According to SiliconBeat, Linden Labs, creator of SecondLife, have raised an additional $11 million in venture capital, led by Globespan Capital Partners.
Yesterday Dave Weiner and Robert Scoble were talking about SecondLife, the popular online environment where people can buy a plot of virtual real estate, build a homestead and live a second life in the environment. Then they started talking about SecondLife as a platform, a thought-provoking throwaway statement that sent me down memory lane.
Scoble thinks Microsoft needs to focus on SL because it runs apps. That made me laugh. You need to focus on shipping Vista. You already own Bungie, no need to overextend yourselves any further. MS Word in 3D anyone?
Forget SL as a platform. Let’s back up and have a discussion about the real next generation of the internet, the 3D web, a richly-detailed immersive virtual environment.
When “new” ideas get popular (again), in come the VC, ready to fund 50 competitors aiming to dethrone SL. Competition is good, but we need a common lingua franca for building and linking virtual environments first. VRML sucked, although the people behind all knew we needed something like HTML to make building 3D worlds online easier and more standardized. Imagine needing a different web browser for each website you visited, total nightmare.
Why do I care? Because I was a founding member of the Boston Computer Society’s Virtual Reality Group, the first in the country, back in 1993. We built virtual worlds on mega-expensive Silicon Graphics hardware and held monthly meetings where 250 would show up to try out the latest virtual environments. We were a ragtag mix of artists, geeks, musicians and designers, pushing the medium as far as we could, for free, for the fun of it. That was my indoctrination into the bleeding-edge, and I’ve been a fan of fresh-out-of-alpha ever since.
Where were the pundits in 1995 when we were all in ActiveWorlds doing the same things as people do in SL today? We did not have the GPU or API or the credit card tie-in but staking a claim and building your own graphical environment has been around for a decade at least. Remember Amy Bruckman and MediaMoo and LambdaMOO? Programming your own avatar on the command line anyone? I had a precusor to a blog in ActiveWorlds in 1996, and my friend had one in MediaMoo in 1994. When the pundits come out staking claims of being the first to blog in 3D in SL I have to chuckle.
Point is, avatars are getting more popular, more and more people have bandwidth, fast computers, video cameras and even I am tiring of the static nature of the web. Today’s hardware and software is finally able to handle the graphic-intensive nature of a compelling virtual world like SL.
SL has 165k members, so where are the new immigrants going to come from? Some say people on social networks will gravitate towards SL. I don’t think so. Most of the people on Myspace will not in fact take to SecondLife because virtual worlds take too long to build and require too much interaction to get anything done unless you are hard-core. Myspace is the ultimate passive online experience for most of us. Stare, click, repeat does not work in SL.
I’m happy that Linden Labs raised more money, hopefully they will push their service farther and make it easier for the uninitiated to get involved. More power to them.
Technorati Tags: second+life, virtual+reality
