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Metaverse Launched?
jlouderb writes "Following in the heels of Worlds Inc. Blaxxun Interactive and Linden Labs, super-stealth project There Inc. launches Wednesday at CES. ExtremeTech has a preview of the world up,
which is characterized by expressive avatars that look like idealized humans. Backed by a long list of notables, including Halsey Minor, Trip Hawkins, Jane Metcalfe and Louis Rosetto, it's
an ambitious effort. But will the target market of Wal-Mart moms show up? Who knows, we all
laughed at AOL too. You can sign up for the public beta and find out for
yourself."
> What is this story about?
If you look at the front page, you'll see a lot of so-called "links" for this story. Click on them, and you get more information! It's amazing what technology can do.
Yes, actually reading the damn thing could be quicker than posting and waiting for someone less lazy to reply...
Wow. This is the very first time I've had to say, it sucks having a Radeon VE card. I filled out the survey, and was told that that invite people in waves, and I'd hear back from them. So, I go looking some more into the site documentation and find that the ATI Radeon series of graphics cards is completely supported... EXCEPT the Radeon VE and 7000.
I don't do 3d gaming. But I do super-high resolution (1920x1200 32bit) display, video playback (mpeg2 decoding functions built in), and some TV output with my video card. (It isn't a 3d screamer, but it is a decent card. AGP 4x, too.) It has been so many years that I've been excluded from something by my video card that I forgot how exclusionary some of these online environments and 3d games are.
Active Worlds has one.
The Metaverse was a VR experience described in the excellent cyberpunk comedy
Snowcrash by Neil Stephenson, the same guy who wrote Cryptonomicon.
In the described virtual world, there was a virtual bar that was highly exclusive, and everyone wanted to hang out there. It was named the Black Sun.[*]
Just as 2001 served as an inspiration for developing communication satellites, Snowcrash's "metaverse" served as the inspiration for the development of VRML. The first company to try and make a VRML world into a commercial venture was, not surprisingly, named "Blaxxun Interactive" in honor of the bar in Stephanson's book.
[*] The protagonist of the story, Hiro Protagonist, was a pizza delivery guy/hacker who wrote the code for much of the metaverse, including the Black Sun bar.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
If you read the little developers part, you can also skin and model objects for use in the game... and sell them. You can use any paint app for skins, and GMax (3D Studio Max lite) for low poly models. For modelers on the unemployed side of things *ahem* this could be a source of side income. Looks interesting enough for me to try the public beta.
But apparently hundreds of thousands of users all over the world
Er, according to a recent news article, AOLs user base clocks in at around 35 million worldwide.
Oh, well, back in the day AW was a non-paying service. I even payed some time for support, but now it's completely paying and I just don't care anymore. My friends there have left anyway.
This is precisely whay you would run these kinds of meeting via a computer interface (though not necessarily the one described in the article which may not have features 1 and 2 below)...
1. Everybody can be presented with a view that includes *all* the other participants on the opposite side of the table if desired
and
2. There is no need for a human to "type the transcript" because, guess what, the server already has the transcript and its in the correct chronological order!
AOL is undoubtedly a large company, but one of the more salient criterions used to assess the health and the future prospects of a company is its ability to grow. Last I read, AOL is faltering a bit in this area.
The point of There, technically, is that it's supposed to scale up to planetary size. One big, seamless world. No "shards". No picking a server.
It's extensible in several ways; you can repaint objects with Photoshop, design new ones with gmax, and add new play with C++. There's some editorial control, to prevent the world from going downhill.
I'm a bit disappointed that There supports dialup. Supporting dialup forces a whole range of design decisions, all of which make the world worse. Broadband penetration is high enough today that broadband-only is commercially feasible. Half of all online people time is on broadband; the heavy users have already migrated.
I have absolutely no idea whether this will work as a business. Or whether it will work as a virtual world, which is even harder.
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).
Sounds OK to me. So.... I was a contractor doing QA at There for a very brief period. I'd also been involved in a focus group for them prior to that.
Currently, I've been doing beta testing but my Windows box isn't up to spec, video card-wise. I think the vid card requirements are gonna kill them, unless they align with the folks that sell them and offer *massive* discounts. It was known over 16 months ago that these cards were required. I think that the "graceful degradation" solution should have been a priority.
Requiring IE for registration during the install and registration is just dumb. I haven't tried the second "private beta" yet but in the first Netscape, Moz or anything else on Windows just failed. It took a phone call and downloading IE to simply get registered. That's odd, because I remember a LOT of the folks (including QA) working in Linux, or at least using CLI stuff.
Lua is a nifty language, but requiring developers to learn something new is going to be a pain. I'd like to see (again) the API and SDK very soon.
There are some extremely talented people there. I wish I'd stayed. I wish I could go back, frankly. It wis a cool product, and visually and functionall stunning. And that was from a demo and testin 16 months ago. It has indeed gotten better since. I want the jet pack back. Hell with a hoverboard.
I wasn't too pleased with the internal alpha process (junior high kids) but it just might make it.
-jim