Nit-Picking/The Usability of Virtual Reality

I’m sure a very common, almost compulsive, comparison is made between Second Life and the Metaverse in Snow Crash. Hell, if you search "Metaverse" on YouTube, a bunch of videos filmed straight out toSecond Life show up. There are tons of comparisons that can be made, so I will only focus on a few, with the aim of pointing out the shortcomings of Second Life in fulfilling Stephenson’s vision of the Metaverse (whether the developers are trying to or not), and the shortcomings of the design of both Second Life and the Metaverse.

The first comparison is the between avatars and their use in the respective virtual worlds. Snow Crash explains how avatars can come in set packages – the Brandy and Clint of the Metaverse – but there is almost infinite customizability if you can code it. This is very similar to Second Life, where your initial avatar is a bland, generic character that is customizable without code, but much more extensively customizable with code. However, in general, Second Life is much less flexible, both in avatar design and in general use. Hiro can write a sword fighting code that is intricate and usable, whereas the best you can do in Second Life is write a code to throw someone around, like what the guy who talked in class on Wednesday did. Furthermore, the graphic rendering described in Snow Crash goes way beyond anything possible in Second Life, and there is much less flexibility in writing code that provides extensive information or functionality, especially as Second Life is relatively contained within it’s own program.

However, this isn’t exactly true. Second Life is able to access information over the internet, allowing users to extend their internet use (and personality) into the virtual world. This also implies that executable programs, both benign and malignant, can be linked through Second Life.

There are also some problems that both Second Life and the Metaverse fall victim to. The most striking one to me is the usability of both. Why on earth would anyone use either beyond the use of any video game? Both are described as "worlds", and the Metaverse has the added feature of letting you communicate with expressions almost to the extent of real life (and with apparent ease). But aside from communication, there seem to be no advantages over your run of the mill MMORPG. You can’t feel anything in either; going to a bar, or a party, or playing a game, or anything, seems less poignant as you’re just watching it happen on a screen. This, in my opinion, should prevent both from being widely adopted; why would you play around in a virtual environment when you can do the same virtual things over the internet, and the replicas of real actions in real life?

Perhaps the best functionality would be the ability to do work in either one. But both lack an effective interface: going out into the ocean to type some code in Second Life seems worthless, especially as it only affects things in Second Life. And working with hypercards in the Metaverse just seems too complicated. Both are far too much like GUIs, obscuring much of the underlying functionality. Perhaps a rotating interface would be more effective, like this or this, so that you could navigate the virtual world on one screen and type code or do work on another screen.

A couple more points that don’t fit into the above rant of sorts:

I think it’s really cool how Second Life has created its own world and its own currency, with an actual exchange rate to US dollars. This seems tantamount to creating your own country. It’s as if virtual reality is the new frontier, where people can expand to and create their own nations or worlds with their own laws and currency. Plus, it’s a limitless frontier.

Secondly, I’m kind of frustrated with some parts of Snow Crash. First, the first few chapters led me to distrust Hiro as a narrator; he seemed to over exaggerate his ability as the Deliverator. This led me to distrust his claim of being an amazing hacker – especially coupled with the fact that he is nearly broke – even though this turned out to actually be true. Second, I feel like the long discussions with the Librarian about Sumerian history stuck out like a sore thumb. Stephenson seemed to force in little humorous quips to break up the extensive background, and the background information itself slowed the pace of the novel and seemed almost unnecessary. Not to say it wasn’t interesting; it was just kind of overly extensive.