The Physical Impossibility of the Metaverse
An unusual soccer ball from Crocheting the Hyperbolic Plane
Stefan Geens, who writes one of the two blogs in the “top two” folder of my feedreader, has a really cool post today about whether virtual worlds and other 3D online spaces really need to mimic the topology and geography of Earth, as they do now. His answer: No, they don’t.
I couldn’t agree more. There’s no reason Second Life should be knit from a contiguous, continuous Euclidean grid. Why don’t we see more metaversal “land” masses that are based on geography and physics that would be impossible in the real world? There’s no reason why we can’t have more of this stuff. Video games are already doing it
Of course, there’s a whole other story here in the kind of “mirror worlds” that Google Earth is hinting at. But that’s a whole other story. (I addressed both these issues a bit here. And as Stefan points out, Avi Bar-Ze’ev covers similar topics here.)
I like reading Stefan’s post as an exhortation to make as much out of the metaverse as we can. So much is possible here, and it’s fast becoming plain that we’re really taking advantage of only a little bit of it. (SL resident Budka Groshomme sounded similar sentiments in the Herald a while back.) It bodes well for the future of the metaverse; things can only get cooler.
Stefan also sounds a metaversal sentiment that couldn’t really resound with me more: Personally, I want to reside on the surface of a Klein bottle or Möbius strip. Yes! Introduce me to the virtual real estate agent that can sell me a plot on that Grid and I’m so there.
Feeds
I’ve asked the same thing but have to admit I wonder if most people are ready for The Room ( http://blog.rebang.com/?p=51 ).
At first blush, Second Life seems to be a Euclidean space (i.e. R^3).
But R^3 doesn’t have any boundaries - and the “space” of Second Life does: the ground, the “ceiling”, and the edges of sims with no adjoining sim. You can’t go outside the boundary (although it’s still an open question where the ceiling ends).
Moreover, SL isn’t just a single, connected subset of R^3 with a boundary. That is, you can’t walk, run, or fly to every point in SL. To get to most islands, you must teleport. You can teleport between almost any two points (depending on land-access permissions).
The ability to teleport drastically changes the nature (topology) of the SL space (what mathematicians calls a manifold).
So what is the topology of the SL manifold?
Here’s one way to think about it: A position in SL can only be represented to a finite precision. I’m not sure what the precision is, but let’s say we can specify position to the thousandth of a meter. So SL isn’t really a continuous space, but a 3D lattice of accesible points.
Two points are “neighbors” if you can travel from one to the other in one step of the simulator.
I suspect that when you are flying, you jump over many accesible points between one time step and the next, so neighbor points aren’t necessarily side-by-side in the 3D lattice.
Let’s visualize the lattice of accesible points as little balls floating at each accesible point. Now run a string between two points if they are neighbors. Do that for all points in the lattice.
Don’t forget to connect two points if you can teleport from one to the other!
So now we have a visual model of the SL manifold. A big 3D lattice of balls with strings between them.
It’s a network… and the network depends on your land-access permissions.
[…] A really cool conversation is breaking out between Avi Bar-Ze’ev’s blog, Stephan Geen’s Ogle Earth, and Mark Wallace’s 3pointD. (csven also hops on the comments at 3pointD, pointing to Peter Molyneux’s The Room). They’re talking about Second Life, Google Earth, and the ways in which space should be represented and navigated in the metaverse and 3D virtual worlds. Whereas Google Earth necessarily maps the flat, round, Euclidean dimensions of the planet, Second Life does not have to though at present it is still contiguous or all connected on one flat map. So what’s the best way to map and navigate a network of virtual spaces? […]
I don’t think SL needs to necessarily mimic Earth topology, or even familiar topology like flat earths, but dammit, if it’s going to mimic Euclidean space on the small scale (which it does) it should have *some* sort of coherent intersim structure that scales up, rather than the situation at the moment. At least, I think so. It seems to me that to do otherwise is to squander what you’ve made on the smaller scale.
Troy McLuhan’s post regarding points in SL space being connected to each other if they can be reached from each other, well, fair enough technically speaking, but in practice it takes a lot longer to TP to somewhere on another sim than to move 0.0001m to somewhere next to me, and I can’t see what’s there. “Next to me” and “where I can TP to” are not the same.
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…
Yes, some of the mathematically-minded are going to find it fun living on that deflated soccer ball you showed. However…Most of them will not actually spend any real money or time *living in* virtual worlds, they just “like the idea” of non-Euclidean geometry and non-contiguous “land” because it fees a kind of anarcho-nihilistic revolutionary zeal common to discussions about the Metaverse.
The rest of us want to have worlds we can walk around in normally. And I say “normally” because most people want virtual life to replicate real life, and they don’t want it to jar them, with having to completely — and uncomfortably — relocate their already-fragile consciousness invested in an avatar.
In fact, when most of the “out-there” people who hammer on this topic of non-contiguous space actually go and physically represent in the world something that they think would be teh kewlness, it turns out just to be a Victorian House — that is, all the bay windows and elaborate dormers of a Victorian house without the walls, that’s all. That is, they just put up a lot of “portals” which are just “windows.” They might put this in a cascading tile like “Windows XP” or they might put this in a fan like on a Mac Safari but they are still…windows, like people have always had windows.They don’t even put any scintillating points of light or twisty flexiprimmed metal strands, they put windows because…you need windows to look at stuff…and you are usually looking at stuff people arrange around realistically like a table or a lamp or a televison (none of which are objectively necessary in a virtual world, but all of which are routinely placed in virtual homes.)
The structure of the eye and mind are not going to change just because we went into cyberspace. The sun and moon and horizon and water and hills are all important to our survival as a species on Earth, and hard-wired into our make-up, so it doesn’t seem likely that we can jetison the need for horizons, motion, and proximity just by going off earth into virtual worlds.
People like to feel they have a roof over their heads, some running water someplace, some flat surfaces to put stuff on, some chairs. They ought to be different. Geez, they’re disembodied consciousnesses, why don’t they just perch like birds on a wire or live in a cactus or something? But…they don’t. Because they don’t *want to* and you can’t *make them.”
Walker, you’re going to *talk a good game* about wanting to live on a Moebius strip but…where are you going to sit? If it was really true that this was popular beyond a tiny sect of technorati, then we’d *already have* sims where there were just stellar pins of light, intricately moving metal sculptures, Moebius strips, Rubik cubes or whatever you could conceive as the thing that would represent non-Euclidean concepts for you. Hell, we don’t even have Mars with red dirt, which we could easily have on private islands.
I really hope the Lindens don’t get ahold of this idea in any kind of big way (it seems Cory and co. already walked through these stages when they first made the world) and fold up all the sims that are beautiful and are contiguous in favour of making some ridiculous deflated soccer ball like this. Because that’s all it will be. If they do that, the value of real estate will plummet. The value really does rest in the contiguous nature more than anything. The private islands with the voids around them aren’t as beautiful as the contiguous mainland sims, those of them that are kept up and not allowed to descend into griefing and ugly builds.
Once the teleportation experience changes, a lot of this hankering for non-contiguous stuff will subside. Currently, we have a 1960s sort of graphical Poindexter/Time Tunnel kind of representation where a “whoosh” noise resounds, and a black screen comes up (Torley very aptly described this as being “clubbed with a seal” — I think of it as being “chloriformed”). You follow a white line filling up like a heating thermometer across this teleportation screen until you arrive and then wait for the grey squares to subside….where you discover that like Tony, you have landed in Pearl Harbour on the morning of 7 December 1941…
Much of the friction and feeling of “contiguous” that people here are fretting about comes not from the land being contiguous, but from that silly p2p experience. Once they figure out how to change that, they’ll change people’s perceptions dramatically. For example, what if, instead of that black, clubbed, unconscious state, you saw not even stars in a cosmos, but some distant representation of the sim you are traveling to — instantly. When you fly around, one of the coolest things about SL is that they’ve got the streaming worked right so that the illusion works that something is tiny as you are far away, then becomes bigger and bigger. Or what if they had a cross-fade. Or what if it clicked instantly, just working faster, like pages on the Internet, back and forth.
If where you went also bookmarked better instantly on a map list, rather than in landmarks that save to inventory only if you remember to pull down world/landmark as you go, that might also give you more feeling of just being anywhere at once.
Once the p2p blackout is addressed, we’ll be well on our way to these portals and windows that people seem to want. Once we have web on a prim, there will also be that ability to put SLURLS into objects, and that might work faster than p2p? or? You’ll also be able to have at least some control over the management of the portals — if you have a house laid out like that deflated soccer ball, people will be walking into your pose balls constantly — the whole notion of privacy for a lot of people is very much tied to their notion of the cover of a house, and of contiguous space they go around in.
I do also have to point out that modern life has speeded up travel and communications faster and faster and faster to the point that now people have to constantly live the Big Lie and claim their email server was down or they didn’t get their FEDEX because the doorman was on strike or they can’t fly over in 45 minutes because their daughter has ballet or whatever. So you make it faster, and people have near constant and instant proximity to each other AND their builds have near constant or instant proximity to each other…and they hate it. Wait…you’re forgetting that SL gives you an early foretaste of the “hell is other people” concept of the afterlife.
Stefan, btw, has the characterization of the RL market and the topology of SL wrong. The ‘central locations’ aren’t at all more valueable. Central…to what? The old feted core sims are collector’s items, but have almost no population. The only selling point some have have is that huge terraformability of 40 plus/minus meters that the Lindens removed in later editions of sims because people terror-formed to grief their neighbours. The really valuable land isn’t in the center at all, but always at the growing tips of the world in the NE or SE, and that’s because people are constantly looking for that fresh, clean, unspoiled Eric-Linden-Ideal-Nature before it “gets messed up by other people.” The most expensive prime mature flat fast waterfront is in the SE at the growing tip of the world, not the center.
Back when there were telehubs, there was also value in land next to hubs because of the forced nature of the travel, but once those were removed, the land value plummetted and avatars ceased going to the lame ‘infohubs’ in their place (there are some of us involved in trying to reclaim and repurpose these old places to make them more interesting now). Now, the valuable merchandising spot is in or near a club or events venue, which could be anywhere, but is still contiguous to that “anywhere.” So in fact, SL because it is chaotic and still a wild frontier doesn’t follow that old meme of the East Coast industrial cities, the railroad, the hubs of industry, etc. It’s more like “wherever I built the coolest private island with the neatest Victorian steampunk theme” — and that could be anywhere.
The reason WoW is more fun to fly around in than SL is simple: in WoW they give you this neat gryphon that flies around on his own — in SL you can’t cross the sim seams in your vehicle often and have to get out and portage. If they fix the sim seams issue, that will go away.
What people want out of the Metaverse is NOT to just turn the pages and gawk, like they gawked at Look or Life magazine starting in the 1900s or 1920s when photography became easier and cheaper to do — the model for Web 1.0 was merely Look or Life or Saturday Evening Post, where you look at the pretty pictures and casually flip them, sometimes stopping to read.
No, in Web 2.0 or 3pointD, we are inhabiting, and immersing ourselves in the space and actually don’t want to keep endlessly turning the page. We’re there. We want to dig in and stay. We want to order in stuff *to* us, not hop around like a frog everywhere. The model for the Metaverse can’t be just Saturday going around to all the flea markets and gallery openings, it’s Sunday ordering in Chinese and lying in bed with the Times. To the extent that a world or world-within-world compels us and keeps us clicking and interacting in that space, it’s successful — to the extent that we are bored and jaded and keep trying to turn the page, it’s a failure.
You don’t have to do anything special to have the non-contiguous friends you seek, if you actual virtual neighbours next door in the world are too annoying. Those friends are a p2p click away - you tp to them or they to you — and again, the blackout experience can just be changed either to move faster or to have different optics.
What worries me about this concept, “In a hyperbolic virtual world, the heptagons could become the commonses around which likeminded people cluster,” is not the hyperbolic planes and heptagons, but the “likeminded.” This makes for an insular, and finally totalitarian, closed society. How is such a society ever refreshed? How do new people find those “likeminded”. On what plane of existence? A commons can be a commons precisely because it’s accessible and not closed in on itself, and it is next door to everything else.To find those likeminded in the hyperbolic plane, I can’t just stumble on them on an evening stroll, or flying around exploring the world hunting for green dots on the “old-fashioned earth-type map,” I just have to “know” they are out there and hope they will give me the coordinates or tp me into their magic circle.
Mark’s idea that we’re all going to power our own 3-d spaces but “connect via agreed-to protocols” can’t just be about technological protocols. There will have to be some overarching architecture for the civilization to keep it civilized.
Ultimately, it seems time is the problem, not space, as we see from what Cory writes, “the benefits of a non-hyperlinked hex grid over a non-hyperlinked regular grid are marginal. Similarly, the hyperlinked variant is only a bit better than a hyperlinked regular grid. Yes, you get to take one step to 6 neighbors rather than 4, but the regular grid actually gives you 8 neighbors since diagonal moves are allowed, even if it is a slightly longer walk.”
The sense of geography and the sense of place, “my home sim with that mountain I like and this shore I sculpted and the neighbour’s lighthouse and my Japanese tea house” — these are all things that people treasure in SL. Cory understands this, when he says, “from the beginning we sought to create a world that had place.” If the Lindens throw this overboard, they won’t have a world. Not the platform, not the technology, but *the world* is their greatest product, if only they themselves would realize it.
>So now we have a visual model of the SL manifold. A big 3D lattice of balls with strings between them.
>It’s a network… and the network depends on your land-access permissions.
Bingo. So the country and the club and the country club still matter — access is all…At least if some of us are willing to construct and maintain old-style public commons anyone can access them.
I suspect “public commons” will be largely unmanageable until anonymity is purged from online activity. So long as griefers insist on behaving in an anti-social fashion, they’ll drive the platforms to the Trusted Network model. It’s happening elsewhere and will happen in 3D as well. For me, that makes something like the PCD Lounge interesting as it’s what I envisioned users creating using Croquet: small, private 3D spaces more like individual estates. The owner pays for hosting and controls all aspects of their virtual world, including access.
Eventually we’ll see a workable public commons, I believe. Perhaps when Reputation systems bridge real and virtual worlds. Until then, I expect fragmentation.
You might wish to look at a Metaverse game titled ‘Project Entropia’, or now being called ‘Entropia Universe’. Although it’s still a typically tangible metaverse mirroring a real-world concept, it’s still interesting in the sense that you literally have an entire cash-based economy within the model.
It’s perhaps the first 3D world environment I’ve actually seen that incorporates a true other physical and economic existence. Avatars of course can also cash-out their Entropia dollars into the real-world cash economy at an exchange-rate. Interesting stuff, even though not entirely within the frame of what you’re discussing here.
Actually, csven, I don’t buy that philosophy of the “tragedy of the commons” to the extent many do because I live it. I create open public commons in SL and people come. Griefers are a minority. Even the most severe griefers will not make me close up the group membership or the space. It’s always an intersting experiment. People ALWAYS exaggerate what griefing is and what it does. Their closing of spaces through aggressive bounce scripts that bark at you like the GULAG that YOU HAVE 10 SECONDS TO CLEAR THE AREA! are almost always worse than the nonce griefing of kids. Most griefers that stick and pester are people known to those they are pestering and it’s over some personal dispute, where the world’s lack of dispute resolution is at fault, not the ability to keep closing up all my commonses.
No, I won’t let griefers “drive me to the Trusted Network model”. The model of trust becomes an old boys’ network, a guild (look at the discussion now on Terra Nova over Richard Bartle’s throwing down the gauntlet again about giving servers to guilds).
Look at what happened in PCD! Far from being viable, the first thing is spawns is Tony Walsh’s urge to mess it up — did you see how he dug into its folders and made the characters look like zombies? And he noticed other kids wrecking it too. If anything, closed spaces inspire more of that kind of behaviour, not less.
Reputation systems are very suspect to me because I see how chance impressions, anonymity, alts, group-think of posses, etc. can really delegitimize these types of systems. The first thing everyone wants to do in a Better Business Bureau situation is declare *themselves and their friends* as the Better Businesses on a whitelist, blacklisting the others. But of course the concept of the BBB belongs to one of open society, not guilds, where a set of neutral, unbiased criteria for what constitutes a better business is used as a template to judge the behaviour of this or that misbehaving business, and transparency is used to post the information to the site and keep up a list of “buyer beware” enterprises. The BBB also has enlightened editorial control, unlike the socialist wiki, so they can take data and analyze whether it is true, whether it is fair, and how to portray it.
You “live” it *inside* a controlled environment, Prok. Griefers are a minority because it’s controlled. I’m not limiting my comments to SL.
As for trusted networks, we all have them. Characterizing it with “old boys network” predefines the system through an association with business as usual. The metaverse is not business as usual and as such, the term is dated. My trusted network may only be four or five people, but it’s no less a network.
I’m not sure what your point is about PCD. I said the PCD Lounge was “interesting”. I didn’t say it worked.
wrt Reputation systems I agree they’ll always be suspect… just as suspect as the voting system here in the U.S. However, most systems don’t function flawlessly. It’s possible something of worth will develop in this regard. After all, reputation via WOM has existed since the dawn of humankind. It’s not going away.
csven, old boys’ networks aren’t only about business, they’re about everything from who gets in the paper, who gets into college, and who gets to marry your daughter. Controlled environments mean arbitrariness without an architecture of the rule of law — it means you do what you want on a whim, and there’s no appeal. I’m not sure which term is dated for you, but to return to the original premise of this thread, the architecture of the world, the very planes or arrangements, are supposed to be more free, not less. I don’t see how a static little chat room no different than the Sims Online, and with less manipulable content, could be “itneresting.”
Reputation by world of mouth can be countered when libel or slander ruins a reputation, by having alternative press and independent courts. Once again, it’s so easy to point to this or that institution in RL as a justification for making only a partial solution based on RL models in the metaverse, but what makes them work in RL is the entirety of all the components of the rule of law.
Prok, the term “business as usual” is not limited to Business. It’s a term that applies to:
- who gets in the paper
- who gets into college
- who gets to marry your daughter
Interestingly, your comment makes my point. You have a limited interpretation of the phrase “business as usual”. Similarly, I’m pointing out that “old boys network” is limited (much more so than “business as usual”). That’s why I used the phrase… to point out that yours is poorly chosen.
As to your inability to see how PCD could be “itneresting” (sic), forgive me if I don’t take the time to explain it. However, the point is that I *did* find it interesting (please note my words: “For me”) and was not commenting on whether or not that particular implementation functions as well as it maybe should. What I found interesting has absolutely nothing to do with how the software functioned.
wrt Reputation systems, I wasn’t justifying anything. Merely pointing out the reality: whatever comes will always “be suspect”. I didn’t say a system wouldn’t function to your standards. I’m only saying that *someone* or some group will question the system no matter how well it works - including with the “entirety of all the components of the rule of law” to support it.
As I frequently do when discussing topics with you, I’d ask that you please pay attention to the words I use. I take time to write things as clearly as possible. Do me the courtesy of reading with similar attention to detail.
Thank you and good day.
csven, it’s hilarious that you’d attribute to me some inability or narrow comprehension in understanding the phrase “business as usual” which is like “same old, same old” or “the way things are in the world”. Everybody knows that!
The first time I read your sentence, I couldn’t be sure, did you mean “you’re talking about business, as usual” (i.e. “talking about business, as you always do since that’s all that interests you”) or “business as usual” i.e. “the way things are”). But I decided to answer *either* interpretation by broadening out any notion of “just business”. And frankly, you haven’t explained at all — again — why the Metaverse isn’t “business as usual”. It sure *is* business as usual with the game gods functioning like even more efficient old boys’ networks than RL. Please.
I’m glad you found PCD interesting. I’d like to try it. I have to say Tony’s review of it soured it for me.
Um, I paid attention to your words, Csven. You consistently have trouble realizing that *disagreeing with you* doesn’t mean that I have somehow failed to understand their um deep meaning. You seem to imply that if someone can only be smart enough to understand your meaning, that they will agree. But I don’t. AND I don’t feel you’ve justified your position. But honestly, it’s not important, and takes away from the topic of this thread.
o You failed to explain what’s interesting, even for you, about PCD, but perhaps that’s because you weren’t a TSO player — that’s just a failure to get it across in several posts, but it’s not terribly important
o You’re still not responding to the issue of how we need to have recourse, and ability to appeal, the real damages that reputation systems do — you seem to think that if someone questions a system, well, they don’t have to opt in or they take their marbles to another game. That’s not good enough for me. We have recourse in RL. But game gods are busy eradicating it from VL.
I’m going to have to agree with many of Prokofy’s points in their first reply. The teleporting system is exactly the same problem as a typical elevator in a rl building — the space(s) at the top of the building, the gorgeous penthouse, is not really connected in any tangible way to the ground floor or street facade of the same building. In this way, they are much like the private islands of a virtual world; in both, access definitely is key.
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In no way do I think living on the inside of a klein bottle of a mobius strip would be cool. Standing there? Maybe for a minute or three, but my guess is probably not more than once or twice total. Besides, how do you turn off the physics and keep your feet attached to said mobius strip? Do some physics work and not others? Like, just adhesion?
Also, I didn’t see anything in PREY, linked by Walker in the op, that seemed to be non-euclidian space, unless it’s the portal thing, which while it might be difficult to script, seems as though it should be nearly possible already in SL.
But unfolded topography (as well as many other theoretical spaces) is a one-trick pony — once you’ve been there, if the content isn’t smoking hot, it’s not likely to satisfy that part of your mind that always seeks to understand the space you’re in with regard to your body so much that you’ll want to set up house there.
For a barely related example, check out Tactile3D, a program that allows you to browse your computer in 3D space, with each directory having it’s own object/icon which you can arrange in 6 or 7 different snazzy ways. While clunky imo, there IS potential there, but I would so want to create the space it actually inhabits — a hexahedral space is just plain difficult to manuever in. Once again, a cool idea though…you just wouldn’t wanna live there.