Smaller Worlds

This year's Virtual Worlds Expo, renamed Engage!, is smaller and leaner than in past years, not only because of the recession, but because of the downturns of the hype cycle on some of our favourite worlds like Second Life. Never mind, though, because it's a chance to see past all the big egos of the past conferences and hear some important voices and see some interesting new projects and get a sense of who is hunkered down for the long run.

The star of the show for my money (ok, I'm on a press pass glued to the free Diet Coke and cookies provided by SmallWorlds lol) is Yogurtistan, a Turkish-made browser-based virtual world that looks pretty hot and has a group of very enthusiastic and eager entrepreneurs and coders taking it around the world for demos. It turns out "yogurt" is an ancient word that means "compound" (i.e. made up of several things) and is probably a basic "nice" word like "cream" or something -- everybody likes it everywhere. Yogurtistan bills itself as "the first 3D Flash world in a browser" -- and apparently that's really the case, judging from the nods of approval from those most knowledgeable in the industry grouped around the stand like Reuben Steiger of Millions of Us and John Swords, lately of the Electric Sheep -- so lately that he was still speaking on their behalf on a panel, although Forseti downsized 9 of them a few weeks ago.

Yogurtistan is using Flash 10 and their own recreated engine, you can read about it here. They have a Turkish based VC called appropriately Golden Horn and plan to IPO. They will have some proprietary code and some opensource for developers as I understood it. They have an innovative way of creating 3-D looking backdrops that turn with the camera angle so it creates the illusion of depth without having to pay for it with prims. You can only get 15 people in a room or on a sim, so to speak, but I'm told by Swords this is normal for teen worlds. I myself have never understood the attempt to chase after big crowds that you can't talk to, as virtual worlds are not mass broadcasting media but conversation facilitators.

Another breathtakingly impressive world is Blue Mars from Avatar Reality -- the prim hair is to die for -- oops, they don't use prims lol. They also will not have user-generated on demand, which of course is our gold standard in SL, but an application process for devs whom they envision as partners. The demo focused on storefronts that would be part of sales of real-life products attached to websites, with artificial intelligence in the avatars. The AI bot would not only talk to you on an adapting script but would track all the eyeball information that marketers want VWs for in the first place. I found it disconcerting that the store concept involves the merchandiser remaining behind the scenes, only managing the AI (I personally love playing store), but this is something that is supposed to help with the cost of staff time and also make it possible to manage a lot of stores or malls at once, I guess.

The scenery and the versimilitude of the items is stunning. The company had a Japanese university professor explaining the world, and it struck me that you never see professors at these events -- the computer scientists and marketers and entrepreneurs aren't at the Ph.D. level. Virtual worlds are growing up (yes, cube, we know they've been around forever since you made them out of popsickle sticks and bubblegum!)

Active Worlds has been around since 1995, growing steadily and offering all the things that SLers complain they don't have -- stand-alone worlds that can be white labelled by obtaining a license to the software and which can be different sizes and costs for different needs, or servers that are either hosted yourself or with the company, or within the contiguous world. There were 703 worlds open when I was shown the demo -- the representative said they have about half a million regular users now (no company but Linden Lab ever gives out statistics). Active Worlds has solved their welcome area griefing problems with a resident-based Gate-Keepers system, where there are *gasp* sign boards, and it there are many scenes of great beauty such as a Van Gogh world come to life, despite what always feels like a more primitive system. I found that in fact, unlike the IBM world based on AW I went to last year, there is a system that shows the creator, by his "citizen number". Citizenship is something you buy for $6.95 a month (good price) and that gives you more privileges. Also a nice concept.

Another world nice little zippy browser world new on the scene is the French Yoowalk -- in general, the ebbing of the American companies gave the non-North Americans a chance to shine this year. Yoowalk is a 2-D world where you, well, do a lot of walking around looking at people's stands -- although you can teleport too -- and these involve webpages coming to life like Le Monde or Le Figaro so that you can sit in a room you've made with your friends and discuss the news you've thrown up on the wall, along with pictures you can upload. You can make your own properties there and they envision a rental of the higher-traffic areas on corners or with more visibility near welcome areas and such. While I was hoping it would be a kind of less-creepy Weblins where you would visit the web as an overlay over a page, it appears to be sucking the pages into the world instead as presences/properties in that world. I realized finally what is creepy about Weblins -- it has no context. Avatars without context, without worlds, are just annoying and if they don't talk or grief you anonymously, as they tend to do when not grounded in a world, they are even more annoying. Yoowalk allows anyone to log on without registration, but then, like the grey avatars logging on from public terminals in Snowcrash, they render as white ghosts who cannot talk, though they can see your chat and content. Another interesting solution to the problem of anonymity!

There was more than one metaversal dev with a nametag sporting their own name as a website or vague consulting groups and "doing some work for some companies" by which I think they meant "here looking for my next gig". And it was the place to be doing that because there is still serious money around. This is the sort of place where you can stand in the Kaneva booth and an investor just walks up to the Kaneva guy, introduces himself as an investor, gets instant attention, and makes a plan for lunch in Atlanta. And BTW, Kaneva still talks about "the 3D web". It didn't go anywhere, it just perhaps receded a bit further into the future, which is unevenly distributed as we know.

But the old gang are missing -- Linden Lab is completely absent, probably the first such event that they've been completely out of, with no Second Life booth or speakers -- and no Corey Bridges from Multiverse, and a number of other former attendee who were big names on the markee. In part I think it's timing -- due to SXSW being more hot than ever this year, just 2 days from now, as it seems to be social media's turn to be in the limelight (Twitter is a virtual world, but nobody has realized this yet and @ev hasn't given us the option to put bling on our little Tweeting avatars).

And it's also because with the high price of travel and the exposition booth itself, not every company can justify the cost. Some have complained that they couldn't pony up the very high fee for a booth given the lack of leads that came out of it. An inherent problem with VW expos is that they never can lay on enough bandwidth -- many of the laptops on the demo tables kept finding the Jacob Javitts conference center wireless was "down". Expo spaces just cannot yet cope with virtual world demands. And there is yet another inherent problem in expos where not only the talks and seminars compete with the expo viewing time, but where now, the industry is more segmented, i.e. next month, Engage! will be running a separate event for trainers and educators in Washington, DC, where I imagine the Gov 2.0 camp will show up.

If we listen to Dr. James Bowers of Whyville, however, we'll understand that education and marketing are now merging -- all marketing is education and all education is marketing -- whether we like this or not, and the task is now not trying to prevent it, but to try to get marketers to accept our ethics, i.e. the right-thinking ethics of thoughtful developers of virtual worlds who see them as about helping children to learn about the world and develop critical judgement, not just get sold to.

Bowers had a fascinating presentation where he illustrated the inefficacy of chasing after "eyeballs" that go nowhere, and the importance of trying to engage with "eyeballs that lead to brains". He showed some figures for making songs, and for downloading Scion models in his world of Whyville -- 11,000 were downloaded in one campaign. And when anecdotally tracked to some show floors, 12-year-olds accompanying mom and dad to go car shopping were showing themselves to be more educated about what's inside a Scion than the car dealers.

That's because in Whyville, they don't just look at an ad for a Scion and press on it to go to a website, and don't just buy a Scion that somebody else textured and plopped into a vendor, they take it apart, see what's inside, go to sites inworld where they can learn about how cars work, and such. And that *engages* them.

Unlike most people who lament the state of the American kid, Bowers says we have the most educated 12 year olds now in human history because of the amount of information they have absorbed. Information makes you smarter, he says, and he should know, as he is a Ph.D. in neuroscience (this seemed to be the year of the Ph.Ds to get heard). I do wonder, of course, about kinetic life experience and little things like "learning to drive that car without wrecking it" which you can only master by doing. Kids spend time online that they used to spend outside making boxcars and running derbies. But what's always interesting about Bowers is that he doesn't fret and wring his hands about the realities of what is happening in our changing world, he explains *that* they are happening unquestionably, and you can either harness the technology and the changes under your ethics, or get run over by them. He himself is happy to have companies partner with him to sell products -- but that's just it, he prefers not "engagement with a brand" but "engagement with a product" in a more indepth way that integrates with the world of learning.

So the moral of the story is, smaller worlds, but better? It's still not clear whether the Second Life tide that lifted all boats in 2007 will continue to lift SL's boat and many smaller ones even with the backwash of disappointment after hype and with the unquestionable cost-cutting in the recession.

Comments

[cube republic]

I've read about Blue Mars, it looks very funky, you will need a really high end graphics card to run it.

[Eric Rice]

Blue Mars is based on the Crytek Engine, or more popular, the game Crysis, which is a breathtaking world that needs like 1.21 jigawatts and a flux capacitor to run. It was so impossible to run. It has a full editor, and the Blue Mars guys are trying to make a world out of it, but I can't even count how many Virtual Worlds Expos I've seen it at. "Soon"... yeah right. My money is on the flash worlds.

Which ESC will dispute the Turkish one being the first, since they've done it, but it's a partner thing and not a retail thing. If it's not retail, it don't count.

For the tekkies, check out Papervision3D, which is the open source 3D engine for Flash, which basically means, anyone can do this now as long as Flash 10 is running. And we kinda sorta know that Flash will run on a few computers, I'm pretty sure.

Also, Flash worlds do have a way into the living room by way of Playstation and Nintendo because of their web browsers supporting Flash. Uniform experience, there.

Xbox, by Microsoft-- not so much. Maybe they should make a brows--- heeeyyy waitasecond.

[cube inada]

"Virtual worlds are growing up (yes, cube, we know they've been around forever since you made them out of popsickle sticks and bubblegum!)"

No they arent, same old flash 3d "swift 3d" stuff from 2001-3...
if anything its Benjamin Buttons life thats occuring around web3d and vr worlds.

Only some more silly name "startup" of the moment wanna be googles making user gen services to pay only the founding coders and vc bankers, thats all.

Were there any 3d toolmakers at the show? no. well thats why vr worlds/ web3d will be waiting again for another 5 years.

Autodesk can wait.

Most mentioned are 3 years old on the vr sherman circuit, let one of them LAUNCH, create a monetizable platform for an industry, and get real numbers of patrons and developers.

THEN they can all claim to be the smartest best educated, infofacted filled 12 year olds in the room/world.:)

revolving cube:)

[Ann Otoole]

Blue mars going for the corporate communist you must buy our crappy turd ball content equals dead out of the gate.

But these guys are smart. They will bilk millions of VC for years out of the deal before they disappear on new yachts for round the world sailing trips.

Was Sirikata represented? http://vimeo.com/3072577

Flash is crap for kids. I would be happy if I never heard any more about flash crap and these crappy sims clones like metaplace.

I'm worried about Linden Lab. They are shoving the economy aspect of Second Life to the parking lot. I suspect Second Life really might have a seriously short remaining shelf life if they think going to 2.5D worlds full of penniless children is the future of the 3D universe.

[cube inada]

Smart like bernie madoff.. hero for the 21st century !!! truly a memory looped society.

LL cant scale based on its original tech decisions of 2001, so the SL grid will become a non for profit edutool for paying foundations.

The "metaverse"-3d media web- will have to wait again. The real question will be tools. and if Adobe and Autodesk and maybe Microsoft are forced by LAW or happy to profit from tool sales and not bubble delusions of open source/ services plans to riches.

In 5 years, GOOGLE will be as Yahoo is today. Adwords found out to be an inaffective ROI, and world governemnt laws and investigations ending the "googleverse" myth.

At that time 3d media will arrive via several priced options of tools and server systems to wrap the networked experience for the masses.

The currently "engaged" metacrowd hasnt seemed to do much more than ben button the past ones.

truly a memory looped society. did i already say that?;)

c3

[Eric Rice]

Ann, Flash isn't crap for kids, not when it can render full 3D with occlusion and clipping and basically look like normal 3D stuff. Yeah, if you're talking Strongbad videos, heh, but honestly, Flash is a tech that powers apps, video, audio, games, graphics and pretty much anything.

And it has been proven to work on machines much less than what Blue Mars and SL/SL-derivs require.

@Cube, yes it's all been around before but more people give a shit now, and the game biz, that lovely lovely game biz, can gank freely from the concepts and the mainstreaming of stuff.

Mainstreaming.

Back in the day, it was illegal to mod stuff and wow, here's the whole freakin' editor. So the new generations are trained to do that, complete with the remix culture that many folks here love/hate.

Shit, I thought the PALACE was OMFG back in the day, as was Active Worlds and Online Traveler. But our game content was kinda ghetto so we really didn't have something to base it against.

All the open gridders can open grid all they want, but cut the excuses and make it work like the Xbox, (or heck, even iPhone 3D games), or get lost in the annals of memory lane.

[Ann Otoole]

Yea Eric. Like Sega didn't get lost with it's sliding background that made street fighter so awsome.

Sorry but if it isn't true 3D then it is kiddie crap.

You can either afford the horsepower to render in real time or you can't. If a person can't afford it then they are of zero interest to the commercial aspects of the future, and that is all that matters because ideology stops at the college campus property line, so poor people need to get over it and go play mario with the kids and be happy they were able to charge that or get it from rentacenter.

In a few more years this conversation won't matter because the next big thing will have arrived and nobody will remember any of this anyway. Assuming the planet survives the depression and still has civilian access internet that is. Isn't looking too good at the moment.

[Raph]

Ann, this webpage isn't in 3d. Does that make it kiddie crap? Most of the Internet isn't in 3d. The entire history of film. Music. Most pictorial art. Kiddie crap?

I am not saying this because of Metaplace. I am saying it because I am tired of the massive misconception that 3d is "better."

Virtual worlds live on the server. Rendering is arbitrary, and largely immaterial. What matters is the fidelity of the simulation.

The reason why Flash is spreading VWs so much is because it's *accessible*.

[Micha Sass]

Blue Mars sounds very interesting. The Crysis engine provides an absolutely gorgeous environment/physic, and the development sandbox tools are quite good. I prefer the LL model of trusting the user to make creative decision, so having licenced estate people and creators sounds very un-free, but it will look 10x as lovely than SL. My PC is quite old (32bit 1gb ram) and has 2yr old graphics card, but plays FarCry (crysis engine) very well. Looking forward to more VWorlds springing up. I like choice.

[cube inada]

I disagree raph,
Its because FLASH is a SOLD TOOL for a few hundred dollars without any TOS or drama from service ventured pressures on creatives that its being used for web games. Its cheap, theres a large-15 plus year old developer base (mac "creatives") and most of today's flash "worlds" are just minor upgrades to decades old flash and shockwave online entertainemnt offerings.

Eric/raph- The "game" industry hasnt made a 2d game in a decade;). Ok one or two--lol and they most likely actaully were 3d engines beneath. 3D as a tech and as a medium offers more options and pushes the "fuller" game industry and its vested interests. like Nvidia:) ATI, Logitech..etc etc.

3D IS a better medium for emotional engagment and entertainment usage.

Fidelity of simulation is less important than the illusion of immersion of experience for the emotional response.

Being shot at from behind in any 3d FPS is always going to be more emotionally surprising experience than seeing the enemy icon walk up behind you in a iso 2.5d game and shoot at you.

If 2D was "better" for interactive immersive entertainment experiences Im sure the xbox MSand the playstation SONY would love to have not had so many 3d chip problems and costs developing there hardware platforms.:)

the web will, like the consoles do now, soon float on a layer of realtime 3d ether..It will only take longer since the open source mythed web is victim to every newbie consortium of coders every 5 years:) Until a toolmaker like adobe or autodesk or MS, decide to go back to "old non web2.0" models of business that truly OPEN up new industries to create new content within, web3d media will continue to be the metapundits "metafantasy" from decade old scifi pulp stories.

I do remember asking marc cantor to combine director 2 and swivel( director3d) together in 1989 for a realtime 3d shockwave director... but macromedia/adobe has not gotten 3d or its marketing right for 20 years....:)

So we all wait and Prok yucks about silly putty.:) and Eric is back to suckling at Sony and MS;) oh well.;) save me a nipple Eric:)I cant wait till flash 15 either:)

Im sure Metaplace is a good activity system , well made layering of features on top of flash...but what the real cost of calling this a creative development system i ask?
some will find LEGO maker fame with it and some may make some hobby money or a tringo for you to share in, but like SL, it's not a tool sold too a creator type offer. The whole deal is just as tenuous and while you may have executed a better design process building a product than LL ever did, Metaplace is still not a tool maker but a service provider.
Im more concerned with this aspect of services vs tools that really is the true "accessibility" issue for creative content to be developed for commercial sale and its creator's ownership choices. Lets just say Ive first hand seen content NOT flourish outside of flash online due to almost all web3d-virtual worlds service type offereings made to creatives for the last 10 years.Thats another reason why Flash dominates today, web3d has over and over again been wrapped up in VC memed service based aspirations.:)

I assume Ann's "KIddie crap" thoughts just means cheaper and faster and less demanding to manage. and flash does make that happen in the post hype post meta world of the meta versal.:)cheap tools, cheap products- kids will love it:) cynism of the sellers i guess.

IF adobe/MM had built in accelerated rt3d into flash 10 years ago, the 2d/2.5d/ 3d marketing positions wouldnt exist from each vested game /activity maker launching a "virtual world" this year:)

on with the show:)
cube

[Ann Otoole]

You want really nice and fabulous 3D real time rendering? Check out Split Second from Disney next year. They solved the riddle of the lighting needed to make 3D really pop. No UGC of course but it is quite impressive given there is factors that can be changed in real time to cause different content to render depending on what is happening.

Yea bring that sort of rendering to Second Life and it's UGC 3D world brethren. It is a simple matter of horsepower on the clients. In 10 years split second will look like 16 bit Sega & Nintendo.

There is just no way to live long enough on this rock.

[cube inada]

well,
one cant live on SLs grid:)---if you made sex stuff -um 60%-70% of item sales? your economy is to be rocked again..good luck..lol and tos yourself in the butt..lol?

and one cant wait for startups to lead by personality alone..wello, wello...?

when no tools are sold to creatives, no content can be made for resale. no economy is created. just dead code , lost investments, and more sherman trade shows every 5 years.;)

rt3d will (like color replace bw tv- film) replace 2d as the wrapper for the commercial web. just as digital is now replaceing analog- same reasons;) but it keeps failing due to a dissconnect in biz models, audience and the reality of what the media can do and what its coders think it will do for "everyone" ;) SL religion changing the world--yeah;)? so 1969-96- Never trust a burning man:)

before this threads heads to 2d/3d better than and what is a "game" round robbins. ill suggest this article I wrote in 1996 originally.
it makes my 2d/3d points and hasnt been made irrelevent as a silly putty toy in over 13 years.:)

http://www.3dezine.com/3DeZine_01/features/interface.php

the history of the rt web 3d BUSINESS- or lack of it as ONE;) is whats made this a 15 year old disscusion.

those who make "entertainment" on closed consoles and in closed systems never had any issues with 3d being "better" for their products for the reasons listed in the article.

and i think the foundational paid for "edutainment" center called the SL grid is now only a few months away:) I mean really, why wasnt the seperate grids part of the intial business plan? oh you mean they woudnt have been able to claim a "world" of 1 million users..? oh you mean they wouldnt have to now kill millions of USD of investment made by "customers" over 3 years?..etc etc.

oh you mean MY money is an EXPERIMENT, your money is an INVESTMENT?..lol

all service oriented, TOS driven creative platforms are best as gamelike activities-toys aka ENTERTAINMENT, licensed activities. Value must be based on that by the viewser, even if dollars are spent and made.

some call it GAMING..in vegas:) some call it Gambling elswhere.
calling it a platform for an economy is a joke. a bad one.

once they cross over into the meme of worlds, governments, platforms for business , etc. they end up like LL is now-- and sadly they werent the first web3d company to play this irresponsable game on those trying to make a living or an industry using rtweb3d.

[Moo2u]

w00t Active Worlds 4 life <3