On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 8:47 AM, David Barbour <[email protected]> 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
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