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.

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!

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?

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.

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.

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.

“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”.

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.