Today, IBM and MIT are hosting an conference about many of the current ideas, concerns, and opportunities associated with virtual worlds: “Virtual Worlds: Where Business, Society, Technology & Policy Converge”. I expect several stories about this to appear, and will add them to this entry as they appear.
- CNet: “IBM: like the Web, virtual worlds will be become business friendly” by Martin LaMonica.
- CNet: “Looking for life in virtual worlds” by Martin LaMonica.
- CNet: “Wanted: Applications for virtual worlds” by Martin LaMonica.
- InformationWeek: “Mitch Kapor: Virtual Worlds Are Like A Drug Experience” by Mitch Wagner .
Videos of the conference sessions are now available.
I’m curious to know the overall theme or general consensus at the end of the day in regards to overcoming locked-in virtual worlds, sometimes called stove pipe worlds. Obviously standards should play a part but did anyone there know anything about 3D MU or even the pain of designing and implementing an API for 3D presentation and interactivity over an internet connection? These things take time and lots of consensus, with buy-in from many disciplines and markets. And congrats on getting Croquet to show. I wonder how they differ from Linden beyond being mostly a university inititative now deep into their own academic thinking. A thoughtful group for sure, but how to bring them to the standards party is a bit of challange perhaps…? This title for the conference is awesome however and right on the money, as it doesn’t seek out a particular killer app for media sensationalism, but focuses on the greater good of society’s need for convergence using virtual worlds.
Yes I agree.
I think there is a huge barrier to entering VW worlds
they require one to have
1. fancy computer and broadband
IF it’s commercial
OR
you are required to have Einstein-level-brainpower
if you want to play with open source VW worlds.
Cheers
It depends. If the profile is set correctly and the server support is there, GPS-enabled cell phones can run 3D worlds and do. A new product from Planet 9 (RayGun) is being beta tested for that now. Some of the features there should be generic (eg, enabling feeds in world).
To do that interoperably across platforms is a challenge as we have seen, but given profiles such as X3D provides and authoring discipline, it is doable. The problems of MU across platforms (eg, moving an avatar from world to world without losing rendering or behaviors (behaviors is an authentication/authorization problem) are where we are today.
Standards are a popular topic, and like all topics that are popular and successful, it’s a topic that has something rotten in it – otherwise it couldn’t be popular and successful: persons want to be reassured about their prejudices, not flung into adventures they only want to dream about.
No one doubts that standards are necessary – but I do affirm that they are necessary only insofar as sharing something is indispensable – for all the rest ,standards are not only dispensable, but it is desired they are dispensed.
For if we argue that we don’t need “more ways to do the same thing”, we express a very pessimistic outlook: in fact, declaring we are in want of _one_ way to do the same thing, we don’t acknowledge how immensely successful we _already_ are in that department.
Try to count how many guys imitate myspace (to quote one). You could enter in a social networ website and then in 10000 more, and barely notice you changed address members and owners.
Standards are a good thing, but only as long as together with standards we promote fantasy, challenge and invention. The reason we are talking of standards for second life likes, is that the original second life did not promote standards, but set them. By saying we need standards to emulate it, we are drawing exactly the lesson that it did NOT sponsor.
We have already plenty of sheep. Our average web master, programmer, or entrepeneur is 99.999% of the times a person entirely completely utterly adverse to risk and whose unique purpose is to ape till the tinest details what they have seen being successful eslewhere – which includes the ERRORS.
In such way an error propagates itself as a digital virus and installs iteslf in all machines: at that point, our audiences have already been miseducated to consider as a feature something that has been implemented in all the wrong ways simply because it was implemented amidst dearth and so the demand flocked on it and then yeah: we have a STANDARD. Yiiipiiieee!
And there is also an error if anyone thinks we should wait until someone has a monopoly position and then start to think about innovation and interoperability. This is all a question of balance and timing. It is also a repeated process from which we all can learn. Innovate, see what works, decide what has to be shared, standardize. Now repeat for the next level or the next series of applications. If at some point we need to rebuild the stack, so be it. So I think we need to think about what and when to standardize. There is a lot of focus and new investment in this area right now. Let’s consider EVERYTHING necessary to do this right.
And I’m sure everyone will agree 100% what those things are. (grin)
Right…. See XML SIG/ERB archives when all we had to do was take a big complicated thing and turn it into a small simple thing that would go on to spawn many more complicated things.
I have to hope we aren’t doing that again but I fear we will.
At heart, most standards wonks are classification gurus. Beware More Meta Than Thous.
Wouldn’t one want to start with a list of the standards that do exist and are in use, then compare those to the products that are in use but have no standards? I don’t fear innovation. I like that. It is all of the reinvention that puts innovators out of business just as they were starting to share that gives me pause to remember. It can kill a market carefully built by one group in favor of another. I’ve seen that before. It’s a burglary.
Then there is the creation of a backwater of content awaiting conversion.
People get hurt. People lose investments in time and creative work. From these, they may not be able to recover. For over a decade now, VRML kept its promise that content created for VRML 2.0 would remain upwardly compatible and for the most part, it has. It is very unique in that respect in 3D. The choices are tough for people who have tools, content and chops when an altogether new and inexperienced group sets out to create a ’standard’. Bob is not an inexperienced standards person. Nor am I. That won’t make 3D experts out of us but neither does it mean our 3D experience is irrelevant. It means we accept the opinions of the other as having a basis in experience and listen sharply because I think we both know the costs of setting a bull loose in a standards shop without some goals and preconditions. Today, I don’t know what those are for this and perhaps I don’t need to know yet, but I will keep probing until I do.
Meanwhile, brainstorm.
len
One thought is to take Bob’s requirements and treat them as an RFI (Request for Information) in the parlance of business negotiations. Then respond to each with a statement of how a given technology implementation could meet those requirements or the effort required to adapt the technology to meet those requirements.
Dry, yes, but reasonable.