Re: al estate in cyberspace?
Torbjoern Caspersen (Torbjoern.Caspersen@ark.unit.no)
Sat, 2 Sep 1995 13:35:27 +0100
>Brandon sez:
>> I offer the following conjecture: the entire concept of "virtual real
>> estate" may very well fall flat on its butt. The whole concept is
>> predicated around the notion that users are actually willing to wander
>> around a virtual world on foot when the neighborhood is commercial.
>> On-foot traversals are tedious, and it's very unlikely that people
>> will waste their time going out of their way to see commercials.
>>
> There are reasons to make people walk though. Randy Farmer and
>Chip Morningstar had some good points in their paper on Habitat in the
>Benedikt Cyberspace book. One of them was that it was good to make
>people walk. It lets them meet their neighbors and feel a sense of
>attachment to their "virtual" community. I agree though that the idea of
>"Virtual Real Estate" is questionable. Although, I think that the idea
>of Condominiums is also questionable, so you have to temper my opinions.
>
> Kevin
I agree that the real-estate concept is misguided. The development of html
pages has shown a flat structure, no pages are inherently more important,
but some are indeed more visited. There are only hierakies within local
pages, not globally.
I can't see any reason for 3d net world to develop any differently. The
real-estate argument requires limited amounts of valuable land. On the net
all land is roughly equal, the transfer speed differences doesn't add up to
much.
A 3d cyberspace will probably be accessed and used quite similar to the www
today, jumping in time and space effortlessly. But as Kevin points out,
there be localities where distance in space is made to be an important
parameter, e.g. in the inevitable 3d MUDs/MOOs.
-----------------------------------------
Torbjoern Caspersen casper@due.unit.no
http://www.stud.unit.no/~casper/
Student of Architecture
at the Norwegian faculty of technology, NTH, Trondheim.