Virtual worlds, real problems

The media loves its darlings, and Second Life is very darling indeed. No surprise, coming as it does in the overlap between three of the hottest topics of the moment — video gaming, now bigger than Hollywood, online communities, now bigger than countries, and e-commerce, now bigger than a jumble sale. In fact, based on the latest figures Second Life has released, the amount of in-game commerce comes a poor second to the turnover of a single department store.

That hasn't stopped the pundits from calling Second Life the next web. Nor should it. However, there are more serious problems. Second Life, like every other 3D virtual environment, is locked in its own world. Although Second Life's creators Linden Lab say that users own the intellectual property in their creations, there's no way to use them outside.

There are no standards that let you move your avatar, your virtual shop, or any of your innovations between virtual realities. Without that, the environments can't even begin to grow to match the web in size or importance, let alone take over from it. And it makes business planning very hard: if Linden goes down or bust, what happens to your Second Life shop? Linden Lab has open sourced its viewer code — but is keeping its back-end closed.

The magic that keeps the internet open hasn't worked this time: while individuals and loose teams can easily innovate with the web, it takes much more investment and planning to make 3D stuff worth the candle. Everything is more complex, more involved: usability, graphics, mathematics, server-client issues and more make 3D development exponentially harder. People who make that investment are not minded to share.

And yet, we all know that we will move to a 3D environment. So much work is being done around the edges, so much technology is falling into place, that it's not a question of if, just when.

The opportunity is there for a large, aggressive, expansion-minded IT company to make the next generation of online experiences work on their terms. By creating the tools, environment and, most importantly, the structure to allow everyone to innovate without restriction, such a company could both create and dominate the market, while not being evil about it. A different company might take a different tack.

In the end, too much evil will fail. The key to success in the 3D universe is freedom. That, much more than polygon-mapped shop fronts, is what matters — and what will determine how long our Second Life will be.