Malcolm Turnbull has made a fair criticism of the proposed Australian National Broadband Network; 100Mbps of FTTH. Fibre To The Home. He says the Government is asserting commercially viability when they haven’t yet done the feasibility study. The best approach, Turnbull says, is to work out what speeds are feasible at what costs and from that, forecast the demand. And I would agree with Malcolm if 100Mbps broadband delivered the same services that we get from 1Mbps. However, that infrastructure is going to lead to new applications, not just faster uses of existing applications. That makes accurately forecasting demand impossible. The normal Australian approach is to be prudent and wait until everyone else has taken the risks. But because we are so remote, and because the internet reduces this remoteness, it’s a ‘good’ risk to take as a country. No other investment has the capacity to so drastically affect our future balance of trade.

I also read Paul Murray in the West Australian voicing sensible concerns in strident tones. He quotes a “some experts” forecast of $150/month for super-fast broadband and asks this question: “what do we get from this other than faster downloads in our homes for mainly entertainment purposes?” This is a valid question. You can stream video at 10Mbps; why do you need 100? Yes, people now have bigger screens and that will require more bandwidth but I don’t believe that streaming today’s internet content on to bigger screens is a strong justification for a $43B investment.

The difference between the Internet on dial-up and the Internet on 1Mbps was CONTENT. And CONTENT will be the difference between 1Mbps and 100Mbps. As soon as the bandwidth allowed for it, we got Skype. We got Napster and Bit Torrent. And we got YouTube. These products did not exist before broadband. Some were not foreseen. First comes the bandwidth, then comes the content that gives people a reason to use the bandwidth. When enough people start using the new applications you get the new business models and the social change that justify the costs.

At 100Mbps we will see some applications completely different to what we currently have. I’ve written before about how faster broadband and processors are going to deliver incredibly compelling experiences that blur the lines between reality and imagination.

100Mbps will allow real-time processing of visual data. That’s not to be sniffed at. It will allow us to overlay video and the environment we live in. It will put realistic animated life-sized avatars in our lounge rooms. Those avatars will be real people in other parts of the world with whom we will have normal conversations.

Interactive video will immerse you convincingly in any landscape or fantasy world. The merging of animation and a real-life environment will allow your friends to appear in your lounge room, dance like Fred Astaire, remove their head from their shoulders, then turn themselves into flying donuts. Do you think that might represent a significant change in communication? Do you think that might suggest new ways of demonstrating and marketing products? 100Mbps would put us at the forefront of that development.

The difference between 1Mbps and 100Mbps is holograms. It’s the replacement of passive, 2D information with immersive 3D environments that connect people in compelling, real-time interactions. It will change our sexual behaviour, it will change our social behaviour and it will change the power structures in society. It’s ‘entertainment’ Paul, but not as we know it.

Three years after this network is constructed, 100Mbps will not be enough.

Image by Radioflyer

From the Department of I Told You So, Google’s Lively has got the boot and Second Life continues to lose corporate traction. Reuters and Avastar have abandoned the platform. Quarter three in Second Life saw negative growth.

Business was interested in Second Life because it was a new interface and it was growing quickly. There will be interest again when there is a jump in the user experience or user numbers. Platform stability would also be a bonus. User numbers will grow only when there is a less demanding interface. Any bonehead can use Facebook.

Second Life’s legacy is significant; the compelling experience of virtual sex, the astonishing creativity of user-generated content in architecture and fashion, the rapid bonding powers of anonymous friendship…

It will continue to be interesting for at least two reasons; the education sector’s on-going search for a more engaging remote education experience and the governance issues surrounding virtual world environments as open as this. The most recent uproar in Second Life was over the pricing of certain types of islands, OpenSpace Sims but it is part of a long history of governance failures.

Linden Lab, who run Second Life, have complete authority but the passion of users who invest time in personal creativity and run virtual businesses makes law-making a very tough management task. I’ll never forget my first interaction with a Second Life entrepreneur; FURIOUS that someone had accidentally built over a virtual boundary, costing him (I calculated) around 20 cents an hour in revenue for a small number of hours. He was ready to rip someone’s head off.

The ego and significance that accrues in the virtual environment makes this a fascinating sandbox for modelling real-world decision-making. If LL work out how to make popular decisions in this environment, they will have learned something very valuable.

Photo by Miabella Foxley.

Google have this philosophy of putting products into beta early in the development phase and ironing out the problems as they go. It’s not going to work with Lively in the virtual world/game space. People are not going to come back. Ask the owners of Second Life. They lose 9/10 people who try it and those 9 do not come back. Despite its dumbed down functionality, Lively will lose at least 9.

Rooms are supposed to contain 20 avatars. Mostly they close with about 12 and lag badly.

People in the environment have NO IDEA what they’re meant to do. What’s worse, there IS nothing to do, other than chat. A large number of people are 14 years old, speak different languages or lag so badly they cannot communicate. Believe me, there’s not a lot of chemistry in there. Didn’t Google study the Second Life orientation experience?

Most of the people I was able to communicate with had computer problems in Lively and were Facebook users. The idea that people are going to migrate their friends’ network across from Facebook is just fanciful. Only one in three are going to have sufficient graphics grunt and bandwidth to make it run tolerably. What are they going to do, stay in Facebook with all their friends or jump across to Lively leaving most of their friends behind? That was a rhetorical question.

I went into Vivaty as well but after it insisted on re-installing the software it packed up completely. Able to display only one room of those I tried. Like Heidi said in her comment; Just Starting.

IBM and Second Life have announced the ability to teleport from Second Life into Open Sim grids (an open source version of Second Life). They describe this as a first; well, my business partner Loki Clifton and others have been doing that stuff for six months. The big guys may have improved the scalability or reliability, but it is not a first and they know it. Must they lie to us?

Linden Lab hope to turn Second Life into a platform rather than a product. One that respects people’s intellectual property, allows transfer of assets and maintains LL’s control of the virtual currency. The benefit to corporates of Open Sim however, is that the virtual world can be SEPARATED from Second Life, avoiding the morality and security issues that send men in business suits scurrying into mouse holes.

The elephant in the room (nicely sustaining the metaphor here) is that the Open Sim versions allow other people to sell ‘virtual land’, currently LL’s major source of income. Already land is being sold at a fraction of the Second Life price. Undermining your own profitability is one of the less successful business strategies. The road to survival for Second Life probably involves transactional fees of some sort. Dare I say ‘tax’.

The ongoing problem for Linden Lab is the lack of platform stability. It crashes and it lags. Assets created within the virtual world are not stable. The monetary system is not stable. I lost several hundred dollars one week and I still don’t know why. Reporting these errors does not lead to remedial action or even attention.

Unless IBM can dig LL out of its technical hole, (unfortunately it’s a development partnership, not a rescue package) the thing doesn’t scale and business is not interested. IBM will host its own Second Life servers for clients; I wonder how solid they will be. I wonder how expensive they will be.

Although I’ve invested lots of time in Second Life and I believe that 3D virtual worlds will be a powerfully disruptive media in the future, I’m writing it off for the time being.

Just because you can create a virtual world like Second Life on a mobile phone platform doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

Lamity is a new virtual world on a mobile phone platform. It’s built on Google’s Open Source software, Android. Lamity is about to launch in Japan, the world’s most sophisticated mobile phone environment. The company (whose slogan translates into English as ‘the enjoyments between man and man’) say you can put 400 avatars in the one ‘town’ which compares favourably to Second Life. But this is specious, since the small screen and the limited navigational ability of Lamity won’t give you any meaningful sense of togetherness. It’s a very limited 3D environment.

The platform allows your avatar (and others) to view web pages in-world. This is also not a very big deal. If I want to view a web page I want full web navigability. I don’t want two little avatars standing in front of it.

Thirdly, you can view movie previews in-world. Walk your avatar into a cinema and activate the screen. Once again, if I want to see a movie preview I don’t want to have to navigate another interface to get to it. You can watch movies in Second Life too but a movie is a 2D experience. If you’re watching it inside a 3D environment your brain wants one or the other. If the principal narrative is in 2D, that’s where your focus will be. May as well watch that in full screen mode.

I’m not saying virtual worlds can’t work on a mobile platform but I think instead of creating imitations of existing virtual world platforms developers need to design for the small screen. It’s big enough for one or two faces. That would be a good place to start.