Tom Hale, Chief Product manager Linden Lab
(picture by Elisabeth Leysen)
There once was this vision that the 2D web would become a part of the 3D internet. I guess Philip Rosedale still has that vision when he muses about digitizing the world.
In the meantime the web is doing just fine. As you can read on www.twitter.com/mixed_realities, there is a constant news flow about virtual goods trade shifting to web social networks, about the success of online social networks (on the web), about embedding virtual environments on the web.
The educators and the business people at SLCC09 beg for easier ways to collaborate and to make presentations in-world. Or to have better social networking tools.
So I guess the community can rejoice now that Tom Hale, Chief Product manager of Linden Lab, unveiled projects such as enabling residents to interact with websites in-world, to use GoogleDocs, to do searches, to click and surf the web, all this in-world.
The user interface will be liberated from clutter and gets a more webby and thus more easily understandable look and feel.
Developers are being invited to make media plug-ins for the viewer. On the web itself there is not only the shopping experience of Xstreet, but also a social network kind of Dashboard.
Buying land, signing up for Second Life, it will all become more flowing, more web and thus user friendly. Communities such as educators, business people will get their (micro)sites.
As Dusan Writer remarks, the worlds of browsers and of virtual environments are meeting more and more. It seems that it is not the 3D internet which is swallowing the 2D web, but the 3D environments which become features of the 2D web.
At least for now. My guess is that this all points to an integration which will become so tight that it becomes unclear what is swallowing what. Most importantly: the users or residents will go from 2D to 3D as they please, in function of their preferences and work & play necessities.
For more quotes from the presentation go to the twitter streams on #slcc09 and #slcc. For pictures use the same tags on Flickr, our pics are on http://www.flickr.com/photos/rolandlegrand/, including many pics of the Tom Hale presentation.
You can also watch an archived video of the Tom Hale presentation thanks to Tara Teats and Mal Burns.
Roland Legrand
