Today, I did a presentation, on connecting real, virtual, mobile, and augmented spaces to support sustainability, for Earth Week SL, with Dave Pentecost and Jim Purbrick, who presented on Carbon Goggles.

Dave and I focused on sensor networks, open data, Pachube, OpenSim, and sustainability from perspective of, “hack local, think global.”  Dave and I will be picking up on some of these themes of sensor networks and sustainability next week in our presentation with Dimitri Darras at ITP,  NYU, Aprl 24th, 6.30 pm to 8 pm – details here.  If you are in New York City, I hope to see you there.

We got some interesting insights into augmented reality from Jim Purbrick whose Carbon Goggles project prototypes how we can use augmented reality to read carbon identity and to combine well organized, verified data from AMEE – a neutral aggregation platform to measure the “carbon footprint” of everything on earth, with crowd sourced tagging and linking.

Shaspa – “the sensor network system that has it all”

We also discussed, recently launched, Shaspa. Shaspa’s energy management packages connect spaces – real, virtual, mobile and augmented.  Shaspa has been blogged  by Maxping and Virtual World News, so you can read all about it, but the Shaspa device kit won’t be available until next week. Some key features of the Home Energy  package are listed on the slide above.  However, this evening, Dave Pentecost and I got a sneak preview of both the Shaspa commmunity and enterprise hardware and software packages from Shaspa founder Oliver Goh. We were pretty impressed.

Dave: “It’s the ultimate hackable device for energy management!”

Oliver: “Bring us any sensor device – with documentation, and within three days we will put a driver into Shaspa.”

Oliver is on the right and Dave on the left in the picture above. The picture below shows Shaspa in OpenSim. Oliver and I will be attending the 3D Training, Learning and Collaboration Conference in Washington, DC, next week.

Links

Here are some of the links that came up in the presentation as many people asked for them to be published. Dave also has them on his blog.

SLIDES on GOOGLE DOCS:
Earth Week SL Presentation, April 18th, 2009 – Google Docs

Pachube, sensor networks

Dave’s blog covering Maya archaeology, jungle ecology, and technology

Maya Frontier, Usumacinta River videos

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Arduino

Pachube – tutorials

Pachube Apps -

Arduino-SL-Pachube data site

SL to Pachube site

Dave’s Danger Shield – Pachube tutorial

TweetaWatt site (LadyAda)

Dave’s post on TweetaWatt to Opensim/SL

Peter Quirk’s post on Importing Sketchup into RealXtend

Opensim

RealXtend

ReactionGrid

homecamp

cminion -wind turbines in OpenSim

MiketheBee

Is it “OMG finally” for Augmented Reality?

Smart Planet: Interview with Andy Stanford-Clark

Orange Cone – Information Shadows and Things as Services

The realXtend 0.3 release is out with a bunch of exciting new features! Click here or on the screenshot above to see the reX video.

Also, RealXtend launched a public avatar service – avatar.realXtend.net If you are interested you should sign up soon. Jani Pirkola, Project Manager for realXtend, told me:

We will get 100 first in to test our worlds and systems and give feedback for us. The limit is because we don’t want to drown if there are too many people.

I signed up on Friday and tried out a number of the innovations including the avatar generator and the teleport that allows your avatar to move between different reX worlds. Also, I used the inworld skype to chat with the reX team. The friend list is now global, meaning that regardless which realXtend world you are in, you can see the online status of your friends. And, if you already have skype installed on your pc you can call other people from the world. Just right click them and select “call” from the menu. realXtend also have their own voice application in development. Jani explained some more about the Skype integration:

If the other person wants, he can also define his real phone number as his contact info, then your skype call will be routed to his mobile phone, for example. realXtend welcomes all millions of skype users to virtual worlds!

In the picture below I am creating Tish Shute (my avatar in reX) in the avatar generator. There is a selection clothes that are real 3D meshes and they adjust to your body. Also reX has added new male and female models and a lot of skins and clothes for them. You can adjust their muscularity and body “fat” and create really nice looking characters.

The speed at which relXtend has been bringing out new features has already begun to attract a lot of interest. Many reX innovations do not exist yet in other virtual worlds, and a dynamic community of developers is beginning to gather in the realXtend Google discussion group. As the content creation tools improve, the new features will, I suspect, begin to catch the attention of content providers.

Jani noted:

The workflow to make more clothes is still quite painful, you need to use a handful of tools to accomplish a good cloth. We will put instructions on how to make clothes on our website when they are ready. I think some content providers should get interested. Making the skins is easier. And if you use Facegen, you can get really nice looking faces and heads for an avatar. It is still possible to use the bone system to scale parts of avatars bigger or smaller and to create something totally different, like godzilla sized avatars. They are awesome!

You can also download the Facegen software on the rex site and after you have generated your 3D likeness use it in the avatar generator. There will be a “how to” on the site soon. But obviously the reX team have been using FaceGen already and Peter Quirk figured it out himself. The picture above is of reX founder Juha Hulkko. I met Juha in reX, Friday, chatting with the reX team just prior to the launch.

Realxtend are using the IKAN (“Inverse Kinematics Using Analytical Methods” from the University of Pennsylvania. Jani Pirkola, Project Manager for realXtend commented:

IKAN was by the time we found it licensed “free for non-commercial use” which is incompatible with GPL license we use because of the Linden Viewer. However, they were very nice and provided the IKAN for us (and thus for everyone) as GPL. So big thanks to IKAN!

There is future development planned for the Inverse Kinematics as on its own it doesn’t deliver very natural movement:

IK movements look a bit awkward as they are but if you could use IK to partly control the keyframe animation that would be good. That is something we don’t have. But now that the IK system is in place, it is the natural next step. Did you see our task list for 2H 2008? I think there was something said about making IK feature complete.

Virtual worlds pioneer, Peter Quirk of No There There has done an extensive exploration of the new release including “how to exploit the Google 3D warehouse to find models and create Ogre meshes from them. As Peter notes the version is marked alpha code so the reX team are looking for feedback and making improvements all the time.

I did successfully teleport over to the ENSAD sim (being developed by Professor François Garnier and students of Ecole Nationale Supérieur des Arts Décoratifs de Paris) with a couple of the reX team members during my visit!

Modular Integration of realXtend Innovation into OpenSim

There has been some concern (see Justin Clark-Casey and Dusan Writer) about the integration of reX code into OpenSim.

Jani Pirkola told me that the idea for modular integration originally came when chatting with Adam Frisby about OpenSim philosophy, “that it could be a generic engine for any kind of viewer.”

Jani explained:

The idea of the modules came up because originally realXtend did many of the changes directly to OpenSim core, which is not a good way to do changes. Instead it is much cleaner to do them into modules that can be loaded on demand.

For example, the realXtend viewer could have its own protocol plugin called clientstack at OpenSim and that way it won’t interfere with SL Viewer.

I was interested to know some more about whether the idea of a build tree and mix and match plugins was already a part of OpenSim’s design. This kind of flexibilty to add or drop different features to builds according to different applications is necessary to accommodate the vast amount of innovation that needs to go on to figure out which are going to be killer apps in the future

I talked to Adam Frisby (one of the founders of OpenSim and CTO of Deep Think), Zha Ewry (IBM) and Justin Clark-Casey (IBM), about the integration of realXtend’s innovations as modules/plugins. OpenSim architecture is pretty good already for implementing mix and match plugins and “to make plugins deeper and richer” is one of the key goals. Adam pointed out OpenSim “is already doing core functionality as plugins – teleports are handled as plugins, and instant messaging and chat certainly are.”

Adam noted there many exciting possibilities that mix and match builds could create for OpenSim:

Adam Frisby: It would nice say to take the meshes from reX and say the set up and easy way to get a sim on line from Tribal, and you mix that with plain OpenSim and you have a fantastic combination.

Zha Ewry: And it is going to be that kind of evolution – we are going to cherry pick from the fifty or sixty creative things the four of five things which turn out to be killer apps. This is how open source projects win or die.

Zha Ewry: Increasingly there is no good reason why everything you do shouldn’t sit into either region code or the modular plug in code. Occasionally we are going to find that you can’t factor a bit of code out because there is some piece of the core that hasn’t been exposed right and then we are going to have to go and do that.

Tish Shute: And how does this model work for interoperability?

Zha Ewry: The Interoperability is almost entirely plugable. There are two or three bits that aren’t at the moment because of the way they entwine deep in… some of that is a matter of figuring out how to do it right and some of it requires a discussion on how we want to manage a couple of messy issues, e.g. what does it mean to host an avatar that is not authenticated by a local authentication? How do we want to handle that data structure? But there is absolutely no reason why the ability to inter operate wouldn’t be done as regions and plug code.

Just to give one example, when we figure out how we are going to fetch assets from off of Linden Lab’s asset server that is going to look like something that plugs in to the asset framework. ie. instead of gong to MySQL, we have a plugin that goes and fetches assets stored on a remote grid.

All of this functionality needs to be done in a way that can be factored as much as possible. So that you can say, I want this from this tree, this from this tree, I want to be able to fetch assets, I want to use the currency module from this tree, and that so that can produce an OpenSim with this set of features. You may be only able to get it with say these three clients but that is what you need and those are the clients that can work with what you need.

Adam explained that the goal is to put the entire realXtend functionality as plug ins on top of OpenSim as very discrete modules, e.g, a module for doing the meshes, a module for their voice chat, their avatar logins, but the goal is to be able to take these and mix and match them with everything else.

I asked Justin to comment when I saw him in the OpenSim Office Hours meeting in Wright’s Plaza, OSGrid, a packed meeting that included Hamilton and Tess Linden and a dynamic discussion on interoperability between the Linden Lab grid and OpenSIm. See Zha Ewry’s blog post, “Happy Jumping Ruths…..Interop takes a step,” to see just how far this work on interoperability between OpenSim and the Linden Lab grid has come!

Justin Clark-Casey: I think that when OpenSim and realXtend first met, there was an intention that realXtend would be integrating all the features and fixes they produced directly into OpenSim.

My motivation for writing my original post was really as an update to the situation as it had started out in February. Though it did prove too difficult, in the end, to integrate their code, I still think they could have spent some development time extracting basic core bug fixes and sending them to us – we really have received no code from them.

This is fine in itself – there’s a very good argument that value-add code should exist as external plugins and shouldn’t make it into the OpenSim core. It just frustrates me somewhat that people talk about doing stability fixes (as realXtend did in one of your interviews) and then don’t spend time to contribute them back them back.

Regarding modularity, this has been one of the core aims of OpenSim for a long time. We want to produce a generally useful platform and not just a Second Life server. I think the vision that Adam has outlined is workable, though I think our module code has quite a lot of evolution to go through yet. But it’s good that realXtend have contracted Adam’s company to do this – Adam certainly knows what he’s doing and the requirements that realXtend have should mean that some time will be spent on developing the module system within OpenSim. In this way, realXtend will be (albeit indirectly) contributing to OpenSim.

Just to be clear, from my understanding of what Adam has said, the new realXtend modules themselves will not be distributed with OpenSim. I’m assuming that instead realXtend will make a seperate distribution of OpenSim core + their modules.

Adam concurred that the Rex code will be not be merged with OpenSim and on the opensim tracker, only the improvements to OpenSim core will be. The Rex modules will be distributed by Rex themselves only.

Much of the coding for the integration of realXtend’s new code with OpenSim will be done in Deep Think’s new Shanghai office. But Adam will handle the integration plug ins to the OpenSim trunk personally. Plugins into different build options will enable, for example, taking a piece from RealXtend, taking a piece from Tribal, taking a piece from DeepThink, mashing it together with OpenSim-Core, and producing a usable result.

Adam noted:

The code we’re doing for Rex makes that possible with their components, and hopefully lets us improve the core at the same time to make it support other peoples work in the same manner.

Recently, I met Kyle Gomboy, a former aerospace test engineer turned entrepreneur (pictured above working in Project Manhattan OpenSim), at a realXtend open house in Second Life. I quickly realized that this little bot (his avatar in Second Life is a cute energy efficient robot called G2 Proto) was one of the power houses behind a big vision.

Kyle, with partner Robin Gomboy (the G of G2), is now working with Microsoft, OpenSim, realXtend and the community of over 800 TechNet and MSDN/.NET that has already come together in Second Life to establish:

a technology grid for companies to come together with community members to form a high tech silicon valley virtually

The Microsoft connection, of course, really intrigued me! IBMers have been a movers and shakers in OpenSim since the early days. But Microsoft had not to my knowledge shown any interest in joining the immersive 3D party.

But within hours of meeting Kyle I had an interview set up with Zain Naboulsi (C# Writer in Second Life), a Microsoft Developer Evangelist who is the engine on the Microsoft side for this “community effort.”  Zain pointed out to me that despite his title, he is known as “the guy for Virtual World Evangelism” at Microsoft. I asked Zain how many virtual world evangelists there are at Microsoft?

Ha good question! There is probably about four or five of us right now.

Zain described his role in Microsoft and how this relates to this community effort in OpenSim?

I am relatively young in Microsoft I just celebrated my first year anniversary so I can’t talk about what happened several years ago, all I know is what happened over the year that I have been there.

My job description when I started this absolutely didn’t include anything about 3d worlds or anything of the kind. I became interested in 3d worlds and I think it speaks volumes for Microsoft that they said alright fine lets make it your job. And, that’s exactly what they did and likewise with other folks it is on their commitment now. Our strategy is straight forward, if you you can prove that your efforts in the community work then you are given carte blanche. If you can’t prove it then why be given the resources to waste.

My friend Ben Lindquist, of Green Phosphor, who is the only developer I know that develops in all the major open source virtual worlds, sent me a link pointing out that Microsoft has been interested in virtual worlds for some time.  But I asked Zain about this notion I have that Microsoft has been hiding its light under a bushel re the free form 3D immersive space. Zain responded:

I think we want to be careful. I mean just because we didn’t show up to the party doesn’t necessarily mean we didn’t like the party. Like most very large companies we wanted to make sure it was a viable type of thing. I think what you are seeing now is the beginning of the emergence of that experimentation and that is validation of the fact that we are definitely interested in this space.

As both Kyle and Zain were very clear that this is an open source community project, with no expectations of paid Microsoft developers being involved, at least in the short term, I was very interested as to how Kyle and Zain saw the big question of how such community driven Open Source development will reward people for their efforts (also see Second Thoughts for an alternate position to my own Open Source advocacy).

The full transcript of my interview with Kyle and Zain follows here. But, I will highlight one of Kyle’s responses. He is an experienced open source developer and entrepreneur and this is the answer he gave to this billion dollar question.

That’s a great question and since I got involved with communities and Open Source it has been a tough one to figure out. But I came to grips with when I found out that you could create this cool java script and that anyone could open new source and take what you did and that annoyed me. And I remember thinking many many years ago, how am I going to get anywhere if everything unique I make people can just take?

But then I began to thinking I can do that to. I can look at their code and then we can move up the whole technology the whole effort together, we’ll move forward faster and that will benefit us all because we will be able to send twice the product to market that we could have if we all stayed in our own little cubicles.

As far as the Manhattan project goes anything we develop there goes back to open source immediately and once it is embedded and tested it goes right back in cos OpenSim is open source and that is the ideology it was started with and we are not going to interrupt that at all.

Of course turning back code to an open source community is not always a straightforward process as a recent debate about the integration of realXtend code in OpenSim sparked off by Justin Clark-Casey and Dusan Writer indicates. But another good friend – an astute virtual world developer/evangelist, Peter Quirk, made an important point re the idea that realXtend “may not be giving back what it takes.” He noted too this must also be viewed from the perspective of “how hard it is to merge source trees that are changing rapidly without any stable releases.”

As I have heard on the grapevine great efforts are being made by both OpenSim and realXtend to work out an approach to integration. I cannot say much specifically at this point. But as Dusan Writer notes, I am an “OS promoter” and as such I think the fact that OpenSim, at such an early stage in its development, is being faced with the challenge of integrating such large contributions as realXtend’s is not just about “cracks in the open.”  This is just as much a question of how to deal with an abundance of riches in an unstructured and rapidly expanding community. The arrival of another important new community of developers from the Microsoft .NET and TECHNET will of course bring more riches and challenges too.

Interview with Zain Naboulsi (MIcrosoft) and Kyle Gomboy (G2)

Tish: Are you going to get involved with the OpenSim community?

Kyle: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been trying to catch Adam [Frisby]. He’s been chatting with me through Facebook. The first thing we want to do is start working with him and Microsoft’s Zain has offered to get support going for some of the packet handling issues that Adam was talking about that might be limiting how many people could be in OpenSim. So Adam was looking to run some code by Microsoft, and Zain was saying that he definitely had some volunteers to help out. We definitely plan to get involved.

Tish: I was interested to know how deep you were going to get in terms of OpenSim development?

Zain: Kyle you want to start and then I’ll take it?

Kyle: I had thrown out to Tish that I had already started discussion with Adam, and first thing he mentioned was some issues with performance that he was hoping if Microsoft got involved they could contribute. Zain had already asked to start working with codeplex and getting some of the files up on there so we could swarm in the .net community and possibly some Microsoft help as we get them more educated on the OpenSim movement.

Zain: Absolutely. You asked how far we’re going to go with this? We’re going to go as far as it lets us go. We honestly believe we’re forging the future here so it needs to go as far as people want to take it.

Tish: Have you thought about where you want to be interoperable with other Microsoft projects, XBox even eventually, Virtual Earth? Have you gone that far or are you just going a step at a time at the minute?

Zain: That’s a great question. Honestly we haven’t thought beyond seeing if people are really interested in this concept and from what Kyle tells me a lot of uptake. And, I know we’ve started some basic experiments, nothing really major, to see. But certainly it’s not inconceivable. I think what it is though, you mentioned the Windows aspect of it, that’s great. But we’ve already proven, if you just look around here, it doesn’t really matter to us that much what the platform is. I think the main reason we’re going to OpenSim is not so much because it all runs on Microsoft stuff which is just a nice bonus, but because I really feel like (and I just love the Lindens by the way so let me get that out!), but I really feel like we’re kind of restricted here [in Second Life]. I think that we can have a lot more flexibility by going the OpenSim route, and working with folks like Adam who I haven’t met personally but Kyle tells me he’s just phenomenal. And everybody Kyle’s met has been cool and talking about all these great things we can do with OpenSim that I don’t think Second Life’s going to give us the ability to do this anytime soon.

Tish: I know some groups are involved in the OpenSim core, are you aiming to be that involved or are you just not sure yet?

Zain: Honestly, this is the very early stages now. [Project] Manhattan is the first real test to see if first of all people respond, secondly if it’s something we want to stay involved in. All indicators are right now that it’s phenomenal. Third, I think the big thing is will this resonate with the community? The main reason we’re in this game right now is about the community. That’s why we built everything you see around you, and that’s why we want to do what we want to do with OpenSim. Then if it benefits the commmunity and the community responds to it, then we’ll stay with it. If the community doesn’t like it, doesn’t think it’s a good idea, then obviously we’ll get out. But from what Kyle has been telling me the community has just had phenominal response to the Manhattan project.

Kyle; Yes, I am pretty much lost to OpenSim at the moment because of all the options and the flexibility and the code familiarity. And everyone I’ve talked to who has gotten their own sim set up, every single person who is getting their ports configured to hook up to our grid agrees, and it doesn’t seem to be a contest even with the quirks here and there, and the lack of some features. There is so much ability – the scripting the c#sharping is everything that we had been talking about needing in SL and the desk top sharing that realXtend is doing. It is exactly the work we want to get involved in. I don’t see myself developing in Second Life, I see myself attaching the work I do in Second Life to OpenSim and everyone else is joining in so far too.

Zain: Let me clarify though too. While OpenSim will be the R&D and experimentation side of what we do, by no stretch of the imagination are we even considering abandoning our Second Life presence. So this sim [Microsoft sim in second Life] isn’t going anywhere. Community is what drives us so now we will have the community folks come here for some things and go there [OpenSim] for other things.

Tish: Just to be absolutely clear, when you say community, you mean your .net and C# developers community right?

Zain: Yes, and the technet folks, all of them, any of the community that wants to come here. But obviously the Microsoft focus people in general, so yes .Net and TechNet.

Kyle: yes we have almost 800 total in Second Life. And Zain is right noone’s leaving Second Life. But this is a community based thing and the biggest number is our c# developers. And what c# developers want to do is get into something and tinker and the top community leaders dove right into OpenSim and have seen past the quirks. So I think it will turn into a socializing place here on the islands [project Manhattan] but I think in the next year you will see a lot of .net innovation coming out of the group that was just meeting here in Second Life.

Zain: Yes I really agree with that. This is a playground now for them but I think it will evolve into something more than that.

Tish: Your focus is really on your developer community isn’t it?

Zain: Yes and I think that we may be the only project from a large company that is hundred percent community driven. I don’t go to outside folks and ask them to build this stuff. The community does it, the community decides on it, the community drives it. That’s the biggest deal. I am here to help the community in any way I can.

Tish: When you say that, it’s not just about people who are interested in Immersive 3D development, it’s people who are working many Microsoft areas right?

Zain: Absolutely. My job as Evangalist is fairly broad in nature. Today I just got done doing a webcast on new features in AJAX. I cover a very broad spectrum of things, but without a doubt an enormous amount of my time is spent with virtual world evangelism. As you aptly pointed out people are getting more and more interested in this stuff so I find more and more of my time is spent there.

Tish: I suppose future directions depend on what the developers pick up on in OpenSim doesn’t it to some degree? Do you have people who have started doing any projects in OpenSim yet?

Zain: I don’t focus internally, yes, Microsoft folks are doing stuff in OpenSim a variety of projects. But my main goal is to get out and encourage the community to get involved in OpenSim. If we can’t get the community engaged and involved in this then ultimately we’re doomed to fail because the community has to want this. The community has to pick this up as early adopters or we’ll never get to the point of mainstream acceptance.

Tish: I know Kyle is interested in something I’m really interested in which is seeing OpenSim as something much more than a 3d virtual world. Some people see OpenSim as something potentially more like a next generation operating system with really far reaching potential for dynamic, interactive data visualization and virtual operations centers and applications like that. I know Kyle you’re interested so perhaps I can ask you about that?

Kyle: I’m one hundred per cent interested in that. You might be able to send an engineer a drawing and then pop in a little active-X control and they can read about the drawing and then just click and have a view of OpenSim and move the camera around and inspect it in 3d. I see more as another output device like an excel graph or something like that.

Zain: I’ve got to agree with Kyle. I think in the short term the only way you’re going to initially get adoption is, to use a metaphor, if we think of the client as the next generation of the web browser. I think by going that path you’re going to get a lot more folks to want to try it. But ultimately certainly it’s entirely possible it becomes the shell or something like it becomes a shell. It might become, not the entire desktop which is probably unlikely, but a major component of the desktop integrated with it just like you get pieces like IM and things like that today. I don’t know if you’ve seen TouchWall yet. One of the technologies we’ve come out with. It’s like surface except it’s a big wall you can use with your interface. And, I can see TouchWall combined with the client we have today, and doing some pretty cool things especially if we can do what Kyle’s talking about – bring in some Exel spreadsheets – basically bringing in the ability to do office type activities into these clients.

Kyle: I don’t mean to say that I rule that out as a possibility, I do think that’s a possibility. I just look at what can I do in the next one or two years with this because whatever I start now that’s about as far as I can really look because the whole game will be changed in three years.

Zain: I totally agree with Kyle on that.

Tish: As far as I can see Intel might have a key part to play now, because I think that the graphics cards are a limiting factor here, particularly for the applications you are talking about Kyle?

Kyle: Yes. The video requirement is pretty steep and not only that I need probably 4 times the resolution that OpenSim has now maybe a thousand by a thousand grid before I can do any real high resolution data visualization. There needs to definitely be some expansion but if you pick the right project and the right application, it’s perfect for a lot of things right now. The other thing that Adam [Frisby] mentioned was some of the threading issues. That would help with concurrency where we can have more than 30 people or so. Even though I’ve read some hidden blogs here and there that someone’s working on a mod that lets you do over a hundred people in a sim. That would help a lot. But you’re right Intel getting involved could mean some help with some of the threading issues.

Tish: I’m really interested when you even start to mention taking this technology into other user interfaces. There’s just something wrong with being stuck in a little 2d window when you have all this 3d power. Anything that gets you away from pushing around a little mouse in a tiny window, that’s where it begins to rock.

Zain: I was in this game place where they had video arcade games and there was this one where they had these motion detectors and you play this karate style game. and you kick and the avatar does what you do. And in the end that’s where all this technology’s headed. You won’t have bulky crap attached to your hands and body like we see now, but you’ll have motion detectors that are finely tuned so that you can move and manipulate things in the virtual world.

I think Phase 1, if we’re really going to get wide adoption of OpenSim, is to treat OpenSim like the conference call center of the future. For the big events that’s where you start getting the budget and interest from internal Microsoft. I think that naturally leads to whole lot of Microsoft folks becoming much more heavily involved.

Tish: I’m assuming at the moment, your OpenSim community just has separate islands. You haven’t gridded them, they’re not related in any way right?

Kyle: That’s right. I’ve only really had the sim up a little over a week now. The initial Manhattan sim. I’m just setting up some different group meeting places within that sim. For example, we’re working on Live-ID integration so you can login with your LiveID and a few other live services integration projects. So I have a designated area, and at that area we have a colored ball that’s a certain color that you know is a wiki for that area or API for that area. You click it and open up the services for that API. Also the inworld scripting area has a link to the approved LSL commands for OpenSim. So the first sim is resources for anything and everything to do with developing in Second Life and OpenSim because we will really be developing for both. I’ve got five or six sims from community members up and running and they are just waiting on me to fire up my grid server. We’ll even try and organize our grid according to different disciplines. There’ll be a .NET developers area with a bunch of islands having to do with .NET work. And then you’ll be able to fly to the TechNet area where there’ll be a windows server and SQL server. So there’s going to be a community grid but it’s going to be organized around the developer community.

Tish: Are you hosting sims for the community for free?

Kyle: Yeah, I’m going to have a few sims up for community experiments and things like that. In addition, since most of the community has at least a broadband connection at home, and a spare computer. Everybody’s been reformatting that old 3 gigahertz single processor computer in the closet and opening up ports, so I’m going to have a grid half made up of hightech companies that want to do their own experiments and the other section of the grid will be community members that just pop in with their own simulator.

Tish: Very nice. So you’re basically showing people how to do a very quick community grid aren’t you?

Kyle: Absolutely. And then any company that has some sort of experiment going on can connect to the grid too. I’m hoping that if Intel develops a grid that they’ll at least teleport link to us or something like that so that we can start out as a community and expand out to Silicon Valley or something like that where we have gateways to all kinds of different experiments. So I’ll let Second Life be the social networking thing and then I’ll have all the Star Trek type of projects going on in OpenSim.

Tish: I love your approach – building a grid based on developer communities – people do need to be very geeky to handle OpenSim development at this level at the minute.

Kyle: Exactly. And you happen to be talking to two developers. Our job is to try and match the technology with the problem. Right now the people most likely to embrace virtual worlds and use it is the technical crowd. That’s just the way the internet came to be and all that. So put it in their hands first, get all the really hyper geeky stuff going, and let it evolve from there down to the regular person. One of the things that is in Manhattan sim now is a meeting place for a standards committee. I want to start right away setting up common standards for how navigation and walkways are done, even making accessibility possible for blind people one day where we use sound to guide you along. And we make sure like on web sites we have the proper alt. text in so audio readers can translate what’s going on. The first step is testing it, putting some standards in so anybody can go into any type of sim and can know how to get around. The we’ll really be able to bring this to the common person who can just pop in there like they can a web page now.

Tish: A question for Zain. I have this notion that Microsoft has a reputation for not liking the free form 3D immersive model?

Zain: I think we want to be careful. I mean just because we didn’t show up to the party doesn’t necessarily mean we didn’t like the party. Like most very large companies we wanted to make sure it was a viable type of thing. I think what you are seeing now is the beginning of the emergence of that experimentation and that is validation of the fact that we are definitely interested in this space.

Tish: A big question for many people looking at OpenSource development is how will people be rewarded for their efforts. You see this as a community development project – how will the members of the community be rewarded. This is a question for Kyle I think!

Kyle: That’s a great question and since I got involved with communities and Open Source it has been a tough one to figure out. But I came to grips with when I found out that you could create this cool java script and that anyone could open new source and take what you did and that annoyed me. And I remember thinking many many years ago, how am I going to get anywhere if everything unique I make people can just take? But then I began to thinking I can do that to. I can look at their code and then we can move up the whole technology the whole effort together, we’ll move forward faster and that will benefit us all because we will be able to send twice the product to market that we could have if we all stayed in our own little cubicles. As far as the Manhattan project goes anything we develop there goes back to open source immediately and once it is embedded and tested it goes right back in cos OpenSim is open source and that is the ideology it was started with and we are not going to interrupt that at all.

Tish: Are you going to become involved with the interoperability efforts like the one launched by Linden Lab – The Architecture Working Group that is making efforts re: the interoperability of OpenSim and Second Life, in particular?

Kyle: It is projects like the LIveID integration that we are working on and many people are interested in OpenID. There may be a lot of third party type of log ins that handle authentication. So you may see that even Linden Lab uses multiple methods for people to authenticate into their grid. And I think that this new group that they have started [AWG] is just proof that they know that they must open up and embrace these other grids and get ahead of the game so that they can work with these other grids right away.

Zain: And as far as standards go i think we have a ways to go before we start getting down to the hard core standards path. First we have to establish that this medium is going to be viable to the market in general. And then start bringing it together much like we did with the web. The web took off and there was a governing body that evolved into the world wide web consortium and I think that eventually you will see that with this who knows maybe even W3C will take over aspects of standards for this medium.

Tish: A question for Zain – how do you describe the community development in OpenSim and how does this differ or follow on from other Microsoft involvement in OpenSource communities? Oh and how do you describe your roles what you do for Microsoft and how this relates to this community effort in OpenSim?

Zain: From my personal experience, I am relatively young in Microsoft I just celebrated my first year anniversary so I can’t talk about what happened several years ago, all I know is what happened over the year that I have been there. But without a doubt I think our approach is simple straight forward and elegant. And as a developer evangelist I am hired to interact with the community. My job description when i started this absolutely didn’t include anything about 3d worlds or anything of the kind. I became interested in 3d worlds and I think it speaks volumes for Microsoft that they said alright fine lets make it your job. And, that’s exactly what did they did and likewise with other folks it is on their commitment now. Our strategy is straight forward if you you can prove that your efforts in the community work then you are given carte blanche. If you can’t prove it then why be given the resources to waste.

Tish: So you actually have the title Metaverse Evangelist?

Zain: No I am still a Developer Evangelist but I am the guy for Virtual World Evangelism which is what we call it internally at Microsoft and I guess externally as well. It is known as Virtual World Evangelism.

Tish: So how many Virtual World Evangelists are there at Microsoft?

Zain: Ha good question! There is probably about four or five of us right now.

Tish: So have I missed asking you any important questions!

Zain: No I think you have hit the big points! If nothing else the one key point I would walk away with from this is the emphasis in my virtual worlds evangelism on the community. That’s really what we are about and that is why we are embracing folks like Adam [Frisby] and the realXtend guys because we want to come in and get more community involvement and get people excited about this. We are not interested in anything but really fostering a good environment for making this stuff happen.

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 ™ (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!!

This week I received several requests to write a post reviewing the recent upsurge of OpenSim based projects. I am in England for a week, so there is no way I can do this before I leave. However there is a good opportunity to learn more about realXtend and meet the realxtend team this week on Wednesday April 23rd, in Second Life. I have reprinted the notice from the realXtend website at the end of this post.

And, as LifeRain points out, “one way to get to know more about OpenSim is to visit a public grid.” There is a complete list of these grids here. OSGrid, OpenlifeGrid and DeepGrid are goods ones to try to start with. The picture above is from Wright Plaza the orientation area for OSGrid below is OpenlifeGrid.

Or You Can “Do it yourself” – I did!

You can also download OpenSim directly from opensimulator.org. I did! And I set it up on a CariNet on a dedicated server for only $100 per month. In the picture above my eight year old son was excited to meet Adam Frisby, one of the core developers on the UgoSim, just minutes after logging in for the first time. Ugotrade Jr. is now enjoying (and so am I) learning to build in a “cost free” environment – no file upload charges! Also, you can get a Ready-To-Run version of OpenSim from OpenlifeGrid.

OpenSim Blogs

There is a OpenSimulator group blog which some of the developers contribute to, and also a Planet OpenSim which agreggates feeds from opensim-related blogs and developers

• Daltonic Gin
• Darb Dabney’s SIMGIS Blog » OpenSim
• Dave’s Educational Blog
• OpenSimulator Project
• Sean’s Mental Walkabout » opensim
• Shengri La: Utopian Micronation
• Tedd Maa
• The Word of Chaos » OpenSim
• VintFalken.com » OpenSim
• artiphys
• justincc’s opensim blog
• nebadon2025.com
• xyzzy xyzzy… » opensi

Meet the realXtenders!