User talk:Tree Kyomoon/Use Cases

Re Login-less Viewing of Regions: I know what you mean (and it would be useful), but the description you give is not correct in its use of the term "login-less":

When you view some part of the 3D virtual world, the camera view is always relative to some presence. In the current SL (and in virtually all other 3D worlds and games), there is one very strong implementation of presence (the position of an avatar after login), and in SL there is also a weaker implementation of presence in the notion of camera pivot point, which can move away from the avatar's position. However, even the camera pivot point is currently constrained by the avatar presence.

Similar issues apply in the case of some possible Login-less Viewing of Regions: the camera always needs to have a location, because without that the server end has no idea which object details to send you for viewing. Therefore, there will always be some form of presence associated with your "login-free" viewing, even if you're supplying the viewing coordinates directly. In other words, what you're requesting is not "login-free" viewing but "lightweight login" viewing, or possibly "no-avatar login" viewing.

The server end will still need to identify you as a valid recipient of object viewing information, even if it is only by your IP address, and to assign your viewer a presence location. (Totally unauthenticated viewing requests are untenable because of trivial abuse.) What's more, it has to do this with respect to your known login credentials in order to implement viewing access controls, which will become common once the world expands beyond the Linden grid.

In summary, lightweight logins might well be useful for restricted access, and avatar-less logins would be useful in many situations because of the current non-scalability of SL for events like live music and sports. The term "login-free" describes this only poorly however, because you can't really create a useful presence without knowing its credentials. --Morgaine Dinova 05:58, 24 September 2007 (PDT)

I think I understand your point, but I respectfully disagree. The primary purpose of "presence" in SL is so that other avatars can "see" or at least be aware of you. That creates a tremendous amount of additional bandwidth/resource useage that wouldnt be required in a login-less state. I believe it is technologically possible to "view" any region without affecting it at least in ways that can be observed by other "agents". It is crucial that this kind of observation of the client be completely anonymous or the "you tube", "google earth" or other publicly accessible content idea wouldnt work.

that said, you could certainly passively gather ip information like web server logs do anyway, but the information should be just that, passive, and not bar entry to viewing.

This, in my opinion, will be a great way to introduce people to Second Life who couldnt be bothered to go through all the trouble of creating an account. "SecondLife Tube" akin to youtube would only be the beginning --Tree Kyomoon