Document:Q10290

From Rhizome Artbase

Virtual worlds are the fact and in 10 years they will be like mobile phones today. The very realistic appearance of virtual worlds will make users strongly emotional bound to them, so it will become the parallel society and have a very strong influence on the "real life". That's why it is very important for us artists to help forming new, positive ethics for virtual worlds. Ethics, which are based on openes, freedom and human rights, instead on the paradigm "the right for the profit".
The aim of virtual reality should be to make dreams come true for everyone, not again only to those, who can buy it. Selling an virtual Island, which is nothing else but few kilobytes of data, for 1000 US$ + 120 US$ months fee is exactly what virtual reality shouldn't be. And it don't need to be, because there are tools, standards and technical possibilities to build virtual worlds without limitations, where one makes his Island, state or planet on his own server or webpage and share it with others for free. We don't need virtual shopping centres, we need virtual reality to spread our fantasy and associate with people from around the world. To make people closer to each other, not to make differences between rich and pure, developed and undeveloped, even bigger. But one corporation, Linden Labs has convinced people, that the new 3-dimensional web is their own online multiplayer game Second life, which is stricktly draft on commercial values.
Linden Labs, owner of Second life has the best PR department on the planet. They have suckered the press and marketing communities like no one else I have ever seen. That's why people think, Second life is a new 3D web, but in fact Its a private environment, the equivalent of one office building in a city. It keeps trying to protray itself as open and opensource like but the truth is there is one door. A place like second life is too experimental and seemingly open, but essentially you are operating under THEIR umbrella. If you create a 3D world and put it up on your own server space, then you are INDEPENDENT. The web3D needs to focus on bringing 3D directly to the webserver, not to be pushed on individual webpages and by companies who are focusing their virtual worlds efforts to very specific applications.
Second Life bought about a lot of hype and at this point, I think its negative publicity. To the outside, Second Life looks like a place full of freaks, REAL freaks, but in fact the only application second life has perfected is to mirror the worst social vibe of the real world, instead of trying to create an atmosphere which extracts the best dreams from the real world.
That's why I built this platform, called Real 3D friend: because friend is not the one, who wants to sell you something. It is a platform, which uses open tools and standards, the real 3D web, not just one web page, owned by some corporation, build with one single purpose: to make money.
In contrary to Second life and other closed worlds, which are entry points to one world on one server, is Real 3D friend entry point into the real 3D web, an open web of millions of free virtual worlds and places, where people share virtual "things" instead trying to sell them. It is a world for human relations instead for business relations.