... and I can't talk about them yet. Solution Provider Conference attendees are under NDA. Inevitably, it will be leaked, and I'll talk about them once they're out there, but suffice it to say -
A LOT of long-asked simple features are being implemented in new versions of the Second Life browser and into next year. There's also really smart changes to the Second Life website coming.
One thing that is safe to say is that Linden Lab's top priority right now is new user experience. That's right on the money, considering high attrition rates and the learning curve of Second Life. That's always the thing I hear most frequently about why people don't go to / stay in Second Life.
So... for now, keep your eyes peeled and ears open for more from Linden Lab. Until then, I'll have to blog about different topics. :)
Augmented Reality is, naturally, perfect for virtual worlds. Here's a screen-shot of the Popcha AR demo. They did a Magic 8-Ball type setup where you hold up a piece of paper with an icon on it, and it places a box on the screen. When you shake the paper, the box spins and gives you the answer to your question.
Say, will Augmented Reality catch on big time?
Another Augmented Reality device that my company, Involve, is exploring is CamSpace. This lets you control your program using basic shapes that you hold up - instant driving wheel, or perhaps avatar control.
And ultimately, that's what Augmented Reality is best at: control. Imagine being able to visualize an entire sim based on a map printed out on a piece of paper, and navigate it with a wireless device or a phone? Imagine mapping the real world interactive instead of to a screen, but directly inside a virtual world? Have real people walk around a virtual space? Have meetings where half the people sitting down are avatars, half meat-bodies?
There's a lot of potential, but right now, barely any practical applications actually released outside of entertaining 1-minute interactions and games. That's why the Postal Service application is so important.
I'll continue to keep my eye on Augmented Reality applications and keep you, my loyal reader, informed.
Before you call me a hypocrite, understand that I still think handshakes are important. But facial expressions are an order of magnitude more important.
Recently, a good discussion has come up in the SLDeveloper mailing list about facial expressions from video. This is, of course, a topic I trumpeteveryfewmonths here. The discussion on the mailing list soon went back to another old everyone's-favorite-wish-list-item topic, "handshakes".
There.com has handshakes because they make all the avatars have the same skeletal structure - same height, cartoonish thinness, limp length, etc. Therefore, the coding is pretty trivial. Since Second Life doesn't have such rigid avatar limitations, it's one of those programming challenges that has been around for a long time, and probably will be. It requires a tremendous amount of effort. And Linden Lab's tried. During 2006, Linden Lab hired staff to do "avatar puppeteering", which resulted in no obvious results. (I can't say if that effort resulted in any more subtle changes, so I can't label it as a failure for lack of internal knowledge. However, the main goal - not accomplished.)
Let's turn back the calendar even further - back when Wagner "Hamlet" James Au was still embedded blogger Hamlet Linden, he wrote this great little social exploratory piece, "Permission to Hug". At the time, avatar Francis Chang had created the first "hug bracelet", which was a device you wear on your avatar and it would do the following: 1. When you type "/hug [avatar's name]" it would pop up a blue dialog box on the avatar's screen asking if it was okay if you could hug that avatar, with yes/no buttons. 2. If the avatar selected yes, it would essentially slowly push your avatar directly towards the other avatar until it detected that both avatars were right next to one another. 3. The hug bracelet would trigger a hug animation in both avatars.
Now, most of the time, it worked pretty well. Though, there were some cases where it pretty much looked silly or stupid: - if you weren't facing the other avatar directly, or vice versa - if there was a big height difference between avatars - if one avatar was non-humanoid.
These hug bracelets are still around today.
Torley and the Handshake
I remember Torley, before he was a Linden, was an avid positive contributor to the old Second Life forums, back when there were few enough of us that it was possible to moderate and keep track of discussions there. He had this epic post about basic functionality Second Life was missing, and included the handshake as one of the primary items. The thread drew a lot of attention, and no doubt was indicative of why Linden Lab ultimately hired Torley - he understood the potential of the platform intuitively. That post was 5-6 years ago.
Handshake - Cultural Gesture
As you probably know, the handshake is ancient, but it's also very Western. The idea is that left-handed people are evil and thus one's weapon had to be used in the right hand. Offering one's right hand, thus, guaranteed you could not effectively attack someone. This has, of course, over time, been made moot (skip to about 3:40):
Heh.
It's pretty ethnocentric of us Westerners to assume the importance of the handshake. While Western Culture has spread it to Eastern countries, it's basically due to one reason: We had the Industrial Revolution first. And while I don't want to get on a political rant, here, lots of Western wealth has arrived in Eastern locations, without an equal amount of Eastern wealth arriving in Western locations in turn. ... in short, in 20 years, we may be bowing instead of shaking hands.
The more the average Chinese citizen talks to the average Western citizen, the more ideas spread, and the more demand there will be for freeing information and media in censoring regimes. (Ironically, I am probably getting added to the Chinese ban list for this blog post.) So if we're trying to "create a new country" as Rosedale would say, and create a Metaverse ecosystem of virtual worlds and social media that encompasses humanity, and not just Western Civilization, we can't get restrict our thinking to one cultural viewpoint.
At the same time, we need to embrace different cultures and try to include them. We SHOULD have the handshake. And we SHOULD have a bow. And perhaps the Indian namaste bow, as well, while we're at it. And perhaps we should be able to tag our profiles with our cultures, and have appropriate gesture options inherent in the other person's browser when they greet us. But I digress.
Facial Expressions: Far more important.
So what's univeral? What do we learn from the instant we are born and look at other humans? Facial expressions. What is the problem with online communication - no body language, no facial expressions. The software is out there to automatically map facial expressions to avatars - it's packaged with many webcams and it's been used in filmmaking for years. Why can't this be a part of the Second Life platform?
Facial expressions are intuitive for all but the severely autistic - and speaking of which, considering the work that has been done to help autistic folks in Second Life, I imagine facial expressions on avatars would be an invaluable teaching tool.
While a handshake or a bow is 2 to 3 seconds of initial interaction, facial expressions last through the entire interaction between two people. While there have been HUD-based devices that allow button-pressing to express emotion animations, these are neither real-time, intuitive, nor contain the subtlety and range of expressions that humans can produce. I've seen far better results from my Logitech webcam camera-to-avatar software that came packaged with my webcam.
There's the "Oh, but webcams cost money" retort. But so do computers that run Second Life well. Webcams can be purchasd for $20, and many laptops come with them built-in. Cost really is not an issue.
Simple Math
Facial expressions also are able to be rendered entirely client-side, meaning that it's far more feasible to implement. So it's simple math: Facial expression animation from webcams produce far more meaningful interaction for far longer periods of time than handshakes. Multiply this by the fact that programming to enable the webcam to expressions is far easier to implement than avatar puppeteering and handshakes.
The result is that we should stop worrying about handshakes, and focus our efforts on the far more important and implementable avatar facial expressions.
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