Internal Server Error

what the voices in my head tell me to write

Monday, June 05, 2006

come over and see me sometime

JuJu finally pulled out all the stops and got the schools network connection sorted. No thanks to BT or Hotbrick. Changing to fixed IP seems to have sorted it out.

So the first thing I did was buy some land in SL. My home is now located at Seopophang(108, 21, 96). Whoo and quite possibly Hoo

I was actually thinking about the differences and simillarities between SL and the web in the car on the way home from work. The main difference is of course Linden Labs control SL and the web is open with no real control.

In this respect the web is more like William Gibson's cyberspace and SL is Neal Stephenson's metaverse. There was one line in Neuromancer that explained it all to me. I can't quote it off the top of my head but it went along the lines of if you viewed a childs calculator in cyberspace it would be vast empty spaces with a few commands in the middle. The web is like that. A particular URL resolves to a website that can be vast and complex like the myspace or a simple personal home page. The difference is that there is no concept of transporting your presence from one location to the next in the web. You click a link and bang your there. Maybe the cyberspace visulization of the web would be a regular 3D grid of equal sized boxes floating in space. Each box would be positioned according to its IP or DNS records. But each box would be a tardis in that the interior dimensions would be bigger than the exterior. They could be as big as you like. So your "presence" would enter a box and find either a simple site or a whole new world.

In SL everything has to obey most of the laws of physics. You cant have a building where the inside is bigger than the outside. This means what you virtually see is what you get.

The ideal solution would be to imagine something between the two. Anyone could host their own virtual world. Its position would be more or less arbitary with perhaps simillar systems to DNS now. Separate bits of content would be linked with roads or other simulcra of transport networks. Crucially they would have both interior and exterior representations. Once you crossed the threshold of the exterieor you could be in a nice SL style house chatting to the owner or a whole new universe unrelated to what is outside.

Anyone know of an army of open source coders?

Imagine the SL library... Eventually ir will be limited by virtual space as there is only so much room on an island. If it continues to represent content as shelves with books on them it will have to have enormously long shelves to browse. The only soultion at the moment would be to have a search facility. Then you are back to square one with no way to browse for content in SL. If you could turn a "corner" in a stack and find instead of a 12 foot long corridor but a 1/2 mile long one instead dispite the previous representation of where you were claiming this was impossible you could still browse. You might have teleports to take you around the index system just as you have hyperlinks today but you are browsing not searching.

It would be a cross between the tardis and the library of Terry Prachetts Unseen University.

Tags: