I've remarked more than once that the virtual world of Second Life reminds me of the web circa 1995. With its frontier like feel, marauding griefers, flashing neon spam, spinning logos and easily gamed Search tools it really does feel like stepping back in time many ways. You can add to that corporate confusion and academic head scratching. Hell even Second Life's "newspapers" seem to be straight out of 1988, more akin to ezines being published with desktop publishing software than the conduits of information they could be if the last 7 years of publishing, information and communication innovation hadn't apparently passed them by. For all of it's backwardness though, I firmly believe that it, or something very much like it, is the future of the web. You can count me amongst the believers, albeit with a few reservations.
I've also spent time over the last few months finding out about other virtual world projects, 3D social spaces and many things in between. I've had the priviledge of speaking with people like Trevor Smith of Ogoglio and discovering Raph Koster of Areae and talking to various other open source projects. I've even gone as far as to forsake my beloved Linux box in favor of a Mac so that I can explore even more worlds. Why? Because I'm not certain that Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life, will be the company that ultimately gets us to Gartners predicted 80% virtual world usage.
Neither it seems, is Cisco Systems Christian Renaud, who in one of the most important blog posts we've seen on the subject in months, goes into great details on the state of play in the business of virtual worlds. Where are we now? Right back at the beginning, right back at the BBS.
Christian asserts that the current state of play is one where "successful early entrants will attempt to fortify their position as much as possible against new competitors", which is what we see with Linden and Mindark, makers of Entropia Universe. It's also one in which "underfunded startups and early casualties will start agitating for open standards between worlds", see Ogoglio and Croquet. One thing is for sure, a walled garden approach will not win out long term. He knows it, I know it, you know it and Linden know's it. Despite having repeatedly stated that the server code for Second Life will go open source, that isn't going to happen anytime in the near future. And this, leaves the whole field wide open still.
In fact, we're nowhere even close to what for now remains a utopian dream of an open Metaverse. One in which your Avatar can travel, with belongings and wallet, to virtually any other world, unhindered by proprietary standards, closed systems and incompatible software.
According to Christian, the timeline will pan out something like this:
- Right now we have one major player, few minor
- Entropia's recent China deal could be a game changer
- One year from now, 3 or 4 major players will be competing for customers on many fronts. They will also discover that a large part of their success may rely on how much data from outside of their world they can bring in. Think web services, RSS etc.
- 3-5yrs from now, attrition and consolidation will have boiled the market down to 2 or 3 big players. Customers are demanding standards, and interoperability
- Adoption = 20% Gartner got it wrong.
- 5-7 years from now, there will be a "rich immersive standard" with Avatar portability, but the major players, like Netscape and Microsoft before them, will snipe at eachother with proprietory extensions to those standards at the expense of users for some time to come.
Personally I think 5-7 years before we see a "rich immersive standard" is over optimistic, but hell I'm game, and good on him for being brave enough to post such a detailed prediction of the future of the 3D web.
There'll be a lot of pain before this space matures, but we live in interesting times.
Based on what I know about Croquet, Areae, and Ogoglio I believe 5-7 years is not optimistic enough. I do agree that there will be a lot of pain, though.
There is a real question of how your identity will travel with you across worlds and spaces. IBM seems to be interested in these questions according this interview.
Whether or not VWs will see it in their interest to use some central repository of identity information and other data is the real challenge.
There's only ONE argument that I can think of against this timeline: there's really no precedent for being able to walk out of one company's app and into another's holding the same data set. Web 2.0 doesn't do this at all yet. You can't bring your Blogspot blog to Wordpress, for instance... at least not easily. You'd think you could. Facebook doesn't transport to MySpace in any way.
Not that I think that matters. The virtual worlds' residents want this. It'll happen because there's a demand. It's just... it's nothing we've ever seen. There's no model.
I'm curious . . .
Onder Skall pointed out, there is no way to go from one TEXT based social web site to the next. Why would going from one 3D based world to the next be easier? Why would the entrenched VW players do it? And why would users want it? I mean in the future. I know they want it now so that they can try out all of the different worlds. Later when the use of this technology is more comfortable and widespread, users may believe it less than wise to let their "GetAJobWorld3D.com" profile and avatar EVEN TOUCH their "ManSheHasBigBoobsWorld3D.com" profile and avatar.
Also, the closest analogs to this that I can find are the social net space and the IM space. Interoperability in both of these spaces has been tepid at best. This is in the face of SOARING user demand for said interoperability. Even though XMPP is here and it is robust, the big guys don't implement it. Why will the VW space be any different? That is, given an open spec, why will the big guys implement it?
What about going between worlds with fundamentally different mechanics?
And last, but DEFINITELY not least, I am assuming you guys know that Tripp Hawkins holds the patent for going between different 3D virtual spaces. Further, judging by the article, I assume you have reason to believe that he has, or at some point will, place this patent in the public domain. It would be helpful if this knowledge was shared with the rest of us. Are you guys aware of any statements by him regarding this issue? It is kind of key to how things develop. Implementing this stuff takes time, and that patent is putting a lot of entrepreneurs off of solving the problem.
Not trying to challenge you guys, it's just that I have precious little time to come up to speed on this space. I am coming up to speed fast, I just like to ask for the opinions of people who seem to be coming to a different conclusion than me. It is always possible that I missed something.
I think you ask these questions from the point of view of the big players now. Which is exactly what Christian is saying: There's just no reason for them to cooperate, they're too busy fortifying their footholds in the space right?
In the future, the benefit of standards will be the same as the benefit on the 2D web. Right now i can go to almost any website on the internet with a standard browser. IE, with the same viewer...
I didn't actually know about the patent. One would assume that it's not worth the paper its written on, as though im certainly no lawyer, it sounds patently ridiculous :)
In the future, I'd hope to be moving around the 3D web in a similar way to the way i move around the 2D web, but that's a long way off i think...
oh, and lastly.. go ahead and challenge the stuff you see here anytime. It's a appreciated!
Welcome to Metaversed!
Hey Nick,
Thanks for the link.
For starters, you caught me with my pants down before I could put up the requisite boilerplate disclaimer that my rants are entirely my own fault and not those of Cisco, but I guess Pandora's box has been kicked wide open by this point.....
There are a number of good points above (Bilbo0s, thanks for that catch on Tripp's patent. Gotta look that one up!). By default, I am only speaking from the vantage I have which is a guy who creates new businesses for a large networking company for a living, and not a game designer. Having said that, I see the same patterns of behavior emerge in each one, each time, and it's almost like watching someone perform updated versions of a Shakespeare play. You know that the heroine is going to die at the end, but the who/what/how she gets there is malleable.
At the MIT/IBM event this week, Joe Miller from Linden Labs was agitating that they are directing their engineering resources towards a new architecture (followed by the clickity-clack of a million blogs being fired up), and Mitch Kapor said 'open & standards based' so many times I thought it was his old Transcendental Meditation mantra. So, if the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have a problem, they are painfully close to an alcoholic 'moment of clarity'.
Now, when everyone drew the traditional Gartner adoption curve (early adopters/enthusiasts/mature/laggards) at the event, they placed virtual worlds much farther to the right (in enthusiast mode now) than I would actually do for another two or three years. We have, at most, a few hundred thousand users of all virtual worlds at any given moment (concurrency). Compare this to five or six million users of skype at any given moment and it puts it in perspective. The orchestra is still warming up, so it's too soon to say that the market architecture and dynamics have been decided.
Finally, I did get some good insight into OpenCroquet while in Cambridge as well. I like the approach on paper, but I need to delve deeper into the IP regime to determine if this is another case of the Linden opensource red herring or if it deserves it's own species.
Feel free to point out any and all of the flaws in my reasoning/logic/insufficient information!
Thanks again, Christian
I agree - 5 to 7 years is not optomistic enough... I would put the mark closer to three yrs. Especially when you consider that there are companies like vastpark who already have the software developed and interest from a broad range of developers and companies who can own and controll their own worlds that interconnect with eachother. its already started...