Really

Tateru Nino has written an article on why virtual worlds are not the future on the web (and summarized it quite concisely on twitter). Tateru argues that the web and virtual environments have different purposes, and may continue to evolve together, perhaps enhancing each other, but still remaining largely separate. The web is for efficiently finding and understanding connected sets of information, whereas virtual environments like Second Life are best used for visualizations and immersing yourself in an environment to experience data: “A virtual environment is a representation of data through digital synesthesia into forms the user will find meaningful or familiar.”

If I understand the argument correctly, it comes down to the notion that some tasks are simply more effectively done in a 2D environment like a web browser; search results, or amazon product listings are best viewed in a list on your web browser, where you can quickly click on them to achieve what you want to do. So, in the future, we’ll still have our web browsers for getting information, and we’ll pop into the virtual world when we want an experience, or want to hang out with other people.

My issue with this argument (and apologies to Tateru if I mis-stated it) is that I’m not sure that the 2D desktop is the best way to interact with and create data. I think this is the problem (I mean, the opportunity – since this is a corporate blog…) that we’re only starting to address. We are so used to dealing with lists and windows and linear pieces of text that it is easy to believe that these are the best ways of doing things on computers. But there is nothing particularly natural about those techniques, and often they seem to be results of physical constraints of our devices. The interface for browsing your files on today’s computers is not significantly different from using the DIR command in MS-DOS. Apple’s use of Cover Flow to browse files in the upcoming Leopard release, is still essentially a one dimensional list, but (as I may have mentioned before) perhaps an initial step on exploring how a 3D space can be used. Other examples are The Ivory Tower of Primitives and the Particle Laboratory in Second Life, showing how a 3D environment can be a more effective mechanism to convey a tutorial than a document or a wiki. As experimenting with 3D virtual environments becomes easier, and the results of those experiments can be used on affordable consumer hardware, people will discover new interface techniques that will displace the standard browser and desktop metaphors.

Email was said to be the original “killer-app” of the Internet, and while email client apps are probably not going away any time soon, web-based email continues to grow. I don’t think it is unreasonable to believe that in the same way that people figured out how to use the new affordances of the web to enhance email, we will start to discover how virtual worlds will make our current web-browsing tasks more effective (though 3D Mailbox’s tool representing your emails as people at a virtual pool party may not be the best approach, there is something to be said for feeding spam to the sharks in the pool….)