Open Standards for Real-Time 3D Communication

If socialization is what people want to do in real time 3D MUs, then the goal of the designer is to enable this.  To enable this, the designer must go beyond the abstraction of social behavior to the real human instances.  Some worlds create general landscapes with social locations.  Others pick a social behavior and design the world to meet the requirements for behaving.  Of the latter type such as Jewel of Indra, the gestures, behaviors, and other semiotic constructs are the means of expressing the behavior according to the social domain or simply, culture.

It follows that creating a business world means building a sustainable social culture through appropriate social expression (norms) of accepted behaviors (affordances).  This is the pragmatic approach (see writings of Aldo de Moor) for MUs on the web.  This is the aspect of world design that has been given the least amount of formal study resulting in tools that do not provide the techniques and rules of construction for the level of design that is one part story, one part emotional longing, and above the level of geometric thought.  In this level, events expressed as sensate objects interacting within and with a sensate environment (second order cybernetic simulation) evolve.  The evolution itself is constrained within the cultural type which if it evolves, evolves slowly and in accordance with the longing of the human users.

The difference between a button pushing GUI (2D traditional) and a 3D world is that in the 2D GUI, the user finds events.  In the 3D world, the events find the user.

“Give them what they want.” Ray Davies - The Kinks

Posted by Len Bullard on 2006-06-12 | Permalink | Comments