Re: [vos-d] [www-vrml] Re: [x3d-public] Wanna help the Mass Avatar Mash?
Sounds right. A test mark is understood legally and otherwise. OTOH, it is best for everyone that X3D apps conform but X3D adapts. Few things are 100% right out of the box including the spec. Since members determine what that is, why sue each other for what it ain't? A horse is a horse unless of course... H-anim conformance is important, everyone knows that. Collada is good for moving loosely contracted assets, but H-anim is the crown jewel for obvious reasons. len From: Alan Hudson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, May 11, 2007 9:46 PM To: Len Bullard We have a conformance/certification mark that you are given permission to use. Looks like this: http://www.xj3d.org/status.html This is only thing protected. We don't stop you labeling your software as X3D. ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] Van Jacobson: named data
You put your finger on the major issue: cost. The energy budget is a part of the noise factor of any communications network, artificial or organized. The web is predated by better designs with regards to noise and is a bit of a botch with respect to quality in terms of how it has been marketed. No surprise there because quite a bit of the technological infrastructure in use today is marketed that way with the marketing goals dominating the feedback to the design goals. The orthogonal pressure of investing schemes such as hedge funds, private equity, venture capital etc. drive the quality down further because the squeeze for numbers if not met by innovation come out of the employees and other aspects of corporate management. Predictions that the network models such as the web would lead to this were made prior to the web tsunami not because of the web in particular although it is a particularly bad case, but because the laws of second order cybernetics and complexity indicate this will be the case. I use examples such as the questions on the blog simply to point out that even for what some would consider cultural memory with a very high penetration of exposure for some spatio-temporal event, the distortion effect of a high intensity noisy signal over a much shorter time at a higher bandwidth is sufficient to degrade the reliability of any copy. The cost of purchasing a vetted copy of the series, watching the first episode (sufficient to answer all of the questions correctly therefore to pass a single test of the reliability of the source) is quite minimal. The cost to correct the damage across the culture is not. So while the value of that particular corpus may not significant, it is easily demonstrated the modulation of frequency and amplitude for a signal of high impact is sufficient to distort a high value decision. Again, the first three pages of Shannon's seminal work provides the basic model of selectors (decision trees). To apply the model socially, behavioral science is a sufficient model. To figure these into a hypermedia system design that can adapt to distortion or to create distortion, a second order cybernetic model is a good start plus some study into signal filtering models. The web isn't actually designed to be dirty. It designed not to care if it is dirty or clean. It is a minimalist contract much the way a virus is a minimalist interface for propagation without regard to host degradation. The web doesn't care. You have to. That's the deal. len -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Lars O. Grobe Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2007 2:39 AM To: VOS Discussion Subject: Re: [vos-d] Van Jacobson: named data In effect, regardless of the wrapper, unless you have the original 1959 first episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle, you probably can't answer those trivia question correctly. There are some approaches to organize these decentralized verification processes in the field of certificates. E.g. cacert.org, where you need a certain credit to sign and need a certain number of signers and documents verified. Maybe one could think about something like that for digital content. If I get the episode from 1959 as digital with the signature from a public library, I might trust it. If not, there might be a second one around, signed by another library, and if both are identical I might trust. Or one copy signed by two libraries. The question is if those libraries will spend the money on people verifying their digitized content, as this is not to be automated. And most of them suffer already from the efforts necessary to digitize content without proof-reading... Maybe the cheap, quick and dirty character of the web is part of its very nature, with proofed and verified content existing only on some small expensive islands... ;-) Lars. ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] Van Jacobson: named data
Understood completely and I know how SSL, checksums, asymmetric keys, etc work but without the understanding that content drifting away from its original sources corrupts means the buyer doesn't understand the technical solution is not the whole solution. In effect, regardless of the wrapper, unless you have the original 1959 first episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle, you probably can't answer those trivia question correctly. If you don't have the authentication and authorization, you don't have access to the original source. If you don't have the digital signature and checksum technology, I can't trust your answers without the original sources. This is the real problem of named data sharing. Otherwise, URIs with registries make the name sharing easy, and the rest is authentication, authorization, signatures, etc. I don't think the problem of discoverability is as big as the speaker believes it is. It isn't just trust. It's verification. For that, you must have an authentic copy of the original source or access which amounts to the same thing but if access, you have to prove that. Names alone won't make that happen. len From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Peter Amstutz Well, on a technical level you have digital signatures that give you a technical way to verify that information from a given source has not been tampered with. Provided you trust that the public key used to sign that data did in fact come from that entity, of course, but trust has to start somewhere. On a social level, you're right, people tend to introduce errors (either accidentally or deliberately) in information. There isn't a technical solution to that. But that's not the kind of transmission we're dealing with; we're only concerned with exact digital copies. Whether the source itself is an eyewitness account, a newpaper article or a wikipedia writeup, the goal is simply propagation of the actual digital document without allowing for the introduction of errors into the document itself. ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] Van Jacobson: named data
Versioning yes, but also vetting and revetting of sources. The further you get from original sources in any communication system, the more noise you incur without adequate checks. Shannon 101. Names alone won't do it. I put a trivia test at my personal blog just for a Do you trust Google and Wikipedia test. The problem is one of not starting from an authenticated or original source. If you start from wikipedia to answer those questions without the original source, you will get about half of them wrong or near wrong. Modern Internet traffic worries about efficiency but typically the data is short lived. If you live where I live you get to watch a fascinating change: NASA is hiring as many sixty and even 70 plus year old engineers as they can find if they have actual J2 series engine experience. The original sources and digital systems failed to keep enough documents alive. They have the designs but like the Canadians who tried to rebuild the V2 engines for their contest submission, they don't know how to run them and it turns out the devil is really in the details. len -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Peter Amstutz Summary: First 40 or so minutes explaining why networks up until now evolved the way they did. Circuit-oriented telephone networks evolved the way they did due to specific ways the underlying circut switching technology worked (going back to human operators working a switchboard!). Packet-switched networks were revolutionary because, unlike the phone system, they were agnostic to the underlying transport medium. TCP/IP was designed for point-to-point communication based on the assumption that the primary use of data networks would still be for point-to-point conversations. Also, TCP/IP was designed in an environment where each computer had many users, by constrast with today, where you have many computers per user. The second part of the talk describes where we are today, and how networks can be adapted to make it better. Modern Internet usage has evolved such that the vast majority of traffic is better described as broadcast traffic rather than point-to-point: publishing web pages, streaming video, file sharing, even email in the case of mailing lists. This is very inefficient if many users are requesting the same data at once. Another problem posed by current architechtures are the challenges of data synchronization between devices, which can also be traced to the fact that devices are often required to synchronize on a peer-to-peer basis, rather than having a mechanism to broadcast changes to other devices. The proposed solution is a bit light on details, but big on ideas: to deal with problems of scale in the age of Internet publishing, we step away from our notions of purely fixed-address, point-to-point communication, and consider that in many cases, it is highly desirable to be able to automatically replicate and propagate that data. In the example given, when you access the New York Times (newspaper) front page, you shouldn't care whether the actual data you get is served from the NYT web server, or from some other downstream server that has a copy -- provided you can verify that it originated from the NYT by checking the digital signature. One significant idea mentioned was that, in the way that TCP/IP abstracts the underlying physical transport layer, such a system ought to be abstracted from the protocol layer -- so that data can be propagated by whatever physical or virtual means are most appropriate or available. He points to Gnutella and Bittorrent as examples of trends in this direction. Each system demonstrates the two key properties of this type of approach, that once something is published and replicated a few times it may stay in the network even if the original source is no longer available, and that popular resources are inherently load balanced by virtue of the fact that the more people access a resource the more intermediate servers will have a copy. Unfortunately he didn't seem to mention Freenet (http://freenetproject.org), which to my knowledge is the most complete implementation of many of the ideas he's promoting. Commentary: This talk is primarily aimed at spurring people to do more research in this area. For this reason, it poses many questions but provides few concrete answers as to how such a system would be put together in practice. He helpfully separates it out into the easy stuff (problems for which reasonable solutions already exist) and the hard stuff (everything else). He doesn't really touch on the highly dynamic nature of current web sites. When every user is served a custom web site, complete with widgets and ads personalized to their zip code, it's much more difficult to replicate in a useful way. Of course media (sound, images, video, maybe 3D meshes later on) are usually not (yet) dynamically generated, and
Re: [vos-d] Metaverse Roadmap
They manage thoughts and ideas toward control attractors. It is one part Electric Sheep (a content builder for SecondLife) plus the usual New York VR cabal. SL needs an independent front organization to for its effort to create a standards patina around their technology. Actually, this sort of thing can become very serious very fast because it is fueled by external sources feeding and paying for press. This was done with the W3C in the early days and used to pirate the status of the legitimate standards organizations. This works for the company sponsors just as it did for those who footed the bills for STimBL and crew at MIT. I call it The Standards Game. Everyone knows how to play it now. The thing to pay attention to is the participation agreements that determine by membership contract what the conditions for contributing intellectual property are if and when they actually do any real work beyond pontificating and holding seminars. That is where the rubber meets the road. OTW, yet another kaffeeklatch and that is fine. Every street corner has a Starbucks. On the other hand, take a look at that participation list. That is a lot of luminaries including Castronova and Dyson. These people get on board, raise money and drain resources to their own pet projects without building too much. The Venture Capitalists love these guys because they are Judas Goats for other investors pulling a lot of money toward their interests. Note the presence of Joi Ito (content must be free; I must keep my Porsche). This is a serious bunch though if you look, not a lot of them are building worlds. They are getting mindshare for the few on that list that do (Koster, ES, Metaverse, etc.). Castronova was given a MacArthur Genius Grant to do a project done in VRML ten years ago and already working in JOI. len From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Peter Amstutz I've seen it. Honestly I think it's mostly self-serving promotional fluff by people with vested interests in hyping their technology. I suppose it's useful from a PR standpoint of promoting immersive 3D, but it doesn't really offer anything concrete that anyone who might be interested in building on metaverse technology could plan around. ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] Flux Worlds Server Announcement
First of all I should mention that I don't speak for VOS/Interreality 3D -- which you seem to be assuming I do. I'm just an enthusiast following their progress and hoping to contribute a bit. I've lurked on the list for a few years now. There are lots of projects but this one has staying power based on the core of people building it. That I support. I am a VRML content builder among other things, but I support real-time 3D in general. I know what *I* want the metaverse to be, and I'm especially annoyed at the Lindens for attempting to appropriate the term and therefore am a bit sensitive to new press releases making hype about the metaverse. And that's basically it. That will only frustrate. The press, the Lindens, their investors, all will work hard to create a patina of invention and legitimacy up to and including rewriting history. That is how the web was won. Can you imagine how irritating it was for the SGML hypertext community to read that Tim Berners-Lee had *invented* hypertext and THE hypertext markup language? The history wasn't that well known so it worked at scale. Hype works. Investors expect it. The way to fight that is to correct the press, but don't fight over terms like *metaverse*. It is already a hype term that has very little meaning. What is a 'metaverse'? We have the same problems with 'virtual reality'. It is just a genre of real-time 3D. VOS has yet to find a genre that is easily summarized. That might be good because it continues to fly under the radar. About the worst thing that can happen is to have the press locusts descend on it before it is ready. I can't count the number of web projects gone South that I've seen because the fringes decided it needed a big press boost or more cred than it had earned. Of such is a bubble made. The VRMLers are careful to acknowledge VRML's roots in practical commercial products, eg, SGI Open Inventor. As a result, when a blogger or press release talks about how VRML was created on the web, but is not a practical product, it is easy to point to the evolution from the SGI product line and correct that. One thing the press really hates is to have their credibility ripped from them with factual reporting. I do think -- if they do it right -- Flux Worlds will be a useful product and an important step in open-standard virtual-worlds. But I maintain that it's an evolutionary step, not a revolutionary one -- There are revolutions of technology and revolutions of scale and market. HTML was not a revolution. It was a design that was decades old. The markup design was essentially the work of Truly Donovan, not Tim or Dan. The US Army had a DTD-less stylesheet driven markup hypertext browser years before XML. HTTP is even less of a revolution. In combination, they caused a scaling effect that was a market revolution. A generation of not-very-adept programmers picked it up and did cool things with it, but the generation that took it to the next level was already very adept and mostly 40-somethings. The press didn't find that very good reading. Fifteen years later, none of it matters, but don't underrate the power of the press to fuel a revolution in market where there was no revolution in technology. and it's no reason not to aim farther ahead, or to abandon all alternate paths. I agree and those paths are also no reason to slag the sincere and working efforts of the VRMLers to get the next piece of their puzzle in place because of the term 'metaverse'. The press made the term popular, not the technologists. You don't own it. The Lindens don't. Parisi doesn't. Everyone will use it as they see fit. It may even die fast because it is a hype term subject to dissolution because it has no insolvent core meaning. Also, as far as I've seen, VOS isn't making lots of publicity or preannouncements -- Peter, Reed et al have been quietly working away for a few years trying to get a good base technology working from the ground up. And they *do* have running code. I know. I keep track. I am waiting to see what this emerges as because so far, it is *geekSpeakBound* and while that is good for the programmers, it won't mean a thing to the content developers or the market. I'm waiting for that synergy when hot content and new technology merge. I warn you though, technology is largely invisible. If VOS creates yetAnotherSocialSpace, it is an also ran. Customers are never wowed by how neat your classes are. So I'm really not sure where a lot of your comments are coming from. 25+ years of experience. Don't get hung up on the terms or claims to primacy as if this project were THE Metaverse. That will just earn these guys enemies where they don't earn them themselves and critics where it isn't in need of critique. So far, VOS is a small personal project with a mail list and some running code, but nothing yet to show that will impress the market. I am impressed by the staying power of the core contributors.
Re: [vos-d] Flux Worlds Server Announcement
We learned the really hard way in the early years of VRML to take it slow when trying to create something intended to scale out the Internet. I won't quarrel with your requirements but I also am very leary of anything that reeks of Snowcrash-like thinking or visions. We got burned because that sort of thinking leads to expectations that are not just impossible in the short term, they aren't achievable. VRML still gets hammered in books, blogs and other articles for overreaching and not hitting those marks despite the fact that as a standard, ten years later, the content still works with current tools and a lot of current content sill works with old tools. That is what a standard has to achieve. Don't overdrive your headlights. It's a deadly mistake. So I'm not criticizing, but take it to the bank that Parisi knows better than anyone what the cost of overreaching is. Your 'metaverse' is worth having, but he is good ways down the path of making his work now and he has been at the forefront of getting such standards built for over a decade now. He isn't 'now' realizing; he paid the price in blood before most of the rest of the current crowd was even trying. len -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ken Taylor Sent: Friday, March 30, 2007 9:10 PM To: VOS Discussion Subject: Re: [vos-d] Flux Worlds Server Announcement Remember, the Metaverse needs open protocols. Without them... everything else is Just a World. I agree with this, and I'm glad that more and more people are realizing it. However, though it's necessary, it's not sufficient to create the metaverse. Some other requirements I would use to evaluate any metaverse system: - Not only can anyone run a server, but they can easily interlink and users can freely traverse the spaces between different servers, with the potential for seamlessly connecting virtual spaces (eg, with portals). - The protocol is future-proof and can keep up with developments in technology and new ideas for interaction while maintaining backwards compatibility and a reasonable experience for those with hardware or bandwidth that can't support the latest-and-greatest - The protocol should support use creation and ownership of content, including a flexible scripting system, and the ability to transfer user-created content between servers. It should support collaborative editing and interaction with content. - The protocol is highly extensible through 3rd-party plugins and not locked-in to whatever the committee decided at standardization time was, for example, the best parameterized-avatar system/voice-chat system/streaming-video protocol/physics system/what-have-you. However, at the same time, there should be a robust baseline spec that allows all users to have a decent experience even with no plugins added. I definitely see VOS as having the potential to meet all these requirements and beyond. I can't really tell from the press release how far they are planning to go with flux worlds. My guess is it's going to be yet-another-shared-space-server, this time based on X3D and easily integrated with web pages. So it'll probably be really neat, but not the metaverse yet ;) -Ken - Original Message - From: Tony Parisi [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: 'x3d-public list' [EMAIL PROTECTED]; 'www-vrml' [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, March 30, 2007 2:08 PM Subject: [www-vrml] Flux Worlds Server Announcement Folks, We've been up to something over here - thought I would tell you about it before you heard it on the street. Media Machines has been developing a multi-user server based on a new protocol that we intend to put out into the open. We have dubbed it Simple Wide Area Multi-User Protocol, or SWMP (pronounced swamp). The intent is to work with Web3D and potentially other organizations to standardize SWMP. We will also supply a basic open source implementation. Our overriding goal-- one that we are pursuing with total passion and vigor-- is to create an open infrastructure for the Metaverse. We have wrapped SWMP into a server product called Flux Worlds. Flux Worlds is currently in alpha test. While the product is still several weeks away from beta test, we announced it yesterday with the goal of attracting early signups for the beta. We are also integrating a prototype of the new X3D networking nodes being developing by the Networking Working Group, right into Flux Player. The results look promising. Anyway, here is the announcement. We would love to have you be part of the beta when it's ready! http://www.mediamachines.com/press/pressrelease-03292007.php Remember, the Metaverse needs open protocols. Without them... everything else is Just a World. Yours virtually, Tony - Tony Parisi 415-902-8002 President/CEO [EMAIL PROTECTED] Media
Re: [vos-d] Flux Worlds Server Announcement
Because when you don't hit the mark, it causes people to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Visions are ok, but lots of publicity and preannouncements without the goods takes on the rep of being snake-oil. It is a very bad strategy to get into a market with the aim of eliminating all competitors. It screws the customers over. Netscape made that mistake and they had their collective rears handed to them. To me, metaverse is just another word. It has no ownership and only as much meaning as there is running code to support it. It's like saying 'Heaven' and then setting up the dogma without the pragma. So no offense, but don't get possessive with a term. Offering up suggestions is cool. It is cooler to offer them with running code. He isn't exactly playing it safe. He has code, he spent the company money to get it ready for open source, and he has the access to the standards editors. Is it more of the same? We've had shared spaces but no standard for hooking those up without buying Blaxxun Community server or any of the various other products. All we've had is client standards. What Tony is talking about is a protocol that can be implemented anywhere, and possibly a reduction in costs for authors to have worlds that is ten percent of what it costs to host at LL. That is significant. Now don't get me wrong, I am not quarreling with the VOS vision or the work. I'm saying if he manages to get this done, it puts something on the street a lot of people need, so stepping back and saying that's not a true Metaverse is sour grapes. No one really knows what a metaverse is. You know what you want it to be and that is cool, but not authoritative or a reason to say he doesn't have one. We got in trouble by promising a science fantasy world that couldn't be built then if ever, and it turned people off to 3D on the web for ten years. If he gets shared spaces out there for ten percent of the cost of SL and does it with content standards that enable the content to move around among worlds without being hostage to POTS server farm market, that is an AMAZING and very revolutionary accomplishment. Give him cred, then get back to your vision and show the next new thing when it is ready to show. It's bad karma to climb up the backs of other swimmers trying to stay afloat in the same ocean. len -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ken Taylor Sent: Friday, March 30, 2007 9:59 PM To: VOS Discussion Subject: Re: [vos-d] Flux Worlds Server Announcement I think that a basic open-standard shared-space server based on X3D is an obvious and safe step -- Flux Worlds will probably be very successful at what it does. But in my view, it doesn't bring us any closer to the metaverse and I hate when people through that word around (ever since the Lindens started doing so). To me it really is just more of the same -- we've had shared space servers around almost as long as VRML itself, and we're not that much closer to a true interconnected 3d universe on the internet. Someone has to stop playing it safe for anything revolutionary to occur. But what's wrong with snowcrash-like thinking or visions anyway? ;) -Ken - Original Message - From: Len Bullard [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: 'VOS Discussion' vos-d@interreality.org Sent: Friday, March 30, 2007 7:47 PM Subject: Re: [vos-d] Flux Worlds Server Announcement We learned the really hard way in the early years of VRML to take it slow when trying to create something intended to scale out the Internet. I won't quarrel with your requirements but I also am very leary of anything that reeks of Snowcrash-like thinking or visions. We got burned because that sort of thinking leads to expectations that are not just impossible in the short term, they aren't achievable. VRML still gets hammered in books, blogs and other articles for overreaching and not hitting those marks despite the fact that as a standard, ten years later, the content still works with current tools and a lot of current content sill works with old tools. That is what a standard has to achieve. Don't overdrive your headlights. It's a deadly mistake. So I'm not criticizing, but take it to the bank that Parisi knows better than anyone what the cost of overreaching is. Your 'metaverse' is worth having, but he is good ways down the path of making his work now and he has been at the forefront of getting such standards built for over a decade now. He isn't 'now' realizing; he paid the price in blood before most of the rest of the current crowd was even trying. len -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ken Taylor Sent: Friday, March 30, 2007 9:10 PM To: VOS Discussion Subject: Re: [vos-d] Flux Worlds Server Announcement Remember, the Metaverse needs open protocols. Without them... everything else is Just a World. I agree with this, and I'm glad that more and more
Re: [vos-d] How to host a product design dinner party
You know more about that niche than you think you do. Figure out what VOS trades with. Transactions determine niche boundaries and more. len -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Reed Hedges Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2007 3:27 PM To: VOS Discussion Subject: Re: [vos-d] How to host a product design dinner party We don't know what our niche is yet. We have one main domain (3D) and a secondary domain (Web) but there might even be others. Actually when we first began this several years ago, we knew someone who knew someone intersted in building factory tracking systems, though we ended up not really considering that at the time. At one point I wanted to do wireless self-organizing sensor networks-- I still think that will be an emerging realm of innovation but I know that VOS is not a good fit for its requirements. I think we have some vague ideas on what we want our specific niches within 3D to be-- Peter and I may not even be able to explain it well yet. So, we're just trying to implement what we can, so we can show it to people and eventually find a niche. Reed On Thu, Mar 22, 2007 at 11:22:10AM -0500, Len Bullard wrote: The urge to focus on one single application is normal, but if you are building a toolkit such as VOS, it would be deadly. You're doing the right thing, but it violates two of the web myths: easy and simple. Simplistic analogies will sell it perhaps, but don't get trapped by your own press. VOS won't be a tool everyone can use. The niche that can can do a lot with it. I think that is Reed's point, yes? len ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] XOD questions
I agree 150% because I begged for that clean up. The unfortunate reality was the people designing the Schema weren't that experienced with Schema design OR XML and they did some ill-conceived things. Schema was very new when they started (else RELAX would have been a better choice but it didn't exist then). Because I wrote the first DTD for VRML, the geometry straw man, I watched with horror as the Schema progressed, but because I was working for Intergraph where VRML and 3D on the web had been dismissed out of hand and *with prejudice*, there wasn't much I could do to be forceful. I'm just saying the Schema per se isn't the problem. You could ignore that. It is the resulting warts in the instance that make it a PIA for loaders or transforms. I understand the disgust with CDATA. Microparsing is a solution for some problems but bad juju overall. There is a reason I, a markup wonk if ever there was one, stick to Classic VRML and VRML97. I will move on to X3D because eventually I will need some of the new features like Inlines with interfaces and bits like the Keyboard Sensor, the upcoming Network Sensor and the physics engine, or the Nice-to-Haves like the Boolean Sequencer that I can replicate in script but a node is easier. For now, I am building in VRML97 where the weather suits my clothes. Didn't mean to interrupt this fine design process. Back to the lurk. Best of luck with VOS. It should be quite cool. len From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Peter Amstutz My basic complaint with X3D was that the transition to XML could have been an opportunity to clean up a lot of the syntactical warts of VRML (delimiting index face sets with -1, for example) while still keeping the basic data model. We could have had a schema that follows the best practices for XML document design, follows XML data types, etc and would have been a breeze for developers to support. Instead, they choose to do a translation that amounted to little more than replacing curly brackets with pointy ones. Having written a minimalist X3D loader (just geometry) it irked me that I had parsing issues -- Parsing Issues, in XML! -- between files produced by two different programs because of the extra syntax embedded in CDATA that wasn't part of the DOM structure. I'm not saying it doesn't work, it is primarily an aesthetic issue -- but it does cause headaches for developers. ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] X3D
V-Realm Builder was and still is excellent. I won a copy in a contest over a decade ago and that was my entry point. I still use it because it is all VRML and has a great terrain editor and index face set utility, and easy treeview interface, great support for sequencing and routing, etc. Big pieces of ROL were done there. OTOH, I like Flux Studio. It is powerful, has fantastic advanced geometry editing with a drop dead easy interface, and well... I still haven't gotten through the feature set although I blogged it at http://3donthewebcheap.blogspot.com I have to admit that for scene assembly, PFE is my work horse because I really don't mind native code. At some point, one really does have to learn the language and you learn to spot bugs fast as well as how to make better protos once you see repeating structures. After awhile, VRML scene graphs just start to make enormous sense from the author's perspective. That is my only caution to the object-oriented programmers: it is too much code geekery for an author in too many cases. A professional game programmer, yes, but the average kid getting started, no. They need to learn a language in the sweet spot between OpenGL and 3DML. Go too high level, there isn't enough power. Go too low level, it takes to much work to do basic stuff. I'm starting to post tutorials there regularly. It is breezy but it is a blog. I am describing my processes for building with code samples as much as anything to give the kids a free place to get the information and a ton of philosophy about my own story telling processes. I call it 3D On The Web CHEAP! because I'm not a believer in the 'ya gotta buy a server spot at SL' or wherever or 'ya need a copy of Poser and 3D Maya' whatever to get into 3D. That wasn't the original promise of 3D on The web before the new guys rebranded it as 'the metaverse', a term I consider kind of dumb (More Meta Than Thou is the death spiral of design). It was 'get an ASCII editor and a browser and if you got the moxie you can go 3D'. I realize the need for powerful tools because real-time 3D is a lot harder than HTML, but I also know that the key to a real metaverse is accessibility relative to costs for the new comers. Otherwise, we might as well all go back to writing records management systems. I believe 3D and games are to this generation what rock n roll was to mine. The best thing I can do for the kids is hold a door open for them as long as I can, because this is their thing and they need to have their own thing, not ours. I really need to shut up. You guys have work to do and I have a blog for pontificating. Thanks for the space! len -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Reed Hedges Fortunately, it sounds like some good GUI editors are coming out (like Flux studio).I never did manage to find a really good GUI tool for building VRML97 that was really focused on VRML and supported all of it, though I was only looking at the free ones. (Back when I was able to actually do 3D for a job I ended up exporting VRML from a simple modeler called AC3D and then mucking about in it by hand slightly.) ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] XOD questions
How is XML restricting you? It doesn't care how you use the tree. There are things that look silly to an XMLer that may have a legitimate application. Bits like parent name='' children/children/parent look like someone didn't understand structure given by XML, but they aren't illegal and there can be reasons to do that. Things like name='name' look worse but I am told there are reasons to do that too. XML doesn't care. OTOH, I generally agree with Peter that scattering information across a file has costs. Some aren't obvious for small files and RAM rich machines, but as the file sizes increase, the lack of regular and compact structures will start to cause inefficiency system-wide or so the theory goes. In terms of all of the exceptions you have to write in XSLT templates, this is usually true. In VRML, one is told one can put ROUTEs anywhere because they aren't part of the scene graph. OTOH, ParallelGraphics wants them near the nodes they connect. Habitually, we put them all together at the bottom of the file because of habits acquired early in the VRML era. Now implementations confuse us and practice doesn't serve us. So IME, it is better to have tighter structures earlier and ask if they are keeping you from doing something, or simply making you be disciplined. len From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Reed Hedges I don't see why the XOD format should prevent stuff like that-- which are important abilities we have in VOS. If we have link why not parent (or the parent attribute)? parent would just be the inverse of link. XML is too restrictive here. XOD is already very specific to VOS in its element names; if you want to reuse a XOD along with some other XML you're going to be applying a trasformation to it anyway, and I'm pretty sure XSLT and XPATH are powerful enough to gather objects declared in different places in the file that have parent child relationships. ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] XOD questions
Be fair, Peter. It is the X3D instance you have to import, not the schema. The schema is baroque to put it mildly. I'm not sure if it is used for import. BS Contact has a validating switch, but I've not tried it. The schema is useful for the x3d-edit utility, but even then, not too many peole edit graphics like a document unless the are already very familiar with the tree. len From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Peter Amstutz Well, the idea was more to support the ability to import other file formats (X3D comes to mind, although it's maybe not a good example since it's really an example of how not to design an XML schema) using a straightforward XSLT transform. Of course, we haven't yet tried writing any transforms so I don't know if it's actually feasable. ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] Is this helpful?
I'm not sure I get what you are after. I have software to compress audio (eg, make an MP3), resample it (eg, make 32-bit into 16-bit and reset 44.1khz as 22khz, 11khz or yeaccchhh 8khz). What you may be looking for is something like Soundcast that streams it to the PCs. JOI uses that as I recall for their in-world radio programs. This uses the web browser sound so I am told and the directional sound properties are lost doing that. For example, when building an immersive album with VRML, I use the spatial audio (22khz mono) for ambient sounds (water, wind, doors open and close, etc.) and turn the spatial off for presentation audio (eg, songs, backgrounds for presentations). So not exactly sure what you are after. The Soundcast sounds *pretty good* compared to say chunking it into 11khz mono (never drop below 22khz or musicians will hunt you down and flay you with dull guitar picks). OTOH, nothing I've heard on the web is as good as wav files (don't start me going on about mp3: it is turning your ears into tin) at 44khz stereo. len -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jason Heblack Is this helpful? Does anybody have softwares which let you shrink your audio and then send the file as fast as possible so that after composition it could be played back quick in the model of *Citizens' Band radio* (/CB/) but instead using better sound? ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] VOS requirements
X3D has a physics specification underway. One is already being integrated into Contact. X3D already has shaders and scripting plus a metadata node for indicating semantics. Since the objects you mention below can be notatd as say DEF Tree and referenced by that name, I'm not sure what you want for semantics past that which won't create a badly layered design. Collada was designed as a transfer format for games. It is compatible with X3D. len -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Karsten Otto Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2007 4:05 AM To: VOS Discussion Subject: Re: [vos-d] VOS requirements Am 24.01.2007 um 19:05 schrieb Peter Amstutz: I agree. I have the book they published describing the COLLADA spec, and intend to base the VOS 3D data models on COLLADA wherever it makes sense, including physics parameters. [...] I guess I'll have to chime in at this point... I only took a quick glance at COLLADA, but it struck me again as a format primarily intended to model the *appearance* of a scene, rathern than its semantics. In that it isn't much different from, say, X3D, only that it may have more up-to-date features such as physics, scripting, and shaders. So once again: A shaded ball on a shaded cylinder being transformed to bend slightly along the Y-axis is just that, it is NOT a tree bending in the wind, even if it *looks* like one. If you ever expect any kind of autonomous machine interaction with a VOS world, please design the 3D data model so that it can co-exist with a semantic data model. Even better, make the semantic entity a first-class memeber of the world, and put the appearance in a child (or even external reference), i.e. world ---member-- tree ---appearance-- (cylinder, sphere) world ---member-- house ---appearance-- (box, extruded triangle) much better than world ---member--- (cylinder, sphere) world ---member-- (box, extruded triangle) and expecting anybody else than a human with a visualization program to ever get the meaning you want to convey. Of course, if you saw Matrix a few time too often, there is no better way to get rid of an agent than placing it in a world it cannot possibly make sense of :-) Touching another topic, this kind of semantic design also gives you a selection criterion for scene querying and caching, reducing bandwidth and memory overhead. If your client is only interested in trees but not houses, why should it download the complete appearance definition of the house? Also, if it has no 3D display capability, it might want to download only the member metadata, and possible a different form of appearance such as a text or 2D icon. Regards, Karsten Otto (kao) ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] SecondLife client goes Open Source
It was expected. It gives them a way to push the financing of the development off to organizations like IBM and to claim they are an open platform. They need to do something to stop the burning of the VC capital and they have to solve out some very difficult technical problems. Expect yet-another-big-burst of CNet articles. len -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Or Botton Sent: Monday, January 08, 2007 9:38 AM To: VOS Discussion Subject: [vos-d] SecondLife client goes Open Source LindenLab have just opened the source code for the SecondLife client. http://secondlife.com/developers/opensource/ This step has actually surprised me - I didnt think that they were anywhere near doing this for the next two years or so. ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] SecondLife client goes Open Source
Letting out the viewer is something of a SOP. I think the server-side is possibly more important given that there are any number of open source viewers out there for 3D platforms that are just as good or better. It is the management of the server farm that makes the difference, that and a big budget for marketing. Yes, I think they are looking at migrating the building market, but the only thing that brings in the bigCos is the site traffic. Otherwise, to Sears, there is no advantage to being there. IBM can talk a lot about boardroom VR but they are a services company in this market and without other companies willing to host on private farms, there is no market. There is a lot of puff in the online worlds market. Of what value is it to own content that you can't move because it only works on that platform? So like a Macintosh or a Mall, without a big membership that is actually going there often, having a presence there is largely a decorative bauble, a loss leader for being 'in the know'. This market is relying on the naivete of the IT groups of the companies hosting there. The in-world economy is a fascinating experiment in waiting to see when the Feds will begin to look at it the same way they look at church bingo. They tend to wait until the value is high enough that they can safely take their cut without killing the game. len -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Or Botton Sent: Monday, January 08, 2007 10:06 AM To: VOS Discussion Subject: Re: [vos-d] SecondLife client goes Open Source Granted, it was expected, but there is one major issue thats a big bad omen: And thats content copy protection. SecondLife has been largely tauted as a place where you can make a quick buck by creating and selling copies of content. This is mostly an artificial market created by placing DRM on objects - being able to flag a texture, model, script or an entire package as non copyable, modifyable or transferable. Personally, I am all for an opensource platform with no DRM involved. I believe that a VR platform can only become mainstream and widespread if it is open and free. But SecondLife's act is more self destructive because by nature they are not open and free. With the source out, it would be a rather easy task to duplicate models and textures of objects, pretty much breaking the DRM with a very casual effort from the programmer. This could be very damaging to their internal economy. Again, I do not support the concept of having virtual economies, but doing what they just did is more like shooting their own foot. Perhaps this signs that LindenLab now views the big gamers - companies and such as the real customers now? These people will have much less of an issue to enforce their copyrights then the regular person. ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] SecondLife client goes Open Source
That's a fair comparison, Peter. There are many lastGen web marketing games being played and some even older Hollywood tricks like the dust-up between the Graefs and the media that published pix and vids of the famous flying penises griefer incident imposed over her avatar image. CNet poses it as 'virtual world' rights incident and a copyright infringement which it isn't but it gives CNet another excuse to put up yetAnotherSL-related story. The Hollywood Catfight for Publicity is a well-worn trick. Currently we are in a simultaneous phase of do-overs (VR_The_New_Thing: WE DO IT RIGHT THIS TIME!) and brand devolution as stalwarts such as CNet become web'loids manufacturing stories and controversies to get eyeballs. Depending on your point of view or market, having real-time 3D come to the front of the pack in this environment may be a curse or a blessing. The good news is that the technology is being taken seriously again as a market in the business development offices of major companies; the bad news is the MAC-Is-The-Platform-of-Choice, aka, the closed systems marketers, are leading the charge. Lots of pundit sites such as Terra Nova are repackaging worn clichés but getting academic grants for them. Bruce Damer is looking for help in documenting the History Of Online Communities. There is sort of a bum's rush by some to be seen as the Gandalfs of VR and I have to suspect some of them are Sarumans In Saris but hey, they keep the presses running stories about VR and real-time 3D and that is good for all of us. Meanwhile everyone is trying with every blurb private or public to kill VRML and X3D because the Web3DC is sitting on the ISO gold standard; so, when IBM steps forward and claims that there are no standards for 3D On The Web, IBM looks sort of stupid. The truth is, there are but they are royalty free and unencumbered and that messes with their plans to get that 99% because there is no complexity moat for the client side, and that violates the classic Warren Buffet rules for evaluating a start-up or technology (barriers for competition). For niche players, the off-the-web applications of web technologies have promise and have gotten serious attention because of major contracts in the Federal markets. The entertainment industry still doesn't quite know what makes this NOT a game market and most of the nova-pundits don't either. This will be the year when a lot of it sorts out. In times of change, I say find your natural allies and work together to keep the market and/or your technology on track for whatever it is you mean to do with it. Me: just building a prototype world for fun and illumination. VRML97 still works for that and I may move it on to X3D. After building worlds for a hobby for a long time now, I know that I want to be able to pick up a project even if it is a decade old and finish it or recycle it. For that I need real standards and technology that keeps working. For that, ISO is gold. They are slow but very predictable. Do what you do with enthusiasm and a deaf left ear. len -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Peter Amstutz Sent: Monday, January 08, 2007 2:29 PM To: VOS Discussion Subject: Re: [vos-d] SecondLife client goes Open Source Interesting. This reminds me of the .com mantra Get Big or Die -- which usually meant expanding quickly and burning through millions of dollars to try and capture 99% of a market that hasn't yet even been proven to be profitable. In a couple years we'll be able to look back and figure out where Second Life is on launch parabola -- has it archived escape velocity and will be the next Amazon or Yahoo, or come crashing to earth when the fuel (stacks of crisp venture capital dollars) runs out? I haven't seen much word-of-mouth promotion of Second Life, and what I have seen has been mostly negative (of course I'm biased here). Rather there's been a lot of over-the-top hype and top-down marketing, rather than the sort of grass-roots support that suggests a sustainable platform. They desparately want to make SL seem bigger than it is, because people like a winner. But if the real numbers are right (250,000 accounts logged at least once in the last two months, 15,000 simultaneous users at peak usage) I can't help but think the user community is really, really small considering their multi-million dollar investment in hardware, software and marketing. Also I agree that they're walking a fine line between the natural laws of cyberspace and real-world legal systems, and this could really burn them at some point down the road. Whenever someone tries to bend cyberspace to conform to their idea of what should and shouldn't be allowed (as opposed to what is naturally possible or impossible) cyberspace ends up worse off for it. On Mon, Jan 08, 2007 at 12:42:10PM -0600, Len Bullard wrote: Letting out the viewer is something of a SOP. I think the server-side
