Rumors of Google’s plans to create a virtual world that rivals that of Second Life have popped up once again over the weekend. The company could now be collaborating with Arizona State University to test the 3D social network, which may be tied into Google’s current applications of Google Earth and Google Maps.
To us, it seems that a virtual world is natural progression of Google Earth and its 3D representations of… well, the Earth. Users could create avatars, like those in Second Life. The “street view” feature of Google Maps could be incorporated, as well as Google SketchUp, with avatars being able to walk around on actual streets and enter real buildings to check out what’s inside and socialize with other avatars. But the purpose wouldn’t be to rival Second Life and all of its fantasy, sex, and moneymaking schemes.
Google Earth CTO Michael Jones insisted (first comment after the post) in January that Google Earth would always remain true to the real world and not dive into the type of fantasy world that Second Life has become. Therefore, Google’s implementation would be more like “First
Life,” but in virtual form. If “My World” turns out to be a virtual representation of real life, however, it seems natural to question the purpose of launching such a service. We could, after all, just step outside and see these things from the vantage point of a real human, not a virtual one.Instead, it makes sense for Google to mesh a bunch of its tools into one, thus creating a whole new advertising opportunity aimed at people, er, avatars, who are “walking” down virtual (real) streets to check out virtual (real) stores and businesses. And if Google wants, it could incorporate some of its more social ventures, such as social networking site Orkut and Google Talk, in order to motivate users to spend more time there. Whatever “My World” ends up being, we think that Google will go much further than just competing with Second Life—if the company makes it functionally useful and ties it in with services that people already use, it may have a chance of succeeding at getting average Internet users to participate. ^
We can create imaginary worlds out of symbols, emotions and commerce. We can then sell those worlds to each other. We can recede further from reality. This is not the use I had hoped for from the net. I don’t think it’s a good place to find dates or friends. I don’t think it should be a life-substitute. Like drugs or sex or a promotion at the workplace, it feels good but what else do we miss in the meantime?
Anytime I spend too much time on the computer, I know I have to leave for a walk through the woods by the bayou’s edge. That area is to my mind every bit as mathematical as a computer, but it considers more factors simultaneously. Computers are just now moving toward awareness of application concurrency (I remember discovering that concurrency was not inherent at about age 11, and having that awareness struggle be my major stumbling block to getting started in programming). Nature is concurrent, it is parallel, it is massively scalable and it is resilient. The categorical thinking that processes one item at a time like a mental bureaucracy is far removed from this graceful integral beauty.
A research team led by professor Jun’ichi Ushiba of the Keio University Biomedical Engineering Laboratory has developed a BCI system that lets the user walk an avatar through the streets of Second Life while relying solely on the power of thought. To control the avatar on screen, the user simply thinks about moving various body parts — the avatar walks forward when the user thinks about moving his/her own feet, and it turns right and left when the user imagines moving his/her right and left arms. ^
More of us should worry first about our first life, and only after that about our Second Life or birth again.
William Gibson, creator of Neuromancer, tells us about his views of futurism.
“If I had gone to Ace Books in 1981 and pitched a novel set in a world with a sexually contagious disease that destroys the human immune system and that is raging across most of the world — particularly badly in Africa — they might have said, ‘Not bad. A little toasty. That’s kind of interesting.’
“And I’d say, ‘ But wait! Islamic terrorists from the Middle East have hijacked airplanes and flown them into the World Trade Center.’ Not only would they not go for it, they probably would have called security.”
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Gibson puts a premium on making his details rich. He’s always wanted his world to be “naturalistic — where people used toilets. And dry cleaners. And things got rusty and things broke.”
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Having said that, Gibson says: “One of the biggest technologically driven changes in my writing is the awareness that every text today has a kind of spectral quasi-hypertext surrounding it.” It is “all of the Googled information that found its way into the book but which isn’t available to the reader as a literal hypertext unless you’re willing to be the animator of the hypertext process” and Google each term that’s distinctive and new.
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“People are still asking me about the death of the book,” Gibson responds, “and yet here I am and every day I go out to the biggest bookstores that have ever existed and are doing the most business daily of any bookstores in history.“It’s the oldest and the first mass medium. And it’s the one that requires the most training to access. Novels, particularly, require serious cultural training. But it’s still the same thing — I make black marks on a white surface and someone else in another location looks at them and interprets them and sees a spaceship or whatever. It’s magic. It’s a magical thing. It’s very old magic, but it’s very thorough. The book is very well worked out, somewhat in the way that the wheel is very well worked out.”
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“Politics has, like, jacked itself up to my level of weirdness,” Gibson acknowledges. “I can work with this,” he says, thinking of recent turns of events. “I like the sheer sort of neo-Stalinist denial of reality. That’s what makes it work. It’s interesting. I’d like to see it get less interesting. But I don’t know that it necessarily will.” ^