why doesn't the second life viewer use a game controller

i've got a few minutes between meetings this morning, so i thought i would just rant. comments are always welcome, of course, but i doubt i'll say anything radical today.

so this is a topic that's bugged me for at least four or five years: why isn't there better support for game controllers and joysticks in second life?

i know.. i know.. the SL viewer has had support for game controllers since days of yore and i'm just whining to suggest it's less than stellar. and before i sound like a complete ass, let me just say, the people that added joystick and game controller support to the SL viewer are ossm, ossm people who did an ossm, ossm job.

but it always seemed to me that game controllers are "second class citizens" in most of the SL viewer domain. if i had my way, you could fire up the SL viewer, and start interacting with the world via a bluetooth (or USB) game controller and microphone.

even with the current support, you still have to interact with the system by way keyboard and mouse far to often to be able to kick back and have a quality "game controller mostly" experience.

the reason i find the game controller + microphone use case compelling is that it's in-line with user expectations about how a virtual world should operate. (i'm saying that, but i really, honestly have no data to back that up. if someone has data one way or another, i'd love to hear about it.)

i demand freedom from the tyranny of the keyboard! but when you look at the second life web viewer beta site, the video they play while setting things up shows avatars typing away.

i guess my point here is, thought second life started as a virtual world where typing was an integral part of the social experience, voice is overtaking (or has overtaken) keyboard use. optimizing for an experience which supports a more naturalized interaction with virtual environments just seems like a good way to attract more users.

okay. i feel better now for having gotten that out. would love to hear what other people think.

boiling the ocean and the profit motive

so VWRAP seems to be heading for the historical trash heap. there's been a little bit of conversation on the VWRAP list about rechartering. morgaine dinova has a wiki where she's working on a replacement intro draft, but after 3 1/2 months she's produced 681 words (the original VWRAP draft was around 9776 words.) at this rate, based solely on word count, we'll have to wait another 50 months. but i'm not hopeful the powers that be at the IETF will leave the working group open for another 4 years waiting on a single draft.

christa lopes posted a hatchet job on metaverse ink denouncing VWRAP as a linden-only club, worthy only of scorn. the article is largely inaccurate, being the memoir of events by a person who actively chose to not be involved. but as max ehrmann reminded us, it's good policy to listen to everyone.

but before VWRAP passes from people's minds, i wanted to offer a few notes about it's motivation; about why there there was VWRAP. diva and morgaine will tell you it's objective was to enable large scale interoperability between different virtual worlds, and that it failed miserably. nothing could be farther from the truth.

while it's true that VWRAP failed generally, it was never intended to be "all things to all people" in terms of virtual world interop. VWRAP was intended to provide a set of interoperability standards between hosts that implement services that created a "Second Life-Like" experience. you can actually read the group's charter, the OGPX mailing list and the original intro doc. it never says "we're going to provide interop between virtual worlds." it talks a lot about services and how they interact. so while you could use VWRAP to provide interop between worlds, that would be a side effect, not a stated goal.

before the VWRAP working group was chartered, we chartered a pair of "BoF Sessions." these are informal "Birds Of a Feather" meetings where people cuss and discuss the relative merits of forming a working group to work on some particular standardization regime. we started back in early 2009 with the MMOX BoF session.

david levine and i co-chaired the MMOX BoF and proposed a relatively narrow scope: standards for a second life-like world. we invited a LOT of people to participate from a LOT of different online game and virtual worlds companies. many simply said, "we don't think standards in this space are interesting" and didn't come. some said "we think standards are interesting, but don't want to limit the discussion to second life-like worlds."

because people like jon watte (then of forterra) and heiner wolf (of webkins) were generally interested, we put them on the agenda to talk about things they think should be standardized. after a fair amount of discussion on the MMOX list and at the MMOX BoF, we couldn't find consensus. but there's nothing wrong with that -- the world is big enough for multiple, even conflicting, opinions.

lisa dusseault proposed we that the "second life-like" camp go back and propose a second BoF that focused on "second life-like" virtual worlds while MMOX was maintained as a more general VW interop group. because i was more interested in "second life-like" worlds, i went on to propose the OGPX BoF.

the next summer, barry leiba, jon peterson and i co-chaired the OGPX BoF. this meeting was focused solely on OGP and "second life-like" worlds. representatives from IBM, linden and adobe were present while reps from intel participated remotely. the OpenSim core contributers were notable by their absence at this meeting.

following the OGPX BoF, a number of us hashed out the group's focus on the mailing list. in september of 2009 we reached consensus and agreed on a charter. we agreed that the working group would focus on the definition of inter-operable services that collaborate to render a virtual world. we also changed the name to VWRAP 'cause people thought the name "Open Grid Protocol" implied we were working on protocols to control general computing grids or cloud computing environments. we also agreed the space available for the group's charter wasn't large enough to contain all aspects of the group's work, so we also agreed the VWRAP intro would extend and refine the charter.

so people who tell you VWRAP was about "big I" Interoperability are fibbing. interestingly, the people who like to say these things, did not attend any of the meetings.

so why did we take the particular path we did? what makes service-level interop interesting?

i can only speak for myself with any authority, but here's what i gleaned from talking with David Levine and Suzy Deffeyes at IBM and Mic Bowman at Intel. let me apologize up front for any inaccuracies. david, suzy, mic -- let me know if i'm way off base here.

many of us work for technology companies. our work allows us to change people's lives for the better by proper application of technology. the world being an imperfect place, we sometimes have to resort to crass commercialism to feed ourselves. for the most part, we get to make cool products for discerning consumers and the money just happens. but at the end of the day, we must justify our actions to our investors or our directors.

one way we felt we could provide a legitimate service to the community while doing things that might be profitable to our investors was to start building a virtual world economy. it's pretty easy to see where people make money here. intel likes to sell CPUs that run virtual worlds. linden sells virtual land to people who want to inhabit virtual worlds. IBM makes coin by creating cutting edge virtual experiences for their global services customers. what you should note here is that no one company dominates this domain. there's no "apple" of virtual worlds; no one company makes CPUs, hosts online services and provides professional services.

this is likely due to virtual worlds being a somewhat immature and niche market. by niche i mean the market is much smaller than it could be and by immature, i mean we're at the beginning of the mass adoption of virtual experiences (which could be MMORPGs, Virtual Worlds or Augmented Reality experiences.) linden has long professed a believe that open source, open protocols and open interfaces will ultimately make them more profitable and make the industry more mature.

a number of people have pointed out similarities between the structure of the "virtual worlds market" now and that of online service providers in the late 80's / early 90's. like early AOL, Compuserve, The Source, Prodigy, BISON and others, Second Life is largely a walled garden. and everyone remembers what happened to the walled gardens: the ISPs ate their collective lunches.

when i pitched linden execs on the idea of a dedicated team inside linden to work on "open" protocols and interfaces, the refrain was "in five years we'll want to be known as the 'google' of virtual worlds and not the 'Compuserve' of virtual worlds." i have long been smoking from Eric von Hippel's pipe and believe that in the long run, "open" systems will always find ways to survive in business environments where walled gardens fail.

i am still a strong believer in the "make the pie higher" model where linden sacrifices a bit of virtual land revenue in exchange for the right to sell to other people's avatars. linden could, if they wanted to, throw open the gates and allow second life avatars to teleport into hypergrid regions (or vice versa.) linden is burdened somewhat by technologies, processes and a social contract that predates this virtual glastnost, but the problems are not insurmountable.

linden's participation in VWRAP was a gamble based on the belief: opening up one small part of the virtual world at a time would allow second life and its peers to grow together. taking a slow but steady path towards complete openness, concentrating on a small bit of functionality each quarter allows everyone to benefit.

david levine referred to this as "boiling the ocean one thimble at a time." start small with a constrained scope and just keep iterating, making incremental improvements.

some critics like prokofy neva (aka catherine fitzpatrick) argue that "open anything"is one step above godless communism. if i understand her arguments properly, she contends the ultimate goal of the open source and open protocol movement in virtual worlds is to institute global virtual collectivism where the "free culture" bolsheviks enforce global ownership of all virtual goods. (of course, i could be missing some of the finer points.) and she's probably partially right. there are plenty of free culture advocates that would prefer to see the concept of intellectual property consigned to the ash-heap of history.

but we don't have to make that mistake. open source, open protocols and open interfaces can still serve the global imperialist hegemony. or not. the fact of the matter is "open" is orthogonal to "free culture." one of the critical components of VWRAP was the trust model. it was discussed at length at IETF meetings and on the VWRAP mailing list, but sadly, was never documented to my satisfaction.

the trust model allowed individual service owners to decide whom they trusted and for what kinds of activities. for instance, if you ran a commercial asset service and you were worried that assets hosted by your service were in grave danger if they were ever instantiated in simulators run by the pirate party in sweden, then the trust model gave VWRAP implementations the tools to deny access to the pirate bay's servers.

that being said, open source and creative commons licenses serve an insanely useful purpose. to build protocols and systems that does not allow content owners the ability to chose the licenses their products were released with is just plain stupid.

so when people come back in a couple years and try to build another virtual worlds standardization group, just remember the following things about VWRAP:

• we weren't trying to boil the ocean. we weren't trying to ensure interoperability between worlds. we just wanted to define a few services and string them together.
  
  
• we wanted to support different IPR regimes ranging from rabid free-cultureists to DRM fans. we felt it wasn't our place as protocol designers to decide what license people used. we just wanted to deliver the bits and allow the endpoints to decide whether they trusted the person on the other side of a connection request.

thanks for listening.

a platform for a compelling, immersive 3d virtual world

so Tateru Nino's just penned a nice, short blog post: Linden Lab Can't turn Second Life into an Engaging Digital Experience.

go read it now, i'll wait.

okay. back? great! let me add a few notes.

in Second Life's early days, it was pretty clear Linden thought of it's creation as an online service for the creation, display and sale of 3d content. back then, you heard a lot of people at the lab saying things like "Your World, Your Imagination." i've heard people say uncharitable things about Linden's founder Philip Rosedale, but seriously, whatever his faults, he was VERY good at internalizing and communicating Second Life's fundamental message: "This is YOUR playground, Linden is here to make sure the plumbing works."

throughout the early-mid 2000's, the SL community rambled along, doing cool things, showing them off, building an early community. after the hype cycle started kicking in, corporate america showed up and a few of their denizens thought (and i paraphrase here): "oh hey, check it out. it's like WebEX except i can build 3d doo-dads to demonstrate concepts and since it's a 'game' i can get away with looking like something other than a corporate drone."

as IBM and Cisco and other corporate heavy-weights started looking at SL as a tool for business operations (rather than just marketing,) you started to hear a lot of talk about SL as a "platform." up 'til this time people had used the word "platform" synonymously with "service." but now the big guys wanted to run a server or two behind their firewalls so corporate secrets wouldn't have to leave the corporate intranet. there's absolutely nothing wrong with this concept; but it's not what SL was initially built to do.

a couple "one off" solutions were built for various corporate customers, but their features were never integrated into the main-line SL service offerings. Linden management was caught in a dilemma: their casual consumer customer base was exploding in 2006, but corporate users seemed like a great market. Linden's challenge was how to increase stability and capability for consumer users while adding features for corporate customers.

around 2006 Linden, IBM, Cisco, Intel and a few other corporate heavies started talking about interoperability in virtual worlds. this eventually led to the Virtual World Interoperability Forum. the VWIF was supposed to produce detailed functional descriptions of how virtual worlds work so there was a good chance virtual worlds operated by different companies could talk to each other. the VWIF eventually sputtered, giving rise to the Second-Life focused: Architecture Working Group (AWG), Open Grid Protocol (OGP) and eventually the Virtual Worlds Region Agent Protocol (VWRAP) working group in the IETF.

but please note, when a crowd of network interoperability people use the term "platform," they don't mean the same thing as when second life users (and even most Linden management.) Second Life management had used the term "platform" to mean, "hey, here's a service you can use to do cool stuff." they did not mean "hey, we have a technology platform you can download, extend and deploy."

but throughout the latter 2000's when Linden was working on their "behind the firewall solution" for corporate customers, there was a small kernel of Linden employees that did intend to make a real-life, honest to goodness "technology platform." the idea was to corral linden's server software into an appliance customers could plonk down in the middle of their data center. viola! instant virtual world populated only by corporate users.

for a lot of different reasons, this turned out to be harder than initially suspected. one reason (certainly not the only one) was the difficulty of maintaining two distinct code bases: one for corporate, behind the firewall use and another for the consumer solution. because Second Life was always considered a "service," there were a wide variety of assumptions the code could make about network architecture and peer service availability. and it turns out that some of the assumptions you make for a huge virtual world with 85,000 concurrent users are not the same as the assumptions you make for a couple simuators and a smattering of "behind the firewall" users.

whatever the reasons, the project to convert the Second Life "service" into a behind the firewall "platform" failed. (though it should be noted a lot of very skilled Lindens did a lot of awesome work to shoehorn Second Life into an appliance.)

about the same time Second Life/Enterprise (SL/E) was being discontinued, Linden's official support for an open virtual worlds interoperability protocol evaporated as well. sic transit gloria munde; at least there's still OpenSim.

but what relevance does this have to the modern world?

does it mean there's no market for "behind the firewall" virtual worlds?

does it mean that Second Life as a "platform" is an architectural dead end?

what about content? and the network effect?

let me offer my two cents about these questions.

first off, Second Life is not and nor has it ever been a "technology platform." Second Life is a "service." it was coded by people who made certain assumptions about their environment (like where the asset servers existed, that peer services were "trustworthy" and what features end users demanded.)

so my first assertion is, the failure of Second Life/Enterprise (SL/E) and VWRAP does nothing to refute the existence of a market for a well-developed, well-supported "behind the firewall" virtual world solution. SL/E's failure simply means it's damn hard to cram the Second Life code base into a small number of servers. in fact, it's so hard that the NRE and support costs are waaaay out of line with any income the service could generate.

i also believe that Second Life, as a technology platform, is dead. as a service? sure, it's still cranking; there are a bazillion people (myself included) who log into SL to socialize and play. what's more, i think Linden also thinks SL as a technology platform is dead. recent actions from Linden management make it clear they're putting all their resources into making SL as compelling an online service as possible.

Tateru Nino speculated that a team of crafty engineers could rebuild something like Second Life in about 6 weeks. i'm more inclined to say it would take 18 months before you get something close to SL's performance and concurrency. were i to develop a business plan for a startup doing more or less the same thing Linden's doing, but with a better, cleaner architecture and the ability to deploy as a real technology platform, i would estimate about 15 man years to beta launch. taking a completely arbitrary figure of $200,000 per man year, you wind up with a $3 million price tag.

so this has got to be how the VCs, angels and midnight engineers are looking at it: given Linden's flat subscriber growth, why would someone risk $3x10^6 on a new virtual world platform?

how 'bout something like a "Social Virtual World" that uses identity information from Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (or even your own corporate LDAP server) ??? that might be compelling.

or even a "virtual world technology framework" that niche application developers could easily extend. that seems like it would be a good idea.

maybe even a "content framework for 2d and 3d experiences" where you could easily develop some kind of 3d model using blender, maya, etc. and have it automagically uploaded to the cloud where virtual world servers could easily import it. bonus points if you work through the intellectual property issues.

so there are a lot of interesting things a VC or angel could fund and an entrepreneur could build, but rebuilding Second Life? no thanks, i'll pass.

predictions for 2011 : second life, virtual worlds and farmville

offering predictions is en vogue for tech bloggers these days; who am i to buck a trend? my area of interest is the technology and business of virtual worlds in general and second life in particular. so here's what i see when i peer into the crystal ball. let's come back in a year and judge the quality of my predictive powers.

i'm going to start with a few easy predictions. these are not so much predictions as observations of existing trends. in other words, here are some trends that will continue.

drama will continue amongst second life residents. it may sound like i'm saying our resident community as being overly sensitive or dramatic. well, yes, i am. but i don't mean it in a bad way. second life attracts drama for the simple reason that people attract drama. saying that there's drama in virtual worlds is to say that there's a critical mass of people who treat the virtual world as an extension (or alternative) to the "real" world. you don't get a high level of emotional involvement with hotmail or google docs. live journal, twitter and facebook get a little more emotional immersion, but it's nowhere near what you get with virtual worlds.

when done right, virtual worlds saturate the senses and engage the "whole person." where you find people, you find drama. and that's a good thing.

InWorlds, ReactionGrid, SpotOn and OSGrid will continue to lure the "old guard" away. let's face it, linden has ticked off several people in the content creation community. the "old guard" lindens are now mostly all swept away; along with them was lost the engagement with the community and the sense we're all pulling in the same direction. despite his faults, philip rosedale was great at communicating second life's vision and making it's residents feel the love.

later in philip's reign and throughout mark kingdon's tenure, the lab found it difficult to communicate effectively to SL residents. after the lab's "adult supervision" left the building, linden management seemed "spooked" by resident's passion. rod humble, the lab's new leader, has a good pedigree, but it'll take months (if not years) for the lab to rebuild credibility with the resident's they've alienated.

there's still plenty of "old folks" left in second life, but the OpenSim based grids can offer features and pricing you won't find in second life. but... while OpenSim based economies will grow, they will still be dwarfed by second life's "linden ecomony."

now let's talk a little about second life and linden lab. the last year's been pretty chaotic for linden what with lay-offs, project cancellations, direction changes and executive shuffles. my prediction for the lab in 2011 is you won't see as much "weirdness" in the lab as you did in 2010. it'll take a few months (at least) for mr. humble to really start to make changes at the lab. towards the end of the summer of 2011, i predict there'll be a few small hornets' nests kicked over, but nothing like the bizarre events of 2010.

i also predict that mark kingdon's focus on facebook or facebook-style games like farmville will get mild lip-service, but eventually fade away. why? farmville, mafia wars and other "casual games" are the polar opposites of second life. people poke at farmville a couple times a day and get on with their lives. second life users log in and stay for a while. and i think rod humble's background allows him to fully understand this concept.

this is not to say the various social media initiatives the lab has will be completely abandoned, but the AU purchase and subsequent shuttering must have really stung, so if the lab releases something socialesque, i think they'll release something small, well thought out, and supported unanimously by executive management. due to the lab's internal processes, i predict it will be a small project implemented by one engineer and two project / product managers within a 6 month period.

talking about technology, we shouldn't forget the web-based initiatives we saw beta tested this last year. i have a bold prediction: we won't see anything like this (web based viewer) from the lab this year. why? the whole "leveraging external technology" sounds like something that would come out of joe miller's technology integration group. four of the five members of this group left the lab in the last year.

plus, the technology is still a little rough. WebGL is out there slowly chugging along, and at the end of the year, we may see a lot of people with web browsers that can effectively communicate with GPUs. google's chrome viewer with it's v8 javascript engine may be able to keep up with the kind of data throughput numbers you'll need to support, but i still think it'll be a couple years before the browser makers create something that can handle the amount of data a typical second life session throws at a client.

so these are my main predictions. 2011 will be an especially boring year compared to 2010 for second life and linden lab. OpenSim based worlds will continue to gain in popularity and second life will not get turned into farmville.