wikimedia and second life - Wiki-research-l

2 Mar 2008

Hello,

Two of the most visible aspects of what is being called Web 2.0 are
Virtual Reality and wiki collaboration. If Wikipedia is a monument to
turning fun and procrastinating into something very useful and
valuable, VR so far seems to be the other way, a way of taking
creative energy and turning it into fun and procrastination. Part of
this is that most VRs have intentionally been "walled gardens," where
effort poured into the VR is only really useful inside of the VR.

I'm hesitating to write this in case it breaks something that I've
been doing, but let me plunge ahead. One of the most interesting VRs
is Linden Lab's Second Life, which is being used as the basis for both
an OpenSim project, and for IBM's virtual world. It's primary
difference from the point of view of social and technical research is
that it has a relatively versatile scripting language called LSL, or
Linden Scripting Language. This language is being ported to run on top
of a mono virtual machine presently, but even in its current state it
can do amazing things. By querying and editing wikimedia wiki's it is
possible to bring information "in world," that is into the vr, easily,
and have wiki information control in world objects. This creates the
potential for true metadata to VR, with in world objects updating text
state, and text state controlling vr objects for display of
information, and finally true interaction, where both sides affect the
other.

This is important because VR has been data processing poor, and
information poor, while it is social interaction rich.

Are there other people looking at wiki-VR interaction? I can go into
more details about how this project is working off list if anyone is
interested.