Cool Intergrations for Your Small World

There is a neat post on Mashable about the virtual online world SmallWorlds:

“SmallWorlds is a new web-based virtual world offering that is looking to combine several aspects of current trends, with a great focus on social media. So you can use Flickr images as posters in your virtual bedroom, or watch YouTube clips on your 3D living room television.

Other applications, like Grafiti, that have become popular on networks like Facebook, are also present in SmallWorlds. Games, such as pool, can also be played within SmallWorlds, in a similar fashion as gameplay on a portal like Yahoo Games. ”

This feels like another step toward the kind of online worlds envisioned in books like SNOW CRASH and NEUROMANCER where all the elements of your online life are sythesized into an actual environment that moves away from “pages” and “links” and incorporates everything from your email to your videos to your calendar.

By allowing you to pull in existing sites, SmallWorlds doesn’t force you to rebuild your “life” from scratch as you sort of have to do in SecondLife.

Not sure this will be wildly popular since these worlds still feel slower than just accessing the net directly but there is clearly interest in finding “skins” to place over the feed so that it all becomes a bit more familiar and, well, homey.

Do We Want To Go Virtual?

In sorta big gaming news, The Sims is becoming EA Land, an online virtual world ala SecondLife and There.com.

One of the main reasons I find myself emersed in new media today is due to my love of cyberpunk as a kid.  The idea of a full virtual reality that we could plug into was just completely enthralling to me at the time.

However, though I was a very early internet adopter and user I never got excited by things like SecondLife or There.com largely because they just seemed like toy – there is nothing that one needs to do in SL and most of the possible activities are pretty much things I do in my real life.  That’s all fine as a temporary escape but it doesn’t emerse one in  a useful alternative world.

It is still quicker and easier to navigate the 2D web via links and scrollbars than it is to wander a Virtual town looking for the “library.”

As a social alternative there is some real potential in these virtual worlds but the idea i had as a kid that we would be living part of our lives inside the machine seems silly to me now.

However, the notion of a “filter” that puts the web over the real world, like explored in Gibson’s last book, Spook Country, is potentially REALLY exciting.

The future is being written…

I’ve been a fan of what is most commonly called “CyberPunk” since I read William Gibson’s Neuromancer as a middle-schooler in the 80’s. I’d soon have my very first modem (1200 baud) hooked up to my Atari 800 allowing me access to what would become THE INTERNET but wasn’t called that yet. Mostly, I logged into a chatroom hosted at Dartmouth College – an early hub of the net and my hometown at the time. By the time I read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash I was dreaming of a day when those crazy ideas would be a reality – perhaps not in my lifetime, but someday.

Instead, here we are with SecondLife, that, though a bit laughed at by the media at large, is an amazing realization of Stephenson’s futuristic vision – and it only took 20ish years from outlandish science fiction to reality (or virtual reality). That’s just plain awesome.

Now, I realize this isn’t a news flash but it leads me to my point that reading near-future sci-fi is one of the ways I continue to keep my head in the game and, whenever possible, ahead of the curve. The time-gap between these outlandish ideas and complete realization seems to me to be shrinking dramatically.

Once case is point to watch is a trend I have noticed in two recent releases, Gibson’s latest (and sadly not greatest) Spook Country and Vernor Vinge’s recent Rainbows End. Both novels, set only 20 years into the future and written quite recently both take the current notion of GoogleMap layers and related tech and bring into the world of realtime overlaying of the world around us via optics (implanted in Vinge and via headgear in Gibson) to give the viewer a completely personalized realtime world view. Whether this is selective data-tagging or actually laying a fantasy vision over the reality, the potential uses and implications really gets the mind spinning.

While I just don’t think we’re going to be living on Mars anytime soon (like so much sci-fi seems to hope) but I do think we will all be choosing exactly how the world looks to us in much the same way we currently chose skins for our homepage.