This post, and my previous post about integration of OpenSim into Web 2.0, explore how immersive virtual worlds, through a full architectural integration into Web 2.0, will become part of the fabric of everyday computing.

The diagram above shows where OpenSim sits in Web 2.0 (click on the diagram to see a readable enlarged version!). The following interview with OpenSim developer, Teravus Ousley, describes some of the work being done to create documented protocols that will make OpenSim fit seamlessly into Web 2.0 architecture.

OpenSim is in the news a lot these days, explicitly as in the case of the announcement last week by 3Di of their “3Di OpenSim” Standard (for more see here and here), and implicitly with the launch of ChinaQ.  Adam Frisby, OpenSim, pointed out to me if you download the ChinaQ client that it is based on OpenSim, it connects nicely to OSGrid too. There is speculation the client is a rebranded version of the realXtend viewer (which is based on the open source Second Life viewer) as all the version numbers are the same.

So OpenSim is not only attracting the interest of business giants like IBM, Microsoft and Intel, it is becoming the architecture of choice for virtual world initiatives from Chinese and Japanese telecoms (see here and here for more). Also, see the press release about Nokia and the City of Oulu, Finland, joining as supporters of realXtend.

But, as Raph Koster in his post commenting on 3Di’s OpenSim announcement notes, the question how immersive virtual worlds can go from strong niche or enterprise markets to mass adoption in consumer markets must be answered.  As Raph points out, Lively, Whirled, SmallWorlds, Vivaty, and yes, Metaplace have a very different architecture that they hope will attract broad consumer markets.  (I did a long interview with Raph on this at The Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo in LA which I will post as soon as it is transcribed, so more on this soon!).

Architectural integration into the heart of Web 2.0, I would argue, is the key to mass adoption for immersive virtual worlds. While architecture alone will not guarantee the necessary breakthroughs in usability for widespread consumer adoption, it will create the ideal conditions for the innovation through which usability obstacles will be overcome, and the enormous potential for immersive, real time interaction over the internet will be realized.

Interview with Teravus Ousley

Tish: What has been  the most fundamental problem re virtual world architecture that has kept immersive virtual worlds isolated from web 2.0 to date? 

Teravus: a lack of standardization, licensing issues, and the difficulty of entry into the industry.

1) Standardization

Tish: In order of importance what in your view are the priorities for standardization?

Teravus: Probably the same order that OpenSimulator was tackled in, basic connect (current state of OGP – Open Grid Protocol).  Basic Service (interaction standards).  Advanced connect/mashup/aggregate extensions.   Preferably people will have working code in the various spaces there to use freely under various licenses..

Tish: Can you show me where OpenSim will fit in this drawing of Web 2.0 architecture? [Teravus makes some modifications on the drawing I send him from Dion Hinchcliffe’s presentation from his Web 2.0 Expo workshop, see original here]

Teravus: The modified diagram [now opening this post] is a great view of how it will look.

Tish: Why is the TCP stream left out of the original drawing? [For more about Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite see here.

Teravus: It is left out because the person who made this diagram had web pages in mind.  Static large files, or small changing files. In the the drawing the fact that TCP streams are smaller then HTTP is on purpose.

Tish: I have heard different opinions on the percentage of the communications for virtual worlds that can be done over HTTP?

Teravus: The fact is that the biggest usage of communications in virtual worlds is transmitting images that’s the number one bandwidth usage. So, if we’re counting by ‘usage’ I say 91%.   If we’re counting by services that use http.   I say probably 75%  I definitely think that http should be evaluated for use on new things ‘first’. But, there are a few places where HTTP doesn’t shine.

I am skeptical about replacing things in the UDP with HTTP  thinking that they’ll ‘perform better. [For more about User Datagram Protocol (UDP) another of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite see here.]

I think there’s been a huge test going on now and for the last 5 or six years with regards to the UDP protocol and it really has performed admirably.   In the last year and a half, I’ve seen attempts to convert several things to HTTP that have failed, and failed somewhat spectacularly sometimes.  In the end the items get reverted back to the UDP protocol. One such item that sticks out in my mind is CAPS(HTTP) based inventory retrieval. The capability to do that in the client has been available since before February. And, it’s been turned on and off on ‘Agni’ at least once in the process. Additionally, we (OpenSimulator) enabled http inventory, and, the  inventory failures rose pretty steeply.

I think some services are really just not ‘right’ for HTTP.. . particularly where a ‘poll’ methodology is used, or, the data is significantly dynamic enough that it makes caching useless.

Anyway, as far as the future is concerned, I do want to see some services over HTTP. Other services, it would be more appropriate to have a TCP stream. Stock market data, for example, uses a TCP stream. The Scalability of the stock market, is just one example of a scalable TCP stream.

Tish: So you see TCP  as the communications protocol that would do the work for the parts of virtual worlds not suitable for HTTP. At least that is how you have shown it in our Web 2.0 architecture drawing. But should there also be a UDP stream?

Teravus: For the virtual world of tomorrow? .. probably not.

Tish: Why not?

Teravus: You have less control over the quality of service when it’s delivered over UDP then TCP.

Tish: What is the exact relation between TCP and UDP.  My understanding is UDP a lower level protocol.

Teravus: TCP offers guaranteed delivery through flow control, while UDP does not.  One of the failures of UDP, is the ‘resend’ technology we’ve put on top of it to try and make it reliable.   TCP does this automatically and better then we could at a lower level but it does also cost up to twice the bandwidth depending on what is being sent. HTTP is a layer on top of TCP.

Tish: So just like the HTTP/TCP discussion there has to be a TCP/UDP boundary discussion …so it is HTTP then TCP then UDP and the boundaries have to be worked on.

Teravus: Those are the orderings in my mind…  probably if UDP uses any..  it should use less then 0.5%.

Tish: And the current Second Life architecture what does it use if it isn’t using HTTP? [to see the work of the Architecture Working Group on the future Second Life architecture here]

Teravus: UDP or HTTP

Tish: and TCP?

Teravus: Well, TCP is a layer under HTTP.  As far as I know, SL doesn’t use TCP streams directly

Teravus: Instead, it uses HTTP polling.  This is one of the places, that I’ve highlighted where it doesn’t shine.

Tish: Polling does sound slow?

Teravus: Polling is essentially..     (connect) Got any data for me? No?(disconnect), (connect) Got any data for me?  No?(disconnect).

Tish: So what is the path to standards for this then?

Teravus: Distilling what we know works and what we actually intend on supporting as far as adoption under these standards.

Tish: Where does MPEG-V fit in?  Have you read their document yet?

Tervavus: MPEG-V is interesting reading…     but is there any working example? I have just the overview. But I’ll read it over to have a better determination of how to ‘keep it in mind’ for the future. It looks like they’ve only really defined the requirements of the MPEG-V spec. The MPEG-V spec looks quite far reaching..  but  the documents so far are requirements and marketing talk aimed toward business people – obviously intended to get more people interested in working on them.

But I have a feeling that any format with MPEG before it will be onerous to support. ..for me it’s too early to tell. It’s quite far reaching…it isn’t anything like ’signal processing’ which the MPEG group is most famous for.

Tish: The whole top down approach of the MPEG-V initiative seems counter to Web 2.0 principles to me.

Teravus: Well, remember..  that even if there’s a virtual world format war (reference to DVD-HD vs BlueRay) we still need to win over the rest of the web.

Tish: Yes and don’t you think the way to win over the web is to use as many existing standards as possible?

Teravus: Well, it’s to use as many existing standards as ‘fit’ though.. KISS, as always (K)eep (I)t (S)imple (S)tupid if we have 30 different internet standards..     people looking at it will @.@

Tish: But it is just lack of documented protocols that has created isolation from Web 2.0?  And really doesn’t it boil down to standardizing that small percentage that is outside HTTP – the TCP and UDP stream that we talked about earlier where the real time stuff that virtual worlds bring to the web happens?

Teravus: no..  actually the HTTP standardization is just as important.

Tish: You mean even though SL used HTTP it isn’t standardized?

Teravus: Not documented specifically.

Tish: And OpenSim is that documented?

Teravus: Not well enough probably to define a standard.

Tish: Is AWG (Architecture Working Group) doing the documentation?

Teravus: working on it..

2) Licensing Issues

Tish: It sounds like some of this work has to go on across client and server.  Are we running into the issue of BSD for OpenSim and GPL for the Second Life viewer?

Tervaus: Well, some of the issue here is license choice.  One of the reasons that libOMV was able to achieve what they did was they did it /before/ the client was open sourced.

Tish: So open sourcing the client actually became an obstacle!!???

Teravus: I don’t think so in a whole.  I think it was great for the community.  I do, however think that C++ UDP stacks will be scrutinized more for GPL license violations because, of course, the client is GPL and C++ .

Tish: It is my understanding that Linden Lab is open to discussions on making the licensing more efficient for the open source community?

Teravus: Well, the client, in a whole, should not be changed as far as the license.   JUST the things that they expect people to adopt should be made more open. If they expect people to adopt PRIMs, then there should be an efficient implementation available for anyone to use..   at the very least, in LGPL format. Otherwise, the die hards are forced to re-implement them from scratch, and most people will just choose something more open.

Tish: Has anyone ever put together a list of the parts that need to be LGPLed?

Teravus: Well, I think it’s there in a few places.  There is at least one jira open on it.

Teravus: A few that come to mind for me..   is the UDP stack and the prim to mesh/UV code.   I think there are some things that can definitely be improved about the UDP Stack.  There are some things, (images come to mind), that would be better over HTTP

Tish: Do you think if the UDP stack were L GPLed that would be a significant help to integrating OpenSim better with the web?

Teravus: Well, it would certainly be adopted by more clients. GPL + (your own code) = GPL Licensed client. LGPL linked library + (your own code) = Your own license.
You still need to mention that you used LL’s UDP stack, and provide the source code for it at request.

The general client itself should remain GPL, it’s better for LL that way.  Just the items that they want people to ’standardize’ on. It would help..   if it was at least LGPL

Tish: And the value to  LL on LGPLing these parts is it helped spread their basic technology while protecting the rest of their viewer?

Teravus: It furthers their goal of standardization on their systems because it allows more people to adopt it for their own uses without worrying about GPL-ing their own client.

Tish: It is hard to standardize without access to the low level parts of the client right?

Teravus: The general population of Developers..     will want a libX that they can plug into their application for communicating.. .  libY to deal with object data..

Tish: Hence your requests for LGPL were  UDP stack and  the prim->mesh/UV

Teravus nods

Tish: and at the moment they only have openmv?

Teravus: That’s the only ‘truly’ open standard right now as far as the LL technology is concerned. OpenSimulator’s use of that data..   could also be seen as a standard..

Teravus: But we have not published anything beyond code..   neither have they  really..  technically..  but their organization of the way things work is very very clear

Tish: What are the most significant limitations of openmv?

Teravus: Probably..  just it not being in c++.   c++ has it’s benefits and it’s pitfalls.  Changes in c++ usually take longer then ones in C#.  But, of course c++ is always faster.  With libOMV It isn’t always clear about what packet is used when.  However, with some experimentation, you can figure it out in 30 minutes or less..

Usability

We didn’t spend much time discussing some of the innovation in usability that this architectural integration into Web 2.0 will enable (more to come on that!). But, Teravus mentioned one interesting use case he is working on.

Teravus: You might also stick a ‘cloud renderer’ into the graphic [Tervaus was looking at the diagram (from Dion Hinchcliffe) that opened my previous post on “Web 2.0 to OpenSim Made easy”  click on the thumbnail below].

Some people have discussed having a ‘video stream’ that’s rendered on the cloud and providing that to flash clients would be the best solution to it for them.

The cloud renderer is for organizations that have large pools of servers with GPUs so would allow for very powerful rendering. The servers can render the scenes and stream them to the low end browsers. It would allow extremely high quality rendering for really low end browsers..  such as ‘cell phones.’

Tish: Is that possible now on OpenSim?

Teravus: Nope.  But it’s something that in the future, I intend on working on. It would essentially be a video [streamed to low end browsers].

Tish: Is that different from what Vollee is doing? The mobile client for SL?

Teravus:  It appears that they are, indeed, pre-rendering the client’s view and streaming it to the mobile device

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!

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.

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!!