On 28/12/2006, at 12:34 AM, Len Bullard wrote:
Collaboration. Something that artists love and need (like most people). In SL, I just finished a lovely piece with another artist that involves 256 different audio files each embedded in a column responding to collisions with avatars to trigger the sound and perform physics on the column. We worked on the piece together, quite literally, in real time, right there in the space. Without the inworld building tools it would be a matter of either working on bits of it individually, then uploading and collating, then uploading to the world. Or, we could physically attend the same location in the real world to work on it together. Both these options have obvious and significant barriers to smooth collaboration. On the other hand, if it is a single artist working on something, then it becomes more an issue of *presence*, ie, it "feels" better to an artist when you are building in the medium it will be consumed in. Second best is what used to be called WYSIWYG editors, which game engines like Unreal and Torque and (I'm yet to try it, but I guess) Flux Studio use, where your authoring environment looks and feels like the end product, but you still have to go through the "compile and upload" process. That's okay, and certainly workable for single artist work, and doable for collaborations, but that "one step removed from live" is very noticeable. Another consideration is one that I think somewhat accounts for the popularity of Second Life (I know people like Clay Shirky are questioning the figures, but it SL *is* popular). Realtime 3D environments are not something that people easily adapt to in my experience - they need analogies to cling on to. The easiest one to grasp is the "it's like the real world" analogy. People appear to be attracted to that. So, in the real world, if you want to build something you just start - you don't have to "leave" the real world and go into another dimension to build something that you then transfer back into the real world. Same in SL - if you want to build something you just start. Want to change your avatar appearance? Fine, just do it. Want to build yourself a house? Just start. And so on. I genuinely think this is one of the chief attractors of SL to the non-technical non-gamer. On this list, everyone's been saying for over a decade "the era of net-based 3D is coming", and it's true, people are finally really starting to adopt the idea, thanks to the preparatory work of all the people on this list as well as 3D games and seemingly unrelated things like Web2.0 and mobile "you" (as in "me") culture. I think that one of the defining properties will be inworld content creation tools. Kind Regards, Adam Nash |