Linden-IBM Avatar's Small Step & the 1US Website

[Paul Kunz, builder of the 1st US Website. Photo by Shel]

Sometime earlier today an avatar was successfully teleported from a SecondLife Virtual World preview Grid onto an OpenSim world developed by IBM, marking the first incident of virtual space travel by a virtual life form. While the folks at Linden Lab are emphasizing the limitations of what was accomplished, one cannot help but marvel at the implications of what it means.

In cyberspace, where humans create worlds and emulations of life forms, we are seeing the first steps of travel. How will this evolve? Will visiting avatars always be welcome? Will bands of avatars start invading worlds and exploiting the original inhabitants. Will some avatars enslave those of lesser technology developments. Will an avatar from one company slip in and spy on a competitor's virtual world at some point in the not-so-distant future.

One can only speculate or perhaps write a great scifi adventure.

I believe virtual life, like real life,  has a way of going beyond what was originally intended and I have a sense that this small virtual steps may someday be looked back upon with the significance of that day in 1993, when Tim Berners-Lee sent a message to Paul Kunz at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Lab over something that he was calling, "The Worldwide Web." The content had to do with collaboration on a paper for an upcoming event. Paul built the first US website on his Trusty NeXT Computer and the world has taken the concept some distance.

So it may be with what IBM and Linden labs accomplished today.

Comments

[Darren Daz Cox]

remember that most people stick around SecondLife for porn/cyber sex, to make real life money or have a fantasy 'doll house/place of their own', traveling to other worlds might be fun once in a while but without a 'what's in it for me' aspect additional worlds aren't going to replace SecondLife.

I can't see IBM allowing people to sell, for real money, stolen porn, artwork and textures, but that is exactly how SL has made so many die hard fans. The less LL does to regulate SL the more innovative people become when there's money to be made.

Jumping into a different platform, an IBM platform no less, makes me think that the psuedo-anonymity of SL might be compromised, especially these days when big US companies have no ethical problems with data mining.

Would you want the fact that you are gender-bending and frequent virtual strip clubs get back to your boss? Even if it's a harmless adult diversion, the more platform skipping you do, the more chances that your avatar will become part of your real life profile.

Now, for the educational end of things (a tiny but growing chunk of the SL world (see Global Kids for example) it might be an amazing thing! Imagine if the Library of Congress had a virtual world connected to their database, imagine if Wikipedia was a virtual world - brilliant!

[Shel Holtz]

Darren, you wrote, "most people stick around SecondLife for porn/cyber sex, to make real life money or have a fantasy 'doll house/place of their own." Do you have research or statistics to support that assertion? Not challenging the comment, per se, just curious...

Most people I know in SL use it for business purposes.

[aion kinah]

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