The Metaverse Should Be Open
Submitted by Taran on Tue, 07/17/2007 - 11:51
When Sarah Nerd posted about cheating on Second Life, I paid attention. I'd never heard of Project Entropia before.
I tried it out, or tried to try it out - when it got down to 5 out of 10 for a review, I gave up on it. First of all, it is a Microsoft only space. That got it losing 1 point for not supporting Mac, another for not supporting Linux, and another for not supporting both. I'm sorry, there are too many Linux and Apple users out there for a system to not support them by design. Then the less than informative downloading of stuff just took forever and left me wondering what the heck it was doing. Sorry, when you hit 5 points lost before I even load a client for a virtual world, something is wrong.
What made it's impression on me the most, though, was that they only supported Microsoft. While Linden Lab is often criticized for the issues related to their Linux client - perhaps the Mac client as well - they at least have them for Second Life. And since I'm writing about the greater global metaverse over here, from taking stock of technology to issues of policy including patents, copyrights and trademarks, it was disturbing to come across a virtual world which discriminates based on what operating system you use.
The Global Metaverse should be Open. It should support more than one operating system, which Linden Lab does get credit for in the context of Second Life. Copyrighted works, too, should have systems which allow for Creative Commons types of licensing so that user created content can travel as far and under the conditions which the creators wish. And open standards of virtual worlds have to be established for a global metaverse - a time will come when people will not only want to travel between virtual worlds - they will expect it.
The metaverse must be open if it is to reach its full potential. The global metaverse must be open if we our to reach our full potential.
It may be time for me to look into other virtual worlds, once I get out from under this writing deadline...
Partitions, Accelerating change
At some point technologies become too valuable to our social fabric to stay locked behind a firewall. Even if we ignore the significant economic potential of open metaverse technologies, it's just too risky to place the basic tools of our community in the hands of a single economic entity which can dictate which platforms are not supported.
If you'd like to have a conversation about the state of the open metaverse then let me know. I track all of the active projects I can find (not just Ogoglio) and the rate of progress is increasing rather quickly.
Sure, Trevor
I'd like to do this maybe next week. I'm on a deadline right now, so my time is tight - and the topic deserves time. :-)
The global metaverse should be multi-lingual too.
Objects, textures, avatars, etc., all the entities and I suppose processes in the global mutiverse need to be designed for use multilingual environment.
An example: in the Hipihi virtual world in beta testing, when I look in my texture folder, I see for names Chinese characters and names. Just translating the interface into other langauges isn't enough, every entity needs to be able to have names in multiple languages. Inventory item descriptions need to have space to hold multiple translations of the description simultaneously.
For communication between folks who don't have a common language, machine translation should be built in to the system. Sure, machine translation is pretty bad, but one wouldn't be negotiating treaties using the machine translations, just chatting with folks you can't understand without help. Possibly the interface should facilitate human translation as well as machine.
Dealing with the implications of a multi-language virtual world is going to be a problem, but it has to be dealt with if we are to have a maximally useful, fully enjoyable global metaverse.
Absolutely!
Multilingualism is one of my big pushes, and I was getting to that with the global metaverse series - I'm just waiting some feedback on some figures; there may be more up to date ones.
One of the main topics of this will be Voice usage. I'm almost sick of bringing it up, but it will come up again. :-)
What?
A lot of people agree with that statement.
Email me. <3
Be patient. :-)
I've been lurking around, and I know about the project. I've just been busy writing.... will be until next week.
Then we drop everything into 3rd gear. ;-)
Post new comment