Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

Comparisons with game experiences and MMORPG interfaces were often made by workshop
students who were also gamers. For instance, NEL from the Awesome Three group mentions how
user-interface controls in World of Warcraft feel much “intuitive” compared to SL, especially in
terms of keyboard-mouse combinations for navigation. She explains how she started typing when
she was trying to move the avatar, or activating unnecessary functions because of this confusion.
Although the maximum number of avatars was not felt as a limitation in workshop projects, similar
technical limitations of lagging affected the workshop processes. As CEL from the Superheroes and
Supervillains group in the workshop mentions: objects “look like phantom, or you see half of the
screen and not the other half” and it gets slow –often impossible - to teleport. NEL from the
Awesome Three group mentions how they were “quite often stuck in objects” or sometimes “in a
building in Metrotopia or under water. And you have to swim around to get out of there.”
Another reason for frustration, especially for the newcomers is the technical limitations such as
lagging while loading sims, insufficient CPU capacity and not being able to teleport. In both
Metrotopia and PAL interviews, experienced designers mention the issue of lagging as a general
limitation, as the sims they design cannot accommodate more than 50-60 avatar at the same time.
Curiza describes this limitation as a “real showstopper”, mainly because it makes it impossible for
him to attract the attention of professional musicians or potential sponsors (such as ’Coca Cola’) for
large-scale projects. SL’s user interface provides users with the ability to customize their
visualization settings, such as level of detail or options for media streaming, which could offer a
solution to the technical limitations to a certain extent. In addition to being able to customize the
interface to a certain extent –by menu options or HUDs- according to their needs, users can change
the environmental settings, which allow them to customize their visual experiences by changing the
level of detail in sight or shifting between day and nighttime.
As I mentioned earlier, the user interface of SL viewers are continuously being developed by
Linden Lab and third parties. During the time of the interviews, the new-generation SL viewer 9 was
recently launched with a number of important new capabilities, including a new GUI with Webbrowser-like
capabilities, new ways of searching and browsing through inworld content, and
enhanced affordances for building virtual objects with HTML integration. On the other hand, this
major change in their ways of interacting with SL has also been received with suspicion and some
confusion. I observed that the main resistance is often not about the new constraints but about the
requirement to change their old habits and adopt a new interface paradigm. For instance, Shaggy
(PAL), “changing where the menu items are and how you interact with the viewer is difficult for
9
I consider viewer 2 and the following versions as next-generation viewers, as their capabilities for accommodating,
visualizing and functionalizing virtual content improved significantly with such features as the HMTL-embedded
surfaces, imported organic models with Mesh surfaces and new organization of the GUI.
159