New virtual world platforms have been popping up almost daily for the last couple of weeks: Vivaty, Lively, JustLeapIn, ExitReality, WebFlock, and I’m sure I forgot a couple. This is a new generation of virtual worlds, eager to show that they’ve learned from the mistakes of Second Life: Browser based! Embeddable in your web page! More fun graphics! Integrated with FaceBook!
Right now (and I realize it is still early), they just seem like more 3D chat rooms, similar to what Meez and IMVU have been offering for a while. To me, this type of platform is not that interesting. I want to be able to create things with other people, and explore environments and tools that others have built. So, I tend to dismiss those environments that seem to focus on just chat – they obviously don’t get it! Of course, IMVU reports that they have more than twenty million users, so maybe I’m the one who doesn’t get it (or, perhaps, people are different and like different things. Looking at Richard Bartle’s classification of player types – Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and Killers, might help us understand what type of person prefers what type of virtual world).
Some of the new-comers are showing glimmers of moving beyond the simple chat rooms: Lively will allow Google Gadgets to be integrated in the 3D space, ExitReality automatically converts a web page into a 3D environment, and JustLeapIn “premium” room templates are much larger than the rooms of of other platforms, allowing plenty of opportunity for exploration.
However, I want to point out a story that’s told about Second Life’s beginnings. Philip Rosedale, describes how at a meeting where an early version of Second Life had been demonstrated, the agenda moved from the demo to a discussion about finances. However, the screen stayed on as “background entertainment” (cutting and pasting Rosedale’s story below from 3PointD):
What happened was, we were watching the background, and we realized this city was emerging, very, very fast, it was this incredible thing. We all started getting drawn more and more back to the screen. We started talking about it, and a snowman showed up, Andrew built a snowman, and I don’t know if it was broken at the beginning, but then somebody else built a sort of burning man, with a bunch of small snowmen bowing down to the greater snowman, and so you could see this jazz thing happening in real time. There had never been a canvas in which two people could paint that way at the same time, much less three or four or five.
That was this moment of change in that board meeting where we said, you know, it’s not necessarily about the wind working really well. It’s actually about people making things together. What’s going to come out of this is cities and intention and collaboration and community, because the capability this thing provides is mysterious in the degree to which is allows people to do things together.
What enabled this “moment of change” was the in-world creation tools, that enabled co-creation and a new form of collaboration. Chatting in a 3D environment may be good, but extending that chat with 3D forms of expression gives us a whole new way of communicating.
) so take a look if you’re curious.
