Why the 3D web is 2.0

Sometimes criticism helps you find the reason for some of your ideas, and a thing that you consider to be perfectly obvious becomes, all of a sudden, questionable.

The challenged belief for today was "Second Life is a web 2.0 phenomenon". I have always been adamant about this, and yet I have to recognize that it is difficult to offer a decisive argument for it. I am lucky because no mathematically constraining definition has been offered for web2.0-ness until now, so there must be some allowance around the issue…

My defence revolves around two basic characteristics, which are shared by both virtual worlds and blogs/wikis/social networks.

On one hand, the user creates a public image – an online representation – of himself. This happens in different ways, since the creation of an avatar has a strict resemblance to the way we present ourselves to the persons who surround us in the real world: being looked at. But it is nonetheless an image controlled by me, exactly like the one I build for myself by writing on this blog.

The second point is about the feeling of co-presence given by the ability to see what other users are doing or have done in an online environment. Call it the live web, or the inhabited part of the web, it can be synchronous or asynchronous, text-only or in 3D photorealism, but the sensation of sharing the environment with others is the significant part of the experience.

  • Fabio Turel |

    @Roberto Carraro: the question about the next steps in merging the real and the “virtual” (in the broadest possible meaning) world is an interesting one, and deserves a dedicated post. For now, in a nutshell, I’d say that the next steps will have a lot to do with the bits of our identity that we are willing to transfer to the web, and the way services, interfaces and devices will enable us to do that.

  • Roberto Carraro |

    Sono d’accordo sulla sua posizione: la nascita di un ambiente digitale abitato da persone vere, sia esso testuale , iconico, video, ha creato la vera “Second Life”.
    Poco importa se le persone siano rappresentate da testi, emoticon, webcam o avatar.
    E’ però innegabile che le tecnologie 3d offrono modelli di esperienza più coinvolgenti, e che l’web 3.0 sarà sempre più simile al mondo reale.
    Secondo lei quali saranno i prossimi passi per portare il mondo reale nel web?

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