Does it matter where something is?

I have had lots of conversations recently about where things are, where they are hosted what platform they are on. This applies not just to metaverse conversations but photos, films and mobile devices.
Whilst there is clearly a current technical need for things to exist somewhere, either as part of a service or just personal storage the concepts of grid computing and peer to peer networks are likely to start to help us not consider where and what version, but just what do we have. This applies in a business and creative context.
Take this image for instance from snapzilla (which I read is about to have a major upgrade too) cars
Now, does it matter the path we took to get this photo? It happens to be a real life photo of Stae Youngs car on a texture in Second Life with epredator potato standing in front of it and the snapshot mailed through to snapzilla.
The services are all there to choose the way to make this composite image, and it also represents a point in time event in a metaverse.
However, I could have used photoshop to composite up the photo. I could have used green screen and a video to matte the two together the list goes on.
The point is the image is there, has some provenance and story behind it as part of a conversation Stae Young and I were having on a private Second Life island. Its now part of this blog entry so is being built upon.
If we can move data and creations around like this, in an easy way then we are able to combine things, as with mashups, to create things we need wherever or whenever we need them.
Does it matter is this is Second Life with a picture in it?, or some metaverse as a plugin in a browser? No not really. It matters that it was quick, simple and the “place” we both happened to be at the same time to allow us to have and document this conversation and collaboratively produce this picture.

This entry was posted in Hursley, Second Life by epredator. Bookmark the permalink.

About epredator

Director of metaverse and emerging tech consultancy http://www.feedingedge.co.uk Former IBM Consulting IT Specialist with 18 years at the company Games player epredator xbox live tag. epredator potato in second life

5 thoughts on “Does it matter where something is?

  1. Some would argue that getting into Second Life is neither quick nor easy, but that is neither here nor there.

    If you’re interested in these questions you might check out PARC’s Speakeasy project which created an abstraction of this sort of recombinant media and then made tools which could chain components together in a dynamic fashion: http://www2.parc.com/csl/projects/speakeasy/

  2. Hmmm that’s interesting. There’s also the thing of recording what is real and what is not. Photos have had this for ever, in terms of photographs that have been edited or those that are recording what has happened for real… I’ve no idea what that means in terms of metaverses.

  3. This comes up often when we explain storage virtualization. The biggest obstacle is that storage admins feel that they need to know physically where data resides. Storage virtualization adds a layer of abstraction, making it less obvious where the data is actually located. To address this, we had to develop a second product that maps virtual to physical, for those who absolutely had to know.

    My metaphor is calling someone by phone number. In the days before mobile phones, you had to know where someone was in order to call the home or office phone they were next to. With cell phones, you don’t need to know where they are at, but I heard the #1 first question asked on a mobile phone conversation is “where you at?” and that now mobile phones offer GPS-like locatability for others to see where your friend is before calling him.

  4. So this begs the questions, is the data intact, is it still worth anything, because the original inferred “picture of a Challenger R/T in RL”, the answers probably yes. If the original was an input screen to search for registered Challenger R/Ts based on supplied criteria, taking a photo in SL fundamentally changes the functionality (you’re no longer delivering a lookup, you’re delivering a picture of a lookup entry screen). A silly analogy of course, but meant to get the point across – mashups break the generally implied “guarantee” that the original functionality remains intact after the mashup. Not to say that mashups are bad, just that we probably don’t focus enough on the continuity of original intent.

  5. I don’t usually post to blogs but on finding the info here I felt I had to, thanks for the useful information!!

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