Slashdot Mirror
Metaverse the Next Big Thing?
CrashPanic writes to tell us TCS Daily has an article entitled "The Next Big Thing" which is about Multiverse. It does a good job of making the case for the evolution to a 3D web through the lens of the past history of Netscape. From the article: "Forces are coalescing that will produce a shift comparable at least to the spread of broadband. This change will have enormous financial, cultural and political repercussions, and the most interesting aspect of the coming transformation is that it will not be some new and unexpected thing. Rather, the Web for many will become the cliched 3D virtual reality that has been so overused as a literary and cinematic devise that most of us have forgotten how compelling that vision was when it first appeared."
Is it practical?
... 3D web is very appealing, and we are starting to get the tools to work with these, but as long as we have the trusty mouse and keyboard, navigation in a 3D realm will always be awkward.
;)
Come on now
Also there is the production costs involved with making such things.
I am not sure if the industry will see this as the Next Big Thing (tm) soon.
--
Mike, the Anonymous Coward
This man uses several pages to talk about the origins of the web and how revolutionary netscape navigator was, but he doesn't even remember it's immediate predecessor NCSA Mosaic, or the predecessor of the web: gopher? And you expect me to think this person is more qualified to predict the future of the web, than someone else, such as my grandmother?
Imagine how much more useful your computer experience would be if you were able to design a virtual office as large or complex as you needed, and reach anything in it without leaving your chair.
My God! They have invented Microsoft Bob!
Patrick Cox should stick to making shoes.
The current web represents a huge investment in time, effort and money. It's not going anywhere for a long time.
Carpe Daemon
The computers most of us use give us a virtual desktop complete with files and crap scattered around. Minus spilled coffee I suppose.
It would be next to impossible to convince a non-technical person to virtually walk through a filing system to find their work when they could just browse to it normally without the 3D stuff.
But the desktop paradigm breaks down when we talk about portable devices. These devices are both much more limited (by being small) and much more powerful (because by their nature they have to be close to the user and their environment) that a totally new way of seeing the inside of your system may have traction.
William Gibson had this in Virtual Light. Neal Stephenson had it in Snow Crash. I think it will eventually come true.
One thing I am sure of. If I am going to have little LCD screens in my glasses I want to focus on infinity to look at them. Not sure how you do that without massive amounts of refractive material in the small space available.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
This sounds like change for the sake of change.
Until there is a real NEED for this, I don't see it happening.
That said, I would think that true VR will come to game consoles long before it comes to any generic computer. In the Console market, this seems like a natural evolution and not just some NEAT-O idea being added on for the sake of change.
The Metaverse, if anyone manages to create one that is truly decentralised, will co-exist with the web. If it's going to replace anything, it's going to replace IRC - a fun place to wander around aimlessly and meet new people, or to form a small group of friends you have things in common with regardless of your physical location. The web is a resource for finding or publishing information. The Metaverse is a communications tool for hanging out with friends and meeting new people.
Man, I love buzzword bingo.
I remember going to a presentation at SGI UK in about 1997, which titled something like "Web 2.0 - the coming 3D web space". It was about how the next generation of the web would all be in 3D. I thought it was bollocks then, and I think it's bollocks today.
If 3D user interfaces were better then we'd be using 3D versions of desktop applications by now. Clearly Photoshop or Microsoft Word with a 3D interface doesn't make much sense, so why should it for online applications?
C# client with a java server?
No.
Second Life, or some successor, may be the thing to kickstart it. Already we're hearing about the likes of Sun and Reuters setting up camp there.
To really gain traction though it would need to be as free (speech and beer) as the web is, and so long as it's run by a single company, it probably won't be.
Of course, it's nonsense to say "the interface is too clumsy" or "it's impractical". The early adopters and a whole bunch of their friends are already there and doing just fine. If you think a keyboard can't handle graceful movements, you've never been aced in Unreal or Tribes by somebody who's shooting you from over there one second and kicking you ass from over there, the next. All while doing a victory dance and providing a running commentary on your p0wnage.
No, the interface is pleny rich, but of course it's going to get better.
And I'd be careful of thinking that the "fully immersive encounter suit might be the end game". There are those that thought that animated gifs would be the end game, too. "Someday, we will even have on-demand delivery of music on the internet. Maybe even video!". All whilst many of use are downloading The Departed via bittorrent, and the Goth-Rock boxed set, while watching The Daily Show via YouTube. Be very careful when thinking you can envision an "endgame".
You are welcome on my lawn.
Opencroquet
It is stunning, biggest drawback is needing openGL which for the life of me I can't get going under Linux. Thus I have only tested on win2k where it is great. Download and try it, it is smalltalk based. It is built for decentralised use. It is very scaleable. It also does not like NATs so thats is a slowing point.
It is probably not going to change the world this week, but once more people are working on it and it gets around NAT and if openGL was not so critticle then I am sure lots linked up worlds would start happening.
Words can not describe it properly, you got to try it. Have a look at the demo videos of interactions. Technically it scores well mostly because so little bandwidth is required for people to share worlds, it does require half decent machines for the computations but anything in the last few years is good enough (ie in the GHz range)
This is my sig, exciting huh!
Browse the internet to go on www.ibm.com. Search for drivers ? Old fashioned !!
... memories of ShadowRun with a sadistic GM
The future is:
Connect to the new 3D virtua-net. Go to the nearest NetTube station next to your ISP building. Take the first Alphabetical Northbound metro on the COM line. Stop at station "I". Walk outside and take the NetBus to IBM Netplex. Ask politely the receptionist for the support area (Otherwise you will get kicked out by the security officer). Walk to the right departement (Hold SHIFT key to run), take the box with updated driver and bring it home. ( Check the driver is in your inventory before leaving )
Ah
I have spent the last 5 years researching information visualization, recently gettinging into immersive (glasses, multi-wall, etc) visualization, and I can say without hesitation that his primary arguement holds no water whatsoever for most tasks relevant to computer users. "three dimensions, even virtual dimensions, are so much better than the two we experience on our monitors today" The problem is that the author makes no case for *why* this is. I don't want to get too far into the weeds here, but a fundamental concept of design is to strip abstract away irrelevant material (noise) to leave that which is important (signal) for the user. He is suggesting moving from a paradigm of 1 dimension (text is 1 dimensional, not two) and moving to four dimensions (time is as relevant as place when you start dealing with avatars, VWs, etc) The human perceptual system doesn't really work that way. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors left us with a hybrid 1D/2D ability, with limited capacity to perceive or reason in higher dimensionality. If we look at information absorbtion, we can do very well with 2d in the form of pictures, maps, etc, but if the story being told doesn't lend itself to that medium, then we are 1-dimensional learners. Reading and speaking are our primary communication mediums for complex ideas and they are completely linear. (time) It boils down to complexity. A virtual world adds unneeded complexity to simple phenomenon. (social networking, productivity applications, etc) Value is derived from making information MORE accessible, not less accessible in a prettier way.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
The year was like, 1997 (I know, I was trying to teach myself in high school). We were all still in dialup. That was half the problem right there. The other problem is the language isn't that great. VRML proved nothing, it was before its time. Ubiquitous broadband, faster computers with hardware acceleration, we are now at the point in time where if 3D makes sense as an online platform, said platform will emerge.
Last place I worked, my cubie was right in the crossfire of a major skirmish most of the time.
h at-shoots-rubber-bands/
http://www.ohgizmo.com/2006/01/19/a-gatling-gun-t
A goal is a dream with a deadline
What you are running into with simulator sickness is mainly your eyes seeing one thing, and your ears telling your brain differently (balance). If you are as susceptible as you claim, you probably have a difficult time watching first-persone views of car chases, roller coaster riding, airplane stunts, etc. You probably don't have a problem with everyday walking around and tasks (and if you do, see a doctor immediately!). This is because in day-to-day life, all your senses are working together and telling your brain the same thing, and nausea/simulator-sickness doesn't kick in. There is also the effects of small field-of-views, frame-rate, sensor lag, and such - but this is only usually an issue in motion platform systems and/or full immersion systems (ie, cockpit flight trainers, full-immersion HMD systems, etc).
As I noted before, all people experience this to some extent or another (sit blindfolded in a slowly spinning chair nodding your head around, and you most likely will spew). The best way (and most expensive) to combat it is to provide accurately timed (near-zero lag) sensory responses just like you would have in the real world to the external simulated view on the monitor or in the HMD/simulator. This is very tough to do, and if the timing is off, it just makes the situation worse. Various companies have even tried vestibular stimulation as a means to combat this (and/or heighten the experience) - one company in the late 1990's even came out with a prototype and API dev kit for Windows using this system - not that it went anywhere.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon