UgoTrade

Tribal Net, which goes into public Beta at the end of this week, not only brings us the long awaited OpenSim on your PC but by creating new back end protocols for OpenSim the Tribal Media team has introduced a key innovation to OpenSim - the decentralized grid. I interviewed the two founders of Tribal Media last week, Darren Guard who is also the founder of OpenSim and Stefan Andersson who was the first to join Darren on the OpenSim project. Stefan also led the development of “Playahead Island” in Second Life ™ (A registered Trademark of Linden Lab). Stefan has deep roots in web development and Playahead is one of Sweden’s largest web communities. Stefan explained the heart of the Tribal Net concept:

Everybody brings their own computing power [to Tribal Net] and we’ve packaged it for end users. I mean that basically joe schmoe can install it, set it up, and run it. Because OpenSim’s been very tech heavy, our goal with Tribal Net is to make Opensim more accessible for the wider layers so to speak. Also we’ve done some work on the map so that now when people go online their regions show up on the map. When they go off line the region disappears [it can also be persistent]. That is also a radically different approach from Second Life .

Yes! It is very easy to install and you will find your region immediately embedded in a network of other regions running on other PCs.

After I had set up my Ugotrade region, I clicked on map and it was a real thrill to see the Ugotrade come up in a neighborhood of other regions (even though I am apparently one of the first five people to try it outside of Tribal!) and immediately begin my first adventure in sim hopping - NOT across a grid run on a bunch of servers NOT on some huge server farm somewhere, but simply by teleporting to other peoples regions run on their own PC’s located across the globe. W00t!

Ugotrade Jr. got into it immediately and his terraforming and building skills are blossoming! Picture below shows his mountain retreat 2.0.

Tribal is still using the Second Life client but Darren said they hope to support the realXtend client at some point. Check out the awesome new avatar technology from realXtend in a new video out this week that shows off character morph controls, inverse kinematics, and clothing physics.

Below is a picture of Stefan And Darren enjoying a game of chess in one of the first regions I visited - a Tribal Net region running on Stefan’s laptop. Stefan explained:

The chess game application installed on the desktop is developed in c# by a third party - and anybody can create their own set of pieces and share it as an xml file

Tribal Media’s Vision

Tribal Net is the first public application from Tribal Media but it is only the beginning of their venture. Stefan explained their vision:

We see a virtual web world much more like the Web works today. Instead of a closed bubble, we should have an open, networked model. One size never fits all, so people should be able to make content on their own computers and share it with others, professionals should be able to make their own applications and run on their own servers, or to have it hosted on reliable hardware. Content should also be much more moveable, people should be able to transfer objects not only between worlds, but also via the web, blogs or e-mails. Tribal Net lets them do that. Our goal is to supply the tools to make this vision come true.

And as Darren noted: “At the moment our back end is basically customized for this one application. Each new application is going to need slightly different customization. Stefan also talked about a Facebook application they have been working on. There is not a general solution at the moment. Darren explained some of what they are hoping to achieve with Tribal Net.

From a engineering side, I think the main point is at the moment we are working on making it easier for people to start up and host their own region. TribalNet is our first demo of that process. Then we hope to make it easier for people to host their own small grids with this easy hosting of regions, so say any school or college could have their own small grid without the admin level that is needed currently for opensim. A important part of our concept is having a GUI for the regions, so that we can later provide add on modules for these GUI’s so for instant maybe we would provide a game construction toolset add on, or a presentation addon , that made it easier to host and control presentations. Some of these then at a later time could move into the viewer. Then at a higher level we have our set of extension api’s which I think its a bit too early to go into detail of.

What follows is the full transcript of my interview with Darren and Stefan. The first bit is about the history of the OpenSim project and then we discuss a number of topics including interoperability with Second Life, the Tribal teams’ view on virtual economies, asset development on Open Source grids, and what application they are most important in Tribal’s vision.

Interview with Darren Guard and Stefan Andersson.

Tish: How did OpenSim begin?

Darren Guard: For a number of years, I had thought about starting or getting involved with a open source virtual world project. But none of them seemed to be going anywhere. One of the problems was trying to create a client and server at the same time. Then in January 2007, I was looking around again at the various options, for use by my ex-employer. At the same time Linden Labs released the code for their client. Which I think from a legal point of view made creating a server that it could connect to a much more easy “sell”. So I started work on writing a very quick prototype server, to see if there was any problems with getting the SL viewer to connect to it and be able to move around. A number of people had the same idea of writing a server which was compatible with the SL viewer, it was even listed in the roadmap on libsecondlife’s website.

So, as much as we all moan about the SL client and wished there was something at least more generic, we do owe opensim’s existence to them releasing the source code. As I just wouldn’t have started Opensim if the
client was a closed proprietary one.

My initial thoughts on what I wanted to use the platform for, were very much on what would be useful in my old job. Simulation (Robotics) and 3d visualisation of data. This is why one of the stated goals of opensim is
it being a 3d application platform and not a SL clone. I see the social grids as just one small subset of the applications that a 3d virtual environment platform could be used for.

This is one of the biggest points of confusion when it comes to opensim. Most people think its goal is just to clone SL and behave exactly how that does, and support all the features out of the box. And we have to repeatedly tell them that its not the goal and that opensim will most likely never have all the features of SL as part of the main project. Other people will have to create the modules to add those features.

The goal of Opensim and Tribalmedia is to produce a common server that can be used as the base of a lot of different applications. I don’t think we can even really start guessing at what the most sucessful applications
will be in the future.

Tish: How did you meet Darren, Stefan?

Stefan Andersson: I’ve been working quite a lot with web, I mean I was quite early in the web development and I’ve been doing that for quite a lot of years. And, I was very interested in web and 3D integration. That’s actually how I stumbled upon Darren, when he first came on-line in lib second life chat room, and said hey I’ve got a prototypic open source second life server here.

Tish: Was the big moment in February 2007, Darren?

Darren: It was January.

Stefan: And I jumped on it. The first thing I did was to tweak his code, and give him some patches so I could connect his Second Life server to my then employers user database. The Employer at that time was Playahead. It’s one of Sweden’s largest web communities. So basically what I did was within an hour of getting my hands on the zip file, Darren’s first unpublished zip file, was to make sure that I could log into the SL viewer with my web community name and my web community password. When I came into a personalized world where all my friends and my friend lists were avatars, and when I chatted with them and I got guestbook messages into their guestbooks, that’s when I sat there and said WOW!

Tish: Not everyone recognised the potential then?

Stefan: I think they still don’t. You ask what’s important to us. We are very application oriented. We are very integration oriented. At the moment OpenSim is not very accessible and understandable for a large audience. We’re trying to show the world that there can be commercial application on this not just social networking applications, but actual 3D application. It’s a bit like the web, everybody thought that the web was about static HTML pages, and then now today we do much of our daily work on HTML. That’s kinda like the grand big hand motions. What we did when we started OpenSim, we had a very clear agenda, that we wanted this to be a shared experience 3D application platform.

Tish: When you say application, are you thinking more vertical applications or are you thinking vertical or horizontal on these distributed grids?

Darren: We don’t see one big monolithic grid, we sort of see, like Stefan said, like a web where you can link from one web site to another. You wouldn’t really say that every web site is part of one grid. When we talk about applications, its custom, i.e., you might go into one application to do one function then hop to do something else.

Stefan: So for example, now we have actually done Tribal Net as a showcase for our product Tribal server. And we did another showcase that we haven’t publicized yet, but basically that was web community integration.

Tish: What do you mean by web community integration?

Darren: That was a Facebook integration.

Tish: There are 2 basic models it seems being tried, a) embedding Opensims within the web or b) embedding the web in Opensims. Which model do you lean towars, or do you see a sort of heterogeneous mix of embedding in web pages and people who grid OpenSim out into larger communities and embed web pages in them?

Stefan: Actually that will probably be very much a per application decision. Some application are very suitable for 2 dimensional presentation and some application are very well suited for 3 dimensional. and we’ve done some prototypes with integrating web and 3D and obviously there’s going to be a lot of that coming.

Tish: How do you differentiate yourself from say an initiative like RealXtend?

Stefan: RealXtend? They are trying to do quite a lot of things. We are not competing with RealXtend. We would probably use Real Xtend.

Darren: Yes. From what I understand of Real Xtend, they’re focusing on the client. They have a central avatar system. I don’t really have that much knowledge of that. The main focus that we spoke about is on the client side. So we’re not really competition for them, we hope to support their client sometime.

Tish: I have heard on the grapevine you are using dynamic sims. What is a dynamic sim?

Stefan: Dynamic Sim! That can mean anything! We have quite a lot of concepts.

Darren: I think what they’re talking about is we’ve got this concept where we can bring a region up quickly when it’s needed so when you login we can bring your region up so that you wouldn’t even know it wasn’t up all the time. If there’s nobody there we can take it down.

Tish:
How have you done that?

Stefan: If you think about how Second Life works right now, how everybody seems to think about that, It’s kind of like a static model, the thing is there, whether anybody wants it or not. So you have like thousands of regions producing air. It’s a terrible waste of CPU. We wanted to do something like a web page, a dynamic web page. It’s constructed when you need it.

Tish: Are other people using this concept?

Darren: I think Adam has done something like it I’m not sure what exactly. But from what I hear Adam has similar ideas.

Stefan: That’s the thing about dynamic regions, It’s a feature of our tribal worlds platform. We used that as a proof of concept in that Facebook application where anybody could add a Facebook application and then they just went into their own private region, which was constructed on the fly for them. And when the last person leaves the room, he just turns the lights off.

Tish: And what kind of concurrencies can you get in these dynamic regions though?

Darren: I don’t think we’ve actually pushed it, but we can certainly get more because it’s basically where Second Life is based on total regions and they have to have a server up for each region, we only have to have a server or an instance of a region up for every person who wants to let a region have somebody in it. So if there’s nobody in a region we just don’t have it up.

Tish: I know everyone’s talking about putting OpenSim in clouds. Is this going to be workable with that idea too? Just in terms of being more efficient about the server side of this. Is that something that works with this or are you another direction than that?

Darren: I think it can work yes. It’s complimentary to our project.

Stefan: What we did with Tribal Net - It’s kind of like OS grid. Everybody brings their own computing power and what we’ve done is that we’ve packaged it for end users. I mean so that basically joe schmoe can install it, set it up, and run it. Because OpenSim’s been very tech heavy, our goal with Tribalnet is to make OpenSim more accessible for the wider layers so to speak. Also we’ve done some work on the map so that now when people go online their regions show up on the map. When they go off line the region disappears. That is also a radically different approach from Second Life.

Darren: To clarify that a little bit. What he means is that instead of a region having a set position on the map, we have a center of the map and the regions brought online are thrust around the center and if a region goes off it’ll be replaced by a new region that comes up.

Tish: What it’s sounding like when you describe this is you’re trying to use some of the ideas of P2P in a distributed grid.

Stefan: Yes definitely. I used to say Hey look Microsoft messenger, it should be like that. I know Darren isn’t that fond of that. But I think of it like that.

Tish: The development curve seems to have been rather slow thus far in P2P virtual worlds like Croquet and Solipsis. How do you see a lot of rich and interesting assets being built up on this kind of distributed grid

Darren: I think it’s too early for even us to say. Yes we’re more sort of a model of decentralized rather than a big monolithic grid like Second Life. One problem with Second Life is all the assets are centralized. That makes you responsible for making sure any users are updated with current textures etc. And you’ve got the problem of trying to police that to make sure there’s no textures that you don’t want there.

Stefan: We’re trying to move to P2P because that’s the only viable solution if we’re going to see web scalability. It just is. And we can’t really have stuff like central avatar repositories and things like that. We have to have a base case, which is the single server, and the single client. And then just have to grow from there. But what I wanted to say is that Darren made a brilliant choice way back when he was pondering what he would do. That was to take something that had proven itself on the market and to the user base. That is the Second Life client. What Darren did was that he combined that with another immensly popular and available technology. And that is .NET (dotnet). Basing this off .NET made it reasonably available to a community of programmers.

Tish: Second Life is the treasure chest of assets at the moment and also great content developers do not want to have to develop different content with different tools for tons of different VWs. What’s your stance on encouraging good content developers in Tribal Net? Are you aiming to be potentially interoperable with Second Life? Are you part of the Linden Lab Architectural Working Group initiative? Or are you going to try and go it alone?

Darren: First of all I need you to clarify the question. Do you mean like some people want to have OpenSim regions that are part of the Second Life grid like IBM, is that what you mean?

Tish: Oh I’m almost assuming from what you have said so far that you’re not going to do that. But are you going to aim for some level of interoperability?

Darren: I’m part of a working group that’s trying to get a common client protocol. We’ve got a sister project called Open Viewer. It’s started a few weeks ago but we’re attempting to incorporate elements of many clients like Croquet in an effort to achieve some degree of universality. Peter Fin from I.B.M. do you know him? He arranged it. We have a common protocol that you might not be able to do every feature in well. But you can at least connect, see the world and move around. We are also part of the Architectural Working Group but the focus is on Second Life there.

Stefan: If you look at what the architecture group has come up with so far, it’s Linden Lab’s protocol version 2 or not even that, it’s Second Life 1.5 - a big wish list basically. What we have, I guess, you could say that we have the small company rogue - a bit decentralized slash anarchistic - approach. We have a saying in OpenSim, I don’t know if you have seen it. I think actually I coined it but it’s “let a thousand worlds bloom.”

What we mean is that it’s too early to start drafting universal protocols. So what we’re doing with OpenSim is, and we’ve been very clear about this often repeating it over and over and over again, not to try to build a free and open source Second Life. We’re trying to build a platform, (we are not trying to make THE protocol) so that people who want to make protocols, should be able to do that with less effort. So when we’ve had our taste of applications, social applications, business applications, marketing applications, everything, then somewhere in there we can see probably something like http.

In Tribal net we have our own backend protocols. We have changed large chunks of the communication stack at the backend, the regions you install on your pc - some parts we have changed because this application needs other data and other processes. So I think we have implemented four different stacks. So we talk from experience.

Tish: Will you be publishing all your protocols?

Stefan: It is way too early to go into that. Right now we do not know what will bring everything forward. This is just one application now.

Darren: At the moment our backend is basically customized for this one application. Each new application is going to need slightly different customization. There is not a general solution at the moment.

Tish: So if it is all in the application, what are the killer apps?!

Stefan: Well we have done integration with web communities and 3D integration, that in combination with marketing applications, for example, being able to go on to say a Toyota site and click on a link and be on a Toyota showroom, not necessarily in the browser like everybody is visualizing because we have seen problems with that. We need something a bit more intelligent. The interplay between 2D and 3D is very intricate.

Tish: Everyone asks me about when they will be able to use OpenSim to create content they can upload into Second Life?

Darren: The big problem with that is SL terms and conditions, you aren’t actually allowed to export your creations out of SL. Now while it would be possible to import creations from OpenSim into SL, really until Linden Labs allows creations to be exported, there isn’t really the reason for people to work too much on adding those features to opensim. As only Linden labs really gains, as its one way traffic

Tish: Is there anything else notable about Tribal Net that hasn’t come up yet?

Darren: From a engineering side, I think the main point is at the moment we are working on making it easier for people to start up and host their own region. TribalNet is our first demo of that process. Then we hope to make it easier for people to host their own small grids with this easy hosting of regions, so say any school or college could have their own small grid without the admin lvel that is needed currently for opensim. A important part of our concept is having a GUI for the regions, so that we can later provide addon modules for these GUI’s so for instant maybe we would provide a game construction toolset addon, or a presentation addon , that made it easier to host and control presentations. Some of these then at a later time could move into the viewer. Then at a higher level we have our set of extenstion api’s which I think its a bit too early to go into detail of.

Tish: My big question is still without a virtual economy what do you see driving rich content production?

Stefan Andersson: Yeah; we’re all about content, actually; Tribal Net is about creating a content producer platform. A complete ‘ladder’ from consumer, over enthusiast, semi-pro and pro. Yeah; basically, we offer empowerment. It’s like ‘your world’ but for real.

I guess you know that content production and systems integration in a third-party hosted environment is a drag.

How many complex games and functions have you seen in SL? Stuff that would be a small thing to code if you had proper tools, becomes a nightmare.

But to me also it seems your definition of ‘content’ is close to the Linden notion of ‘content.’ The Lindens created an economy based on artificial scarcity you pay to stop somebody from sharing something but ‘content’ also often play a role in the execution of a service.

Just an example : you have a medieval battle sim with castles with all kind of nifty storytelling bound to them the busines model is subscription, perhaps; combined with added value like buying weapons well, the actual assets are for free - the service owner couldn’t care less if you walk away with the sword into another world because it only functions in a context, the context of the battle system.

So, yeah, you could have a static snapshot of a weapon or you could have the customizable weapon that actually functions in a system now, the former will be very hard to charge enough for to make up for the production cost but the latter you definitively could. charge enough for to make up for the production cost.

Tish: You have a very innovative idea for a distributed grid. Will people have problems with their firewalls though?

Stefan: That’s the big hurdle we’ve done everything we can to make everything else easy but the server still needs to be accessible from the net.

Now, next week we’re launching the next version, which has a built-in sandbox too so you can terraform and build without being public

I don’t know if you saw that in the gui, but we’re adding ‘load/save’ to it so that you can easily export terrain and objects.

Well the private mode is sharing content db with the public mode. so, basically, you just go public or, you save it to your hard disk and upload it onto a hosted region.

At the moment, it’s just “save all object definitions” and “load all object definitions” but even that’s enough to export objects, tweak them, re-import them that’s how the superprim was done and the chessboard pieces. The chessboard coder has access to objects and object definitions on a whole other level that the SL coder, for example notepad, basically. It’s like, text editing html pages all over again.

Tish: hmmm a very interesting concept…..

Stefan: well, it becomes even more interesting when you have a program creating those definitions.

Tish: Are you planning on Linux support?

Stefan: We’re planning on linux support. It’s just that these versions, that are very end-user oriented, windows is the main demography. Our commercial Tribal Server runs linux just fine. And, as I said, we’re planning for even the end-user versions to run on linux.

At this point in the interview, Stefan encouraged me to try Tribal Net myself! I was at first resistant. After all I already have an OpenSim up. But it was truly a revelation to so quickly get set up and find myself with a region (a full on free form 3D programmable space on a PC!!!) - a virtual world of my own that let me interact with my neighbors and yes, for me, Tribal Net was “an easy-to-install, easy-to-configure express version of the full Tribal Server” as the Tribal Net website proclaims!

Beta Phase

Currently, Tribal Net is in ‘Beta’ phase. They write:

This means we have made the software available to the public in order to get feedback and hunt down bugs. If you want to try the Beta out, or simply want to be notified when the 1.0 version is released, you can ‘register’ here.

See you soon in Tribal Net!!

Only a two weeks after debuting their first Hands Free 3D video showing the possibilities for navigating Second Life “hands free” without a mouse or keyboard, Mitch Kapor (MitchK Linden in Second Life) and Philippe Bossut have a new demo out - Hands Free Object Editing in Second Life.

Philippe points out on the Hands Free 3D blog that they have already seen a lot of interest in their “hands free” project even from the main press (see this article from the NYT). Hands Free 3D, a project of Kapor Enterprises, is creating a prototypical interface using the 3D Camera designed by 3DV Systems to control virtual worlds like Second Life.

Mitch Kapor told me, they are now working “so that avatars can directly mirror body language and facial expression.”

Mitch very generously gave me an interview in which he not only describes his project to explore how:

the camera could be a central device to a whole new kind of interface the way the mouse became the central piece of hardware that enabled the whole graphical user interface and it enabled the transition from character based computing DOS to the GUI.

But also, Mitch shares some of his thoughts on the future of Second Life. A full transcription follows in this post.

“Moving From Science Fiction to Science”

Mitch explained to me he began to get excited with the idea of Hands Free 3D when he realized:

we had a shot at moving from science fiction to science as it were actually making some of this stuff work that people have been talking about for a long time

As Gwyneth Llewelyn points out much of the so called virtual worlds industry has backed off the bigger vision of a unified metaverse and is retreating into a more limited vision of a multitude of closed and controlled virtual worlds (see Digado’s post Raising Kids in Virtual Worlds and this video from fastcompany.tv to see how this controlled/controlling vision for virtual worlds plays from Disney’s point of view).

But while a bigger vision for virtual environments with a revolutionary role in adult life may not not be interesting to marketeers at the moment, it has a momentum that cannot be stopped. Mitch Kapor made a prediction during the interview that I wholeheartedly agree with:

the big vision of 3D is in the process of happening. It will be very transformative and anybody who is not counting on that happening, is likely to be run over by it.

I got very excited when I heard about the Hands Free 3D project because developing a natural interaction between people and virtual environments to me is one of the “it” projects for immersive 3D.

The dialogue between science fiction and science is of course the ongoing story of the metaverse. And seeing Iron Man which is alive with new possibilities for “seamless interfaces between people bits and atoms” made me think of how very exciting this new chapter in metaverse development is.

The Tangible Media Group, MIT, founded by Hiroshi Ishii has pioneered new couplings of the physical and the virtual. And, alumni John Underkoffler’s vision is definitely in play in Iron Man. Underkoffler’s exact credit flew by me too quickly - but he was clearly a futurist for Iron Man. Matt McGann points out that there is a very cool article about his work on Minority Report here.

Oh I cannot mention Iron Man without noting Iron Man in Second Life (see Massively) and Annie Ok’s latest great machinima!

And, Click on the screen shot below or here to watch the “Hands Free 3D: Second Life Object Editing Demo”

Interview with Mitch Kapor

Tish Shute: How did you get the idea to focus on Hands Free 3D out of all the possible areas you could have begun R&D in?

Mitch Kapor: You were asking me where did the idea come from? It originated in the fact that this kind of difficulty - of creating a natural, easier user interface - that we’ve had is characteristic of virtual world interactions.

There are things to be done about that at every conceivable level. From fixing all the little bugs to a bigger initiative. I was doing a thought experiment about what would really make a virtual world fundamentally easier to use.

I didn’t have an answer, but somebody had mentioned to me - one of the other investors in Second Life - that there are two Israeli companies working on 3D cameras. I had read about and heard about lots of things but this caught my attention. And I started to ask some questions about it. I had seen the video that Johnny Lee shot with the Wii on YouTube.

That had begun to prepare my mind to think about how you could use new types of input devices to control virtual worlds. So when I heard about the cameras I said this is really interesting and I started to make some phone calls and inquire. The Idea came to me that you could use the camera … the camera could be a central device to a whole new kind of interface the way the mouse became the central piece of hardware that enabled the whole graphical user interface and it enabled the transition from character based computing DOS to the GUI.

One of the other things is that I’ve now been around long enough, 30 years - active and professional - that I’ve seen many things come and go and I have a feeling for patterns. So I was fortunate in actually being able to get hold of a prototype of one of the cameras to do some experiments with it.

Tish Shute:
They’re not yet released generally are they, later this Summer, right?

Mitch Kapor:
Well .. it’s unclear. Sometime in 2008 or 2009. There will be multiple manufacturers. They have somewhat different approaches as to how they’re going to go to market. I’d say it’s all being sorted out soon. Everybody I’ve talked to is quite certain that by Christmas season of 2009 at the latest, they’ll be available in high volume at low cost.

Tish Shute:
I just got so excited when I saw you doing this because I think, basically, in terms of free form 3D programmable space which is how I’ve come to see Second Life now, it’s the future. Everyone’s been complaining that the problem with free form 3d programmable space for a mass audience is the difficulty of the interface. So there seems to have been this big retreat back into 2.5D, 3D chat rooms - plugins to Facebook etc. It seems like a step backward to me.

Mitch Kapor:
I think it’s inevitable that we’re going to get fully interactive 3D. It’s all a question of how we’re going to get there and how long it takes. It’s understandable why, for commercial reasons, people do more incremental things, but those are only going to get you so far.

Tish Shute:
Well it seems to me ideas about the evolution of 3D are to some degree being driven by marketing on the web forces at the minute. I suppose the thinking is that you can get these 3D chatrooms up easily and they are more amenable to marketing than a freeform 3D space like Second Life.

But my question is why you didn’t decide to go to game controllers? I suppose this is where a lot of thinking goes because all the kids have already a high level of skill with these?

Mitch Kapor:
Well, I’m not a gamer. It seemed to me that the possibilities with a camera to do the imaging and to be able in real time, to extract out a 3D model of the scene and the objects in it, is fundamentally just incredibly powerful. It feels like the right direction if you can develop it. What I was pleasantly surprised by was actually creating the first demo was pretty straightforward.

Tish Shute:
How did you prevent every random motion being sucked into the program?

Mitch Kapor:
It turns out that the cameras are pretty sensitive. They can detect relatively small motions like the resolution at a distance of 5 to 10 feet is a half a centimeter. That would be one part in several hundreds. maybe one part in a thousand. So it can detect slight motions. I don’t know the details of the software that the camera came with and that Philippe wrote. One of the other advantages is that Philippe, who is the engineer that did the work, has a PhD in computer graphics. And, he has been around the block quite a few times, and had a whole bag of tricks. I know that he spent some of the time writing filtering code to filter out noise in the signal and so on.

Tish Shute:
Do you have to be particular about where you stand at the minute? Can you smoothly go back and forth between when you have to type and things like that?

Mitch Kapor:
No, I’m not anticipating problems. We have another video coming up very shortly where we show object editing. The object editing isn’t as sexy as we would like it because it has to use the existing interface. They’re having to emulate keyboard and mouse. The point is that we have the concept of a control plane, a vertical plane, in front of you, that if you put your hand out so it crosses that imaginary plane, then it interprets what you do as controlling the mouse.

If you push through to the far side than pull it back it doesn’t. That actually works quite well as a gesture. And you get visual feedback when you’re in the control plane, it lights something up, so you can see - OK. It’s sort of like when you’re using the mouse to target an object you can tell tell when a mouse is inside a clickable button. Similarly there’ll be some kind of control zones. When your hand or other body part is in that you’ll get some feedback in the same way that a button highlights to indicate I’m clickable, or you’re over me. It’ll be a similar kind of thing.

Tish Shute:
But you have to avoid ending up with a mapping that’s more difficult to learn than the original one, don’t you?

Mitch Kapor:
I agree with you, but on the navigation and flying, we’ve had people learn to use this in less than 30 seconds. We just stand them up and say lean forward, lean back, stand up, lean to the side, raise your arms, and they’re moving, they’re flying, they’re walking.

Tish Shute:
And you don’t get a problem with the casual motion?

Mitch Kapor:
No. And this was just our first shot at this.

Tish Shute:
I know! I was really impressed that you could actually have done that in 3 weeks.

Mitch Kapor:
I think the start to finish time was a couple of months including the fact that Philippe had never seen the Second Life viewer code. So, he started like any other developer, just downloading and building the Second Life client. And, we never had a camera before! Ha!

Tish Shute:
But this is the great beauty of Second Life - the power that people have to do so many amazing things so rapidly.

Mitch Kapor:
He’s already re-written the code once. We’re totally prepared to give the code to Linden. It’s a little premature because the cameras’ aren’t available, but if the cameras’ were available, we would just donate the code. The nice thing is it’s actually pretty clean. It interfaces to the client at just a couple of points. We’ve isolated the dependencies.

Tish Shute:
But that’s my other question. If you donate the code will it be open source so that other developers could get involved? I know lots of people …

Mitch Kapor:
This stuff, the demonstration stuff, absolutely. That’s the intent. The purpose of this whole phase was just to test what we could do and to promote or evangelize the use of the camera. Get people excited. We’re thinking about what we might do with it.

I’m actually incredibly excited about the thing Philippe is working on now which is to use the camera so that avatars can directly mirror body language and facial expression. So that if I’m sitting in my chair and I have my arms crossed, my avatar will cross it’s arms. If I tilt my head to the side or smile or frown, the avatar will do the same thing. We’re quite optimistic that we can do something compelling in pretty short order, like less than a month.

Tish Shute:
Wow! That is really, really exciting. I think that has just been something people have been talking about a lot recently - to have gesturing and expressions transmitted to the avatar ..

Mitch Kapor:
The reason I get so excited is cause when I started believing we had a shot at moving from science fiction to science as it were actually making some of this stuff work that people have been talking about for a long time.

Tish Shute:
So the plan is to make your work part of the open source community and …

Mitch Kapor:
I don’t have a plan yet. I would say anything we’re doing in this phase we’re happy to give away. At some point I think things are going to become clearer as to the availability of the cameras, what Linden is going to build in, and then businesses that might be built off of what we’re doing.

But I’m very confident that the kinds of things we’re doing now and in the short term are just going to become part of the standard repertoire of things you can do in Second Life in code that’s available to developers.

I don’t have the exact road map.

Tish Shute:
I heard your recent talks in Second Life and how you were very interested in seeing how Second Life could become more of a business tool. I’ve talked about what Second Life and its “cousins” offers in comparison to other open source platforms like SUN’s Project Wonderland and the Croquet platform Quaq. For example, Second Life is a free form 3D programmable space that’s really accessible and easy to develop in.

But in Qwaq you can drag and drop documents in from 2D applications easily, and Wonderland has some great telephony/audio development. I’m totally psyched by what you’re doing because it has the potential to make the free form programmable space of Second Life more widely useful, and it could be bring much innovation to business communications.

I see a future in interactive data visualization, for example, the idea that Ben Lindquist of Green Phosphor has been developing, i.e., that you can actually model business processes dynamically in a collaborative environment. What are your thoughts on Second Life’s potential in business applications?

Mitch Kapor:
One thought is that a more general platform, more general purpose, more open, in the long run, all other things being equal, will be superior to more limited, less capable, more closed platforms, for building any kind of application.

And at the moment, Second Life is the most general and most open platform. So all other things being equal, which usually they’re not, Second Life should be viewed as superior by people who are building a variety of applications.

But there are clearly some things that need to happen. Well let me put it this way some of the other platforms have temporarily at least moved further ahead in enterprise related applications by developing collaboration capabilities.

So the imperative is for Second Life to provide comparable capabilities. It has to do that, in terms of fundamental stability, reliability, in all respects. If it does that then it’s actually going to win on it’s own merits.

Tish Shute:
I absolutely agree with you because in terms of ease of use, it’s the only dynamic networked general simulation platform around. There’s no one else close.

Mitch Kapor:
It’s also I think highly scalable in ways that some other things aren’t. Even though it doesn’t have as many 9’s in uptime as it needs to have, there have been recent signs of more progress. I guess the HTML on the prim stuff is rolling out finally or at least the first version of it.

I think it’s ended in beta now.

It’s not the full thing. But it’s a huge step. That’s going to help a lot.

Tish Shute:
Plus the fact it seems Linden Labs moving towards a more heterogeneous idea of a grid where there’ll be the potential to connect behind the firewall worlds with the main grid .

Mitch Kapor:
I also know that there are some third parties that have done that. They’ve sworn me temporarily to confidentiality. But they have done some very impressive stuff with integrating the web with Second Life in ways that you can for instance in a web interface just go and grab a PowerPoint. In your Second Life window. The power point will just show up. So there is a kind of work around to using the familiar web to get your intercollaboration stuff working. There’s progress. It’s going to be some time before it all sorts itself out.

But to come back to the camera as a more natural interface, I think for personal interaction, is important. It’s going to be a breakthrough.

Tish Shute:
It’s a huge breakthrough also to have the avatar related to your real life gestures. It’s a huge leap forward. When you introduced it at metaverse meetup that really got people’s attention. I have a question. Have you thought about going even further with the thought driven game controllers?

Mitch Kapor:
At some point I intend to take another look at that. I have the feeling that your not doing anything highly profound. Kind of a cute hack.

Tish Shute:
Again they’re not available, I would guess they would give some to you though.

Mitch Kapor:
From looking at earlier incarnations of this stuff I think what they can pick up on is very superficial. So I’m not sure that they’re going to be that interesting cause we really don’t know how to do, without some invasive type of surgery,

Tish Shute:
You can do it with very very complicated brain scanning you can do a lot more, but I agree. Although I did see the Japanese University was using them for severely disabled people. Looked like they were doing some interesting things.

My question is, this is something you mentioned in one of your talks in Second Life, you thought some of the steps forward to make Second Life truly a player in the business world, would be changes on the server level. Were you thinking more about the moves that are going on towards open source and making a heterogeneous grid?

Mitch Kapor:
Yes. I was thinking about letting people run it behind the firewall, and also it’s not just putting it behind the firewall, anytime you’re talking about an enterprise application, the enterprises want to integrate all of their existing IT systems. They already have these very sophisticated systems for managing say identity, and having easy integration of those thing with Second Life identity management is not glamorous but very important.

Tish Shute:
This brings to mind another question. I know I have some ideas about what Second Life really brings to the table for business. No one else has taken on working with dynamic melded states on the internet in 3D to the degree Second Life has. That’s sort of, to me, the essence of it - having groups of people working around 3D objects that can be updated on the fly and modeled on the fly.

Mitch Kapor:

If we do things well there will be a good level of interoperability and all of the open source work and the reverse engineered clones will actually be a good thing.

Second Life is, and I’ve probably used this line, faced with insurmountable opportunities on all sides.

Let me ask you a question. I’ve read your blog, or some of it, but what do you actually do?

Tish Shute:
I spend a lot of time on my blog at the minute!!! You can tell I have kids and dogs driving me crazy [dog is barking in the background], which is exactly why I took this up a year ago. I worked in film and special effects for the early part of my career.

When I had my kids and dogs and all of that it got to be just too much to do 24/7 film production. My son’s nearly 9 now. I tried academia for a while, then I just said forget it..too hard to be in a medieval guild as a second career!

And I actually a year ago when I started looking at this (Second Life) I thought my goodness this is what we sat around and talked about every night when we were doing multiple pass motion control photography in the eighties. And so I started writing about it and that took a life of it’s own. And now it’s become a little ridiculous because it’s an excessively time consuming hobby!

Mitch Kapor:
Are you in New York or the UK?

Tish Shute:
Yes. I’m in Manhattan.

Mitch Kapor:
The reason Second Life has gotten as far as it’s gotten is because of people like you who have become inspired and become obsessed and feel the possibilities and feel them to be so utterly compelling to cause some rearrangement of life priorities.

Tish Shute:
It’s interesting cause it’s like every week I say “Oh I really can’t spend all this time writing!” Then I see something, like this week I saw all the new wave of 3D chat rooms coming out. And it just got me going again! I just can’t bear to not to have a voice because when you see the big picture you want the really innovative stuff to move forward. That’s why when I saw your work on hands free 3D, I said: “Oh my goodness, someone’s taking it the next step. And as you say there isn’t a path that’s clear. There’s no guarantees. But its a path worth traveling, in my view!

Mitch Kapor:
I firmly believe, I have complete conviction, that all of the 3D, the big vision of 3D is in the process of happening. It will be very transformative and anybody who is not counting on that happening, is likely to be run over by it.

Tish Shute:
Right. Of course you’re much more knowledgeable of this aspect of it but in terms of business applications, has anything interesting happened in a long long while?

Mitch Kapor:
There are some interesting things that are happening, I just learned this by accident, that are being kept under very close wraps. There’s at least one consultancy that is doing extremely well with very large prestigious global corporations. They have done a lot of development of this integration of web with Second Life. Their clients are shy. They do not want public exposure at the moment because of the backlash against the overhyping of Second Life that happened last year. I was very heartened to hear about this. I think it’s going to start coming out in the next few months what some of these companies are doing.

Tish Shute:
I agree. Many of the interesting things I know about I can’t write about either because there’s no interest for people developing business applications to have a lot of web publicity about it in the early stages.

Mitch Kapor:
Right. I think we’ll be in this phase for a while. But then we’ll get out of it.

Tish Shute:
In terms of specifics about business application, do you have any dreams for Second Life?

Mitch Kapor:
I would like to just personally have a really good meeting application. Just simple like when you and I want to get together and meet in world, I would like that to be easy, bullet proof, convenient, natural. I’m imagining that we both have cameras, so that we can see each other and you get body language and you get a sense something like what you would get in a face to face meeting. And I want people to have the ability to easily get more realistic avatars, if that’s what they want. And actually there’s a lot of good technology around that now. Where you can just basically take a picture or two with an ordinary digital camera, upload it and get back something that pretty much looks like you.

Tish Shute:
What do you think are the biggest obstacles to this kind of free form 3D programmable space?

Mitch Kapor:
There’s a lot of software that has to be written to bring out its full potential. And not just by Linden or any one company. It’s really a collective effort that is the work of a whole generation.

It’s comparable to all of the work that went into making the ecosystem of the personal computer. Or for that matter the ecosystem of the internet. It requires having the right architecture, it has to stay open. If that can happen I think it’s mostly just a matter of time and some patience.

It is going to happen. There are lots of individual challenges. Tons of problems to solve. I’m not a technological determinist, but at this point I don’t think anything can hold it back.

In a way though having lived through the onset of the internet, while it has changed things a lot, and in certain ways it would be very difficult to imagine life without it, it also has left things the same. I mean people bring all of themselves and their issues into every technological medium. The drama gets played out in a different ways, but it’s neither going to be a good thing or a bad thing. It’s going to be some of both. And so the question is, to me, how people of good will who want to make the world a better place are going to use whatever new things get created in a positive way.

Tish Shute:
I know Mark (Zero Linden) heads up a lot of interoperability work in his office hours and other meetings. But I got a couple of emails this week saying that all these groups that are working off of either clones or reverse engineered, and there are so many of them, and some are under wraps too, need to actually meet on an even more regular basis?

Mitch Kapor:
That’s true. I guess it’s much more desirable for people to meet and talk, and if they don’t for awhile, you get more noise in the system. It just will take longer to put things back together.

Tish Shute:
That’s what I was thinking, that it’s become pretty clear to me that cooperation, if it is going to happen, has to happen around the clones and the reverse engineered versions of Second Life because other platforms are not prioritizing interoperability at the moment, that I know of.

Mitch Kapor:
People will call - this and that should be happening but my view is that the ecosystem is still sufficiently underdeveloped that there is a risk of attempted premature standardization.

If you look at the history of things, It’s very important for there to be working instances before anybody attempts to standardize anything.

There’s a lot to be learned in the early history of the internet. pre-history, from the 60’s up through the 80’s — when the basic protocols were being developed. There’s some very smart people working on that and a certain amount of looseness is actually quite important now.

There’ll be people who want to prematurely standardize and get everybody together and all you’ll wind up with is a massive crud.

I thinks that the power of the open systems is so much greater than the walled gardens Also the open source ethic is so deeply established in large parts of the development community, even in enterprises, that overall I’m not too worried about it.

When the functionality of whatever it is, is that well known and well understood, that’s the period in which the open source alternatives can really flourish. When there’s still a lot of evolution in functionality, and design in the user experience, open source techniques can become too slow.

So it’s going to be somewhat chaotic. I think we have to embrace or at least make peace with a certain amount of chaos right now and the understanding that it’s likely to settle down. The chaos is not the last word.

≈

Ogle Earth - a blog that “focuses on Google Earth” published a great post on “Programming Planetariums in Second Life” last week (hat tip to Kat Lemieux also). These planetariums in SL are the work of Magnus Zeisig (Magnuz Binder) a freelance SL builder located in Stockholm, Sweden, dubbed “one of Sweden’s most talented programmers.” I acquired the 3D display of the galaxies within 500 million light years from us pictured above for my small plot of land in Second Life. Ogle Earth writes:

Second Life is not a dedicated virtual globe or virtual planetarium but a free-form three-dimensional programmable space that anyone can use to build globes and planetariums in.

This phrase, “free-form three-dimensional programmable space,” I think will end up being a mantra for me at least in the next few months. As a new crop of 3D chat rooms emerges, like Vivaty, pointing out the difference between a 3D chat and “free-form three-dimensional programmable space” like Second Life, OpenSim, realXtend and HiPiHi (now in public beta - see my interview with Xu Hui, CEO of HiPiHi, here) may become a regular task. While I look forward to inviting Facebook friends to see photos and videos into my Vivaty scene, this will not be “3D life such as you’d find in Second Life” as some blogs have proclaimed.

“Exploring The Heavens on Earth”

“Exploring the Heavens on Earth” comes from Jeanne Holm’s (NASA) talk title. She will be presenting at the Federal Virtual Worlds Expo: Implementing the Future, on April 24th (see my previous post). Last week I spent some time “exploring the heavens on earth” in Second Life with Erika Vick a second generation NASA contractor who has been with NASA almost 18 years. Erica now works in NASA HQ Strategic Communications. She is Universa Vanalten in Second Life (in the picture above we are in the Moon Rover on NASA’s CoLab sim in SL. The other NASA sim in Second Life, Explorer Island, was created by the visionary from NASA Jet Burns). But as Universa explained most of the NASA content in SL is contributed by people outside NASA. I asked Universa how NASA’s involvement in Second Life was going.

I have been in SL for about a year now and wanted to use SL for Agency purposes….. it has been slow building support for this but now its going like gangbusters.

We’re going to be doing a mixed reality event for the NASA Future Forum in San Jose CA on May 14th

NASA’s MMORPG

Universa also updated me on the Office of Education Distance Learning group’s rfi (request for information) to get feedback about developing an MMORPG around NASA missions which has now turned into a request for proposals and a controversy in the blogosphere about the level of support NASA will offer developers (see here and here). Robert Rice attended the NASA MMORPG Workshop held on Monday of this week at the BWI Marriot and says that “Slashdot, Gamasutra, Second Life Herald and even Wired are all wrong” re their interpretation of NASA’s role (or lack of role!) as a partner in the project. Robert Rice writes:

there is a pretty solid opportunity here for any smart developer that can put together an interesting proposal and find some funding for it. NASA hinted at a few sources that might consider forming a consortium and providing funding, but as I said before, half of the audience stopped paying attention after “NASA will not provide the partner any funding

I think Robert is on the right track! You can check out NASA’s RFP here.

Universa said this to me concerning NASA’s position re funding proposals:

We got 186 responses…much more than expected. Our Administrator for Office of Education totally has the vision for virtutal worlds. There is going to be a Request for Proposals go out soon to follow up on the rfi NASA doesn’t have the money to develop the MMORPG. So the first question is does anyone want to take this on. The fact that we got 186 responses sounds like yes. NASA will provide content experts to consult, and whatever resources we can bring to the table.

Robert also mentioned that the attendee list for the workshop is supposed to be published. He notes: “Almost everyone there wanted to know who *else* was there (to gauge the competition maybe?). It will be posted on the NASA MMO page.”

International Space Station

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Image above: A camera aboard the International Space Station captured this image of the Soyuz TMA-11 spacecraft shortly after undocking. Credit: NASA TV<

I posted here about my visit to the awesome replica of the International Space Station in Second Life built by Illusion Factory. And how Piet Hut (see more about Piet’s latest Second Life adventures below!) brought his friend, astronaut Ed Lu, into Second Life to visit the International Space Station in Second Life. Ed Lu lived in the real one for a half a year in 2003!

I have become totally hooked on NASA TV lately, and particularly, I have been enjoying some of the events that have been streamed into in Second Life, including the annoucement of the latest Google Lunar X entrants, and The Stephen Hawking Lecture.

Virtual Worlds Astrophysics Group

On April 4, Dr. Rob Knop (a.k.a Prospero Linden a.k.a Prospero Frobozz) gave a talk titled “The Power of the Dark Side: How Dark Matter and Dark Energy dominate our Universe.” Dr. Knop was on the team that discovered the accelerating expansion of the universe (picture and quote from the Scilands blog).

This is the first in a series of monthly talks organized by the Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA). They are to be held on the first Friday of every month.
SLURL:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Spaceport%20Bravo/117/66/278

Also from the Scilands blog an announcement for:

Star Simulations School

Learn about software for simulating stars, star clusters and galaxies. Organized by Piet Hut from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Aimed at anyone with a serious interest in astronomy and computer simulations of stars and galaxies. The main idea is to provide guidance for those who are interested in learning to use and/or write software for astronomical simulations, on all levels.

Examples of approaches and packages that we will discuss can be found on the following web sites:

http://www.artcompsci.org/ http://www.manybody.org/manybody/nemo.html

http://www.manybody.org/manybody/starlab.html http://muse.li/

When: The third Friday of every month at 8:00 AM Pacific Time Where: In the virtual world Second Life, at the ISM Workshop room:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Spaceport%20Bravo/153/205/59

The first class will be on Friday, April 18 polling whoever attends to see what their wishes are and then in May starting to offer workshops accordingly.

Optimizing A Free Form 3D Programmable Space

The optimization of Second Life as general purpose simulation platform was eloquently explained at a Fireside Chat with Sidewinder Linden about the Havok4 Physics Engine organized by the International Society for Technology in Education. Here is ashort extract from the one hour talk.

One of the realities of a world such as Second Life is that it is a general purpose simulation. It is not optimized for detailed, high accuracy (very high frame rate) calculation of object dynamics. It’s instead optimized to handle things like “not falling over when people dump 1000 random shapes in a region from 100m in the air” and having reasonable dynamics with a scripting language that allows you to build interesting things.

Now that’s not to say you can’t do real simulation, but it is not really a substitute for high precision simulation. With that all said… you can build things that are visually compelling and illustrate points, with low effort and ‘reasonable” realism.

An analogy I’d draw is to the build tools themselves [Sidewinder Linden comes from a CAD background...]. When I look at the build tools in Second Life, I’m constantly amazed at what people build, because they are pretty basic compared to “real computer aided design” systems but they’re simple and effective.

If you think about the physics modeling in the same way, you might find that you can build many interesting things that are visually compelling and satisfy the teaching objectives of understanding without necessarily having the “smooth like butter” or “high precision” of a “heavy physics simulator” (which by the way you’ll spend many moons programming in c++ to do even the basics

This is the kind of thing I hear from folks building physics-based projects in second life - does this general philosophy work for the type of education that you do, or is precision simulation “the only and right way” to get the points across in your environments?

Exploratorium in Second Life

“What can a museum do in a virtual world that would be difficult—or impossible—to do in the real world?” Exploratorium media creators and educators have been exploring this question by experimenting in Second Life (see the Exploratorium in Second Life blog for details).

The screenshot below is from Destination Mars - A Meteor Impact Simulation on the Surface of Mars

Project Director: Patio Plasma
Model Building & Scripting: Emileigh Starbrook
Particle Systems Scripting: Debbie Trilling

Teleport to the Destination Mars viewing area and:

“Experience a scale model of a Martian asteroid impact. The model crater is 50 m in diamter and the model runs in slow motion at 1/10th the speed of an actual event.”

Watch a machinima* of the Destination Mars simulation.

In another mix of real and virtual reality, the Exploratorium team “streamed an entire rare transit of the planet Mercury live from telescopes at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) in Kitt Peak, Arizona, into the International Spaceflight Museum site in SL.”

This week I received several requests to write a post reviewing the recent upsurge of OpenSim based projects. I am in England for a week, so there is no way I can do this before I leave. However there is a good opportunity to learn more about realXtend and meet the realxtend team this week on Wednesday April 23rd, in Second Life. I have reprinted the notice from the realXtend website at the end of this post.

And, as LifeRain points out, “one way to get to know more about OpenSim is to visit a public grid.” There is a complete list of these grids here. OSGrid, OpenlifeGrid and DeepGrid are goods ones to try to start with. The picture above is from Wright Plaza the orientation area for OSGrid below is OpenlifeGrid.

Or You Can “Do it yourself” - I did!

You can also download OpenSim directly from opensimulator.org. I did! And I set it up on a CariNet on a dedicated server for only $100 per month. In the picture above my eight year old son was excited to meet Adam Frisby, one of the core developers on the UgoSim, just minutes after logging in for the first time. Ugotrade Jr. is now enjoying (and so am I) learning to build in a “cost free” environment - no file upload charges! Also, you can get a Ready-To-Run version of OpenSim from OpenlifeGrid.

OpenSim Blogs

There is a OpenSimulator group blog which some of the developers contribute to, and also a Planet OpenSim which agreggates feeds from opensim-related blogs and developers

• Daltonic Gin
• Darb Dabney’s SIMGIS Blog » OpenSim
• Dave’s Educational Blog
• OpenSimulator Project
• Sean’s Mental Walkabout » opensim
• Shengri La: Utopian Micronation
• Tedd Maa
• The Word of Chaos » OpenSim
• VintFalken.com » OpenSim
• artiphys
• justincc’s opensim blog
• nebadon2025.com
• xyzzy xyzzy… » opensi

Meet the realXtenders!

Next week there will be a key event for Virtual Worlds:

Federal Virtual Worlds Expo: Implementing the Future. The picture above is from the November event.

The Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds is a newly formed group of federal government employees and contractors interested in exploring the use of virtual worlds in government, sharing best practices and policies, creating shared repositories, and networking.

April 24-25, 2008

National Defense University Washington, DC

If you cannot attend the meeting physically, you can attend through Second Life free of charge at the following NOAA SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Meteora/199/138/28

There will be a series of pre-conference workshops in SL, April 23rd, led by Pathfinder Linden, John Lester, Sue Singer, Aimee Weber

One of the speakers will be Jeanne Holm—NASA. Jeanne’s talk title: “Exploring the Heavens on Earth” inspired me to write an upcoming post, looking at the work of NASA and space enthusiasts in the the “free-form three-dimensional programmable space” of Second Life.

Screen shot from realXtend’s wickedly cool avatar tech demo (see video here).

Some people may have walked away from Virtual Worlds 2008, NYC, thinking the vision of the metaverse has boiled down to two notions: 1) every toy should have its own own virtual world and 2) may a thousand walled gardens flourish. But, if you did come away thinking that, you missed out on another important current at the conference - the rapid growth of the open metaverse and the excitement of developers, architects and visionaries who are exploring its potential.

The discussion at the Open Source Virtual Worlds Round Table included so many of the key players, including Philip Rosedale, and covered such a big chunk of issues that that I have transcribed it and published it at the end of this post - the audio is here. The audio quality is poor (except for the round table facilitators from OpenSim, Sun’s Project Wonderland, Qwaq and myself as we were sitting right on top of my ipod!) So, I hope the transcription of the discussion will be useful to all those involved in pioneering the open source metaverse.

The dichotomy of visions - an open metaverse or a thousand walled gardens - present at VW 2008 did not escape the very savvy virtual world writer Wagner James Au (Hamlet Au in Second Life) who narrates this tale of two conferences on GigaOm, here and here. Hamlet, author of The Making of Second Life, and part of metaversal thinking from the early days is in unique position to understand the accomplishments and vagaries of its prodigal children.

The inadequacies of the short term constrained visions that held the main stage at Virtual Worlds 2008 were also commented on by Cory Ondrejka, one of the founders and former CTO of Linden Lab who wrote on his blog:

Is this really the Metaverse? Is this even the 3D internet? Isn’t this the same week that we saw Congressional testimony on virtual worlds, on their potential impact on education, community, business, and communication? Technology is just enabling us to take incredibly bold steps, to connect people in entirely new ways. From 3D camera technology to spatialized voice to novel interfaces to mobile to augmented reality, we should be ready to embark on the next exponential curve, building on everything learned from Second Life over the last 8 years.

Not game over by a long shot - the party has just started!

The young guns are working with the open source and reverse engineered derivatives of Second Life to explore the full potential of avatar presence in a 3D, interactive, dynamic, networked environment. And this is just the very beginning.

On 3rd of April the OpenSim platform was load tested with the amazing Antigone (top image), who sang live in OpenSim in an event sponsored by the Sine Wave Company (boardwalk leading to the stage in OpenSim above).

And, if you were thinking that Philip Rosedale stepping down as CEO of Linden Lab was a sign that Philip was giving up a leadership role in the future of the open metaverse, think again. Philip’s continuing deep engagement with the technical and business challenges of the Open Metaverse was quite clear when he showed up and sparked off an intense discussion at the Open Source Virtual Worlds Round Table.

In this picture, Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab, Zafka Zhang of HiPiHi, Wagner James Au (author of The Making of Second Life), Tess Linden, Eilif Trondsen of SRI Consulting Business Intelligence are just some of the metarati at the round table.

Also very visible at Virtual Worlds 2008 was Cory Ondrejka. And while Cory is now consulting on a wide range of entrepreneurial, technology, and innovation projects, he has a tremendous amount of domain knowledge about the design, architecture, and scaling challenges of virtual worlds. And, as I saw Cory chatting with the new kids on the block, I found myself thinking, how interesting it was that his experience was actually on the open market at this critical juncture for open source virtual worlds. (But Cory did hint to me that he may not be as free to consult in the near future.)

Cory noted in a brief chat after the conference that there are a lot of potential stumbling blocks for Second Life competitors and the aspirant architects of the Open Metaverse face challenges linked to design (repeating failures from the late ’90s), architecture (given target market and use, are you picking the correct technologies?), and scaling (do any aspects of your design require vertical scaling? what are the choke points?). Cory will be writing up more of his thoughts about some of this on his blog, I think.

What is the architecture of the Open Metaverse?

Picture from Nicole Yankelovich of Sun Microsystems Wonderland blog post - from left to right, Remy Malan, Qwaq, Nicole, me, Jani Pirkola, realXtend, Adam Frisby OpenSim, Adam Johnson, Genkii.

The power of virtual worlds for business collaboration was the emphasis of Sun and Qwaq’s presentation during the Open Source Virtual Worlds round table. Nicole Yankelovich demoed Project Wonderland’s multiple group voice chat that cleverly simulates “watercooler chitchat” that real-world office spaces provide and impressive telephony that allows users to communicate in or out of the virtual world space by phone (See Nicole’s blog and Hamlet’s write up on GigaOm here for more). But the discussion centered on the open metaverse as something akin to the next generation internet where business, consumers, communities and the individuals and organizations of public life have the possibility to interconnect and interact as well as stay behind firewalls. And the voices for this vision came from the open source initiatives with their roots in the Linden Lab Second Life technology.

Topics discussed were:

What is the business model for Linden Lab in the open metaverse? (Philip gave the most clear and convincing explanation of this I have heard.)

How will forking not become an issue and break up the open metaverse before it has begun?

Will the open metaverse have a virtual currency?

How can truly wicked avatars using blended animation and inverse kinematics be deployed without choking performance?

How will IP be protected and will obfustication be employed?

How will asset/content development flourish in the open metaverse?

The latter question included a discussion about different models of content production and content monetization in virtual worlds including new ideas like the open source content project of Clever Zebra. For info on their upcoming vBusiness expo see here.

I relayed a couple of questions from Peter Quirk, EMC, who unfortunately couldn’t attend the conference. Peter’s questions produced some excellent discussion and responses.

1) Is the lack of useful assets to populate a world, whether it’s OpenSim, Croquet or Wonderland the number one business issue?

2) Instead of driving to a complete implementation of LSL, has OpenSim gone off in open source fragmentation land inventing their own scripting extensions which are guaranteed to cause problems going in the other direction?

If you are interested in any of these questions you may want to study this transcript that includes lengthy comments from Philip Rosedale (Linden Lab), Adam Frisby (OpenSim), David Levine (IBM) - Zha Ewry in Second Life, Jani Pirkola (realXtend), Christian Westbrook of WelloHorld, and several other key architects of the open metaverse.

What’s New?
Enterprise Applications in Open Source Virtual Worlds?

I moderated two enterprise round tables at Virtual Worlds 2008, one on Open Source Virtual Worlds and one on Enterprise Applications and the discussion at both was driven by key innovators in these areas.

The Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo in Fall 2008 will have a full on enterprise track Chris Sherman says. But the “knights of the enterprise round table” gave us taste last week of what is to come.

It was fascinating to hear Michael Osias from IBM and Oliver Goh from Eolus and who are pioneering enterprise command and control centers for building automation, green data centers, energy and facility management debate with Mark Phillips from the Simulation Business Unit of MASA Group Inc.

“What’s new?” about these enterprise applications on OpenSim, asked Mark Philips who works at the very highest end of business simulation. It is true, from the perspective of the lofty budgets that high end business simulation is accustomed to, command and control centers in 3D environments are nothing new. But Michael and Mark who have worked together in the past did come to agree that never before has this kind of software been accessible for cheap and rapid protoyping/development/and deployment in this way and with the potential to be used both inside and outside of firewalls in both in secure and massively networked environments.

Virtual worlds for children maybe a marketers utopia/cornucopia but the open metaverse is still the most exciting social and technical paradigm shift since the mass adoption of the internet.

A New Era of Business Tools and Business Process Modeling

Melanie Swan from MS Futures, one of the facilitators of the Enterprise Applications round table described how open source data visualization tools will open a new era for business tools that have given us little that is new in recent years.

And Ben Lindquist of Green Phosphor described how virtual worlds will be more than collaborative spaces they will become where business processes are modeled on an ongoing basis within the enterprise.

What I see happening is knowledge workers, analysts, middle management, spending time in a virtual space modeling the actual business that they do and doing that on a continual basis.

Imagine a network of pipes and other objects that actually represents your business processes, your organizational model, your supply chain; and you can see your people working on it in the virtual world. They’ll be able to perform “what if” scenarios - answering questions such as “what if we combine these two offices - what does it do to responsiveness”, and then when a change works well in the model, it can be implemented in the real world through integration with the ERP system.

IBM’s big news at the conference was that they would be working with Second Life behind their firewall. But with 6000 plus IBMers in Second Life and a working interest in interoperability issues, it is common knowledge that IBM gets the open metaverse and its potential. Perhaps what is more surprising than the news of Second Life being experimented with on IBM blade servers is that this collaboration hadn’t happened sooner. For more insights on what the IBM behind the firewall project is about read David Levine’s (Zha Ewry in Second Life) post here.

Transcript of Discussion at the Open Source Virtual Worlds Round Table

Philip Rosedale (LL): Blended animation and IK (Inverse Kinematics) is a really cool thing it’s also a really hard problem, I would love to see progress on that. Its got to be one of thing to make the world really ??. We wanted to do that from the very beginning. Its a daunting problem of course. You’re simultaneously having to use the animation in-world as a kind of a mechanical guide to move what is supposed to be a mechanical hand, and the problem is there’s a lot of corner cases where trying to do that with an animation kind of won’t work. In the same way that say break your arm you can’t put it anywhere, you run into this interesting problem. But I have to say that I think that is a great piece of work. It is one of the things that in my personal opinion it’s one of the key elements of believability that the avatar lacks today that we essentially have this odd situation where we have a little bit of physics going on the avatar bumping into things and getting up on a table and then all the animations are happening without any respect for the kinetics of the environment so its a very hard problem and I’d love to see some work being done on it.

We love to work on it! But it is a question of having the people..

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3D data visualization in virtual worlds, Antigone,