O Blog do Gustavo Felisberto

A few weeks ago I attended some presentations about social 3d worlds. Two of the four presentations were about what can be done on Second Life and how to do it, another was about E-Learning and Virtual Worlds and the last one (actually it was the third) was by Marcos Marado and was a very nice retrospective about virtual worlds dating back to 1968. His presentation showed that many of these virtual worlds was eventually taken over my something newer. Surely many are still used today, but the user base dropped to a shadow of what was before.

My feeling is that the same will happen to second life. And why will that happen? Today I see two classes of problems with second life that need addressing:
Technical Problems
It is a very slow engine! It is open source code so the community should be able to fix it right? Wrong!! The problem is at a level that I do not believe a fix can be produced by changing the client code. As I saw last Saturday most of the performance issues come from the fact that the engine was designed to parse user produced content.

Economical Problems
Second Life is not a game. It does not aim to be a game. It aims to be a simulation of the real world, and it wants to be as perfect as possible. So good a simulation that money inside the virtual world is bought with real €€ and can be converted back.

Second life is an emerging platform for content production and distribution, just like the web was in 95. The main difference is the cost involved in a web presence versus a second life presence. Also back in 95/96 it was easy to imagine why should company A or B be in the web. With second life it is not that easy.