Our group was talking the other day about SL eventually becoming the Internet itself. Will Linden Labs eventually relinguish their control and allow for a more open format? Will the scripting language be something that will be adopted by more people or will SL move to a more widely used language? Will there be less blocks on how much you can upload or how much it costs to upload? What are all the things preventing SL from being the main interface with the Web and how will (if, at all) will those barriers be taken down? Just pondering, my thoughts have not run their full course on this one.
Although it is extremely dangerous and probably foolish to try to predict the future, I have a feeling that SL per-se is just an early stage of a phase-change sort of thing. An expression, certainly, of the oncoming singularity, or perhaps more appropriately like a branch on the evolutionary tree of technology that might or might not succeed. And like you wonder, if LL does not open the source and allow full participation, that branch is surely to wither and die.
ReplyDeleteI find certain similarity with the development of computer graphics, that grew in tandem with advances in technology. Without going too far back, I remember when to create a 3D model you had to enter the x,y,z coordinate of every pixel that made every polygon that finally constituted your "model" and then had to specify the shader or visual characteristics, reaction to light source etc, you get the picture.
Very soon came entrepreneurs that started creating interfaces and hiding the great complexity as technology progressed at an increasing rate, making possible the photorealism that we take for granted today or the ease of use of a tool like SketchUp which allows practically anybody to construct and manipulate 3D objects integrated into the virtual earth.
The same way that the confluence of different advances in different fields resulted in the computer and internet revolutions, the blossoming of social spaces, Google Earth (and its siblings), VR, robotics, telepresence etc. will bring about an unimaginable change before our eyes. The question is, will we see it? or will it just absorb us like a nutrient?