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Metaverse the Next Big Thing?
CrashPanic writes to tell us TCS Daily has an article entitled "The Next Big Thing" which is about Multiverse. It does a good job of making the case for the evolution to a 3D web through the lens of the past history of Netscape. From the article: "Forces are coalescing that will produce a shift comparable at least to the spread of broadband. This change will have enormous financial, cultural and political repercussions, and the most interesting aspect of the coming transformation is that it will not be some new and unexpected thing. Rather, the Web for many will become the cliched 3D virtual reality that has been so overused as a literary and cinematic devise that most of us have forgotten how compelling that vision was when it first appeared."
This man uses several pages to talk about the origins of the web and how revolutionary netscape navigator was, but he doesn't even remember it's immediate predecessor NCSA Mosaic, or the predecessor of the web: gopher? And you expect me to think this person is more qualified to predict the future of the web, than someone else, such as my grandmother?
Imagine how much more useful your computer experience would be if you were able to design a virtual office as large or complex as you needed, and reach anything in it without leaving your chair.
My God! They have invented Microsoft Bob!
Patrick Cox should stick to making shoes.
The current web represents a huge investment in time, effort and money. It's not going anywhere for a long time.
Carpe Daemon
The computers most of us use give us a virtual desktop complete with files and crap scattered around. Minus spilled coffee I suppose.
It would be next to impossible to convince a non-technical person to virtually walk through a filing system to find their work when they could just browse to it normally without the 3D stuff.
But the desktop paradigm breaks down when we talk about portable devices. These devices are both much more limited (by being small) and much more powerful (because by their nature they have to be close to the user and their environment) that a totally new way of seeing the inside of your system may have traction.
William Gibson had this in Virtual Light. Neal Stephenson had it in Snow Crash. I think it will eventually come true.
One thing I am sure of. If I am going to have little LCD screens in my glasses I want to focus on infinity to look at them. Not sure how you do that without massive amounts of refractive material in the small space available.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
This sounds like change for the sake of change.
Until there is a real NEED for this, I don't see it happening.
That said, I would think that true VR will come to game consoles long before it comes to any generic computer. In the Console market, this seems like a natural evolution and not just some NEAT-O idea being added on for the sake of change.
The Metaverse, if anyone manages to create one that is truly decentralised, will co-exist with the web. If it's going to replace anything, it's going to replace IRC - a fun place to wander around aimlessly and meet new people, or to form a small group of friends you have things in common with regardless of your physical location. The web is a resource for finding or publishing information. The Metaverse is a communications tool for hanging out with friends and meeting new people.
Man, I love buzzword bingo.
Navigation in a 3D realm will always be awkward
Tell that to the MMORPG players. If you want to be able to go up and down rather than having gravity pulling you down to the ground, then think back to even early versions of UT - being able to zoom around the map in flying mode. Mouse - point. Aim. Whatever. WASD or arrow keys, go towards aim; this includes flying, flying backwards, going straight up or down, or looping round in a climbing spiral with a half twist at the top. That isn't "awkward". Any beginner user in any system has trouble; think of the expense of driving lessons. In a computerised 3D realm, you can zoom around and bump into things without harm, so the learning curve is easier, and the range of movement much higher.
Movement and navigation in a 3D realm is no barrier whatsoever.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
I remember going to a presentation at SGI UK in about 1997, which titled something like "Web 2.0 - the coming 3D web space". It was about how the next generation of the web would all be in 3D. I thought it was bollocks then, and I think it's bollocks today.
If 3D user interfaces were better then we'd be using 3D versions of desktop applications by now. Clearly Photoshop or Microsoft Word with a 3D interface doesn't make much sense, so why should it for online applications?
Second Life, or some successor, may be the thing to kickstart it. Already we're hearing about the likes of Sun and Reuters setting up camp there.
To really gain traction though it would need to be as free (speech and beer) as the web is, and so long as it's run by a single company, it probably won't be.
Of course, it's nonsense to say "the interface is too clumsy" or "it's impractical". The early adopters and a whole bunch of their friends are already there and doing just fine. If you think a keyboard can't handle graceful movements, you've never been aced in Unreal or Tribes by somebody who's shooting you from over there one second and kicking you ass from over there, the next. All while doing a victory dance and providing a running commentary on your p0wnage.
No, the interface is pleny rich, but of course it's going to get better.
And I'd be careful of thinking that the "fully immersive encounter suit might be the end game". There are those that thought that animated gifs would be the end game, too. "Someday, we will even have on-demand delivery of music on the internet. Maybe even video!". All whilst many of use are downloading The Departed via bittorrent, and the Goth-Rock boxed set, while watching The Daily Show via YouTube. Be very careful when thinking you can envision an "endgame".
You are welcome on my lawn.
Opencroquet
It is stunning, biggest drawback is needing openGL which for the life of me I can't get going under Linux. Thus I have only tested on win2k where it is great. Download and try it, it is smalltalk based. It is built for decentralised use. It is very scaleable. It also does not like NATs so thats is a slowing point.
It is probably not going to change the world this week, but once more people are working on it and it gets around NAT and if openGL was not so critticle then I am sure lots linked up worlds would start happening.
Words can not describe it properly, you got to try it. Have a look at the demo videos of interactions. Technically it scores well mostly because so little bandwidth is required for people to share worlds, it does require half decent machines for the computations but anything in the last few years is good enough (ie in the GHz range)
This is my sig, exciting huh!
"Movement and navigation in a 3D realm is no barrier whatsoever."
Agreed, I'm an old fart and have have taught quite a few other old farts to "appreciate" 3D games. I find it takes an hour or so to learn reasonably fluid motion in a 3D game (and thus start to experience the game), but once learned the skill will transfer to most other 3D games. I know it does because they keep on playing without the need to retrain every time they get a new game.
I think it is well worth the hour or two to learn the interface via practice, in the real 3D world most "noobs" can't even stand up for 10-15 months and many people never achive fluid motion even after a lifetime of practice!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I think the real problem here is that once we make the transition to a 3d virtual internet world, all those CS players will be running around shooting each other while we're at the cs_Office trying to get some damn work done. I don't want to work in a world where every 5 minutes we hear the bang of an AWP (and the subsequent "awpers r n00berz"), a constant "teams, teams, teams" and "teams are fine, teams are fine" all while getting frag and flash spammed. It just wouldn't be very productive.
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
If you're flying a plane, in real life, you're mostly working with two dimensions as well: you can turn left and right, and you can climb and descend. A small subset of planes and pilots can roll without changing direction, but normally that's not done; partial rolls are just a part of turning. There is also a throttle control, but that just controls how fast you're moving in your chosen 2D direction.
My point isn't that planes can't be controlled in 3D, it's that most of the time they aren't. I think the reason for that is because we evolved on a large and basically two dimensional space, and 2D navigation is simply more natural for us. That makes 2D controls easier to understand and use, even for navigating 3D spaces.
If you want an example of true 3D controls, think of a helicopter: up/down, left/right, forward/back, and apparently very difficult to control safely.
I have spent the last 5 years researching information visualization, recently gettinging into immersive (glasses, multi-wall, etc) visualization, and I can say without hesitation that his primary arguement holds no water whatsoever for most tasks relevant to computer users. "three dimensions, even virtual dimensions, are so much better than the two we experience on our monitors today" The problem is that the author makes no case for *why* this is. I don't want to get too far into the weeds here, but a fundamental concept of design is to strip abstract away irrelevant material (noise) to leave that which is important (signal) for the user. He is suggesting moving from a paradigm of 1 dimension (text is 1 dimensional, not two) and moving to four dimensions (time is as relevant as place when you start dealing with avatars, VWs, etc) The human perceptual system doesn't really work that way. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors left us with a hybrid 1D/2D ability, with limited capacity to perceive or reason in higher dimensionality. If we look at information absorbtion, we can do very well with 2d in the form of pictures, maps, etc, but if the story being told doesn't lend itself to that medium, then we are 1-dimensional learners. Reading and speaking are our primary communication mediums for complex ideas and they are completely linear. (time) It boils down to complexity. A virtual world adds unneeded complexity to simple phenomenon. (social networking, productivity applications, etc) Value is derived from making information MORE accessible, not less accessible in a prettier way.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
The main problem is that the web isn't two-dimensional, paper is.
Ticker-tape: One-dimensional (you read along).
Paper: Two-dimensional (read along, skip down/up)
MMORPGs: Three-dimensional (move in three dimensions)
Hypertext: non-linear - you can jump from the middle of one document to the middle of a completely different document.
Hypertext is effectively omni-dimensional, limited only by the number of links the author chooses to put in the document (and, increasingly, by the number of browser extensions, AJAX goodies, javascript favelets/bookmarklets, etc) that use the current clipboard selection or source of the page you're reading and offer you even more navigatioal options.
The web is multi-dimensional, not just two or three.
This is why everyone predicting "the death of the web" in favour of some "better" 3D option has always been wrong. Every time. (Anyone remember VRML?)
3D games won't kill hypertext, because a clunky "spatially-based" interface to a three dimensional world (bonus points: realised on a two-dimensional interface device!) is already worse than the effectively infinitely-dimensional system we're currently using.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself