Re: [fonc] Re: SecondPlace, QwaqLife or TeleSim? Open ended, comments welcome
On 8/8/2011 6:55 PM, Casey Ransberger wrote: On Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 3:48 AM, Giulio Prisco giu...@gmail.com mailto:giu...@gmail.com wrote: SecondPlace, QwaqLife or TeleSim? Open ended, comments welcome. http://giulioprisco.blogspot.com/2011/08/secondplace-qwaqlife-or-telesim.html I almost missed this thread. I'm also hunting that grail. VR for consumers that isn't lame. CC'd FONC because I think this is actually relevant to that conversation. My feeling is, and I may be wrong, that the problems with Second Life are twofold: 1. There are technical problems with the implementation. It's very crashy and didn't scale well. My suspicion is that the biggest problem they have is getting the user generated texture maps out to all of the clients on the fly. This leads to usability issues, etc. It can take minutes to get to the point where one is actually participating after arriving in a sim, while all those textures and meshes load it just thrashes like crazy. Also there's the server-centric architecture, which is usually harder to scale than peer to peer technology. I have not yet determined what the weight of the OpenQwaq server is yet, though, because I don't have enough machines to build out a production-like environment currently. It seems a touch crawly running all of the services on my modest laptop under a single CentOS host in VMWare while the client is also running at the same time (heh) and this is not a real measure of server or client performance:) it's currently just a way to warm up my apartment. [sorry in advance, I mostly ended up running off in an unrelated direction, but maybe it could still be interesting]. IMO, probably better (than centralized servers) is to have independent world-servers which run alongside a traditional web-server (such as Apache or similar). one can jump to a server using its URL, pull down its local content via HTTP, and connect to a server which manages the shared VR world, ... a partial issue though becomes how much client-specific content to allow, for example, if clients use their own avatars (which are bounced along using the webserver to distribute them to anyone who sees them), and a persons' avatar is derived from copyrighted material, there is always a risk that some jerkface lawyers may try to sue the person running the server, or the author of the VR software, with copyright infringement (unless of course one uses the usual sets of legal disclaimers and terms of use agreements and similar). allowing user-created worlds on a shared server (sort of like a Wiki) poses similar problems. the temptation for people to be lazy and use copyrighted images/music/... in their worlds is fairly large, and nearly any new technology is a major bait for opportunistic lawsuit-crazy lawyers... 2. Their entire business model ended up being a cultural toxin. Free accounts mean spam and griefing/trolling/abuse. A profit motive for users seemed like a good idea at the outset, as it's about the most marketable universal out there, but it seems that DRM+UGC = red light district, real estate, fashion, and a handful of enterprise applications which would probably be served at least as well by Teleplace. I think one ultimately wants user generated content, but I'm not sure what the right way to do it is. One might read a book about Logo:) yep, and there is a question of what exact purposes these 3D worlds serve vs more traditional systems, such as good old web-pages. games is a major application area for 3D, but the more open-ended world that is non-game systems is a much bigger problems, and the relative merits of 3D are much less obvious. a partial issue at the time though is potentially the reasonably high costs of producing decent-quality 3D content (models, maps, ...) in contrast to most other content. the industry-standard tools are typically expensive, have a steep learning curve, and still leave content production a rather long and tedious process (it is, in contrast, much faster and easier to produce spiffy-looking 2D graphics artwork, or for that matter to edit documents in a WYSIWYG editor). also, the near-monopoly status that Autodesk holds in the DCC tools market is not ideal either (they tend to buy out most any competition which tends to gain any real semblance of market share). also, there is also the general problem of a lack of non-suck free DCC tools. yes, I have my own 3D DCC tools, but sadly, they are not exactly non-suck either... another problem at the present time is the general lack of freely-available 3D artwork, meaning much content production has to start from the ground-up, from basic cubes and cylinders (again, this may have something to do with the present sad state of DCC tools). Minecraft has been running with an honor system for awhile now, and people just don't seem to mess with each other as much there. They're implementing some anti-griefing
VR for the rest of us (was Re: [fonc] Re: SecondPlace, QwaqLife or TeleSim? Open ended, comments welcome)
Inline and abridged... and rather long anyhow. I *really* like some of the ideas that are getting tossed around. On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 2:05 AM, BGB cr88...@gmail.com wrote: On 8/8/2011 6:55 PM, Casey Ransberger wrote: I almost missed this thread. I'm also hunting that grail. VR for consumers that isn't lame. CC'd FONC because I think this is actually relevant to that conversation. My feeling is, and I may be wrong, that the problems with Second Life are twofold: [sorry in advance, I mostly ended up running off in an unrelated direction, but maybe it could still be interesting]. You're fine, I do it all the time:) IMO, probably better (than centralized servers) is to have independent world-servers which run alongside a traditional web-server (such as Apache or similar). This appears more or less to be the way OpenQwaq works. I'm pretty sure that I haven't fully comprehended everything the server does and how that relates to the more familiar (to me) client, though. I note that the models and such seem to live on the server, and then get sent (synced?) to the client. one can jump to a server using its URL, pull down its local content via HTTP, and connect to a server which manages the shared VR world, ... Ah, you're talking about running in a web browser? Yeah, that will probably happen, but the web browser strikes me as a rather poor choice of life support system for a 3D multimedia collaboration and learning environment at least as of today... OTOH I guess it solves the problem of not being able to deploy (e.g.) GPL'd code on platforms like iOS. I should say that I'm a huge fan of things like Clamato and Lively Kernel, but I'm not sure the WebGL thing is ready for prime time, and I'm not sure how something like e.g. Croquet will translate at this point in time. I also don't have a Croquet implemented in Javascript lying around anywhere, and it's not exactly a small amount of work to implement the basis. I don't even understand how all of the parts work or interact yet... a partial issue though becomes how much client-specific content to allow, for example, if clients use their own avatars (which are bounced along using the webserver to distribute them to anyone who sees them), and a persons' avatar is derived from copyrighted material, there is always a risk that some jerkface lawyers may try to sue the person running the server, or the author of the VR software, with copyright infringement (unless of course one uses the usual sets of legal disclaimers and terms of use agreements and similar). Heh, yes. Fortunately there are places one can go to purchase assets which can then be used under commercially compatible licenses... to be honest, though, the avatar I've been testing with is *cough* Tron. Found it on the web and couldn't really resist. Got to take him out of there before I can deploy anything, I think, but I Am Not A Lawyer, so I can't say that I actually know, and like most folks, I'm going to play it safe... what I do know is that this is slightly embarrassing :O Working on an original protagonist/avatar for my game but she's not quite done yet. It's all dialed in but the clothes aren't right yet. Having to learn to use this pile of expensive 3D animation software as I go... I really wish I could just draw everything using a pencil and then use a lightbox to transfer the keyframes to cell and paint, but I don't know how to make hand drawn animation work in 3D. This is actually why I was curious about the availability of the sources to SketchPad, because that constraints in 3D idea seems to underly the automated inbetweening that goes on nowadays and you could do stuff in 3D using a light pen with SketchPad, which seems better than what I have now in a lot of ways. allowing user-created worlds on a shared server (sort of like a Wiki) poses similar problems. the temptation for people to be lazy and use copyrighted images/music/... in their worlds is fairly large, and nearly any new technology is a major bait for opportunistic lawsuit-crazy lawyers... So it *seems* like the way most businesses deal with this is by taking UGC down without quarter whenever someone complains. I'll probably end up having to do something like this. It's still painful because one then needs to employ people to actually handle that every day. I don't know, maybe there's some way to use community policing to accomplish this. In my view, though, if it happens, it isn't the worst problem in the world to have. It means someone noticed that your product/service or what have you exists! And if it was fatal, I don't think YouTube would still be on the internet. In fact all of that bad press probably helped YouTube get traction. yep, and there is a question of what exact purposes these 3D worlds serve vs more traditional systems, such as good old web-pages. I think being able to point at things and see by the eyes and the angle of the head what people are looking at
[fonc] MODULARITY: aosd.2012 - Second CFP on the Modularity Visions Track
MODULARITY: aosd.2012 *** AOSD 2012 *** March 25-30, 2012 Hasso-Plattner-Institut Potsdam, Germany http://aosd.net/2012/ -- Modularity Visions Track Call for Papers -- Modularity properties are key determinants of quality in information systems, software, and system production processes. Modularity influences system diversity, dependability, performance, evolution, the structure and the dynamics of the organizations that produce systems, human understanding and management of systems, and ultimately system value. Yet the nature of and possibilities for modularity, limits to modularity, the mechanisms needed to achieve it in given forms, and its costs and benefits remain poorly understood. Significant advances in modularity thus are possible and promise to yield breakthroughs in our ability to conceive, design, develop, validate, integrate, deploy, operate and evolve modern information systems and their underlying software artifacts. The Modularity Visions track of AOSD 2012 (MV) seeks papers presenting compelling insights into modularity in information systems, including its nature, forms, mechanisms, consequences, limits, costs and benefits. Rather than ex post results, MV seeks promising ex ante proposals for future work. The scope of MV is broad: open to submissions from all areas of computer science, as well as from other fields. Reviewing Process -- Reviewing will be based on norms applied to peer-reviewed proposals to programs that demand breakthrough potential. Papers must be well written, present new perspectives on, or approaches to, important problems, formulate clear hypotheses justified by analysis or results from preliminary work, evaluate potential significance and risks, articulate how progress can be evaluated, and discuss related and required future work. MV will use a two-phase review process. Each paper will first be reviewed by at least two members of the program committee (PC). Any paper receiving at least one positive review will be reviewed by at least one more PC member. The PC will then recommend acceptance, rejection, or an invitation to revise and resubmit. Authors of revised papers should explain how they responded to earlier reviews. MV may include invited papers. Important Dates --- All deadlines are at 23:59:59 Apia, Samoa time. Paper submission: September 23, 2011 Notification: October 28, 2011 Invited revisions: November 25, 2011 Notification for revised submissions: December 16, 2011 Camera-ready copy to publisher: January 9, 2012 Instructions for Authors Work submitted to the AOSD Modularity Visions track must not be under review for publication in any other venue and must not already have been published. Submission will be carried out electronically via CyberChair (http://cyberchairpro.borbala.net/modvispapers/submit/). The AOSD 2012 Research Results and MV tracks use separate CyberChair URLs. Papers must be submitted as PDF files not to exceed 12 pages (including bibliography, appendices and figures) using the SIGPLAN Proceedings Format and a 10 point font. By default the SIGPLAN Proceedings Format uses a 9 point font. If you are formatting your paper using LaTeX, you will need to set the 10pt option in the \documentclass command. If you are formatting your paper using Word, you may use the provided Word template, which uses a 10pt font. Include page numbers in submissions. Setting the preprint option in the \documentclass command generates page numbers. Ensure that your submission is legible printed when in black and white. Different colors must map to distinct gray values and all writing must be readable. Submission deadlines, length limits, and formatting instructions are firm. Submissions that deviate materially will be rejected without review by the program chair. Submitted papers must adhere to SIGPLAN's republication policy. Publication --- Accepted papers will be published by the ACM in the AOSD 2012 Proceedings and in the ACM Digital Library. Authors of accepted papers are expected to revise papers in light of reviewers' comments, agree to provide camera-ready versions by camera-ready deadlines, and agree to sign the standard ACM copyright form. Program Chair - Kevin Sullivan , University of Virginia, USA Program Committee - Carliss Baldwin, Harvard Business School, USA Richard Gabriel, IBM Research, USA William Griswold, University of California San Diego, USA Fabio Kon, University of São Paulo, Brazil Kumiyo Nakakoji, Software Research Associates Inc., Japan Kevin Sullivan, University of Virginia, USA (Chair) Laurence Tratt, Middlesex University, UK ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: VR for the rest of us (was Re: [fonc] Re: SecondPlace, QwaqLife or TeleSim? Open ended, comments welcome)
On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 2:05 AM, BGB cr88...@gmail.com wrote: if clients use their own avatars (which are bounced along using the webserver to distribute them to anyone who sees them), and a persons' avatar is derived from copyrighted material, there is always a risk that some jerkface lawyers may try to sue the person running the server, or the author of the VR software, with copyright infringement (unless of course one uses the usual sets of legal disclaimers and terms of use agreements and similar). I can think of two more problems. First, there will undoubtedly be avatars shaped like giant billboards, dicks, and other objectionable material. Unlike signatures on bulletin boards, this will be a lot harder to police since avatars move around. Second, we probably want the ability to stylize avatars as they move between worlds. For example, some worlds may prefer a cell-shaded art style. When I was pursuing this back in 2003-4, I was looking into possibilities such as CSS for 3D - not just for avatars, but for the world itself, so that people could support proper world mashups. My ideas there were more along the lines of providing a sort of 'DNA' for the avatars and 3D worlds, describing them in a common ontology, with variations from a norm (male, female; height, body-shape; crooked-nose, snub nose; etc.) and sometimes tweaks or non-standard extensions per world. This would allow developers of the world to prevent 'literal' dicks from entering their world. It would also allow people to become non-humans (e.g. werewolf, vampire, or orc, ... or dick) when they enter certain worlds... i.e. to take on various roles in common games. games is a major application area for 3D, but the more open-ended world that is non-game systems is a much bigger problems, and the relative merits of 3D are much less obvious. Yeah, 3D tends to be rather sparse of informational content. Today, I'm interested in possibility of augmented reality... e.g. look through your Tablet's video camera, and see a mixed camera/3D rendering of the scene. A few pictures of a printer in context, along with meta-data about location and network address, and we might be able to drag and drop documents onto a 'visible' printer in a 3D space. There are a lot more privacy issues, of course, with augmented reality - i.e. keeping people out of our homes and businesses unless they belong there. ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: VR for the rest of us (was Re: [fonc] Re: SecondPlace, QwaqLife or TeleSim? Open ended, comments welcome)
On Mon, Aug 8, 2011 at 6:55 PM, Casey Ransberger casey.obrie...@gmail.comwrote: 2. Their entire business model ended up being a cultural toxin. Free accounts mean spam and griefing/trolling/abuse. A profit motive for users seemed like a good idea at the outset, as it's about the most marketable universal out there, but it seems that DRM+UGC = red light district, real estate, fashion, and a handful of enterprise applications which would probably be served at least as well by Teleplace. I think one ultimately wants user generated content, but I'm not sure what the right way to do it is. One might read a book about Logo:) I think any solution will need to accommodate porn, or it simply won't be accepted. The idea should be, instead, to keep it from infecting everything else and allow parents to protect their children. My own interest, when I was pursuing this in 2003-4, was scalable composition of federated worlds. Today, I'm somewhat interested in 3D as an abstract space for layout of information. For example, we can have a sort of XSLT or XQuery generating 3D content, and thus see the same 'world' with many different views. This could possibly solve the problems 3D has with information density. We'd get a 3D world where the only real content is 'information', and the layout of that information is up to the client. ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: VR for the rest of us (was Re: [fonc] Re: SecondPlace, QwaqLife or TeleSim? Open ended, comments welcome)
On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 8:47 AM, David Barbour dmbarb...@gmail.com wrote: I think any solution will need to accommodate porn, or it simply won't be accepted. The idea should be, instead, to keep it from infecting everything else and allow parents to protect their children. 3D design is extraordinarily expensive to develop properly - the adult-oriented free-for-all in Second Life failed because it didn't scale and there was no revenue model. However some 3D virtual worlds are extraordinarily successful. World of Warcraft, Minecraft and Roblox are some of my favourite examples. And also note the lack of porn (although WoW has a high level of titillation it also has been very successful in attracting women). My own interest, when I was pursuing this in 2003-4, was scalable composition of federated worlds. It would have been good if some of the ideas that SL and others were pursuing at the time took off. The original concept of VRML as a standard in the hypertext model still makes sense to me, but the gaming platforms seem to prefer the silo model. The Teatime model seems promising but I confess I still have a hard time getting my head around it. There are papers I need to read again, but I found myself disagreeing with some of the assumptions and when that happens I usually remain stuck with my preconceived notions. Despite its commercial nature Minecraft seems very open and easy to adapt. Interestingly this implementation does a lot more to show that Java is fast enough for real-time 3D environments than Croquet was able to with Squeak. Croquet always felt awkward to me, partly it was performance, but it was also because some of the primitives were too primitive. While Croquet allows the arbitrary import of geometric meshes, many other important complex graphical and physical characteristics are completely unsupported. Minecraft limits its primitives to simple blocks. While counter-intuitive, they provide a useful abstraction that simplifies the introduction of physics, lighting models and particle effects. Today, I'm somewhat interested in 3D as an abstract space for layout of information. For example, we can have a sort of XSLT or XQuery generating 3D content, and thus see the same 'world' with many different views. This could possibly solve the problems 3D has with information density. We'd get a 3D world where the only real content is 'information', and the layout of that information is up to the client. Field is an exciting tool for visualization: http://openendedgroup.com/field- it's very Smalltalk-like with an extremely capable graphics library. Regards, Steve ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: VR for the rest of us (was Re: [fonc] Re: SecondPlace, QwaqLife or TeleSim? Open ended, comments welcome)
Cut it down to what I'm responding too, and inline. On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 11:09 AM, Steve Wart st...@wart.ca wrote: Despite its commercial nature Minecraft seems very open and easy to adapt. Interestingly this implementation does a lot more to show that Java is fast enough for real-time 3D environments than Croquet was able to with Squeak. Croquet always felt awkward to me, partly it was performance, but it was also because some of the primitives were too primitive. Have you checked out OpenQwaq? Runs on Cog. I have a feeling if I ran the server on a different computer, rather than in VMWare on the same modest hardware, performance would be a non-issue unless I allowed extremely complex meshes or high-rez textures in. It's even totally acceptable and usable even the way I'm currently running it, which is in a relatively resource starved way. It chunks just a wee bit from time to time. I've been really impressed with the performance so far. It would not, in any previous year, have occurred to me to run an application that rendered 3D graphics alongside an application that virtualized a big old enterprise operating system at the same time on the same machine, but here I am doing it:) Regards, Steve ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc -- Casey Ransberger ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: VR for the rest of us (was Re: [fonc] Re: SecondPlace, QwaqLife or TeleSim? Open ended, comments welcome)
On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 11:09 AM, Steve Wart st...@wart.ca wrote: 3D design is extraordinarily expensive to develop properly That is not an essential property of 3D design. We could have an ontology / 'markup language' just for building and animating avatars, similar to dressing up a doll, if we want to make one. And a modular ontology for buildings (including concepts such as crenelations and gargoyles). And another for environments. Etc. Given a suitably modular meta-language, we can even have dedicated languages for describing zombies. I see the impoverished languages of today as an opportunity. For accessibility reasons - e.g. desktop vs. iPhone access to a world - it is preferable that we develop in these high-level ontologies anyway. My own vague interest has steered me towards modular, reusable, multi-player interactive fiction - with a lot of inspiration from the Inform 7 language [1]. I have a bunch of half-formed designs from my earlier work on the subject, and my efforts in language design. And also note the lack of porn (although WoW has a high level of titillation it also has been very successful in attracting women). Lol. Pornography is a human trait with an ancient and ignoble history, even if male dominated. I once watched a rather funny (but somewhat perverted) video called 'Ballad of the Sex Junkie' developed in WoW. It's NSFW, but is tame enough for Youtube. Anyhow, I'm speaking at the federated world level. It would be silly to deny that those red-lights districts will exist. This rule is the same for all computer security: you cannot protect against a threat by ignoring it! I prefer soft security, wherever possible, and this means recognizing and accommodating threats in order to gain some control of them. By recognizing red lights districts, and the inevitable fallout (such as naked avatars waltzing through worlds), we can isolate them (e.g. by ensuring that the avatar has suitable clothing upon entering a 'no shirt no shoes no service' world). The original concept of VRML as a standard in the hypertext model still makes sense to me, but the gaming platforms seem to prefer the silo model. VRML is an awfully low-level ontology for building 3D models! I would suggest that this is part of *why* we favor the silo model. Think about what it would take to build designs that let us achieve something similar to CSS for 3D and avatar animation. Separation of artistic rendition (presentation) from content is important. Anything short of that is ultimately unsuitable for world mashups! Working with cones and boxes is not the right level for this. I think we really do need an ontology for architecture, avatars, environments, etc. as a common foundation in the world. The Teatime model seems promising Teatime protocol is unscalable and insecure. It is suitable for LANs where you trust the participants, but would die a slow, choking death if faced with 'flash crowds', 'script kiddies', and their like. No variation on Teatime will ever work at scale. Transactions scale poorly and have plenty of flaws [2] But there are some lessons you can take away from Teatime. Use of temporal semantics is a suitable basis for consistency even without transactions - we can tame this with a more commutative/idempotent model and *eventual consistency*. Explicit delay is an effective approach to achieve near wall-clock determinism in the face of distribution latencies (e.g. a signal propagates to multiple clients, but triggers at some specific time in the future). I have developed a very simple and effective programming model - Reactive Demand Programming - for solving these and related concerns [3]. One might think of RDP as a fusion of eventless FRP and OOP - i.e. OOP where messages and responses are replaced by continuous control signals, and state is primarily replaced by continuous integrals. RDP is, by no small margin, the most promising model for developing modular, federated, distributed command and control systems, augmented reality systems, and 3D worlds. Croquet always felt awkward to me, partly it was performance, but it was also because some of the primitives were too primitive. I agree that this is a problem. VRML is a problem for the same reason - i.e. it is not clear what the physics should be, nor how we should recharacterize for a different artistic style, and so on. Regards, Dave [1] http://inform7.com/ [2] http://awelonblue.wordpress.com/2011/07/05/transaction-tribulation/ [3] http://awelonblue.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/comparing-frp-to-rdp/ ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: VR for the rest of us (was Re: [fonc] Re: SecondPlace, QwaqLife or TeleSim? Open ended, comments welcome)
On 8/9/2011 1:44 PM, David Barbour wrote:
On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 11:09 AM, Steve Wart st...@wart.ca
mailto:st...@wart.ca wrote:
3D design is extraordinarily expensive to develop properly
That is not an essential property of 3D design. We could have an
ontology / 'markup language' just for building and animating avatars,
similar to dressing up a doll, if we want to make one. And a modular
ontology for buildings (including concepts such as crenelations and
gargoyles). And another for environments. Etc. Given a suitably
modular meta-language, we can even have dedicated languages for
describing zombies.
I see the impoverished languages of today as an opportunity. For
accessibility reasons - e.g. desktop vs. iPhone access to a world - it
is preferable that we develop in these high-level ontologies anyway.
My own vague interest has steered me towards modular, reusable,
multi-player interactive fiction - with a lot of inspiration from the
Inform 7 language [1]. I have a bunch of half-formed designs from my
earlier work on the subject, and my efforts in language design.
yes, although sadly existing technology and tools have done a terrible
job at this, and are still mostly at the level of:
create a cube;
stretch it to about the right size;
put a building exterior texture or similar on it;
...;
call it done.
or, one wants to build a building, and so resorts to endless geometric
fiddling (placing/sizing/texturing cubes to make walls/doors, import a
chair model and copy/paste it a crapload of times, ...).
yes, granted, a few programs have procedural modeling features, ...
And also note the lack of porn (although WoW has a high level of
titillation it also has been very successful in attracting women).
Lol. Pornography is a human trait with an ancient and ignoble history,
even if male dominated. I once watched a rather funny (but somewhat
perverted) video called 'Ballad of the Sex Junkie' developed in WoW.
It's NSFW, but is tame enough for Youtube.
Anyhow, I'm speaking at the federated world level. It would be silly
to deny that those red-lights districts will exist. This rule is the
same for all computer security: you cannot protect against a threat by
ignoring it! I prefer soft security, wherever possible, and this means
recognizing and accommodating threats in order to gain some control of
them. By recognizing red lights districts, and the inevitable fallout
(such as naked avatars waltzing through worlds), we can isolate them
(e.g. by ensuring that the avatar has suitable clothing upon entering
a 'no shirt no shoes no service' world).
possibly, if done more like the existing web, then a person will have
different user accounts and different avatars for different servers.
transferring from one location to another, or going to favorite places,
may then inevitably involve some number login screens...
The original concept of VRML as a standard in the hypertext model
still makes sense to me, but the gaming platforms seem to prefer
the silo model.
VRML is an awfully low-level ontology for building 3D models! I would
suggest that this is part of /why/ we favor the silo model.
VRML also looked like a mishmash of things that would not normally go
together in game data files.
in many game engines, most of the game contents are spread across a
large number of different files, each format typically fairly
specialized, and integrated into a single combined world.
VRML seems to try to be more like HTML, and express the entire world
structure in a single file.
IMO, this is not a terribly great approach.
granted, I hold a similar complaint against Collada as well (although it
sees the world more from the POV of a traditional 3D modeling app).
Think about what it would take to build designs that let us achieve
something similar to CSS for 3D and avatar animation. Separation of
artistic rendition (presentation) from content is important. Anything
short of that is ultimately unsuitable for world mashups! Working with
cones and boxes is not the right level for this.
yep.
ideally, we should probably be working with higher-level entities
instead of lower-level geometry.
like, say, one goes about defining an entity type, allowing for certain
input parameters, ...
then, later, a piece of code may import the entity.
entity {
classname=someapp/my_entity_type
origin=...
...
}
Quake-series engines have generally done similar for most higher-level
entities (excluding basic map geometry).
to some extent (and with a different syntax) Valve is already doing
something vaguely similar with entities which may also import map
geometry (one can do things like, say, import premade world objects in
Hammer Editor, ...).
applying this at a larger scale may make some sense.
taken further, it could mean the elimination of brushes as
traditionally understood in the map sense, with brushes essentially
becoming
Re: VR for the rest of us (was Re: [fonc] Re: SecondPlace, QwaqLife or TeleSim? Open ended, comments welcome)
On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 3:40 PM, BGB cr88...@gmail.com wrote: ideally, we should probably be working with higher-level entities instead of lower-level geometry. I agree with rendering high-level concepts rather than low-level geometries. But I favor a more logical model - i.e. rendering a set of logical predicates. Either way, we have a set of records to render. But predicates can be computed dynamically, a result of composing queries and computing views. Predicates lack identity or state. This greatly affects how we manage the opposite direction: modeling user input. possibly, ultimately all levels should be expressed, but what should be fundamental, what should be expressed in each map, ... is potentially a subject of debate. I wouldn't want to build in any 'fundamental' features, except maybe strings and numbers. But we should expect a lot of de-facto standards - including forms, rooms, avatars, clothing, doors, buildings, landscapes, materials, some SVG equivalent, common image formats, video, et cetera - as a natural consequence of the development model. It would pay to make sure we have a lot of *good* standards from the very start, along with a flexible model (e.g. supporting declarative mixins might be nice). I am not familiar with the Teatime protocol. apparently Wikipedia doesn't really know about it either... Teatime was developed for Croquet. You can look it up on the VPRI site. But the short summary is: * Each computer has a redundant copy of the world. * New (or recovering) participant gets snapshot + set of recent messages. * User input is sent to every computer by distributed transaction. * Messages generated within the world run normally. * Logical discrete clock with millisecond precision; you can schedule incremental events for future. * Smooth interpolation of more cyclic animations without discrete events is achieved indirectly: renderer provides render-time. This works well for medium-sized worlds and medium numbers of participants. It scales further by connecting a lot of smaller worlds together (via 'portals'), which will have separate transaction queues. It is feasible to make it scale further yet using specialized protocols for handling 'crowds', e.g. if we were to model 10k participants viewing a stage, we could model most of the crowd as relatively static NPCs, and use some content-distribution techniques. But at this point we're already fighting the technology, and there are still security concerns, disruption tolerance concerns, and so on. Regards, Dave ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: VR for the rest of us (was Re: [fonc] Re: SecondPlace, QwaqLife or TeleSim? Open ended, comments welcome)
On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 4:17 PM, David Barbour dmbarb...@gmail.com wrote: The best way to have a conversation with someone is in person, I think it depends on the nature of the conversation. There are significant advantages to written conversations, such as: the ability to spend more time thinking about our responses, the ability to operate at different times, and having a written record you can search and reference. Well put. This is an excellent point, and I stand *quite* corrected. I wrote this while slightly irked that a message I sent via a popular textual communication medium was too long. I still prefer a mailing list for most of the stuff I like to talk about: case in point. -- Casey Ransberger ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
[fonc] Large places and lots of users (was Re: VR for the rest of us)
Aha. This explains why various wonderful people warned me that what I wanted to do would end up being expensive to implement. There's been some talk about federated worlds and this is I *think* part of what I'm after. So let me ask you this: if I can find a way to cut down the time to load a new room far enough to where users don't have to notice it very much, e.g. by caching a lot of assets on disk, etc, find a way so that one can see into the next room in a matrix of rooms, and then just make the portals invisible and at compass boundaries between spaces, do you still think I'd need to rip out TeaTime and replace it with something of a completely different design in order to build a large, apparently (but not actually) continuous space? I realize that I'm probably pushing my luck:) but crowds are important for large groups like everyone, so this just got twice as interesting! On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 5:37 PM, David Barbour dmbarb...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 3:40 PM, BGB cr88...@gmail.com wrote: ideally, we should probably be working with higher-level entities instead of lower-level geometry. I agree with rendering high-level concepts rather than low-level geometries. But I favor a more logical model - i.e. rendering a set of logical predicates. Either way, we have a set of records to render. But predicates can be computed dynamically, a result of composing queries and computing views. Predicates lack identity or state. This greatly affects how we manage the opposite direction: modeling user input. possibly, ultimately all levels should be expressed, but what should be fundamental, what should be expressed in each map, ... is potentially a subject of debate. I wouldn't want to build in any 'fundamental' features, except maybe strings and numbers. But we should expect a lot of de-facto standards - including forms, rooms, avatars, clothing, doors, buildings, landscapes, materials, some SVG equivalent, common image formats, video, et cetera - as a natural consequence of the development model. It would pay to make sure we have a lot of *good* standards from the very start, along with a flexible model (e.g. supporting declarative mixins might be nice). I am not familiar with the Teatime protocol. apparently Wikipedia doesn't really know about it either... Teatime was developed for Croquet. You can look it up on the VPRI site. But the short summary is: * Each computer has a redundant copy of the world. * New (or recovering) participant gets snapshot + set of recent messages. * User input is sent to every computer by distributed transaction. * Messages generated within the world run normally. * Logical discrete clock with millisecond precision; you can schedule incremental events for future. * Smooth interpolation of more cyclic animations without discrete events is achieved indirectly: renderer provides render-time. This works well for medium-sized worlds and medium numbers of participants. It scales further by connecting a lot of smaller worlds together (via 'portals'), which will have separate transaction queues. It is feasible to make it scale further yet using specialized protocols for handling 'crowds', e.g. if we were to model 10k participants viewing a stage, we could model most of the crowd as relatively static NPCs, and use some content-distribution techniques. But at this point we're already fighting the technology, and there are still security concerns, disruption tolerance concerns, and so on. Regards, Dave ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc -- Casey Ransberger ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: VR for the rest of us (was Re: [fonc] Re: SecondPlace, QwaqLife or TeleSim? Open ended, comments welcome)
This is actually exactly what I mean when I'm talking about turtles. I want to be able to express a cartoon fairytale castle that uses forced perspective to look bigger than it is in as little code as possible. Terrain seems best arrived upon by way of parameters to fractals, but I haven't figured out a way to this with man made structures quite yet (I'm sure there's a way to do it, and I don't count the Seattle Art Museum, which just looks like an amorphous blob.) On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 1:44 PM, David Barbour dmbarb...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 11:09 AM, Steve Wart st...@wart.ca wrote: 3D design is extraordinarily expensive to develop properly That is not an essential property of 3D design. We could have an ontology / 'markup language' just for building and animating avatars, similar to dressing up a doll, if we want to make one. And a modular ontology for buildings (including concepts such as crenelations and gargoyles). And another for environments. Etc. Given a suitably modular meta-language, we can even have dedicated languages for describing zombies. I see the impoverished languages of today as an opportunity. For accessibility reasons - e.g. desktop vs. iPhone access to a world - it is preferable that we develop in these high-level ontologies anyway. My own vague interest has steered me towards modular, reusable, multi-player interactive fiction - with a lot of inspiration from the Inform 7 language [1]. I have a bunch of half-formed designs from my earlier work on the subject, and my efforts in language design. And also note the lack of porn (although WoW has a high level of titillation it also has been very successful in attracting women). Lol. Pornography is a human trait with an ancient and ignoble history, even if male dominated. I once watched a rather funny (but somewhat perverted) video called 'Ballad of the Sex Junkie' developed in WoW. It's NSFW, but is tame enough for Youtube. Anyhow, I'm speaking at the federated world level. It would be silly to deny that those red-lights districts will exist. This rule is the same for all computer security: you cannot protect against a threat by ignoring it! I prefer soft security, wherever possible, and this means recognizing and accommodating threats in order to gain some control of them. By recognizing red lights districts, and the inevitable fallout (such as naked avatars waltzing through worlds), we can isolate them (e.g. by ensuring that the avatar has suitable clothing upon entering a 'no shirt no shoes no service' world). The original concept of VRML as a standard in the hypertext model still makes sense to me, but the gaming platforms seem to prefer the silo model. VRML is an awfully low-level ontology for building 3D models! I would suggest that this is part of *why* we favor the silo model. Think about what it would take to build designs that let us achieve something similar to CSS for 3D and avatar animation. Separation of artistic rendition (presentation) from content is important. Anything short of that is ultimately unsuitable for world mashups! Working with cones and boxes is not the right level for this. I think we really do need an ontology for architecture, avatars, environments, etc. as a common foundation in the world. The Teatime model seems promising Teatime protocol is unscalable and insecure. It is suitable for LANs where you trust the participants, but would die a slow, choking death if faced with 'flash crowds', 'script kiddies', and their like. No variation on Teatime will ever work at scale. Transactions scale poorly and have plenty of flaws [2] But there are some lessons you can take away from Teatime. Use of temporal semantics is a suitable basis for consistency even without transactions - we can tame this with a more commutative/idempotent model and *eventual consistency*. Explicit delay is an effective approach to achieve near wall-clock determinism in the face of distribution latencies (e.g. a signal propagates to multiple clients, but triggers at some specific time in the future). I have developed a very simple and effective programming model - Reactive Demand Programming - for solving these and related concerns [3]. One might think of RDP as a fusion of eventless FRP and OOP - i.e. OOP where messages and responses are replaced by continuous control signals, and state is primarily replaced by continuous integrals. RDP is, by no small margin, the most promising model for developing modular, federated, distributed command and control systems, augmented reality systems, and 3D worlds. Croquet always felt awkward to me, partly it was performance, but it was also because some of the primitives were too primitive. I agree that this is a problem. VRML is a problem for the same reason - i.e. it is not clear what the physics should be, nor how we should recharacterize for a different artistic style, and so on.
Re: [fonc] Large places and lots of users (was Re: VR for the rest of us)
What would a blimp look like as it floats through this invisible matrix? Could you ensure it is artifact free? Could you fire your canon at it from a different room? Consider the possibility of a very large blimp (a bunch of participants might be wining and dining up there). I don't believe you'll need something 'completely different' from TeaTime. You are clever. You will find workarounds, if you look for them. Consider, instead, the possibility of 'TeaTime + careful discipline'. If you can localize interactions, bound them to just a few cells in the matrix, you can keep synchronization costs to a reasonable level - but this will cost you expressiveness. Careful applications of idempotence and commutativity can save you a lot of efforts by supporting 'eventual consistency' and reducing the need for strict ordering of events within a time-slice - i.e. you can find disciplined ways to weaken the transactions necessary (and thus improve performance) - but this would require more careful expression of many algorithms. Motion of objects (non-characters) through cells will be a challenge to model, especially if they have dependencies (references) to other objects in the environment. Autonomous objects raise their own challenges (Grab your rifles, men, we're going after that mutant kangaroo. It's somewhere in this matrix.) What federated worlds really means: you have many *independent* developers linking their worlds together. At the Internet scale, this might mean * millions* of concurrent developers, the way we have billions of web-pages today. To ask a million developers to be 'disciplined' would be optimistic. Even asking them to be 'benign' would be ineffective. A million developers will have almost a million agendas. At large scales, discipline and security must be systematic, and on the path of least resistance. The win is commensurate with the challenge - rich content and relationships, secure business integration, augmented reality, and a cloud of not-entirely-trustworthy compute resources available for competitive prices with an e-purse (but not every computation needs trust). This is part of what I aim to achieve with RDP. So long as your world is built by yourself or a small group, you can achieve the discipline necessary to make TeaTime or a minor variation work at scale. You can even allow some user-generated content, if you carefully control its construction or at least limit damage. Regards, Dave On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 8:39 PM, Casey Ransberger casey.obrie...@gmail.comwrote: Aha. This explains why various wonderful people warned me that what I wanted to do would end up being expensive to implement. There's been some talk about federated worlds and this is I *think* part of what I'm after. So let me ask you this: if I can find a way to cut down the time to load a new room far enough to where users don't have to notice it very much, e.g. by caching a lot of assets on disk, etc, find a way so that one can see into the next room in a matrix of rooms, and then just make the portals invisible and at compass boundaries between spaces, do you still think I'd need to rip out TeaTime and replace it with something of a completely different design in order to build a large, apparently (but not actually) continuous space? I realize that I'm probably pushing my luck:) but crowds are important for large groups like everyone, so this just got twice as interesting! On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 5:37 PM, David Barbour dmbarb...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 3:40 PM, BGB cr88...@gmail.com wrote: ideally, we should probably be working with higher-level entities instead of lower-level geometry. I agree with rendering high-level concepts rather than low-level geometries. But I favor a more logical model - i.e. rendering a set of logical predicates. Either way, we have a set of records to render. But predicates can be computed dynamically, a result of composing queries and computing views. Predicates lack identity or state. This greatly affects how we manage the opposite direction: modeling user input. possibly, ultimately all levels should be expressed, but what should be fundamental, what should be expressed in each map, ... is potentially a subject of debate. I wouldn't want to build in any 'fundamental' features, except maybe strings and numbers. But we should expect a lot of de-facto standards - including forms, rooms, avatars, clothing, doors, buildings, landscapes, materials, some SVG equivalent, common image formats, video, et cetera - as a natural consequence of the development model. It would pay to make sure we have a lot of *good* standards from the very start, along with a flexible model (e.g. supporting declarative mixins might be nice). I am not familiar with the Teatime protocol. apparently Wikipedia doesn't really know about it either... Teatime was developed for Croquet. You can look it up on the VPRI site. But the short summary is:
