Justin recently wrote an article about the likelihood of the concept of a “Grid” to vanish fairly completely. I think he’s bang on there and I expect to see things play out fairly similar to how he describes. The reason for this is that the concept of a “Grid” is completely and utterly irrelevant in the long term.
What?
I suspect in the long term, some of the models presented by alternate virtual worlds (Croquet in particular) are largely correct. While the ability to “load balance” a larger 3D space across multiple servers by partitioning the geometry accordingly is a very valid feature - it restricts you to creating giant contiguous landmasses.
And I dont think this is something either users nor companies want.
The analogue with the traditional web is the concept of somewhere like Geocities - under the contiguous space model, every user from geocities has their webspace crammed right next to someone elses, and you can see it whether you like it or not.
If someone makes any parallels here with the Second Life™ Mainland, you are probably right on target - it’s probably one of the reasons that Private Islands in Second Life eclipse the number of mainland regions. Now that’s not to say that users wont want to congregate together on occasion - consider the Steampunk themed Caledon sims - but in that occasion it is strictly by choice, and not representative of the majority of users.
Supporting both is of course a priority - but I suspect in the long term that the abitrary collections of regions wont be crammed together. Most will be linked by the same technologies that link the internet today - IP and DNS, and any organisation will be built ontop of that rather than the concept of the grid itself.
So what about users?
Right now - the single most inconvenient factor to visiting the OpenSim grids today is the requirement that you create a user account before visiting. Unlike email where you can login with a single username and send a message anywhere - you need a seperate account for each server you want to visit.
If we seperate these out (as the AWG OGP spec does) we get to the point where your username comes from someone like an email provider (ISP, Free Hosting site, etc), and the regions are seperate things that you can connect to like visiting a webpage.
In this case, grids become groups of commonly themed regions that are visitable with either commonly themed URLs (ogp://grid.com/regionname/x/y/z/) or contiguous landmasses and not much more.
One of the beauties of the internet’s design is that you only need a single number to represent every server connected (an IP address), there’s millions of servers connected each with their own address - if you tried to organize those millions of servers into a set of finite artificial constructs, you would probably fail - the operators of those servers tend to like to run their own environments and not be reliant on other people for stability and uptime (there’s a bit of a commercial incentive there).
Why proposing things that rely on grids is probably a bad idea
There’s been a lot of suggestions lately about things like content enforcement being locked to a specific grid for example. The catch here is that there’s potentially one “grid” for every independent region online under the AWG spec. Only places such as the Caledon-equivilents are forming grids with multiple servers in them.
In this case the question becomes - if grids are not a good analogue for the operator group, what is? The answer here is probably the hosting companies. While I don’t have a firm number here - I’d say that probably 50-80% of the web hosting on the internet today is done by a small group of companies and their resellers (1and1, GoDaddy, etc) - and those are the groups you will want to get contracts for enforcement with.
The remainder may sign onto the contracts, but you can easily get the large groups with a smaller amount of effort just by hitting the hosting companies.
As I commented on Justin’s article, the grid is a natural way of dividing geography into manageable units with an implied navigation system. Most well-drawn street directories use a grid format, with a convention that as you travel east you go to the next page, while north-south travel requires you to move a stride back or forward on the grid.
If you do away with the grid concept, you have to do away with normal physics at the boundaries of your island. In theory, each island now has its own timeframe, since there is no concept of the Sun and moon apparently moving from east to west across adjacent regions. Even the compass points become highly suspect because while you may link the eastern boundary of your region to the western boundary of someone else’s region, they may not link their western boundary back to your eastern boundary.
You can abandon the grid if you think that space is much less important than content. I think that what makes virtual worlds so different from the web is that they embody the concepts of volumetric space, distance, proximity, direction and gravity so naturally. I’d hate to lose them because we want to tie the representation of the world to our concept of the web which is based on an abstraction of the printed page and citations (hyperlinks).
Peter Quirk
18 Aug 08 at 2:14 am
Well, I think at the heart of it, Content is far more important than space - your visiting an environment for it’s content.
On the Second Life Grid today, there’s approx 22,000 private islands, and ~7000 mainland regions. Most of those 22,000 are separate entities with their own sun/moon cycle, etc, and that’s the way people have preferred it. Continents by comparison are a very rare beast.
Adam Frisby
18 Aug 08 at 8:25 pm
I hope then like a web page we have portals/links to other islands so the islands can be “surfed”. Having no grid removes exploration and requires then a search engine to find things and that requires you to have a pre-defined interest. This makes it no longer a world/universe but a series of discrete hidden islands.
Worlds can be explored, the web must be searched. They are different things.
Psyke Phaeton
19 Aug 08 at 11:30 am
The interesting idea that popped into my head while reading this was linking regions together, but not necessarily just with a link/portal window, but closer to a region “crossing”
Is it terribly infeasible that if I have a region (say on a 1and1 server) and my friend has a region (say on a GoDaddy server) and we want to “join” our land together akin to a landmass, couldn’t there some way to enable this without requiring them to exist next to eachother on the same grid?
Accomplishing something like this would make the “Grid” concept even more moot since anyone with a region could choose what 4 other regions share a border.
If possible, it would create some interesting situations as well such as what happens if I decide to link one of my borders to another location, but they do not share it back. One could see or walk across from one direction, but not the other. This would also create the possibility that walking west, then north, then east then south across boundaries wouldn’t necessarily mean ending up in the same place.
It also raises the interesting possibility (since the regions are volumes) of linking above and below, creating stacked regions.
Tony
3 Sep 08 at 7:49 pm