This post is by guest blogger William.
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Since the earliest days of online collaboration, we have seen many incarnations of systems we think are a new concept. With Lucasfilms’ Habitat on the Commodore to Blaxxun Interactive, the evolution of the social online environment has progressed quite steadily from earlier days into what we see again today – namely Second Life, There, and Activeworlds.
Recently it was noted that, yes, even Sony will be throwing their hat into this strange “new” world as they gear up to release the Home environment for their PS3 console. But with the ever increasing popularity of this media and all of the new features, what does Activeworlds, the once leader of virtual environments, think?
Or are they thinking at all?
As I read about Sony’s Home environment, and watched the subsequent video promoting this new environment, my unorthodox mind immediately made the connection where seemingly nobody else has, in that I saw this as not something to run on a PS3, but saw just the software aspects and its relation to other incarnations on PC (Second Life, There, and Activeworlds). As this came to mind, it immediately dawned on me “What better way to put this into perspective, than to simply ask a company that was part of the forefront of this type of software since the beginnings?”
So I wrote seven questions that I thought were relevant to the situation and decided to try and interview just such a company using them. What follows is my interview with Martin from the company Activeworlds, Inc who many people would know was one of the major players in this media from 1995 onward to about 2001 when they seemingly dropped off the map. Rest assured this company is indeed still in operation, if not as popular as in its heyday.
How would the once leader of this media form propose to catch up to these newcomers and would they be willing to meet the challenge as we see this new form of interaction blossoming all around? Let’s take a look…
GameCouch: I understand that in 1995 – 2001 Activeworlds was in the forefront of this technology and concept. While it is understood that Home is running on the specialized technology of the PS3, the features contained for it are still very advanced over current implementations for the PC market. Are there any plans to mimic or surpass that type of quality and make a bid for the market again with AWI?
Martin: Activeworlds is always improving, and while it may take awhile to get the graphics capabilities of the PS3, it goes without saying that we will eventually get there. It’s unlikely that we’ll beat PS3 to the punch, even with their release date scheduled for fall of this year.
The PS3 is essentially a giant graphics chip wrapped around a blu-ray DVD player and somewhere inside there’s a CPU handling input. It’s probably equivalent to 4 nVidia 8800 GTXs running in parallel, it’s an amazing piece of hardware. It also costs half the price of that many video cards, and each time it’s sold SONY loses money. Eventually the prices of those cards will come down, but the MSRP of the PS3 will remain similar to what it is now due to its customized hardware. What I’m getting at is that SONY has an enormous bank, which it is using to do battle with Nintendo and Microsoft. There are other huge businesses out there with just as much available bank and in some cases more, and we’re talking with them.
That being said, it’s also true that while AWI has a long history, with world builds dating back to 1995, and has experience in creating stable, secure, and functional building environments using this same engine. Leaping to something customized isn’t exactly easy. I don’t know what the plans for such things as physics, radiosity lighting, soft shadows, and z-buffering look like. Activeworlds is focused on writing the best engine for other companies and communities to purchase and modify on their own for the least amount of money.
William’s take: I wasn’t referring to the hardware PS3 Home was running on, or the history of Sony or how much they are or aren’t making from each sale. I was referring to the features contained in the software and if there are any types of plans in AWI to focus on utilizing the latest hardware for PCs in order to offer something close to what Home or similar types of competition may offer for the PC market – one such feature is outlined in the next question.
GC: The Avatar customization process in Second Life, There and PS3 Home are much different than what is offered in the AW system, in that the entire customization process is completely dynamic. Are there any plans to mimic this type of control in customization for the citizens of AW in future implementations?
Martin: Second Life has brought avatar generation to the forefront of the debate. It’s time Activeworlds shifted the focus back to building. Meaning, Second Life avatars look good, but they only represent the fickle attitudes of users who want to look ‘good’. It’s VR, and looks are basically irrelevant. My Second Life character isn’t even capable of having the size of my spare tire, it’s a false image. Of course, that is a given when looking at the furries in SL or the robots in AWI.
AWI is halfway there with clothes customization, it’s not yet there with manipulating vertices and stretching or shrinking faces. However, we’re getting there. Our current thrust is rendering avatars in a .x format. It’s an offspring of DirectX, and most of the current 3D programs can export bone-oriented animations (or what we call sequences) to .x format. This includes, Maya, 3DStudio, and Blender. Blender is free. Activeworlds currently has two Universes with customizable clothing and assets. This means that you can both change your pants, and give your avatar a sword, or a shield, or a party hat or all three.
William’s take: I believe the users themselves brought avatar customization to the forefront, and not the companies that offered it to them. The vertex stretching and shrinking surfaces are a common thing in newer systems and while not a single user has complained that they have too much customization options available (it’s actually incredibly popular), they have however asked about the lack thereof with AW based technology. Simply put, users expect to have that amount of control over how they look in a virtual world – and not have the same handful of avatars to choose from. This is very important to the demographic that uses the systems, as a large part of this customization is free to the end user. So I will have to take your answer as a flat “We are ignoring this completely while changing the subject to something we already know we can do” as noted with this statement alone:
It’s time Activeworlds shifted the focus back to building. Meaning, Second Life avatars look good, but they only represent the fickle attitudes of users who want to look ‘good’. It’s VR, and looks are basically irrelevant.
Have you guys even taken a look at the demographic at all concerning this? It’s overwhelming that this statement is absolutely incorrect on all counts.
GC: One of the things that seems to play a large part in these new systems is the concept of Dynamic Marketing, meaning not sticking to simple billboard or obvious advertising. This would include clothing labels, product placement, brand name products for use in world (Panasonic Televisions, etc). Do you believe this is concept has a future to offset the upfront costs to the user and if so, would AWI propose to include such things in their own system?
Martin: I can’t talk about this.
GC: In the newer systems being offered, whether it be for PC or a specialized system, there is a definite inclusion for a higher level of physics in the environment. Does the inclusion of higher levels of physics play a part in the near future of AW? – Fluid Dynamics, Cloth Simulation, Vehicle Dynamics, Avatar Movement, etc.
Martin: Physics are nice, but there’s a price. For example, if you dive into the SecondLife architecture documentation, you’ll quickly realize why SL requires such an enormous amount of server power. Each and every frame is calculated by the servers, combining the avatar positioning and movements with the objects in frame for anyone viewable, which is then combined and calculated server-side, and then a frame is calculated for everyone in view, that frame is sent back to the clients which then draw it. It’s an incredibly inefficient approach, but they have physics. The entire AW Universe runs on 3 servers, one uni, one world, and one hosting the downloadable 3D model/texture/avatar/sound data. Second Life has to buy a new box for every 3 new citizens. This is why a private “Island” costs $1600 to start with their system. It’s also why a Second Life Universe system costs $2,500,000 to begin – and why nobody is buying one. If a business or educational entity like Harvard were to do MUVEES in the Second Life environment.. First, they can’t because schools don’t have the bandwidth to handle SL, lots of schools come to us asking if we require a T1 per classroom, because that’s what SL has spec’d out for them. All that information required for physics needs a huge amount of bandwidth, as every single frame drawn requires the avatar’s positioning, actions, and then a frame-download for each client. Second, after than 2.5 million dollar investment, a company or institution will have to buy an enormous amount of servers to handle their user load. If someone like MGM Studios was to make a site for some upcoming sci-fi movie, that site would eventually cost 5 million dollars. The vast majority of that expense is physics. It’s easy to point at look at physics SDK kits and say “Hey, why not this” but in doing so, one would not be considering the eventual ramifications of implementing it. With 50 viewers, the efficiency of such engines quickly breaks down. A box falls down some stairs, and with some degree of accuracy for the person who kicked it. 50 people are watching this. Great, but what happens if one of those people watching dives under that box? The box has an affected path, which must be updated for all 50 viewers, and this happens every single frame. Online is not Half-Life2, it’s a much different beast, and you’ll notice that games such as Half-Life2 have limits on the amount of players per game – typically dependent on server power and bandwidth.
William’s take: I fail to understand how any of that answer actually had anything to do with the question. In one sentence you describe how inefficient the Second Life server structure is and in the next you attribute all of the things you just outlined as why it is inefficient to being the fault of Physics implementation.
GC: If AWI could have any features from the PS3 Home environment for a PC version, what would they be?
Martin: Being free? We have everything else other than the lighting. I suppose the object preview window is nice, but that wouldn’t take our programmers more than a week to implement. I’ll bring it up.
William’s take: Are you serious? Saying that Activeworlds has everything that the PS3 Home does except lighting is a wholly incorrect statement, one which I am sure the readers of the article will point out. *sigh*
GC: In systems like Second Life, There and even the PS3 Home environment, the ability to chat via VoIP seems included – though the inclusion is transparent to the user as a built in ability with some iconic indication over the avatar to denote that they are speaking, and the voice chat is not including the users of the entire world as one chat space (people in range can hear you, and you have the option to exclude persons and moderate). While currently AW includes VoIP, the way it does so is not transparent to the user – will this be something to be worked on in coming releases of the AW system?
Martin: VoIP is something we’ve done, and until more users are willing to put on headsets, after buying them of course, I think where were are now is where we’ll be until a market demands it. How many people own Bluetooth headsets – today? I don’t. I don’t know anyone who does. Do you? Does the SONY system require the purchase of a headset? If so, how is that cost not offloaded to the customer? If AWI were to offer a Bluetooth headset and receiver for 29.95 would you buy one?
That’s the difference between console players and AWI’s user base. It’s assumed that the Bluetooth headset offered by SONY works with all the games it’s compatible with, and on the flip side all the systems the AWI headset would work with is AWI. Unless you already have a device with jacks into your computer and handles Bluetooth voice traffic which the AWI browser listens for and broadcasts to the rest of the users. If you can think of a reason why AWI should eat this cost, I’m all ears.
William’s take: I didn’t ask about Bluetooth headsets. The question was about whether the VoIP system would be more transparent within the environment with possibly an icon over the speaker person’s head indicating he/she is speaking via VoIP. This is transparent, while the current approach is more like running Skype side by side with the AW browser. It doesn’t feel like it is included, merely tacked onto the current browser as a last minute thing. Secondly – I never asked about specialized hardware just for AW use. A standard microphone headset works just fine now, so nothing more would be needed to use the VoIP if it were made more transparent (icon over the head indicating the user is talking, etc), or if there were better options included for the user to moderate the VoIP and whom he/she wishes to hear.
GC: Can AWI authorize some screen shots of the future of the technology for this article? Such would raise some definite eyebrows and again possibly get some more coverage for the company. Screen shots of the common stuff in AW wouldn’t really count as we are looking for the future of this market, so see if Rick and JP will allow some more media to be “leaked” for this just as Sony has “leaked” screen shots and a video for Home.
Martin: This is a horrifically crappy rendition of our new avatar engine – it’s not even real because the girl is green-screened and I took that out with Adobe After Effects and swapped in a different world background, but the sequence is accurate, and the engine is rapidly coming together. Not only that, it’s video which is three weeks old, and our programmers work at lightning speed.
The thing is, the engine has to support both this new system and the old system. But for amusement let’s say AWI decided one day to switch to an entirely new engine, which made every single thing obsolete and unusable and inaccessible, but waved a few pictures in front of our world owners you think they’d be happy about that? Oh, hey, guys and gals, 4.2 is coming September 1, and you have to rebuild everything. No, there’s no import, you have to rebuild everything. For real. No, serious. Way.
William’s take: Switching to an entirely new engine does not make everything obsolete. The inability to include the code telling the engine by which the legacy formats would work are what would do that.
So there we have it. A handful of questions for a company who proclaims itself the 3D Internet. What I have managed to gather from this interview both horrifies me and confuses me to no end, with assertions that looks are irrelevant in virtual reality, physics are completely out of range, using a new 3D engine would force everyone to start from scratch with the building… and on and on.
But there is a small glimmer of hope in this industry. There will be some advancements coming from the camp of Activeworlds (most notably in the looks department, which after this interview is shocking). But that also leaves me to wonder about players such as Second Life and There, although I must admit that if an interview with Activeworlds turned out like this, (and in all seriousness this was literally cut and paste from emails back and forth – notice the many parts where I nearly pleaded for them to not answer so badly), then what should I expect should I land an interview with Linden Labs or whomever currently owns There.com?
It’s very clear that while the Virtual Environment is making a comeback, it is still far from its potential. Second Life is opening more branches across the country to facilitate what it deems is a decentralized network (which it really isn’t) and There.com looks to be trying to cash in with its technology for the short term (Virtual Laguna Beach). And while they both seem to enjoy throwing vast amounts of money into media and public relations, this approach can not cover the fact they neither could possibly be the real Metaverse they both love to tell the real world they are or will eventually be (if only investors and businesses infuse just a few million more dollars into their environment).
As far as I am concerned, the PS3 Home network in all of its graphical power is nothing more than a last minute hop onto the bandwagon by Sony in order to catch a wave of social environments and appeal to what they think is “cool” and “innovative” to its demographic, much like the SixAxis controller throw in after the Wiimote announcement from Nintendo. Whether or not it is successful isn’t the issue here; rather I believe we should all look at the big picture here and wonder what exactly the real Metaverse will look like after all of the high profile players in this market burn out as a result of not seeing the overall picture.
And that, I would imagine, is the final realization. That something so great as a true Metaverse instead gets torn to shreds by venture capitalists and boards of directors who know absolutely nothing about this media paradigm shift, other than how to turn a quick buck at the expense of something great.
There will be a Metaverse, and I imagine it will be absolutely grand in its implementation. Right now all I see are companies planning for the short term, and that is how a truly great idea gets destroyed.