Philip Rosedale has a pretty fascinating new Medium post based on a presentation he recently made at an unnamed Metaverse work group, laying out a vision for value creation in next gen platforms, primarily based on what worked well (more or less) in Second Life — Clear Property Rights, Collective Ownership and Participation, a Stable Currency Price, and so on. It includes a call for a feature that was clearly unique and great about 3D content creation in Second Life — but I'm not entirely sure is feasible, beyond SL and Minecraft:
Support Live Collaboration rather than Offline Editing
Having someone stop by and compliment your work-in-progress is a powerful amplifier for participation, as is the ability to recruit passersby to help with a project. Reducing the time delay between content creation and publishing is effective in both virtual worlds and programming languages (compiled versus interpreted). A great temptation in virtual worlds is to take advantage of powerful offline editors (Unity, Blender, etc) and standardized file formats by creating an edit/publish sequence. Roblox, VRChat, and Sansar are examples of worlds taking this approach. But the problem is both that the creator cannot enjoy social interaction while working, and also that multiple creators cannot then work together on one place or project.
Something magical was surely lost when our focus moved away from live, immersive social creation, and we seemed to resign ourselves to offline editing as the inevitable default.
But is it really possible to build an in-world collaborative creation system, where the content is also mesh and optimized?
Philip believes so, when I ask him, pointing to Sony Dreams as an example:
"That could all be done live together," he argues. I agree that Dreams is an impressive model, though last I checked, its userbase is frustratingly small.
Rec Room by contrast, is quite large, and it does support multi-user creation. As a Rec Room creator recently told me:
In Rec Room, you're doing it with up to 40 people across almost any platform, voice chatting and co-building and hanging out the entire time. You don't have the friction of needing to go download Unity or ROBLOX Studio and learn all of this dev tool stuff on your own. Plus other Rec Room users will teach you how to build in real time.
Then again, Rec Room graphics are by design cartoonish and blocky, which can limit its appeal as a metaverse platform for broad demographics. (Rec Room's user base is overwhelmingly kids.)
Somewhat ironically, Second Life, which enabled mesh file support in 2010-ish, might still be the industry leader in live multi-user creation with content that's also high quality mesh:
"[E]ven with mesh live collaboration is tons better in SL because multiple people can still rez and script, arrange, edit meta-data, etc.," as Philip puts it to me.
That's also true, though in recent years, it definitely seems to be an under-appreciated feature of Second Life. I rarely see announced events of YouTube videos of live building in an SL sandbox, beyond one put out by Linden Lab itself. (Above.)
So to me it remains an open question: Can we bring excitement around shared, immersive creation, and scale it up to as many metaverse users as possible?
… you know, like this, but much more visually dazzling?
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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