RealityPrime

Jerry Paffendorf is Futurist in Residence with The Electric Sheep Company, providers of professional services including 3D art, custom software, and experience design for platform virtual worlds like Second Life, Multiverse, There, and Google Earth. He also serves as a researcher with the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to improving our understanding of accelerating technological change, its drivers and implications, where he helps direct the Metaverse Roadmap Project. A creative curator of ideas about change and the future, Jerry is a frequent public speaker and helps put together the Accelerating Change, State of Play, Second Life Community Convention, and Metaverse Roadmap Summit conferences, and has worked on many Second Life projects, including the monthly Second Life Future Salon, SL Relay for Life, and Democracy Island. Jerry holds a BFA from Montclair State University in New Jersey, and an MS in Studies of the Future from the University of Houston. He lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

These questions were asked in September, 2006

AB: What’s your vision of "Web3D?" How do you differentiate it from the common "2D web" experience and existing "networked 3D" applications (like Second Life, Google Earth…)?

JP: In a nutshell, my 3D Web operating principle is that every web application and computer program will eventually be recreated for, modified to work with, or otherwise streamed into a virtual world interface. We’ll have the video game version of the planet and the planet version of the web. You’ll be able to represent anything in a shared 3D space, not just as "notes written on a wall" [one wall at a time], which is the current 2D web experience. The 3D Web will be open for anyone to create, connect, and own their environments built on a set of standards, not so dissimilar from the web or creating web pages or applications today. The 3D Web will be a superset that wraps around and draws from the 2D web, so there’s no inherent conflict between the two. 2D rocks and will live on where it’s more efficient, but we’ll be accessing it from within an environment that’s capable of displaying more, a whole new simulation layer on top of everything that we’ll start to colonize in all sorts of interesting ways that we’re just starting to think about.

My starting point for thinking about the 3D Web comes from massively multi-player games and virtual worlds where you have hundreds, thousands, or millions of people all running around seeing each other and doing things in shared 3D spaces in realtime. I imagine the game- and action-oriented interfaces (avatar movement, animations, object inventories, character status, etc.) merged with the kind of web-connected address, search, plug-ins and other tool bars and boxes you find in a standard 2D web browser. Among other things, out of this convergence you get a motivational framework of play, socialization and accomplishment for being in a 3D space (think about questing, leveling, and group collaboration in World of Warcraft); you get the creative, social, and self-expressive benefits of building, customizing, and sharing your personal avatar, 3D content and environments (think about Second Life where 3D creation happens in realtime for all to see), and you have access to all the world’s information, goods, social networks, and digital media via the web. Very powerful, and again note not necessarily all 3D all the time, depending on what you want to do.
   
To help think about the 3D Web experience and capabilities apart from 2D, I sometimes use the breakdown of metaverse, mirror world, and augmented reality technologies [editorial note: see Glossary, Part 5]. Second Life is a metaverse technology where anything imaginary can be created without existing reference. Google Earth is a mirror world technology that accurately models geography and architecture and gives information a connection to place. Augmented reality technologies are like the projects coming out of the Mixed Reality Lab in Singapore (www.mixedrealitylab.org/) where 3D simulations are overlaid on physical spaces.

Personal computers have been powerful enough for decent 3D graphics for 5, maybe 10 years. Yet, for most participants on the world wide web, 3D is not a typical feature, despite some very successful specialized uses of networked 3D, like Second Life, Google Earth, and World of Warcraft. Why do think that is?

Big picture, I see two major enabling differences from 5-10 years ago. First, video games really had to grow up and blow up. We needed more gaming and 3D literacy, more adult gamers who grew up playing games, more money in the industry, more attention being paid, more relationships built through networked online gaming, more cultural ubiquity and acceptance. We also needed the participatory web. We needed more people interacting online, producing their own media, starting their own online businesses, creating their own programs, mash-ups, uploading more of their personal lives, and feeling at home on the web. If you put those two broad ongoing developments together you’ve got what I think are two of the biggest current and near-term drivers towards the 3D Web: video games plus web 2.0 extended in exciting new directions. Active Worlds versus Second Life is a great example of this, I think. Active Worlds tried something similar to Second Life a decade earlier but the surrounding environment wasn’t ready. With SL, the surrounding environment is becoming so ready that you see people fighting through all of its current difficulties and short-comings because, dangit, they want its promise.

I recently bought a pretty fun book called "Bad Predictions: 2000 years of the best minds making the worst forecasts". It has a few historical thoughts on the telephone that I think are interesting here:

I think we’re at the beginning of growing out of a similar kind of awkward stage of uncertainty around the idea of the 3D Web. Will it really happen? You can look at video game technologies and see them as only toys. You can marvel at the really cool technology and amount of creative energy spent in something like Second Life, but not see how it might come to intersect with the flow of your own life, how it could ever be truly useful for you. You can recognize the importance of something like Google Earth but dramatically underestimate its future ubiquity (how essential it could become to have a lightning-fast graphical interface to the entire planet that puts information into global context). And you can hand-wave about all the awesome stuff it will do and the things it will make better (I’ve done some of that, with my eyes open to uncertainties, and hopefully listing visions helps pave the way). But just like it’s now the opposite of crazy to think about being able to talk to anyone in the world any time you want, we’re at the start of recognizing the power of virtually being with and doing things with anyone in the world any time you want, whether its playing games or doing business or learning, and that’s just the kind of thing the 3D Web will facilitate. Also riffing on those quotes, I do think about the 3D Web on a telephone level, as an inevitable developmental stage of communication technology. We can’t avoid it, we can only guide its development.

I like this David Gelernter quote, kind of a grand one, from his book Mirror Worlds (subtitled: "the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox…How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean"), written back in 1993:

It’s all about network effects, where the information, people, meaning, and opportunities are. That’s the attractor I’ve already experienced as a kind of early adopter of "serious" uses of gamespace. As more and more of the web and our attention gets connected to gamespace, virtual worlds, and 3D Web stuff, questions of usefulness disappear under the practicality, just like they did for the web. One day there will be a 3D Web in every city!

In your experience, what is 3D good for? How is it best used?

First, if you’re going to simulate the real world as it is, you need 3D because we live in a 3D world. Recreating or prototyping physical objects, cities, terrain: all that takes 3D. Do a little thought experiment about the future of something like Google Earth. It will eventually be the complete video game version of the planet that you can run, drive, and fly around like Grand Theft Auto. It will be full of real people from all over the world that you can see, talk to, and interact with, and you’ll be able to pull up and post information about everything you see (that’s when the world is really really flat). Compare that to a 2D map of the planet. The 2D map is awesome for lots of things, and maybe a more efficient view for representing things like driving directions. But you’re going to want to use the thing where you can double-click that 2D map and drop down to ground level. The superset wins as the 3D map can contain and be viewed as 2D, but the 2D-only map can’t contain 3D.

My experience is largely with massively multi-player virtual worlds so I’ll give another narrow example from that space. 3D gives great spatial context for social things like play and presence that you can’t get in 2D. There are situations where you can do more and see more simultaneously, and faster, in a 3D space that you can look, run, click, or pan around. Compare this to 2D where you might see a list of people who are around or online, but you’re not sharing a realtime experience with them and you have no idea where their attention is, where their presence is. In 3D space that can represented by a gathering of avatars in a space that represents their interests. 2D space can encroach upon this too, but I see it reaching a limit where we’ll discover we really want recourse to 3D, the ability push out into a more robust 3D space. We want to see behind, around, over there, turn around, zoom in, zoom out, lots of things at once, lots of people showing you who they are, maybe throw something in the corner and throw something else on top of it. As an example, when I log into Xbox Live I wonder where all the people are. There are millions of them there and you can find them by scrolling through lists, but there’s no 3D commons where you can run around and meet people who look interesting and hop into games with them. I find that frustrating and think something like that would be successful tomorrow, not five years from now.

On play and interaction in 2D and 3D, here’s an anecdote: I signed up for a CyWorld which gives you a little 2D room to decorate as part of a social network. This is a huge topic of discussion in metaverse and 3D Web circles: do we really need these "confusing" 3D worlds when we can deliver faster 2D experiences that have virtual world features like avatars and graphical spaces? A lot of people are thinking that way, even those who built the foundations of 3D massively multi-player worlds, who in many cases feel slightly burned by 3D not panning out in the ’90s. 2D social virtual worlds can be great, and in Asia they continue to out-compete their 3D counterparts. But in my experience, wanting to run free in new directions, the CyWorld 2D window quickly felt like a wall and I wanted to run around and create things in a 3D space with my friends and not be confined to standing next to them in a shoebox. It felt like a puddle and I wanted an ocean. In the long run it’s on the wrong side of the superset, training wheels for the metaverse where you can do that and more.

Is there any inherent conflict in the 2D web model of looking at pages of a big dynamic book, vs. the most typical 3D paradigm of being in a big 3D room or mall? If so, how do we address that for new 3D designs?

Three words jump to mind: tabs (as in tabbing between Firefox pages), HUDs (heads-up displays, like the text and icons that sit on top of video games), and widgets (little web-connected windows like Dashboard on the Mac). Over the next few years I think we’ll see the 2D web more noticeably begin to co-exist with video games, virtual worlds, and 3D web apps with more 2D web-connected tabs, HUDs, and widgets showing up in 3D spaces. More 3D-capable browsers and programs (Second Life, Google Earth, and Multiverse, among others) on your PC will allow you to tab and toggle between 2D HTML pages and immersive 3D spaces–when you’re not just opening a browser right in the virtual world–and next-gen home console systems are mixing a galaxy of 3D gameplay experiences with web access, persistent gamer identity, and all varieties of digital media, which puts the idea of the 3D web right under our noses. I love the Xbox Live experience of just hitting a button on the controller to instantly pull up a 2D overlay with your media, messages, and online profile. It works great. And in Second Life you already see a number of 2D HUDs that connect to the web. They just sit right on top of the 3D space, no problem, displaying information and letting you cause an action on the web or in the world. On the web we’re seeing increased development of little widgets of functionality you can use to assemble entire sites and services, which looks remarkably similar to some of the GUI creation and customization we see in World of Warcraft. Your 3D Web environment will be able to swallow and use all those things to best advantage. I don’t really see a 2D vs. 3D future, or an impending design crisis in integrating the two. It’s all woven together.

Okay. Some very cool stuff to think about. Thanks, Jerry.

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