A Glimpse At The Ghost Of Metaverse Past

Back on March 1st 2006 Philip Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka presented a Google Tech Talk : Glimpse Inside a Metaverse: The Virtual World of Second Life. I’ll embed the video at the end of the post, it’s around an hour long but it gives a fascinating insight into where Second Life was over eight years ago.

An interesting point to note is that the presentation demonstrates Second Life in action but due to a database upgrade, the demonstration of Second Life could not be shown on the main grid. This exemplifies well the improvement in maintenance practices that we see in Second Life today, that sort of downtime generally doesn’t happen these days.

The video demonstrates well why Second Life was considered to have such great potential. Philip talks of the economy, the growth in land mass and how people could earn money and withdraw it via Paypal, which they can still very much do today. There’s no shipping involved in this sort of commerce, there’s no Visa requirements to work in an international market. Things have of course changed recently with identification requirements being more strictly applied, but you still don’t get dinged with shipping fees and you still don’t need a work Visa. However it should also be noted that a question is raised about IRS regulations, so even back in 2006 it seems that these things were on the horizon, people could see it coming.

The video demonstrates some of the creations of Starax, especially his wand which at the time, Cory suggested. cost USD$30.00, which took Philip by surprise although he does say how cool the wand was. He also discusses the success of Anshe Chung. There’s also an interesting point to be noted in terms of demographics. Back then the population was 43% female with an average age of 32 and an international population of 25%. I have no idea what the demographics are today but it would be interesting to see them.

The answer as to why Second Life didn’t have a standard scripting language such as LUA is answered here. However there were plans, after implementing Mono, to move towards using more standard scripting languages. Interestingly High Fidelity has gone a different route and is embracing Javascript and the hints are that Linden Lab’s next generation virtual world will also use a more standard scripting language.

There’s an interesting comparison between the World Of Warcraft model of using shards and Second Life’s one world model. Philip suggests that Second Life at the time was about as big as one World Of Warcraft shard. He also gives a nod to the fact that Eve-Online has a one world design, rather than shards.

A really good point with this video is that is explains a lot about how Second Life works, in pretty easy to understand terms. Cory describes the Second Life client as being “Incredibly dumb“. This isn’t an insult to viewer developers or the excellent strides they have made, it’s simply pointing out that a lot of Second Life’s work takes place server side, that content is streamed rather than stored locally. Now this is back in 2006 when the high speed broadband many of us experience today simply wasn’t available and yet, it worked.

However this was partially because by 2006 the cost of bandwidth had got a lot cheaper. Philip suggests that five years earlier they would probably have been out of business due to the cost of bandwidth.

Then Philip says “We don’t see this as a game, we see it as a platform that is in many ways better than the real world“. He’s talking about how people can socialise, share ideas, share content and build communities here. Whereas some people will disagree with that statement it does without doubt exemplify one of the key advantages of the virtual world experience in that people from all around the world can easily share ideas, content and community spirit. This is extended later into the discussion with regards to live music and I certainly feel that live music and even comedy will provide a good use case for virtual worlds of the future.

There’s discussion about graphics and why the graphics in Second Life were not as good as say, those from Unreal Engine. Philip explains why that was and predicted that Second Life would catch up as graphics technology developed. This of course was before the rise in mobile computing.

There’s a discussion about the permissions system with Cory pointing out that you could set an item to not be able to be transferred, or you could create an item to not be copied but you could not do both. This, Cory points out, was contentious and it remains contentious to this very day but the video also points out the realities that there are limitations as to just how much protection can be applied to content. This is an issue today too and is unlikely to change in the near future.

There’s discussion about parental controls and Philip makes a good case for the old teen grid where he points out that adults didn’t usually last long on the teen grid because “They don’t speak teen“, in other words, they were spotted quite easily. He also points out that if people were suspected of being underage on the main grid, they would have to provide identity documentation but he also makes a really interesting comment that possibly explains why the teen grid was eventually discarded and why future virtual worlds are unlikely to have a teen grid : “Maybe we’ll get so big that it will be difficult to do that or it will be handled by users, or something.”

I suspect that if virtual worlds grow the way developers hope, that it will be users who control whether teens are allowed in their places and not the developers. I certainly suspect that will be the case with an open source distributed virtual world such as High Fidelity precisely because of the nature of its design.

Something really interesting that I discovered via this video is that before users were banned from Second Life, they went before a citizen board for review before getting kicked out. That’s both scary and interesting.

What’s really impressive about this video is that although it’s more than eight years old, the challenges facing any new virtual world are similar at a core level. Obviously over time habits have changed and the rise of mobile computing means that different approaches will need to be taken in some areas, whereas the rise of VR devices such as the Oculus Rift mean that there are new ways to engage with users. However before going forward, it’s really a good idea to be aware of the past and this video creates a really good starting point for any new virtual venture in terms of the challenges the devs are likely to face.

Tweet