Three speach brings us an interview with Phil Harrison, of the Sony Computer Entertainment inc. There is an interesting part about differences of Sony's PS Home and Second Life pointed by Terra Nova:
We don't give users the level of influence over the environment, behaviour and object definitions that Second Life does – as secure as any other PS3 game…
Do I see loud and clear statement about connection between no user generated content and security? No doubt that prebuilt worlds could be more secure in technical way than user generated. But, what happened to freedom and creativity? Echo of this sentence sounds something like: "We'll give you nice clothes and dances and apartments. We'll provide you all the copyrighted music and video. Now you can enjoy your consumerism in virtual world. You can sit with your friends in virtual room we designed for you and listen and watch what we think you should like." Again, what happened with freedom and creativity?
And there is another aspect of security. If there is no content that users bring into the world, there is no danger of NC-17 rated material. No sex, no violence, no harsh words. Everything is nice and clean and sterile. We learned our lesson with internet. Once you let users upload their stuff, there will be everything. And, all those things will be no more under control and monopoly of big corporations.
And, once again, what happened with… you know… freedom and creativity? Is the metaverse that we are building in this very moment supposed to be the world of perfect consumers or we are allowed to use our imagination and creativity, the very things that makes us human beings?
I think that some people may migrate to Home and leave Second Life and others may do both (like I intend to). I think it depends on what you enjoy most about the experience. For me it’s about the creativity the most. Yes I think that having tons of premade free content is great, but if I can’t add my own stuff, it will be a disappointment. The fact that you can make whatever you want, design your own clothes, etc. in SL I think is a big part of it. You at least need to be able to alter what you buy (ie like change the texture) or it’s not really unique, no matter how you arrange everything. Although I do think that Home will have a lot going for it that SL doesn’t. For one the avatars and environment are much more realistic. And of course the game aspect will be a big selling point. You can do just about anything in SL, but gaming isn’t really one of them. You may be able to do things like play skeeball, but it’s more about watching your avatar doing it, you can’t control it. Of course getting around in Home I’m sure will be a lot easier as well. I think though that there will be a lot of crossover and SL may lose some, but I don’t think by any means it will be enough to make it suffer.
realism of the objects and avatars comes from computing power and bandwidth. SL is sacrificing it’s look to have less system requirements. And of course, UGC has to be payed somewhere. Stuff made by the company can be packed on the disc or in patches that are stored localy. If everything is user-generated then everything has to come from the server.