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Here's one: http://www.interreality.org/about ; http://interreality.org/wiki/VipDocumentation . Project is dormant for the past couple of years but could pick up again if there was interest.

Here's one: http://www.interreality.org/about ; http://interreality.org/wiki/VipDocumentation . Project is dormant for the past couple of years but could pick up again if there was interest.

Open source system for interoperable 3D environments: http://www.interreality.org/
(Also useful for other stuff than 3D!)

And we've put a lot of work into trynig to design a flexible structured system, and also actually making the networking perform efficiently for this application (no conneccting to random SQL databases or using HTTP over TCP sockets and stuff like that!)

Check it out. We're currently revising a some of the core library, but we will soon need people to help make the end user application have more features and work nicely, and also need people to try making 3D worlds and other content.

The problem with open source development is that to build large projects in timely fashion (i.e. in less than 10 years) simply require more resources than can be realistically put together by a group of volunteers. It requires a team of people working full time. Traditionally, building these sorts of large-scale applications happens either by:

a) Someone with a lot of money and a specific need hires some contractors to build a custom system

b) Someone with a big idea is able to raise capital based on their ability to use copyright and patents to suppress competition

Case (a) is generally compatible with open source, because someone has already decided to put up the money to do the development. However, since you're developing a product to address a fairly narrow need, it's harder to justify (to management to pay for) working on the "big ideas" that solve a broad class of problems.

Case (b) is where interesting, innovative research & development happens, since developers are set out to solve some interesting problem that is broadly applicable to a lot of users (and therefor potential customers). However, such development often requires months or years of development to get off the ground, or to turn prototypes into polished products. Investors typically arn't interested in supporting this development without corresponding customer lock-in which they perceive will allow them to extract the maximum profits from the product.

A large part of the reason for the original article (that certain companies tend to reap the profits of other people's open source sweat work) is that the authors of such products haven't set up companies themselves to provide the services that other people are profiting from. The problem is, nobody is interested in supporting open source until it's already done and ready to use, hence other companies take the cream of the crop while leaving all the risk to individual developers.

What we need are "open source incubators" that provide the support network (both personal and financial) to help get such open soucre development off the ground.

I'll end this with a mention that my own open source project, http://interreality.org/ is looking for this type of support and/or investment to make the jump from prototype to polished product. We are working to build a general purpose platform for online 3D virtual worlds (think Second Life, but with none of the nasty scalability problems, architechtural limitations, or stupid "virtual land economy"). We are presently in the trap I describe here: we're trying to build an extremely complex product that at the pace of volunteer labor will take years and years to complete. If we could fund a couple of people to work on it full time for a year, we could make massive progress and hopefully come out with a product that would be the premire open source platform for online 3D virtual spaces. We're looking for advice and leads on how to make this work. If this sounds interesting to you, feel free to email me tetron@interreality.org.

The scenario you describe is pretty similar to what we want to do at http://www.interreality.org./

The other free software project trying to do this is VOS/Interreality (I'm a developer on that). No relation to Interverse, though it also uses Crystalspace.

http://interreality.org/

It's dead.
Here are a couple that's not

http://interreality.org/
http://croquetproject.org/
http://metaverse.sourceforge.net/

There is an open source project called the Interreality Project at http://interreality.org/ that aims to create a 3D server/browser.

        * I want to run my own server, I don't feel like paying an increasing monthly fee to just build the world I would like to share with my friends, considering how many "islands" there are, quite a few people are keen to have their own place appart. But if I would like to build something massive, like an insane bookstore that would cost a fortune. ...
        * Closed source -- so its not going anywhere fast

Many people have often tried to hack web stuff into doing shared 3D. For example, the Open Source Metaverse Project uses an SQL database to store stuff and web servers to serve it.

It really doesn't make a ton of sense once you start trying to do it, other than the fact that web technology is already deployed. Just getting the initial data to people is not hard. Its how to implement changes, interaction, etc.

SL is build both technically and socially on the idea of real estate. The scalability of that is one aspect in which it doesn't work right. But this kind of thing is a hard problem. It's something we have thought about in designing another open source shared virtual environment based on the Virtual Object System but have not yet implemented anything to solve it in our servers. (Though the tools are there for it to be added in the future.)

If you're doing it on the cheap and only have three or four projectors, you don't need much of a cluster, just a three or four networked computers. Or, use two dualhead computers.

You'll have a small amount of lag in the syncronization (network + OS + application software) but with some tweaking of the OS network configuration, or using some insanely fast system rather than a network (shared memory backplane?), you might get it to a few ms?

If you want frame-by-frame synchronization you need some specialized equipment driving the projectors, stuff like this: http://www.es.com/products/image+generators/index. asp

(Anyone making a homebrew CAVE want to try using http://interreality.org/ VOS software in it?)

Project Interreality - Virtual Object System (VOS)

http://interreality.org

http://interreality.org/~reed/tmp/google_copyright ed.png

I don't know about Quake, but there's a patch for Crystal Space/Mozilla called Crystalzilla which does this.

http://interreality.org/projects/crystalzilla

"Proof of concept" using all free software (client and server): Free 3D engine, free web browser, free networking architecture. Pending changes to Mozilla will be integrated into user applications sooner or later. Hackers wanted...

http://interreality.org/projects/crystalzilla

"Proof of concept" using all free software (client and server): Free 3D engine, free web browser, free networking architecture. Pending changes to Mozilla will be integrated into user applications sooner or later. Hackers wanted...

What do you mean when you say "Virtual Reality". There are lots of related technologies that were pretty immature in the early 90s that have made a lot of progress, the biggest one being 3D graphics display hardware and software.

Now, I think, one of the more interesting technologies that could possibly be grouped under the otherwise vague "Virtual Reality" umbrella to work on is user-interface stuff, and desiging applications and networking software that lets people use their personal computers to share a graphical world and collaborate in it over the Internet.

There are several Free Software projects working on this, one of them I helped design so I feel obligated to plug it here :) http://interreality.org/ (actually, another VOS user told me to!)

It's important that a strong Free Software project emerge in this area soon, or the field will become dominated by proprietary software and standards! Interreality and VOS are especially lacking in nice, easy to use applications for non-programmers and non-Unix-geeks, and we need artists to try creating worlds for the system and give us some direction on where it needs to go.

Regarding VRML, you may think it's lame and dead but it's not. The latest version, called X3D, fixes a bunch of problems with VRML97, and with today's graphics cards the graphical quality is far better than it was 10 years ago.

Reed

Want to help create a free and open VR platform? After some major reworking of the system, we're about to start releasing new versions of VOS/Interreality. Rather than paying a company to use their world to chat, buy and sell virtual consumer goods, VOS enables a distributed network of interconnected worlds; host a piece of it on your cable modem and make it do something interesting! It's Free Software (open source) of course and extensible to more specialized games as well (two have already begun). Let us know if you're interested in helping!

Joy2Key

The link is for a Linux version, although I remember seeing win32 versions as well.

Check out the following screenshot where Mozilla is being put on a polygon in the Crystal Space 3D Engine. This feat was done by the VOS Project:


Mozilla on a 3D polygon

Greetings,

An interesting tidbit from the VP of there.com: he is wondering about hosting: does the original creator of the game run the third-party contentent (code)? A big problem with robustness, security and scalability there. And what will the technical architecture look like? I'm surprised that they haven't thought about these issues with There (or maybe they have but don't want to give them away).

Well, as one of the lead developers on the VOS project, I think it could look a bit like VOS of course! I'm inclined towards an open distributed architecture, with some standard authentication mechanism that lets you either pay to enter or use a sector of the world (or not pay, of course), or looks you up in a list of subscribers. Bitpass and PayPal can be used here. Maybe there is a central authority for a particular set of such sectors that can do billing and accounting more conveniently.

If broadband continues to become more popular (and ISPs stop blocking ports and restricting upload bandwidth!) then people can host their own segments of worlds on their home servers. Maybe some object replication would be useful as well.

Another interesting tidbit is offering many methods of access: special game client, web sites, on your mobile phone, etc. Is this a hard technical problem or not? Will it be affected by the architecture of the game/world/metaverse?

Obviously easy to use authoring tools (based on libraries of common objects and basic customizable building blocks) will be essential, though we shouldn't exclude those with more skill in more advanced modeling programs.

Finally, I wonder how much growth there can be in the standard MMORPG which requires a large investment of time and dedication of its players. Would a game/world that doesn't dominate your entire life be as much fun?

Also, has anyone had a chance to try out Second Life yet?

The fundamental problem I have with the numerous attempts at building VR systems (aside from the fact that they are usually quite clunky and boring to use for anything besides basic chatting) is that these systems are almost universally based on large-scale central servers, rather than networks of small sites. Consider the model of the world wide web: anyone with a little bit of connectivity and bandwidth can host their own web site. Why shouldn't VR be the same way? Why do we chain ourselvers to monolithic, commercially controlled world servers rather than a community of interlinked VR rooms? The underlying technology has subtle social effects as well: would you rather have an autocratic dictatorship of a "planned" world or a democratic community where anyone can add their own pieces to the world?

The second problem (that has been noted by many people) is that 3DVR chatting has been done many, many times and is fairly uninteresting. To make this usefull, we need some big ideas about how we can bring existing applications into a 3D space and have them work more effectively, as well as completely new approaches which are only possible in an immersive environment. If VR is to be useful, it should be a ubiquitus application sitting in the background, one of many which helps you achive your tasks (work or play) rather than the elephant application that demands constant attention.

I have been leading my own free software project to build such a system: The Interreality Project and Virtual Object System (VOS). We have built a new protocol infrastructure to support distributed virtual objects (which are used to build virtual worlds) and a client program using the Crystal Space 3D engine. All of our software in available under the GPL or LGPL, and we are on our tenth public release (with a new release planned for the next couple weeks). The system has been in use at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics for over a year, we have several outside developers, and there seems to be quite a bit of interest in our little project (the web site got 55,000 hits last month).

Our vision is a 3D companion to the web, but not in the (incredibly stupid) sense of putting 3D objects on web pages, but a highly interlinked ecosystem of small information resources -- which happen to convey information in 3D rather than mere 2D. Of course, multiuser support is also a fundamental part of this system -- if the world is dynamic, then any part can move and change and communicate, users, bots, agents and applicances. Perhaps the real key is that we must strive for a system that reflects the nature of the beast, the nature of the Internet, rather than trying to emulate the real world (badly).

The Virtual Object System / Interreality Project is a free software (GPL/LGPL) effort to build the software infrastructure and applications for distributed peer-to-peer virtual reality. The basic model of enabling users to host their own virtual worlds is the same as BrendanWorld, but our software supports 3D, is open source, cross platform (GNU/Linux, MacOS X and Windows) and built upon a powerful, extensible generic base. We're pretty far along in some ways, but the reason you haven't heard of us is that we've been keeping a pretty low profile so far, at least until we get our documentation up to speed. We do welcome new developers, so please come check us out!