"Second Life is the future of the 3D Web" - you hear a lot of that (or variations of it) from media and bloggers and assorted conference speakers and organizers. The problem with this statement is that it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of two important things: What Second Life is, and what the Web is.

The Web

Nothing really beats the web for efficiency of linked information. The average adult United States citizen reads 250-300 words per minute, while practiced readers can easily achieve 600-800+ words per minute (Bailey and Bailey, 1999).

Native English speakers comprehend the spoken word at an average rate of 150-160 words per minute (the recommended maximum rate for spoken word books) and narration, and most of us tend to settle at around 100-110 words per minute when speaking non-prepared material.

Two-finger typists manage about 37 words per minute, professionals range from 60 to over 150 words per minute.

With a little care, a mix of audio, text and visuals can be used (traditionally what is called multimedia - though these days a lot of people use multimedia to refer to any video presentation, regardless of the presence or absence of any other form of media) to increase the bandwidth for comprehension. A video presentation with spoken narration, images and supporting text can present information very compactly - this sort of presentation isn't actually really all that common on the Web (though perhaps it should be).

The Web primarily is the playground of images and supporting text, or text and supporting images with related concepts, information and material conveniently linked. You can soak information from the Web very quickly, browse into related knowledge areas; see a product, find out more about it, see reviews (positive and negative), find better prices, purchase it and arrange shipping.

A number of applications and pseudo-applications live on the web, turning some pages into more dynamic entities that act as gateways to services or information. Yay, for the Web! You might be a comparatively recent addition to the Internet, but we love you anyway!

Virtual Environments, and Second Life

A virtual environment is all about telepresence - not necessarily the traditional Waldo-style of telepresence (though that happens sometimes), but telepresence in an artificial space. Note, for the record, that artificial does not mean fake, or unreal in this instance; merely that it is an artifice - a space, location or set of locations that is created rather than occurring naturally.

Virtual environments rather predate the Web, if you count the text-based ones. As an example, there are remote telemetry units of the sort used for remote broadcasting relays and in satellites with lightweight virtual environment servers built into them. Engineers can log into them remotely, use them to examine the internal state of the hardware, discuss the information with other engineers, and make modifications to the system state, all without having to gather around a table, or pick up a telephone. At least one class of hardware has been incorporating virtual environment servers since the early 1990's - long before anyone thought of actually incorporating a Web server into one.

A virtual environment is a representation of data through digital synesthesia into forms the user will find meaningful or familiar. What that data is and how it is represented is more the dealer's choice. From classic MUDs like lp, diku and Everquest, to more sophisticated environments like MOO, Genesis or Second Life, and everything between, the goal is the creation of an environment that follows fundamental representational principles that we can relate to via reflex and experience coupled with avatars who possess presence and location. The majority of virtual environments have also been mutable from the inside, rather than being consumption-only.

Second Life as one of the latest generations in virtual environment technology (depending on how you count this things you may consider it a second, third, fourth or fifth generation virtual environment, depending on how you slice these things) has a lot in common with it's predecessors (though apparently a lot of this is the result of unintentional parallel evolution - given the same conditions, similar solutions tend to evolve. Linden Lab CTO, Cory Ondrejka has indicated that Second Life largely eschewed examination of previous generations of virtual worlds, which is why you see the same wheels being invented in Second Life as in generations past. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does lead to expensive lessons at times).

Either way, the Web allows you to call up information. The virtual environment allows you to experience and visualize data.

There's some overlap between the Web and the Virtual Environment, but it isn't a whole hell of a lot. There are ongoing efforts to provide bridging between Second Life and the Web, however at best the two of them are only ever going to enhance each-other, as neither one of them is suited to fulfilling the goals of the other. Some tasks might migrate out of Second Life (and some have) and others might migrate from the Web and into Second Life, but don't expect either one to replace the other.

If anything's going to be "the future of the 3D web", then it's the Web that's going to do it - and it's not going to be a simple or an easy task. Assorted 3D web-browsers and web-visualizers have come and gone, and none of them have that revolutionary or evolutionary advantage that gets them past the post. The boring old 2D Web (1.0, or 2.0; take your pick) frankly has outdone them for efficiency, cost and ease-of-use.

Virtual Environments aren't going to slip in and replace the Web wholesale, or indeed to any large degree. VE's provide something else that the Web can't or isn't providing, just as the Web provides something VE's can't or aren't.

As time goes, the two will become inevitably increasingly bridged together, extending and enhancing each-other, but there's no sign that either one is going to eat the other, and to be honest, it is best that they each fulfill their function well in cooperation with the other than each trying to do the other's job and doing it poorly.