At no time do the fingers leave the hand...
So Philip Rosedale (our own Philip Linden) is making a new virtual world or a new virtual world thingy. He has $2.4 million in VC money (or does this mean he put in some of his own? It doesn't seem to clarify.) He has started yet another company called High Fidelity and yesterday announced he was retiring Coffee and Power. The way Hamlet ne Linden Au explains it, it seems like virtual reality technology, i.e. goggles and point and click, but the actual web site says, "We're building a virtual world [emphasis added] enabling rich avatar interactions driven by sensor-equipped hardware, simulated and served by devices (phones, tablets and laptops/desktops) contributed by end-users." Check out the videos.
If that sounds a bit, well, intrusive or complex, think of the abuse reports that will get generated from this: "We're building a coordination system enabling millions of people to contribute their devices and share them to simulate the virtual world."
I'm going to ponder some more what this means: "a sparse voxel octree data structure". But meanwhile I think Lilith Heart will be able to design a tree around this...and that's what's important.
I couldn't be more thrilled about High Fidelity. Philip is an engineer with a background in physics and I think he's just better at making worlds and thinking about the ramifications of their properties than he is at thinking up mass governance plans (or economic miracle machines). For a time, he had a company called Coffee and Power which was supposed to match people and tasks -- I personally just sampled it briefly, although it seemed interesting. I don't know what the issues were with it, probably the problem of customer service, governance, and populating it with enough tasks -- the problems that plague all online things. (Plus it had competition from other companies with the same idea which also eventually abandoned their models.)
He also had another service whose name escapes me now which basically seemed like a kind of codification of influence-peddling. Instead of secretly bribing someone, you could openly bribe them by paying them for their time, say, 15 minutes of Philip's time might cost $450 or whatever it was bidding for. No doubt this seemed "fun" at first, but I wondered at which point it would turn into the Russian civil service, which metasticized into the Soviet state, where positions were for sale because they were lucrative, i.e. you could use them to get bribes or goods, and therefore government was always in a kind of bidding war with the oligarchs or corrupt power ministries -- and still is today. It's impossible to get rid of a system like that...
To be sure, from having made and inhabited and managed Second Life, I think Philip probably understands more about the Internet and social media and groups online than anyone in the world -- funny as you may think that is. Really. He may have this understanding without even realizing it himself. He thinks Second Life is a big brain, maybe it fits into some Silicon Valley cult-like idea of the Singularity for him. But in fact, what Second Life is, is a great incubator and prototyper (accidently usually) of every other phenomenon on the Internet.
Remember what Prokofy's definition of a world is:
o a sense of place
o geographical contiguity
o drama
I think it's fair to say that by creating the physical properties of the world as he did regarding these first two things, Philip ensured the last thing. That is, think of it: if prim's didn't have the property of density and visibility and non-occlusion, how could you have the Bush Guy? Or that big grief wall your neighbour put up?
Or take the controversy today over whether Redditt should crowdsource terrorist-chasing by examing all the videos and pictures together online, something "progressive" technologist Alex Madrigal scolds them about -- although he was unavailable for scolding Anonymous in Steubenville, a far worse threat to the real justice system with its due process. Philip didn't invent the prototype, but let's say he created the conditions for it by first creating the world, then putting in the capacity for media to have URLs and then for people to grab the URLs logging into media. So an earlier form of this Redditt issue was when Sluniverse witch-hunted the Red-Zone guy who invented a device to scan the URLs and compare them for alts, and then out alts (and take advantage politically or financially of that information). There are a thousand stories like that, and I doubt Philip even thinks of his world in that way -- as a protyper of the Internet -- but there it is.
But now he's moved on to the next thing, and it's going to be different. How different?
Well, it could be very different if the premise of the world is not the real world, which I used to call "the versimilitude," but something else.
There's a Facebook group to join and that's where I started out with my newbie's question: is a voxel like a prim?
Despite the root "vox" or "voice," that's not how to understand it, as it is unrelated to voice.
Instead, it's a "volume pixel" or voxel, like a pixel, only 3D.
Some people claim Second Life is really only 2D despite its appearances because it has this grid format with prims (and later sculpties and now mesh).
So I was answered with a reference to Wikipedia.
And then I had this to say on Facebook, where Philip prefers to live (he is barely active on G+):
So this is fascinating, and I wonder what the implications are for the ontology of the virtual world if its building blocks are not based on prims/sculpties/mesh which have precise grid locations, but now have voxels, whose positions are inferred. With so much interpolation, what does it mean practically, in terms of being able to script objects and put physics in them and such, and what does it mean philosophically, if the world is not a rough analogy any more of the real world with atoms? Also, you wonder if it will take a long time to rez on sims... In any event, I can't wait to see how this looks, and from looking at the demos, it seems like eventually the vision is to have virtuality interact with real life through smart phones and laptops. So is it augmented reality?
In my lifetime we've gone from "Hi-Fidelity" meaning something your stereo speakers did in performing well from your record player with 33 1/3 rpm records on it, to meaning this good-looking virtual world that one hopes will get off the ground...but I think we're probably a few years away from greeting Philip in the Welcome Area on a walkabout from our i-phones...
As you know, I've been a long time critic of the world of Second Life and its makers. I take it seriously. That's actually paying it a big compliment. Particularly in earlier years, I've been a critic of Philip and Jeska, who joined Philip on his various post-SL adventures.
Even so, they feel like relatives, they feel like home. Who isn't interested in what Philip Linden does?! We are all cult followers of sorts, even if it takes the form of hugely snarky nay-saying at the Sharia Court of Sluniverse.
Jeska has come a very long way since she did ads for FlipperPAY Peregrine and gave him that extra Linden boost, and then also conceded to FlipperPAY's initial banning of me from SLCC Chicago -- as a member of the orgcom. Right before she left Linden Lab, she presided faithfully enough over my very thorough abuse report on the endless harassment of me by Woodbury University, although it seemed like more senior Lindens first blocked action on this, then changed their mind (it's shrouded in mystery).
But today, Jeska is a married woman and not only with the battle scars of Second Life community management, but the spurs earned from having to play nursemaid to all those male tech egos in these different companies as they tan in the sun with their solar panels (I hope Jeska doesn't burn easily!) -- which couldn't have been easy.
The main thing I've always admired about Jeska, even when criticizing this or that aspect of her actions as part of Linden lab, was her ability to remain relentlessly cheerful in spite of the most awful situations. That's a treasure. When we last caught up with Jeska in one of Philip's recent experiments, her image was beaming on a little robot that was summoned into a room to have a meeting -- but of course, what's most important about any virtual world isn't the code or pixels or robots or tech, but the heart, and that's what Jeska has. I consider it an honour that she has been to my real-life house (after the original SLCC) with about 30 other Second Lifers -- and you know, there aren't that many Lindens I think I could have over to my house, or who would even give me the time of day.
Then there's Ryan Linden, whom I don't know, although he was one of the ancient ones but about Ryan Linden I can say this: the door and door script he invented in 2003 is still in use today because he had the vision to understand that even though he first appeared at a hippie camp with everything all hanging out on an open grid, gradually the norms showed up and wanted to be able to lock their doors and have privacy -- or at least a sort of symbolic privacy, even though we know that the sit-hack could defeat Ryan's door. Ryan's build in Brown is still lovingly preserved today if you want to pick up his endearingly small prefab.
Will Ryan build a door out of voxels that is not subject to the sit-hack? This is the burning question for the future of High Fidelity. Truly.
And this: will dummies be able to edit or at least move around voxels?
It is said about physicists that they do their best work by the age of 30. I don't know if that is true of physicists of virtual worlds, however, because their properties aren't really the same. I think Philip in fact has his best work ahead if he can keep his wits about him and assemble the right team and keep delivering. He has very loyal followers that have stayed with him through two or three or four companies now.
The crux of the snark at Slun seems to be that these technologies are already being used by other people or something, I guess. But of course, it's all about how you put it together. Ultimately, to succeed at the technologists' premise -- although I have many qualms about its ramifications -- the virtual world has to turn inside out. It can't be in a box inside your computer or a little box inside your phone anymore -- either literally, as a download, or figuratively, as a separate place in your mind. It has to be seamlessly integrated with the real world, not as augmented reality, but the place where all the augments of reality have a kind of home where further meta things can happen to them.
So the virtual world screen then becomes a table top and a wall and is at the airport or the school or the workplace -- but it's a screen you feel you step in and out of because the device in your hand or a key board or an ipad can run or interact with what is happening in it. Google Glass is still putting a layer over what is "out there" and tacitly recognizing a Proscenium Arch as in the theater. It's a kind of Second Life HUD over the world.
But ultimately the voxelated virtual world integrated with gadgets has to lose the arch and this is of course going to have exciting but also terrible ramifications. If the swing of your arm can move something not only in the real world but on a screen in a virtual world that may be attached to other devices...is the world then a giant drone war?
Stay tuned...
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