One cool thing they did recently was to recreate pre-1989 Berlin in commemoration of the fall of the wall. Your character can walk around and see what it looked like in 3d. It gives a whole new meaning to Checkpoint Charlie and what it was like to live there, to me at least.

Hoping forthcoming worlds offer fun, usability, speed and, most importantly, context.

Part of the problem is the paradigm has been defined by social media definitions when in fact data visualization in new, simpler ways, engineering model mockups, telemetry integration with real world machinery, disaster training, complex logisitical data such as fleet dispersement & asset locations, tracking and control & many more ROI based solutions can be done in addition to collaboration of disparate teams.

Try out your own ideas with BSD licensed http://opensimulator.org or http://unity3d.com which we are teaching in our own virtual world http://reactiongrid.com . Thank you all for putting real thought into the future of virtual worlds.

Thank you both for your thoughtful comments. I appreciate the time and effort that you’ve both put into exploring and understanding these virtual worlds. Admittedly I need to thoroughly explore Second Life as I’m truly excited about it’s constant evolution and improvement with it’s solid business plan. Chris, I think I’ll take you up on that in-world invitation… as soon as the Holiday craziness is over.

I followed Justin here after he Tweeted that he had commented. The subject is one of interest to me . Besides coming here from Twitter, I’m putting off taking a break into Second Life in order to come here and comment instead… if you ever go in-world, I’m ChristopherBest Daviau.

First let me thank you for taking the time to write this article (also skimmed a few other while I was here).

I understand where your coming from, but I’m more optimistic.

Consider that the engagement time in Twitter is very low commitment. Now, some people like myself or Justin or some others (maybe you), frankly people who’s business it is to be on top of these sort of technology trends, may invest quite a lot of time in Twitter at once. But for the average user twitter is given as much time investment as checking their watch from time-to-time.

SecondLife requires (and receives) a time commitment from its user-base that other platforms could only dream of (and turns a handsome profit as well, unlike, say Twitter).

True, the graphical experience is indeed not yet where it needs to be. But it is in a constant state of improvement. And just this week Linden Lab rolled out their private Virtual World platform for the enterprise.

Like you, I also favor a more immersive, rich interaction experience. I’m quite convinced it will get there. Have a look at KZero’s Radar report and it will make you feel better:
http://tr.im/kzero_v6

On another note, I don’t think Second Life, or frankly any emerging technology can be separated from the hype machine of the marketing departments that build them up before running off to the next new, new thing. But that’s a whole other story.

I’ve enjoyed reading your blog.

cheers,
Chris

PS. I invite you to join the conversation sometime over at my blog, GigantiCo.

The virtual worlds that have succeeded so far are different. World of Warcraft is an environment that promotes collaboration and interaction of any type supported by the developer. The developer made it fun.

Eve Online has a sandbox feel. The economy, the objects, everything is built by players. You can be a thug or a prince with no real world risks at all. So the developers tap into what we would be if we could be anything at all with no negative consequences.

I have a hard time getting my mind around a virtual world that could be as interactive and high speed as twitter. Twitter seems to work in a very similar way to our thought process. When you add visuals you might have a very hard time holding anyone’s attention because actions will have to take much longer that 140 char bursts of information.

OK, I’m doing a stream of consciousness comment hope is makes just a bit of sense