[staff] Virtual worlds – a new year
2008 is now a week old and the past week has seen the blogosphere bustling with entries of top 10 lists, year-end summaries, New Year resolutions and predictions from everything on the future state of the union to the future of the Internet.
This also includes a fair amount of thought on the future of Second Life and virtual worlds. Linden Lab had a great, fairly-regular podcast that would highlight various event’s like Town Hall’s and other speakers, and although it had been mostly silent for months, a December episode was issued featuring Philip Rosedale himself and his thoughts on past, present and future SL. He responds to some of the usual statistical questions of growth rates over the year, concurrency and how well or not the grid is scaling to handle growth. Also addressed is some of the marketing rush to Second Life in which even Philip cautions marketers to be aware of what they want from a virtual space before jumping.
Some of the best parts of the interview are the parts towards his optimism of what virtual environments like Second Life can hold for a future…where activities such as collaborative meetings, interactive engaged learning and expression grow in usage.
One of the future things Philip said he would like to see is more utilization of SL for science focused projects and learning. This charge is not only being taken up by Global Kids itself, with the development of it’s new virtual world focused science curriculum, but also by projects like The Tech Museum in San Jose’s use of SL to collaboratively create exhibits for their museum, and by the growing number of institutions that are part of the Science Archipelago of sims.
All of this charges my resolve in choosing to work on virtual world focused projects. I would love to see a 2008 that takes the existing strength’s of Second Life and breaks beyond that to allow for more interaction with other social media applications and cell phone technologies. I also think to the OLPC laptop I purchased and wonder how this could be used to help broaden virtual worlds to make them more accessible to developing countries. To offer up the idea of a truly connected global population that would be able to interact and collaborate irregardless of geography. Now, wouldn’t that truly be a great year! Of course, this all takes time, but like Philip, I share the optimism that the high adoption of virtual worlds in 2007 and more to come this year will work toward that goal.
I also recorded some related thoughts on this Friday in a audio Utterz post which became the spark for this post.
Take care and Happy New Year all!
