Neogence is on stealth mode with an immersive mobile augmented reality platform – “tools, sdk, and infrastructure plus some applications.” They are probably six months away from YouTubing anything according to CEO, Robert Rice.  But Robert rustled up this pic for me – a Google street view of Neogence R&D labs: “the patio on the lower left is where I do a lot of pacing and smoking my pipe and the porch and office upstairs is where  a lot of  meetings have been held.”

Robert Rice (@RobertRice ), CEO of Neogence, recently tweeted:

I’m changing my name to Robert Mobile Ubiquitous Geospatial Augmented Rice. I’m betting on radical changes in next 18 months.

Although Robert’s new AR platform is still under wraps, I think you will get a good idea of what direction he is going in from this interview (full text at end of  this post). Robert is the author of “MMO Evolution” and is a key developer and thought leader in persistent immersive environments, simulations, virtual worlds and massively multiplayer games as well as large scale communities and social networking.

It is OMG finally, at least, for minimally immersive but truly useful AR.

Since the launch of Android a new generation of useful augmented reality applications like Wikitude are emerging.

After the last NYC Tech Meetup, my  friend Nathan Freitas,  (@NatDefreitas),  or rather Nathan Mobile Meets Social Freitas, demoed for me a cool graffiti app  he has developed on Android.   You leave a marker for your graffiti so other people can find view/add their own – a nice primal experience like pissing on the lamp post to let your pack know where you’ve been.  Also the graffiti app taps into a long history of  NYC street culture around tagging and graffiti art.  For more cool mobile projects Nathan is working on – Vote Report and data collection for mass events, a guide to pubs and nightlife in New York City, and more, see his blog, “Nathan’s OpenIdeals. With Camera, GPS, compass, and accelerometer, and APIs on Android for temperature, light meters, (no hardware yet), Nathan says Android:

“seems to be the platform most likely to socialize the idea that sensor data could be a piece of every application.”

As Nathan is fond of saying:

The compass is a killer app enabler!

Also see OpenIntents for some interesting Android Sensor projects.

Wikitude was one of Thomas Wrobel’s two top AR milestones for 2008 (see Gamesalfreso):

Wikitude I think. Seems the first released, useful, AR software.

AR Geisha doll is also a remarkable breakout for AR – but useful, nah.

I asked Robert if he also thought Wikitude and AR Geisha doll as  significant breakthroughs:

Yes,  these are among the first attempts to get away from the novelty of simply rendering a 3D object based on a marker and making it interesting.

Remember, one of the biggest risks that AR has, is being branded as “novelty”, which means “cool for five minutes but ultimately a waste of time.” I think we have a ways to go before something is truly useful, but as 2009 progresses we should start seeing some effort here. I’d guess 2010 before something really useful comes out…at least something practical.

Now, having said that, I should say that I expect entertainment and games to take the lead (as usual), although there are a few companies really trying to leverage AR and video/graphics compositing for marketing (brochures) and location based methods (kiosks, large screen projections, etc.)

So when is it “OMG finally!” for massively multiuser augmented reality?

The picture above is from benjapo’s portfolio on istockphoto – also see the istock video here.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang (who weighed in recently on the twitter-baby debates – see my KickBee Posterous blog) challenges design assumptions for augmented reality that take as a given the user’s desire for numerous private enhancements to their reality.

Alex points out less will probably be more so that enhancements do not impinge on shared experience.  See his write up of a talk he gave at the Royal College of Art, “and the end of my own private Shibuya.” Photo below by Stéfan, “Karaoke in Shibuya“

Part of the pleasure of these streetscapes is precisely that they’re collectively experienced, rather than individual visions: for even a brief period, we share with other postmodern, globe-hopping flaneurs and expatriates and temporary natives the light of the ABC-Mart sign and storefront.

It is collective experience of enhanced, augmented, virtual or real experiences that interests me too. This is one of the reasons I find Pachube and the EEML project of Haque Design and Research so interesting.

Extended Environments Markup Language (EEML), a protocol for sharing sensor data between remote responsive environments, both physical and virtual. It can be used to facilitate direct connections between any two environments; it can also be used to facilitate many-to-many connections as implemented by the web service Pachube, which enables people to tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices and spaces around the world.

“Distinctions between virtual and real are as quaint and outmoded as distinctions between mind and body” (Usman Haque)

Usman Haque (founder of Pachube and Haque Design and Research) points out this is an underlying premise of his work – and augmented reality (full interview coming up soon!).

The pictures above show the Haque Design project, Remote:

‘Remote’ connects together two spaces, one in Boston the other in Second Life, and treats them as a single contiguous environment, bound together by the internet so that things that occur in one space affect things that happen in the other and vice versa – remotely controlling each other.

There was a discussion in twitter recently about how the terms like Second Life, Exit Reality, Virtual Worlds are misleading and outmoded. As Robert pointed out we need:

one word please…that sums up virtual and/or augmented reality, interactive, immersive, virtual worlds, mmorpgs, simulations, etc… also, I really don’t like the term “augmented reality” or “mixed reality”. Neither is all that great. And NO “matrix” or “metaverse” please

Robert argues strongly that there is a stultification both in virtual world technology – much of what we call virtual world technology was already, basically, where it is now in the mid 90’s. And MMOGs have devolved into gameplay design “that emphasizes the single player experience and does nothing to take advantage of the potential of the massively connected internet.”

Robert suggested I take a cruise through a new Virtual Space -  CoolIris to find some good pictures for this post (note the partnership between CoolIris and Seesmic to Streamline Video Blogging. I added the Cooliris Plugin to Firefox and typed Augmented Reality into search and soon I was cruising a highway of images and links. The Road Map image grabbed my attention (see below). It shows the continua that the Metaverse RoadMap authors thought are likely to influence the ways in which the Metaverse unfolds. It is “a map of the spectrum of technologies and applications ranging from augmentation to simulation; and the spectrum ranging from intimate (identity-focused)external (world-focused)”

Quite to my surprise, when I clicked out of CoolIris to the source for the image, I found it had been drawn from a post I wrote in May 2007, Hybridized Digital/Physical Worlds: Where Pop and Corporate Cultures Mingle. My post talks about a number of hybridization experiments that were bringing together lifelogging, sensors everywhere, simulation, virtual worlds, and augmentation.

The striking difference from 2007 to now is that we have definitely moved on from mere experimentation. And the poles of the continua intimate/extimate, augmentation/simulation as expressed in the Metaverse Roadmap are now becoming entwined (note the picture above seems to be slightly different to the one used in the road map as published here – perhaps I had an early version?)

“Augmented Reality is not just about overlaying data…” (Robert Rice)

The screenshot above is from TotalImmersions video demoing Augmented Reality with 3D Cell Phones. Also see video of their immersive games, and FutureScope kiosks here and here.

Gamesalfreso noted that Will Wright, delivered the best augmented reality quote of the year. When describing AR as the way of the future for games, Will Wright said:

“Games could increase our awareness of our immediate environment, rather than distract us from it”.

Robert points out in this interview the term Augmented Reality itself has become associated with a very limited understanding of what “enhancing your specific reality,” is really about. Robert notes:

it is inherently about who YOU are, WHERE you are, WHAT you are doing, WHAT is around you, etc.

When I talk about AR, I try to expand the definition a little bit. Usually, when you talk to someone about augmented reality, the first thing that comes to mind is overlaying 3D graphics on a video stream. I think though, that it should more properly be any media that is specific to your location and the context of what you are doing (or want to do)…augmenting or enhancing your specific reality.

In this sense, anything that at least knows who you are (your ID, mobile phone #, etc.), where you are (GPS coord or a specific place like a cafe), and gives you relevant data, information, or media = augmented reality. Sure, you can make things more interactive or immersive, but that is the minimum.

So, in this case, yes, I think there will be networked applications in the next 18 months…mostly things that are enhanced by friends lists (you are here, your friend is over there). These will be *application specific*. My team at Neogence is already going beyond this, building a platform and infrastructure for other applications to be developed on…all networked through the same backbone. Now, in this context (the science fiction AR that we all dream about), no I do not see anyone else trying to leap a generation or two ahead of the industry to build a massively multiuser shared AR space. Expect to see things like multi-user AR games, virtual pets, kiosk marketing, magic book, “gee whiz” presentations (tradeshow booths, entertainment parks, etc.), and so forth.

Goggle’s Are Not The Secret Sauce…

AR Cat left and Robert Rice right

What has come to be associated with the term Augmented Reality, in the popular imagination – an idea of 3D graphics projected over markers that has been forever waiting for the advent of “wicked next generation transparent wearable displays” – nirvana for augmented reality. While such displays may be nirvana for AR (and they could be with us in less than twenty four months), Goggles are not the “secret sauce” of AR as Robert points out.

All the glasses are, is another display device. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you are looking at an LCD monitor, an IPhone, a head mounted display, or a pair of wicked next generation transparent wearable displays that magically draw directly on your retinas.

The real tricky stuff is what happens on the backend…making it all persistent, massively multiuser, intelligent, interoperable, realistic, etc. etc.

There has been quite a buzz going around about the new Vuzix Eyewear, and recently Robert talked with Vuzix and checked The Wrap 920AV eyewear out:

Vuzix is not alone in pursuing the ultimate in hardware, at least as far as wearable displays. However, I think they are much farther than the rest of the pack in vision, roadmap, and execution. They have put together a team that has a sense of urgency and ambition that will blow the industry away. After talking to them, I got the feeling that they really know what they are doing and there is a lot of mind blowing stuff in their pipeline. I’m sure they are one of the few companies that really gets it and has a clear vision of the future. Definitely my first choice to work with.

Hybrid Augmented/Virtual Reality

Cory Ondrejka posted this picture of the anybots telepresence robot and “congrats to Trevor Blackwell and the rest of the Anybots team on the launch of QA at CES.”  Cory (one of the founders and former CTO of Second Life) also made some predictions for Virtual Worlds, some optimistic and some less so, including “the increasing need to be able to diversify the Second Life product offering to begin truly rebuilding the code base.”

Robert is unabashedly irritated with the state of play in Virtual Worlds and MMOGS:

Unless both industries (Virtual Worlds and MMOGs) have some serious upheaval or radical new approaches, they will quickly be eclipsed by AR, which will eventually evolve into something hybrid..AR/VR depending on your level of access and hardware.

I’d like to see someone grab an engine like Offset, Crytek, HERO, or Unreal 3, and smack on a fat MMO server infrastructure (Eve or Bigworld)…toss in the right tools, and you would see a revolution and renaissance occur at the same time in the virtual world space. All the puzzle pieces are there, just no one is putting them together the right way.

I did just find out that Nortel’s WebAlive is powered by the Unreal 3 engine. You can try WebAlive out here.

Robert points out how rare it has become to see people really push virtual worlds technology and MMOGs into entirely new directions.  Although, of course, there are exceptions.  I managed to engage some interest from Robert in the possibilities the opensource modular architecture of OpenSim opens up, and the augmented reality experiments from Georgia Tech with Second Life (screenshot below) got praise from Robert for trying to do something new. (Georgia tech have also put out a virtual pet app for the iphone ).

But while Robert clearly has zero patience for virtual world technology which he sees stuck in the mid nineties, he notes:

the innovative and wonderful stuff about SL isn’t SL, it is what people are doing and creating on their own with terrible tools *IN* SL [Second Life].

The immersive mobile augmented reality platform Robert is building, he hopes, will generate this kind of user creativity but with 21st century tools.

So is it “OMG” finally for the Augmented Reality we have dreamed about?

According to Robert:

It really boils down to a markerless solution and a good application.

In the interview below we cover a number of topics including business models for Augmented Reality, e.g., how business models based on micro-transactions and virtual goods will translate to Augmented Reality.

Many of the challenges to becoming mainstream faced by virtual worlds  are similar to the challenges AR must overcome. Robert discusses these including the interface/gui that is a critical element for AR, solving the riddle of one world or many, patent wars in Virtual Worlds and Augmented Reality, the role of Augmented Reality in the future of sustainable computing, and what interoperability is about.

The Back Story for AR/VR…

In case you want to get up to speed on the required background reading for  Augmented Reality. This is Robert’s required reading list and Denno Coil is an absolute must see (feel free to add to this list in the comments, please).

“If you want to see the things that have inspired our vision of what we want to build, check out:

* Dream Park by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes
* Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
* Spook Country by William Gibson
* Halting State by Charles Stross
* The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
* Donnerjack by Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold
* Otherland by Tad Williams
* Neuromancer by William Gibson
* Idoru by Wiliam Gibson
* Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

and watch the whole anime of Denno Coil (subbed NOT dubbed!)”

Screenshot from Denno Coil from Concrete Badger.

Interview With Robert Rice

Tish Shute: I am glad to hear that you are working on this [an immersive mobile augmented reality platform]!

Robert Rice: We switched gears from MMO stuff about a year ago and we are finally getting some traction. It is very hard doing anything in this economy right now, but we found an opportunity to take AR to a new level beyond what you see on youtube. AR is still too “cute” and novelty. We don’t want to play around.

Tish Shute: I like Wikitude ‘cos it even manages to do something useful!

Robert Rice: Yeah, useful = traction. Now that we are getting near a prototype we are starting to get a lot of interest even though we are still technically way under the radar.

Tish Shute: r u funded?

Robert Rice: privately funded, some revenues from an early license, and ongoing discussions with several institutional investors. So, we have some funding, but nothing spectacular just yet.

Tish Shute: are you just developing an AR platform?

Robert Rice: hrm, sort of, but not just that. By platform I mean tools, sdk, and infrastructure plus some applications. The idea is to build something that facilitates everyone else making cool things and useful applications for different industries/sectors

Tish Shute: Yes that is the cool thing to do but isn’t that hard to fund!

(Robert grins) Well, that depends on the business model. We’ve got that figured out. I’d be absolutely happy if everyone and their brother were making applications on our stuff that gives us an edge on market penetration/saturation. There are plenty examples that prove the model. If you give people free and easy to use tools, they will run with it. ARtoolkit for example, has tons of people making nifty things and posting videos on youtube that has pushed them to the forefront as THE AR middleware to use right now, or heck, look at youtube free service, and they dominate video sharing.  Sure there will be a lot of “noise”, but there will also be a lot of “signal” that will rise to the top, facilitating and enabling is creating value in its own right.

Tish Shute: But how do you expect to monetize?

Robert Rice: There are a good half a dozen ways to monetize AR or an AR platform.

Tish Shute: What are your top 3?

Robert Rice: hrm, microtransactions, localized mobile advertising, and enterprise solutions (visualization)

Tish Shute: Do you think the consumer market will give the lead?

Robert Rice: I’m not sure. We are getting people from academia, intelligence, defense, border security, and some corporate types knocking on our door already, and pretty aggressively. It may be that those sectors push AR before consumer entertainment really kicks off.

But going back to a discussion we had earlier – yes working with “no markers” is a big deal.

Tish Shute: Can you talk about what you are doing there or is it still under wraps?

Robert Rice: I can say that between some university tech transfer and some of our own proprietary stuff, we are using some fairly common visual tracking technology. if you are really plugged into the AR scene, you will know there are probably half a dozen visual tracking methods out there. We just looked for the best one, licensed it for commercial use, and then started working our magic. This is a very small piece of the overall effort, but worth noting.

The downside with working with university tech is that it is usually based on research, incomplete, and not wrapped up in a nice commercial package on the upside, it can be a good start to build on.

Tish Shute: As you know I am very interested in “technology that matters” in particular tech that can help us accomplish the urgent goal of sustainable living.

Robert Rice:: oh, I’m pretty keen on sustainable living as well…after I sell off a few companies and have money of my own, I’m going to get into arcologies
❦
Robert grins

The interesting thing with the visual stuff combined with our other tech, is that we can make things multiuser, persistent, dynamic, and mobile.
The markers (fiducials) are really really limiting outside of basic applications. You can’t really plaster everyone and everything with a marker.  And they are, by nature, static (even if they are animated or whatever).

Also… our stuff works indoors and outdoors even without a GPS connection.
❦
Robert grins

Tish Shute: Now that does sound interesting!

Robert Rice: Yeah, with visual, you don’t need a compass or accelerometers either. Less hardware : )

You start with wifi triangulation or gps coord to get a “brute” location, and then you use the visual stuff for down to the meter accuracy and that by nature, gives you your orientation and positioning.

Tish Shute: Wow this is beginning to sound very interesting!

Robert Rice: Once you have that, it doesn’t matter where you go, it continues to track and continually refines areas you have been before. We’ve spent the last year figuring all this out. There are so many problems and obstacles that are going to be developing in the future for anyone trying to do what we are, but we have already discovered solutions.

oh, visual tracking = gesture based interfaces too that’s going to take some work, but its doable.  The real pain in the ass there isn’t the actual tracking, it is in the interface design.

That’s something that almost every AR company, venture, and research program is missing out on entirely. They are so focused on making cute things with markers.  They are missing the larger problems of AR Spam, interface, iconography, GUI, metaphor, interoperability, privacy, identity.

Tish Shute: So how are you dealing with all that!!

Robert Rice: We took the backwards approach of trying to think where we want things to be in ten years (and we read all the cool books…Vinge, Stephenson, Gibson, etc.) and then we spent time trying to think of what the potential problems are….like AR spam. Its bad enough when a giant penis flies by in second life, we don’t want that to happen in a global wireless AR platform.

Tish Shute: Do you have a prototype yet?

Robert Rice: hrm, 6 months away from youtubing something. Problem has been slow funding, which equals slow development. We also don’t want to show our cards too soon…too many potential competitors out there.

❦
Robert grins

Tish Shute: when you say microtransactions what is the business potential there?

Robert Rice: hrm last year I think, $1.5B was spent on virtual items. That’s games and virtual worlds. That should hit $5B in a couple of years. That’s basically people buying and selling things like WoW gold or items in SL or whatever. microtransactions, is basically the same thing, but in AR space.

Why couldn’t a 3D artist make a wicked animated 3D dragon, and then sell it to someone else? With AR, you could sit it on your shoulder. With a good scripting engine, you could train it to do stuff. Thats what I want to enable.

tools + sdk + platform = enabling people to make and create. Add in a commerce level (microtransactions) and wala.

Tish Shute: At the moment all of these virtual goods are very platform specific, is that a problem for you?

Robert Rice: Not at all. This is at a higher level. You have to switch mental models when you talk about what AR could or should be. For example, lets contrast the web and virtual worlds. For every virtual world you go to, you have to download a whole new client. Imagine if that model was applied to the web… you would need a brand new browser for every website you went to. That is just so…wrong.

It’s the same thing for AR…people are thinking about it with the same mental and business models and development philosophies as virtual worlds or web.  There are some things and aspects that work fine, but not everything.

Virtual worlds, are, by nature, necessarily different and walled gardens. The idea of 100% open and interoperable virtual worlds is a red herring…it sounds good but in practice it is a really dumb idea.

Tish Shute: I was wondering if you had a way to leverage all the 3D content already created ‘cos that would jump start things in AR wouldn’t it?

Robert Rice: Oh yeah, that’s easy. They all use the same polygons. Any virtual item in any game or virtual world is likely created with 3D studio or maya or something similar would be easy to convert and use.

Tish Shute: So people could bring their WoW weapons into your system?

Robert Rice: Not legally, but sure. Its just a 3D model with a texture.  It doesn’t matter if you use corel draw or photoshop or paintshop pro….or one screwdriver or another. Part of my team’s advantage, is that we are all experienced in MMORPG and virtual world design and development. We know the tools, the tech, and what works and what doesn’t.

Tish Shute: But some of the 3D content created in the social worlds is what has most value to people.

Robert Rice: Right, and that can be exported out easily.

Tish Shute: But back to “real” life applications. Is you platform really markerless?

Robert Rice: Yes.  marker = printed icon or glyph, also known as a fiducial

Tish Shute: But u must have some marker?

Robert Rice: hrm, more accurately, you need a point of reference.

Visual tracking has been around for more than a decade.  Lots of work for robots and other sectors.

Robert Rice: But isn’t the specificity of reference n terms of RL applications a vital key, for example, for a database of things?

Robert grin That is a different problem…tracking, registration, mapping, positioning, etc. That question has to do with mapping which is related to visual tracking, but not the same thing. We have a rather unique approach to some of this that I can’t discuss (patent pending).

Tish Shute: But for example, to create an augmented natural history of food – say I want to point at the slab of meat on my plate and know where that cow came from, what feed lot how it was treated etc

Robert Rice: That is not possible without ubiquitous nanotechnology. Shall I explain?

Tish Shute: Yes please!

Robert Rice: Ok, lets step back a minute and turn that burger back into a cow… the first problem (of this particular situation) is differentiating from one cow to another since most cows look alike, you can either attempt to discriminate visually (cow patterns) or use a much simpler option, like giving each cow a rfid chip in their bell, or hoof

Now, most people would try to figure out how to jam all sorts of info in the rfid chip, which sounds like a good idea, but isn’t, the trick would be to simply use the rfid to store a unique identifier with is then linked to a database elsewhere, or hoof.

That database should continually be updated with whatever relevant information you need so as you get close with your AR laptop, wearable displays, or embedded brain chip, you get the identifier broadcast, then you get the info downloaded to you, and it “sticks” to the cow with the generic visual tracking (object following, even simple bounding box is sufficient for a slow moving cow)

So, up to that point, you can get tons of information about that specific cow, that cow population (remember, AR is not just about overlaying data…it is inherently about who YOU are, WHERE you are, WHAT you are doing, WHAT is around you, etc.) Tie in data visualisation and some farmer tools and all sorts of other things happen. Now, lets move the timeline ahead a bit.

The butcher gets the cow and does his handiwork…because we know all the info about the cow, all of the meat can be properly labeled and marked. Ideally, with a UPC code or a unique glyph (somewhat problematic depending on how many unique glyphs you can create) so, while you are in the grocery store, you can access the relevant shopping data…age of cow, state of origin, type of feed, how many spots, how much body fat, which butcher, whatever not because of what is inside the package, but the package itself.

Getting back to your hamburger, the problem is that it is a burger…there is nothing to distinguish that burger from another one at the table…unless you stuck a rfid chip in it or splattered it with ink and a unique glyph, or maybe a special one of a kind plate.

However, a properly designed AR system could say “hey! that/s a hamburger! and I know I am at Fat Daddy’s Burger Joint in Raleigh North Carolina on Glenwood Avenue, and I know that they cook their burgers this particular way, and their meat supplier is those guys over there, and they usually get their cow meat from a farm out in Utah”

With ubiquitous nanomites or whatever, then its not that far out to consider edible nanos that are in the meat and that broad cast info so a slab of meat can tell you about itself and broadcast that to the general public.

Tish Shute: What useful scenarios can we create without the nanomites?

Robert Rice: If it wasn’t a burger or a consumable organic, the scenario changes.

Tish Shute: What is the time scale on nanomites?

Robert Rice: ehhhhhhh 20 years minimum if we are lucky. They sound good on paper, but there is a whole book worth of problems and why they are so far off…as consumer grade, all over the place, type of stuff.

Tish Shute: Did you see the Nokia Home Control center?

Robert Rice: Yes, I saw the Nokia stuff.

AR for sensors, like security systems, temperature control, etc. all become “sources of data” that a AR system can visualize. So yes, thats easily doable. You could do that in a short period of time with some half decent engineers.

The trick of what Nokia is doing is aggregating sensor data from a building/home/facility, mashing it together, and sending the mobile device alerts and data visualization conceptually rather simple, but no one has done it right or well yet.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Nokia pulled it off.

Tish Shute: yes and if they do and someone does an AR interface to it that would be an inflection point for AR?

Robert Rice: In a roundabout way, yes. You could get data directly from your house, or get it through your mobile device and in either case, use the AR for visualization and control.

The interface/gui is a critical element for AR. That is one of the areas where it, as an industry, risks doing a bad job and turning into just a fad or another novelty like VR.  Virtual worlds have been struggling with that for a while, but MMORPGs have had the effect of extending their life cycle

Tish Shute: Yes VWs have not solved the interface problem.

Robert Rice: The interface is one of their problems yes. Most virtual worlds are stuck in 1996/98

Tish Shute: If AR  is inherently about who YOU are, WHERE you are, WHAT you are doing, WHAT is around you, etc. seems that it is the ideal interface for home control?

Robert Rice: Well for home control, you must know:

1) Who am I? Am I authorized to know this information? Am I a guest?

2) Where am I? Is this my house? or someone elses?

3) What am I doing? Do I want to make all the doors lock? Turn on or off lights? Open the garage door? Trigger the security alarm?

So the same questions apply

I’d say that all virtual worlds are stuck in the mid 90s. They are at least a decade behind the game worlds…in technology, design, implementation, architecture, etc. etc. In my opinion, things like Second Life are shameful in how they are presented as state of the art, innovative, ground breaking, new, wonderful, and world changing.

But thats another topic of conversation : )

Tish Shute: Well for me the contribution of VWs is the presence enabled real time interaction with application (as 3D info machine) and context with other people.

Robert Rice: Oh,there is no doubt that they are greatly useful and have a phenomenal amount of potential.

They *could* be all those things I just said that SL isn’t…the problem is that they are either just existing, or they are meandering around without any real focus or direction. They aren’t evolving.

Even MMORPGs are losing their way and beginning to stagnate terribly

Tish Shute: yes I agree

Robert Rice: But, AR has the potential to change a lot of things.

Im sure you have seen the yellowbook commercials? The technologies you are seeing here are doable in hrm, a year or less maybe. The tricky part is the interactivity and AI…that is, the content. Everything else isn’t a problem. The avatar there could be photorealistic or stylized like a WoW character.

You could do that to some degree with markers for registration but dynamically changing the content linked to those markers is a little weird

(by the way, for the record, I like markers just fine, I just don’t think they are useful for real-world mobile applications)

I also think that the guys that want to dust the planet with miniature rfid chips are on crack and are going about it the wrong way

Tish Shute: A high level of interactivity is hard though. Isn’t it? Even in VWs it is very limited.

Robert Rice: it depends if you can track what the user is doing, and interpret that properly. Interactive is also a very lose term.

Clicking a button and making a light blink could be considered interactive.

Tish Shute: In VWs a high level of interactivity would  be to wield a virtual hammer and have a real nail go in! is physics part of the problem?

Robert Rice: physics aren’t difficult, plenty of middleware out there for it. The problem with that isnt so much the physics as much as it is the scale and purpose

Tish Shute: well for robotics?

Robert Rice: that gets into a conversation about meshes, textures, and volumetric collision detection and stuff

Tish Shute: virtual robotics?

Robert Rice: You mean teleremote/telepresence of real robots?

Tish Shute: yes!

Robert Rice: ah, for that, you need some tactile feedback and some other stuff – doable, but insanely difficult. That’s why you don’t see a whole lot of remote controlled surgery robots all over the place.

They do exist…

Tish Shute: Will AR contribute to sustainable living by freeing us from some of our energy hogging devices?

Robert Rice: AR will ultimately encourage energy saving and recycling. where did I leave a light on at? where is the nearest trash can? what is the UV index outside today?

Yes, computers are energy hogs, but as we start seeing larger SSD drives, more efficient CPUs (even if the number of cores increases in multiples), and so on, the power will go down.

Also, think about this…wearable displays potentially use less energy than LCD monitors on your desk.

Tish Shute: Yes I should pick the brains of my intel chums on energy saving!

Robert Rice: Getting rid of the monitor and switching to solid state drives will save an assload of power. Yes, I said assload.

Tell your intel chums to quit screwing around with single core mobile CPUs. We need multiple cores, that are smaller, faster, and use less power.

Tish Shute: Is AR is the sustainable future of VW and MMOGs?

Robert Rice: The fun stuff will happen when they are both integrated in some fashion.

Tish Shute: So perhaps this is why the Georgia guys are thinking in trying to combine AR and SL (see video here).

Robert Rice: That first video was pretty damn cool. It just pains me that they are using SL for it. And omg, all those markers on the table.

Although, I could care less about seeing my SL avatar on my coffee table. I would rather see an avatar representing ME in the real world, moving around in a virtual world that is a “to scale” replica of the real world. That is MUCH more interesting and innovative.

But even if I don’t like where they are going, or that they are using SL, the important thing is that they are doing something and forging ahead. I have a massive amount of respect for anyone, private, government, or academic, that is doing that.

And yes, the door (or window, or looking glass) has to work both ways for maximum potential, at least, that’s what Id like to see. They don’t *have* to, but it would be rather cool.

And going back to sustainability, AR has the potential to make monitors generally obsolete, laptops too. That’s a lot of power hungry devices with all sorts of metals and batteries inside.

But, even if the tech was absolutely crazy awesome right this minute, it would take a little while for consumer adoption.

Tish Shute: But AR unleashes the mobile device?

Robert Rice: Yes, AR is going to be built on powerful mobile devices for the near future, eventually embedded comps in clothing and whatnot. But that is a ways off

Entertainment is going to be the first huge driver.

Tish Shute: So people will get used to having a pet virtual dragon on their shoulder first?

Robert Rice: Yes, virtual dragon is way cool, easy tech for games, and can eventually be leveraged into a smart agent which becomes a practical application…agent based contextual search, etc. Yes, entertainment will also drive people to get used to the tech

Tish Shute: Oh thanks for turning me on to gamesalfresco!

Robert Rice: Ive noticed that the good stuff usually gets linked to there. They don’t list my blog, but that’s what I get for staying under the radar and not posting often. But anyway, gamesalfresco is the first place I send people that need a crash course in AR. Great site, great owner.

Tish Shute: So are you in agreement with Thomas Wrobel’s positioning of  Wikitude and AR Geisha doll as being significant milestones for AR?

Robert Rice: Yes,  these are among the first attempts to get away from the novelty of simply rendering a 3D object based on a marker and making it interesting.

Remember, one of the biggest risks that AR has, is being branded as “novelty”, which means “cool for five minutes but ultimately a waste of time.” I think we have a ways to go before something is truly useful, but as 2009 progresses we should start seeing some effort here. I’d guess 2010 before something really useful comes out…at least something practical.

Now, having said that, I should say that I expect entertainment and games to take the lead (as usual), although there are a few companies really trying to leverage AR and video/graphics compositing for marketing (brochures) and location based methods (kiosks, large screen projections, etc.)

Tish Shute: Many people would say SnowCrash (metaverse) is now and Halting State (AR) is ten years from now. But you are seeing a development timeline for some popular AR apps in the next 18 months?

Robert Rice: Anyone that says SnowCrash is -now- is living in a box. Virtual Worlds, Virtual Reality, and immersive tech in general stopped innovating in the mid 90s. I’m continually flabbergasted at the number of people that think that things like Second Life are state-of-the-art or innovative. You might as well try to market a walkman as cutting edge, even though we have IPods out there.

Id like to see someone grab an engine like offset, crytek, hero, or unreal 3, and smack on a fat mmo server infrastructure (eve or big world)…toss in the right tools, and you would see a revolution and renaissance occur at the same time in the virtual world space. All the puzzle pieces are there, just no one is putting them together the right way.

Tish Shute: Why doesn’t anyone do that?

Robert Rice: Its not cheap, people will only fund a copy of something that exists already, people fear change and innovation, etc, The list goes on. The right money goes to the wrong people all the time.

Alternatively stated, there is a lot of “right idea, wrong implementation”

MMORPGs carried the torch and have made huge strides on the technology front, but have devolved in design. More often than not the gameplay emphasizes the single player experience and does nothing to take advantage of the potential of the massively connected internet.

Unless both industries have some serious upheaval or radical new approaches, they will quickly be eclipsed by AR, which will eventually evolve into something hybrid..AR/VR depending on your level of access and hardware.

But yes, I’d say that the next 18 months are going to be very interesting with a lot of money being thrown around, new ventures, and plenty of content/applications. I expect most of this will be centered on single user AR experienced through a mobile device with a screen (iphone, android, etc.). I expect that there will be a significant boost after Vuzix releases some of their wearable *transparent* displays, putting Microvision back into the “has potential but is too quiet” position.

Tish Shute: AR conjurs an image in many people’s minds of dreadful head gear!

Robert Rice: Yes, it is either transparent wearable displays (in eyeglass formfactor) or nothing. HMDs with miniature LCD or OLED displays are good for streaming video, but for the mobile ubiquitous AR we all dream about, it has to be something that looks and feels like a pair of Oakleys.

I should also mention that several different types and modes of AR are going to find themselves being defined and refined over the next two years as we continue to blaze new trails, establish a lexicon (we keep borrowing terms from games, VR, virtual worlds, mmorpgs), and really work out the how as well as the why.

Even though the idea of AR has been around for a long time, the technology is just beginning to emerge, and very few people are even looking far enough ahead to figure out the problems and solutions that the tech creates. Really, who is thinking about how to deal with AR spam right now?

Tish Shute: Do you see any successful networked AR applications emerging in the next 18 months?

Robert Rice: Yes and no.

When I talk about AR, I try to expand the definition a little bit. Usually, when you talk to someone about augmented reality, the first thing that comes to mind is overlaying 3D graphics on a video stream. I think though, that it should more properly be any media that is specific to your location and the context of what you are doing (or want to do)…augmenting or enhancing your specific reality.

In this sense, anything that at least knows who you are (your ID, mobile phone #, etc.), where you are (GPS coord or a specific place like a cafe), and gives you relevant data, information, or media = augmented reality. Sure, you can make things more interactive or immersive, but that is the minimum.

So, in this case, yes, I think there will be networked applications in the next 18 months…mostly things that are enhanced by friends lists (you are here, your friend is over there). These will be *application specific*. My team at Neogence is already going beyond this, building a platform and infrastructure for other applications to be developed on…all networked through the same backbone. Now, in this context (the science fiction AR that we all dream about), no I do not see anyone else trying to leap a generation or two ahead of the industry to build a massively multiuser shared AR space. Expect to see things like multi-user AR games, virtual pets, kiosk marketing, magic book, “gee whiz” presentations (tradeshow booths, entertainment parks, etc.), and so forth.

The big thing I’m worried about is AR becoming the next silicon valley trend…once they realize the potential, an enormous amount of capital will flow to a bunch of startups with half baked ideas, weak business models, ten year old tech, and a lot of overhyped marketing. That is the very thing that will kill this technology as something that has true power and potential to literally change the way we interact with each other, our surroundings, information, and media.

Tish Shute: Do you think AR has value for a project like Pachube that helps us connect dtat from lots of different environments and sensor actuator data?

Robert Rice: I think that AR has value as an interface to this data (essentially data visualization based on information streaming from a sensor or source that is interpreted in some dynamic graphical manner that has meaning). This is one of the “big areas” where ubiquitous augmented reality and wearable computing will really shine. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on Pachube .

Tish Shute: I can’t help it! I am really interested to hear more about the Vuzix glasses?

Robert Rice: Yeah, everyone is getting hung up on the glasses as the end-all be all and having markers everywhere too.

All the glasses are, is another display device. At the end of the day, it doesnt matter if you are looking at a lcd monitor, a iphone, a head mounted display, or a pair of wicked next generation transparent wearable displays that magically draw directly on your retinas.

The real tricky stuff is what happens on the backend…making it all persistent, massively multiuser, intelligent, interoperable, realistic, etc. etc.

I think that we are within 24 months of the magic wearables (these new ones by vuzix are probably the real first generation attempt at doing it right). They wont be perfect, but I expect they will be functional…and once we have functional, we can start doing the good stuff.

Tish Shute: You mentioned you disappointement with VWs and MMORPGs earlier.  Could you tell me more about that?

Robert Rice: Yeah, there was an evolutionary divergence between virtual worlds and mmorpgs a while back. One stagnated almost completely, and the other leapt ahead in one sense and devolved horribly in the other sense. Neither is where the state of the art should be.  That is a whole other conversation, and probably a second book.

Tish Shute: So making AR persistent, massively multiuser, intelligent, interoperable, realistic, etc. etc. that is where your efforts are going?

Robert Rice: Yes. I fully expect that the hardware is almost ready for it. You can cobble together some amazing things in the lab right now, and I think commercial viability is imminent. The real value (as far as I’m concerned) is in making it mobile, wireless, persistent, and massively multiuser. You could argue that augmented reality will take over where virtual reality failed and become internet 3, internet one being the internet, internet two being the web…

mmorpgs are nothing more than single player games in a multiuser environment these days. I’m more than a bit bitter about it. All the right money went to the wrong people, and the best games we have are barely shadows of what we could have had by now.

Tish Shute: Are there any open source AR platform dev projects?

Robert Rice: open source? hrm, Im sure there are multiple ones out there

if not entirely open source, there are plenty of things to experiment with that are generally free if you aren’t trying to sell something, DART and ARTOOLKIT come to mind as very accessible applications.

Marker based AR is very important right now…it is easy, low tech, understandable, highly customizable, and most importantly, accessible to the average joe. Ultimately though, we need a method of pure tracking…no markers glued to everything on the planet, no “billions of RFIDs” embedded in every square inch of every object on the planet, etc.

Tish Shute: What do you mean by interoperability in AR? And what do you think about the development of standards?

Robert Rice: Ooh, good question.

Ok, so the internet is basically computers communicating with computers, and the web is mostly pages linking to other pages (I’m greatly oversimplifying here). Hold this thought for a minute.

Switch over to MMORPGs. If you want to play in one (or a virtual world), you need to download a client that is specific to that world. One client does not work with another world. There are plenty of efforts to change this, but they are all barking up the wrong tree. The specific uniqueness of each world defeats the need and purpose of true interoperability, unless you completely reinvent the whole thing with a common backbone, features, functionality, etc. The very nature of virtual worlds and mmorpgs rebels against this.You absolutely do not want an avatar from second life running around in world of warcraft (for reasons that should be obvious).

On the other hand, with the web, you can use just about any client (browser) to access nearly any website (some requiring plugins or whatever).

The thing with augmented reality, is how do we go about making this? I’ve seen a few people thinking about this from the wrong perspective. There was a question at the last techcrunch to the Sekai Camera guys (a conceptual AR application for the iphone) where someone on the panel wanted to know how website owners would convert their content for augmented reality. BZZZZZT! That is a fundamental misunderstanding of what AR is, or could be, and it falls into the same trap I see a lot of people doing…and that is looking at AR through the web 2.0 lens or the virtual world lens. It is absolutely fundamentally different at the core…sure there are similarities: it has social networking/media applications and properties, and it has 3D graphics, but it stops there.

Ubiquitous augmented reality will be dramatically different depending on which standards, approaches, and philosophies get the most traction first. Will you walk down the street with your AR glasses and have a pop up every 30 feet asking you if you want to access the AR content on another server? Will you then have to register, subscribe, or whatever?

Or will all AR content be mediated by one sole master control server deep in the bowels of google? What about some other option? Will you need different sets of glasses to access different features and content from multiple sources?

At the end of the day, it should not matter what brand of glasses you are wearing, you should never have to deal with AR server popups to join/subscribe, and so forth.

Interoperability, in the context of what I was saying earlier, is the sense of how to build the infrastructure so all of this is seamless to the end user, but still maintaining the features/functionality necessary for all of what augmented reality promises us…I dont want to see everything in AR space, I want to be able to tune in or filter out some things, and I want to customize the snot out of what I see (perhaps changing metaphors or “holoscapes”), and so on. It all has to work together and simplify the end-user experience or it won’t get anywhere

Tish Shute: So what caused the stagnation of new development and devolution of MMOGs in you opinion?

Robert Rice: yes, look at all the hope and hype for the mmorpgs released in the last 12 months really, what is different or better? Now, what is worse?

I bet any decent mmorpg gamer could give you a list of 2 or 3 things for the first question and 20-30 things for the second.

And, VWs seem to be stuck in a feedback loop

Tish Shute: feedback loop?

Robert Rice: Imagine nailing one of your feet to the ground and then trying to run ’round and ’round and ’round.

Tish Shute: Why do you think this happened to VWs?

Robert Rice: Men in suits and flashy watches.

actually, hang on…..

I saw a video clip the other day from a conference about using various virtual and game technologies for simulations and other real world applications several people were talking about “avatar technology” and how theirs was better than their competitions and what not.

Now, can you tell me what “avatar technology” is? Avatar technology is a red herring. Avatar technology is the same thing as calling a toaster a new “fire technology.”

Robert Rice: The problem is that a lot of people that don’t have a clue about what they are doing are selling the tech to other people that have no clue what they are buying, but they feel like the should for some unknown reason.

That is happening all over the government, academic, and industrial sectors now with a few companies selling virtual worlds (again, mid 90-s tech) as the ultimate solution to all problems.

Anyway, getting back to your question

Once virtual reality started getting some buzz, some people got greedy and jumped into the avatar/virtual world thing and tried making it commercial too soon half of the 3D chat worlds were being jammed into platforms for virtual shopping malls.

Most of the money funding tech R&D started funneling towards VRML, and doing 3D in web pages, etc.

Tish Shute: yes horrible idea trying make web pages 3D IMHO

Robert Rice: The money people got involved too soon, and then the greedy people jumped in and tried patenting everything possible. Take a look at the worlds.com patent for 3D worlds.

They filed it back in 2000 or so and it was awarded in 07 (it shouldnt have been in my opinion) now they are suing everyone they can.

Tish Shute: Will there be patent wars in AR?

Robert Rice: Yes, the AR patent wars will be legendary once people start waking up to the real potential here.

The only solution is for everyone to band together and pre-emptively patent or make public domain every possible patentable concept, technology, or implementation for AR otherwise, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Tish Shute: Is the AR community organized enough to do that yet?

Robert Rice: That depends on how my company fares in the next six months.

Tish Shute: Will you patent or make your tech public domain?

Robert Rice: I plan on patenting the snot out of everything we can possibly think of, and then giving away our content creation tools and SDK stuff for free. The whole goal of what we are trying to build is to empower the end user and facilitate the creation of a wonderful world of augmented reality.

There are some things we will make public domain for sure, on top of that

Tish Shute: So back to my question on networked real time experience. Will we have networked Real time AR experiences in the next 18 months

Robert Rice: It is possible, yes. Other than what we are doing, I am not aware of anyone else taking the same approach we are, but the potential for an “under the radar venture” (much like my own company) is definitely there.

Tish Shute: Will you use cloud computing?

Robert Rice: I think that’s overrated and probably another attempt at the whole “thin client” model that some companies have been pushing for the last 20 years.

It sounds good on paper, but ultimately takes power and control away from the end user.

Tish Shute: cloud computing?

Robert Rice: Yes. You know, we aren’t playing around, We are totally building “THE AR” that everyone keeps dreaming about. None of this cute stuff you see on youtube. Actually, if you want to see the things that have inspired our vision of what we want to build, check out:

* Dream Park by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes
* Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
* Spook Country by William Gibson
* Halting State by Charles Stross
* The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
* Donnerjack by Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold
* Otherland by Tad Williams
* Neuromancer by William Gibson
* Idoru by Wiliam Gibson
* Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

and watch the whole anime of Denno Coil (subbed NOT dubbed!).

Tish Shute: So scaling the real time experience won’t be a problem in your project hehe

Cos no sharding allowed in AR right

And if you have lots of API calls?

Robert Rice:: haha, sharding is one of the dumbest things to happen to the VW/MMO industry

It is a solution to a technical problem that was relevant 15 years ago.

Tish Shute: so why did it stick (i know men in suits)

Robert Rice: it stuck because “thats what the other guys did” and the mmo designers are too lazy to reconcile gameplay for PvP and RP gamers

However, there is a curious problem between dealing with “one world” and “anyone can start their own custom AR server”

Tish Shute: Now that is a very interesting problem the one world and own AR server

Robert Rice: It took me a few weeks of not sleeping to figure that one out. It gets back to the interoperability issue

Tish Shute: What did you come up with?

Robert Rice: a solution. Thats all I can say for now on that.

Tish Shute: eeextra seeekrit!

Well I will definitely have to bug you on that.

The problem has produced some creativity in OpenSim with people coming up with hybrids of p2p and oneworld

Robert Rice: As far as virtual worlds are concerned, they need to look at the problem from a different perspective. They are trying to make all virtual worlds interoperable intead of creating a new model for interoperable worlds that new ones will be created to adhere to.

Tish Shute: well some people are. I would say most OpenSim developers see their modular approach doing this.  And you choose to interoperate based on what modules you have activated and then social agreements…

Robert Rice: hrm, thats a start, but that only works on a functional and social level – doesn’t account for content (story, mythos, game rules), unique data (my +3 sword), or the concepts of commerce, inherent value, and intellectual property

Enabling my WoW avatar to run around in SL and vice versa creates more problems than it solves.

Its like two alien races working hard to make sure that their two spaceships can dock but no one is paying any attention to the fact that race A breathes nitrogen and race B breathes sulpher.

Its technically possible, but they are missing the boat on the content side of the problem.

Tish Shute: Yes but don’t you think when a modular open source tech for virtual worlds  becomes pervasive, what will happen is that those interested in a similar genre will increasingly use the module in ways that allows their content to interoperate if they want it too

Robert Rice: everyone has to use the same backend tech, and the front end clients need to adhere to the same standards. Bu I have to admit, I haven’t been paying much attention to the vw space in the last 9 months or so.

Oh I have to run now.  But download and install cooliris. I promise you will be blown away and will start using it to search for images and videos

Its frigging awesome.

Tish Shute: Will do!  Thanks so much great talking to you. I can’t wait for your launch.

OpenSim is designed for interoperability innovation. Adam Frisby explains:

By allowing easy customization and extension, we can test and refine interoperability protocols very quickly and efficiently. The interconnect with Second Life (TM) was developed by David Levine, IBM, in only a number of days (David Levine on the right, Adam Frisby, left).

Please join us on Thursday, September, 4th, 4pm to 5pm at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo, LA for our panel, “Open-Source, Interoperable Virtual Worlds,” which will be part of the Future of Virtual Worlds track.

Support for standardisation in Virtual World technologies has been growing steadily in recent times, join the developers of OpenSim and industry commentators as they discuss where open-source virtual worlds are heading and the progress made towards standard protocols for interoperability.

- Adam Frisby, Director, DeepThink (and OpenSim Developer)
- Tish Shute, Writer/Virtual World Evangelist, Ugotrade.com
- Mic Bowman, Principal Engineer, Intel
- Justin Clark-Casey, OpenSim Developer, IBM

Also, special panel guest Mike Mazur, OpenSim Developer, 3Di. We hope David Levine, IBM, will be back from Europe and join us too!

Adam Frisby, Deep Think, is one of the founders and leading developers of OpenSim. Adam has been behind so many important steps forward in the open metaverse that I cannot list them all here. But a notable recent project of Adam’s is a new “Lively style” viewer for OpenSim and Second Life (TM), Xenki (see Adam’s blog for more).

Mic Bowman, Intel

Mic Bowman presented at the Intel Developer’s Forum earlier this month. He outlined a road map for how virtual worlds will move into the fabric of everyday computing with open source software playing a key role (the slide of OpenSim architecture above is from this presentation). Virtual Worlds are an important part of Intel’s strategy for developing connected visual computing experiences. For more about Intel’s CVC initiative (see this press coverage of IDF, The Inquirer, bit-tech.net, hexus, Trusted Reviews).

Basically… my message for the panel is this: To achieve a thriving, growing, broadly adopted CVC ecosystem, we believe the industry must come to some agreement on common building block technologies. Open source technologies represent a critical element in the discovery and development of these technologies, and foster innovative usages that drive adoption.

Justin Clark-Casey, Fashion Research Institute, Inc.

Another interesting member of our panel and important OpenSim developer is Justin Clark-Casey. Justin, formerly of IBM, is now with the Fashion Reasearch Institute, Inc as a full time OpenSim developer/architect. Fashion Research Institute is considered by many one of the most advanced business cases on OpenSim (more about Shenlei Winkler, CEO of FRI, in my next post, “Meet the Rising Stars of the Open Metaverse at VW 2008.”

Recently Justin has been working on something called a region archive in OpenSim.

Basically, this is a way of saving a sim to a single file (currently a tar.gz) and reloading it into another OpenSimulator. This file contains all the necessary data (prim xml and assets such as textures and scripts) necessary to restore the entire region.

It’s currently experimental so still has some bugs. But, it can be used via the load-oar/save-oar commands on the OpenSim region console.

The ability to save and load archives is something that people developing whole applications using OpenSim will be very interested in, and will contribute to the business value of OpenSim.

OpenSim and Linden Lab are at the Center of Interoperability Innovation

Since the launch of Open Grid (beta) the interoperability initiative from OpenSim and Linden Lab (for more see here), cross world interoperability has begun with avatar hopping. Now the thorny issues of trust management, economy, and IP that are the major part of asset interoperability are on the table.

The picture above of Gridnaut, Lawson English, (Saijanai Kuhn in SL) is from Lynn Cullens (Bjorlyn Loon in SL), Director of Communications for Metanomics.
Open Grid has expanded to 31 regions in less than a month and there is now OGP support in OpenSim trunk. Vivaty has expressed interest in joining interoperability efforts so we may see some of the new browser based worlds become part of this initiative soon

Hamilton Linden, who is leading the Open Platform Product Group (OPPG) as Director, Engineering for Linden Lab, and, Tess Linden, Technical Director, leading design and Implementation for the OPPG (Open Platform Product Group), will be holding office hours at the Linden Lab booth at VW2008, LA to discuss Open Grid. We hope that both Hamilton and Tess will special guests at the panel also!

The video above (see here on YouTube) of an OpenSim integration with Facebook was posted today by Stefan Andersson of Tribal Media also see his blog here. This is the third in a series of videos that introduces Tribal’s new concept for 3D/web integration.

The picture above shows the in the left pane fetched pictures from Stefan’s Facebook photos. As Stefan explains a hybrid web app is talking to the region to change the picture accordingly and pull the photos into frames on the wall (for a more detailed technical explanation see here).

These videos (see the first here) from Stefan and his partner at Tribal Media, Darren Guard, Stefan explained, demonstrate as proof of concept how a “3D web architecture” could look and feel.

This concept has quite far reaching implications to many or our current notions of how inventory, virtual economy and content will work in virtual worlds. Stefan explained:

Sufficient to say is that Tribal One was an experiment, showing some concepts – much like realXtend is introducing some innovative new concepts. For example: Who creates your ‘inventory’ and what are you supposed to do with that? In our concept, the ‘inventory’ is a set of services that I can use to interact with the world, i.e, I have a “pictureFrame” in my inventory that, when I drag it onto a wall, the act of dragging it onto the wall instructs the region with the wall to use that url to fetch the definition of that pictureFrame, as well as showing that pictureFrames application web page to me. And, when I interact with that web page, that web page interacts with the region to change the picture in the frame. Contrast that with the notion of an ‘inventory’ that contains a set list of stored objects that I can ‘rez’.

The next video Stefan noted will demo a ‘friends’ tab and you can choose to ‘join’ or ‘visit’ them. “The point there being not having to run, fly or teleport just click. Also, the clip shows ‘snapping.’ the picture frames ‘snap’ to compatible surfaces something you’d like in Second Life.”

Interview with Stefan Andersson

Tish Shute: What are the goals of Tribal One?

Stefan Andersson: One of the central goals with the Tribal Server platform is actually about cost-efficiently adding 3D to existing communities or intranets. We did the Tribal One to:

1) show how easy it is to build what we call a “Community Provider” which basically is a connector between an OpenSim-based server and any given community or intranet – the ‘provider’ is just a small piece of code that provides authentication and profile data for the 3D region.

2) show how a hybrid web/2d interface could look, and address those very questions that we discussed would be interesting to ask Avi Bar-Zeev (see full interview here).

3) show our concept of 3D web applications, where a user works with an application trhu a seamless mix of 2D and 3D interactions, all resulting in http methods on a simple web application in the background.

We wanted to show how third-parties could create 3D-aware applications without coding anything but web services, for example in php. This has two great benefits; a) you can let web-coders (of which there are plenty) do the work of 3d-coders (of which there are few) and b) you can utilize existing web service contracts and security solutions when passing over trust boundaries, which would let a 3D-host securely interact with public web services, instead of letting a hosted region have direct database access.

Tish: Is it correct to say while your experiment here provides a nice solution to identity management between 2D and 3D spaces but it does not approach the issues that OGP and AWG (Architecture Working Group) are dealing with re trust management now, where the real meat on the table is now inventory and permissions and economy?

Stefan: That would be correct; in our model, the inventory actually consists of url references to web applicatons; for example – the picture frame that is visible in the clip I’m uploading, is in the inventory as a url to a web application that creates the xml definition for the 3D object

We are aiming for something a bit more ‘active’ than a static collection of statically stored assets.

We wanted to proof-of-concept an approach where you had an application generating the inventory and the objects in the inventory, as opposed to having a static databse listing of statically stored items.

So, the inventory is generated on-the-fly for the user, depending on what services he or she has subscribed to, and how those services are configured – not just by how stuff has been given/taken.

So, if you had an Phat wardrobe node in your inventory, for example, Phat could add items to that node depending on what you did on their web site

Tish: And that would be assuming they offered virtual clothing right?

Stefan: Yes, exactly.

Okay, take some virtual clothing company – the point is that the inventory, in this case, could be modified ‘from the outside’. Of course, in an SL-centric world view, that’s outrageous, but if you thought of this from a service-centric view, it would make sense.

Tish: But protocols could be worked out to extend this beyond Tribal to other OpenSim worlds and even Second Life assuming those other worlds wanted to participate?

Stefan:Yes, definitively – we did this to show how a 3D web architecture could look and feel.

Tish: Server centric is like Tribal where you are basically running your sim on your own PC

Stefan: Yes – we actually based all this on very simple web protocols; the ‘web viewport’ concept is just an extension of the existing OpenSim object exchange xml ‘standard’.

Tish: And while this idea would have no place in the old SL grid – would it be more feasable to integrate it in the new Linden Lab Open Grid with the agent domains?

Could agent domains say choose to opt in and opt out of these kind of web services?

Stefan: To be honest, I’m waiting for the AWG (Architecture Working Group) to solve the ‘inventory’ issue before I would venture using the term ‘agent domain’.

Tish: So when there is inventory sharing that is when the agent domain comes of age in your view?

Stefan: Well the question is: Who creates your ‘inventory’ and what are you supposed to do with that?

In our concept, the ‘inventory’ is a set of services that I can use to interact with the world.

Ie, I have a “pictureFrame” in my inventory that, when I drag it onto a wall, the act of dragging it onto the wall instructs the region with the wall to use that url to fetch the definition of that pictureFrame, as well as showing that pictureFrames application web page to me.

And, when I interact with that web page, that web page interacts with the region to change the picture in the frame.

Contrast that with the notion of an ‘inventory’ that contains a set list of stored objects that I can ‘rez’.

Tish: And at the moment in AWG discussions ideas are limited to Second Life models of inventory?

Stefan: That is my understanding

Again, Tribal One is not a ready-made product – it’s a vision of how future 3D/Web applications could function.

We just need somebody to pay us to finish it! *laughs*

Tish: Is there any reason why assuming AWG figure out how to manage the conventional notion on inventory this concept couldn’t be layered into extended protocols and options?

Stefan: I would assume the AWG solution would be able to fit our concepts – since we’ve already done this with the existing SL protocol.

Tish: Do you see this new notion of inventory offering new oppoertunities to content creators to be rewarded for their work?

Stefan: Well, with this prototype we were more looking at how the web works; we were more concerned with generating and distributing content from a service point of view.

This concept is more oriented towards users utilizing a business service, like a web site.

In our scenario, content is created by server-side services written in for example php.

imagine, if you will, if the SL model was based on scripts that were able to create objects, instead of objects having scripts.

Tish: Won’t this involve the development of lots of new tools for content creation?

Stefan: Well, yes and no; it’s like with the web you need people to do the designing, and then people to do the scripting, but you also need people to do the server side coding.

We are not addressing the current SL paradigms of content creation we are addressing what we felt was missing; a platform for organisations to make dynamically created content, like the difference between a static html page and a php page. Both can have client-side scripting on them, but the php page can pull data out of databases – any kind of databases – existing databses.

Take the example with the “where I’ve been” application in Facebook: You add that app, then you can fill in where you’ve been, and you get a nice map of where you been, and you can compare that to that of your friends

Now, that’s a database creating those images out of the data that you and your friends entered.

What we did, was an api, so that the author of that facebook app could add a set of php pages, which would let users share in inventory item, that was an url to an web app that returned the definition for a map of where I’ve been, so I could have that same map on the wall in my 3d living room.

Tish: So this implies a completely different model of content creation and economy to the one Second Life uses?

Stefan: Well, in these kinds of business scenarios, the content in itself would probably have little value, but the service that generated the customized content would have great value.

Tish: So this will raise the bar for people making a living from content creation? right?

Stefan: Most definitively. But that is how it should be.

Tish: I’m not sure everyone will agree with that!

Stefan: Oh? That’s the back side of progress; the ‘advanced’ part of ‘advancement’ if you will. That’s why it has value.

Tish: Well one of the things that made SL popular was the fact that a non professional developer, just someone with talent, could make a few Lindens creating content.

But, don’t you think the two models of content production will work together?

Stefan: They still will be able to. Most definitively in SL.

Again, it’s like with the web; in the beginning, people could make money out of just being able to notepad some html and ftp it to a server.

Today we have .NET server side database programmers doing the server bits, and educated professional graphical designers doing the ui and design bits.

Tish: Won’t the web services model have to rest in some way on a template understanding of content?

Stefan: Of course it has. You’re very right about that.

But then again, it’s not an ‘either-or’ – it’s a ‘both’.

And with that, a whole new spectrum of utility.

Tish: Perhaps, the two models will find interesting ways to interact in the end? They already do to some degree?

Stefan: Yes, you know these malls with 10 packs of skins, where the only difference is the combination of skin and makeup?

Or hair variations?

A good designer teams up with a good programmer and creates one good app that just delivers that exact combination.

There is good design and bad design, good design will always be coveted.

Tish: So do you have any summarizing remarks?

Stefan: Social games and technical innovation aside, what is needed to bring forth the 3D web revolution are good examples of business and user value – applications reaching beyond social networking bubbles and into the intranets and databases of organizations – and I believe Tribal Media has shown that we are very well suited to help bring those applications to life.

Open Grid Public Beta opened today (see Second Life blog) marking the beginning of a new era of interoperable virtual worlds and a new architecture for Second Life TM. The magic of “running code and consensus” is here and, at least between OpenSim and Second Life TM, avatars are jumping back and forth. Hamilton Linden, who is leading the Open Platform Product Group (OPPG) as Director, Engineering for Linden Lab said:

The Public Open Grid Beta is an important step towards opening up the Second Life Grid to become interoperable with other virtual worlds. Having successfully demonstrated interoperability with IBM, we’re excited to begin interoperability testing with the entire OpenSim community.

In the picture opening this post Adam Frisby (avatar Adam Zaius) one of the founders of OpenSim, David Levine, IBM, (avatar Zha Ewry) who wrote the interoperability code. and myself are about to teleport from the Ugotrade OGP (Open Grid protocol) enabled OpenSim to the Linden Lab Open Grid. The teleport to an external region option is in a pull down menu that brings up the box you see on the left. If you join the Beta and want to visit, my region URL is http://ugotrade.net:9000

As these teleports are about moving identity, at the moment, and no digital assets are moved, we are all Ruths.

You must join Gridnauts in Second Life TM if you want to participate. The download and instructions for the OGP (Open Grid Protocol) Open Grid Viewer will be on the Wiki. And, to get a zipped binary package to set up an OGP enabled OpenSim you can go to the OpenSim forge site. Thanks to Mono and .NET using the same bytecode format, the same package will work just fine for .NET and Linux/Mono. Mike Ortman, DeepThink has generously created the zip package which he will keep updated.

In the screenshot below, Adam Zaius, Zha Ewry and Tara5 Oh are preparing to teleport back from Open Grid to the Ugotrade OGP OpenSim.

Linden Lab’s New Architecture

But along with interoperability the Open Grid Beta marks the debut of Linden Lab’s new architecture that has been incubated in the Architectural Working Group (AWG) spearheaded by Zero Linden. As Zero Linden explained:

A key component of virtual worlds that sets them apart from web sites, is that you interact with them with your chosen identity. Separating out the Agent Domain enables your identity to be held and hosted by a organization of your choice, and enables your identity to be truly independent of the many organizations that will eventually host regions. The web can’t do this – your identity on a web site is tied up with that web site. You have an account at each web site. In virtual worlds, independent persistent identity is key to the experience – and Agent Domains are just the technical mechanism that enables them in an open virtual world.

The interop protocols developed in AWG and used in David Levine’s, IBM, (Zha Ewry in Second Life) interoperability patch not only play an important part in enabling virtual world interoperability, they will be a key component of the new Linden Lab architecture and eventually part of their main production grid Agni, that is the grid we call Second Life. Zero explained:

The plan is, that once this is shown to work, that this code base will eventually be rolled into Agni, probably even before Agni is opened up to outside grids. TPing, and Login will be done on Agni using these interop protocols as the standard method. Of course, there are legacy viewers to support – so the existing stuff isn’t going away for some time. And we’ll proceed very cautiously onto Agni, with “kill switches” that allows to revert all viewers, even new, back to the old pathways.

Zero Linden and Zha Ewry will be speaking on “OpenSim and the Future” – the progress they have made, and the implications of their work at Metanomics, Noon PST on Monday, August 4th. Dusan Writer will also be announcing the follow-up to his much-lauded competition to create a better Second Life client viewer at the start of the show.

The picture below shows how the Open Grid client which, in addition to the teleport option after login, allows you to select an external region even before you log in

The Open Grid – a community of developers, “playing with shiny things”

There is a strong team of Linden’s working with Hamilton in the Open Platform Product Group. Tess Linden, Technical Director, leads design and Implementation for the OPPG, and Layla Linden has been getting the agent domain ready. Periapse Linden is project manager for OPPG. Whump Linden is managing the Open Grid Public Beta. Whump is also a very interesting contributor, I think, to the evolution of the Open Grid. He has an enormous amount of web experience and has been a blogger since 1998. Whump came to Linden Lab from Apple’s MobileMe group. He is the point person for the Open Grid Beta which is organized through the Second Life TM Gridnauts group.

Enus Linden and Infinity Linden are working on testing tools known as the PyOGP test harness. These testing tools are a very interesting project themselves. Tao Takashi who was the prime mover in the PyOGP project before it became part of the Open Grid Beta explained to me:

My vision was always to create something like libsecondlife but for plain Python instead of .NET. The old protocol was just too undocumented to really get something like this done quickly so when OGP was getting born I though of trying again but with a better protocol and by coincidence Linden Lab need a test harness for testing all those components out there so PyOGP was born, as the library can now serve as backend for the tests. But in the long run of course more is possible. It can also become a full implementation of client and server, web service interface and more. I am working on an agent domain implementation for pyogp right now and I have some ideas for some text based or maybe even 2d gfx client.

Something worth noting about the Interoperability effort between Linden lab and OpenSim, the Architectural Working Group, and the PyOGP initiative is the large number of experienced and talented developers that are putting extraordinary amounts of time and effort into these projects.

The meetings are packed. I had my first God-mode teleport into a full sim in Second Life TM from Zero Linden today so I could get into the AWG meeting to ask some questions for this post. Yes, God-mode is truly the finest way to travel! I hope to devote a series of posts to the pioneering developers that are creating the future of open source virtual worlds. Their dedication and brilliance is quite extraordinary.

Hey but for starters a tip of the hat to the indefatigable and omnipresent Saijanai Kuhn (Lawson English in RL) – “a 20+ year script kiddie programmer who always wanted to get into game programming.” Saijanai says: “This is my chance to do something kool on a significant scale, so I’m excited about the whole AWG OGP thing.”

And, If you want a little example of how quickly some of this developing brilliance produces results in this community check out this prototype for a “Livelyâ„¢”-style viewer for OpenSim+SL. that Adam Frisby (OpenSim/Deep Think) whipped up in a few hours! There is a currently a petition to release llmath/llvolume.cpp under a more liberal license which Adam pointed out to me is “somewhat required to do accurate rendering in alternate clients.”

I spent this weekend jumping around Second Life and OpenSims with Whump Linden and Zha Ewry. The picture below shows Zha, Whump and I arriving on the LL Open Grid from Zha’s laptop sim. There is a bug Zha told me that is making us arrive at (0,0,0) on the sim.

Managing Assets and Identity in an Interoperable Open Grid

Linden Lab is NOT throwing the baby (the Second Life economy) out with the bath water (the old Second Life Architecture). Linden Lab have made this very clear many times but Zero reiterated for me when I asked this question:

Absolutely — after all, I love babies — we positively need to build an architecture that supports the economy of SL — while at the same time allowing the virtual world to be open to a wider variety of experiences.

And, if you have already watched the video of the NYC Metaverse Meetup you will know that interoperability of assets and managing identity in open virtual worlds is what’s on everyone’s minds. But as David Levine (Zha Ewry in SL) pointed out several times: “These teleports are just about moving identity for the moment they do not bring a single digital asset with them for a moment.”

There was a long but very interesting discussion about some of the issues of managing and federating identity and moving assets between multiple virtual worlds at the Meetup. And, Adam Frisby and David Levine outlined some of technical and social steps to full interoperability in that discussion.

David Levine has also asserted several times that a big priority for him is looking at how the interoperability of assets can be implemented without detriment to “creators” whom he describes are “the secret sauce” that makes Second Life a compelling place and the ingredient that makes a virtual world either work or not work. But, interoperability, regardless of how particular virtual worlds decide to handle it, will force virtual worlds to rethink the way they do or don’t help their content creators and users to relate outside of the little puddle of their own particular terms of service. But, David pointed out, if we want to do something that spans not just one or two applications, this discussion, which is social as much as technical, has to be done in a broader community

For now, the goals of the OGP Beta are narrow. As Whump pointed out:

The matter of inventory is not in scope for this part of the beta. Figuring out inventory is a combination of technical and community work. Some of this will be figuring out a common vocabulary for talking about these issues. We want to figure out the basics of protocols for teleport, find the bugs, and refine these issues. We want to have running code and test suites, because that will bring interested parties.

But, while the beta has begun with a simple version of OpenSim trunk the next step will be to work on interop with projects like realXtend and Tribal Net. Both these initiatives are bringing a lot of innovation to OpenSim. Both realXtend and Tribal see interoperability as a key project and are looking forward to joining the Beta soon.

Roadmap for Open Grid

I asked Zero Linden what the roadmap for the next few months would be:

Zero Linden: Well, now that we’ve demonstrated some technical work, and are going into a public beta, August is going to find much of the LL side hunkered down and fleshing out much architectural detail. For some areas, especially inventory and identity, we’ll be putting together some concrete frameworks so those more complex discussions can make progress in the Fall. So the next step is to pave the way for clear progress on them. They are big issues and deserve the time and background work to make them be successful discussions and eventually successful desgins.

Tara5 Oh: So when you say concrete framework you mean code and architecture?

Zero Linden: I mean more of a specific set of issues, use cases and design options to have a discussion about. We’ve been talking about identity and inventory in largely general terms for almost a year. I think we as a whole have a common sense of what we are talking about. Now we need some specific points to answer, and a guide for the design. Then, the code will follow.

Tara5 Oh: so when you say uses cases do u have a wish list yet?

Zero Linden: Well, I have may personal pet use cases — who doesn’t — what we will be developing in August is a more rational set. So, in short, nothing yet. I’m trying to stay purposly “zen mind” about it — since it can be such an explosive topic.

In the picture below Whump Linden gazes out at the open horizon.

Today it is official, “The IBM and Linden Lab Interoperability Announcement” – see also, Torley Linden’s video here (screenshot above).

Hamilton Linden and Inifinty Linden visited OpenSim office hours in Wright’s Plaza, OSGrid, last week with some big news (screenshot below). 25 avatars gathered to discuss with great enthusiasm Hamilton Linden’s proposal that Linden Lab would provide an Open Beta for the Open Grid Protocol for login and teleport between OpenSim and the Linden Lab Public Open Grid Beta.

This interoperability work has been pioneered by David Levine (IBM researcher, Zha Ewry in Second Life) in conjunction with Linden Lab’s Architecture Working Group. Zha has personally coded the patch and she blogged her progress on this last month. Zha’s interop patch can be viewed here.

Later in this post for Zha’s gives an outline of the steps that could lead to the advent of much anticipated and hotly debated content interoperability.

Why is this Interoperability Initiative so important?

While, in Zha’s words, “this is a proof of concept of protocol.” It is an important first step, not only toward realizing Linden Lab’s dream of expanding the influence of their technology, but for consolidating a heterogenous mix of applications for virtual worlds in an interoperable environment.

Notably, it will allow corporations to deploy private and exploratory grids on OpenSim technology while remaining interoperable with the largest virtual world community to date, Linden Lab’s Second Life.

But it is not only interoperability between Second Life and OpenSim which will unleash the power of virtual worlds, it is interoperability between OpenSim grids. New OpenSim grids like Tribal Net and innovative projects like realXtend are beginning to discuss consolidating their influence through interoperability.

Both Tribal Net and realXtend have led the way re innovation with OpenSim technology (see my posts here, here, here for realXtend and here for Tribal Net). And, both are now in early discussions with OSGrid re interoperability. Charles Krinke, a developer and very excellent open source community organizer, runs OSGrid. He gave me a some background on OSGrid (see an upcoming post for more).

OSGrid is the second oldest OpenSim grid and was created in July, 2007. I began running it in August with 150 users and a dozen regions. Others were brought in as managers, most notably “Nebadon Izumi”, “Hiro Protagonist”, “Paulie Flomar” and more in the fall. We now have 3200 users and nearly 400 regions attached as of early July, 2008.

There are two goals for OSGrid. One is to test the OpenSim releases on a daily basis and the other is to build a healthy community.

Interoperability and consolidation of virtual worlds is vital to their development not only because Metcalfe’s law states that “the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system” but because Second Life has demonstrated that one of the key contributions of Virtual Worlds so far is their potential to collapse geography (as Cory Ondrejka put it).

Open Virtual Worlds must continue to create new and richer forms of networked interaction, enabling the communication not only of personal identities, but of community identities and cultures in ways not possible or imagined before. This potential cannot be fulfilled by small isolated worlds.

A New Era for Virtual Worlds Begins!

The excitement was palable today in meetings held in Second Life and OpenSim that discussed moving the interoperability initiative forward.

Interoperability is a big deal. This much was clear. And the press were on it! Eric Reuters showed up in the OpenSim IRC today asking questions about IP and virtual economies in the Open Metaverse. And, there are many posts already including TechCrunch, Information Week, Virtual World News, Gamasutra, and Dusan Writer‘s.

In the IBM press release, Colin Parris, Vice President, Digital Convergence, IBM said. “Developing this protocol is a key milestone and has the potential to push virtual worlds into the next stage of their evolution.”

The screenshot above is from OpenSim office hours today, Wright’s Plaza, OSGrid. There were 31 avatars present including Zha Ewry, avatar of David Levine, IBM, and at least four Lindens – Hamilton Linden, Tess Linden, Whump Linden, and Periapse Linden (Whump and Periapse are running the Linden Lab Public Open Beta Grid).

Also, there were many of the key OpenSim developers, Adam Johnson and Jeff Ames dropped in from Genkii, Japan (see here for more). There were several avatars from IBM in addition to Zha, and members of the Microsoft Development Community in OpenSim, notably G2 Proto, were there.

In the foreground of the screenshot above you can see the OpenSim avatar of Mic Bowman, Principal Engineer from Intel, Finrod Meriman. Mic is an important advocate for Interoperable Virtual Worlds and active member of the OpenSim development community. This was a power house gathering signalling interoperability as the future of virtual worlds has arrived.

Hamilton announced the link for the Public Open Grid Beta, and told the gathering:

You just need to contact Periapse or Whump Linden and they’ll get you setup. Although, we’re are officially committing to July 31st to start. But we’d obviously like to do it sooner. When it starts they’ll give you the info for the downloadable viewer and access to the Agent Domain Host.

Steps Towards Content Interoperability: Interview with Zha Ewry.

Interoperability will raise many new social/business questions for virtual worlds (particularly re content and business models). However, because this proof of concept is between the Linden Lab Public Open Grid Beta, which is not part of the Second Life economy, and OpenSim there is time for some of these questions to be explored.

This exploratory process began at a large meeting held by Zero Linden last week that focused on some of the community concerns about interoperability (see transcript here).

I asked Zha Ewry what she saw as the steps that would lead to content traveling back and forth between Second Life and OpenSim. The movement of content is where most of the thorny social/legal/business questions around interoperability emerge.

Zha outlined what the technical steps would be while noting that the social questions were just beginning to be explored:

Zha: There are a series of about four technical/social/legal steps.

First, we need a protocol for establishing proof of identity between
the components. ie for the sims and services to cross prove they are
who they claim to be, which is peer to having a trusted identity for
the users.

Second, we need a way of expressing policy This is orthogonal to one,
but pretty much requires the proof of identity in order to be useful.
In particular, we want to be able to express what the content creator
desires, including whether they wish it to be restricted to a grid, or
set of grids, copy and use and so on.

Third, we need an agreed public protocol for asset fetch including
both copy, and ACID fetch, and a reliable way of managing no-copy
assets. This is the brute work of moving the digital assets around,
and would exploit one and two to determine if assets should be movable
at all.

Fourth you would want the legal and social framework for using the
technical capabilities. This would be akin to a Terms of Service for
connecting stuff together, which would spell out what policies were in
place. effectively, these become the specific agreements which couple
the first three together, so that we have a safe, agreed way of moving
only the publically accessible assets (we can in fact, do parts of
this, in parallel, so we could work on 3) with public domain assets,
on a set of sims, that only had public assets) while working on 1 and
2.

A lot of this takes on a flavor of building up a layered set of
abilities, and then allowing people to compose a range of possible
solutions. At the protocol level, we want to allow a lot of
flexibility so different grids and communities can explore different
strategies. This is not about a one size fits all approach, or about
having a good enough crystal ball to pick an approach. An open source
community, with open protocols has the luxury of encouraging
experimentation.

Tish: So have the proof of identity protocols been published in any
current AWG docs or worked on?

Zha: It has been discussed, but not in any detail

Tish: So on the agenda?

Zha: Oh, very much so!

For an in depth and somewhat technical discussion of how issues of IP, trust, and managing permissions, licenses etc. might be managed with interoperable virtual worlds see the chatlog from todays Architectural Working Group Groupies discussion.

Content is already on the move in the Open Metaverse

Tribal Net announced this week that Second Inventory is now working on Tribal:

This software lets you backup and restore content to and from different grids, like for example the Second Life(tm) grid, and Tribal Net – which makes Tribal Net an excellent tool to work in private or offline with content, or to make and transfer objects thru e-mail or the web. (You can now distribute your Second Life(tm) object thru your blog – literally!)

Also Tribal annoinced they have 200 members, “and 150 of those has published their own islands. We now have a small core of dedicated 3D pioneers.”

They have also started a community micro-blogosphere that you might want to check out.

Ron Andrade of Common.Sensible has been checking Tribal out and has written a nice post about what he has found. He also notes re the integration of Tribal with Second Inventory that this is not opened the door to all kinds of content transfer or theft.

Now don’t panic, all you against-theft-aggregations and I. P. advocates. You can only copy your inventory and you must be using the same avatar name on Tribal Net as you are using in Second Life. All the permissions remain the same. So, creators, fear not: your hard work is safe. Well, every bit as safe as it currently is in Second Life. Although it is unknown how scripts and other things will react. But hey, if you are the adventurous type with the resources and time, give it a shot.

Stefan Andersson of Tribal noted we should remember “the pioneering and experimental aspect of inter-grid content transfer, and that people should expect some bumps in the road.”

There is a lot of excitement in the Japanese Metaverse these days.

I met some of the the most important Japanese metaverse companies at the Virtual Worlds Expo and Conference in New York City earlier this year. And, last week, I managed to catch up with Naoyoshi Shimaya, CEO of Metabirds, and Hiroshi Asaeda, CEO of Meltingdots. I also had a very interesting conversation with Ken Brady and Adam Johnson about their recently launched metaverse consulting company Genkii.

The picture opening this post is a self portrait by Yuki (Genkii’s CCO). See my interview with Ken and Adam later in this post, and my interviews with Metabirds here, and Meltingdots here.

Adam also clued me in to the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo 2008, Tokyo May 28th to 30th. You can attend the conference in Second Life â„¢ (A registered Trademark of Linden Lab). Today, I had a little walkabout the conference site in Second Life (picture below).

Philip Rosedale, founder of Second Life ™ (A registered Trademark of Linden Lab) will give “his first and long awaited lecture in Japan.”

Thanks to Genkii’s Adam Johnson for sending me all the updates on the conference! Also, Adam sent me some very interesting news about NTT’s recent investment in the ngi group (see below). This news is making 3Di and their OpenSim developers smile, I would guess!

Big news for the Open Source Metaverse in Japan!

NTTとngi、3Dインターネット関連事業などで業務・資本提携を発表

NTT, the largest telecommunication company in Japan will invest in the ngi group with a total of 1,630,000,000 yen. ngi group is the owner of 3Di so NTT is planning to work on metaverse business with their new NGN (next generation network) system (see Second Times).

I contacted 3Di who are very involved in OpenSim development and part of OpenSim core to try and find out more. But though “currently engaged in a lot of interesting discussion with other companies, and a lot of interesting projects” they are not commenting on this new round of funding. There was an English article in the Nikkei news, Thursday, May 8th, about the ngi/3Di/NTT deal, ” NTT To Take Stakes In ngi group Firms To Tap 3-D Virtual Space Tech:”

NTT will use the ngi group’s 3-D image processing technology to develop a system for managing virtual spaces on its fiber-optic based next-generation network (NGN). It will build such systems on behalf of companies that want to sell goods and host online advertising forums, among other businesses. It will begin receiving orders through such subsidiaries as NTT Communications Corp. as early as October

I asked Ken to comment on this news:

Ken Brady: As far as NTT taking a stake in ngi group and 3Di, I think we’ll have to wait and see what that means for the industry as a whole. NTT is huge, and they have a record of encouraging some really significant innovations. They could really be a driving force behind Japanese adoption of virtual worlds.

Tish Shute: Will this funding specifically get chaneled to any OpenSim projects or is that still another open question?

Ken Brady: I would bet some of it will go toward OpenSim projects, though I think it’s too early to say to what extent. Since NTT is taking an interest in 3Di, and since 3Di is so involved in OpenSim, I think there’s a pretty good chance that they are looking strongly in this direction.

Genkii:

“A Strategic consultancy for social media and virtual worlds.”

Above are Yuki’s portraits of Jeff Ames (CTO), Ken Brady (CEO), and Adam Johnson (COO) and a photo of the Genkii team in Tokyo.

Genkii is not only one of the coolest new companies on the planet, headed up by CEO, Ken Brady, formerly Director of International Strategies at Centric, a science fiction writer, and award winning film producer. But I think Genkii is one of the first Metaverse consulting companies in the world to put “a strong focus on leveraging Open Source platforms.”

While Japanese communities in Second Life are flourishing showing the some of the highest retention rates of anywhere in Second Life, Japan has become an important hub for OpenSim development.

The Open Metaverse enables a melding and reinvention of what has up to these point been divided realms – virtual worlds and the web. And, this company of metaverse “strategists” seems to be gearing up to make productive the fertile ground the first generation of metaverse evangelists has prepared.

As Ken points out virtual worlds are in an unusual and enviable position right now.

It’s really going to come down to what system gives users the experience they want. I think there is a lot of experimentation and head-scratching going on right now about this. In all phases of advertising, purchasing content, etc. Virtual worlds are in an unusual (and enviable, I’d argue) position because we are developing these things while still in the early stages of the industry, while industries like TV, print, movies, music are struggling with radical change.

I think what comes out of all this is a meshing of technologies. Hopefully we grab the good of what’s worked for the web and the good of what’s worked (so far) in virtual worlds and fuse them into a viable, scalable model. We need to create a system that allows people to create and play and work in virtual worlds as easily and as robustly as they do now on the web. That’s a pretty big order.

Also, that requires a huge melding of the minds. A lot of people from a lot of industries need to work together to make this happen.

Genkii already has a strong roster of strategic alliances including:

3Di, Centric, Metabirds, Synthespian Studios, Anvil Media, i-POP, Yosh, Fix8, Metaversatility, DeepThink Labs, and Syn Entertainment.

Interview with Ken Brady and Adam Johnson

Tish Shute: Ken how did you end up in Japan (Adam has told me his story before now he came to Japan to work for ngi!)

Ken Brady: My grandmother is Japanese and I’ve been coming back and forth here for about 5 years. My wife, Yuki, is Japanese/Taiwanese (she’s Genkii’s CCO), and we knew we’d like to live here at some point. While I was with Centric, I was back and forth helping them set up some operations in Asia, and moved when it worked out for everyone involved.

Tish Shute: It seems like Europe and Asia are blazing the trail with OpenSim. Is the US stuck in the dinosaur age re the Open Metaverse?

Ken Brady: OpenSim is growing quickly, there are more and more people (and companies) getting involved in its development, and it’s getting quite a bit of attention in VW media and blogs.

But I think it’s odd, isn’t it? When the web revolution really got its legs in 1995, the development was very US-centric, with other countries following. Now that we’re in the throes of a virtual world and 3D web revolution, it’s a real global undertaking. I don’t know if the US is exactly behind, but they’re certainly not holding all the cards in the game. What happens in Asia and Europe is certainly pushing the US these days.

Tish Shute: Yes you are right. It is not fair to say US is behind ‘cos everyone still has to take a hat off to Linden Lab!

Ken Brady: You’re absolutely right about recognizing LL as the icon they are. Especially in Asia, people always mention SL as the baseline on which every other upstart is measured. It’s all about whether something is a copy of Second Life, an alternative to Second Life, etc. Their name recognition is high.

Tish Shute: And yes SL asset development is spectacular!!! I am wondering if Linden Lab will make a move that could facilitate the rapid development of content in OpenSim. Then we would see a 3D revolution so much quicker, wouldn’t we?

Ken Brady: Agreed that asset development is key. OpenSim needs a robust system that will encourage interest in the platform. Active involvement by a large number of users is what’s going to get it really moving, of course. There’s something of a chicken and the egg dilemma there, right? Many people won’t use OpenSim until all the features are in place, while all the features may not be in place until more people use it.

Tish Shute: I am interested to pursue what your view on virtual economies is. Nao from Metabirds suggests that many new forms of virtual economies will emerge to promote asset development in the Open Metaverse but others seem to think virtual economies are a dead dog, and new models will drive asset developement. And, there are many that think Second Life be the heart of asset development in many prototypical virtual worlds if there work on interoperability with OpenSim proceeds? But what is your view on this very contested question?

Adam Johnson: The easiest route is just to plug in a system that’s already out there. Visa, or Paypal for example. There are also some pluggable game economy systems out there as well. Twofish comes to mind. The second way would be for Linden Lab to open up some sort of API to use their economy. OpenSim already has most of the inner workings in place for economy transactions. All that needs to be done is to customize it to your needs.

Ken Brady: Though I agree with Adam regarding plug-in economies (an easy route), I think there are so many possible models that could arise, depending on the nature of the virtual world in question. Closed systems offer some level of stability, such as with the L$, QQ coins, etc. But there will be certain situations where a virtual economy is not necessary to the development of the world. Barter systems can arise, a more open set of IP rules (like creative commons) could arise to allow more of a reputation-based economy.

Tish Shute: I know you are close to HiPiHi and they have a vision of creating a protected environment for a virtual economy but with some innovations on the Linden Lab model? They mentioned a virtual world ebay idea to me. Do you have thoughts on this idea?

Ken Brady: I don’t think that one system is right for every space. Unless we have all worlds becoming the same, operating on the same rules, with the same users, with the same goals for using each world. Of course, in that case, we’ll all create one virtual world, right?

I really think that reputation economies are viable, though, and what better place to prove the model than in a virtual world?

Tish Shute: Could you explain more about your idea of a reputaion model and what kind of economy that would work in?

Ken Brady: It was a science fiction idea that moved toward an economic model while no one was looking, I think. Both Jason Stoddard, Centric’s CEO and a fellow science fiction writer, and I are big propenents of this model. eBay is, to an extent, an example. In that case, your feedback (others’ satisfaction with your transactions) raises your standing in the community. As more people see your high rating, more people buy from you.

Tish Shute: Didn’t people game the reputation system in Second Life so much they had to take it out?

Ken Brady: Yes, people did that in SL. But it was a limited system, really. It was a popularity contest that didn’t truly mean anything. You didn’t get anything out of having a high ranking. With eBay, it’s self-correcting. Look at Digg or other systems that allow you to rate people up/down. Eventually, you know who to listen to/block. Or who to buy from/stay away from.

Adam Johnson: I think that it’s not well represented solely by a number. Something based on word of mouth probably holds more value.

Ken Brady: Exactly. In a world with no monetary system, though, reputation becomes the goal. The better your reputation, the higher your standing the community (whatever that may correspond to).

For this system to work as an economy, though, there has to be a way to actually get something out of your good reputation. Say, in SL, that land was given out based on reputation, and people with a certain rating got an island…it would make for a radically different environment. If there’s money coming in somewhere, it’s easier. If there is ad revenue, the higher your reputation, the higher the percentage of ad revenue passed on to you.

But this is all just conjecture. I guess I’m just saying that Nao from Metabirds is right: there are so many different models, and that there will be many concepts attempted.

Tish Shute: I realize from your work in Centric you are very familiar with all the social media plays. But I know many people are erked by the social media model of monetizing through advertising. They see advertising as taking over the internet! Will virtual worlds become Scobleized to survive in the open metaverse?

Ken Brady: I don’t actually think advertising is taking over the internet, nor will it take over virtual worlds. That’s been the argument from the beginning, but I think it’s a bit overstated. Ads are everywhere: TV print, movies, the room you’re in right now. They’re just more in your face online where you’re staring at a screen.

Adam Johnson: I’m sure there will be advertising free VWs, but they will cost you. If users want something that’s free, advertising will come into play more than likely. But, as computing power gets better, and the VW systems more efficient, and bandwith cheaper, it will become easier to support a VW with little money.

Ken Brady: I think Scoble offers an insight into the possibility of a reputation economy, so I think that will be one model.

Personally, I don’t have a problem with being paid to disseminate an idea I already have and support. Scoble hypes things he wants to hype, and that’s how advertising could change with that model of propagation. I don’t like the idea of people hocking products and ideas they don’t support, which is how it has worked with advertising in the past.

Adam Johnson: With reputation at least, if you hock something not good, you lose your reputation status. It is all balanced out and keeps people in check.

Ken Brady: I think having a two-tiered opt-out model (ads for a free experience; ad-free for a small fee) works sometimes. It may work in virtual worlds, but it’s not yet proven.

Tish Shute: Yes and there are two ends to this aren’t there? Because on the one hand much of the sophistication of the Web 2.0 revolution in terms of monetizing (and I agree Scoble is an example of that) has gone on apart from the development of virtual worlds up to this point. And, conversley the innovation of VWs has not really melded with the web so now we are at a turning point with OpenSim where these two directions collide and what will come out of this collision is…………?

Ken Brady: It’s really going to come down to what system gives users the experience they want. I think there is a lot of experimentation and head-scratching going on right now about this. In all phases of advertising, purchasing content, etc. Virtual worlds are in an unusual (and enviable, I’d argue) position because we are developing these things while still in the early stages of the industry, while industries like TV, print, movies, music are struggling with radical change.

I think what comes out of all this is a meshing of technologies. Hopefully we grab the good of what’s worked for the web and the good of what’s worked (so far) in virtual worlds and fuse them into a viable, scalable model. We need to create a system that allows people to create and play and work in virtual worlds as easily and as robustly as they do now on the web. That’s a pretty big order.

Also, that requires a huge melding of the minds. A lot of people from a lot of industries need to work together to make this happen.

Tish Shute: Yes but I take my hat off to Genkii, Tribal, Rex, Deep Think, HiPiHi, 3Di because none of you seem to be retreating in 2.5 D and flash plug ins or simply a model that plugs 3D into the web?

Ken Brady: I think those models are right for many people, but aren’t necessarily right for what we’re trying to accomplish overall. I think of most 2.5D/Flash virtual worlds as stepping stones. Sure, there are some great ideas and technologies that will come from them, but they are mostly grabbing a segment of the population that’s not ready (in hardware, broadband, or desire) to make the jump to more free-form 3D worlds. I firmly believe the 3D web is coming, but many times you have to take it in steps. And, really, that’s what Second Life, HiPiHi, OpenSim all are anyway. All steps toward something new.

Don’t get me wrong: I also think the 3D web will incorporate a lot of 2.5D/Flash technology, and that all that we learn from current and upcoming platforms will be integrated in those that come after. 3D worlds need to be easier, no download, more stable, etc. We’re just not there yet.

Tish Shute: And what about the intergration of mobile with immersive 3D?

Ken Brady: Mobile technology is absolutely central to any social technology here in Japan. Sometimes, I think people don’t realize how true that is, but think it’s an exaggeration. There are, I believe, now over 100 million mobile subscribers in Japan. And these are 3G phones. Coverage is awesome, and phone use is ubiquitous. Look at mixi, Japan’s largest social network. Most of its users update by mobile phone. Much more often than using a computer. Social media that doesn’t support mobile dies in Japan.

Tish Shute: But the integration of mobile and virtual worlds is not as easy is it – and I don’t mean technically I mean conceptually?

Ken Brady: It’s not easy. Conceptually, it’s a much different thing to be in a virtual world on a computer, keyboard and mouse at the ready, than using a mobile. I think that way of thinking stems from a western outlook. In the US, I think it will be hard to get people to log into a virtual world on their phones, even when the technology is available. In Japan, it wouldn’t be any more strange than sitting on the train watching TV on your phone, or writing a novel on your phone for others to read from their phones, or updating your mixi blog. These things happen constantly here already.

Tish Shute: Also as Genkii is the first consulting agency for VWs that I have seen that foregrounds open source (are there any others) could you tell me more about that?

Ken Brady: We don’t know if we’re the only consulting agency for VWs putting open Source upfront, but, if not, we’re one of the few. I know NMC has talked about its Open Virtual Worlds Project with Sun and I know others have mentioned open source worlds, but I’m not entirely sure where they stand on actual development and involvement.

Tish Shute: I should ask you articulate why you have directed you energy towards OpenSim and OpenSocial (but I am pretty sure I know the answer to that question) but many other people will not!

Ken Brady: I think you’ll see a lot more agencies talking about open source as soon as more clients are interested in it. Demand will drive it, as always. In our case, we believe that open source development is important to advancing these young technologies. We want to see virtual worlds and social media mature into the amazing technologies we know they can be.

OpenSim represents, we think, an opportunity to build a platform that will advance virtual world technology and the user experience. OpenSocial represents the same, albeit in a tangential industry.

Adam Johnson: We may have a bias towards OpenSim, but we are still agnostic in that effect. We are keeping our eye on the other projects such as Croquet, and Sun’s platform as well.

Ken Brady: We think this will be integral to advancing relevant industries, and we want to help where we can. It’s not about any one player or one platform. Adam is right. We’re platform agnostic, but we will recommend open source where it’s possible, and therefore applicable.

Adam Johnson: But I am in favor of all of the projects coming together to at least collaborate on knowledge, lessons learned, tips, etc.

I’m sure we are all going through similar problems, and are solving them over and over again needlessly.

Ken Brady: Agreed. I think the virtual worlds industry is awesome for one reason above many others: almost everyone I’ve met in the industry I like and want to collaborate with. I don’t feel competitive against most of them, because we’re all so early in this field. We all need to work together.

Adam Johnson: I think this year you will start to see some first steps in interoperability between the OpenSim projects. Within OpenSim, you will start to see all of the grids starting to interconnect with eachother, forming one large grid of grids. And from there, hopefully we can get some SL and OpenSim interconnect happening as well.

Tish Shute: So any involvement with enterprise solutions from Genkii?

Ken Brady: As far as enterprise worlds, we’ve certainly talked to some folks about it. I’ve discussed this in length with a lot of people in the film industry, especially. I think it’s a fascinating and exciting direction to go. 3D space is such a good collaborative environment and it’s being under-utilitzed. This summer I’ll be doing an interactive presentation for the Directors Guild of America on using virtual worlds for film production and collaboration. Having worked in the film industry myself and made movies, I feel it would be an outstanding use of the technology.

Adam Johnson: We definitely want to get involved there at some point. I know our partner Jeff Ames, who is also a core dev of OpenSim, and a major contributor to the OpenViewer project has some great ideas for dataviz.

Tish Shute: Then I have a big question for Ken re the science fiction to science moves that we may see soon in virtual worlds (the one i would most like to see is get 3D off a 2D screen!).

Ken Brady: I think there are an exciting number of science fiction concepts coming to life in virtual worlds already. I’ve gotten some grief from some of my fellow SF writers who ask why I’m wasting time in virtual worlds, seriously. I then show them some of the things that they wrote about or read about becoming real in the virtual space. Sometimes it scares them, sometimes excites them. It’s weird.

Certainly some of the most exciting are 3D devices. Who hasn’t been pining for full 3D? I still remember wearing a 3D helmet and playing with Dactyl Nightmare in the early 90s and I want to see integration of that sort of technology. We all know it will happen, but exactly when and which sort of system will be dominant is questionable. There are helmets, 180 degree screens, iGlasses, etc. Inobtrusive, wearable tech is really my personal choice. I look forward to augmented reality and my iGlasses. Input devices are also moving forward quickly. Mitch Kapor’s work in SL, Johnny Lee’s Wii hack, Surface, Keio University’s thought controller, and other similar technologies make me giddy.

Some of it is open source and some is not. I’m trying to get in to go play with as much as possible for an article I’m writing for Analog about virtual worlds. I’ll let you know when I find out!

I met Naoyoshi, CEO of Metabirds, at the Electric Sheep Company’s party during the Virtual Worlds Conference, 2008. And, ever since then, I have been looking forward to hearing more about Naoyoshi’s vision for the future of virtual worlds and his pioneering company Metabirds that has developed 25 sims in Second Life â„¢ (A registered Trademark of Linden Lab).

The first part of this interview began in a gmail conversation and then we met in Second Life to talk at length about a number of directions Naoyoshi is exploring; including his blog portal web site and point service “SLMaMe”, his ventures in OpenSim with a brand new project OpenNebula, and his pioneering of manufacturing 2.0 with Naturum Islands Resort in Second Life.

SLMaMe (for the Google translation see here), Nao points out, “gets 14,000,000 page views per month.” Also SLMaMe’s innovative point service, Nao explains below, is the basis for micropayments in 2D/3D virtualworlds.

Interview with Naoyoshi Shimaya, CEO of Metabirds: Part One

Tish: Could you tell me a bit about what Metabirds have been doing lately? What are your latest projects?

Nao: Our biggest project is “SLMaMe”, which is blog portal web site about virtual worlds. It gets 14,000,000 page views per month. We produce the “Naturum Islands Resort” project in SL. It’s an outdoor resort region that uses 2 SIMs. Naturum is an EC website which is the biggest outdoorgoods EC. They have blog comunity. Metabirds brought them into SL.

And we are planning to create real outdoor product using SL creators’ design.

Tish: Are you still mainly focused in SL? Or are you working in other virtual worlds?

Nao: We are interested in the OpenSimsolution, and we have started creating a grid, OpenNebula. Also, we are interested in other metaverses.
Especially, we are interested in:
* virtual worlds in which we can create objects
* virtual worlds in which we can do business
( sell and buy objects, services, lands… using virtual money which can exchange
to real money.

Tish: How is Second Life doing in Japan? I sometimes visit Japanese sims and see a lot of enthusiasm for music and fashion? What are the most successful parts of SL from you perspective?

Nao: Creatives/arts and businesses. I believe it’s absolutely necessary for us to develop the virtual world.

Tish: What do you think is the way forward for SL in Japan? And for Virtual World adoption in Japan?
Nao: I think time will provide a solution to many of the Hardware/Software/Network problems. And the problems will be solved soon, if we keep wanting an ideal virtual world.

And, most companies will come into virtual worlds after people/users come into virtual worlds.

Tish: What are, from your point of view, the biggest changes necessary to SL to make it more appealing to a large audience in Japan?

Nao: *stability, using world wide distributed processing servers

Tish: and… for all virtual worlds..

Nao:

*output devices ( e.g. glasses )
*input devices ( e.g. brain waves )

Tish: In the US there has been a recent upsurge in 3D chat rooms and lite weight 3D and walled garden virtual worlds. Is this the same in Japan and are you still optimistic that an immersive free form 3D programmable space like SL can expand its appeal to a mass audience?

Nao: I think…
“3D chat rooms and lite weight 3D and “walled garden virtual worlds” are just services.
Second Life and other CREATIVE virtual worlds are next infrastructure for the internet.

The former can boom and can get a lot of users in the short period (1~5 years)

The latter can get a lot of users in the long period ( 3~10 years )
Because there are a lot of interesting services that can be born in these platforms.

Tish: What do you see, if any, is the role for virtual worlds in positive global development?

Nao:

*Business
The virtual market can be the biggest market we have ever found.
It will show a hidden labor force all over the world.

I think virtual wealth can be as valuable as real wealth, in the meaning that they provide – happiness… to make our life happy.
We can exchange virtual goods with each other using virtual/real money.
Businesses can develop that also provide real life goods,services for people.

*Community
We can connect with other people more richly using virtual worlds than previous internet services.
It will be able to create more powerful “Imagined communities” using real/virtual mixed world.
Some will fail, but, some communities will gain influence in “real” life all over the world.

Part 2: In Second Life

Tara5 Oh: Adam Johnson mentioned to me that Metabirds and Genkii are working together?
Nao Noe: Genkii is our partner.

Tara5 Oh: Does “Open Nebula” have an English client?

Nao Noe: “Open Nebula” is small now, because it has just started. You can join using SL client in English. But we don’t have English website, and English information yet

Nao Noe: You can log in “Open Nebula” using SL client launched with ” 　-loginuri http://60.32.217.116:8002/ -set systemLanguage ja”
-loginuri http://60.32.217.116:8002/

Nao Noe: You can register user account at

http://opennebula.net/RegistUser/entry_1.php

Tara5 Oh: Cool I will try and go in! Do you anticipate putting up an English website soon?

Nao Noe: We want to make English website…… but we don’t have time now.

Nao Noe: “Open Nebula” is a wasteland now, and not stable. It’s just a test project.

Tara5 Oh: I am very interested in how people feel assets will be built up in OpenSim projects? Are u thinking of building a virtual economy and using micropayments in the future?

Nao Noe: Yes I am. We have SLMaMe, which is blog portal website. In SLMaMe, we have a point service.

Nao Noe: I think the point service will be used for micropayments in 2D/3D virtualworlds.

Tara5 Oh: What do you mean by a point service?

Nao Noe: For now, a blog user can get 10 SLMaMe points(named MaMeTa ), when their adsence is clicked. The user will change these points to L$ next month. And, in the near future, the user can buy “MaMeta” with L$, JPY, US$ and, can get a lot of services in many Virtual Worlds.

Tara5 Oh: So an ad on a blog can earn you SLMaMe points which you can then convert into L$ ?

Nao Noe: Yes

Nao Noe: I want to make this point service to a virtual currency.

Nao Noe: But, I’m not interested in just “exchange money”.

Tara5 Oh: What is your interest?

Nao Noe: I want people to change virtual items, virtual services……. I want people to do interesting businesses using our currency.

Tara5 Oh: One of the big challenges for OpenSource virtual worlds is to make incentives for people to build interesting assets but they also want to be able to port assets across worlds. Do you see assets being exchanged between SL and OpenNebula?

Nao Noe: I think our economies/grid can be exist equally with LL and other real countries’ economy. But, it’s small we are creating very very small country. If we want to exchange money/asset with another VW, other real country, I think it’s just a political and technical problem.
But, if we want more and more, to exchange with other world/country, it will be realized in the near future.

Tara5 Oh: Yes I agree with you!

Tara5 Oh: How has the Japanese community in Second Life been growing? I see a lot of cool music and fashion events!

Nao Noe: I love Japanese users’ music and fashion very much.

Nao Noe: It’s very important that we introduce them into real world people.

Nao Noe: so, I made SLMaMe website.

Nao Noe: I know a lot of users become SL user, after reading user blogs.

Nao Noe: We are planning to create Real goods with Naturum. We are choosing a SL creator in fashion contest event in SLMaMe.

Tara5 Oh: There are a lot of English speaking admirers of Japanese fashion in SL!

Tara5 Oh: Cool are you hoping to do some RL integration?

Nao Noe: Yes

Nao Noe: At first, we are trying to create clothes in small lots, using SL creator’s design.

Nao Noe: Naturum has manufacturing network, because they have large EC website.

Nao Noe: we are trying for “manufacturing2.0″

Tara5 Oh: What other VWs besides SL and OpenSim are Metabirds developing in?

Nao Noe: I’m interested in HipiHi. I want to make SLMaMe into English and Chinese version. In the Chinese Version, HiPiHi is very important.

Tara5 Oh: In the US the Electric Sheep have moved a lot to 2.5 D and closed virtual worlds!

Nao Noe: I know ESC are moving a lot 2.5D

Nao Noe: I think it’s important in the near future, to maintain the company.

Tara5 Oh: in the US there is a huge interest in 3D immersive for corporate collaboration and education . Is that true in Japan?

Nao Noe: In my opinion, it’s true. OpenSim is a strong platform for this we will introduce OpenSim to companies.

Tara5 Oh: so to follow up on my question about 2.5 D has Metabirds managed to stay focused on the 3D immersive without having to develop more in 2.5D and flash like ESC?

Nao Noe: We are very small company, we don’t need many fixed cost. It’s a simple solution for us.

Tara5 Oh: So you continue to find SL devlopment profitable?

Nao Noe: SL, OpenSim, HiPiHi, SLMaMe.

Tara5 Oh: Which all develop the immersive 3D path which is good I think!

Tara5 Oh: Melting Dots also felt their communities in SL were strong and growing although they work across other platforms. Do you feel this about your SL communities? How many sims do you have in SL?

Nao Noe: about 25 and we have SLMaMe comunity gathering thousands of SL core users who are VW core users in Japan. it’s very strong.

Tara5 Oh: What does MaMe mean in English?

Nao Noe: Bean

Nao Noe: SLMaMe is a broad bean.

Tara5 Oh: heh Bean is a slang word for currency in English too!

Tara5 Oh: Do you have your own portal for Metabirds sims in SL?

Nao Noe: our company site is http://www.metabirds.com/ and http://www.metabirds.com/service/metaworld.html is information.

Nao Noe: And we are planning to create Social Network Site website for the metabirdssims(metaworld) user http://metaworld.jp/

Tara5 Oh: how many people work for Metabirds now?

Nao Noe: about 10.

Tara5 Oh: and you are based in Tokyo?

Nao Noe: Yes, but our staff live all over Japan.

Tara5 Oh: so you are a virtual company too?

Nao Noe: Yes.

Nao Noe: We are using SL and Skype to communicate with each other.

Tara5 Oh: Melting Dots said they saw themselves primarily as virtual world event creators and an agency specializing in social media – how do you describe Metabirds?

Nao Noe: We are “Virtual World Business Developer.”

Tara5 Oh: I saw the recent press release from NTT.

NTT, the largest telecommunication company in Japan will invest in the NGI group with a total of 1,630,000,000 yen. NGI group is the owner of 3Di so NTT is planning to work on metaverse business with their new NGN (Next generation network) system (see Second Times).

Tara5 Oh: What do you think are the implications of this for Japanese virtual World development?

Nao Noe: I think it’s good for hardware/network infrastracture for virtual worlds.

Nao Noe: and, on their service, Metabirds can provide a lot of businesses then, then the users will become happy If they provide low cost and stable infrastracture, it’s very good for us.

Meltingdots from left to right, Hiroshi, Ebiichi, Yamazaki, Ito at the Electric Sheep Company’s party for Virtual Worlds, 2008 in New York City.

Ever since my friend Al Kronos clued me in to all the Meltingdots hotness in Second Life, I have been meaning to catch up with them. So when I met CEO, Hiroshi Asaeda and the Meltingdots crew in “real” life, I was thrilled. And, last week I caught up with Hiroshi Asaeda in Second Life â„¢ (A registered Trademark of Linden Lab).

Meltingdots are a very successful event organizer in Second Life. The screenshot below is a DJ event presented by one of Japan’s major music labels – avex. For more see avex island in Second Life.

Meltingdots also publish Virtual Walker - a virtual world themed magazine.

They held an event in Second Life (screenshot below) just a few days before Virtual Walker was published in “real life”. Hiroshi said: “Everybody joined the conversation, how SL would grow, how users should get involved, and what real companies should do.”

You can participate in Meltingdots events in Second Life every night from 21:00PM Japan time.

The event in the picture below was a lecture course to how to build and customize a “meltingdog.”

Interview with Hiroshi Asaeda, CEO of Meltingdots

Tara5 Oh: Could you tell me a bit about Meltingdots are you still mainly focused in Second Life?

Asaeda Meltingdots: I would answer no to that question. We are starting in many other virtual worlds.

Tara5 Oh: Were are you starting?

Asaeda Meltingdots: Were doing more stuff in avatar services.

Tara5 Oh: Could you explain what that means?

Asaeda Meltingdots: All services in which avatars exist. It can be 3D and 2D. What’s important to me is that it has another virtual YOU in the web.

Tara5 Oh: So like The Electric Sheep Company while you began with a focus on SL you have broadened now?

Asaeda Meltingdots: Yes, but we are not going to quit SL.

Tara5 Oh: How is SL going in Japan? I sometimes visit Japanese sims and see a lot of enthusiasm for music and fashion?

Asaeda Meltingdots: There are many high quality items made by Japanese SL users. And they are very cheap.

Tara5 Oh: Is there also a scientific and educational community as in Europe and US?

Asaeda Meltingdots: Meltingdots built a SIM for a University, but I don’t hear much about an original community yet. The reason for this is that Japan is a small country, that they can actually meet in RL if they want.

Tara5 Oh: Have you got involved with the OpenSim development yet – I know 3Di is very into it!

Asaeda Meltingdots: Not yet in our company. But I think it is hard for companies to be satisfied in the SL client right now.

Tara5 Oh: What are the biggest changes necessary to SL to make it more appealing to a large audience?

Asaeda Meltingdots: Well the biggest problem so far in Japan is that there aren’t many Linden staffs – just one! Jun Linden is my friend.

You can’t buy land in Yen, you can’t buy Linden dollars in Yen. That problem is BIG.

Tara5 Oh: Is this because no-one in Japan has been able to find a way to become what I think Linden Lab calls a global provider?

Asaeda Meltingdots: You have to pay LL to be a global provider and you can’t make money from bringing in new users. People buy land from LL. so there isn’t much benefit.

Tara5 Oh: And LL have no servers in Japan yet do they?

Asaeda Meltingdots: No they don’t.

Tara5 Oh: Have you talked to people at LL about remedying this situation?

Asaeda Meltingdots: To make the business model work, LL should pay back each users registering to the provider. I talked with them a long time ago, maybe about 6 months ago.

Tara5 Oh: It seems to me, although the Japanese community is small, still the interest in an immersive virtual economy like SL is strong – what do you think?

Asaeda Meltingdots: I think it is very strong.

At least I can say there are no virtual worlds that are even close to Second Life yet

Tara5 Oh: What are the Meltingdots builds that you think have been most successful?

Asaeda Meltingdots: We think our events our the most successful so far, buildings don’t matter.

We had real major musicians come in to Second Life. And we had them communicate with their fans.

Asaeda Meltingdots: We publish magazines about virtual worlds, every 3 months, 30,000 copies all around Japan.

We are partnered with one of the biggest media companies in japan.

Tara5 Oh: What are the most popular avatar networks in Japan?

Asaeda Meltingdots: youtube, nicovideo, mobile games, and Second Life. Avatar networks in Japan are mainly game sites.

We’re working with other companies mainly. We’re more like an agency.

Sorry, I have to go. My colleagues are calling me right now!

It is jaw dropping the number of new features that realXtend has brought to the Second Life â„¢ (A registered Trademark of Linden Lab) open source client and OpenSim server tech in only a few short months. Last week the Rex team posted a video showing inverse kinematics, character morph controls, and clothing physics- see here. And, this week they have revealed their latest feature – the integration of Facegen (see the video here or click on the screenshot above).

I attended realXtend’s recent open meeting in Second Life. The Rex team answered questions to an eager crowd that included, the Second Life avatar, G2 Proto, of Kyle “G” the lead developer from G2 (see here for more on their hardware and networking division). Kyle “G” is currently involved in a collaborative effort with Microsoft to explore the abilities of the C#/.NET based OpenSim software. He is spearheading efforts with the Second Life Microsoft .Net User Group to create the Microsoft’s new developer community OpenSim grid – Project Manhattan. Kyle seemed very interested in the work of realXtend! I have an in depth interview with Kyle from G2 and Zain from Microsoft that details their vision for Virtual World Developer and Platform Evangelism on Open Sim. I am transcribing this and will post soon!

Interview with Jani Pirkola

Jani Pirkola, Rex’s Project Manager, kindly took some time to answer a few questions in the middle of this very busy and exciting time for Rex. The new Rex video showing the Facegen integration has just been posted on the Rex media page. Jani said:

It is almost scary as it is so real! I really start to see that we are approaching something so real as in Snowcrash or Otherland series of books. You can also make yourself look younger or older, different gender or race.

Tish: Wow!! Congratulations to the realXtend team you really have shown the world what can be done with the open source Second Life client and achieved what many considered impossible at this stage! These two new avatar tech videos are awesome!

Jani: Well, the main focus of our work at the moment is on Avatar. We have integrated Facegen so that you can use photos from your own face to create your own avatar.
We are just about to release new versions of viewer and server, and we start to host public avatar storage and authentication services to promote the future internet and avatar portability.
Now we have a lot of work to do on planning. But we are going to focus on three tracks:

1) a base track to fix stability issues.

2) a user experience track to make it look extremely good.

3) a collaboration track to do all the document sharing stuff.
In the new software release we have some cool new features. For example, you can have friends list working no matter where you and your friends are, so it works across realXtend grids and worlds. The same is true for your personal inventory, you can have that too with you when you teleport to different worlds.

Tish: One of the great things Rex has done is to offer so many new and great features so fast that you have for the first time created a situation where content developers have a significant new incentive to start working in an OpenSim grid. Are you beginning to see interest from content developers?

Jani: Yes, I have received many contacts for example from architects, they see the value of using real 3D models in virtual worlds. Professor François Garnier of Ecole Nationale Supérieur des Arts Décoratifs de Paris is one of the early adopters of realXtend platform in their art productions.

Tish: Obviously SL has a huge lead on content production and will probably offer licensing to open grids that want to share content at some point? But, what new models for content production do you see emerging in the Open Metaverse?

Jani: From Second Life users we have heard some complaining about the IP rights issue. They would die to have that feature on realXtend. But we have a plan for this; We could make an object rights server, that keeps SHA1 hash values of all the assets and licenses how to use that asset plus information about which users are allowed to use that asset.

Then it is possible to build a feature to the viewer that users can check if someone is using stolen or bought jacket. That creates a social pressure instead of trying to technically prevent copying. Technical prevention is always going to fail in the end, so we need to use social pressure instead. For example, If everyone could check whether an asset is owned or stolen, someone who is representing a company would not want to use anything stolen on them.

Ben Goertzel, Novamente, said that if someone steals his AI pet dog, it is a dead dog without the AI that runs on his server. Philip Rosedale was in agreement on this point also. Philip said much the same thing when he attended our Open Source Virtual Worlds panel at VW 2008.

If you really want to protect some content, you need to have server side functionality attached to it. This combined with our idea of using asset hash on a server, we think would boost the content creation.

realXtend offers possibility to use OGRE meshes and world is full of ready made 3D models that you can convert to that format. So that solves at least part of the initial egg-chicken content problem for realXtend.

Tish: Some people are proclaiming the notion of a virtual economy is dead, others say that virtual economies still have legs. What is your view on this?

Jani: First of all, I am an engineer, so economics is not my cup of tea. Still it seems that virtual money is successful in many games and virtual worlds. If it can be tied to RL money, that can be a source of many problems, like money laundering. I am not ready to say it is dead, but we might have to wait to see what future brings in this area.

Tish: There is a lot of work on interoperability going on right now. I even heard that Qwaq is considering working on interoperability with OpenSim! And I heard Rex is in talks with Solipsis. What are Rex’s goals for interoperability? I know in order to develop some of the super cool features of Rex you are not currently integrated with the OS trunk. But Adam Frisby mentioned to me a way you could remain integrated with OpenSim but still have the freedom to be the trail blazers of the future. Could you tell me more about your plans for compatibility with OpenSim in the future?

Jani: Yes, right now we are in warm talks with Solipsis to figure out how to co-operate the best possible way. Lets see what comes out from that. Their technological ideology is the best I can think of, combination of both client-server and peer-to-peer to get best of both of the worlds.

The focus in realXtend is to lead the development. There is a secondary goal to be interoperable whenever it makes sense. I just heard from Adam that the latest OpenSim is rock solid, so that is a big incentive for us to continue our efforts to modify realXtend code to be compatible with them. The goal here is to make realXtend as modules for OpenSim for easy integration.

Tish: Rex has blazed the trail with facilitating the import/export of meshes! But large meshes from programs like 3D max, while they create totally new opportunities for applications and content development, can be time consuming to work in and often require a lot of time on the import /export work, and they can be difficult to fine tune in world. One of the dreams for the future might be prim meshes that would bring the best of both worlds together (prim and mesh) do you see this as a possibility? I have heard many obstacles from bandwidth to graphic card inadequacies. But as Rex now has a reputation for doing the impossible I am asking your view on whether prim meshes are on the horizon? If not what are you doing to make meshes more flexible and easy to work with in world?

Jani: That is an interesting idea, and we have toyed ourselves with it already. It is definitely not impossible, though we have not made any decisions whether we will implement it or not.
We are going to do a lot of improvements to world building tools and add new possibilities like projectors, and things that are familiar from game level editing tools. Mesh selection is going to be fixed, for example. So you can expect much more in the area of world building. We are doing a lot of world building ourselves and have found it too cumbersome at the moment.

Tish: OpenSim is definitely the fastest forward moving kid on the metaverse block. I know that the Rex avatar server is out and the Rex grid open. But, as I have a Mac I have no first hand experience, so I am interested to know how well things are progressing re stability, concurrency and ability to scale?

Jani: Those are currently the weak points we have, but we are going to attack also these in the near future. The stability is number one, it is a must for every application out there.

Tish: OpenSim is beginning to get a lot of interest from major corporate players. IBM, Microsoft, Intel, are three of the big ones. How do you think this will effect Rex and the developing ecosystem of OpenSim?

Jani: I think you could compare OpenSim and realXtend to operating system and a windowing system. realXtend is built on OpenSim, so every big company who starts to use OpenSim, will consider using realXtend as well. By using realXtend, you actually use OpenSim server plus some modifications we have done to enable all the new features.
I am sure that OpenSim and realXtend benefit each other as the whole ecosystem looks richer that way.

Tish: Recently I talked to several key metaverse developers in Japan and the integration of 3D immersive and mobile tech is very much part of their vision. But Japanese cell phone habits make the possibilities for interesting integration very rich. In Europe and the US what interesting directions do you think this integration with 3D immersive and mobile could take?

Jani: That is something we have given a lot of thought to, but we haven’t found a clear answer yet. One idea is that there could be communication application that you can use to have presence in the virtual world even when you are on the move.

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 â„¢ (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!!