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MetaverseU time capsules

March 28th, 2008 (Visited 1400 times) Tags: 3d web, henrik bennetsen, metaverse, metaverseu

Henrik Bennetsen cornered everyone he could at MetaverseU and asked them a set of questions about the metaverse:

What excites you about current metaverse technology?
What concerns you about current metaverse technology?
What will be most the surprising impact of metaverse technology on society within the next decade?
What barriers will metaverse technology never overcome?

Now he’s posted all the videos of all the answers — and there’s some good stuff in there.

Here’s my answers:

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18 Responses to “MetaverseU time capsules”

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Out to Pasture » Blog Archive » What is a virtual world? wrote on March 28th, 2008 at 11:46 am:

[...] Addition: Speaking of metaverse thoughts, here are some of Henrik’s interview videos from Metaverse U earlier this year (thanks Raph) [...]

Reader Comments

Joe Ludwig said on March 28th, 2008 at 2:03 pm:
You actually winced when the words “metaverse technology” came out of your mouth. Really don’t like that term?
Prokofy Neva said on March 29th, 2008 at 10:09 am:
I hope some day to give a very long answer to Henrik’s questions, which I’ve been thinking about for weeks since he first posted them.

One of the really insidious things he has done is privileged those people who have a quick and easy way to make a video of themselves and access YouTube getting to be the ones to make time capsules first and shape the discussion. Always a built-in problem with trying to democratize the adaption of technology at an early stage. And this isn’t about the third-world digital divide. This is about people even very interested and capable of dealing with these issues not happening to have a web-cam or digital camera to easily generate a YouTube.

But I do have some very short answers.

What concerns me the very most about “metaverse technology” (wince indeed!) is due process and liberal democracy and the way in which these core values have been utterly missing from most of the creation of this new technology. This can be seen in very basic ways in the petri dish of Second Life, where we actually live inside of the software experiment, as with the JIRA system to provide feature proposals and bug reports. The entire wiki/jira/group tools sort of social/political technology have really lagged behind the streaming 3-D and interconnectivity technology.

o i.e. the inability to create a system for participation and feedback where people can vote “no” (not just a technical inability, but a built-in ideological bias against the use of the “no” vote in the cultic wisdom-of-crowd doctrines)
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-50

o the conferring of power to make decisions on small, elitist groups of people who imagine they know better as “technical experts”, and their closing off, stopping or even destroying the contributions and voting of others in a system (the first Feature Voting System with thousands of user contributions, ideas, votes, etc. was simply “cleaned up” by a Linden pet within a few weeks, removing all proposals “they didn’t like” and then the entire thing was shut down over night by a Linden and revamped into the much more clunky and non-intuitive interface of the JIRA. Then a group was blessed to be able to shut down any proposals they didn’t like:

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-382

I cite these very parochial and complex examples just because perhaps some more astute and thoughtful admirers of technology will be induced to see how technology is used to subvert people’s free will and democratic participation.
Prokofy Neva said on March 29th, 2008 at 10:25 am:
I liked your explanation about the tendency to throw “big iron” (if that’s what you actually said, can’t quite hear it) or lots of physical machines at the problem of virtuality, and having companies buy a big server to make a walled garden, versus a light and nimble architecture than spreads out over the existing Internet and then enables people to make their own. But…there are still many problems inherent in this supposedly open structure of yours, the main one of which is you are still at the center of it, still generating its overarching rules, and then selling the customizing it in part based on obfuscation of its complexity (even as it is declared “open”) and in part based on customization to which you still control the slider and the major rule set.
Raph said on March 29th, 2008 at 12:14 pm:

One of the really insidious things he has done is privileged those people who have a quick and easy way to make a video of themselves and access YouTube getting to be the ones to make time capsules first and shape the discussion.

Actually, he filmed people himself, at the Metaverse U sessions. Which you may regard as being even more exclusionary.

But…there are still many problems inherent in this supposedly open structure of yours, the main one of which is you are still at the center of it

Yes. We are a ways still from the fully distributed system, though OpenCroquet and Ogoglio seem to be making the effort.
Prokofy Neva said on March 29th, 2008 at 6:36 pm:
Raph,

Actually, while he did film some of the people at Metaverse U, he told them to put up their own videos, and many are doing that now themselves. And yes, Metaverse U was hilariously exclusionary. I was invited to speak — then disinvited lol. Then SL version of it was hugely laggy and crappy and almost nobody could hear much or get to participate due to bad tech decisions. Anyway, it is now up on videos so you can partake in its afterlife, but you know, it’s just kind of hilarious that it’s all so self-referential.

It will be easier for me to believe what you are saying about Ogoglio when I can go, as a dummy, and just log into the thing and use it myself. Until then, all talk of its openness is just talk.
Gene Endrody said on March 29th, 2008 at 9:55 pm:
Prokofy Neva said:

“the conferring of power to make decisions on small, elitist groups of people who imagine they know better as “technical experts”

and then later said….

“It will be easier for me to believe what you are saying about Ogoglio when I can go, as a dummy, and just log into the thing and use it myself. Until then, all talk of its openness is just talk.”

So your saying you need the elitist “technical experts”? Ironic.
Prokofy Neva said on March 29th, 2008 at 10:39 pm:
Uh, no, Gene. Literalist much?

I’m saying that *when* the smarties are done just showing off to each other and making a closed world only open to programmers, and are ready to *truly open it up to the public user* — OPEN IT UP — then we can go into it.

That won’t involve “needing technical experts,” that’s a silly way to put it.

It *will* involve those tekkies making their thing coherent and usable, however.

This is a normal process with much of technology, even computer technology.

Somehow virtual worlds think they are special and can stay deliberately hard to use and opaque.
Gene Endrody said on March 30th, 2008 at 5:44 pm:
“It *will* involve those tekkies making their thing coherent and usable”

and…

“Until then, all talk of its openness is just talk.”

It would seem that even when technical experts attempt to develop tech in a manner consistent with your world view, you are predisposed not to give them the benefit of the doubt. At least we know that even if something came along that fit your vision exactly, you still wouldn’t like it because it was made by the elitist tekkies.
Spaz said on March 30th, 2008 at 8:34 pm:
No virtual world is made deliberately opaque or deliberately hard to use. Like all new technology, this stuff is really hard to make and in the meantime, people have to meet developers halfway and accept that it’s going to take some education and training to participate at the level of creation. Give it a long enough time and ‘a dummy’ will be able to create amazingly complex things with a few verbal commands, like in Star Trek or something like that. You can either wait a couple hundred years or you can learn some basic scripting and programming skills to participate today. It’s not secret or forbidden knowledge and no one is hiding it; anyone who is willing to put in the time can learn.
Prokofy Neva said on March 30th, 2008 at 8:43 pm:
“It *will* involve those tekkies making their thing coherent and usable”
“Until then, all talk of its openness is just talk.”

I stand by what I wrote, and I’m not sure what your point is, except to play the usual game of “OMGODZORZ let’s try to play gotcha and find the hyPROKisy blah blah” But…there isn’t anything inconsistent here except in your mind, I guess.

Because…I’m right. Technology that doesn’t open itself up to average use isn’t open. It can be open to some little squad or cabal of geeks, but who cares? That’s not being open. That’s just having a list up for the team to join in the locker room. That doesn’t count.

The Lindens are elitist tekkies, for example, and I criticize quite a bit about what they do, especially all their little secretive dev programs like SL Views, etc. But when all is said and done, I bow very deeply to what they have achieved, which is a place where anybody, even being a dummy, can come in, learn stuff, make a store, or an art gallery and sell stuff or show stuff — and people do, from all over the world. That’s not likely something *you* value, evidently, because you want everything to be Linux and geeky and therefore obscure and “special,” but these particular geeks who are indeed as elitist as all get out at least had the wisdom and the vision to realize that nobody would pay for their sandbox unless they democratized it at least this much, and I think in some sense Philip Rosedale does believe his rhetoric about wanting this to be “for everybody”.

BTW, Raph’s thing is also something that is as simple as dirt to come and load, click on and join and do stuff.

Erm, I think we’re getting some live insight into “what barriers will Metaverse technology never overcome”.
Prokofy Neva said on March 30th, 2008 at 8:46 pm:
You can either wait a couple hundred years or you can learn some basic scripting and programming skills to participate today. It’s not secret or forbidden knowledge and no one is hiding it; anyone who is willing to put in the time can learn.

Oh, don’t be ridiculous. Why should I have to go learn to script and program to be in a world??? My God, that’s just nuts. See what I mean about a closed society? It’s like telling everybody they have to learn the theory of combustion and build an engine before they can drive a car.

Indeed, a lot of these worlds ARE made very deliberately complex, because it’s like a secret language and club that makers put up to bring in a closeknit dev set. Vast Park is like that. Multiverse is like that. Croquet is like that. They aren’t trying to be simple and have interface for dummies, because they are still at the stage where they need it to be a geeky dev club. In part, sure, it is hard to have 3-d streaming interactive persistent stuff on servers. We get all that. But you know? It’s not *that* hard. People master far more complex routines to play WoW than they do to rez out a house in Second Life.
Spaz said on March 30th, 2008 at 9:43 pm:
You don’t/shouldn’t have to learn to script and program to participate in a world. You do have to learn those things to create one (presently). Again, that will be remedied given sufficient time.
Rik said on March 31st, 2008 at 1:29 am:
Indeed, a lot of these worlds ARE made very deliberately complex, because it’s like a secret language and club that makers put up to bring in a closeknit dev set. Vast Park is like that. Multiverse is like that. Croquet is like that. They aren’t trying to be simple and have interface for dummies, because they are still at the stage where they need it to be a geeky dev club.

Deliberately??? I assure you if they had a button on the game server marked “make it very easy to create content as making a webpage without losing any or the robustness we have worked so hard to create” that the Multiverse guys would be pushing it. If you really think all existing virtual worlds are hard to keep out the people then go find some like-minded individuals and an angel investor and start a new one.
Gene Endrody said on March 31st, 2008 at 9:24 am:
“The Lindens are elitist tekkies, for example, and I criticize quite a bit about what they do”

That cuts to the heart of my issue with your comments. You criticize everything and everyone in the industry and contribute NOTHING. Most contributors here can point to something in either industry or academia that they can hang their hat on. Anybody can say controversial things, but the reason why people like Richard and Raph are influential in our little “cabal of geeks” (as you put it) is because their contributions beyond just words in a blog are significant.
Swift Voyager said on March 31st, 2008 at 11:27 am:
…“what barriers will Metaverse technology never overcome”.

How do people like Goons and the Something Aweful game fit into this? If it’s really open, then it’s open to destructive people as well as constructive people. Am I taking things too far if I compare the information superhighway to a real life highway? The roads are open for everyone to use (with drivers’ license), and most of the people there try to use it “correctly”. However, you always have people who abuse things that are open to the public. Therefore you need a controling body of elite individuals (the government), who design, build, regulate, and maintain the roads. When you start trying to say that the metaverse should be more open to everyone and that having “elite people” running everything, I’m envisioning a superhighway where people can go out and repaint the lines or post traffic lights any way they please. Are you saying that you don’t want people with elite power, or are you saying that those people could be selected from and/or by the user base?
Ola Fosheim Grøstad said on March 31st, 2008 at 5:27 pm:
Spaz:No virtual world is made deliberately opaque or deliberately hard to use.

Sure, but they are most likely deliberately avoiding usability expertise and usability testing in early development. Unfortunately. You can’t fix usability in testing. It’s too late!
len said on April 1st, 2008 at 6:49 am:
It is more likely that technologies such as Vivaty is offering are the seachange, Raph. It is the shift away from big iron as you note and to the self-organization of worlds not as games (too hard) but as consumer services. Real-life is the driver. People want to choose their choices.

Home page has a meaning.

The more important part for your readers is the use of the standard languages so the content producers get the scaling advantage. Free from the vendor, they can sell into different markets with different brands without having to keep downloading yet another toolkit. The change will be the interface specification is the selector of the profile, not the standard itself.

You might want to buy a book on X3D. I know you won’t, but friendly advice anyway.