Ten facts about early Second Life

Following a signpost from Ziki Questi's blog, I spent some time yesterday at 'Second Life History', an LEA (Linden Endowment for the Arts) installation by Sniper Siemens which presents a walk through SL's history, from 2001 right up to 2014 (where a set of steps leads towards SL2).

It's a fascinating virtual stroll and it's particularly easy to linger on some of the photographs along the way, snapshots of a world that looks very different from the metaverse today.  My only real complaint, in fact, would be that there weren't enough of these.  This got me thinking: personal snapshots are amongst the few inventory items not bound eventually to perish so long as they get saved out onto a hard disk before SL gets switched off; wouldn't it be great if someone created a year-by-year collection of these, contributed to by as many different residents as possible?

Around the exhibit, information is also presented through a series of sculptures depicting key SL events in the order that they occurred.  Personally, I'm most interested in the period before I joined (although it was still interesting to revisit some of the headlines from my own time in SL).  Here are ten facts you may or may not know about that period:

1. SL started out as 'LindenWorld' in 2001. 
2. 'Da Boom' was the first SL sim (and it still exists today). 
3. Stellar Sunshine was the first SL resident.  She joined in March 2002 and is now aged 12 years and four months old.
4. Linden Dollars were introduced in December 2003.
5. The full range of basic prim shapes we have for building inworld today wasn't complete until 2004.
6. Teleporting was introduced in 2004, but it was only from one 'telehub' to another and you had to pay to use it. Free point-to-point teleporting as we know it today wasn't introduced until December 2005.
7. The free basic account wasn't introduced until October 2005.  Free accounts used to pay a L$50 stipend every week, but this stopped in May 2006.
8. The first 'gateway' for the first hour experience was opened in November 2005 (Orientation Island).
9. Megaprims were created by Gene Replacement aka Plastic Duck in 2006.
10. A hack in September 2006 allowed access to residents' real names, contact information and passwords.

The installation is only open until 30 July, so hurry over to take a look if you can.  It's an immersive reminder of what a fascinating story the tale of SL is, and one I count myself privileged to have witnessed unfolding.

Could an office in Second Life 2 be the killer app that virtual reality is looking for?

Screenshot from 'Quantum of Solace' created by hwww.inventinginteractive.com.

Now that everyone’s panicking about the atomic bomb dropped by Linden last month when they announced their successor to Second Life (which, I’m now given to understand, has nothing whatsoever to do with competing in a suddenly rapidly expanding market and is just the next step in the company’s mission to screw residents in every last way achievable), I thought it might be a good moment to start thinking about the ways in which a ‘next generation’ virtual world could differ from the present one.

A new metaverse which works in broadly the same way as the present one – albeit with better graphics, less lag, and full immersion via the Oculus Rift – might sound like a good thing, but would it really capture the imagination of the masses?  A lot of us thought that 3D cinema was a new and amazing thing when Avatar was released a few years back, but when it came to buying a 3D TV, few people could really be bothered and Nintendo’s 3DS handheld games console – complete with its built-in 3D camera that would enable us all to record our moments in stereoscopy – completely failed to capture the public’s imagination (though, admittedly, not as much as the Wii U did).  If SL2 really is going to capture the attention of hundreds of millions of people rather than just millions of people, as Linden CEO Ebbe Altberg has recently claimed as its objective, it will need to bring with it something genuinely new.  The same is true of VR more generally.  In my mind, one such thing is objects with function.

Many objects in SL do already have function, but it’s an extremely limited function.  You can sit on a chair.  You can lie on a lounger.  You can open a door.  You can close your blinds.  Perhaps the most sophisticated functional object I’ve seen so far is one of those fancy television screens that links to channels showing old movies or which can play YouTube videos: it’s a method for watching something with someone, for sure, but it’s hardly bringing into being something that can’t be done outworld.  No.  The sort of function I’m thinking of is far more complex.

Just over a year ago, I was fortunate enough to get a short tour of future concepts being developed by IBM.  These included a facial recognition system for use in commercial environments (remember those billboards in Minority Report that changed when Tom Cruise walked past them to show him personalised adverts?  - that technology exists right now) and a remote control toy car that you can drive with your mind.  But centre stage for me was the big black table in the room with a surface that acted like a giant iPad.  If it had actually just been a giant iPad it wouldn’t really have impressed me all that much; what blew my mind was the way in which it was possible to manipulate documents on this thing: you could spread them all around you like pieces of paper, you could tap one to bring up a localised keyboard alongside it for editing; when you were done with it you just pushed it to one side for filing.  We’ve seen similar fictional systems to this in movies like Quantum of Solace and, more recently, The Amazing Spider-man 2; what I saw at IBM was nowhere near as whizz-bang as either of these, but it was real and – by God – it worked.

I’m particularly excited by technology such as this because for years I‘ve struggled with the concept of the ‘paperless office’.  I’ve been interested in computers for over thirty years now, but my enjoyment and knowledge of them hasn’t stretched so far to any acceptance on my part for replacing paper in my everyday work.  Sure, I use a PC to write reports and emails like everyone else, but the moment two documents are required for any particular job, I start reaching for the print button.  To give you an example, when I’m marking an essay I need to see both the essay itself and the marking grid I use: I could switch between them on my PC screen, but I dislike doing so intensely.  I want to see them side by side, so I end up printing both essay and grid, completing the latter by hand and then later typing it up.  It’s an inefficient way of working, I know, but it’s the best fit there is for the way in which I need to think.  For people like me, then, the interactive surface I saw at IBM represents a way in which the paperless office could actually happen.

But do I see such technology turning up in regular office spaces such as mine in the near future?  I do not.  The cost is likely to be prohibitive without a mass market to sell to and a mass market is likely going to be very difficult to establish when – quite apart from anything else – people are living in smaller and smaller spaces.    If 3D TVs costing hundreds of pounds were a difficult sell, I hardly imagine interactive tables costing thousands or tens of thousands of pounds are going to walk their way into people’s dining rooms.

But virtual reality might just be the way through which people like me could access this way of working, and at a fraction of the price.  I sit at my regular table or desk and put on my Oculus Rift and activate/teleport to my office in the virtual world: there I’m sitting at an interactive desk where I can spread all my electronic documents around me and work on them in the manner that suits me.  So what I feel through my fingers is the surface of my real life desk, but what I see is my interactive desk with all its documents and applications.  The system would of course be linked to a cloud storage account so that I can access outside of the metaverse the work I do inside it: swiping a document into a particular folder on my desk would store it in – let’s say – my Dropbox account, so I would then be able to bring it up in the real world on a PC or tablet.

There would be other benefits to working this way.  Rather than being an isolated room, my office in virtual reality could be connected to the virtual offices of all my co-workers so that we could use the interactive desks for meetings or joint working.  Whole buildings could be constructed in the metaverse for individual companies or organisations: buildings where people actually work rather than the business-themed dolls’ houses we see in SL composed of empty room after empty room.  Working from home would never have to be the solitary thing that it is now, where contact with other people comes in the form of emails and the occasional phone call.

Is current technology up to this?  I don’t know.  I’ve not had any experience so far of using a virtual reality headset, so it might be that my expectations don’t quite match the reality of this technology as it stands at the moment.  It might be, for example, that the graphics resolution isn’t quite so good that I’d be able to read the text on documents comfortably without enlarging it significantly or bending over to see it.  Also, in addition to the headset, some sort of device would be required for reading my hand and finger movements.  I know that the Microsoft Kinect is capable of reading body movement, but I don’t know whether it’s fine-tuned enough to do so sufficiently well to distinguish between different virtual key presses or to be able to keep up with my typing speed.  A system that constantly produced typing errors because it was only 99 per cent accurate would be infuriating.

Then there’s the creation of the document management software itself.  Whilst not beyond the scope of technology today (as I saw at IBM), this would be no small issue: it would effectively be the creation of a whole new operating system, the sort of thing it takes Microsoft, Apple and Google years to develop (and, in the case of Windows, still get wrong).  I say it wouldn’t be beyond the scope of technology today, but there I’m thinking of a system for use in real life: implementing such a thing in a virtual world would require an inworld scripting system light years ahead of what’s achievable with something like Linden Scripting Language.  And it would require lots and lots of processing power.

But this is future-gazing, and from the vantage-point of a period in time that’s not even yet the beginning of the virtual reality era.  Whatever does start to emerge next year, it will be certain to be improved upon quickly.  And it’s been acknowledged by the current architects of virtual reality that VR as yet has no ‘killer application’ concept that might make it a must-have rather than a novelty or niche interest.  The first ever killer app, incidentally, was VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program (for the Apple II computer).  Can you imagine working life now without spreadsheets or any other the other killer apps that succeeded them, such as word processing software or email?

I realise you were probably hoping for something a little more exciting from the metaverse than yet another reworking of the way you use a word processor, but it might just be that one day you can’t imagine working life as possible without your virtual reality office.

The impossible snapshots

As a treat on Independence Day, here's a new story featuring The Avatar Dining Club.  You can read the first of these, by the way, here.

For the second meeting of the Avatar Dining Club, our host Edward set up a laptop at the far end of the table.  For some reason, perhaps because we were all still relative strangers and perhaps because we were using the same restaurant in Basingstoke (and, at that, the same table), the other six of us had taken the positions we'd more or less randomly chosen at the first meal. Mary-Anne Middlemarch, a fashion blogger, was to my right, Raw Concrete, a builder, was to my left, the man who called himself Jennifer Bit in the metaverse sat opposite me and to his/her respective left and right were Rainy September, a clubber and explorer, and Indigo Williams, a club owner and skin designer.

That meant Edward sat at the head, as before, and the laptop was positioned opposite him.  On its screen was a plump man in his early thirties with a week’s growth of beard and neatly parted hair.  As Edward took his seat, the man tucked a napkin into his collar.  "Everybody, this is Takin," Edward announced.  "He is to be our guest for the evening."  We all said slightly uncomfortable hellos and Takin returned the gesture in a strong Welsh accent, adding "Well, Takin's not my real name, of course.  I feel a little uncomfortable introducing myself with that name in the flesh."

"Not exactly the flesh," Raw commented, as he eyed up the menu.

"Now now, Takin," Edward said.  "Remember the rules: here we all assume the character we adopt in the virtual world.  There's to be no real life information shared at this table."

"I'm Jennifer, by the way," said Jennifer, somewhat underlining that point.  We took that as our prompt to introduce ourselves in turn.  And then the starters came.

It was a little odd, to say the least, to be tucking into food prepared for us by a chef whilst Takin went to get his supper from the microwave.  Edward enquired politely about the distant meal and our distant diner guest obliged us all by holding up the box in front of his webcam.  Beef lasagne for one, with slices of white bread on the side.  I tried not to make too much noise when I cracked open my crusty roll and took my first sip of a delicious chicken and asparagus soup.  An uncomfortable silence settled and, after a minute or so, even Edward started to look distinctly restless, perhaps worried that he'd tampered with the format to our meeting too quickly.

"Anyway," said Raw, though a mouthful of garlic bread, "you were right about the whole spelling thing, Edward.  I asked her.  She thought it was hilarious it took seven people to work it out."

"Work what out?" asked Takin, his personal volume not quite right.

"Raw got spotted as an alt by his girl," Indigo said to the screen.  "He couldn't work how she knew, and it turned out it was his diabolical spelling."

Raw growled.  "She's not my 'girl'."

"So you say," said Rainy.

"And,” he added, “I'm dyslexic."

"Which means nothing more complicated than 'problems with words'," Indigo stated.  She had smoked salmon for her starter.  I detest smoked salmon and the smell was turning my stomach a little.

Raw growled, "Why don't you try, 'problems with words despite years and years of trying to read and spell better.'?"

"Do you get that thing where the letters jump about?" Mary-Anne asked, leaning forward so she could see around me.

"No," he replied.

"So what is it like?" asked Rainy.

"Remember when you were learning to drive and it was really hard because you had to keep everything in your head?"  We all nodded.  "Like that," he said, "only for reading instead of driving."

“In any case,” I commented, “it didn’t take seven people to work it out: six people failed and Edward succeeded.”

“Oh my dear fellow,” said Edward, brushing my compliment away like it was a crumb fallen from the broken breadstick he held in his hand, “don’t be so dismissive of the initial questioning: I couldn’t have seen the answer without all of your very helpful enquiries.”

"So you say," said Rainy.

“Tell everyone here about your online identity, Takin,” said Edward, directing our attention back towards the computer.  Takin paused to wipe tomato sauce from the corner of his mouth (I was desperately relieved that he had noticed it) then said with a shrug, “I make cars in the metaverse.”

“What sort of cars?” Raw asked, with interest.

“The cars I grew up with, mostly.  I just finished a beige Austin Maestro today - the first car I ever went in.”

“Keeping up with the orders must be a challenge for you,” said Indigo, dryly.

Takin chuckled.  “Well, I don’t only build piles of British junk.  I have a whole range of 70s and 80s cars: Citroen, Ford, Vauxhall, Volkswagen, Volvo, Peugeot 205 - my 205 is quite a seller, actually.”

Jennifer sighed suddenly, happily.  “I had a lot of fun in my old 205,” s/he said.

“There you go, see?” said Takin with satisfaction.  “People like the memories they get from messing about in old cars they used to own.  It’s not just the exteriors I do either: I spend a lot of time in research to make sure I get the fittings and fabrics right too.”

“A new metaversian application,” said Indigo.  “Re-own all the stuff you once had to get rid of.”

“I have memories of the back seat of a Ford Orion I’d prefer stayed firmly in my forgotten past,” commented Rainy.  Which led to a few moments of a slightly awkward silence.

“Why the Maestro, then?” asked Mary-Anne.  “Have you done all the good cars?”

“Oh, that was just for me, see?” Takin replied.  “I needed a bit of cheering up.”

“Really?” said Edward.  “What’s wrong, old friend?”

Takin reddened slightly.  “Well, me and Sophie split up, Edward.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that.  You two were the perfect couple.”

“I take it this is an online relationship we’re talking about?” queried Indigo.

Takin nodded.  “Don’t be sorry for me, Edward,” he said quietly.  “Actually, I’m surprised you hadn’t already heard.”

“My connections to the community gossip - nor, indeed, my energy for it - aren’t quite what they used to be, I’m afraid.”  Edward rubbed his chin for a moment, massaging the short growth of white beard there, then wagged his finger at the laptop.  “Have you been a bad boy?”

Now Takin reddened much more fiercely.  He started to speak, but Edward cut him off abruptly.  “Don’t answer that; I shouldn’t have asked.  This is a conversation you and I need to have privately, not out in public.”

Takin sat up straight.  “It’s not exactly public here though is it, Edward?  In any case, the pictures are all over her facebook for everyone to see.  And they do say confession is good for the soul.”

“Though not necessarily good for my appetite,” said Indigo.

“There’s pictures?” said Jennifer.

“Lots of pictures,” said Takin miserably.  “Though how they got taken I’ll never know"

“Generally speaking,” said Raw, as he accepted his pizza from the waiter, “it involves a camera of some sort.”

“Well I know that, of course,” Takin snapped.  “But they got taken at my skyhouse, see?  The only person who could have taken them was the lady I was with at the time - and she swears blind it wasn’t her.”

“She’s lying,” said Indigo straight away, waving a forked carrot dismissively.  “She set you up.  She’s a detective.  She’s probably not even a she.  No offense,” she added, looking at Jennifer.

Jennifer sat up straight.  “Why would I take offence?”

“But I’ve known her for years,” argued Takin.  “Mellia and I have always been mates, but when she was unattached I wasn’t and vice versa.  Why would she set me up?”

“Well then it’s obvious what happened,” said Raw.  “Whoever it was that took the pictures zoomed in on you from far away.  That’s hardly difficult in the metaverse.”

“But I told you I was at my skyhouse,” said Takin firmly.  “I own the land down below it and I’ve set my parcel’s settings to private so no one looking in from the outside can see avatars on the inside.  Anyone who zoomed in on the place would have seen it empty.  Only I can change the settings.”

“You might have changed them once and forgot about it,” Raw suggested.

“Well of course it was the first thing I checked once the photos got sent to me the next day,” said Takin.  “But they were still set to private.”

"These photos," I said, "I take it they're-"

"Of my indiscretion, yes," Takin finished, bristling slightly.  "Well, one of them."

"Oh, Takin!" Edward said, despairingly.

"Serves you right," said Rainy, firmly.  "Serves you right.  No sympathy here."

"If I wanted sympathy, I'd tell you about the endless arguments Sophie and I had gotten into," Takin said.  "Or I'd tell you some of the names she called me."

"Then you should have ended it with her," Rainy replied.  "Simple."

"I know that, and I'm absolutely not trying to defend myself.  All I really want to know is how she did it."

"Just out of interest," said Raw, as he sprinkled yet more parmesan over his four cheese supreme, "what names did she call you."

Takin reddened again.  "I'd rather not say."

"Are you certain there wasn't anyone else hidden away in your house when you were... indiscretioning?" Jennifer asked.

"Not only would my security system have ejected them, but I'd have seen them on my personal radar," Takin replied.

"So what about Mellia?" I asked.  "Did you have to add her to the system?"

"Every time," Takin said.  "And afterwards, I'd take her off the list so Sophie didn't see her name there."

"Men are such deceitful pigs," muttered Rainy, glaring into her wine glass.

Takin frowned.  "Though now that you come to mention it, I didn't have to add her that night."

"The first clue!" Declared Mary-Anne.

"Can't you tell us at least one of the names she called you?" Raw pleaded.

Takin hesitated for a brief moment, then leaned in towards his camera.  "She called me a pervert!" he whispered.  "She told me one of her fantasies and asked me about mine, and when I told her, she called me a pervert!"

Edward coughed and studied his broccoli intently.  Indigo giggled into her napkin..

Raw said, "What was the fan-"

"Perhaps you should tell us," said Edward, loudly, "what happened that evening.  I don't mean the details of the indiscretion," he added.  "Think 'storyboard'."

"Well I knew Sophie was early to bed that night, see?"  Takin paused to open a new can of lager.  "Just before she logged out, she messaged me to say she wanted a goodnight hug.  I was getting the knobs right on the air vents for a Vauxhall Cavalier at the time, but also messaging Mellia, because we'd agreed to meet up that evening once Sophie was off.  So I took the teleport Sophie sent me back to our skyhouse, gave her the hug and wished her sweet dreams."

"How many seconds elapsed between her logging off and you teleporting over your mistress?" Rainy asked, acidly.

"Actually, it was at least ten minutes, but that was because I was waiting for everything to rezz."

"It was laggy?" Raw asked.

"That's what I thought at first.  In the end, I realised it had to be one of those glitchy evenings where only half your stuff appears and I so gave up waiting."

"So long as the bed was there, right?" Rainy commented.

"And the settee," Takin replied, levelly.  "And the hat stand.  And the, um, fridge."  He cleared his throat.  "Sophie has an eye for... functionality.  So I teleported Mellia over and, well, I suppose there's not much else to tell, really. The next evening I logged on and there were all these impossible snapshots sent to me plus a very long and very vitriolic letter."

"What if," said Mary-Anne, "they dressed two other avatars up like you and Mellia and staged the whole thing?"

"Who's 'they'?" Raw asked.

"Even if they'd gone to all the trouble of finding out our body shapes and our skins and our hairstyles, not to mention makeups and tattoos and Lord knows what else," said Takin, "How could they possibly know what we were wearing that evening?"

"Isn't it part of the deal that you weren't wearing anything at all?" asked Indigo.

"Oh, we were wearing stuff," Takin assured us.  "And using stuff."

"Storyboard, Takin," Edward repeated.

"Well I'm stumped," I said.  "Unless Sophie had somehow managed to disable your security and someone was hiding in there."

"She might have disabled my system," Takin said, "though I've no idea how; but there's no way she could have  disabled my radar.  I'm telling you, there was no-one within at least 200 metres of us.  And even if the security system was turned off, my land settings were still set to private, so no-one could have seen what we were doing."

"Do you have any ideas, Edward?" Indigo asked.  "After all, you solved the puzzle last time."

"Possibly, my dear," Edward said, thoughtfully.  "Nothing really definite, but maybe..."

"I'm all ears," said Takin.

"Perhaps if I could ask a couple of questions," our host said.  "Would I be correct in assuming that the house itself belonged to Sophie?"

"You would indeed," Takin replied.  "I pay the rent on the land and Sophie picked out the house."

"And the furnishings?"

"Not all of them," he said.  "She does have a better eye than me, though.  Well, did."

"She's not dead just because she stopped going out with you," Rainy pointed out.  “You are allowed to use the present tense.”

Edward continued.  "Would I also be correct then in assuming that the items you couldn't see when you teleported there were all your items?"

Takin frowned.  "Now that you mention it, I think you might be right."

"Well then," Edward said, "it seems fairly clear to me."

"It seems fairly unclear to me!" Raw declared.

"It's a simple matter of logic, my boy: if was impossible for someone to take pictures of Takin at his home, then he could not have been at his home."

"I don't understand," said Takin.

"I imagine it happened something like this: Sophie linked up her house and all the furnishings she bought for it, and took the whole lot into her inventory, leaving all your bits and pieces floating in mid-air.  Then she teleported to a different location where there were no security or privacy restrictions and re-rezzed it all at the same altitude as you were used to.  Then she messaged you for that goodnight hug: I take it she did send you a teleport to her location rather than just asking you to come home?"

"Yeah," Takin said.  "She did."

"So in the end, all the photographer had to do - whoever he or she was - was keep a respectable distance away and zoom in to get the pictures.  By the time you logged in to your home spot the following evening, Sophie had moved everything back to its original location."

"I'll be damned," said Indigo.  "Edward, you did it again."

“Just a theory, my dear.  Though if you log your system messages, Takin, then it should be recorded the name of the region you actually teleported to that night: if it’s not your home location then that’s the proof.”

Takin’s gaze changed as he did some typing and some mouse-pointer moving, bringing up the log to check there and then.  Finally, he sighed and nodded.

"So she suspected me all along," he said.  “Bloody hell.”

"Cheats are never as good at lying as they think they are," Rainy said, not without a touch of satisfaction.

“And there is nothing quite so ingenious as a suspicious partner,” Edward added.  “Inside the metaverse or out of it.”