Blog: Dan Power

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2-D vs. 3-D web, cars vs. planes

Today's GridTalk in Second Life sponsored by Dr. Dobbs/Information Week focused on discussing the upcoming Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose, Oct. 10 & 11. At 8 a.m. PST/SLT, John Jainschigg CTO of CMP Metaverse/Dr. Dobb's Journal, (aka John Zhaoying in SL) and Kim Smith, CMP Metaverse, Director/Operations & Sales, (aka Rissa Maidstone in SL), led an hour plus discussion with about 25 in attendance.

I can't attend Virtual Worlds, instead I'll be at Teradata Partners in Las Vegas. My guess is that Shawn Rogers, Ron Powell, and I will be among the few discussing Second Life and Virtual Worlds at Partners. That lack of visibility in the DW community will change as data warehousing technologies are used to support Virtual Worlds and as Decision Support comes to Virtual Worlds.

If you are at Teradata Partners, say Hi (check http://www.teradata.com/teradata-partners/). Congratulations to all the employees at the newly autonomous Teradata company.

You can find out more about the Virtual Worlds conference at http://www.virtualworlds2007.com/index.html .

Also, I'm designing a new web site focused on Virtual Worlds for decision support called DecisionSupportWorld.com. At the web site, there are links to three recent Ask Dan! columns:

Power, D., "Can multi-user visual simulations provide real world decision support?" DSS News, Vol. 8, No. 13, July 1, 2007, URL http://dssresources.com/newsletters/193.php .

Power, D., "What are the best Second Life resources for communications-driven decision support?" DSS News, Vol. 8, No. 14, July 15, 2007, URL http://dssresources.com/newsletters/194.php .

Power, D., "What are the advantages and disadvantages of using Second Life for decision support?" DSS News, Vol. 8, No. 15, July 29, 2007, URL http://dssresources.com/newsletters/195.php .

The 3-D Web and Virtual Worlds are the frontier of collaborative computing and visualization. We can compare the 2-D Web we are so familiar with to automobiles (cars) and the 3-D web to airplanes (planes) . Both technologies will co-exist and complement each other. The 2-D technology is more advanced than 3-D today, but the pace of development of the 3-D web is amazing.

I want to share some excerpts from today's discussion:

[8:09] Jeffronius Batra: Perhaps we should talk about how to make sure that more people understand what VW are all about and what the benefits are.
[8:09] Shamir Katsu: Another grand scheme was an idea Goldie and I were kicking around. She talked about it here: http://www.viddler.com/explore/goldiekatsu/videos/60/
[8:09] Leinad Meriman: I am pushing benefitting managers with DecisionSupportWorld.com.

[8:12] Yazzara Robbiani: It does feel like Internet in early 90s, but with one important difference
[8:12] Jeffronius Batra: Agreed on OpenSim, they've made remarkable progress in just a few months.
[8:12] Rissa Maidstone: I totally agree.
[8:12] John Zhaoying: The big difference: the fact that we've all seen the Internet in the 90s already?

8:16] Rissa Maidstone: Yazzara, I think if you took a good look at what happened recently during the 6-day Life2.0 conference here in SL, you'd be inclined to change your mind.
[8:16] Leinad Meriman: I compare the WWW to the car and the 3-D web to airplanes, both transportation and one follows the others
[8:16] Rissa Maidstone: Love it Leinad.

[8:24] JayR Cela: Soph / that is why I beleave we should all be supporting the OpenSimm project
[8:24] Jeffronius Batra: Mitch and Philip have a great vision but sometimes it is so utopian and big picture that it scares away the more practically minded sounds.
[8:24] Rissa Maidstone: Its interesting, the industry I came from, which has little to no relation on a market segment, encouraged "sleeping with the enemy" so to speak--working with your competition, teaming up to bring improvements to the field, competing against each other in order to offer a variety of choice and technical challenge.
[8:24] Dancer Morris: I think that ultimately there will be consolidation in social networking, just as there was in other parts of the net earlier
[8:26] Dancer Morris: ultimately I'm not sure that there is room for more than one metaverse in the world.. but I'd like that one metaverse to be open-source with choices of software to run it and access it
[8:26] Rissa Maidstone: I see many similarities between what's happening here, and what needs to happen in the physical world.
[8:26] Sophrosyne Stenvaag: Rissa, that's a terrific model - and I imagine gained a lot of sticky support -

8:28] Leinad Meriman: we don't want 3-d viewer integrated into the desktop OS like IE
[8:28] JayR Cela: Zero has been with LL for about 2 years and was brought aboard for the Open Souce effort / but even he is getting resistance from Phillip and others
[8:28] Sophrosyne Stenvaag: woot, Leinad!

[8:38] John Zhaoying: The current estimate is something like 50,000 users with positive monthly linden flow.

[8:39] Dancer Morris: 50,000 is about all that the current infrastructure can support

[8:40] Jeffronius Batra: John, OpenSim people tell me that the current infrastructure is maxing out at that 50K.

[8:43] JayR Cela: ultimately it will be Google vs. Microsoft and LL will die in the dust

[8:44] Jeffronius Batra: My wife and my son have had a family reunion in SL.
[8:45] Jeffronius Batra: Here's my blog post about it: http://www.jeff-barr.com/?p=972 . I write this stuff to get others to think about doing the same.

My excerpts don't really do more than capture a few highlights. A chat discussion has so many threads and 10 or so people chatting concurrently can be hard to follow. The good news is we have a transcript.

So Virtual Worlds are here to stay. We are in the early stages with Linden Lab's Second Life. The concurrency, load, open sim issues are major hurdles. Microsoft and Google are on the horizon.

Find out about Virtual Worlds.

Dan Power aka in SL Leinad Meriman

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