Second life is an amazing platform, a world where you can buy/sell virtual property, build/buy/sell virtual objects, and meet interesting people. Recently I dusted off my avatar (born in 2006) and re-experienced my second life for my second-first time. The following live blog illustrates some of the challenges faced by individuals new to Second Life. Don’t give up hope though, once I left orientation island the people I found and the subsequent people and conversations were worth the effort.
* 19:35 – Downloaded new SL client, installed. Had to use recover name and password function on site. Response email went to junk mail.
* 19:40 – Logged on to find myself underwater with no way to swim. I walked for a few minutes in a couple of different directions. Was assaulted by an auto-bot that kept inviting me to spend $100 to spend 30 minutes on a boat with “24 Sceneries.” The boat was floating above my head. No you can’t fly under water. (NOTE: This would not happen to a new member, I must’ve been at this location when I last logged out two years ago.)
* 19:50 – Located Teleport Home function and BAM! found myself in a strip mall (orientation island).
* 19:51 – Found group of people using talk function to harass an English sounding fellow who was shouting rude things about race, and America. Listened for a few minutes watched people. Very negative. Not sure who was more of an ass.
* 19:52 – Wandered off to track what looked like monorail. No monorail arrived. I walked down the tracks to another city center. This appeared to be a fishing town. Witnessed smoke bombs and two flying cars (very little realism). Lots of gun shots. Nobody appeared to be hurt.
* 20:01 – Accidentally sat on a man on the bench. He jumped up and flew away.
* 20:02 – More rude insults from miscellaneous people standing around.
* 20:10 – I think a giant space ship just landed on me. Not positive what it is except there are three large pipes facing outwards and an entry way in the center
* 20:15 – Cars are back, just sitting there.
* 20:30 – Machine gun fire and someone just handed me a “landmark.” Reads, “Neon Nights Complex, Sim Camping, Free Lindens, Make Money. There is a picture that is a series of pink geometric objects. I’m not sure what I’m looking at. Buttons to Teleport and Show on Map.
* 20:34 – Got up to inspect car, walked right through it. Am now watching tiger stripped dancing girl with tiger teddy bear and mini skirt. Nice tail, no really, she has a tail.
* 20:35 – Someone just started playing a really terrible hip-hop song (I like hip-hop, this is just bad). Can’t figure out where the sound is coming from.
* 20:36 – Strange skinless (all grey) woman figure is swimming in the air in front of me. Strange!
* 20:37 – 2.5 seconds of a song… stop… 1 second of a different song… stop… repeat
* 20:38 – Buttless chaps wearing tattooed man with nipple piercings (connected by a chain) is doing spin kicks in front of me.
* 20:39 – Seems to be a rash of stupid banter on the chat window. “Don’t step in my wee” and “I need to lose three pounds so I bought a pint of ice cream.”
* 20:40 – Loud Fart noise.
* 20:42 – a woman just stood on my head. I looked up for a crotch view. Yikes. She’s a zombie.
* 20:43 – Random typing noise is annoying
* 20:44 – Sound keeps jumping from a hard shoed person walking in a very long echoing hallway to euro trash dance music… Ooops now it’s both sexy hip hop and Beasty Boys with Saturday Night Fever overlapping it. This is a special kind of hell.
* 20:45 – There is a woman standing in front of me in a feather dress with nothing but her hair covering her boobs. Nice looking but dead behind the eyes.
* 20:46 – Lots of these girls look like prostitutes. I just realized chaps guy is a match pair with tiger lady. They are dancing together to “Shake your Ass”
* 20:46 – Is that a chainsaw sound? Definitely a whip crack.
* 20:48 – Almost walked into a canal. Walked right through fence. Wouldn’t have been able to get out of that if I fell. Whew!
* 20:49 – Attempted to walk further down the road and was stopped by an invisible wall. A message just popped up saying I could not enter that zone because the server was full. I am now standing knee deep in the street.
* 20:50 – Quote of the minute – “Bestiality is bad”. More disembodied typing sounds.
* 20:53 – The region you have entered is running a different version of the simulator. What does that mean?
* 20:55 – Not sure what the map I’m standing on is but the random walk-through, walk over behavior is disorienting.
* 20:56 – Someone has a voice processor that makes them talk like a chipmunk.
* 20:59 – Just fell into the sidewalk in front of “Furry Slut.” She’s dancing erotically and her hair is flowing very realistically. Strange Grey boxes are emanating from here like a disco pattern.
* 21:01 – A black man in camouflage pants just urinated next to me. Complete with sound effects and a penis coming out of his pants. Yes a yellow green stream and a puddle were included.
* 21:04 – Blue message pop-up – Duane Scarborough’s “Hypnose Homme” Are you interested in men’s fragrances from the perspective of a BUTTON=MALE, BUTTON=FEMALE, BUTTON=IGNORE
* 21:06 – Seems to be a lot of urinating right now. Woman in funny hat just whipped out a penis and peed on the first offending urinator.
* 21:07 – I’m leaving now. Wondering what the hell was the point of that? Bad rendering, obscenity, lot’s of people doing nothing but standing around.
* 21:08 – As I log out the last sound I hear, besides the incessant typing sounds, was a single bird chirping in an idyllic manner. Almost surreal.
Stay tuned for follow-up posts where we will be addressing ideas for a Captivate, Convert, Continue process that could help Second Life build relationships with customers, improve the quality of the overall experience, and increase their population.
Second life has been setting the pace for virtual world development since 2003. We’ve been playing (er.. experiencing) since 2006. We even own land by the virtual sea, but the concept of a second or alternate world has always troubled us. Reality is already pretty complex.
Augmented Reality (AR) on the other hand, is exciting because we see a digitally enhanced reality as not only possible, but the key to supercharging the man / machine dyad. Imagine a world where digital daemon’s travel with us as friends, servants and guardians (I need to lay off the children’s literature). You don’t have to imagine too hard, the folks at Georgia Tech are already working on realizing part of this vision. The video above shows how digital can be superimposed over reality in a hyper-realistic manner. The last minute of video above is the most exciting, but heck, the whole thing is only 3 minutes long… Enjoy! (Thanks Stephanie)
Maybe I’ve been thinking about this topic because of the recent arrival of my twin sons Pascal and Thibault, but it seems to me we are about to take the next evolutionary step in the digital world with regards to replication. Digital replication, creation, or programming, has traditionally had a steep entry curve, requiring very smart people with very specific skills to create anything of value. Today games like Spore™ and LittleBigPlanet™ are replacing yesterday’s object oriented programming languages and are making online content creation accessible to a much larger audience. Virtual worlds like World of Warcraft™, Second Life™, and even the upcoming Diablo III MMORPG offer trading and even sale of your creations for fun or profit. Inworld artifact and content creation doesn’t represent the end, the next-generation replicator will allow users to create self-sustaining, independent objects that can exist outside (outworld) the domain of their originating world. These objects will be able to easily travel between devices (including mobile platforms) in ways that are relevant to their creator. Perhaps these objects themselves will contain within themselves the ability to replicate, perhaps even evolve?
Post back if you’ve already seen this in the wild and have a great weekend!
Most virtual worlds have have fans/residents that use the world, creatures, and other residents to create Machinima. Second Life is special because you get to do set design instead of location hunting. The concept is interesting but it seems they still haven’t figured out the mouth part yet. EWWWW! Learn more about the behind the scenes for this project here.
Second Life (SL), one of the first successful virtual worlds, was released in the wild in 2003. Some of us have avatars born in 2006. As part of our continuing exploration of the future of digital, we have decided to build a virtual office / meeting place / retreat in second life, and where better to build but on the waterfront. SL shares a lot of common traits with RL (real life); one being beachfront property is expensive and coveted. Needless to say, the auction was a very exciting event and we may have set a new record for the price paid for virtual soil. We now own approximately 10,000 square meters of virtual land in Second Life. Construction and landscaping begins today.
A very popular topic at DUX ’07 was social networking sites. By my informal tally, every presentation of the 3-day conference made at least some reference to Facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn and similar sites in order to provide a context to their main subject. I counted 12 presentations that focused specifically on social networking. These lectures addressed issues such as where the space is going and how they’ve been adapted to address traditionally offline tasks, such as smoking cessation. Some examined Second Life, a 3D rendering of Social Network (one of many ways Second Life can be defined). Peter Mortensen and Conrad Wai of Jump Associates gave an interesting presentation on the individual trust social networking sites require for them to be successful.
Bringing this topic back to Tanagram has sparked an exciting debate within our office. Do social networking sites connect or disconnect people? Our staff seems to be divided on this. In the disconnected camp, the argument goes that a Facebook post is short and uninformative. It is a cheap replacement of a phone call that allows me to check in on someone on my time and at my convenience without having any real interaction with that person. I am not required to invest any effort for this interaction and so the value of it is less.
In the connected camp, the argument is that these sites create a new line of communication. People can continue to connect via the phone and email but now you can interact quickly via Facebook to see what a person is up to at this moment. Each form of interaction (social networking, email, phone, blog) has its own value and it is not a choice of either/or communication.
I’m firmly in the latter camp. I do have a Facebook page (go ahead and look me up – I’ll gladly add you as a friend). I admit that I’m not a social networking guru. I’m perplexed by some of the more bizarre interactions it fosters. A couple of my friends – Mark and Andrew – are currently waging between them a month-long zombie war. I see daily updates of this such as: Andrew’s Bishop in the Church of Zombie regulated on Mark’s Lieutenant Zombie! Victory dances ensued. Huzzah! There seems to be no end in sight to this war.
Still, Facebook has allowed me to find friends that I’ve not spoken with in years. I readily admit that some of these friends I would probably never pick up the phone to call because I can’t honestly think of anything I would want to say to them. Perhaps I shouldn’t call them friends anymore? Yet that supposition seems harsh and I do wish them well even though I don’t seek a personal conversation with them. I think there is value in these brief connections allowed by social networking sites. I’m able to see the daily happenings of a friend’s life and I think there is an intrinsic value to this.
What strikes me most about the disconnected argument is that this line of reasoning is quite similar to the arguments against email 10 years ago. Back then email was viewed as a lazy way of writing a letter, lacking any sort of thought or consideration. This too is similar to the debate over proper cell phone etiquette as the mobile device became widespread. Calling a person to chat while you waited for a plane suggested you weren’t willing to invest the time for a proper phone call when you were at home (I believe a Seinfeld episode captured this argument a while back). I think it’s odd we now hold email and phone calls as the ideal alternative to social networking.
Social networking sites, in my opinion, offer a give-and-take proposition that lets us come out ahead. Our interactions through these sites may be less thought-intensive, certainly less self-invested, but they give us much more everyday connection. Since we don’t live our lives in a vacuum – seeing some friends on Facebook but also communicating with them via email, phone, and in person – it is possible to augment our relationships through these sites.
Recent Comments