There’s not a great deal to say about this, other than that as a fan of both Second Life and The Daily Show, I thought it was pretty great. It was, in my humble opinion, a thousand times more entertaining than the real-life event, which didn’t seem to serve any real purpose whatsoever, and wasn’t much less informative :)
I watched the live video feed of the real-life event from beginning to end, and was pretty much disgusted with the morons holding the Congressional hearing by the end. I’d have been better off just watching this:
If you are actually interested in an analysis of what happened at the hearing, visit the Virtually Blind blog for more info.
Virtual World News had an article a couple of days ago on IBM’s announcement that they had built a 3D data center simulation using OpenSim, which I found particularly fascinating because I have long believed that the potential of Virtual Worlds like Second Life® and OpenSimulator was far larger and with potential for much broader application than what we are currently seeing. Take, for instance, this comment by an IBM researcher on the topic:
"Viewing information about your data center in 2-D text — even in real time — only tells a data center manager part of the story, because our brains are wired for sight and sound," said IBM Researcher Michael Osias, who architected the 3-D data center service. "By actually seeing the operations of your data center in 3-D, even down to flames showing hotspots and visualizations of the utilization of servers allows for a clearer understanding of the enterprise resources, better informed decision-making and a higher level of interaction and collaboration."
Visualization is extremely important, and the ability of virtual worlds to enhance visualization and make use of our visual/spatial processing abilities (using the concept of space as a memory cue and productivity enhancer) is absolutely fascinating and intuitive. We are quite simply built to work in a 3D world with maximum effectiveness, and evidence suggests that people have been formally taking advantage of this astounding ability since before 85 BC. IBM obviously believes that this has practical business application, and while some may question whether there is truly any practical benefit to using virtual worlds in this way, I strongly believe that we will discover over time that it’s one of the most powerful and effective uses of the technology - for business or otherwise.
I remember back in high school more than a decade ago, while reading a book about computer graphics programming in class one day I came across a quote (likely only half-remembered now) that really struck me powerfully : "Computers may be great at business and calculations, but graphics is what they are for". I doubt that the author of that book (it may have been Michael Abrash, I cannot recall after so much time) could have envisioned how powerful commodity graphics and general-purpose computing hardware would become in less than 20 years from the time he wrote that, but I’m willing to bet that he’d feel similarly about 3D technology and virtual worlds : It’s what computers are for. How exciting to be able to use a system like loci by actually building our own 3D representations, and then to use that representation to manage extremely complex real-world systems that are difficult to truly understand in a flat printout or 2D program.
Over at UgoTrade and Massively there’s a buzz going about realXtend joining the OpenSim project, and I have got to say that this announcement (and the accompanying screenshots and video) marks perhaps the first time that I’ve gotten truly excited about a virtual world other than Second Life®.
Let me start with the goodies before I say my piece :
Who is realXtend?
I’ve never heard of them before, but here’s what their website has to say:
Creating an open source platform for interconnected virtual worlds is the goal of realXtend project. We collaborate with OpenSim, OpenViewer and realXtend viewer projects.
Next generation virtual reality development is the core of realXtend project. We focus on interoperability technologies, usability and real-life application support.
The announcement goes into a little more detail about the relationship between OpenSimulator and realXtend:
realXtend is contributing all the server side code for their developments to OpenSim and continues to do so from now on. This collaboration of two projects with a similar vision enables realXtend and OpenSim to focus on common issues, and solve them more quickly - leveraging experience and knowledge from each party. realXtend project manager Jani Pirkola comments on the joining as "I see this as a great possibility to quickly make OpenSim the global de facto standard and to significantly speed up the global technology development in this area. Our common goal is to create the best open source virtual world server platform, and to continue the rapid evolution of OpenSim".
What’s so cool about this partnership?
For the little time I’ve had to learn about this (even more info on the OpenSimulator blog), here are just a few of the things mentioned that get me stoked:
OGRE rendering support - Anyone in the graphics and games industry has heard of OGRE. It’s one of the oldest and most capable open source rendering engines available, and is absolutely packed with features and optimizations that blow Second Life’s rendering pipeline completely out of the water.
Real 3D mesh support - Yes, that’s right, this project uses actual 3d meshes instead of just geometric solid primitives! According to Adam Frisby of the OpenSimulator project: "Meshes behave just like another prim type - you can drag, scale, and rotate meshes around using the same method that you use on primitives and object groups. You can link meshes with other primitives, save them to inventory and use them in pretty much the same way you use primitives."
Unlimited Attachments - ’nuff said.
Ability to script avatar skeletons - Apparently inverse kinematics is on the feature list, but in addition to that developers will have the ability to script fine-grained control of the skeleton’s bones. While it may not allow for everything that Endorphin would, it would seem to me that this could provide a great deal more spontaneity and interactivity between avatars than Second Life®.ever could. Note, this is not just .bvh animations uploaded like Second Life®.we’re talking scripted access to the skeleton!
There’s a great deal more information at the sites linked above (document sharing, collaboration, roadmap, etc.), and I’m far from finished reading and learning about what exactly this could all mean, but it all looks very promising indeed!
If we could get C:SI working on such a system, it would be insanely cool, and I’m already imagining what we could accomplish with that kind of detail and interactivity
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