The Dessert of the Real

It’s a funny thing – but after ten years of innovation on the web – our interfaces are largely the same as when we started. This is not a gripe about design. Usability, rich media, and personalisation have done wonders to transform the humble web page. The truth is, however, no two dimension interface can adequately capture the rich, n dimensional complexity of the web as it is today. If you want my pick on what the Internet will look like in years to come, the best place to start is in the world of games.

I caught up recently with Philip Rosedale, the CEO and founder of Second Life – a self sustaining virtual world modelled on the kinds of metaverse communities popularised by cyberpunk writers such as Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. At first blush, Second Life seems to be just the Sims on steroids – people chatting, building houses, hanging out in bars and earning virtual money in virtual jobs. Except for two important exceptions. Firstly, there is real money involved. And secondly, as it turns out, it is easier doing business in three dimensions.

Philip’s theory is that one of the consequences of new mediums being little understood is that they are at first used for play. Certainly if you lucky enough to be around for the invention of the telephone, radio or television – it would have been hard to conceive that that one day these devices would become billion dollar platforms for business communications, political influence and commercial profit. The transformation from toy to tool is still happening, and faster than ever. Case in point - the rapid shift of email and instant messaging from playthings for teenagers to indispensable enterprise services.

So what can Second Life tell us about how visual interfaces can create value for business? Philip gave the simple example of the difference between a business meeting conducted over the phone and one hosted in a vibrant virtual environment. If you had started your meeting in Second Life by looking around, perhaps chatting about the realism of Mount Fuji in the distance or the azure coloured sky you would actually have a much chance of later recalling the detail and specifics of your conversation than if it was just a routine teleconference appointment. The reason for this is rooted in the science of mnemonics. A casual visitor in ancient Rome might have spotted a philosopher or orator pacing through the streets taking careful note of buildings as he did so. The prevailing memory trick of that time was to use architectural details as a memory hook, with which entire poems or speeches could be stored and recalled easily at a latter date by simply walking through virtual buildings in the mind. 

However to say that virtual worlds make online chat better, is a bit like saying that reading Shakespeare is good for improving your spelling. It is an exercise in dramatic understatement. Games like Second Life not only have a carefully constructed model of real world physics, but also incorporate key tenets of land ownership and intellectual property. Any object you create is your own – to assign, share or sell. Perhaps even more than accurate colour and particle motion, ownership is an intrinsic feature of reality. And as a platform provider, you know you are onto a good thing when people start quitting their jobs to earn money from your network. It happened with eBay. Now it is happening again – this time with virtual items of clothing, animations and building services.

More interesting perhaps are the longer term applications of interfaces capable of displaying greater complexity. I reread ‘Snow Crash’ recently – Neal Stephenson’s novel about how the web will ultimately be transformed into a three dimensional analogue of the real world. What stuck in my mind was the biggest limitation with our current interpersonal interfaces was how poorly they compare to the richness of physical presence. In Snow Crash, one of the most successful figures is not a crack programmer, but someone who managed to accurately convey facial expressions and emotions on a virtual avatar.

Ask any scientist – and they will tell you there is only so much the human mind can comprehend through mathematics and paper diagrams. Nothing beats a good computer generated visual simulation to properly interrogate the results of an experiment. Much attention to date has been spent on how information can be generated on the web, and less on how it might be displayed. Forget the old clichés about putting imaginary retail items into a virtual shopping trolley. Instead umagine being able to visualise your rolodex of contacts and their associates as an expandable 3D network, or search results as a data lattice that you could unpack, recombine and even hand to someone else. Psychologists and religious gurus alike have been saying for years that our perceptions shape our reality. At the risk of invoking the Wachowski brothers, at some point a new interface stops being just a representation of something else and a universe in its own right.

Second Life is free to join. If you type “Mike Walsh” in the recommendation field when you sign up we will be connected in the game. You’ll find me under a palm tree sipping a pina colada.

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