Andie's Log

The web is levelling

In a talk about how to make websites that are not primarily blogs with Wordpress at Geek Girl Meetup I had a short passage about how it’s so much easier to build a full-featured website or service today, because the web has levelled quite fast the last few years. Here’s a write-up of that thought since some people have been asking for it on Twitter.

Like a WoW character, the web as a whole is gaining more and more skills in the form of more and more abstracted services and libraries. First someone proves the concept of a new thing, like doing asynchronous requests for new content with JavaScript, or storing files in the cloud. Every part of each new thing is meticulously handcoded, but as soon as the concept and implementation make sense to enough people, someone wraps all the tedious stuff into a nice library, service or API.

With most of these tools being released open source, and some really strong communities popping up around them, the web ecosystem is fast gaining a lot of higher level building blocks. More and more things are becoming a one-click operation: the blog revolution started because it no longer took serious programming skills to set one up. Today you can get a shop, a social network, a blog, a video website, on demand computing power or storage and a number of other building blocks for a new idea that can be easily accessed through a couple of sign-up clicks or API calls.

So while the web 2.0 ecosystem started out as a stumbling n00b where each quest took lots and lots of detail work and you had to plow through slaying boars in the beginner zone for a serious amount of time and cost to get things up and running, today the web is more like a level 50 warrior who can just wander unhurt and untroubled through the basic quests ad get to the core of what’s new with an idea and start solving hard problems much faster since most of the plumbing is taken care of already.

Second Life and user created content for Augmented Reality apps

The first wave of Augmented Reality apps is about to hit the world - they will mostly be based on geolocation and compass data to overlay information on the live camera feed on iPhones and Android phones.

One big question for AR apps is where the content will come from - several apps like Layar and Wikitude are trying to build platforms where users can add new layers of information or points of interest. Here we’re still talking text and image input, potentially also about users choosing a content type or template so that the information they input will be displayed in an appropriate way.

But what about 3D objects? One next step after displaying 2D “signs” on the real world like in Nearest Tube or Wikitude would be placing 3D objects in the world. How could that type of content be created by users? I would say there are two widely used 3D-modelling systems that “regular” people (not professional 3D artists) are using to create this type of content - Google Sketchup and the build tools in Second Life. I wonder if Linden Labs has thought of using their 3D content creation and scripting system for AR 3D content?

A huge user base already knows how to create and script 3D objects, and there is a huge bank of existing content and experience creating it. I’m going with the Linden Labs tools here because they have the scripting language and the social dimension, whereas Google Sketchup is more of a utility.

What if objects created in Second Life could be moved into the real world? This doesn’t even have to be based on AR markers - you could just rez Second Life objects and structures on geographical locations, and have them visible in a layer in an AR app. What if you could place your SL avatar on a real world location? Or place other SL objects like a mailbox, a house, a vehicle, an art installation, on a “real” geolocation, and have it visible through the lens of an augmented reality app? Second Life stuff could come back to the first life.

Is this a total long shot, or does anyone else see the connection?