Are you one of those people who need something more to get you excited about the future of virtual worlds than, “I am in ur browser, chatting in 3D?”

Well, perhaps, it is time for you to take a close look at the burgeoning open source ecosystem surrounding OpenSIm.

Jonas Karlsson, Xerox, (avatar Poinky Malaprop) wrote an excellent post (I quote his great title above!) explaining why he is not turned on by the big bubble of browser based worlds that have sprung up recently – Vivaty, Lively, JustLeapIn, ExitReality, WebFlock and more

This flood of browser based worlds into the virtual world scene has caused many commentators in the field to articulate clearly what is important about virtual worlds and where these lite weight worlds fall short (see Dusan Writer) and how they can’t realize virtual worlds’ potential as innovative disruptive technnologies that will actually improve the human condition.

Even the the mainstream of the blogosphere can see how retro and limited this new crop of VWs lite are (see PC World’s look at Lively).

I am not arguing that these “stepping stone” browser worlds won’t be something that many people try out. But, like Jonas and Gwyneth Llewelyn, I believe that the destiny of virtual worlds lies elsewhere. I agree with Jonas, the keys that opened the doors for virtual worlds to bring something new, exciting and very beneficial to human communication were sown in Second Life with the “in-world creation tools, that enabled co-creation and a new form of collaboration” – none of these “in ur browser” wannabes are even close to offering this kind of paradigm shifting experience. Though some of them may play a role in introducing a wider audience to a limited sense of the possibilities of avatar interaction.

Why is OpenSim Important?

While Second Life demonstrated most of the key paradigm shifts to social interaction possible through virtual worlds, open source and open standard development, as Linden Lab has acknowledged for a while now, are central to unleashing the full potential of virtual worlds into a scalable, global and world changing phenomena.

A number of interesting open source virtual world projects are out there. But, of all these, OpenSim is beginning to show its got the right stuff to move virtual worlds forward quickly, in a positive direction. Open standards are not arrived at by ivory tower committees. They are worked out on the ground in a process which requires the magic of “rough consensus and running code” (this phrase is drawn from a conversation I had with Mic Bowman, Intel, about interoperability of virtual worlds).

This magic, “rough consensus and running code” is exemplified in the rapidly developing ecosystem committed to growing OpenSim technology – OpenSim provides powerful and fexible software modules for building virtual worlds.

There is a powerful community of amazing diversity working with OpenSIm – from many enthused individuals to contributors from some of the world’s largest corporations, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft (see the many commentaries, here and here, in the blogosphere on the MS dev community entry into OpenSim and for my interview with Kyle Gomboy of the MS dev community and Zain Naboulsi, Microsoft, see here).

And, while Linden Lab do not contribute code directly to OpenSim yet, some of Linden Lab’s top developers are involved in a major an interoperability effort between Second Life and OpenSim. This effort has also been spearheaded by David Levine (avatar Zha Ewry), IBM.

David’s interoperability patch and Linden Lab’s OWG (Open Grid Protocols) will go into Beta on the LL Preview Grid at the end of the month. To become part of this Beta you must join the Gridnauts group in Second Life. The code developed from this interoperability work will eventually be part of the OpenSim trunk.

There is a common misunderstanding about OpenSim. OpenSim is NOT a virtual world, and is certainly not as many in the blogosphere like to suggest a virtual world competing with Second Life. On the contrary as the err “love child” of Second Life, it carries the qualities of Second Life into the future. And Linden Lab’s acknowledgement and support of OpenSim is clear in their interoperability efforts. … [visit site to read more]

Junichiro Makino, University of Tokyo, leads the way into the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) in Tokyo. Piet Hut, Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton, is right behind … [visit site to read more]

Today it is official, “The IBM and Linden Lab Interoperability Announcement” – see also, visit site to read more]

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves” … [visit site to read more]

]]> http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/06/16/philips-designs-ideation-quest-in-second-life/feed/ 4 http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/04/21/the-federal-consortium-of-virtual-worlds/ http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/04/21/the-federal-consortium-of-virtual-worlds/#comments Mon, 21 Apr 2008 21:47:47 +0000 Tish Shute http://www.ugotrade.com/?p=1438

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

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]]> http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/04/21/the-federal-consortium-of-virtual-worlds/feed/ 0 http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/04/11/the-architects-of-the-open-source-metaverse-at-virtual-worlds-2008/ http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/04/11/the-architects-of-the-open-source-metaverse-at-virtual-worlds-2008/#comments Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:28:09 +0000 Tish Shute http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/04/11/the-architects-of-the-open-source-metaverse-at-virtual-worlds-2008/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the architecture of the Open Metaverse?

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

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

Topics discussed were:

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

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

Will the open metaverse have a virtual currency?

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

How will IP be protected and will obfustication be employed?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New Era of Business Tools and Business Process Modeling

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript of Discussion at the Open Source Virtual Worlds Round Table

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

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

(for more click on “read entire post” for the rest of this transcript)
… [visit site to read more]

]]> http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/04/11/the-architects-of-the-open-source-metaverse-at-virtual-worlds-2008/feed/ 3 http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/04/02/hipihi-in-public-beta-interview-with-xu-hui-ceo/ http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/04/02/hipihi-in-public-beta-interview-with-xu-hui-ceo/#comments Thu, 03 Apr 2008 04:18:14 +0000 Tish Shute http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/04/02/hipihi-in-public-beta-interview-with-xu-hui-ceo/

HiPiHi is taking up the challenge of building a managed world with the emphasis on creating a strong virtual economy and a community built around the trading and creation of virtual … [visit site to read more]

]]> http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/04/02/hipihi-in-public-beta-interview-with-xu-hui-ceo/feed/ 3 http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/03/20/avatar-rights-freedom-openess-in-immersive-software/ http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/03/20/avatar-rights-freedom-openess-in-immersive-software/#comments Thu, 20 Mar 2008 05:26:18 +0000 Tish Shute http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/03/20/avatar-rights-freedom-openess-in-immersive-software/

The social consequences of the architectural decisions that will take us into a future of openness in immersive software are potentially vast. Open immersive software is poised to begin to play a disruptive role in the next generation of the … [visit site to read more]

]]> http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/03/20/avatar-rights-freedom-openess-in-immersive-software/feed/ 6 http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/03/03/openspime-instrumentation-for-the-planet/ http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/03/03/openspime-instrumentation-for-the-planet/#comments Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:45:11 +0000 Tish Shute http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/03/03/openspime-instrumentation-for-the-planet/

We have built the technology for monitoring almost everything, almost everywhere and we are making 99% of it open-source. Thanx to Bruce Sterling who inspired us, we called our technology “OpenSpime.” This is a concrete opportunity to monitor … [visit site to read more]

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