What I said on my SL Profiles blog…
THE FUTURE OF SECOND LIFE AND THE 3D VR WEB:
Linden Lab is losing control of their virtual world. They have been forced to ban casinos and other gambling from the grid, have cautioned users engaged in “age play” (after several countries passed laws making “virtual child sexual abuse” illegal), and have now announced plans to reinstate some form of ID verification. The latter appears to be the result of a European investigation begun in Germany regarding kiddie porn in SL, and the use of SL as a meeting place and forum for passing illegal kiddie porn between pedophiles.
Eventually LL’s SECOND LIFE will crash and burn, either due to the inherent un-scalability of the grid, or the legal complications resulting from unfortunate policy changes instituted by Philip Rosedale, the CEO and virtual feuhrer.
Eventually, as Prok Neva states in his cogent analysis in SECOND THOUGHTS, “The Liquidity Event”, the LL grid will be turned over to corporate interests and LL will no longer provide servers for hosting virtual land for subscribers.
Who will be providing the hosting servers which create the virtual land of SL?
Probably independent contractors, who will run mini-server farms and pay LL to remotely connect their sims to the SL grid. The SL grid will exist only as a construct of network connections between these remotely-hosted subnets patched together by the network admins of Linden Lab.
The individual’s “Second Life” experience at that point will consist of signing up for accounts which provide only a basic avatar creation service. Access to SL will be through a variety of independent grids, many of which will be either pay-per-access, subscription only, or supported by advertising. Those who want to own and operate virtual land and businesses will arrange through these contractors to rent a server (or part of one); the operators of the independent grids will probably be using open-source client and server software, and they will pay LL for connection/integration into the SL grid, with a sliding scale, again, for mainland, coastal, or island locations.
Linden Lab’s capital involvement will be drastically reduced, their overhead reduced, and their only direct involvement will be in managing connections to the grid by subcontractors and selling their avatar-creation services.
Whether the avatars designed in this method will be compatible with other virtual worlds or only with LL-origin software is one prime question. This would be one area in virtualization that would be very lucrative for others who want to get involved in the VR-web development business.
Teams are already working on an open-source version of the SL client, and LL has announced that they will be opening the SL server software to OS analysis and development. Other companies are already involved in OS VW software development – CROQUET, for example, and two companies, METAVERSUM and MULTIVERSE, are both working toward open-source VW serverware.
IBM has also announced that it has developed its own Virtual World, based on Garage Games’ Torque Game Engine.
So development is continuing, and I am looking forward to having a virtual home again. It won’t be in SECOND LIFE, but I will be virtual again.
