Question
What is the main reason for Second Life's failure to meet industry and media expectations made during its 2006-2007 hype era?
Answer
First mover disadvantage.
It's the Friendster of the space. The winnings tend to go to the second or third entrant after the first mover figures out the risks the hard way.
When I joined sometime in 2007, I wondered what the hell I was supposed to do there. SL fans told me that I shouldn't come in with a WoW type game mindset and expect to find things to kill and missions to accomplish.
The problem is, I did not come in with those gamer expectations because I am not a gamer.
I was looking for anything to do.
Remind anyone of Friendster?
The candidate activities I was offered didn't interest me (vaguely depressing role-playing and sex with fantasy activities, some sort of strange Bitcoinish virtual real-estate land grab that quickly became out of reach cost-wise, maker-activities around building stuff... I recall I built a kind of log cabin with a signpost -- all this was on the exploratory Xerox island that one of my then colleagues had set up).
Now consider how Facebook (entrant #3 or #4 depending on how you count) made the social network space viable: by creating a basic, meaningful activity stream that didn't require some sort of geeky special interest. Just pure socializing via superficial gossip on each other's walls.
A 3DVW equivalent of Facebook has to figure out the core of a meaningful 3D activity stream.
What can you do in virtual-facetime that you cannot do more easily somewhere else?
Tough question because the trend is headed the other way. People don't like face time or phone time. They are tending to use the least intimate communication channel they can to accomplish a given task (texting, IM, email) because the lower the fidelity of the channel, the less of an effort it takes to manage how you present yourself. In rank order of decreasing fidelity, we have:
1. IRL = dress, looks, voice, smell, touch
2. Live webcam = IRL - smell, touch
3. Audio = Live webcam - video
4.5. IM = audio - voice
4.5. Voicemail = audio - realtime
6. Email = IM - realtime
7. Text = IM - realtime - writing skill
Virtual worlds kinda head off in an orthogonal direction here. They lower the fidelity of the experience to below text (since you are mainly communicating with mouse-clicks), but then they give you a lot more fidelity in an entirely new direction that you must either fill with information or leave as useless noise (if you're not doing something interesting with your avatar in the 3DVW, it is essentially a distraction... who wants to look at a rag doll miming typing motions on an invisible keyboard?)
I think there IS room for 3DVW. You just need the enabling technology of cheap and comfy immersive 3D glasses, motion capture on a 2D treadmill and the mouse disintermediated from touch, via a glove.
That sounds like complicated rigging, but it is the minimal set I can think of that can turn the medium into a subconscious background element instead of an in-the-way foreground element.
The very cumbersome nature of the equipment (especially the 2D treadmill... I can't see any way around it, except maybe a lot more teleportation and flying that people will likely want to do) suggests to me that this is going to be a somewhat specialized thing if/when it does take off. I am not sure what advantage it offers over the simpler technology of 3D-immersive telepresence which at least has the potential to disrupt IRL. Entertainment is the only application I can really think of (not even education really seems like a good use case... chemistry equations on paper probably beat flying around a giant molecule...).
Another way to think of 3DVW is that the only actually useful piece of the experience medium is touch, and tablets/smartphones have managed to deliver touch in much simpler ways. If that's the case, the iPhone would be the Facebook of SL.
It's the Friendster of the space. The winnings tend to go to the second or third entrant after the first mover figures out the risks the hard way.
When I joined sometime in 2007, I wondered what the hell I was supposed to do there. SL fans told me that I shouldn't come in with a WoW type game mindset and expect to find things to kill and missions to accomplish.
The problem is, I did not come in with those gamer expectations because I am not a gamer.
I was looking for anything to do.
Remind anyone of Friendster?
The candidate activities I was offered didn't interest me (vaguely depressing role-playing and sex with fantasy activities, some sort of strange Bitcoinish virtual real-estate land grab that quickly became out of reach cost-wise, maker-activities around building stuff... I recall I built a kind of log cabin with a signpost -- all this was on the exploratory Xerox island that one of my then colleagues had set up).
Now consider how Facebook (entrant #3 or #4 depending on how you count) made the social network space viable: by creating a basic, meaningful activity stream that didn't require some sort of geeky special interest. Just pure socializing via superficial gossip on each other's walls.
A 3DVW equivalent of Facebook has to figure out the core of a meaningful 3D activity stream.
What can you do in virtual-facetime that you cannot do more easily somewhere else?
Tough question because the trend is headed the other way. People don't like face time or phone time. They are tending to use the least intimate communication channel they can to accomplish a given task (texting, IM, email) because the lower the fidelity of the channel, the less of an effort it takes to manage how you present yourself. In rank order of decreasing fidelity, we have:
1. IRL = dress, looks, voice, smell, touch
2. Live webcam = IRL - smell, touch
3. Audio = Live webcam - video
4.5. IM = audio - voice
4.5. Voicemail = audio - realtime
6. Email = IM - realtime
7. Text = IM - realtime - writing skill
Virtual worlds kinda head off in an orthogonal direction here. They lower the fidelity of the experience to below text (since you are mainly communicating with mouse-clicks), but then they give you a lot more fidelity in an entirely new direction that you must either fill with information or leave as useless noise (if you're not doing something interesting with your avatar in the 3DVW, it is essentially a distraction... who wants to look at a rag doll miming typing motions on an invisible keyboard?)
I think there IS room for 3DVW. You just need the enabling technology of cheap and comfy immersive 3D glasses, motion capture on a 2D treadmill and the mouse disintermediated from touch, via a glove.
That sounds like complicated rigging, but it is the minimal set I can think of that can turn the medium into a subconscious background element instead of an in-the-way foreground element.
The very cumbersome nature of the equipment (especially the 2D treadmill... I can't see any way around it, except maybe a lot more teleportation and flying that people will likely want to do) suggests to me that this is going to be a somewhat specialized thing if/when it does take off. I am not sure what advantage it offers over the simpler technology of 3D-immersive telepresence which at least has the potential to disrupt IRL. Entertainment is the only application I can really think of (not even education really seems like a good use case... chemistry equations on paper probably beat flying around a giant molecule...).
Another way to think of 3DVW is that the only actually useful piece of the experience medium is touch, and tablets/smartphones have managed to deliver touch in much simpler ways. If that's the case, the iPhone would be the Facebook of SL.