Second Life: A Response

This past week, we had a presentation in class about SecondLife . For those who don't know Second Life is an online virtual world that allows users to create and experience others created content such as locations, buildings, and clothing.

In general, we discussed the many ways certain people use SecondLife. Some as a ways of communicating with others, sharing content, getting feed back from people, or as a means of experiencing new things. However, I believe that there are some limitations in terms of the program itself.

For many in our class, one of the main points of confusion was the difficulty curve in learning the program. Not only are the controls unusual, but they are not standard to many web schemes. Along with this issue is the the performance and demand that the program takes from computers. Being almost a decade old does not stop it from bringing new and powerful computers to a grinding slow halt.

In many ways, I appreciate the ideas and thoughts SecondLife tries to achieve, but I believe that there are newer technologies that achieve the same.

Metaplace: the evolved second life.

Well, in our discussions of second life, I remembered about a particular development that may be interesting to those interested about virtual worlds. It is Metaplace which functions as an evolution of the concepts and ideas that are presented in second life.

What it does is that it turns your internet browser, and a typical website, and transforms those into a virtual world. So instead of having a program to access a virtual world, anyone with the proper browser can access the virtual world simply by putting in the web address like a typical website.

Just in terms of achieving its promise I could see Metaplace recreating the Internet in terms of the way we experience it. Instead of viewing the internet as pages we would be able to experience every web address as an entirely different world and experience. Each person would be able to create their own second life for anyone to access.

Thoughts?