Caleb Booker

I tend to shy away from linking Terra Nova articles. They’re like flame-bait for intellectuals, and who really has the time for that? This latest from Bruce Damer (pictured, right), entitled Virtually Eternal: A Positive Pathway to a Healthy and Sustainable Virtual Worlds Industry?, is a real gem. It starts off as a general overview of the development of the net and virtual worlds, and makes fun comparisons to early adopters of the automobile and the old Hollywood studio system. He was definitely on to something with his DOS/Windows reference. I’m not sure I got the Max Headroom meets Back To The Future reference, and I’m not 100% in agreement with his conclusions, but it’s a good read.

Anyhow… I had a point in there somewhere… ah, right: you owe Bob Metcalfe a debt of gratitude.

In the late 1970s, Bob Metcalfe, the co-inventor of Ethernet at Xerox hit the road promoting TCP/IP as an open networking standard. He faced an uphill battle against entrenched technologies but he prevailed and we live in Metcalfe’s world today. Metcalfe’s force of personality, some lucky accidents, and a healthy dose of self interest pushed TCP/IP over the tipping point by the early 90s, just in time for the spread of the Internet to the masses.

Stop for a second and really think about what TCP/IP is: a standard low-level way of passing traffic around the ‘net. Everything rides on top of it: instant messages, email, virtual worlds, the oh-so-trendy Facebook… it’s the Internet’s lifestream. Thank you Mr. Metcalfe.

You’re probably wondering: why is this important right now? Well, right now virtual worlds are all custom built from the ground up. Few of them use any kind of common standard, making any kind of transmission of data from one world to the next extremely awkward if not impossible. Everything is, perhaps inadvertently, locked down.

Now, that’s not to say there aren’t some incredibly useful platforms. The fact that we’re using Forterra’s OLIVE for the vBusiness Expo, and managed to jerry-rig Second Life into doing it in the past, is testimonial enough that some great things can be done right now without anything changing.

What we’re running into now I suppose is that we want some kind of virtual worlds standard that’s as wide-open as TCP/IP is. All it would have to do is pass 3D information on quickly and with some error-checking. Other standards (like a standard avatar format) could be built alongside or on top of it, but what we really need to get grid-wide 3D is a standard for the streaming transmission of 3D data. The problem is, nobody can agree on one.

Some would argue that there are standards floating around out there that would serve already, but whether or not they exist isn’t the point. The point is that everybody needs to get on board, and the Internet isn’t always conducive to consensus. What we need is an evangelist that will tour from one company to another, either physically or in avatar format, and preach an open standard as Metcalfe did with TCP/IP.

So, are you up to it? Are you a Metcalfe? Is your company in a position to make you one?

Psst… Sun’s Darkstar… I’m looking at you!

Posted on July 7th, 2008 under futurism. RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.