Author Archive
May 7, 2006
Deja Vu – The 3D Web
I just got back from attending the bulk of the Metaverse Roadmap: Pathways to the 3D Web conference which was an attempt to bring the minds of various disciplines together to figure out how the Metaverse (3D Web) will come about over the next ten years. Since my online community development experience stretches back three decades and includes the creation of a half dozen avatar-world platforms and dozens of virtual worlds, they thought I might have something to contribute. I don’t know if they expected that I would join such notables as Raph Koster, Daniel James, Ethan Zuckerman in forming a sort of Skeptics Posse which spent a lot of energy trying to help direct some of the inexperienced techno-optimism into more useful/helpful channels. This rant is a continuation of that process.
Turned out that I was the only one attending that was a part of the last 3D Web techno-idealist wave (and colossal marketing mistake): VRML. And a lot of what I heard reminded me the writings, creations and speeches created 10 years ago by the the most influential people in VRML. The hype back then about the imminent “3D Web” was distracting a lot of companies, people, and money with promises of a much more accessible Internet through so-called natural metaphors and intuitive geographic (and stereographic) displays. At the time, Chip Morningstar, Doug Crockford a I wrote several articles and papers and made speeches critical of the Portable Avatars and 3D Is Always Better memes. More recently, this blog contains postings digging into the social, user-interface, and commercial challenges for multi-user 3D experiences.
When VRML 3.0 proposed a standard for a fundamentally broken distributed object computation model (tying behavior to polygons), we’d had enough and prepared a paper in response: Living Worlds Considered Harmful. About the time we finished it, VRML collapsed under its own weight, so we didn’t publish it – thinking, “Why whip the 3D Web dead horse?” Well, the Metaverse Roadmap conference taught my why you should always publish: You never know if that dead horse will rise again as some sort of zombie or phoenix. So, as of today, we’ve published the paper above for the next wave of application developers to consider. It’s never too late to learn from your elders. :-)
Below I am republishing my Wired rant from January 1996, which seems to be just as relevant today:
Now in 3-D!
3-D isn’t an interface paradigm. 3-D isn’t a world model. 3-D isn’t the missing ingredient. 3-D isn’t an inherently better representation for every purpose. 3-D is an attribute, like the color blue.
Any time you read or hear about how great 3-D is and how it’s going to change everything about computers and services, substitute the word blue for 3-D.
Don’t get me wrong; there are great applications for 3D. That’s not the point.
The point is that idealistic assumptions and techno-optimism are no substitute for understanding what people actually want and do when they interact with each other, whether via computers or in the physical world.
Let’s not repeat the path VRML took – that’d be a double waste and I won’t do it. Let’s figure out the problem first, and then look to see if a global-shared-3d-standard-UI-identity-object-system is the solution. So far, I haven’t found a single one.
February 22, 2006
Three Generations of Habitat Oracles
Today, there were three “Generations” of Habitat Chief Oracle’s in the same place at the same time. An “Oracle” was the term and title we used for in-world customer service representative. In MMOPGs, they’re often called Game-Masters. In the Habitats, they played a double role as mystical beings, endowed with power.
I was “The Oracle” and was embodied as a fountain in the public square in the original Lucasfilm’s Habitat from 1986-1988 and am pictured on the right.
Oracle Layza was Tomoko Kojima for Fujitsu Habitat I & II is Japan from 1990-2000 or so and is pictured in the center.
Oracle Vaserius (Jeff Douglas) worked in WorldsAway from 1994-1997 and is on the left.
You know what’s interesting? We all work for Yahoo! now.
January 9, 2006
Declaring Plats as Income on your 1040? Come again?
From TerraNova
“IRS advisers specializing in the arcane field of barter income recently offered the opinion that any trade of one virtual item for another–gold pieces for thick leather, uber drops for plat–could very well constitute a taxable, income-generating exchange according to the IRS’s rules on barter. ” — Julian Dibbell
It was one thing when people asserted that you should claim ebay-sales of rare virtual items as taxable on their 1040s, but this new claim goes beyond the pale.
I’ve been trying to stop this meme for awhile, including creating the KidTrade design to demonstrate that a ebay-virtual-goods-market is a design choice, gutting the argument that virtual goods are somehow transformed into “real property” just because these markets involve real money.
This meme must die.
Bruce Boston is attempting to get the IRS to give an official opinion on the topic. I’ve joined Bruce’s effort to end this silliness. There’s no way the IRS is going to tax gold-pieces spent in world, and this project should put that question to rest, for good. If your company would benefit from this clarification, please consider participating, or at least adding your voice.
[Comments disabled here, please direct comments either to the Terranova thread (for discussion of original question) or Bruce’s Blog (to participate in the IRS clarification project).]
December 20, 2005
The Robin Hood of Neopets [circa 2000]
Over on my Yahoo! 360° blog I have a new post recounting how my son was The Robin Hood of Neopets, at least breifly back in mid-2000.
November 21, 2005
A couple of 10 year-olds…
WorldsAway’s Dreamscape also recently celebrated 10 years of avatar community.
Of course, it all started with Lucasfilm’s Habitat and Club Caribe almost 20 years ago…
Of course, it all started with Lucasfilm’s Habitat and Club Caribe almost 20 years ago…
November 3, 2005
"Dude! We're gettin' the band back together."
Jeff (Vaz/Vaserius) Douglas has joined the Yahoo! communities team as the Product Manager for Chat. That makes two Habitat Lead Oracles, from two countries now on board: Vaserius in the US, and Layza in Japan.
As Cory Ondrejka said to me at a recent conference: “You think you might be concentrating a lot of the experience pool in one place?”
Damn straight!
October 19, 2005
Yume: A 15-Year Quest Completed
I’ve posted a little Fujitsu habitat history on my
Yahoo! 360 blog. Please leave any comments there.
Randy
September 9, 2005
Second Life Moves to Embrace Pure Consumers
Last year I wrote The Business of Social Avatar Virtual Worlds [Or, why I really like Second Life, even if their business is most likely doomed] in which I urged Linden Lab to consider that
Consumers want to be fed content, they may even pay for it and a good platform can enable many talented people to create content, it seems that the main missing components are a way to identify and promote the content the consumers want and a create way to deliver it to them with the least possible burden on the consumer’s part.
Well, today Linden Lab announced that Second Life membership is now free.
This bold move is the first step in allowing pure consumers in – those who will spend their participation-generated (and purchased for $) Linden dollars on the all that greated user-generated content. This reduces some of the skepticism I’ve had about their recent growth hype. Assuming they continue on this path, they may well reach 1m users in their timeframe.
Congratulations to those at Linden Lab!
Now they’re in for the next challenges: optimizing the interface for consumers (which has been incrementally underway for more than a year) and dealing with the new abuses (and abusers) that come with no-barrier-to-entry registration.
I hope they’re ready!
August 12, 2005
Dream Team Reunites
Doug Crockford has joined Yahoo!
Chip, Crock, and I have worked together on and off for 20 years and are together once again. The last few times we started/founded various companies together.
Getting smart start-ups to succeeed is hard. So, this time we’re going to try to change the world from within a large, successful, and smart company.
Now we’ve got vision, mandates, customers, and a budget. :-)
Woo Hoo!
[BTW, Yahoo! is now agressively hiring for the communities group…]
May 12, 2005
USC: Public Diplomacy and Virtual Worlds
From USC Center for Public Democracy has a new project:
New Technology and Public Diplomacy: “Public Diplomacy and Virtual Worlds”
The Public Diplomacy and Virtual Worlds project is a research project examining one aspect of new technology and public diplomacy: the role of video games, specifically Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), in public diplomacy.
The study explores the role of MMOGs in the following ways:
- For U.S. games, as extensions of the U.S. brand and their role in shaping how the world sees the U.S. (for non-U.S. games their role as extensions of identity, image and brand of their respective country);
- As online venues (or virtual worlds) in which people from different cultures come together and shape or form ideas about each other and their respective cultures;
- The unique role that ‘localization’ plays in public diplomacy (How does framing a game for a community outside the game’s country of origin play a role in its impact?);
- Game Design: As public policy play tools that can be used to educate (not train) people about how different cultures work and/or function (e.g. Roleplay Kofi Annan or the President of Russia, etc.).
…
Early research has confirmed that within these spaces, there is a unique opportunity to create, foster and sustain intercultural dialogue and that perception of national values, ideals, and character are both reinforced and altered by the real time interactions that occur in these spaces.
The results of this work should be interesting to read. I hope that it includes an accounting of such events as the anti-chinese-adena-farming bigotry. I think that Second Life might be a good place to expore some of the cultural education issues (at least for cultures that value personal land ownership), but I’m not clear what kind of methodology makes sense for this project – is this some sort of strange ethnography?