First There Was the Grid

3pointD linked to an interesting article on Ogle Earth entitled “Metaverse 2.0” which talks about the fact that Google Earth and Second Life are modeled on the real Earth and a flat Earth, respectively. It argues that SL in particular suffers from a failure of imagination in mapping its world onto a boring, 2D grid and offers both hexagonal, hyperlinked topology and a hyperbolic space as solutions. It is a pretty nice piece and covers a lot of territory that we considered early in SL’s history — back in the “Linden World” days of early 2001 — so I thought that I’d talk a bit of history as to how we ended up with the 2D grid. Also, I find it interesting that it is completely possible to create the desired world within SL, despite the underlying topological choice.