NMC, BMG, Intel

I'm trying to retain this blog not as a news blog, but as a critical thinking blog. As we bring in the big names into Second Life, it's important to understand not just that big money is entering the Metaverse, but the specific significance and implications of each one.

A few from recent weeks:

NMC

Last week Larry Johnson announced Phase 2 of New Media Consortium campus in Second Life. Infinite Vision Media was announced as the hired developer for phase 2. (IVM is the company I'm a partner in since the merge.)

NMC is a cooperation of different learning institutions to create a shared community space for the educators in SL. Linden Lab has their own space that they have set up, as well, though theirs acts more as a "newbie land" type space rather than a conscious collaboration like NMC.

This is an extremely significant project in the scope of the Metaverse for one reason above all others in particular: This is the growth of shared, non-residential space in the Metaverse.

SL History Lesson: Residential Communities

What does this mean? Well, basically the majority of land in SL is residential land. A lot of that is virtual suburban sprawl - a mess of shops and swimming pools and clubs and villas. There are a number of different communities that have emerged from the sprawl. One of the first was Luskwood - a "furry" community. Hosts of other types of groups have followed, and at one point land barons (who buy, sell, and rent land en Masse in SL) got savvy to the idea and started themed private residential communities.

Why does this occur? Very simple. The Metaverse has something that the traditional Internet does not: Locality. On the World Wide Web, there is no relation of proximity from say, Microsoft.com and Google.com - they are both on servers and are accessed independently. Even web pages within sites technically have no relative proximity on the Internet. Often times they may not even have proximity on the same physical server.

Location, Proximity = Community, Collaboration

NMC is not a residential community; it is a business one. (albeit non-profit & educational) The idea that businesses, educators, and developers share the same space means that they exchange ideas and participate in each others' developmental processes. This is exactly one of the primary advantages that the Metaverse offers over the Internet, and a big reason why it will ultimately grow to a ubiquitous platform. As more space is dedicated for shared use, or proximity-based use.

Malls popped up in early 2004, however they were always designed for individual consumer experience, not for collaboration of the shops. They are essentially a 3-D catalog, little more. Instead, it is the spaces designed for interpersonal interaction that promote collaboration and ultimately progress in virtual world use.

BMG

You may remember that it was Electric Sheep Company that did Phase 1 of NMC's SL campus. They passed from what appears to be focusing on bigger fish, Sony BMG. They're premiering with a meet-and-greet event with one of my favorite songwriters, Ben Folds. According to their press release, Sony BMG will be experimenting with selling music via Second Life.

Nice work, sheep. (And fret not, I've got some more big fish coming soon, too. *grin*)

While meet-n-greets aren't new to SL, Ben Folds is certainly a big name. But what's signficant is less the promotional event for their kick-off, and more about their long-term plan to sell music via SL. I pressed a couple sheepers for details, but alas, it's private right now, so I can only wait and see how the sheep have planned to do this. I would assume that at worst, they have some sort of jukebox with previews of music, album art, and links to a WWW site where users can buy the music. If Sony's being cooperative with them, I could guess that they're preprogramming in streams to their servers. And if sheep are really clever, they'll come out with something portable.

We shall see. I'm anxious to see this outcome.

Intel

One final significant event was the publicity stunt Millions of Us did with Intel over the past weekend. SL builder extraordinaire, Versu Richelieu, was locked in a Manhattan storefront for 72 hours (with restroom breaks, I assume) building a replica of the very surroundings she was locked up in. This was to promote Intel's new Dual-Core PCs. While the actual tie-in between dual-cores and Second Life was ... well, not direct, I still think this was a really cool stunt.

I stopped by on Friday after going to Digital Life 2006 (sadly an underwhelming display of old technology). Versu was in good spirits, with plenty of gummy bears, and doing a surprisingly thorough job of building the streets. Links to photos and machinima by Tao Takashi here. MOU did a very good job covering this and updating their blog with info.

Why This Was Cool

So, this was cool because I came to an epiphany. I was allowed to poke my head in and chat with Versu for a couple minutes, and she told me that her avatar had originally been in a virtual storefront. Partly because of technical reasons, she freed her avatar. Aside from the fact that it made it easier to build, she said she told Reuben (MOU's CEO) that is she was trapped in a window, her avatar would have to be free, not both encaged.

It made me realize how much the mind controls one's perception of freedom. It also occured to me again how much virtual worlds really immerse a person to the point where it tricks them in their physical state. I have heard plenty of stories of disabled people using Second Life and finding new freedoms, but this was a different concept: Versu has no disabilities that I know of, and yet she found herself able to ignore her own personal lack of mobility by experiencing through her avatar.

That's so immensely fascinating to me!

So this publicity stunt succeeded, to me, not just because of the IBM name, but because of the human experiment it conducted in the process. It reaffirms the power of virtual worlds and avatars. Very, very cool.

Oh, and Sun Microsystems: All talk, no substance.

Millions of Us also ran a neat press conference for Sun Microsystems a week ago, but from what Sun actually said, it all sounded like hypothetical talk.

From "In the Grid" magazine:

"(Sun) can tremendously add to both the back-end architecture and front-end interface of the emerging MMO community, and that they plan on heavily doing so, or at least as much as their departments can convince the rest of the company to support it. Although perhaps a little more grandiose than the eventual project, Gage for example talked about the concept of replacing Linden's entire SL infrastructure, running the entire thing instead through a custom-made combination of Linux and Java, making the system not only work a lot smoother but immediately tie the environment into two of the largest developer communities on the planet."

To me, that sounds as if Sun is trying to buy Linden Lab. And personally as a non-fan of Java, and realizing how much resources Linden Lab has tied up into its current model, this all sounds like hype to me. So, congrats to Millions of Us for the neat press conference, but I'm not holding my breath to see what Sun does. I'm also chuckling at the idea that Java is one of the two biggest dev communities on the web. 15 years later, Sun is still trying to rule the world with Java, and it ain't happening.

Fortune 500? Sure. But Sun is clearly jumping on the Metaverse bandwagon rather than helping to pull it along. I guess we'll see what else they may have up their sleeves.