When I tell people that I subscribe to the metaverse, Second Life, I get a lot of blank looks. And when I try to describe Second Life, they think it’s either a role-playing game or another The Sims Online. The most unusual response was from a friend who thought it was some kind of kinky sex-chat program. (sigh)
If you’ve read Neal Stephenson‘s Snow Crash, you know what a metaverse is: it’s a computer-generated shared reality that is built and inhabited by its users. Stephenson’s Metaverse is a virtual world where people conduct social and business interactions much as they do in reality, but without reality’s constraints. Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, have clearly followed this vision.
In an article on the New York Law School’s website, Cory Ondrejka, Linden Lab’s VP of Development, describes the role of user-created content in the metaverse and how it relates to Second Life.
Link: Cory Ondrejka: “Escaping the Guilded Cage: User Created Content and Building the Metaverse” (PDF)
As an aside, back in ’94 or ’95 when I tried to explain the World Wide Web to people, I got the same kind of blank looks as I do now when I try to explain the concept of a metaverse. “Well, what’s it for?” Since then, the Web has become the single most recognized element of the Internet, and it facilitates human interaction in ways that the Web’s creators never dreamed.
Is a metaverse going to be our next Web? In ten or twenty years, will we do our online shopping in a 3-D representation of a brick-and-mortar shop? Will teleconferences and distance learning happen in virtual seminar rooms? Will we chat with far-away friends and family as if they were in the same room?
Golly, but that would be swell.