Interopable Worlds...

... or, Fluid Activities in Many Native Environments

In "Virtual teleportation arrives" on Thursday, Aharon Etengoff says that "teleporting an avatar between platforms will undoubtedly have a significant impact on the future of virtual worlds. Indeed, an open standard for interoperability would permit users to cross seamlessly from one three-dimensional universe to another."

To me, the advantage of "teleportation" between worlds would be in moving more than just your individual appearance. As one commenter notes, just being able to move your avatar would be like "being in facebook and being able to switch to myspace without having to type your username and password again. Nice, but not earthshaking."

As another commenter sees it, "My buds and I might be in a game of BF2342 some day and escape an ambush by being teleported into the Sims10, then over to Quake Wars7 grab some new weapons and teleport back to the BF2732 game just behind our ambushers and zap em?"

- YES! You should be able to move so fluidly between worlds, with your objects and friends, that you can put each environment to its highest and best use, without messing up your train of thought. You should be able to span your activities across multiple worlds, because each world has its own rules, process and value in what you're doing. More than that, when you move from place to place, it's not just you and your files that're moving. Most of the time you're in the middle of a social activity, so you should be able to move with your friends by your side - rather than losing and regaining contact once you arrive. Portals should frame social settings, digital or not.

We shouldn't be looking at digital design in terms of booleans and polygons, we should be looking at swarming, cellular automata and other fluid patterning. And in our increasingly internet-augmented real world, people may demand more fluidly porous ways of navigating our places.

Virtual Teleportation Arrives, And Is Commented On [The Enquirer]

Powerthirst

I was going to post something deeply meaningful, but instead I found a video which embodies everything I would like to be able to do with machinima. It's awesome.