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:
