Slashdot Mirror
Virtual Reality Getting its Own Network?
loganrapp writes "We've all watched the Matrix, and regardless of how we felt about them, the concept of plugging into a virtual reality appeals greatly to us. It appears that a nonprofit group called the International Association of Virtual Reality Technologies plans to build a network purely for virtual reality. Its name? Neuronet, and the first generation is planned for 2007, with "consumer applications" planned for 2009. There is some fear, however, that the whole thing is a scam."
Wouldn't using an existing network like say the internet be much cheaper?
Yes, looks bogus.
Domain names are so Web 1.0, anyway. In virtual reality, you have virtual real estate, like the "islands" of Second Life.
Bah, I say. This is about as likely to happen in 2007 as DNF being released.
They talk about "not enough bandwidth" to transmit the necessary information.
But wait, there's more! There are so many unanswered questions. How do you connect (not by DSL or cable!)? What's the interface? Does it run on a computer, or a separate appliance?
On another note, this should not make references to the Matrix. It's nothing more than a Second Life, with lower entry requirements (for the providers, of course)
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Neuronet eh? I think a group of researchers got a little too much into the Neal Stephenson and William Gibson novels. Wonder if it's going to be open to the public, I've got some Shadowrun hacking fantasies I've been dying to act out.
I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
From the article: ...IAVRT is overseeing the registration of Neuronet domain names, the group said. Trademark holders can get an early start from February 5 to June 1; the general public is set to get access after June 4...
...Funds raised from the sale of network domain names will offset the considerable costs associated with the creation of the network...
quoting IAVRT co-founder Chistopher Scully:
and
If this is not the definition of vapornet, I do not know what is.
I wonder who are that easy to fool and will pay the registration fee.
Some paid SCO a license fee for Linux, so they might have a customer base here.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
They're trying to create an entire new network? Not even the telco's did that (used existing telephone infrastructure). And, they plan to finance it by selling domain names in this network. But, no company will buy one (they must be expensive...) until they see a need. There's no need until the network exists...
Anybody with any idea how they could possibly create an entire new network spanning much of the US (forget the world), with essentially no prospect of money until it's finished?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I'd tell you how to get there, but your primitive HTML tags are incapable of displaying the 3rd dimension required to visualize the hyperlink.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
(in a deep Austrian accent) My CPU is a neural net processor, a learning computer.
If they did that, they couldn't sell the
The statement "...new standards must be created, and network hardware must support those standards..." sounds like they either don't know what they are talking about or it is compeletely bogus. Exactly what modifications to ethernet hardware would be needed for this service? In fact, what changes to IP would be needed? There are already realtime flags/protocols and multicasting built into it. They would just need to buy the right routing equipment, wouldn't they?
I can see why they can't use normal ISPs, since most of them don't support multicast at the home user's end and their latency and bandwidth allowed is usually bad for games/vr. But why would they need to engineer whole new protocols? I just don't see it.
So we're looking at 10 gigabits/second minimum, for the kind of really heavy-duty traffic we're talking about, for any reasonable number of servers on that network. There's plenty of dark fiber around and I believe that the record for 200+ mile distances over fiber is in the order of around 4 or 5 petabytes/second. The backbone isn't going to be a technological problem, then. It would be damn expensive to light up enough to cover even as small a region as the United States, but it isn't impossible.
But that's the backbone. How do you get that traffic into people's homes? We're barely at the point of getting people to pay for single gigabit connections, never mind ten gigabit ethernet drops. The NICs are not exactly cheap either. And it's not just any old PC that can sustain a data stream through the PCI bus at those kinds of rates. You're looking at a fairly expensive piece of machinery, and one that is to be used not just solely for games (gaming machines are always expensive) but solely for games on that network. The more you use it for anything else, the less return you get for your investment.
Do I think this is a hoax? Yes. Because it's impossible? No, it could be done. But either it won't be done well enough to be worth having a new network for it, OR it will be too expensive for gamers.
On the other hand, a high-performance VR network for the scientific community, an order or two in magnitude faster than anything currently out there, could be done tomorrow and you're damn right that DARPA, CERN and the other Really Big League users could afford to pay the connection charges. Compared to the cost of the LHA in Switzerland, a ten gig drop per office in these labs that went to a secure petabyte trans-atlantic backbone would look like chump change.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Think of it as like typing a street name into your GPS receiver.
The fact it's being financed by selling internet based swamp land is a concern.
This would have been hard enough to pitch in '99. They're going to build a whole network for a niche application that isn't even consuming a single-digit percentage of the existing internet? That's nuts.
OK, maybe VR is consuming a significant percentage of the net if you define it as "network gaming" or something. If you do that though, you immediately provide an argument against the need for another network, since these applications are successful with the current net. You might be able to argue that you could provide more bandwidth-intensive applications with the dedicated network, but a logical first step is to write the software and run it over the existing network first, and then run demos on a LAN showing how a dedicated network would help. If your LAN demos blow people away, then maybe you have something... but if that were possible, you'd already be hearing network gamers say things like "this rocks on the corporate LAN, but is worthless on my cable modem". I haven't heard anything like that.
Then, as that linked blog pointed out, you'd want to be able to communicate with the Internet at large. So. Then you'd need a Neuronet to Internet gateway of some kind. Even if this conveyed an advantage, just think of the cost--bringing in another ISP just for one app that most people don't even care about???
This just makes no sense to anybody who knows anything. Maybe they'll fleece some really stupid VCs though.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Even if we assume for a minute that this isn't a scam ...
They've got their underlying model entirely wrong if they're expecting massive growth and success of their VR network by analogy with the Internet.
The Internet bloomed in popularity because it was decentralized and uncontrolled, growing branches at all points and sprouting leaf nodes everywhere. The explosive growth of content "at the edges" happened because of a total lack of coordination and restriction, ie. because people could do their own thing without asking, and almost without cost. And its millions of contributors were driven by fun and interest, not by earning money from their sites.
In contrast, these Neuronet folks seem to be starting with a centralised and tightly restricted registration scheme, plus costly membership that is clearly creating an elite and a money-driven pyramid right from the start.
Well that won't work, if they expect growth modelled on the growth of the Internet.
And it also won't work because of the lack of community-based VR systems to run on such a VR network. The few existing ones that could qualify (Second Life, all online MMOGs and game worlds, clan-based FPSs, etc etc) are almost all proprietary or centralized or both, and hence don't meet the two key requirements for explosive growth.
Frameworks for making non-proprietary and decentralized VR systems do exist, in fact there are many of them (in the guise of open-source 3D game engines), but that's merely a potential rather than a reality for today.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Why don't they start with, say, the VR interfacing hardware, and then, I don't know, maybe the computers and software needed to generate the environment.
Get two or more of these nonexistant devices in the same room talking to eachother over nice fast cheap ethernet first. THEN worry about the external network to hook said nonexistant devices together over a distance.
Oh, wait, my bad. Not as easy to get peoples money that way. Nevermind.
It's almost unfortunate that this would never work out, be it a hoax or not. As someone mentioned earlier, until there are users on the network, no company will buy domains for it, but until people buy domains for it, there will be no network. The exaggerated scope of it seems to make me think it's a hoax though. If they would just make small VR arcades, or VR cafes or what have you, and then network those in a small area, and then gradually grow larger and larger, then maybe that would be viable. But to propose to instantly shoot out from coast to coast? This is either a scam or a really, really, poorly thought out operation.
-dKL