I’m on the plane now between Chicago and Tucson, heading for the InformationWeek 500 Conference. Travel has gone very well so far, with no glitches. Evidently the guy sitting behind me on the plane was arrested recently on a Driving-While-Intoxicated charge. To hear him speak, the problem was that he got caught, not that he had been drinking and driving. Ah, ethics.
My plane book for this trip is Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture
Last May I decided to sell all my Second Life land and take a break from that virtual world for a period. There were several reasons why I did this. The first was that I had spent tens of hours in the environment and felt I understood it pretty well technically. That doesn’t mean I knew how to do everything, but I knew enough to know what I didn’t know, and knew where to find that out if I subsequently need to know it. (Got that?)
Next up was the investment. In addition to the small monthly membership charge, I was paying $75 per month in charges to Linden for the land I owned. That adds up but was worth it for the experimentation I was doing and the time I was willing to spend. I still believe that in the future I will want to have my own virtual world space on my own computer and then I will connect that in to one or more individual virtual worlds or clusters of such. When I’m just operating by myself, I won’t pay anything to anyone, but when I’m connected to a “commercial virtual world cluster,” I might be willing to “pay as I go” for time, property transfer, currency exchange, and so forth. If I just want to connect to a friend’s virtual world, I don’t expect to pay anything.
The next reason why I stepped away was that I got fed up with the neighborhood in which my land was placed. Simply put, I didn’t want to live next door to the “night club of the week” or the perpetual ads that litter the Second Life mainland. I’ve gone back several times since I sold the land and probably two-thirds of the tenants and buildings have changed. The beautiful castle next door is gone and that seemed to vanish soon after I got rid of my beautiful castle. The casino on the other side of the property is for sale, and a bunch of random looking buildings fill in the rest of the space. There are more of the 16 square-meter ad plots near the road and the ones that bothered me in May are still there, owned by absentee avatars who just care about advertising. Some even seemed to pride themselves in “spoiling the views.” I fully accept that they have a right to do it within the rules of land ownership. I just didn’t want to live there any more. Furthermore, I knew that I could move somewhere else, possibly to a private island, but I didn’t want to go that route.
I was getting antsy about the land for another reason: prices were dropping as Linden added more and more regions. If I was going to get out with a good portion of my investment intact, I needed to do it soon. I had done well in buying and selling various plots as I consolidated the main property area, so I didn’t make out so badly.
Another minor issue with the land was that it was in a snowy region. That seemed like a great idea last January but was less appealing as the Spring came. Besides, there was no place to put my SL speed boat.
Finally, I found that although SL was a great place for socializing, I was paying a lot of money every month to isolate myself in my building projects. Friends would occasionally drop by and I would wander about here and there, but I was not taking advantage of the environment. It got boring without aims for human (albeit virtual) interaction or new in-world goals. I was in a rut, that is.
So I decided to take a break. I sold my land and converted the resulting Linden $ back to US $. The money I got for selling the land I used to buy a real-life banjo. That’s a project for this winter.
After that, I focused on World of Warcraft with my son and, to a lesser extent, my daughter. We have two accounts, so my kids can do quests together or I can run quests or dungeons with William. I’m more of the solo, long distance kind of fighter, while he prefers to group and be right in the middle of the melee action. In a duel, he beats me in about 5 seconds, even though I am several levels above him. I’ll be writing more about this in future entries since I think the game/environment deserves some analysis in this space. There are already hundreds if not thousands of websites and blogs devoted to WoW, but I’ll try to make it relevant to my usual topics. I may even throw in some tips and lessons learned.
Getting back to Second Life, I still have the IBM island to develop around open source and standards. I was waiting for spatial voice in SL to go mainstream and it has now, so that is no longer an excuse. I wanted to let the island sit a bit so I could think about the design and I’m about ready to get going. (Note that I’ve been known to think about building a real-life bookcase for six months before construction began.) If I could approach just some of the terraforming and landscaping beauty of WoW, I would be very satisfied.
There will be private inside-IBM spaces as well as public visitor spaces. There won’t be any snow. There probably won’t be any castles. It will include things that I don’t know how to construct yet. If I’m successful, it will be dynamic in content and experience.
In the meanwhile, I bought some new land in SL but much, much less that I had before. It is ocean-front. Actually, it is ocean-all-around, except above. I’ll be detailing that and the construction of the new IBM island in a new series about SL that will start up here within a few days.
I can’t imagine NOT hosting my own 3D. I’ve always done it that way. Even if time consuming, it is a LOT cheaper, thus 3D On the Web Cheap!
OTOH, I use X3D/VRML for art as in the virtual reality album concept, but the Media Machines Flux system now has the beginnings of a MU system with more to come using the standards work for the Network Sensor.
The challenge here: do you REALLY want to host your own private world? You can but that comes with some technical challenges the hobbyists usually don’t want to step up to particularly hosting. The advantages are control of the landscape, of course, and as much control over content and behavior as you care to assume. Even without the Network Sensor, some people have been hosting X3D/VRML worlds with chat for some time now.
At the moment, the browsers are still unequal in capability. The clear performance winner by an order of magnitude is Bit Management’s BS Contact. So far, no other browser is close and that is simply due to the ability of Holger Grahn and his crew, and the fact that they’ve stayed the course for over ten years. Practice does make perfect.
There is no free lunch. If LL drops support for a capability and you’ve built a considerable amount of content for it, you have to rework. That just happened to me with the gif animation support in Contact. I have to hope that it is a bug and not a deprecation. But this is the problem for all of us who have moved on from office documents to the emerging businesses of ultra-complex hypermedia content where real-time wrapper formats such as 3D contain the sub-media active formats. It is major challenge for the standards committees because just as we saw with desktop wysiwyg, costs to build go down but only as costs to maintain go up in the face of churn in the wrapped formats (think VML or SVG). As the web is now bifurcating again with entertainment media coming to the front, expect this to become even more challenging.
Len, can you describe your own setup?
Sure… (Note: ROL only works correctly on the BS Contact VRML/X3D 7.0 browser. It works partially on others but BS Contact has superior rendering and culling both of which are not options when building open (as in unoccluded) worlds).
The basic setup at home is a Dell P1000 on a 56k (48 really) dial-up. Really.
The sound card is an old SoundBlaster and yes, one CAN make a good recording with these as long as the recording software, mics and instruments are at least semi-pro. I use Adobe Audition for the sound software. It is relatively cheap and easy to learn (emphasize the last bit: don’t
try Pro Tools software unless you have a lot of patience or a good teacher/producer: take baby steps). I used clips for the audio in ROL because of the need for authenticity in the Hindi music.
Yes, I have dial up at home. Pathetic, ain’t it? But…
It means the hosted big download data center worlds aren’t an option for me at home. I’ve had good experience with the Blaxxun-hosted worlds, but if one is doing MU, dial-up doesn’t cut it. I have a family account at a local ISP and I store the worlds there. Because this is VRML/X3D, all one needs is the browser to download the world. ROL is not a MU, but it has been hosted elsewhere for MU and it works. It is the client that cares about such things and by separating communication services (eg, chat, voip, etc), VRML/X3D is fine for this. Note that the consortium and the vendors are specing the extra services now and Bit Management and Media Machines are implementing them, so the situation for MU will improve quickly in X3D. VRML pioneered these but X3D changed the focus to other applications. SL swung the market back in that direction, but it is better that real-time 3D not be thought of exclusively as VR. VR is a genre. Real-time 3D is a technology. Let’s not confuse novels with paper or movies with film. The rest of the stuff are services and when we get around to a more expansive set of standards, we will do well to keep these in different boxes.
One way to get into this cheaply is to build stand alone worlds until one is happy/proficient and then move the world to a MU-capable hosting site. That’s a bit cheaper than diving into space rental although it also means one doesn’t get the in-world building tools. Depending on one’s concepts, that can be a good thing as the non-hosted toolkits can be more flexible. VR is not the only thing one does with real time 3D on the web.
On the other hand, if one is building stand alone worlds such as River of Life for art projects, (a virtual reality sound album), then dial-up and locally hosted editors are fine.
It means I am not editing online a la Web 2.0 and for heavy graphics work, I recommend doing
it this way. 90% of 3D work is vertex twiddling and texture making. This is not really collaborative work. Somewhat like painting your bathroom, it is best done solo. I am not against collaborative world building. You will note that ROL has a very long list of credits, but only one author: moi. ROL is a combination of animation, poetry, music and techniques for creating a story inside a non-linear world (a topic for another thread). The VRMLers have been very generous with their scripts, models and time. Community is not synonymous with collaboration, but it is synonymous with sharing. There are big hearted incredibly talented people such as Cecile Muller at WildPeaks who one very much should be on good terms with. The touches one gets when they share objects makes soooo much difference.
What I also have: a lot of experience with VRML from 1.0 to X3D. That means I can work comfortably in Professional File Editor (Free) and a demo browser if the browser has a console with error output.
This is the old school of web building. I am a believer in taking demo software with a Save As Even If Restricted feature, using it to build pieces, then assembling the pieces by hand. It isn’t easy but it is cheap.
I have various demo editors such as Internet Space Builder. It maxes out at a certain number of textures and vertices, but stay in the limits and as a Boolean carving editor and texture hanger, it is great! I have the Numedia Avatar Studio which I used to create Kamala’s shell, then extended her behaviors by creating new positions and then integrating these by hand into the main file. It is a tedious process but workable.
Again, a beauty of standards is the old editors stay useful and one can use combinations of them if one understands the language.
DO LEARN THE LANGUAGE. There is no excuse for not doing it. Scene-graph technology is easy to understand and the rest is good old fashioned JavaScript. I am the living proof any idiot can do this if the idiot’s family gives him the time.
I have an old VRML97 editor from Ligos (V-Realm Builder) that I won in a contest many years ago. It still works and that is the good thing about standard formats. I also have the free-to-use
Flux Editor from Media Machines. There is a tutorial on my blog for that. That one is a gift from Media Machines to the community. It is phenomenal.
** A GOOD OBJECT EDITOR FOR MAKING THE SET PIECES IS A MUST.**
Luckily, you can get one for free from Media Machines.
You do need to pick a browser and stick with it. Even with standards, the color palettes and implementations vary. I use Bit Management Contact for my worlds work. I use Flux for some other smaller pieces, but the truth is, no one in the marketplace can touch Holger Grahn and
his team for their mastery of real-time 3D browser building. They are one of the two technical teams that survived the dot-bomb in 3D and kept improving. The other is ParallelGraphics who build Cortona. Some new players such as Octaga and Media Machines are getting better faster,
but on a low-end unaccelerated machine, stick with Bit Management. Note the demo player has a floating frotus that is very annoying but free is free. Note that Flux is open source and if floating frotuses make you angry and you have the chops, Flux is there to be improved.
The kicker: none of this is possible without 3D standards and a consortium who’s members subscribe to an open participation agreement. Politically, socially, economically and artistically,
these are a must have.
For more on the projects, tools, techniques and code, see
http://3donthewebcheap.blogspot.com.
Interesting that you chose WoW. I too play WoW as a means of keeping in touch with my son, who is 1500 miles from home, living on his own now. It gives us an environment in which we can work together on quests, pvp or raids, chat about whatever, and soon (as I understand), we will have voice chat without the need of an add-on. The experience is so different than using IM or picking up the phone. It is much more like being in the same place. In many regards, we’ve become closer since we started playing WoW together than we have been in years (the teenage years to be specific, but that’s another story:-)
Why does that work?
Onset cues. This is *the* engine of presence in virtual worlds or any simulation for that matter.
The fun question is what effect simulated onset cues have on a developing personality.
What is the right balance of the cues for the online personality and the meatspace personality?
Note that as the book Sutor mentions, people come to ‘cons’ and use the cues of their online personality in the meatspace social world having become uncomfortable with using their own real names, etc., in a gathering of like-trained individuals. This is a key idea for applying VR sims to training environments or business environments.
See norms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_(sociology)
It comes down to the evolution of clusters of message types (norms) and affordances (behaviors) in disparate locations that share some property. Abstractly, that is what a situation semantic is. The sales and marketing heads use this concept to create business classes that may be physically located in different places but those places have some similarity related to the products, therefore, the arrangements of the cluster. For example, think of a franchise that sells in Texas and Florida. The shared property is the temperature of the region and that is a low-energy semantic force that organizes the product clusters.
An intelligent framework is sensitive or “aware” of these forces so that the emergence of situation semantics is at once both natural and directed. In short form, “smart enough to go with the flow”.
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/10_870221
http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/humanmarkup-comment/200110/msg00128.html
http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/humanmarkup-comment/200110/msg00128.html
Where it goes wrong:
http://www.up4.com/archives/000088.html
*Dis*believers have no place in the lab or the emergence point of innovation.
Hints for open implementations
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/humanmarkup-comment/200206/msg00057.html
http://www.aec.at/en/archiv_files/19902/E1990b_159.pdf
That is a link to an article about flight simulation basics in which the concept of cueing is explained. Flight simulation pioneered much of the modern simulation systems to which VR owes its existence. Music systems are another area where there are ideas that can be harvested but flight simulation is the place to begin historically.
VR opens many possibilities for representation. Some are entertaining; some are fantastic, but only a limited set will be instructive. Understanding how and where to emphasize the real-world real-time nature of cueing is fundamental to creating effective VR training systems, and to creating self-directed norms based business systems. These are not new theories in either the instuctional or business system domains, but we do need to reconsider them in terms of the expansiveness of the real-time 3D media wrappers. We need to investigate the service mixes, how they can be represented in 3D (eg, what to do with VOIP given spatial sound), and what combinations are right for specific products IBM will offer.
Not my company, of course, but these are offered as research topics for BlueMen while you have the backing of upper management and the resources. It is good to play, but an hour in the library will usually save you a month in the lab.