellent article on IBM’s business makeover which discusses how, as their operation evolves, it’s becoming less grounded in real products (which are more and more just commodities) and turning increasingly to “virtual” services. This provides an excellent example of the flipside of VR: as virtual worlds and simulations become increasingly realistic with graphics and simpler interfaces, real world operations are migrating towards them as well. I think there’s a collision on the horizon – a “rebang”, if you will. Even if IBM fails, the trend is there. Now let’s wait and see if Big Blue can successfully shed that earthbound hardware heritage.
Tag Archives: #metaverse
Going Virtual
Sooner or later this was going to happen: I’m now the proud owner of virtual beachfront property (probably as close as I’ll ever get to owning real waterfront turf). I’ve sent emails out which include a snapshot similar to the above, and now need to begin terraforming I suppose… well, after I figure out what I intend to build.
This certainly doesn’t look anything like the images of cyberspace I imagined while reading Gibson’s short stories (collected in the excellent “Burning Chrome“) or how Robert Longo depicted one of those shorts in the movie “Johnny Mnemonic“. I’ll admit I wonder why that is. There’s an easy answer: we just aren’t prepared for 3D spatial orientations that challenge years of experience about what we understand as “reality”. And then there might be another, simpler explanation altogether: we like sand and sun. Even if it’s virtual.
Stranger In A Strange Land
As mentioned in a prior post, I’ve been spending some time exploring Second Life’s virtual world. One expects that objects, graphics, animations, physics and the rest improve in this corner of cyberspace just like they do most everywhere else. That’s just technology, and videogames have certainly been showing off some amazing things lately. But what I’m finding interesting is how real people interact with – and through – this virtual world.
Take for example the above image, “sittin’ at the crick…”. For lack of a better description, this is a “photograph” snapped by an SL “resident”, Jellybean Madison. She (apparently) posted it online from within the SL simulation using a third party tool called Snapzilla. I’ll let them explain it:
Snapzilla [is a] new feature from SLUniverse that allows everyone in Second Life to share their snapshots with the world, directly through SL. Downloading snapshots to your hard drive and then uploading them is hardly spontaneous. With Snapzilla, you just click the Snapshot button in Second Life and choose Email Postcard and you are on your way to sharing your snapshots.
An image posted and given a caption? Emailed to others? Shared? Why? I don’t know exactly because I’m too new to the experience. But I have noticed that there are other, similar tools in beta which send images to sites like Flickr, possibly the best known and most popular image-hosting website on the net. So these snapshots will be seen by a large audience; many of whom have never been inside a virtual reality sim. Furthermore, in as much as all images online are really nothing more than colored pixels, these “photos” are as real to the strangers who view them as the “real” photos taken in meatspace using a 35mm. And when the graphics improve in years to come, who’s to say what’s valid and what isn’t?
But it doesn’t stop with photos. I was checking my email yesterday and discovered that an “in-world” message had been forwarded to my real world email. Lines blur. It’s one thing to know of this interactivity and another to experience it. And even more interesting are the number of independent projects coded by residents for doing things like tracking virtual world assets (which have real world value in many cases) outside the simulation. Now that sounds like the kind of thing Microsoft should build into their Xbox 2 feature set.
A Second Look at Second Life
Since this blog only went “live” yesterday (I’d disabled it’s pingback features until then) I was surprised to see someone outside my small circle of mostly disinterested acquaintances had stopped in to visit. Curious to know who, I paid Setpoint Originator a visit. It appears we have some things in common. More importantly, I noticed the two previous entries concerned Second Life, and so decided to pay a long overdue visit to its homepage and some other related sites. The one that really struck me was this blog entry over on Wonderland. The “Virtual Hallucinations” example reinforces my previous thoughts on Molyneux’s “The Room” experiment in that there are surprising (and perhaps startling) ways to use this technology, and makes me wonder if something similar couldn’t be coded into SL… perhaps the ability to create enclosed environments wherein more dramatic experimentation can take place. Just a thought. But of actually greater interest to me now are some of the virtual economic and social issues transpiring there. Worth a third look…tomorrow after a good night’s rest.
Emerging Creative Amplifiers
What a great tag: “creative amplifier”. Wish I could claim it. But all I did was hijack it from Will Wright, the Creator of reportedly the most popular videogame in history – “The Sims“. Today Gamespot has a synopsis of Wright’s presentation for his forthgaming game entitled “Spore”.
Holy cow. Not more than an hour ago I was (re)visiting Allegorithmic’s website; they’re a company which has been making procedural texture creation software for about a year now. With Wright’s game taking procedural content to unheard of levels, and all the other “creative amplifier” tools recently announced and/or released, I’m having a hard time not publicly declaring the imminent creation of the Metaverse. It seems as if all the major pieces to the puzzle are in place, with only their integration remaining. Now I’m just waiting for the announcement.