Continuing his blog series on what he’s learned as a lead developer/consultant at Oculus, Eve Online, and of course Linden Lab, Jim “Babbage” Purbrick has a new post arguing that the architecture of the metaverse should be a network of linked, small spaces:
As the Second Life continued to expand and change at an ever faster rate it became increasingly important to have ways to find the good stuff. Bookmarks, searches and external blogs indexed the expanding world helping people find things. Rather than walk, fly or sail around the world people would teleport from place to place or event to event. Even if you wanted to walk it became increasingly hard to do so: more and more parcels of land became private, restricting entry to both people and any scripted fish unlucky enough to try to swim across the boundary… Technologically, Second Life also began to split at the seams. The addition of Second Life URLs (SLurls) allowed blogs to link to locations in Second Life and people increasingly wrote scripts which published out to the web and Twitter or pulled data in from the web to visualize in 3D….
[I]t was incredibly encouraging to see some of the earliest experiments in social VR at Oculus try something similar by linking Oculus Rooms to other experiences via coordinated app launch (CAL). While the first CAL implementations linked Oculus Rooms to a fixed set of published experiences it’s easy to imagine people using similar technology to build environments which link to their favorite locations around the Metaverse just as early web sites curated links to favourite content around the web.
I understand Jim’s reasons for wanting the Metaverse to act more like the web — but then that means the Metaverse acts less like a world. Or as I put it to him:
“Don’t linked small spaces create a sense of discontinuity and hurt immersion and a feeling of being in a ‘world’? In your post, you mention some virtual worlds that link with small rooms (Metaplace, Whirled and Sansar), but they’re all small in terms of user bases. The biggest virtual worlds, Minecraft and Fortnite, are huge contiguous spaces.”
Babbage’s reply to that:
“I think some worlds benefit immensely from being contiguous spaces: Minecraft is about exploring your own unique world grown from a random number seed, travelling in Warcraft ensures quests take time, lets you become immersed in the curated world and provides time for conversation along the way, a lot of EVE is about trying to move shipments of materiel around or hunting people who are doing the moving.
“Many of these worlds still use linked spaces where they help though: instanced dungeons in MMOs or wormholes and star gates in EVE that let you take short cuts. In Second Life putting everything on a grid meant that if you travelled across the mainland you’d walk past a random selection of castles, bars and space stations and even in curated estates you’d walk past mile after mile of people’s houses, each of which needed a unique X, Y, Z. It’s telling that even in a world [SL] which did a decent job of letting you soar across the landscape most people teleport around.
“Designing your Metaverse to consciously support linking allows you to bake those links into the world. I can build a house with four doors each of which takes you to my favourite places. Instead of using external bookmarks or blogs to overlay links on a contiguous space I can weave them in to the world and ensure that every door leads to something amazing and not to a driveway and then a suburban sprawl.
“If your Metaverse needs to include everything I think it’s hard to design a contiguous space without everything feeling incongruous. I think it’s better not to try.”
Personally I think a fair amount contiguous incongruity is great, but it isn’t inevitable to contiguous spaces. Second Life’s continental landmass feels like suburban sprawl because it’s built on the visual metaphor of an open continent, as opposed to another frame of reference. (Say a series of islands, or tiny planets.)
In any case, while it’s true that people in SL generally teleport from one point to another when they do travel — rather than walking/flying or traveling in a vehicle, and so on — it’s also apparently true that 70% of SL users do not leave the location from where they last logged in (another Linden vet tells me. One likely reason why: When you can instantly go anywhere without much trouble, going anywhere doesn’t seem worth the trouble.
To be fair, Minecraft and Fortnite aren’t the only models to reference. ROBLOX is about as large in terms of users, and that’s closer to Jim’s vision of linked rooms. In any case, do read the rest here.
Previously:
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
Leave a comment