The Skinnable World

During the State of Play II conference, TL, Torill, and several others kept challenging the presumption that Norrath and other virtual worlds should be thought of as separate places.   This is a good question to ask with regard to Norrath, but I wonder whether if it will be an even more important issue with regard to the future direction of virtual worlds.

With regard to Norrath, I think the point being pressed is simply the continguous nature of social experience and community.  I'm generally in favor of the objectionable separation, though, because I think there are important reasons to speak about virtual environments (esp. those that are explicitly fashioned as games) as separate "places" (note the scare quotes) that are independent and meaningfully distinct from Cartesian space.  This isn't too radical, I think, because the last decade has seen a great deal of debate about how to characterize the Web and the Internet as a social space (if it must be a space at all) -- and why making that determination might be important for law and for society.

However, having said that, I think it's clear that the future heralds an increasing collapse of any easy lines drawn between physical and virtual spaces.  The collapse is well underway, and I'm not talking metaphorically about eBay economies here.  When I see things like Google Maps, A9's Block View, RFID, geocaching, Bluejacking, and Catch Bob, it isn't too hard to spot the fact that there can be, will be, and are currently increasing synergies between real space and virtual information spaces.   The folks from There.com are virtually rebuilding the real Earth.  It's not clear to me (or to anyone, I think) exactly how mixing the capacity for virtual space and the persistence of real space will play out.  Will discrete 3-D virtual spaces be useful in localized areas?  What exactly will the ambient data fields for places look like?  How would people want to skin the world?  But putting it all together, I think we can safely predict that the importance of the tangible information in real space will continue to diminish -- posting a virtual signpoint or advertisement will be as effective as -- perhaps better than -- creating a real signpost. 

One question to ask is how we'll all feel about this creep away from the physically visible and toward the virtually important.   People seem already annoyed enough about how those talking into tiny cell-phones disrupt standard social expectations.  What will they think of people playing pervasive games in real space?  And if Dave Winer is annoyed now at how Google Toolbar annotates his web pages, how is he going to feel when Google starts annotating him and his physical spaces?  If we can dress up Martha digitially, how long will it be before we start enhancing ourselves digitally, dressing our real environments with virtual ornaments, and even dressing other people with metadata that can be "seen" by those who share their local space and own the right virtual glasses?  Our increasingly large metadata profiles are out there now, in fact, they're just not geographically linked, so that (most of us) can't currently profile the random passerby on the street.  But we're starting to profile locations -- that's a first step down a longer road. 

So I'd predict the next significant branch we'll see in the evolution of virtual worlds is going to be the development of an interactive virtual skin for our real environments, a Craig's list-type skin full of local possibilities and data in your space that is there but only virtually there.  Norrath and true virtual spaces (MMORPGs for sure) will still exist as separate places (because why should we tie virtual things to geography where we don't need to) -- but virtual worlds like Norrath will have a relationship to an increasingly important cousin -- a virtual skin that is tied to the physical world.

With this discussion of a skin really overlaying the real, I can't help but, as Julian did in My Tiny Life, reference Baudrilliard who referenced Borges:

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.

He goes a bit too far, of course, but it's a good provocation to end with.

Comments

[Chris Yeh]

1.

Or, like the writers of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, simply create an artificial universe where you can do your reporting. In the real world, Frogstar fighters are gunmetal grey.

[Jerry Paffendorf]

2.

Good stuff. These are definitely two things coming up and coming together: 3D digital worlds and the geospatial web.

I recently came across a John Udell article, Annotating the Planet with Google Maps, that very much captured my imagination. Just look at his amazing voice-narrated screencast to get the big idea. You knew this was coming, but it’s a pleasure to witness its arrival. So simple.

Udell calls Google Maps “an environment we [will] colonize” and (during the screencast) notes that "In the very near future there are going to be billions of people walking around the planet with GPS-aware phones. I used to wonder what kinds of things we'd be able to do with them. Now it's clear: we are going to use them to collectively annotate the planet."

That’s hot stuff. It’s like the first World Wide Web fish crawling out of the cyber ocean and growing spatial legs or something. Soon I suppose we’ll see WikiCity.

In the post Greg mentions A9’s new blockview (built from GPS-enabled cameras), which is also really cool. I characterize a lot of this stuff as “location intelligence,” a term coined by the mobile location blogging and alert company, WaveMarket (who by the way just got funded to the tune of $9.4 million—we got realtime media, now we’re gonna get realspace too).

On the stitched satellite imaging side we've also recently seen Google's purchase of the Keyhole geographic information system and the re-release of NASA’s World Wind digital earth (kind of a 2 & 1/2D Earth model that companies like Forterra are starting to try and build in massively multi-user 3D).

This is all very exciting. Most virtual worlds discussion is still at the gaming/ludological end of the scale (which makes sense because most VWs are designed and marketed as games :-). But if anyone can point me towards more of the 3D real world-mapping apps I’d much appreciate it. I try to find as much as I can and have staked out a little bit of thinking in this area, but I still haven’t found the buzzing community like I have around MMORPGs.

[greglas]

3.

Jerry --

Thanks a bunch for your thoughts. The Udell article is exactly what I was thinking about -- and "annotating the planet" sounds like a catchy meme to me. :-)

What I wonder about is exactly how the ambient data fields will be structured -- I figure it will first be appearing on a pocket device with a screen and building off the Web -- but will there be physically pinned private/premium platforms/datasets that aren't integrated? And how tightly will that data be pinned to physical geography? And will there be spam problems? Ad-based revenues? Special eyeglasses a la William Gibson? ;-)

If you find a community -- please post a link here. (And you might check out Nicolas Nova's RSS feed, if you haven't yet.)

[greglas]

4.

Related:

http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/2005_03_01_blogger_archives.php#111158645793823214

Pointing to:

Doug Rushkoff's "Honey I Geo-Tagged the Kids

[greglas]

5.

Nicolas Nova caught the Rushkoff piece too and has more links/thoughts:

http://tecfa.unige.ch/perso/staf/nova/blog/2005/03/23/new-scientist-on-map-makers/

Feels like a meme cresting -- expect panels on collaborative cartography at Etech and SXSW next year. :-)

[Jerry Paffendorf]

6.

Hi Greg and gang,

Just put a new post on my blog with two relevant ideas ideas here:

1. "WikiCities" which would combine core elements of Wikipedia and Google Maps, allowing users to "garden" geospatial content and keep it fresh by weeding out spam, etc.

2. Pinning interactive 3D world files (ala the defunct Adobe Atmosphere) to the mapspace. This file-based 3D recreation of a real coffee shop (made in Atmosphere) caught my eye, and there's no reason you can't attach 3D files like this to a 2D map! Like Block View 3.0 or something...

>Feels like a meme cresting -- expect panels on collaborative cartography at Etech and SXSW next year. :-)

Expect panels at Accelerating Change this year! :-) (site being built)

Thanks for the links above.

[greglas]

7.

More steps along the path:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/JohnBattellesSearchblog?m=429

[George Showman]

8.

This is a topic that I and many other architects and architecture students find particularly interesting, for obvious reasons. My M.Arch. studio project at Columbia's GSAPP this semester is in fact all about this. Basically, I'm working from an assumption that handheld/implanted GPS devices, heads-up displays (on that topic: I assume you're familiar with Steve Mann's work and ideas about "mediated reality"), and RFIDs will combine in the very near future to create something like the "annotated reality" to which Jerry P. refers above. But I think it will also be, for the majority of people, an extremely targeted and manipulative kind of annotation. Every piece of public space (e.g. sidewalk space) will be a location where you will be subjected to targeted marketing. You may be able to filter this, but that is also a bit of a problem, because inevitably you will be filtering out things you'd rather not have, or SHOULDN'T have, missed.

Anyway, my studio project is a proposal for a virtual "fog" that is an overlay over a near-future L.A., and which provides an un-predictable, un-customizable fluctuation in how wireless devices inter-connect. A sort of "weather" for virtual-world intrusions into the RW. My premise is that people will voluntarily sign up for this, as a social mixer if nothing else.

I wish I could share a link about this project, but I'm still bringing it all together. My final review is in a week... I will try to post a link after that, because I would love to hear any T-Ner's opinion on it. But the point of this post is really to say that we need to think very clearly and ambitiously about how to carve out a public territory in the annotated, mediated, skinned, "R + many Vs" World. Otherwise we'll end up with a world where everybody carries around his custom-made filter through which he samples what he likes from the underlying reality/virtuality. We will lose the ability to bear witness, and we will lose our exposure to happenstance. We will also create even deeper divides between those who are wired and those who are not.

[greglas]

9.

Hey George, thanks for the comments. Definitely do post a link when you have the time.

As always, I'm fascinated simply by the sci-fi/infotech aspect of all this, but my real interest in exploring it is to ferret out what this type of change might imply for social policy and law -- and your point of caution about the possible digital divide looming here, and the dangers of gated virtual communities imposed on public space, is, imho, just right. A skinned world means that even a public forum might not be effectively public anymore, because a private information space will exist on top of the public geographic space.