Unity3D: Where the Metaverse is Going?

A year ago I posted my belief that OpenSim is the future of the Metaverse, because there were no really good competitors.  Well there is a competitor that could quickly take over and replace OpenSim, OR it could enhance OpenSim and give it what it needs to become the 3D web.  I’m not sure which, and a good case could be made for either.

Unity3D is a gaming graphics platform that does not need a powerful computer to run on, can be run as an embed on a web page, or can run on many smart phones.  It efficiently handles complex shadows, water reflections, transparencies, atmospheric effects, and complex mesh objects.  Scripting can be done with javascript, and needed assets can be loaded on the fly, so no need for huge downloads.  3D objects can be imported from practically any source.  While it can’t compete with the latest graphic engines, it looks really good.  Unity3D is NOT an MMO or Virtual World platform, but one can be built to fit in, and some already have.

Currently, I know of at least 6 3D Virtual Worlds that use unity3D graphics: Friendshangout, Frenzoo, Gojiyo, NuVera, RealLifePlus, and ResLive.  All are in the early development stage, and none generating a lot of traffic.  Two of those were developed by The Sine Wave Company which will set up commercial Unity3D virtual worlds for anyone for a price.  Reaction Grid, which runs an OpenSim grid for businesses and educators, has created a Unity3D based grid called Jibe which is still experimental, but offers a place to host your own Unity world.

At least 3 companies are providing avatars for Unity3D based worlds. Evolver, N-Sided, and DigiMi (Daz3D).

So you would think with all of this activity going on with Unity3D that this would mark the beginning of the end for OpenSim/Second Life as a platform for the 3D web wouldn’t you?  While it could be the case, OpenSim has some major advantages of Unity. First, its free. Second, it scales well in that you can (usually) have a hundred avatars in a location at the same time without having issues.  Third, it is a lot easier for players to develop and build stuff in OpenSim.  It seems that if we could combine Unity3D’s low overhead graphics and mesh support with OpenSim’s multiplayer infrastructure, that we would have something really awesome.

Turns out, this is already being done.  For starters, Tipodean Technologies has developed a web based client for SL and OpenSim allowing you to visit Second Life or an OpenSim based location in a web browser, without a client. It works by converting SL/OS objects at a location to be viewable in a Unity3D web embed.   It is still very experimental, but showing a lot of promise.  Secondly, we have the Rezzable people who have figured out how to take whole OpenSim regions and turn them into unity3D regions, and they can do this on the fly, so if something changes on the OpenSim region, it changes in the Unity3D view too. Here is a demo of this at Heritage-Key (you will need a Heritage-Key login to try it).  The bottom line is that Unity3D and OpenSim are very much compatible.

The ultimate OS/U3D integration would have the graphical virtual world built in Unity3D, and have OpenSim handle the MMO/Assets/Inventory/Communication back end.  That way both would service their strengths.

If you are interested in becoming a 3D Virtual World developer of some sort. learning Unity3D is going to be an important step.  Here is a good overview of Unity3D development from an SL perspective, and here is what I have been told is an excellent book for beginners.

What if you built an awesome 3D Virtual World and nobody came?

What if you built an awesome 3D Virtual World and nobody came? That seems to be the question facing the makers of a 3D virtual world that I recently discovered.

I was tinkering around with evolver.com a 3D avatar maker that hopes to create a common avatar for multiple web based 3D worlds. I was using it to create a new avatar for facebook, and I saw one of the “transport” options was something called

friendshangout.com

The name sounds atrociously lame. Sounds like a chat website for lonely emo teenagers. Who would want to go to a website like that? Curiosity, of course, got the better of me. The website was as lame as I thought it would be, featuring lots of pics of good looking college kids with dumb smiles on their face, and a video of some blonde chick reading marketing dribble from a teleprompter.

My first reaction was “I want no part of this”, my second was to see just how lame of a 3D chat this was going to be, like slowing down to look at an auto accident, or smelling expired milk before throwing it away.

So I create an account, go to the 3D chat page and pick a beach setting. My expectation dropped even further when I saw the 3D Chat runs in a web browser (remember Google Lively?). I was ready for the worst, and then…

OMG!!!

This was completely unexpected! A beautiful fully developed 3D world with awesome graphics, easy to use navigation, decent evolver avatars, that runs in a freaking web browser!

There are also vehicles to ride, and about a half dozen environments to explore. The only thing I didn’t try out was the chat feature as I could never find anyone else online. I pretty much had the place to myself, which was kind of sad.

This is a quality 3D Virtual World that impressed me way more than Blue Mars, and it is too bad it is buried behind crappy marketing.

Further reasearch indicates that the virtual world is based on the Unity game engine. The friends hangout “Island Paradise” is identical to the demo “Tropical Paradise” as seen on unity3d.com. Apparently some of the other places at friends hangout consist of other demos, or worlds created from arteria3d.com.

A little whois research indicates that friendshangout.com was registered over five years ago by a company that has a bunch of similarly designed websites, which tells me it is some off the shelf web template they are using.

So someone has managed to combined cheap avatars from evolver.com, with a cheap web based 3D gaming engine from unity3d.com (was $200, now available for free), and put up a cheap website with a domain they already owned.

If they were to actually get some professional web designer with a decent social network web system, and buy a decent domain name, and promoted it, they may have something really cool.

There is not enough content here for long term interest, but in the mean time, I am enjoying what is here.

It is a nice place to visit on the remote outskirts of the Metaverse.

Blue Mars is NOT Second Life

I want to take a second look at Blue Mars from the perspective of what Blue Mars is trying to be. It is still very unfinished of course, but based on what I read and what I have seen so far, I get a picture of Blue Mars’s real purpose, and it is not what most people think.

The majority of the people jumping on the Blue Mars bandwagon are Second Life players, hoping for something similar, or more accurately, something not in control of Linden Labs.  I feel for them, but they are likely to be disappointed.

Let me tell you what I believe Blue Mars really is and why its goals are not compatible with the Second Life model of the 3D web. Or, to use an obvious metaphor, Second Life is on Venus, Blue Mars is on Mars.

Take a look at what Blue Mars is doing.  First, as I pointed out in my previous review of Blue Mars, a primary activity in virtual worlds is building stuff, and Blue Mars is keeping the building parts out.  Second, they are keeping avatars fairly standard, with only the face being adjustable. Third, they are built on a gaming engine designed to be flexible enough to make many kinds of video games, not just social worlds. Fourth, the tools they are making available to “developers” are professional level, requiring some prior game design knowledge, sending the message “amateurs need not apply”.

The missing piece of the puzzle is to look at the latest trends in 3D Virtual World games, and I consider myself an expert. Take a look at my What is the Metaverse? page. I give a list of attributes for a metaverse, one of which has sadly not come into fruition. To quote:

Game Launching – Think XBox Live, where you meet up with your friends, pick a multiplayer game to play, you all load up the game and suddenly you are all teamed together. Obviously XBox Live has this ability, but XBox Live is all text until you get into the game. Playstation 3 Home is a 3D social world that lets you do this too. If we really want to have a “Metaverse” this is the way to do it: Tie all the individual online games together, let players carry their identity from game to game, and provide a way to move in groups between games.

My idea is to create a toolbox that game developers could use so that player could move from game to game with the same identity and similar avatars.  Playstation 3 Home is supposed to have this ability, I do not know how well it works. I know others were attempting this ability, but never successfully.

What we have been seeing as a trend is an intermediate step: Create a bunch of small games yourself and  integrate them into a larger virtual world. This is what Free Realms is doing, as well as Empire of Sports, Football Superstars, and Moondo.

The design of Blue Mars is that of a portal to various games. Each game space is capable of having its own rules and designs, but uses the same avatars in each room. What Blue Mars is mostly looking for is “game developers” to create these game spaces, not SL object builders or fashion designers.  Some game spaces could be created to work similar to  Second Life, or they could be adventure games, sports simulations, RPG games, even first person shooters, as long as it is 3D and runs on the CryEngine2 and designable using the game engine provided.

This is what Blue Mars really is: A gaming portal with common avatars.  It is not a good place to start a designer business like Second Life is, it is not a good place to become a merchant or build your dream house or hold meetings.  Blue Mars is designed to be a place to build 3D games and get other players to come check out your games.

If successful, Blue Mars will be a compliment to SL, not a substitute.  Second Life is designed to be a social network but has limited game design potential (made problematic by script lag).  Blue Mars is designed to be a gaming network with limited social potential.

I do not have any thoughts about Blue Mars potential for success in this venture, except to point out it is likely to be difficult. The real measure of success will be if they actually attract professional game designers and gaming companies to create content for their platform.

In the mean time, they are going to have to develop some “developers” themselves. These early developers are likely to not be very good early on, but will get better.  Meanwhile, Blue Mars needs to develop their own in house “killer apps” to attract players.

There is potential here but it is a path that has never been tried before.

The Quest for the 3D Web Page

I have been keeping track and trying many of the 3D Virtual Worlds and even related 3D websites out there, and I have been noticing a trend: Most of the newest 3D web programs have focused primarily on creating what amounts to 3D web pages.

The list keeps growing: scenecaster.com, 3dxplorer.com, vivaty.com, lively.com, exitreality.com, and the latest is justleapin.com. They all take differing approaches, but their goal is the same, they want to be the “standard” 3D web page program.

What each is about is letting people build a customized 3D web page like a “room” that can be explored via a browser (and ultimately a browser plug-in since nothing is standard yet), and allowing others to visit as well. If two people are in the same 3D room at the same time, they will see each other and can chat with each other. Like 2D web pages there should be conventions for connecting and linking rooms together, embedding media, allowing comment posting, etc.

3D web pages have been a goal for a while now. VRML has been around for years, and was supposed to be the 3D equivalent to HTML. You could even create VRML using a simple text editor, if you knew what you were doing. Most tools to create VRML were hard to use, and VRML took forever to load, especially in the age of dialup that everyone had in the 90′s. The technology was never there to display properly either. VRML is still around: As mentioned in my review, Exit Reality is based on it.

After VRML failed to catch on widely, the trend moved towards “persistent” worlds, like Active Worlds, Second Life and There. These are separate programs designed to access a “grid” where players rent space to build what they want. You can travel between spaces if you want or teleport from place to place.

Maintaning the “persistence” turns out to be very complicated, and as players of these programs know, buggy as hell.

So the later 3D virtual worlds simplified things as much as possible. IMVU came out only to do 3D chatting, the most popular activity in these earlier worlds. But building and decorating was number two, and most of the latest 3D virtual world programs, like Kaneva and Twinity, provide a “house” you can decorate as you please. They just drop the complication of house to house travel, every player has their own space to use as they see fit.

The websites in the second paragraph attempt to offer something even less complicated. They allow you to build 3D “rooms”, often as many as you want, that can be viewed in a browser, embedded in a web page. They replace the separate executable download with a browser plug-in that is generally easier to get the viewing audience to accept.

For all intents and purposes, we have come full circle; these sites deliver the 3D web page experience that VRML promised only with better graphics, with rooms that are easy to build, easy to load, as customizable as possible, and accessible by all.

If the idea of a 3D web is to catch on, everything must be customizable, it must work like HTML, and must be as simple as HTML. You must be able to start with a blank slate, or a pre-built template, navigation must be intuitive, and interactive. Quality should vary from simplistic to photo realistic depending on the computer capabilities of the viewer. Special effects (weather, particle, lighting, animation, water, physics, reflection and refraction) should be optional to both the builder and the user.

Eventually, one of those websites listed above may become the new defacto standard for “3D web pages” which will eventually lead to a 3D internet. Lets face it, if any of them do, it will be decided by advertiser dollars more than users. That means it will be Google Lively.

Except that Google Lively fails in most of the criteria listed, especially in the customizable part.

The program that inspired me to write this post in the first place was justleapin.com, now in open beta. It is lacking somewhat in features at the moment, but shows great promise in doing exactly what a 3D website program should do. Currently instead of avatars, you can add, animated people. Room navigation is simple mouse view. I dont know if avatar support is forthcoming, but I like the idea of adding animated people the way you add an animated gif to a 2D web page. You can customize any texture in the room, or embed videos, music, sounds, etc. There is a small library of 3D objects you can add, which could grow in the future. It also displays the room in decent graphics quality without being a resource hog.

I think that the decoratable “room” or “house” may be a popular model right now, but I know from my SL explorations, that thinking in just room terms is too limiting. Ultimately creating a 3D “space” should not have form limitations.

I do not know when or even if 3D web pages/sites will catch on. I do believe that expressing ideas should not have to be limited to 2D text or pictures or video, and that sometimes 3D may be a more effective and desirable way to express them sometimes.

Virtual World Philosophy: Escape From Reality

Online gaming is not my only interest. In the real world I have been lately interested in the phenomenon of “Peak Oil” and the eventual deleterious affects it will have on society in the near future. I don’t talk about it much on this site/blog, because the focus here is on online entertainment in general and 3D virtual worlds in particular. If you want a good breakdown on peak oil, there is this site.

My interest in this essay though is speculation about what will happen to online virtual world gaming in the event of a global economic depression which a peak oil generated energy crisis is very likely to cause. I am making an assumption that an energy crisis will have little effect on server farm maintenance or internet infrastructure, since the energy crisis’s biggest effect will be on transportation and real world mobility, and virtual world infrastructure is largely stationary.

Lets start at the beginning with the popular speculative fiction novel that started the whole metaverse craze to begin with: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. In this book, the United States has essentially collapsed and taken over by corporations. Most of the population is dirt poor and living in squalor, the main character (conveniently named Hiro Protagonist) lives in a storage locker. Parallel to this horrible real world is a virtual world paradise called The Metaverse, where Hiro has a modest mansion in an exclusive neighborhood of hackers near the busiest section of the grid.

Snow Crash is fiction of course, but it leads to an interesting question: How well can virtual getaways help us deal with real world stress? People have been using television, video games, etc. to relieve stress for years. Online gaming and virtual worlds are new to the equation, but those players involved find online gaming more immersive, and as a consequence more stress relieving than more passive entertainment.

We already know the consequences of too much TV or too much video games, so its important to keep all of this in proper balance. Online gaming worlds are still mostly just diversion entertainment and can be overused at the expense of ones real life.

But lets get back to the future real life bad times. A real world energy crisis will have a negative effect on everyone. Conservation will be the key: Smaller, more energy efficient housing, less long distance travel, living closer to work and shopping centers, mass transit, etc. The real world “lifestyle” will be on the decline for all, and if that does not cause a lot of real world stress, it will at the very least cause a lot of real world disappointment.

Can virtual success in online gaming relieve the real world disappointment enough to keep us sane? I’m not the only one who thinks about this sometimes. Here is a few choice quotes from the “Metaverse Roadmap Overview“

The virtual worlds scenario imagines broad future participation in virtual space commons. Many new forms of association will emerge that are presently cost-prohibitive in physical space, and VWs may outcompete physical space for many traditional social, economic, and political functions. In the 20 year scenario, they may become primary tools (with video and text secondary) for learning many aspects of history, for acquiring new skills, for job assessment, and for many of our most cost-effective and productive forms of collaboration.

In the stronger version of this scenario, VWs capture most, if not all, current forms of digital interaction, from entertainment to work to education to shopping to dating, even email and operating systems, though the 3D aspects may remain minimally used in the latter contexts. Youth raised in such conditions might live increasingly Spartan lives in the physical world, and rich, exotic lives in virtual space—lives they perceive as more empowering, creative and “real” than their physical existence, in the ways that count most.

New identities, new social experiences.

Aided by VW interoperability, an individual may easily access a far broader set of experiences in digital settings than she or he could in the physical world, as well as a vastly larger social network. …

In a more limited version of the scenario, VWs become popular for a few social and professional interactions, and as an interface in certain social contexts, but end up filling a circumscribed role similar to that of present-day televisions, home game consoles, or personal computers. Much of what people do today in the physical world continues with little input from virtual worlds. This limited scenario came primarily from non-technologists, who thought cultural conservatism and economic barriers would be major roadblocks to the stronger vision.

Experience ha taught me that the “stronger” version is far more likely, especially when you expand the virtual world definition to include MMORPGs. Social virtual worlds are not for everybody, as witnessed by the 10% retention rate in Second Life, but “rich exotic lives in virtual space” applies just as much to a level 80 druid in WoW as it does to a mansion owner in Second Life.

One of my first blog entries on this board was about the advent of the “Virtual Third Place“. A small but growing crowd is substituting online destinations for social gatherings instead of traditional neighborhood pubs, clubs, and coffee houses. Business executives are going on WoW raids together rather than golfing together.

Not only are people seeing it as more enjoyable, they are recognizing it is also more economical, especially as gas prices rise.

As travel costs go up, virtual meetings, even whole virtual work places are going to be more and more common. All of this predicted in Snow Crash way before it became a reality.

Welcome to the new reality, with many parts virtual.

The Metaverse Summit

Someone held a summit on the Metaverse and didn’t invite me

Oh well, but at least there are plenty of thoughts around from blogs of the attendees.

Lets start by pointing out the website of the organizers of the conference:

http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/

Basically, the point of the conference was to layout a possible roadmap that will get us to a “Metaverse” by 2016. On the roadmap overview page, they list imminent technological and societal changes to get us there.

In the true spirit of the internet, information about the goings on at the summit can be found in podcasts and blogs and some scattered media outlets. The latter reporting that the conference was not without controversy:

The trickiest salvos in this conflict were delivered just after the conference in the comments accompanying the Metaverse Roadmap blog thread of theoretician of fun, Raph Koster. The leading massively multiplayer games thinker came under fire from Second Life‘s most outspoken critic and advocate, Prokofy Neva, in a voluminous and hotly argued exchange that has spread across multiple threads and forums across the blogosphere.

Prokofy attacked numerous aspects of what Koster said, but also much of what the Second Lifer perceived he stood for. The Metaverse Roadmap came under fire for not being diverse enough, and featuring a familiar set of ‘panel-dwellers’, such as Koster:

“You don’t get diversity just from ‘multiple generations of technology’ – for something as big and far-reaching and impactful as ‘the Metaverse’ it seems to me that you need to have people from all walks of life, including non-technological – not just users, but thinkers and doers from a wide variety of fields. I don’t see the different viewpoints appearing in the blogs – not yet, anyway. It’s a lot of enthusiastic cheerleadering. The ‘non-profit’ types were like Randy Moss of American Cancer Society which is already in SL and promoting it – but not people who had never heard of SL. That would be the real test – take people who are smart and involved and doing great things but never heard of any of this and see – does it work for them?”Prokofy was making some valid points amid the contention, arguing that the real innovators on this new frontier might not the developers and gamers, but the people who were using the likes of Second Life for business or education:

“I find there’s a horrible, horrible, hangover from this MMORPG culture you’ve all imbined for decades that is hugely destructive and is near to strangling the infant of the Metaverse in its cradle. You conceive of worlds as if they all involve skilling, leveling up, killing orcs, and getting advice from NPS and Wizards. YOUR goal is to be the ultimate Wizard (like a resident becoming a Linden). But there’s no objective need to force these memes and cultural institutions of MMORPGs, with their rigid, stratified, tekkie-serving forms of governance on virtual worlds just because they’re virtual, and you can fly in them. None whatsoever. Indeed, to the extent that we can shatter this horrid MMORPG culture with its fanboyz and resmods and alt-outings and rare-hoarding, we’re be that much farther ahead.”

More info on the exchange can be found here http://www.3pointd.com/20060516/metaverse-grudge-match/

I’m still reading all this info, so I may come up with some thoughts about it all soon.