Recently I've heard a human having one of those moments of initial second life enthusiasm and saying: "This is great, everything is possible!" Yes, it is possible to fly, you can have wings and tail, sun is always shining…. But, as you soon will discover, not everything is possible in the world of our imaginations.
Some things are not possible now, some never will be. Here comes my (probably not definitive) list, and I'd like to know yours.
- Scents are something we'll going to wait a long for. Smells are powerful thing in our human's lives. They escapes the reason, they make them fall in love. There are no scents in the virtual world, though I do rarely feel the perfume of some people around, or the scent of the place. Precious moments! Does that mean that avie or place is created so well that it fills the gap made by technical restrictions? Or that we made *that* kind of connection/communication which hacks deep into my human's mind and triggers the illusion? I don't know, scents are beyond the reason.
- Spontaneous reactions All the gestures, mimics, all the barely visible moves, that are the base of any body language. And those that are voluntar too. Too many times you need a quick spontaneous smile but even calling a prepared gesture or clicking a HUD means passing the right moment.
- Bad weather No, not lag storms. I mean sudden summer rains that screws your hair and outfit just ten minutes before the date you've been preparing for. I mean snow that blocks you in the house for days. I mean heats that makes you all sticky, oversensitive and crazy. Weather that is the starting point of typical English conversation, just before switching topic to the government (still, we all have so much to say about Lindens, maybe that is the compensation).
- Limited endurance Whether it is pain of arousal, one can go endlessly with it. You know those young guys that can have sex for hours, making you silently scream in desperation "Oh, will you ever cumm?". But they are young (both avatars and their humans) and think that if they do it long enough she will reach her moments of bliss. Actually, she were there long ago and now is waiting to switch to cuddling while they are enjoying their avatar's porn star performance. Same goes with the pain. I guess that is one of the reasons of BDSM popularity in second life. I've heard that Xcite! has made one step in that direction but I was so disgusted by genital clicking as a noob that I never checked that toy.
- Dreams Gods know how many nights I spent thinking about second life dream engine. And, despite the fact that I haven't made much progress, I know I'll be back at the subject in the months to come.
Except scents and the dream, things I miss in second life are those that we usually hate in our first lives (that list is not definitive, I can tell you about acne and two-day armpit hairs, but those I miss just because I am lazy to make them). We hate them but they would make our world more real and more immersive. And, in most cases, more fun.
I am sure I forgot about lot of things here. What do you miss in second life?
Scent isn’t that big a deal for me, and I’m *almost* willing to agree with Esteban that it’s an atomic-world myth designed to subjugate us!
Weather would be nice. I have a storm generator installed outside my beachfront teahouse – and when I’m down, there’s nothing like sitting in there while a good hard storm pounds the coast.
What I miss most is a little thing – being able to drink a cup of tea *sitting down*! I’ve made myself a little sitting-and-thinking nook in my house, with the tea set Argent gave me close at hand. But furniture locks down your arms – all I can do is pour a nice cup of tea down my back! :P
I guess I miss a lot of little things, but I find most of them get filled in by my imagination so I don’t mind. One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that when I recall places I visit a lot I remember sounds and sensations that SL couldn’t have conveyed – my imagintion just fills in the details. I’ve been spending a lot of time in Soph’s “sitting-and-thinking” nook myself, and for reason whenever I think of it I can remember the sounds of footsteps on the wooden floors in there, and the feel of tatami under my feet.
Pity about smell though, especially since it’s the sense most closely associated with emotional memory. Right now, unless I conciously make an effort to work it into conversation it doesn’t become real for me. I really would like to be able to smell, say, pine needles on the forest floor when I’m out hiking with Natsumi.
I agree with Soph about missing the weather. In particular, I would love to be able to see rivulets of water running down a window during a rainstorm. Animated texture maybe?
As for dreams…I do borrow my human’s brain to have SL dreams sometimes. Once I dreamt that Soph, Gala, and Vids (all looking much more “real” than they do on the screen) were all standing around our living room talking about the new SIM. Then there was the time where I half-woke from dreaming and shook out my blanket. The reason? I was dreaming the textures needed rebaking!
A while back I remember reading about someone developing a smell gadget for computer games. I believe it was a usb device that was filled with vials of some kind of basic chemicals that would be mixed together to, in theory, replicate any real world scent and blow a puff of it in your face on command from the game. I remember a lot of blog posts about it, mostly filled with fart jokes.
Yes scent! *nods* That would be a fantastic addition. It is said that it has more influence on our mood than any other sense. Now I use my imagination and words, but it somehow doesn’t work as well as imagining other senses.
Related with scent is air: wouldn’t it be wonderful, not only smelling the salty seabreeze, but also feeling it in your hair? Or feel the air move when someone passes by… Feel warmth and cold.
Another thing I really miss, is to look someone in the eyes, which is a part of the body language you mentioned. I miss the quick glance to see if someone is serious or joking, or the ability to stare in the eyes of my beloved. Words can be such a poor way to express yourself, particularly in a foreign language.
i miss mostly, natures reactions to my own. like when i jump, feeling the sand lift under my feet, the water spraying on my legs when i turn with my surf board. the leaves falling when the wind blows hard. the feeling of the wind in my hair. feeling the cushions of my couch flatten as i sit on them.
all those little things that make my actions feel like the real thing and not that i’m just a shadow without consequences on the world around me
only neko’s have the option of scent, namely the scent of the environment they are in , like a cat. So if i see a neko on a tropical island (for some reason there are a lot of tropical islands in sl , must be the fantasy of a vast majority i guess) I DO smell the salty sea and i DO smell the salt on her warm neko skin . And if i walk with my loved one on a warm summerday in august in a landscape that resembles the one i played in when i was a kid , i DO smell the chamomile next to that dried up dirtroad. So i am sorry to say …there is scent in sl.
you just need to think outside the sl box you’re in.
I miss the sense of touch. Sometimes I feel
so close to someone, I want to slide an arm
around them and give them a real hug.
I have this idea for a vibrating chair with arms…
All those attempts to induce scents failed. It is not much about technology but human’s sense get saturated very fast. Not to mention that one cannot turn off the scent as easily as can do with sound or light. Guess we’ll all have to turn to nekos.