back to the future
DESCRIPTION
A review of the most innovative technologies that were launched in the Second Life® environment and how it completely modified and transformed it.TRANSCRIPT
“Back To The Future”Gwyneth Llewelyn
Innovation Week ’08Orange Island, September 29, 2008
What innovations changed Second Life® completely?
Clues to find them:
“Disruptive innovation”: suddenly a host of new things start to become common, when they were unthinkable before
Fads that never go out of ‘fashion’
Since we just have one hour....
... we’ll focus on the kinds of innovations that unforeseenly changed the way we think about Second Life®
Often Linden Lab introduced them with completely different goals
Residents, however, transformed them and created something new
The Economy
Second Life started... without the L$!
Allowed residents to exchange goods and services using a micropayment currency
Things like the LindeX (after the Gaming Open Market exchange) were unplanned and unexpected!
Lessig’s IP-on-a-prim
Intended to allow deeper-grained control in collaborative building
Instead: it made SL an one-of-a-kind virtual world, the single one featuring only user-generated content!
Animations
Introduced in June 2004
Linden Lab thought about “emotes” (inside gestures)
But... it was used by the dance industry
... and made the whole sex industry go through a Renaissance!
Flexible prims (flexies)
A nice addition to tortured prims allowing new types of building elements (e.g. flags, awnings...)
Totally used by the fashion industry!
The same applies, of course, to sculpties
Web connectivity
June 2004: XML-RPC allows webservers to communicate with in-world objects (before that: email)
Planned to allow simple interactions with remote databases
... but we got web-based shops, market exchanges, social site mashups...
Voice
Planned to “keep up with the competition” who used voice for gaming purposes
But we got business conferences, seminars, live music, even talk shows...
LL is the world’s second largest VoIP operator after Skype (in just one year!)
Streaming media
Perhaps thought to allow people to tell their friends what they were listening to...
Generated a huge music economy, where DJs and live musicians now work full time, and radios and in-world TV stations offer regular features
Resident innovations!
Mostly they addressed SL’s limitations by clever tweaking of certain features, exploiting bugs, or thinking out-of-the-box
Some have become so popular and universal that residents think it was “planned this way”!
The Ugly Avatar
Newer generations will never remember Ruth any more, but...
we all have prim hair, shoes, and skirts
animation overriders & dance bracelets
avatar radars
skins
Extending Second Life
If Linden Lab were any other company (think Kaneva!), these would be part of their services:
SnapzillaThe online webshopsSL Profiles
LindeX is just LL’s clone of the GOM
libOpenMV
Formerly known as libsecondlife, this is a re-engeneering solution to talk to SL without using a 3D viewerIt brought us CopyBot and LandBots... but also all sorts of new ways of get rid of LL’s imposed limits on LSLStatistics, metrics, mapping, invites...
The future?...
As we will see later, new technologies might become the next ‘disruptive technology’
