Cafe Bucky

[this is a sketch about how I see a couple of trends merging to the point where something very new is created]

We are going to hit a point of blurring.  It’ll be great …

I’ve paid attention to Virtual Reality (mostly in the form of SecondLife, but a little exposure to X3D as well) for a few years now, and am about to jump into Augmented Reality …

But I can look ahead and see what’s really going to happen in a few years.  We’re going to get a lot of mixed scenarios where it’s not so clear how to classify what happens on screen:

• Virtual Reality is about synthetic worlds, where content from the real world is brought in.   A couple of examples I have personally worked on would be: bringing photos and video into SecondLife  – sometimes static, sometimes live.  I also have personally worked on objects for Vivaty that bring audio, video, and images from Flickr into a Virtual Space.
• Augmented Reality is about the Real World (as in realtime video), with data from the internet and local storage dynamically overlaid.  The classic example is to take video with a smartphone, and dynamically overlay information for nearest subway stations. places to eat, and real estate listings.

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality can be seen as the flip side of each other.

You start with the synthetic, and bring in the real / web.  Or … you start with the real, and you bring in the web / synthetic.

For the time being, the worlds are largely going to stay that way.  It takes a lot of processing power and a lot of code that doesnt readily exist at the moment to put the two modes together.

But I can see it — think the present boundaries are going to just stay put? :)

Blended Reality will give the ability to flow seamlessly between real video with synthetic overlays, to the scenario of completely immersive environments, back to straight live video.

Scenario: I walk to Central Park and pull out a decent sized tablet (jam 4 iphones together — That’s a good screen size to envision).  I see live video, and overlays of points of interest.  I may pick a point of interest (let’s say it’s winter, so we pick the ice rink).  I get a feed in-scene of the latest photos / writeups of the ice rink, and I can segue into a virtual world recreation of it.  I meet with friends who may be elsewhere, but who are enjoying the get-together in the virtual sense.  From their point of view, perhaps they see live video of what’s happening at the ice rink.  Maybe their friends in real life have a clickable visual tag floating on them from the viewer point of view (if the RL friends choose to make their location info available to some of their contacts)  Perhaps some of the video comes from my tablet! The gist of this is, mixing modes based on location…

I’m just doing the flat-screen writeup of this for the time being.  It’s enough of a start to envision stepping into and out of virtual and augmented spaces, whether on the go with some tablet, or behind a desk.  Think not so much of overlapping hard window definitions, but of smooth transitions from between flat / augmented / virtual areas of the screen.

As I said, this is just a sketch — thoughts that have occurred to me in the last day.  The basic idea is that I dont see the hard boundaries of Virtual and Augmented Realities staying put.  They are going to blur and meet in the middle ;)

I recently marked 3 years in SecondLife, and have also been spending time using OpenSim.  I think OpenSim is the virtual world equivalent of Apache, and I think it’s going to catch on in a big way …

Backing up a bit …

So, OpenSim could be seen as an Open Source implementation of SecondLife.  But It’s more than that.  It is a platform for creating your own virtual worlds.  It’s a 3D environment where the users create content, can meet each other, and interact in real time from anywhere in the world.

Oh oh .. blank stares …  Some from tech people in the audience who think they are all done learning ;)

I recently had three encounters with a couple of friends and a recruiter, and each had the same sort of skeptical look or response to the idea of SecondLife and Virtual Worlds.  Pretty much 3 in 24 hours …

If SecondLife is off the radar for many in the tech world, OpenSim is farther still.

So let’s meander along.  I’ll explain.  I’m good at this.  I’ve been on the web since 1993, and in Virtual Worlds (VW) for three years.  Relax, this will be fun. Get your popcorn.  Keep your frikken butter off my sofa! Sheesh… some people …

In 1993 and 1994, the web was still way off the radar screen for most people.  I was at Autodesk, and I can say most managers there Simply Did Not Get The Web.  I went on to AOL to work on AOL.Com.  I made and lost a fortune, but that is not today’s topic.

So I am used to the blank stare thing.  Y’all will get the Virtual World thing… eventually.

Enter SecondLife and OpenSim.  SecondLife is a great VW platform.  It’s controlled by one company, and the server side of it is proprietary.  A few of the strong points of SecondLife are:

• immersive 3D environment
• user created content
• an economy
• great place to have meetings and trainings
• it is what you make of it
• strong creative and educational community

The client side of SecondLife is a viewer you run on your computer that gets you into the immersive 3D environment …

… and it so happens that the viewer (and its derivatives) work fine with OpenSim servers.

.. Where can an OpenSim server run?  On your Windows, Mac, or Linux machine.  Yes, you can have a self-contained virtual world on your laptop.  This is fine for some.  They’ll run a server, tell their friends how to connect, and that’s that.  Just like a private web site but in 3D.

Where it gets really interesting is to survey the publicly available grids out there (collections of one or more OpenSim instances), and to realize that companies and organizations can have their own private ones.

1994.  Apache.  Web.
2009.  OpenSim. Virtual World.

I’ve thrashed through some of the basics.  You can go to SecondLife.com and Opensimulator.org sites to get more background.

OpenSim is becoming to Virtual Worlds what Apache has been to the web.  It’s Open Source, there are brilliant people from all over the world contributing to it (echoing the development model of Linux, Apache, PHP, Perl, and some other high profile successes).

And we are at 1994 all over again.  OpenSim is at version 0.6.4, which means it is 64% of the way towards implementing the functionality found in the SecondLife server.  It looks as if it could reach 100% parity by the end of 2009.  There are already many organizations getting real results from their initial explorations (such as IBM), conducting meetings and trainings, or using a virtual space as a museum (ReactionGrid.com is recreating the 1939 Worlds Fair).

Do you think I mention meetings and trainings too easily?  Would I really do that?  Of course not.  Amada Linden did a good writeup entitled “Working in the Virtual World“.  Amanda says:

“I believe that the only good alternative to virtual meetings is a face-to-face meeting. It would be a hard to argue the teleconference calls or WebEx can create as immersive an experience”

If you want to drill deeper, see Caleb Booker’s post: Why Webcams Fail

I had known about OpenSim last year, but dismissed it as too early.  The wake up call for me was an article “OpenSimulator: The Choice for 2010” by Gwyneth Llewelyn.  She analyzed the state of OpenSim very well, but more importantly, she has a great handle on what it is going to take to succeed as a VW platform.  It got me thinking, and together with my partner Kim, we started checking it out.

Without going into 20 reasons why we personally love it, I will just paint with some broad strokes:

• SecondLife provides a great reference example
• the OpenSim developers are very capable, and there are organizations such as IBM committing real resources to the effort
• the developers of OpenSim do not feel constrained by the Linden Lab efforts
• there have already been very real advances in the OpenSim platform that cant be found in SecondLife, such as scripting at the region level, integration with skype, dynamic text on prims, arbitrary images on prims from URLs, and HyperGrid (teleport from one grid to another)

In a nutshell, OpenSim is evolving into the sort of effort we have previously seen with Linux and Apache.  A very real community is forming, and there’s even some tutorial material out there …

It’s 1994 all over again, and it makes me smile.