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."
Sounds exactly like Sims Online to me, and they already have an established brand.
So... it's just like a MMORPG, except when some kid pisses you off, you can't murder him?
$8.95/mo web hosting
So, what, we can't make ones that look like us in real life?
Shooting daggers and a very Mario-like floating heart convey deeper emotions.
"Deeper" being a relative term... How many times in one day do you wink at someone?
There expects its audience to skew more towards women than men, at least at first. Why? Well according to CEO Tom Melcher, "men will go where the women are, but the reverse isn't true."
The logic there doesn't quite work. Why not just say "The company behind There has figured out what drinking establishments have known for several hundred years"?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I'm really not impressed with the idea. The tech, yes, the detail, yes, but honestly what is the point of this except a few gewgaws tossed onto a virtual chatroom?
Yeah, text chatting may not have motorbikes, but it's a lot simpler, and when the day is done, simplicity is important when you have things to get done (like chatting about whatever).
And the extras like the stores, etc. seem pointless to the core experience as well as making it more complex.
I'm sure that someday VR-type chats may well exist and even be useful. But I don't think this is going to be it.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Thanks for the offer guys, but I'll keep not buying Nike in the real world ;-)
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.
> 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...
It seems you haven't noticed, but they have indeed all but taken over the world. From a crappy little provider, by catering to non-tech customers, they have grown into an enormous company.
Yes their service may still stink. But apparently hundreds of thousands of users all over the world are happy with them. Call them lusers if you want, but if you're still laughing at AOL I think the joke's on you.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
"Because There focuses on non-tech geeks, and because communication and chatting forms the core of the world, the company limits you to normal, human looking avatars. "
The strength of the Metaverse in Snowcrash was the ability to program everything and everything.... it was basically a GIANT graphical MUSE (not a mud), where EVERYONE is a developer.
-Berj
Yeah but real live people don't come with a volume control. :P
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.
Sure, it may look a tad corny now, but with it being open ended and allowing people to develop their own worlds I think I may be an early adopter of this stuff.
:p
I'd really dig a whole snow-crash-ish house, and who ever builds the first "Black Sun" will be instantly cool with the other geeks using this setup.
I don't see if they charge for the service or not, but if they don't I imagine a lot of people will check this out.
I can't wait for someone to build a slashdot world and I can slap the shit out of CmdrTaco myself
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
It's been tried so many times before, and has never been met with more than a cursory glance from the public at large. These companies need to realize that you need something compelling in your virtual world; furthermore, it needs to be compelling enough to get around the 3D nature of the place.
Anyone remember the Magic Desk system for early handhelds? It was organized like a room in a house. You walked out the door, went to the library to get a book, etc. It sucked because you had to virtually 'walk' to each location, which was totally unnecessary. How about those 3D window managers? Giant pain in the ass, total form without function (and this from a Mac geek).
3D is great for spatial orientation and tasty graphics, but as we all know here it actually hinders you as an interface (compared to our perfectly-suited 2D metaphor for our 2D screens and input devices).
The Sims Online offers a fairly rich 2.5D world that gives you a reason to go - it's a game, and you can chat, wander around, shop, etc. Add the customization bit and it's the only real Metaverse going, IMHO.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
For all of you who think this is a new thing, Blaxxun's been doing it for years with their atrociously clunky, sanitized Cybertown, which allowed creation and sale of furniture and other objects used to customize hideously-unlivable, 10-polygon homes and served as basically a chat room for slumming soccer moms and toadying males in it for the girls.
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
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.
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...
The book describes in detail that while some people hang out and expand the Metaverse with their own code, most teenage girls are happy to go to Wal-Mart and buy an avatar in one of three pre-packaged breast sizes; "improbable", "impossible", and "ludicruous".
I know one, but I keep her locked up in the house coding away and only let her out once a day to tan.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
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.
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
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?
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.)
This sounds like a usable interface for 2 or 3 people working together, but it'll break down real quick as the numbers increase.
(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.)
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
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.
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.
Halsey Minor, Trip Hawkins, Jane Metcalfe and Louis Rosetto... are "notable"? With that list of posers, burnouts, con men, and also-rans, you know you can safely ignore this for what it is - pure media hype.
Someone stop them before we get another torrent of empty-headed buzzword-filled "articles" describing how this nth attempt at a failed idea (god, how is Blaxxun even still around?) is now suddenly going to "change the world"...
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
I am laughing at AOL, because their user base is eroding faster than Lake Erie's north shore, and they have all but lost relevance these days.
AOL got popular because they had (past tense) good marketing, and because they carpet-bombed North America with CDs. People had heard about this 'online' thing in 97 and wanted to try it, but with a nice pair of TCP/IP training wheels.
Everyone looses the training wheels when they learn ho to ride. Hell, some move up to 18-speed recumbant bikes. AOL was smart - they basically rooked Time Warner for imaginary money.
So, no. They had all but taken over the world, but now they are on their way to something else.. .if they're smart.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
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?).
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.
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.
And run it on what? Happy feelings and rainbows pouring out of their asses? Or do you have a massive cluster with an incredibly fat connection that you've been looking for someone to use for free? I love free shit as much as anyone, but they have to pay some serious bucks to keep this thing running, not to mention try and recoup that huge initial investment.
;)
Their current ideas on financing the project seem to be pretty good, as you only pay for what you use, except for the bandwidth to go in and hang out. But that is their hook to get people in the first place, so it is probably best that they don't charge any sort of monthly fee. I imagine that it is going to take quite some time to fine-tune the system, but as long as most of the content is user created and auctioned to other users, they shouldn't have too many issues in that area, since it will be the users who dictate value for products and services. There Inc. collects the setup fee to implement new products and a small percentage of each transaction of those products, keeping the system running.
The only problems that I see are if they allow the world to stagnate rather than constantly updating the engine and providing new features in the APIs, and if they run out of funding before a sufficient user economy becomes established to support the project, since there won't be much going on for the first few months as they attract new users and the users get comfortable with creating new content and the idea of making micropayments for those products.
Given enough time, though, I see no reason why they cannot be successful, especially with scarcity well implemented into the system. After all, the MMOG maniacs buy and sell virtual items and cash by the digital truckload every day, and most of that stuff they could get for free with a bit of work in the game itself, as there is no scarcity except in the rare circumstance of an item spawn being discontinued. If hardware were free, then it wouldn't matter, but if they just allowed users to create and use giant multiple megabyte vehicles with a buttload of CPU-chowing options without cost, they'd be bankrupt in a matter of days.
To be honest, I don't expect much success from this project, being the pessimistic bastard that I am, but I do hope that I am wrong because I would love to see a Metaverse-style cyberspace actually be implemented. Then we'll just need the badass visual and audio devices for total immersion. Well, OK, and the groin devices as well, since pornography seems to be the spearhead of technological advancement.
Shawn
Because you gotta bitch
I don't think anyone in their right mind is confusing this with reality.
What about people who can't go outside? What about people with disabilities that prevent them from walking, running, playing, driving a dune buggy, flying etc. etc... What about people who want to explore their inner sexuality - that may be at odds with their external sex? What about people who just want to be freaks - granted this game doesn't allow you to be a strange creature - but, I think you get the drift by now.
Another thing: why would I want to be around people in my real life environment, particularly if there is no one compatible with me within 500 miles? Much better from this perspective to spend more time meeting people in the VR environment. Why settle for talk of beer and cars - when I can login online and talk with folks about things I really care about?
I agree its not for everyone. However, I wouldn't chide anyone from spending time inside of a VR world if it makes them happy.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
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