"What I would say thought, is that there has been a long-standing debate, a theoretical debate in the field of virtual worlds. And sometimes the name of it has changed over time. But I'd say 25 or 30 years or so, people have been talking about, trying to design a way to operate in this kind of 3D computing environment, immersive computing environment. And there's been a long-standing divide between the augmentationists and the immersionists.
The augmentationists, which I think is what you are describing Craig Mundie as, is someone who talks about having this computing environment to augment your life, really be part of the way of the way you interact with real-world environments. So there's a whiteboard there, and I have computing overlay over here, and it says what I see is somebody else and we're in the virtual space together that way.
That's versus the immersive perspective, or sometimes it's called the synthetic perspective, where there's an entire environment that's completely composed of these user-created or computer-generated objects. Whether they're created by users or by companies is kind of irrelevant. That's the immersionist perspective. It's the idea of the difference between Minority Report and the Matrix. You take two movies, and one you're living in this computing environment where Tom Cruise is running past ads that speak to him. That's augmentationist. Where in the Matrix, you're entirely in an environment that is completely, has no relationship to the real-world environment.
You can't settle this argument by talking about it. You know it has been going on for 25 years. There are two things though, that I could say that I could point out in favor of the immersionist view. One is, look, if you are talking about online environments where users and companies have created the vast majority of the content and all of the content that is in that online environment has value that is determined by people's use of it? They use it with respect to their real lives, but it exists in this online environment.
You know, that's a pretty fair description of the World Wide Web. The Web isn't interesting because "oh, I go on this website and it relates to this desk I am standing next to." No. It's completely about that online environment. Basically, all of the online computing history to date really fits the immersionist version.
What fits the augmentation theory I suppose is the spread of mobile devices and such. But that's kind of a cheap reach right now. You are not really using your mobile devices to you know make a computing environment around you, it's just to connect with people. But maybe that's the technology development in the sort of the immersionist camp.
But the rise of mobile computing vs. the rise of the online Web, they're both very significant, they both have a great deal of economic and social meaning over the last 20 year."
This perspective on how Second Life approaches their virtual world offering caught my eye too as we face challenges of planning for where our learning technologies need to be for 2012 and beyond.
"Remember, this company was founded, as many startups are founded, on the idea that you're throwing the football to where you think the receiver is going to be. At that time, there wasn't enough broadband penetration or computing power available at all to run any kind of satisfactory experience in Second Life. But the founders here, the early folks here said "look that's coming at a certain point, so we need to develop toward that point" which was relatively further out."
Full interview here. http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/11/20/interview-linden-labs-ginsu-yoon?page=0%2C0
