The problem that Second Life is solving, that is "how to have a shared experience with someone when you're not physically close", is actually the same problem that a lot of MMOs are solving in some form or another; see this article [1] for a great example.
The subtlety lies in the fact that MMOs are games, and that Second Life tried to tackle the problem by being more of a "lifestyle" application; sure you could play games, but you could also read content, talk with people merely for the sake of talking, and so on. The point was that content in Second Life would be mostly created by 3rd parties.
In other words, while MMOs offer a shared experience by being the content consumed by the users, Second Life positioned itself more as a platform for content that would be consumed by users all over the world. Second Life is the city, 3rd parties are the shops and businesses and movie theaters and so on.
It's a noble cause, and we are far from having solved that problem yet (as any couple in a long distance relationship will tell you). However, I don't believe we will solve that problem with software, but rather with interaction embodied in physical objects (which is an extremely recent field). For example, see [2] for a great example of what that could be (there is another, older project I have in mind that involves beds, lights and webcams but can't find any links right now).
If you're interested in tangible and embodied interaction, the academic TEI conference is the best place for that- sadly it's an ACM conference, which means you need an ACM account to access the paper archives, but you can easily access the proceedings index (for example for TEI2013 [4]) and google the PDFs from there :)
You're right about MMOs. But what's missing there is the opportunity to do anything or many things. In an MMO, you can only do one thing -- play the game. And that's fine, and millions of people are happy doing just that. But it's not a general-purpose tool.
The subtlety lies in the fact that MMOs are games, and that Second Life tried to tackle the problem by being more of a "lifestyle" application; sure you could play games, but you could also read content, talk with people merely for the sake of talking, and so on. The point was that content in Second Life would be mostly created by 3rd parties.
In other words, while MMOs offer a shared experience by being the content consumed by the users, Second Life positioned itself more as a platform for content that would be consumed by users all over the world. Second Life is the city, 3rd parties are the shops and businesses and movie theaters and so on.
It's a noble cause, and we are far from having solved that problem yet (as any couple in a long distance relationship will tell you). However, I don't believe we will solve that problem with software, but rather with interaction embodied in physical objects (which is an extremely recent field). For example, see [2] for a great example of what that could be (there is another, older project I have in mind that involves beds, lights and webcams but can't find any links right now).
If you're interested in tangible and embodied interaction, the academic TEI conference is the best place for that- sadly it's an ACM conference, which means you need an ACM account to access the paper archives, but you can easily access the proceedings index (for example for TEI2013 [4]) and google the PDFs from there :)
[1]: http://www.latimes.com/local/la-fi-c1-rodrigos-world-2013090...
[2]: http://littleriot.com/pillowtalk/
[3]: http://www.tei-conf.org/
[4]: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2460625&CFID=242863494&CFT...