New Challenges

Abstract

As most people know by now, virtual worlds are fraught with technological glitches and challenges. A highly limited number of SIMS (i.e., users and their virtual “stuff”) can be in any one place at any one time without the system becoming incredibly slow or crashing all together; creating and navigating avatars is a slow, clunky process that severely tests patience and is far from natural; and despite the fastest high-speed Internet connections mainstream users have ever enjoyed, worlds can be very slow to work with. Multimedia streams (including Flash technology) that are commonly seen elsewhere on the Net are not available to use seamlessly within virtual worlds, and there is currently no portability between worlds or between the worlds and the web. In other words, my avatar in Second Life and all the virtual goodies she possesses are confined to the “walls” within Second Life and cannot be the same in There.com or any other virtual world. It’s also interesting to note that the vast majority of virtual worlds are Windows-based only, entirely ignoring users of Mac, Linux, Red Hat, etc.