I was recently invited to provide my professional opinion about ExitReailty, so I spent a little time to take another look. I’m struggling with it.
On one hand, it’s full of potential. Browser-based virtual spaces are our best bet for mass adoption of 3D-internet concepts and conventions, so obviously this leads right into that paradigm. You can pop almost any webpage into the address bar, install a tiny plugin, and you’re instantly wandering around that page in a 3D environment. The environments are easy to alter, and the graphic quality of your avatar isn’t bad at all.
On the other hand, is 3D right for 2D content? There are some things that virtual worlds do really well – they give you a sense of having an experience, and allow you to participate (as Sandy Kearney of IBM has often pointed out). I don’t think we’re doing that, however, when wandering around a 3D space looking at someone’s MySpace page, or a blog (see a screenshot of mine in 3D by clicking on the thumbnail above), or even a YouTube video.
Sure, potentially you could sit down in the theater-like seats and watch a YouTube clip with a few friends… but the clips are less than 10 minutes long. After that you have to leave the room to watch another. That’s not much of an experience, and you can’t do much to participate.
So while the on-the-fly translation of 2D content into 3D is really cool, I don’t think these applications are really making ExitReality shine. There are a few things that could work:
Galleries – Well this is a bit of a no-brainer I suppose. The one thing they did really right was put a Flickr tab on the address bar. In the real world people don’t often go somewhere to read text on walls, but they sure do travel to see pictures there. To make this killer: have a single space dedicated to Flickr, organized by tags, that you could accidentally meet people interested in roughly the same kind of thing you are.
Chat Room – You might argue that it does this automatically, but a really good gathering space in 3D doesn’t look much like the automatically generated spaces we’re seeing here. People should be able to make a stand-alone space not based on any page, link web-hosted graphics to it, tie in a little streaming music, and then have the text chat available in 2D (output only) to draw people into the 3D environment. To make this killer: incorporate VOIP and webcam feeds.
Meeting Spaces – Obviously I’m biased here as I work for Clever Zebra and we’re arranging the vBusiness Expo, but easy to use 3D meeting spaces are in huge demand. If I could just get a custom-built meeting room that people could visit by clicking a button on my webpage, that would be huge. To make this killer: Design a demo for a customer support scenario, including having the customer service agent creating downloadable PDF links on the fly for the user to click on to help them find what they need.
This is off the top of my head of course, but you get the general idea. The initial applications of ExitReality are really missing the mark, but down the road, who knows. They just need to find the right application.
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?
I happened across a Wired article yesterday entitled “Spies Want a Second Life of Their Own“. Long story short: some intelligence agencies (which seem to be multiplying; a new one is mentioned in the article) want a virtual world but can’t use Second Life because it’s insecure, and because they want to be able to “roll back” the conversation to see what led them to the conclusions they’ve drawn so far.
What was interesting about it was that they were talking about rolling back blog posts, emails, social network connections and all sorts of things. None of that has anything to do with virtual worlds directly (well, except in ProtoSphere‘s case where it’s integrated, and Kaneva to a lesser extent) but, interestingly enough, there wasn’t a distinction made.
Yesterday I had mentioned a popular misconception about virtual worlds perpetuated by their fans (that Second Life can do anything), and now here’s another: that virtual worlds don’t have to be 3D environments. Guys, seriously, they do. Let’s not extend the metaphor so far that it loses meaning just so that we can congratulate ourselves for being lateral thinkers. Facebook, Myspace, and Weblo are not virtual worlds no matter how many elaborate and clever arguments are made to the contrary.
… but I digress…
What I found really strange here was that they didn’t talk about Forterra’s OLIVE. It was completely baffling. Not only are communications on the platform encrypted, but you can actually “replay” 3D interactions and watch them from different camera angles or points of view. It’s perfect for what they need it to do.
Instead, they’re looking at taking their Myspace clone (called A-Space, here’s an overview) and tacking on a 3D environment built from scratch called “A-SpaceX”. Yikes.
There are a couple of concerns here. First, security in a 3D environment is not easy. There’s a reason that very few platforms offer any kind of security guarantees in the first place. We’re talking about a lot of network traffic that has to travel quickly to be useful. Keeping that secure is something programmers often overlook when trying to get things working right.
Of even greater concern here is that you will always have security gaps if you add major components after the fact. The only way to make sure that communication between the 3D environment and 2D webspace is secure is to have an expert in the 3D space make sure it’s all compliant with web security standards. If you’re inventing something from scratch, there are no experts.
MellaniuM is a small company that’s representative of a few hundred unsung hero companies of the metaverse, in my opinion. They fill a niche with virtual worlds technology in a way that can have a serious return on investment.
In their case, they create renderings of real-world constructions. You can walk around them, see how they work, and get a feel for what it would be like in physical space. I don’t have to tell you what the implications of that are for engineers, architects, designers, and a host of other professional sectors. They caused a big stir awhile back with a rendering of a furnace – engineers in the metallurgy sector were extremely grateful to be able to see from the inside how everything was supposed to fit together!
Right now they’re actively pursuing virtual renderings of classic architecture, which perhaps isn’t anything new. What I found interesting today, however, is the latest video that featured renderings first in Second Life, and then in the old 2004 Unreal engine. Check it out:
MELLANIUM:ARCHAEOLOGY – Flythroughs of the Theatre of Pompey and the Titanic Environments as created in Second Life and Mellanium’s “Bridge from CAD to UNREAL”
You know, for fans of Second Life this has to be a bit depressing. With the constant push for updates to the Second Life system, years later the whole thing still can’t handle any kind of draw distance and isn’t nearly as smooth as something from way back in 2004. I asked Joe Rigby of MellaniuM about it, and he said that the Unreal installation was rendering that way because it was all on the hard drive.
Technical details aside, something becomes clear here: Second Life has limits to what you can do with it. Second Life’s fanbase does it a massive disservice by trying to push it as the be-all end-all of platforms, and when it fails (because how can one platform really do everything?) the press has a field day.
I guess I was a bit misleading with the title: it’s not about this vs. that, it’s about using the right tools for the right application.
Of course, you already knew that. That’s partially why we’re holding the vBusiness Expo in Forterra’s OLIVE this time around, and why as a company Clever Zebra is officially platform agnostic. MellaniuM’s video, however, is a really clear illustration of why that is, and what the possibilities are elsewhere.
I was recently invited to provide my professional opinion about ExitReailty, so I spent a little time to take another look. I’m struggling with it.
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 