Anyway, I really don’t like your tone. You’re a borderline troll. So don’t bother responding yet again.

As for Linden, I’m sure they’ll make money before this latest bubble bursts. However, I personally wouldn’t want to be forever known as the AOL of virtual worlds.

You really need to bring your worldview out of 1990’s. avi. The only kind of client that’s going to get any significant cross-world mindshare is an open one. The open meme has taken hold, and isn’t going to disappear.

And that means that if you have powers or resources to guard, then you have to guard them server-side, because nothing that happens client-side is in your power to restrict. This was true even before open-source became huge. It was just a bit harder to modify binaries before, so fewer people could do it, but certainly not impossible.

Linden Labs understands this, as well as the fallacy that underlies DRM, and refuses to get into a pointless arms race with their customers. Indeed, they have open-sourced their client so that they can ride on the shoulders of giants instead of fighting them. If you continue to see these issues through the eyes of a previous generation, and see users and their clients as adversaries as your phrase above suggests, then things are not going to go well for you.

First There Was the Grid… 3pointD linked to an interesting article on Ogle Earth entitled "Metaverse 2.0" which talks about the fact that Google Earth and Second Life are modeled on the real Earth and a flat Earth, respectively. It argues that SL in particular…

Taking any such "effectively-2D" space and bending the whole thing to any non-holed continuous shape, no matter how extreme, is roughly equivalent for an ant on the ground. Flat, elliptic, hyperbolic, matter only insofar as they form new connections (seams, folds, short-cuts, and warps) as in the case with GE’s sphere, which makes it so east and west meet; or even a torus, which does the same for north and south.

For example, you could take GE and wrap the data to the inside of the sphere and it would work roughly the same. The principal difference would be that the horizon slopes up and if you go to the middle and relax your FOV, you can see roughly 1/2 the world at a time. I did such a thought experiment of a VW in my first novel, but I called the space RealityPrime. Imagine what the metaphor is if the Metaverse is the Earth, just inside out and right under our feet. I’m not sure people would actually like that.

Metaverse 2.0, if decentralized, would need to work more like the web, handling discontinuities and arbitrary connections, where we lose the nice metaphor of one big flat space and wind up using graph theory to draw our maps. But I think we agree on that. The challenge is how to make it all feel seamless, despite the natural discontinuities, where distance may be measured more in "hops" than in kilometers.

Over the past few weeks, there’s been a little more chatter than usual in the mainstream media and on blogs about 3D virtual worlds and their relative merits. Both Google Earth and Second Life have been mooted as a paradigm……

Just one comment. When you refer to Cartesian space, that’s the same as Euclidian space. So when you ask “And why limit ourselves to Cartesian spaces?”, that is what I was toying with when I looked at hyperbolic space and elliptic space. Just not sure if I got that across properly:-)

As I see it, there are two real-world constraints we can let go off when building M2: That space has to be flat (Euclidian) and that the topology has to follow the geometry of space (it can be non-contiguous, like the web.) it just took me a very long post to say that.