Is the Ideal Metaverse a Network of Linked Places, or a Seamless World?

Continuing his blog series on what he's learned as a lead developer/consultant at Oculus, Eve Online, and of course Linden Lab, Jim "Babbage" Purbrick has a new post arguing that the architecture of the metaverse should be a network of linked, small spaces:

As the Second Life continued to expand and change at an ever faster rate it became increasingly important to have ways to find the good stuff. Bookmarks, searches and external blogs indexed the expanding world helping people find things. Rather than walk, fly or sail around the world people would teleport from place to place or event to event. Even if you wanted to walk it became increasingly hard to do so: more and more parcels of land became private, restricting entry to both people and any scripted fish unlucky enough to try to swim across the boundary... Technologically, Second Life also began to split at the seams. The addition of Second Life URLs (SLurls) allowed blogs to link to locations in Second Life and people increasingly wrote scripts which published out to the web and Twitter or pulled data in from the web to visualize in 3D....

[I]t was incredibly encouraging to see some of the earliest experiments in social VR at Oculus try something similar by linking Oculus Rooms to other experiences via coordinated app launch (CAL). While the first CAL implementations linked Oculus Rooms to a fixed set of published experiences it’s easy to imagine people using similar technology to build environments which link to their favorite locations around the Metaverse just as early web sites curated links to favourite content around the web.

I understand Jim's reasons for wanting the Metaverse to act more like the web -- but then that means the Metaverse acts less like a world. Or as I put it to him:

"Don't linked small spaces create a sense of discontinuity and hurt immersion and a feeling of being in a 'world'? In your post, you mention some virtual worlds that link with small rooms (Metaplace, Whirled and Sansar), but they're all small in terms of user bases. The biggest virtual worlds, Minecraft and Fortnite, are huge contiguous spaces."

Babbage's reply to that:

"I think some worlds benefit immensely from being contiguous spaces: Minecraft is about exploring your own unique world grown from a random number seed, travelling in Warcraft ensures quests take time, lets you become immersed in the curated world and provides time for conversation along the way, a lot of EVE is about trying to move shipments of materiel around or hunting people who are doing the moving.

"Many of these worlds still use linked spaces where they help though: instanced dungeons in MMOs or wormholes and star gates in EVE that let you take short cuts. In Second Life putting everything on a grid meant that if you travelled across the mainland you'd walk past a random selection of castles, bars and space stations and even in curated estates you'd walk past mile after mile of people's houses, each of which needed a unique X, Y, Z.  It's telling that even in a world [SL] which did a decent job of letting you soar across the landscape most people teleport around.

"Designing your Metaverse to consciously support linking allows you to bake those links into the world. I can build a house with four doors each of which takes you to my favourite places. Instead of using external bookmarks or blogs to overlay links on a contiguous space I can weave them in to the world and ensure that every door leads to something amazing and not to a driveway and then a suburban sprawl.

"If your Metaverse needs to include everything I think it's hard to design a contiguous space without everything feeling incongruous. I think it's better not to try."

Personally I think a fair amount contiguous incongruity is great, but it isn't inevitable to contiguous spaces. Second Life's continental landmass feels like suburban sprawl because it's built on the visual metaphor of an open continent, as opposed to another frame of reference. (Say a series of islands, or tiny planets.)

In any case, while it's true that people in SL generally teleport from one point to another when they do travel -- rather than walking/flying or traveling in a vehicle, and so on -- it's also apparently true that 70% of SL users do not leave the location from where they last logged in (another Linden vet tells me. One likely reason why:  When you can instantly go anywhere without much trouble, going anywhere doesn't seem worth the trouble.

To be fair, Minecraft and Fortnite aren't the only models to reference. ROBLOX is about as large in terms of users, and that's closer to Jim's vision of linked rooms. In any case, do read the rest here.

Previously:

• How To Create Avatars For Virtual Worlds -- An Oculus/Linden Lab Vet's Advice
• Babbage Is Back: Linden Lab Vet Jim Purbrick Leaves Oculus, Starts Sharing His Wisdom On Creating Virtual Worlds

Comments

[Alicia]

Babbage just brought up the biggest problem that would literally destroy the first-time-user experience, "Towards the end of my time at Linden Lab there was a push to standardize these efforts and make it possible for experiences run by different organisations, potentially on different technology stacks, to inter-operate. For people to teleport not just between regions, but between organisations taking their appearance and inventory of clothes, animations, and interactive objects which defined their identity with them. This was a big deal, so it was incredibly encouraging to see some of the earliest experiments in social VR at Oculus try something similar by linking Oculus Rooms to other experiences via coordinated app launch (CAL). While the first CAL implementations linked Oculus Rooms to a fixed set of published experiences it’s easy to imagine people using similar technology to build environments which link to their favorite locations around the Metaverse just as early web sites curated links to favourite content around the web."

For a metaverse to work in the capacity he's talking about... it must be brand new for everyone. No ifs, no ands, and most certainly no buts. People are going to whine and say, "... but we have the tech and the capability to do that!" and yes, we do, but then you neglect the huge differences of each and every world. So, literally, your stuff will break upon entering those different worlds because of the very fact that the stuff you have specifically from that one game will only work for that specific game.

If you're going to create that one metaversal game on a massive scale that will allow for all of that to happen, then each and every subsequent world must have the exact same coding, scripting, and game engines... or else, it will fail immediately. Not only that, but that will guarantee, and ensure, that brand new people have a wonderful first-time experience as opposed to the latter.

[Adeon Writer]

Both. Continuity of identity is vital, however, the various places themselves need not be linked nor contiguous.

[Pulsar]

Second Life, too, benefits from having contiguous spaces.
While I prefer a mix, because teleport is handy and islands are useful also to create places with your special settings (western, medieval, science fiction, etc); many things that make SL unique won't be possible without contiguous spaces.

I suspect that Linden Lab failed to interpret the behavior of their users again, in the same way they misunderstood why some account registration stopped at the last-name choice.

It's true that if you just want to move from A to B, teleport is the way. Yes, various games, CRPG ones too, have ways to quickly jump from location to location.
On the other hands there are also games that are vehicle simulators and the fun is the vehicle and the experience you have with it, but not only that.
With SL you also add the social side to the experience: you do that with your friends and you meet other people when you travel around (by sailing or at airports, etc), plus it's a creative platform, so you have a huge variety and freedom to enjoy it, even in crazy fun ways.

It also true that many people never left their infohub. I saw that myself, many times.
But as soon as you showed them it was a creative world, yes, a whole world, with almost everything made by other people, many of them were interested, amazed or even blown away that you could use SL also as a sort of social Flight Simulator with a working airport network, or experience it as a passenger with a RP crew, or the cruises with realistic sailing boats, many of them together. And more recently, the community of Drivers of SL and their adventures.

Also, yes, those WoW, Minecraft and Eve examples... may apply to SL too. Despite the lack of care SL traveling had (LL took 17 years to find out it was possible to improve the region crossing... while they were working at something else), SLers made their own shipping game ("Get the Freight Out", you can see signs here and there in the mainland); some RP has quests where you have to travel in their mini-continent; Drivers of SL has adventures in the mainlands roads; and "I like to explore" isn't so rare to read in SL profiles.

So it isn't that there isn't interest to travel and to play with vehicles or just immerse yourself in something that actually feels like a world.

And people at infohubs had no idea also because:
- in the early days having a long drawing distance wasn't common, so if you were in Zebrasil infohub, you won't know there was a Volcano that actually erupts in the region next to it and an aircraft carrier not far from it.
- there was no sign telling something along the lines: "look, SL isn't 3D chat rooms, it's a whole world! It's huge!".
- Now LL made that even worse: the current Social Islands make it even less apparent now, as the name says, they are isolated places.

So, Linden Lab failed to communicate, people weren't aware, region crossing used to be awful... meanwhile it could have been a Minecraft on steroid, but "prims" and sandboxes have been almost killed in favor of using Blender. Lack of anything to encourage optimized content did the rest.
This selected people that doesn't move much.
Therefore, SL ended up with an user base of unoptimized virtual clubbers (who see the club essentially empty anyway as they have to derender almost anyone else), horny dudes that hunts for women, not so clothed fashionistas that pile up ad shopping events, selfies and so on.
And a bunch of folks who just stand and do nothing (except camming and sending private messages, not just because of the lag) at the entrance of anywhere, with devices that have to sweep them away from the entrance. That's so sad.

And what did conclude someone at Linden Lab? That contiguous spaces wasn't a thing to have. So they made the nth room-loader, which flopped(*).
____
* also because their usual lack of optimization guidelines and no indication of how many Mb, pardon Gb, the "creators" made you download, resulting in insane half-hour downloads at 10 Mbps (a common network speeds when Sansar was presented to the public), several other design shortcomings, poor communication, especially at the beginning, and so on and on. And yes also VR not blooming, but they failed compared to VRChat too, even Neos VR is doing better.

[Adeon Writer]

I would argue that you can't escape Second Life's contiguousness. NO matter what you do, you have that ocean with the skybox. if you want something else, you have to do your best to blot it out and recreate your own with prims, which never look as good than if you had full access to the backdrop.

[irihapeti]

i think that we have to get away from stuff (rendered objects) as the driver of how we think about the metaverse. As while we do this then is a circular conversation about this render engine, that render engine, some other render engine, and how they can all be reconciled so that we can take our stuff with us where ever we go.

i don't think it is about this, because it is endlessly circular. New technologies come and old technologies go. Stuff gets obsoleted as new stuff is created/made. So what remains constant in all of this ? We do, the people.

i mentioned this before in previous conversations on here. The first constant thing about me (a person) is my username. The 2nd constant thing is my list of friends/acquaintances/contacts. The 3rd constant is my ability to communicate with them no matter what viewer/browser/device/platform I might be using at any given moment. The 4th constant is my ability to deposit and withdraw my money safely and securely, so that I can buy stuff/experiences for any particular world/game/viewport of the metaverse and/or get paid for stuff/experiences that I provide in any of the different offerings/views.

that the triangles that compose my avatar and stuff may not be transferable between the different worlds/games/viewports when I portal between them is neither here nor there really. Stuff is stuff is stuff

the constant reinforcement is that when I portal between say Second Life and Fortnite or Eve or Rust or whichever, then when I friend somebody where ever I am then we are on each others lists no matter where ever else we may be thereafter. This is what binds us, as people, and it is this binding on which the metaverse can be founded. The relationships between ourselves and other people.

if we had the money to make this then where would we start ? I would suggest to first buy/build a contacts messaging management app. Then buy/build something like Tilia and back this into the messaging app. Constants: Identity + Relationships + Money. Money induces trade. Trade provides earnings to pay the bills.

then once we have this then make a robust API, and make this API available to organisations/companies/independents to hook in their view of the metaverse (whatever form of triangles they may be). And then within our constant app we create a 3D google/bing-like search facility and map, of all the offerings from those orgs.

from a new user's pov. Download the Constant Metaverse app. Create an account. Look in search. See say Second Life listed. Click the button. Says I need to download the SL viewer. Press Ok. It downloads and I am automagically on the Starter Island in my SL newbie outfit. Pick Rust, download, auto logged in and I am naked. Same with any other world/game/experience/concert venue/etc that I haven't been too before.

and over time as I travel all the different places then I will create/buy/acquire stuff for each of the different views of the metaverse as I go.

like 2D websites, all the different worlds/games/viewports will rise and fall, but the constant metaverse, the binding, remains. Always there, always on

[Adeon Writer]

You have just described Steam.

[TonyVT Skarredghost]

I agree on the linking, otherwise it is a true mess. Fun the first time, but then superconfusing.