What I disagree most with though is the assertion that the whole point of using a 3D virtual space is its similarity to being in a physical space. To me that is another completely arbitrary limitation. Sure, people aren’t going to leave familiar environments behind immediately since they help set the context of interactions but I hope we will gradually get beyond that to find better ways of working. Bob has it so right with his Mardi Gras example; the real world doesn’t scale well either! Why recreate the overcrowding, queues, inconvenience etc. of a real event. Surely every seat in a virtual event should be a front row seat?

People want to be around people, but only with in limits. e.g. While in New Orleans for Mardi Gras I was on a street was SO crowded I literally couldn’t move. The virtual world analogy is lag caused by the client trying to render too many avatars at once, particularly visible in SL due to the user generated content. The other down side to too many people in one area is that you can’t interact with all of them. Chat scrolls by too quickly. I challenge someone to show me how having 1000 people in an area of a world adds any value. It sounds neat, but in balancing cost vs benefit, is it really there?

So the ideal situation is being around enough people to keep you interested, but not so many that your performance is seriously effected. Some worlds, of which Prototerra’s platform was the first, create parallel dimensions. So if a region of the world gets over some defined population limit, the server does not assign new users to the region of the world. The server automagically create a new dimension (which looks exactly like the first) and users going into the area of the world are assigned to this parallel dimension. User can travel between dimensions if they choose, to join friends for example. And the server allows the population limit to be broken for dimension travel. So you can always be with your friends.

I like to compare the SL way of doing it to a web site. Would eBay be in business if only 50 people could be on one of their web site at a time? Virtual worlds like websites need to scale scale scale.

Prototerra’s worlds have had thousands of people spread out simultaneously across multiple dimensions. And all of these user felt like they were in a full house. We also can assign people to dimension based on things like language, or region, so that all of the French speakers, and Turkish speakers can be in the same dimension.

Lots more could be said on this subject, but I will save it for another time.