SL Creativity

2D browsing in 3D

June 9, 2006 on 7:09 pm | In Uncategorized |

Recently the first step of a mozilla browser integration with Second Life was rolled out and almost instantly a clever little hack expanded the possibilities. The SL blogosphere was all over it and I just stumbled over Wired asking: Where’s the value proposition?

I’d like to have a little stab at that.

First of all right now the integration is limited to your own user interface, which means that collaborative aspects are not here yet. Getting a browser on the prim so multiple residents can interact with the web in a communal fashion is something I believe has a lot of emergent properties.

First of all the notion that we’re moving towards a 3D web is something I believe in. The people behind the interesting Croquet Project state how this current “document” metaphor for our computer navigation has survived very well:

The emergence of software monopolies removed any encouragement to innovate on the platform. Compare a modern PC of 2004 to the first Macintosh shipping in 1984 and the major difference you will see is color.

There are many passionate discussions of 2D vs. 3D on Terra Nova and I won’t go into the details here, but I would just like to say that I think that 2D augments 3D well and vice versa. The current web is a huge and rapidly growing resource, whilst SL with its 3D appears to have tabbed into this great creativity. What would happen if the two met?

I would argue that especially around collaboration is where 3D can augment 2D well. It is incredible how much creativity and participation something like Wikipedia has produced with its asynchronous wiki. I would think that if you added the opportunity to edit articles in real time with real time discussions then this already exponential growth would bend further upwards and collaborative writing might branch into areas such as fiction where it has been less successful up until now. Sure new practices would have to be developed, but I feel that the community will handle this as well as it handled the 2D tools.

And wikis are only one example. The whole Web 2.0 paradigm brought (and continues to bring) us many great tools that works straight in the browser. All these tools would be accessible from SL and could be updated as new community practices were being invented.

This whole thing got me to thinking about what in world access the rest of the web could do for SL culture. Tringo showed a need for social entertainment in SL. I am thinking about all the fps, Lemmings (try it!), flash etc. games right in the browser I been playing when I should have been working. This would add some tried and tested entertainment elements to SL that weren’t native to the world and what would that mean?

I actually think that it would make SL richer and more diverse. One example: A problem right now is that people show in SL but does not hang around. Maybe some more familiarity through 2D web stuff in combination with the overwhelming thing that is SL could make these new residents give it a little more of chance.

These were just some quick thoughts inspired by the Wired question above. This really interests me and I might return to it in a later post.

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