Mr Pixel Goes to Washington

The Nature and Growth of Virtual Worlds

Mitch Kapor, the current chairman of the board of Linden Lab, said of Second Life just this past week that it “touches something deep in people.” My own experience, gleaned through the NMC’s research and work in that particular virtual world, echoes that observation, and the idea is part and parcel of why this new technology is so compelling.

A snapshot of the experience across just one aspect of virtual worlds illuminates this well. There are many ways one might engage in real-time interaction at a distance, such as via a webinar, instant messaging, or even high-definition video conferencing, but in each of these, one never lets go of the essential reality that you are not together. Even with the best of these, a piece of glass separates the participants. One can do a very simple test to discern this — if you move close to the screen in a video conference, no one on the other end steps out of your way. They know that you are not really there.

In a virtual world, on the other hand, the participants each make a choice to move through that glass and meet in the middle, and in so doing, extend their physical presences into the virtual space. If you conduct the same test of moving your avatar closer to another person’s avatar, he or she will move away, just as he or she would in the real world. Not only has that person extended his or her physical presence into the world via an avatar, but a sense of personal space as well. The two of you both know intuitively that you are somehow actually together. You have met in the middle.

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It is this simple yet profound sense of being in the same place at the same time, seeing and doing the same things, that is at the center of what is new about this technology. No other technology has this compelling characteristic. The applications for it and for bridging time, culture, and distance are endless.

Nowhere among virtual worlds can one see this aspect so clearly as in Second Life. At the NMC, we see Second Life as the most currently evolved of the virtual world platforms today, and wherever this technology takes us, Second Life will be seen as the seminal first instance of what the 3D web might look like. The reasons for that are clear.

Second Life sits at the intersection of three deeply significant trends, and it is here that one should start in order to understand why this technology offers such profound potential. The first trend is an increasing focus on people as the organizing principle of the network, which has been fueled by hundreds of social networking applications, the anytime, anywhere access of wireless networks, and the clear desire of people to connect seamlessly in real time via these networks. At its core, a platform like Second Life is a social space, and it is that platform’s success in meeting the need of people to come together that has driven its success and popularity.

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The second trend is the ever-improving ability of our computing and communications devices to represent data and information visually across three dimensions, and to distribute that information in real time over the network. Because of the huge success in the gaming market (which is nearly doubling each year and is predicted to top US $69 billion by 2011), most new computers now have the capacity to render three dimensional images of startling fidelity. Second Life’s contribution here has been to extend this capacity over a grid network based on thousands of servers so that a virtual world of considerable size and complexity can be rendered in real time and shared among tens of thousands of simultaneous participants.

Second Life is unique among the emerging virtual worlds because it also capitalizes on a third major trend — allowing users to generate content — which also the driving force behind such Web 2.0 phenomena as YouTube, MySpace, and Flickr. This has fostered a tremendous sense of ownership and pride among participants that in turn fuels the growth of the community.

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It is hard to underestimate the complexity of the task Linden Lab has set upon, and as noted before, while virtual worlds have developed to the point where there are already many compelling examples and a large number of persuasive applications to which they have been put, all of them are at the very earliest stages of their development.

Nonetheless, the growth over the last two years has been remarkable — the number of Second Life accounts has increased by 86 times over that period, from 150,000 in January 2006 to over 13,000,000 today — the adoption of the technology is still an order of magnitude or more away from the numbers commonly associated with the 2D Internet.

At any given moment, more than 50,000 people from countries across the globe are actively engaged in Second Life, and those number are growing steadily. Just in the past week, more than 420,000 people spent time in that virtual world; add to those numbers the tens of thousands of people using other virtual world platforms at any given time for which published data are not available.

Despite the relative immaturity of the technology, virtual worlds are clearly compelling to a large and growing number of visitors.