Slashdot Mirror
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."
In Stephenson's metaverse, the "cool" people were the best programmers, they always had the coolest stuff. If someone creates an open world that allows people to use the system to build/program their own things (buildings/vehicles/etc...) inside the world (think MUSH/MUD with graphics) then we are getting closer.
The next step would be more VR, an immersive interface, etc...
But it has to start somewhere. Although (slashdot appeal to the choir) it seems like the metaverse of Snow Crash was more of a *open* thing.
One of the things that made the metaverse(tm) so cool of an idea was the dynamic nature of the place. People had the ability to create thier own environments, assuming you "owned property" in the metaverse, and create objects as well.
...thats how I envisioned it anyway.
A true implementation of the metaverse would allow me to model my own home, in my own space, on my own server, allow people to visit it AND allow me to program objects in that space that other people could see. For example a program, that takes the shape of a radio, that when another user get within range of it, they download the part of the app that they need, that I wrote, such that they can then hear the music from the radio (streaming mp3's, ect).
And at first I'm sure the place would be mainly populated by programmer and techy types, eager to see what they can code, and how they can push the technology. But I would assume, just like in the www, that as the software gets fleshed out the masses will come, and they will have an already existing base of freeware objects and models to pick and choose from, as well as commercial products.
Of course there would be security problems that would have to be overcome, and different systems to be compatable with, plus a streaming model format. But I think that with a combination of something like java and open source clients and servers, the only parts that would need to be "official" would be the hooks for the in game software, and some kind of central property authority to keep track of how different properties (individual servers) interconnect and where they exist on the x/y plane of the the metaverse.
THEN there is the whole bandwidth issue, I don't think this would work very well on the current crop of cable and dsl modems. but hey, the www as we know it know it today wouldn't exist unless people before had pushed the bounderies of technology.
Let's be frank ... women LOVE to chat. I don't mean to be sexist here, but it is the truth. However, many women are VERY self-concious of their appearence ... so many of them will stay home instead of "going out", as others who have posted before me suggested. This will give an arena to those people who feel "ugly", or that have a hard time going out, or that live in the middle of no-where (or in a dead town) to virtuall go out and chat with people. This can be good in that it is better that people, in general, interact with people instead of turning into isolationists ... it isn't healthy ...
.... this type of virtual reality world isn't healthy either. It allows people to make themselves look any way they want to "look" without any of the hard work. It also could make real interperson communication more difficult for people since they will rely on a sim like this as a crutch. But most importantly, a sim like this will allow people to settle for the status-quo instead of actually doing something to improve themselves. Since people won't see the real them online, they feel less and less inclined to take care of themselves both from a health and an appearance aspect.
... compaired to that of men), which in turn will draw men to it ... but at a great cost to socity as a whole. This game could possibly become a sociological disaster in that the game encourages VERY unhealthy behaviour for long periods of time. Games like this can actually ruin people's lives ... just ask some of the EverQuest junkies from around the world.
....
HOWEVER,
The bottom line of all this rambling: This company COULD make quite a killing since this game will obviously appeal to the market of women (a market that is realatively untapped in the computer world
(* prepares to dodge all of the fireballs and weapons that will be thrown my way from those junkies *)
Just my $0.02 cents
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
It's all about chatting, not about gaming. And chatting has already to be proven a very popular pastime, even with people who don't use the Internet a lot otherwise.
And they got one thing right: "Well that was certainly fun. The most interesting aspect of the avatar chat mode is the way words are communicated. Instead of opening a chat window underneath the main screen, There uses cartoon style bubbles that pop up above the avatar's head. There claims that this keeps your eye more on the avatar, and the facial expressions, rather than just turning the entire experience into a text chat.". Guess how almost all MMORPGs have implemented speech. With a g..damned IRC-like interface which makes all conversation a rather impersonal affair!
Except one... Ultima Online, like "There" also floats the speech text over the avatars, and I must say it works very well. Being able to see your partners, and to see quickly who says what, makes it very easy to converse with others in that game. I even have had a business meeting with three colleagues in Ultima Online, as an experiment. Our alternatives were ICQ, E-mail, IRC or a conference call. Meeting "face to face" in-game was by far the most effective of these options.
"There" may well be a success, if properly marketed. If they have any brains they'll try and hook up with big ISPs like AOL and the like, and have them distribute the software with those free CDs we all know and love. They do, as someone pointed out, face competition from the Sims. The Sims is different but they aim at the same market segment.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I agree, this does look like a clone of the Sims Online which in of itself is just a graphical frontend to the chat muds we've had around for over a decade (some of which also had graphical frontends). All the commercial attempts at a graphical chat space have sucked up to the now so maybe this one will be different but honestly IM, email, and chat is about making communication easier. Adding VR elements to it adds complexity back into the equation so if you're going to do it you better be offering something that makes some good use of the VR. Also they need to make it possible to send/receive Jabber IM's (So AIM, ICQ, etc will all work) from their system because IM is easier than chatting in any physical space - real or virtual. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Okay, so at first glance this seems like just another chat room/MMORPG/Palace rip-off, with maybe slightly better graphics. But then I started reading into it some more, and I started getting impressed. They're planning to release open API's, anyone can create their own objects and sell/share them, create new parts of There for themselves and other.. once you start doing that, the 'Metaverse' moniker starts to stick. Right now it's cute and sanitized and controlled. But once those API's open up, well.. look what happened to the web. Sure, 90% of it is sanitized commercial crap (or pr0n), but there's all these pockets of individuality flowering through here and there that keep me coming back with a hint of the old promise that first got me hooked during the days that BBS's were cutting edge.
Err.. back to the topic on hand: The exciting thing about this, and what sets it apart from pretty much every other MMORPG/virtual chat out there is that ability to create new parts of the world and have them accessible to others. As people log on and start making that world their own, that's when things get interesting, that's when the whole 'Metaverse' concept starts taking hold. This is the only concept like this I've seen that holds any promise of becoming even partially what we all imagine the 'Metaverse' to be.
As a side note, take a good look at the people who are backing this project. It reads like a who's who of online and gaming celebs in a way. It makes me curious to see how this develops, as I find it hard to believe so many of them would back it to the tune of $33 million if they didn't see a heckuva lot more potential in this than just another virtual chat room.
"Two things are infinite: the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the first one." - Albert Einstein
that is where There is heading. my brother is one of their lead engineers and this thing has been under wraps for over 4 years with some of the best minds in the industry hammering it out, making it scalable and extensible... it's the framework for something very.. very... different, than anything else done so far (including simsonline).
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
Why is it that people create these virtual worlds that contain the same limitations as the real world. The idea of money only makes sense when you have scarcity. Guess what, this is cyberspace: there is no scarcity necessary here. And yet people build it into their worlds as a "feature".
What I would really find interesting to see is how such a world would look like when there is no scarcity. How would population centers look (usually city center means $$$).
An interesting quote I found in this Wired article:
These little economies raise big questions, therefore, and by no coincidence, they tend to be the big questions of the economic age. How, for instance, do we assign value to immaterial goods? What defines ownership when property becomes as fluid as thought? What defines productivity when work becomes a game and games become work?
Are we so used to the notion of scarcity that we wish to reproduce it in cyberspace? Would we not rather move beyond this idea?
Another interesting aspect to think about is how copyrights relate to this. Say I write a piece of code that represents my design for a Castle in such a virtual world. If I copyright it nobody else can legally build the same castle as me. And so the idea of scarcity is reintroduced. But it is only relevant as long as there is no rich public domain from which people can retrieve equivalent items. So hopefully there would be tons of castles available under a Creative Commons license.
"Get ten to twenty "avatars" and sit them around a virtual conference room table. Now have them start "talking" and all of these baloons start popping up. First off, can you see all of them? If you're on one side of the table how do you see the balloons of the people on your side while watching for balloons of people on the other side?"
I can see where watching 20 people at once in a first-person view will be all but impossible. Does "There" have a 3rd person view? UO does, one can easily put 20 people around a large table where everyone can see everyone else, thanks to the isometric overhead viewpoint.
Ultima Online has a neat solution for overlappen texts of multiple persons speaking at once. If two texts overlap, the one typed in last moves to the foreground, the older text moves to the background and fades a bit. You can bring the other text forward by moving your mouse over it, but even with two or three texts overlapping, it is often quite possible to read all three. If it isn't just move your mouse over the text that is obscured. This system works surprisingly well even in busy areas, and I am surprised no other game or program has copied it.
"Great, now who's the poor soul who has to type the transcript of this whole meeting. How are they making sure they get things in the right chronological order. (Certain comments won't make any sense unless they follow the comment they were built upon.)"
As for minutes, Ultima optionally keeps a log of all text you see on your screen, even noting who said what. Instant minutes! This should be easy to add to "There" and I suspect that users will ask for such a feature at some point, just as they already have IRC and ICQ logs.
"This sounds like a usable interface for 2 or 3 people working together, but it'll break down real quick as the numbers increase."
I have held meetings in Ultima with as much as 15 people, not business related but about in-game matters. It was a proper meeting nonetheless and proceeded very smoothly. Of course all participants were used to the interface already, which helped.
"(Also, one of the joys of IRC was that you could go AFK to take care of something quickly and then go back and read the 'conversation' that happened while you were out.)"
Ultima also has an on-screen log window that will store a few minutes' worth of babbling.
The concept of virtual meetings with avatars is sound, I'd say, and I am speaking from experience. Whether or not "There" will measure up, I don't know.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
It seems that the solution to the bandwidth problem is to have some kind of 3D markup language that can degrade gracefully, in essentially the way HTML works today. Don't have a GeForce10e32 ? You get lower quality versions of the textures, simpler polygons, etc.
The only issue is how much bandwidth is required to receive a minimal scene--and that might well be above what we have right now. Has anyone actually tried to implement such a thing, or at least gotten the preliminaries done so we have some data to work with?
It also seems like a true Metaverse (ala Stephenson) would require a better interface than we have right now. I doubt the general public is going to go for a world where they have to type to speak all day; some kind of voice system is necessary (perhaps incorporating something like Rojer Wilco would help, but most VoIP solutions today are a bit raw...) Plus some of those goggles Hiro wears in Snow Crash would be pretty nice ;)
I like the idea of a property server--it sounds a lot like DNS today, and it could be distributed across multiple servers in the same way; you'd do a lookup of the coordinates, and get an IP back. If the IP's down, it would appear as a fenced in "default" property, otherwise you'd connect to their server, and grab their object information.
Anyway, I've babbled enough. The point is, I think that with a proper 3D language, we really could implement something like this today, though it might be slow as hell for a while, and only really be useful on large LANs (colleges, anyone?).
Not everyone did, at least at first. I was like 13 or 14 when the AOL 1.0 disk (a floppy) came to me out of the blue. I knew about the Internet, and I had even experienced it through a BBS-email gateway (FTP over email was ... interesting). The problem I was experiencing was this: while I could find magazines and books and other materials that taught me about the Internet, an actual dialup connection (we're talking pre-WWW here) was horrendously expensive where I lived in Oklahoma. IIRC, the materials that came with the AOL disk advertised some really good rates compared with the other local rates. Of course, they had neglected to install an access number in my LATA, so I never gave them any business. But I didn't begin to associate AOL with newbies for quite some time.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.