[-empyre-] AR musings in Leonardo Electronic Almanac

[Rob Myers]

On 25/04/11 08:13, Alan Sondheim wrote:
> 
> Hi - The Leonardo article is excellent; the reason SL faded, however, is
> that it didn't fulfill the dream of virtual life - most people are used to
> games, and SL has no teleology at all.

Virtual Reality was infinite blackness with a few fascinating spaces and
objects around 0.0, 0.0, 0.0. Second Life is simulacral suburbia.

The only regions of Second Life that give me that old virtual rush are
the sandboxes with their glitch aesthetic and the Odyssey gallery.

Stray more than a few dozen metres from the origin in VR and you fall
forever. Stray more than a few dozen metres from anywhere in SL and
you're in a strip mall.

The teleology of VR was immanent to its form: VR was there to be
experienced. The architecture and socialising of games are [more
directly] instrumentalized: they are there for you to hack and slash around.

Second Life lacks the teleology of either. It's there to be normalized
and made unproblematic.

Our best hope is that browser 3D + WebSockets + JavaScript break the
stifling conformity of Second Life's unified grid and give some more
interesting destinations and destinatees the space to bloom around their
own co-ordinate systems.

- Rob.

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