Deformed: Virtual Worlds & 1970s Computing History

Location: Watching Douglas Engelbart's "The Mother of all Demos"

image credit: New Media Consortium at Flickr

Many of us who have dabbled with virtual worlds have wondered how they could form a constellation of networked systems, in much the same way as the Internet's servers do today. Whatever the fate of this niche technology called virtual worlds, from the failure to run on mobile devices to the inherent boom-bust cycle of Second Life's particular brand, the road not taken always beckons.

There is an historical precedent here, and it's one that has a happy ending. Could the same be true for virtual worlds?

Today's Internet: Clarke's Law in Action

For a moment, consider the complex and delicate magic that occurs whenever we use the Internet. My university server talks fine to Google, for work such as the just-completed Usher project. Whenever the Outlook mail client randomly eats student file attachments sent to me, I smile. Ah, Microsoft's wonderfully Byzantine and wonderfully doomed, technology, eating even its own Word files. Cue Apple and Google, as the Ottomans on the horizon, slowly gobbling up a once mighty empire.  Good riddance.

Then, because of the lack of monopoly that Microsoft coveted and almost got, I have the students try, try again with Gmail. Excede's servers send me the results and, once I type, transmit my thoughts--profound or inane--from home travel via satellite to Google.  When I send notice of this post to interested folks at Twitter or Facebook, the servers hosting that data all "talk" to one another.

Types of Gardens and a World-Wide Web, 1975?

Compare that to virtual worlds technology, ostensibly part of the Internet since that is how we access it. Second Life, InWorldz, and many others that share core technologies could, in theory, speak to each other. Had development not branched off as it has done, Linden Lab and a few other grids might have pioneered a system for avatars and inventory to travel from world to world.  That happens with OpenSim Hypergridding, a technology that John Lester promoted, before his work for Reaction Grid turned to Jibe-based 3D worlds.  But "interoperability" died years ago at Linden Lab, and it seems unlikely to return.

It's curious, this set of walled gardens. If today the Internet resembles Borges Garden of Forking Paths, Virtual Worlds resemble something else: the road taken in the 1970s toward personal computing.

I realized that while reading John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said, a history of early computing got influenced by the American Counterculture:

When personal computing finally blossomed in Silicon Valley in the mid-seventies, it did so largely without the history and research that had gone before it. As a consequence, the personal-computer industry would be deformed for years, creating a world of isolated desktop boxes, in contrast to the communities of shared information that had been pioneered in the sixties and early seventies. (179)

The Internet did not begin with Al Gore, whatever he may have claimed. It did not begin in Jobs' family garage and with Steve Wozniak's brilliant hardware hacks. It did not begin at Xerox PARC with the Alto. The personal computer with a GUI and mouse? Yes, we can credit or blame Xerox and Apple for that.

But years before, nearly every element of the modern Internet would have been possible with the Augment system, developed under the leadership of Douglas Engelbart. Yet that development stalled and ended, a revolution stillborn.  I think we can see an analogue for what is going on, at this cultural moment, with user-generated virtual worlds.

Engelbart's Mouse

Want to see what might have been for the Internet? I am convinced that had something like Augment  been made less opaque for casual users, we'd have had an academic, and perhaps consumer Internet in 1975. Engelbart gave a show-stopper of a demo in 1968, with mouse, text-editing with clipboard and copy/paste, multiple files, graphics on screen, electronic mail, hyperlinks tagged to graphics, and remote visitors via a network.  You can see what he was doing with Augment at these videos from Stanford.

The reasons for Augment's failure are complex; Markoff's book does justice both to the creator's vision and his ultimate failure to produce a widely adapted product.  What happened, however, for consumers was the emergence of walled gardens and proprietary systems from Apple, Microsoft, Digital, Tandy, and other competitors forgotten except by historians of technology.

When the Internet emerged, it came late to a culture of desktop boxes that could not, generally, talk to one another.

What if the personal computer revolution had begun with networking? And similarly...

What if Virtual Worlds Had Begun with Interoperability?

I'm writing an article about one group of USENET hobbyists who have made the jump to Facebook, because the old .alt group proved too chaotic and full of spammers, trolls, and other bottom feeders. They also made the leap because, frankly, .jpgs and text import and export well between applications. Text did in Engelbart's day.

Little aside from these, plus Collada files and some other graphic formats, can move between different virtual worlds.  Standards for inventories, for avatar meshes, and for "land" templates are different. In this technology landscape, OpenSim grids serve as today's Augment. Managing a bunch of avatars and a region in OS is hard to master, not stable in my experience except in the hands of a pro, but interoperable. Running an entire campus-hosted grid would be lovely, but it's beyond my time or expertise to learn.

Other products with potential beyond SL's technology, such Unity 3D and Jibe, produce elegant worlds, but they don't talk to other worlds and expert designers need to craft objects. They do offer vast potential, according to OpenSim pioneer Adam Frisby, for scaling, running on mobile devices, and improved grahics.

That sounds great until one considers faculty skills-sets and what it takes to build with Unity or Jibe. As noted  before in this blog, developing for these platforms may be within reach for architecture and engineering students, but at my university, it's challenge enough to get students to juggle multiple e-mail accounts and embed files from YouTube into their blog posts. We faculty lack time and incentives to do more with them, let alone learn 3D applications such as Maya or Blender.  Yet nearly all of us at my school have created content, mostly with text and images and sometimes digital video, and shared it on the Internet.

For all its limitations and toxicity as a brand, Second Life and, lets amateurs with a copy of Photoshop build easily. I'm told that Cloud Party does too, and I will soon try again with Cloud Party's latest build tools. Scripting remains something for those not faint of heart and projects to make visual scripting tools, such as MIT's Scratch for SL, remain as stillborn as Augment.

What it will Take to be Disruptive

Here comes a sweeping generalization, and I'm ready to fall on this sword if some wise person can prove me wrong. Virtual worlds will never be a disruptive technology, in Tim Wu's sense of the term, until they become an interoperable and popular tool for everyday life, as the Web and e-mail have become.

Had virtual worlds begun with a series of collaborative academic ventures rooted in common standards, rather than a group of for-profit start-ups from The Valley, we might have that disruption and a 3D Web today.  Then the profits would follow, because in 1968, who could have foreseen eBay or Amazon or Facebook?

Right now, however, it's still 1968 and we've all seen the potential of a disruptive technology, as those who watched Engelbart's presentation did.

So today, who will build the 3D Web?

Hamlet, AOL, Facebook, and SL

Location: New World Notes

It must be a slow news-day for fake worlds, or I'd have something fresh to say. Yet I was caught by the change in tone in Hamlet Au's reporting at New World Notes. He's long been viewed as an SL advocate, even after his gig reporting on the Blue Mars virtual world (now in the process of withering into something like IMVU for mobile devices). Now Hamlet is claiming that SL must change fast or fade away.

For a few years, my colleague at VWER, AJ Kelton, has been calling SL the virtual-worlds equivalent of AOL , in its older incarnation as a wall-garden network. AOL remade itself into a starting point for viewing the rest of the Internet, something Linden Lab began with some early interoperability experiments but gave up.

Hamlet is correct, in a reply to a comment, that the comparison is fair:

"The comparison isn't in the services each company provides. The comparison is with their main revenue streams -- both of them are out of date and cannot be replenished."

I've written this at NWN and I'll say it here; if Linden Lab wants a new revenue stream, they need to renew work on interoperability...and more than teleporting to or from the Hypergrid as "Ruth." LL could use its clout to devise licensing for IP so it can deliver Marketplace content to other grids and make the Linden Dollar the default intergrid currency.

That would bring in some revenue from the OpenSim universe. I've a hundred bucks worth of shopping I'd have done for my simulation in Jokaydia Grid, and I bet others would spend that much and more, all with revenues going to LL from commissions.

It's sad to see the best known virtual world miss this opportunity. I'm seeing it clearly in SL for my own use. I will soon pay my annual fee for Premium, but as for tier, I'm happy with my free 512 square-meter sandbox. Now my serious work goes on in OpenSim, where costs are far lower.  Anything I want to import from that side I can build there and import to SL for a measly 10L fee. But some content will be beyond my ability or the time I'd allot to learn more. So I'd just as soon pay some Linden Dollars to the Marketplace to have the content delivered to Jokaydia Grid.

As for other ways to bring in more money? New accounts would help, but I disagree with Hamlet's push for Facebook integration. I recently was dragged, kicking and screaming, to Facebook by my student employees, and I've set up a modest profile so I can manage one of our campus' corporate FB accounts.  I just don't see what the fuss is over, by the way. FB is clunky in its interface (no support I could find for HTML tags, for instance) and the page layout is boring.  I'm sure that templates exist, or that I'm missing some bigger point.

Facebook does a great job of connecting real people. Second Life enables immersion in something one cannot do in real life or even immersion as someone else. 

SL and FB are oil and water. So whatever direction the Lindens choose for their product to escape AOL's irrelevant role in the modern Internet, Facebook is not what I'd choose.

Update 2/22/11:

Nice reply to Hamlet's post by Ananda: c'mon, LL, this could be your goldmine!

I still hope for the day when SL is not such a walled garden, where LL is a central certification and clearinghouse for avatars that can roam (with their stuff!) from place to place in the 3D version of the Web. Perhaps getting a "certified hypergrid identity" or "certified hypergrid host" could provide a new revenue source? LL's biggest asset is not so much the land, but the community network effect and, frankly, the built-up inventories. If LL can find a way to certify alternate land hosts as trustworthy (i.e. you can trust them to host content and assets with privacy and not immediately turn around and resell them) and to provide a content or avatar registry service, so copybot items are automatically flagged, and avatars are free to use duly purchased and licensed content on other grids, something like that might be a better way to go than to depend on continuing to host land in what seems like the most inefficient, inflexible manner possible.