A Wish For The Future Of Synthetic Worlds

While the social networking software folk are on patrol, exploring ways to create more value in social networking software¹, I'm more interested in what people can use these worlds of silicon and code for. Yesterday I wrote about the potential in the Havok physics engine with Intel's purchase of Havok - but that all means nothing without context. I kicked it around a bit and read some more - and suddenly a use case appeared: Learning Architecture In A Virtual World.

When I was a pre-teen lover of all things related to computing, I made some money here and there working on people's systems. One of those systems allowed me to test out the really cool unformat utility - a Norton Utility², I think - and when it ran, the then latest version of Autocad appeared². I spent hours playing with it, rotating the shuttle round and round and basically doing a lot of things completely accidentally. I ended up reading up on things related to that sort of design from my father's old college texts (he had an awesome Engineering Reference... I wish I knew where it was). Structural strengths, tensile strength all sorts of other things entered my vocabulary - half pleasing and half annoying my father. I got interested in that stuff, but that exposure also got me more seriously interested in Physics. Oddly, Autocad had more to do with my interest related to Physics than Isaac Newton did, but the end result is that to this day I still love trying to find out how the world works. No teacher gave me that. Unstoppable curiosity and an innate philosophy of 'better living through reckless experimentation' have been my greatest assets³

Recalling that in the context of the article of Learning Architecture in A Virtual World really is exciting for me to consider in that way. Imagine a virtual world where all these factors were brought into play - a vast 4 dimensional (yes, 4) world where the building blocks had attributes which could be toyed with to test tolerances. Where the vectored forces of the world could be altered or simulated for different environments... but I have been down this path of thought before. It was in the context of Space instead of the immediate Earth, but last year when NASA announced their use of a synthetic world, one of the issues was related to varying the physics between quantum and classical. I thought of using fuzzy logic for that, put it on a shelf... but lets revisit that. Wouldn't such a world be a great place to test theories based on what we know so far? A giant simulator? But simulators have faults; nothing rivals the real world for experimentation.

And imagine the discussions people would have then! That would be exciting, I think. That would be an artificial world I would think could easily fit into curriculum of schools... because children want to play. Most children do not particularly enjoy math, but show them a fractal and watch the cognitive dissonance appear. Try explaining calculus to most young men without explaining that acceleration is calculus, that the rate of change of the power band of an engine coupled with the rate of change of the amount of power transmitted to the axle can make a car speed into a race. Demonstrate the strength of an arch. These sorts of things which have been asleep in books could be brought to life in some ways, making the world less daunting to people.

Of course, that requires one very monstrous physics engine and may not be viable within the next 10 years... But imagine the value of having such things to speak about... and how that would actually add value to social networks. Others have spoken of plants that grow, amongst other things... Imagine.

But then, if it were any good... it would rival our own reality, and our own reality is something we haven't been very good at coming to terms with. Still, there is value in talking if there is something to talk about. It is a wish... a thought... it could save some poor kid their eyebrows. I imagine that there might be some value to that.

¹ Perhaps they should be dealing with the subjectivity of the concept of value instead.
² They're up to AutoCAD LT 2008 now. Go figure.
³ I managed to live through the experiments, though a few times my eyebrows didn't. A 9 year old trying to make gas that wasn't flammable (!) because his father says gas is dangerous should not have access to gasoline, water, matches and an empty Milo tin. But I did learn that gas on water does burn...