The 2008 Metaverse Tour: Comparing 50 Virtual Worlds
Last Updated on Wednesday, 6 August 2008 07:36 Written by admin Wednesday, 6 August 2008 07:34
I was pretty surprised to see the range of quality in the different worlds. It was instantly clear to me why Second Life is so popular.
One of the 50 worlds surveyed here is by There.com, which is where Forterra’s OLIVE platform got its start.
BECOME A GRIDNAUT
From the Second Life blog (be sure to watch the video of the teleport described below):
Last month IBM and Linden Lab demonstrated inter grid teleports between the Second Life preview grid and an Opensim instance run by IBM. Torley Linden made a video of the event. Now we are making the intergrid teleport code available for all developers interested in making virtual worlds interoperate. Today we begin a public beta program for all prospective “gridnauts” (a gridnaut is anyone who has successfully teleported between virtual worlds).
This beta is intended for virtual world developers. The purpose is to establish a base level of interoperability — no inventory, textures, or attachments will transfer upon intergrid teleport. You will appear on the target grid’s simulator as that grid’s default avatar (Ruth). Second Life resident Tara5 Oh has a walkthrough of the Open Grid Beta Program.
IARPA’s Virtual Project A-SpaceX won’t be another Second Life
Last Updated on Friday, 4 July 2008 10:12 Written by admin Thursday, 3 July 2008 10:08
I think there’s a bright future for virtual worlds as a platform for the Intelligence Community, as well as the Department of Defense, but it’s not going to be Second Life. Here’s why.
According to Gartner Research, there are 3 key challenges to the enterprise adoption of Second Life:
- Insufficient graphics capabilities in workplace computers. Will businesses find work in a virtual environment sufficiently productive to warrant buying gaming class computers for all of their employees? Even if they do, and that’s a huge “if”, Second Life only supports NVIDIA graphics cards and a few ATI cards.
- Complicated development environment. Gartner refers to this as “Technical Glitches”, but what it comes down to is that Linden Labs hasn’t come up with a scalable design that suits the average organization’s needs. What they have is over-kill for the largest part of the market.
- Downtime. Second Life is frequently down during business hours. This seems like a no-brainer, but even if it caught Linden Labs by surprise, there’s no evidence that it’s doing anything to remedy the situation.
Noah at DangerRoom recently posted about A-SpaceX, an initiative from IARPA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Air Force Research Laboratory:
“A-SpaceX’s analysts will be able to turn back the clock, and see how they arrived at conclusions. “We believe a key dimension of exploring changing data will be the ability to manipulate time in the synthetic worlds – in effect turning these worlds into Time Machines,” the announcement notes. And those machines ought to be able to go forward, as well. “Proactive analysis could be explored by applying predictive models that look forward in time and suggest indicators leading to future events.”
“This new effort builds on A-Space, an intelligence community collaboration tool that’s under development. When completed, it is supposed to allow spooks to instant message, blog, share documents and photos, trade competing hypotheses, and do Facebook-style social networking.
“However, A-SpaceX goes several, several steps further — designing a whole virtual world for spies, not just their answer to MySpace. Which leads some in the intelligence community to be downright skeptical of the program. “They can’t do plain old forensics right and they’re going to develop a mechanism that rolls the clock backwards and forwards based on multiple inputs?” one source asks. “It should be good R&D, but its just that: no chance this becomes operational in a meaningful timeframe.”
“An open planning meeting for A-SpaceX is scheduled for next Tuesday, July 8th, in College Park, Maryland. Originally, folks were going to be able to “attend” the meeting “via a web simulcast and via Second Life.” But those plans had to be scrapped. “
If IARPA holds true to its intention to have A-SpaceX be a part of A-Space, then it will have to be on an open platform. That might pose a problem for the handful of companies who have the experience to build it. They’re almost all hawking proprietary software rather than an open virtual platform like Second Life. One exception, ironically, is Microsoft, thanks to its recent ESP release. From a recent Gartner Research report “Microsoft ESP Marks Shift to Richer Simulation Platforms”:
“Platforms such as Microsoft ESP will slowly begin to change the nature of simulation training. Because simulations such as ESP offer more of a free-play environment, the resulting simulations will be more realistic. In the past, some high-end applications had to run on special hardware. And even today for some other virtual environments, platform configurations can be a major stumbling block (see Note 1). By providing a platform of tools that scale around a variety of hardware from large systems to laptops, Microsoft has increased the options for developers to create simulation solutions. The ability to scale should give developers from smaller organizations access to tools that previously may have been too expensive. Another feature of the approach is the ability to create content on top of the platform so that developers are not forced to start over each time. Some organizations — notably in healthcare and education — have made significant investment to create customized, immersive environments. However, with the acceptance of these environments by the intended user community still in question, only larger enterprises have been able to afford these costly experiments.”
I fully expect to see Forterra Systems submit a proposal for this project, even though their OLIVE platform is a closed (proprietary) system. They’ve got an excellent track record within the DoD and IC for their 3D training work. It’ll be interesting to see which approach wins out – Closed or Open. Personally, I think an open platform is the better choice.
For more information on the military’s use of virtual world’s, see the recent CRS report “Avatars, Virtual Reality Technology, and the U.S. Military: Emerging Policy Issues“.
Strolling a Virtual World Using Only Your Brain Waves
Last Updated on Monday, 16 June 2008 11:26 Written by admin Monday, 16 June 2008 11:16
A pretty spectacular achievement coming out of Keio University in Japan:
The research group led by Assistant Prof. Junichi Ushiba of the Faculty of Science and Technology of Keio University applied the technology “to operate the computer using brain images (*1)” released last year and succeeds in enabling a disabled person suffering muscle disorder (41 year old male) to stroll through “Second Life® (*2)”, a three-dimentional virtual world on the Internet, to walk towards the avatar of a student logged in at Keio University located 16km from the subject’s home, and to have a conversation with the student using the “voice chat” function.
Inside Cyber Warfare
