3pointD.com

Linden Lab chief technology officer Cory Ondrejka amused the crowd at the end of last Saturday’s sessions of the Second Life Community Convention by showing them Linden World (video above), the precursor to the virtual world of Second Life, as it was in 2001. Apparently, videos of Linden World have never been seen outside of Linden Lab, and Linden World itself has not worked properly since SL was in beta.

Linden World presented a vision of the metaverse that has changed radically since then — thank god. One entertaining feature of the early world was that objects and automata were added to the environment by shooting them from your avatar’s all-purpose gun. Birds, rocks and snake-like animals called ators were shot into a primitive eco-system. Ators chased birds, growing and reproducing after they’d caught a sufficient number, and birds garnered sustenance from — what else? — rocks.

An ator chases a few birds, who in turn chase rocks, in Linden World, the precursor to the virtual world of Second Life

Terraforming was accomplished in a similar manner, by shooting grenades at the ground. All objects carried full physics, and could be destroyed and broken up the same way. Complex water and wind systems were also part of the world, and tidal waves and tornadoes could be produced by firing grenades. All of this required massive computational power, however, which proved too much for what the world eventually became.

The transition to a user-created environment came at a board meeting, when CEO Philip Rosedale asked a few Linden World engineers to play around with the world in the background while he spoke to investors and directors. It soon became apparent that having people create their own world was far more fascinating than watching birds chase rocks.

“We were watching this in the background, and we realized a city was emerging very, very fast. It was an incredible thing,” Rosedale recalled in a keynote that wrapped up Saturday’s sessions. “Someone built a snowman and someone else built a sort of burning man, and you could see this jazz thing happening in real time. There had never been a canvas two people could paint in at the same time, much less three or four or five.”

“That was a moment of change,” Rosedale said. “We realized it’s not necessarily about the wind working really well. It’s about people making things together, because the capability this thing provides is mysterious in the degree to which it allows people to do things together.”

“At that point, we really turned to this idea of what we would have to do to let everybody come in and do this thing together,” he recalled. “After that it’s all kind of a blur.”

“Now is this odd time. You’ve probably all heard me talk about the event horizon of content creation, and how that even horizon is expanding. The rate at which people are building stuff in Second Life is at the point now where no one in this room could experience all of it in real time. There was a point where you could, but a couple of years ago or half a year ago, that point was passed. The content is now moving faster than all of us. It’s a fascinating experience to be part of a phenomenon like this.”