Historical Precedent: Mobile Computing & Our Unease?

Location: In front of a large screen

image credit: U Penn Library Exhibit, "John W. Mauchly and the Development of the ENIAC Computer"

It's a common complaint that any mention of virtual worlds has ebbed in the popular media, and one reason given has often been the shift to mobile devices and tiny screens. Certainly that describes my students' preferences for online devices: about 90% of the e-mail I get from students comes from their phones.

I have met stiff resistance from colleagues wedded to desktop and laptop computers when suggesting that we need to make mobile computing the focus for our efforts with virtual worlds and more. For some historical precedent about this, consider an argument put forward by John Markoff in What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.  In this, Markoff clearly realizes, as Tim Wu did a few years later in The Master Switch, that some technologies overturn entire industries and ways of communicating:

Indeed, the hallmark of each generation of computing has been that its practitioners have resisted each subsequent shift in technology. Mainframes, minicomputers, PCs, PDAs--at the outset of each innovation, the old guard has fought a pitched battle against the upstarts, only to give in to the brutal realities of cost and performance.

As Moore's Law makes our hand-held devices more powerful, I suspect this will happen again. For the latest shift, it will mean that something the size of a smart phone will be our primary computing device on the go or, when attached to  virtual keyboards and easily accessed monitors, nearly everywhere else. Here's a picture from the year 2023:

You enter your office and look at something like a large-screen television hung on the wall above the desk. You speak a login keyword. The phone, linked to the global data-cloud, remains in your pocket as you begin to work, using gestures in the air while in range of the television's scanner.  Windows for e-mail, a spreadsheet, and a calendar appear and you move them around with your hands while you issue voice commands. To input text you simply speak, and the voice-recognition software in the phone translates this to text. You finish just before a face-to-face meeting with colleagues, and walk down the hall. In the conference room, there's another big television, and with voice alone, you begin to talk. The notes taken in your office appear on the wall.

I will be a very late-comer to mobile computing, when I get a smart phone this fall. I don't fancy my iPad all that much, finding it must useful for quick browsing to, say, check the weather or read an e-book.  That may well change. For the longest time, Markoff notes, printing was one of the biggest hurdles for personal computing. When these puzzles get solved, such as providing big screens and input devices for mobile computing carried in a pocket, progress happens rapidly.

In a world with haptic and voice interfaces, as well as a robust data-cloud, we should get ready to say farewell to both desktop and laptop in fewer years than we might imagine. Then, imagine the students' gesture of neurotically clutching their smart phones to see as antique as clutching a magical talisman.

A Novel Way to Market a New Virtual World

 
Location: Watching one door close as another creaks and threatens to open

I read Iris Ophelia's post that Tiny Speck's Glitch will close, joining the ranks of Google's Lively and Raph Koster's Metaplace in the bin of might-have-been sensations. Will Cloud Party be next?

I loved Glitch for a short while, but did not spend a great deal of time there after the funny concept grew a little tired. I never found community as we ran about squeezing chickens, planting seeds, and donating goodies to appease the giants and curry favor with them.

Iris noted that she too had tried it and stayed away until she heard the world was going under. She also noted the beautiful content she'd found. It was not enough, since not too many folks even knew that Glitch existed.

I'll quote at length from the company's closing announcement about why it failed to attract a user base large enough to sustain the world:

And, given the prevailing technological trends — the movement towards mobile and especially the continued decline of the Flash platform on which Glitch was built — it was unlikely to do so before its time was up. Glitch was very ambitious and pushed the limits of what could be done in a browser-based game ... and then those limits pushed back.

I have said, many times, to colleagues still vainly cheerleading for virtual worlds that I see the future daily: students using handheld devices, not heavy-duty desktops or even, increasingly, laptop computers. I feel sorry for virtual-world evangelists today, especially though naive enough to think that Linden Lab's bizarre corporate culture will pull off some miracle and make our media landscape that of 2006 again. Virtual-world evangelists remind me of me and my geeky Apollo-era friends, waiting for the Moon Base and our flying cars. Going on toward 50 years later, we are still waiting.

So does Glitch's closure mean that the virtual world concept is doomed to failure? Unlike SL, Glitch was fast and ran in a browser. So Flash or not, what could the next starry-eyed designer do to bolster the success of a virtual world with user-generated content?

How about market the world outside the echo-chamber of those who use and write about virtual worlds?

There's My Flying Car! A Vision For Marketing a Virtual World

No world with big aspirations is going to get enough users by cannibalizing SL's user base. Not Glitch or Cloud Party. None of these, including Google's Lively or Koster's Metaplace, advertised.

Compare that to the big games. I saw lots of adverts for Mass Effect III and now for the Assassin's Creed series, including ads on television. Would such expensive TV blitzes help a new virtual world? I don't know, but I have a notion that something different might.

I am about to read Ernest Cline's Ready Player One, a novel I'll teach next term in my first-year seminar Cyberspace: History, Culture, and Future. The novel's setting is largely a near-ubiquitous virtual world called Oasis, and today I began to think: what if an author worked with a game designer from the start to let readers of the book enter the book's world? And what if the book contained clues and puzzles that might be of use in the virtual world?

Cline beat me to the punch, partly. He announced that:

I’ve hidden an “Easter egg” in the text of both the hardcover and paperback editions of Ready Player One. If readers can find this hidden clue, it will lead them to the first of three increasingly difficult video game challenges. The first video game challenge is an Atari 2600 game that contains another Easter Egg that will lead you to the Second Challenge. Completing the Second Challenge will lead you to the Third and Final Challenge.

A winner, Craig Queen, won an actual DeLorean car. While Cline did not take the audacious step of trying to get someone to build Oasis, he's on the road to it.

His contest is pure marketing gold, the sort of thing that Linden Lab could have done but never did, in their assiduous attempts to avoid advertising their world. Imagine giving away a real automobile in 2007, at the height of the SL frenzy, for a Premium member who had solved an in-world riddle. It would have made national news, and Linden Lab would have easily parted with a Porsche or two.

The Lindens relied on free media buzz and insider hipness to pump up SL. We are more harried and tethered to our mobile devices now than five years ago, so cutting through the smog of information would be harder. And hip? That's no longer the case for virtual worlds, so it escapes me why Tiny Speck, with a platform both more obscure and more stable than Linden Lab's, did not promote their game.

If someone can figure out how to create an immersive space that can be accessed by the computers we carry in our hands, it will still need marketing, where Tiny Speck, Rezzable, Linden Lab, Raph Koster, and Google all failed. It will take a tie-in to the broader geek culture, and it will take something like what Cline is pioneering: cult book and world released together.

Why Cloud Party Matters To Educators

Location: Shiny Canyon, in Facebook!

A great number of pixels have been used to praise or critique Cloud Party over at Hamlet Au's New World Notes. True, one needs a Facebook account, and sacrifices anonymity, to use the service fully. Anonymous logins are possible at the link I gave above, but they only permit limited interactions and the avatar's experience and content--as far as I understand--do not persist.

Here are some reasons I think Cloud Party represents the next generation of virtual worlds:

• No client: this is key to mass adoption. For educators, it means that a student only needs a FB account. That means about 100% uptake for my students.
• Real life ID: for Millennials, that too is key. They find virtual worlds "creepy" because, to paraphrase most of my 100+ users, "you don't know who is on the other end of the wire."  Their faith in authenticity may be naive, but it's strong and consistent in this demographic. Blame it on 12 years of "Internet Safety" classes rammed into their heads by schools.

• Users such as "Pussycat Catnip" argued, with me and others in a long string of commentary at Au's blog, that one key aspect of enjoying SL is being able to assume a new identity. For her, Cloud Party's link to Facebook "makes it useless for anyone wishing to explore concepts like identity or self expression." Frankly, that matters little in how I've used virtual worlds, save for the House of Usher simulation, which is a one-off assignment with roleplay.
  
  Fretful administrators at colleges and universities will like the seeming transparency of Cloud Party as currently configured, though I suspect that "Cloud Party" to be only a marginally better name than the tainted "Second Life" moniker. I'd have preferred "New World" or similar, but Cloud Party goes not purport to be an educational tool. Nor did SL; we just took to it, and so did many others with some very different interests and intentions.
• Easy UI that looks bound for mobile devices: Desktop rigs are the choice for serious games for serious gamers. They are not my students or colleagues, however; gamers here are a very small, and disrespected, part of the student body. When mainstream students do play games, they are more likely to pick up a console or play a casual game on their mobile devices and laptops.
  
  Cloud Party exploits the metaphors of mobile computing nicely.
  
  The Control Panel, shown here, looks like a smart phone and, when opened, provides small icons straight out of the world of mobile computing.
• Perfect Timing. Educators screwed over by Linden Lab's mid-year doubling of tier have been looking for something easier to use than OpenSim. I think something like this new virtual world could do the trick. My Avatar looks like a newbie refugee from The Sims Online, but I can live with that. Building is very much like SL, from what I see. Linden Lab needs to be worried...very worried.
• Storm Clouds? Right now, unless a browser supports WebGL, it won't run this virtual world. Nor will iOS devices. I am searching for a app to try it on my iPad.  Android users may have more luck. But for now, the majority of computing on my campus is done with laptops on wireless. About 70%, at last report, of new students bring Mac OS laptops.  On my MacBook Pro, Cloud Party runs very well and the fan never comes on, as it does constantly with SL running the Firestorm viewer.
  
  I hope that Cloud Party pursues access to all tablet OSes, though one wonders if Apple and Microsoft will open their mobile OSes to WebGL; on a phone Cloud Party would not be useful for more than texting. A tablet might be too constrained for building, but given my limited experience, my iPad's screen is plenty big for moving and chatting.  Much of Cloud Party depends on right clicks, so that would need to be fixed for mobile users.

Now for the experience: In two visits, I completed the basic and build tutorials and got a free house in a region called "Shiny Valley." Easy enough for veteran SLers. What about those new to virtual worlds? The tutorials were excellent, better than what I found in Second Life and more akin to my unalloyed joys of the first hour in Glitch. My interest in Glitch waned, I admit, because of the lack of realistic avatars and its side-scroll interface.

Here I am being greeted by Gwenette Sinclair, one of the new neighbors.  I know, it's The Sims kinda-sorta. But shiny!

We immediately went to YouTube to watch this R.E.M. video:




It's nice to feel happy about this shiny new virtual world. I hope the happy dance continues. Come by Shiny Canyon for a visit.

Mobile: Shiny? Yes. Hyped? Yes. Fad? No.

About the image: Got your own SL meme? Thanks to Hamlet Au for alerting us to this hilarious meme. Have a crack at adding your own caption here.

Location: Before My Crystal Ball

The other day at VWER, a colleague who should know better claimed that tablet-based computing is a fad on campus, the newest and shiniest object for technologists and administrators. I disagree, even though I have long resisted using a tablet.

This summer, my work will focus increasingly on mobile. I'm not going completely back to Flatland. I'll be finishing some work on Usher, both at SL and Jokaydia Grid, given that I might run the simulation again in the Spring of 2013. Yet I'd be nuts to devote much time to these platforms, given the energy generated by the technology that students and colleagues are actually using already.

It's something of an apples-to-watermelon comparison, when looking at virtual worlds and mobile computing. That said, I remain convinced that SL in particular is a "legacy app" because of its limited return on investment. Readers of this blog may have to get used to a few new directions here, but I'll continue to cover my and colleagues work in virtual worlds.

As for this post? I don't think the SL evangelist is teaching on an actual campus today. Here's why.

Reason 1: Students have mobile hardware on them 24/7

When Second Life was being hyped in mainstream media, students were not carrying technology, by and large, that ran it well. As I noted as early as my first class with SL in the Spring of 2007, if an application did not run well on wireless and on a laptop free of an AC adapter, it might as well not exist for students.

In the five years since, that gap has widened as SL and the promise of public virtual worlds remain down in the Trough of Disillusionment. Gartner analysts predict 5-10 years for mainstream adoption.

Meanwhile, after diving in to the Trough in the 90s, e-readers began climbing out. Media tablets are past the Peak of Inflated Expectations, but they remain two to five years from mainstream adoption. Part of that involves standards. No one knows who will dominate the tablet wars that are surely erupt as Windows 8 devices roll out. I don't really care, as I'm still a novice even with my iPad 2. Microsoft has deep pockets and, despite my disdain for their OS before Windows 7, they can build great hardware; my MS two-button mouse is King Mouse, even when I compare it to the sleek Apple cordless I use at work.

Even as tablets begin to jockey for market share, the mobile experience has gone from students' ways of contacting each other socially to the default device for using the Internet. These devices are already "always on and always on you," to quote from Sherry Turkle's Alone Together, a text I'm devouring on my iPad. One after another student tells me, in brief e-mails sent from iPhones, that their laptops are being reserved for times when they have to "type a paper." That means Word, and that means print.

I'll blog more about the reading experience on a tablet later.

Whoever gains (or in Apple's case, maintains) dominance and establishes the standard matters less to me than the fact that SL and OpenSim do not run well, if at all, on tablets.  Unity 3D does for iOS and Android. I cannot make content for that platform yet, and may never do so, but I'd like to try my hand at exploring others' work.

Concurrent to all this churn, we are  moving to tablets on our campuses for consuming media. If Moore's Law holds true, these devices will become better and better at creating content.

One does not wish to be on the wrong side of history, and I think SL evangelists are clearly on the wrong side, unless they are early in their careers and have a Plan B for research and teaching.

Reason 2: Mobile apps directly relate to classroom work

Save for simulations, as I've noted at length here, there are few compelling reasons to use a virtual world of any sort in the classroom. Many of us don't even need a "world" for a class: we need one or two sims and good content.

The bigger world of SL helps this teacher only insofar as it gets me together with colleagues to share ideas. For some social-sciences or writing courses, I could see the advantage of studying a lively online culture, though IRB reviews could be a nightmare for publication. For language classes, live contact with speakers of other languages would be good.

Otherwise, why DO we send students in-world?

For mobile technology, especially e-texts and note-taking apps, the advantage in a classroom setting, traditional, online, or hybrid, are immediate. Students need not lug heavy books to class, work, or bed. The devices link them directly to research sources. Virtual worlds, in comparison, are clumsy add-on apps that do not play with other applications well. Hence the notecards, LSL minefields, database failures, and other peculiarities that keep VWs from becoming mainstream in the near-term future.

Meanwhile, students working with a colleague in Physics are walking around campus at night and pointing their iPads at the heavens. On their screens, Sky Safari. It is intuitive and easy and can be done on the prowl with our campus wireless. Don't try that with a virtual world.

Reason 3: "Fast, Easy Fun"...We got it wrong before

We will all have characters in MOOs. We will all study literary hypertext. We will all have avatars in immersive 3D virtual worlds.

We'll all pilot flying cars on our commutes, too.

None of these technologies were easy for mainstream users. Some were fast, and to me all of them could be fun.

Remember Linden Lab's marketing push a while back, given Philip Rosedale's pitch that SL should be "Fast, Easy, Fun"? Hamlet Au nailed the challenges Linden Lab faced then. I would claim, based on my experience in OpenSim, that the challenges are even higher for mainstream faculty.

Not so for tablets and smart phones. They are fast and easy. Changing apps is a lot easier for a noob like me than was changing my outfit in SL.

And used judiciously, they are fun.  Too many users are addicted to them, but that's beyond a faculty member's control.

Mobile devices as "Flavor of the Month"? Hardly. More like "future main course."

Grandpa's Box: My Thoughts on the Future of Our Computers

Location: Using Obsolescent Computing Tool

I don't know how many of my friends among Second Life's digerati are in contact with young people on a daily basis. I am, and I am stunned by how fast they are abandoning the personal computer.

The other day, I got a briefing from a Writing Consultant who works for me. She reviewed our Writing Center Web site and, while polite and praising the content, noted that the organization is all wrong for a student audience. "I no longer use my laptop," she admitted. "The iPad is my primary computer."

Much of our content, developed over many years and going through a vetting process with several bureaucratic levels, is all wrong.

It has happened with hyperdrive speed, this shift.  We are not an engineering or arts school: our students reflect typical affluent users.

Should I cheer at this funeral?

Iggy in the Confessional Booth, Before St. Steve

As a Mac-OS fanatic, I take no comfort in Apple's victory with portable devices. Windows-users, we are in the same boat, because the iPad is no Mac. Or Windows PC.

It's the anti-Mac, or better still, the final realization of Steve Jobs' dream of 1984: a sleek and closed-down platform with an elegant interface, but where one pays a price: Apple controls every damned thing. The iPhones and iPads are also hip examples of industrial design, just as the Mac of 1984 was no bulky (and sturdy) IBM PC of the sort I then owned. The IBM was for office-clones who had reluctantly given up their Selectric typewriters. The Mac was for artists and freaks.

It was a machine with a personality. Over time, it acquired a soul after Jobs' hammer-lock on hardware design was yanked away. Except for Extensions conflicts before OS X. But we won't go there...Jobs' "second coming" swept away the Old Order.

Jobs is a man with Olympian ambition and an insanely great idea or two: his ideal factory would take trucks of sand in one end and ship out computers at the other end. He wants to own the whole system. Henry Ford was smiling from plutocrat-heaven when he looked down at St. Steve.  Tim Wu understands this well in his book The Master Switch. Wu takes some well aimed swipes at Jobs.

Sorry, Steve. I really adore your OS, but I'm thinking of backing Google with an Android purchase. And--horrors--I think I'll be playing Mass Effect on an Xbox 360.

Confession #2: I'm going to buy that in several months, mostly to play the latest Mass Effect.  Let's give the Devil his due; Microsoft kept their corporate wet-blanket culture off the gaming division, and out of that we got the Kinect.

Trouble for Granda's Box

My "Nerd-Night" tabletop RPG group consists of one Mac-guy (me) and a bunch of Windows-based gamers who get away from their MMOs to go "old school" and roll some d20s. Some of them own console games, but not a one uses a smart phone or tablet.

They are dinosaurs as surely as I am. They don't get why the next generation of computer users are eschewing desktop systems for portable devices. I, on the other hand, get it.

Millennials want to always be in touch with their hive. They need self assurance and confirmation of their choices, and they do their social planning on the fly. That's impossible from a tethered desktop or even a laptop. I've yet to see more than a scattering of students use a laptop outside, as university promotional photos often show. Instead, they compute as they walk across campus. Give them data glasses that look just like sunglasses, and they'd use them too. Just don't make them stop, even for a nanosecond.

I recently had an epiphany that the wider culture is also getting it when I saw this Scott Adams' cartoon.

My buddies and I are Dilbert. My students, the young fella.

I don't know how Apple's closed system will fare against the Android OS from Google. Poorly, I secretly hope. But as a Microsoft-hater, I am also pleased that Windows will be the biggest loser of all. The company, except for its Kinect, has been no innovator in recent years. Was it ever? Steve Balmer has the cool-factor of Dilbert.

Whatever our desktop OS, I think we old timers with our grandpa boxes will look back at the System Wars of the 1980s and 90s with nostalgia. Like many other hobbies I embrace, from model-building to boardgames about World War II, the rest of society has moved on and I'm in this eddy of forgotten time.

I see a future in which content creators will use powerful computers in some form. The rest of the public--the consumers--will want to be close to the Machine. Machines as easy to use that they are ubiquitous, a part of our bodies.

It's what Sherry Turkle of MIT has called "always on, always on you" technology. Get ready for it.

But I still don't own a cell phone...my "dumb phone," a pay-as-you-go model, expired in April.  It won't be missed.