New Views of Synthetic Worlds

In a recent post I mentioned a symposium I attended sponsored by Cisco and The Santa Fe Institute. All about synthetic worlds. Second Life and games like World of Warcraft are now well publicized examples of these ideas. Interfaces, really, with a new capability to expand interface into a third dimension .... plus another dimension ... a fourth synthetic and social dimension, allowing new kinds of interaction with people, especially in groups.

This is all not new. Back in the 90s we connected with a company called Blaxxun that wanted to do some of the same kinds of things. Bandwidth was still uncommon outside of universities. We were asked to advertise there, but there was little social component, and we passed. Even before then, back to the 70s. the military was building 3D worlds to help trainees interact with battle environments.

Edward Castronova of Indiana, author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games, gave a talk, perhaps too tongue-in-cheek, about how the Second Life currency of Lindens was becoming more real to many than dollars. Well, OK, but then it has not been taxed yet. Still Castronova made the point that alternative currencies are making people take notice. They are being used on E-Bay, exchanged for actual labor. Economists know what that means. Cisco's Christian Renaud talked about their new space in Second Life and how they were seeking to use it as an engagement space for clients. MillionsofUs CEO Reuben Steiger gave a pep talk about where all of this is going and what we should expect, and not expect. Byron Reeves of Stanford gave a talk on some extensions of work he had reported on in his book The Media Equation. That work had inspired us to do early work on having advertising avatars talk to consumers. A good meeting, with lots of interesting ideas being posed.

The meeting turned out to also be a revealing view into how easy (and not-so-easy) it was to use SL as a collaboration space. The talks were delivered in real and second life, and then transmitted to both. There were some problems, created by lag, that occurred along the way, making it unclear who had seen what, except for the people in Real Life, who could nod in acknowledgement.

From an engineer's perspective we have worked with synthetic worlds for a long time. Simulations (sims) have been used since before computing became personal to model proposed worlds to test them before construction. Synthetic Worlds are places where a very general purpose interface has been constructed, mostly with social interactions in mind. Its still not easy to do complex specific things there. As Steiger suggested, its still a place where you can do mostly chaotic, unplanned things, not precisely scripted or planned actions. Sure you can build, construct 'scripts' of object interaction, and text chat all you want. But the interface is still mostly limiting, as opposed to enabling. I have seen things there that are breathtaking, but they are mostly about art as opposed to about engineering and science.

I remain optimistic about where all of this is going. In its current form its really not completely ready for business, but I can see how its evolving in that direction. The enterprise needs some help in making this work. Even better interfaces, stability and interaction. It may not happen in this go around. Looking forward to it.