Holiday’s give you time to ponder and inject serendipitous thoughts and events into your life. For me this time is was seeing an episode of Coast telling part of the story of Albert Einstein in Belgium. It got me thinking about relativity and points of view that people approach things with. In particular this related to just how many people and things need to be in a virtual space at any one time.

If you arrive at metaverse interaction from a “business” perspective or are used to Second Life and/or Opensim then having more than 50 avatars in one region or space at a time is viewed as an unfortunate limitation. The point of view being used is that of needing to be a mass communication vehicle, running huge events for thousands of people who will all listen to your message. That however is a flat web mentality. A billboard, even with interaction and a sense of belonging.
If you arrive at metaverse interaction from a “games” perspective. Having 32 people in once space performing a task is pretty much the maximum (in general). Having more doesn’t always add to the experience. Ok so Eve Online has 60,000 users on one server but you don’t really get to see them. It is also the exception. A few games have dabbled with FPS scenes with 128 people battling. You battle however is with the few dug in around you seldom the people the other side of the map.
So we have two relative view points. It is odd that the “business” perspective where it is about meetings and communication, sharing ideas and understanding will use the objection of “oh only 50 people?” when in fact the gathering it needs are targeting small groups collaborating on fast ideas. The games industry direction is one of “whats the point having all that freedom and that many people” when that industry is about mass take up and use of produced resources.
If we had the ultimate virtual environment that could house an infinite number of objects and avatars at amazing resolutions would we be any better off in working out how to communicate or play with one one another?
It is the restrictions of the mediums themselves that brings the greatest creativity?
If everyone could log on and all be in one place surely we would still have sparse areas where no one was or over crowded areas where it seemed to busy you would use your client to not bother rendering quite so many people.
I am not saying we should not strive for more and bigger spaces, I would love to see them. I am also not saying lets stick with 32 soldiers in a war torn town. I am saying that everyone should consider the other perspectives of what they are trying to do and why and not discount the other view. The chances are the other view may be what you actually want to do.
I was also struck by scale and relative size whilst wandering around the amazing sand sculptures in portugal. It was like a texture free virtual world.

Each of these is crafted from millions of particles of sand. It is not just a surface rendering, the whole thing is sand right through. No computer style rendering shortcuts. So each particle is a physical pixel, a phixel ? It takes up space and can only be viewed by the number of people who can fit in the space. The constraints of the medium again make it interesting. There is a choice to sculpt in lots of materials, yet this huge gathering chose only to use sand, because of its properties and impact and a craft and talent required to use them.
This all blended in mentally with Minecraft.

The predlets got interested seeing me start to play and actually understand the point and pointlessness of Minecraft.
I was only really doing a few bits and pieces, but once you start digging and rebuilding, combining and digging some more it is (as it success has shown) a totally intriguing experience. I think it works because of its lego like qualities. You are restricted in the medium and in the resources, but challenges you set yourself become very real despite the old school doom like block graphics.
So once again it is all relative, it is not everything to everyone with one perfect ultra solution.
In the mean time it is good news that Intel is pushing forward with 1,000 avatars in a sim (i.e. more than most high end games would dream of going near) as reported here http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2011/06/1000-avatars-soon-coming-to-a-region-near-you/ and there are some interesting papers on how Opensim scales and works from Intel here

I just got the great news that my application to present at the Evolve portion of this years Develop conference has been accepted. It will of course be an elective session. Having attended Develop the last couple of years, and really enjoyed the sessions I felt that the virtual world industry and the crossover into social media was missing. So this year I thought I would throw my hat in the ring and do a version of washing away cave paintings.

Evolve is a part of the conference on day 1 that is about emerging trends and tech. Michael Acton Smith of Moshi is keynoting the day too
I submitted this as my talk.

EVOLVE: So You Think Virtual Worlds Aren’t Important?
Session Details
User generated virtual worlds may seem a sideshow. Open source development is making inroads, with Opensim, into fully user generated environments hosted anywhere run by anyone. These are used for entertainment and in training medical staff or school education.

They are an innovative platform for the next wave of designers and programmers. We have shown, on the kids ITV show The Cool Stuff Collective, these virtual worlds are growing to be a distribution platform for goods that will not remain solely as digital properties. Virtual things are getting real. Come and pay attention to virtual worlds and the future.

Wish me luck and maybe see you there (early bird registration finishes june 15th )

Right now I am in the US, in Washinton for the Federal Consortium of Virtual worlds as part of a delegation from e426.org and the IEEE to discuss virtual environment standards and eco systems. This is all very cool and forward thinking as twe are not just talking about file formats but about human experience.
Rather pleasingly though Dave Taylor has a poster session here and did a demo yesterday of the Missive Project. Around major incident simulations. This is a project very dear to my heart as various aspects of it are things that I built as Feeding Edge Ltd.
It is worth reading his post(er) and I am sure I will talk to a few more people at the conference about it.
Lots of the environments send and receive data form various sources. A web menu drives options, a remote virtual patient in a scenario model responds. I do all the brokering and message aggregation and interpretation in the middle. Old habits die hard, this was SL/opensim middleware.
It is great to catch up with friends old and new from the industry but if you need an ROI on virtual worlds (do you want to sit like this for 8 hours )

Also I discovered on the flight over just how pitiful the 3DS battery life is, no wi-fi on and it only lasted about 3.5 hours of playing ghost recon! Not good. Though it did make me watch The Social Network on the seat back TV instead, which was much better than I though it would be.
Anyway, off to the conference.

Metaverse’s are what I do and have done for a living for a good few years now. Just in case you did not know
This morning I finally got to see the piece on Opensim I did as part of my future tech slot on The Cool Stuff Collective. It has been odd getting to see it as I ended up with a duff DVD (it broke just before the piece), just as we sat down to watch some friends arrived so we had to put it on pause, but in the end I watched it.

I managed to say Opensimultor (though we don’t say URL’s) and also get in a great reference to QuestHistory (From Rezzable), who kindly provided the OAR file for the greenies room that we flew around in on the show.
We had a 2 computer setup and were were talking to an OpenSim server I have running on a slicehost in the US. We were both running the Imprudence viewer, mine on the Mac and Sy on Windows. We had some picture in picture mixing too. So Sy had his view and I had mine. I got Sy to build a cube and then I modified it to illustrate the building tools.

My copy of the cool stuff set that we used was a 30 min build I did on a local opensim on the train one day.
The piece was a bit too long so some of the things we did didn’t make the edit but all the important pieces form co-creation, immersion and shared experience right up to and including the ability to drive 3d printers from these models we build and share together made it into the show.
My avatar had green spikey hair, my striped leather jacket and some felt tip trousers. These are all things that have a meaning and legacy for me, despite being “virtual”. The green spikes were part of my original Second Life avatar, the Jacket is my actual jacket photographed and textured as I wear in SL now and the felt tip trousers was something I coloured in when doing some painting with predlet 1.0 back in 2006. It would have been nice to have been able to talk about Second Life as an original seed and commercial operation, versus the open source opensim. However SL is really not geared up for 7-12 year old users so we could not encourage that. With the closing of the teen grid and the apparent ambivalence to education and establishment in general SL missing some great opportunities to make a difference again. So it was great to be able to talk about one that is actually doing things with QuestHistory well done Rezzable!
I gave Sy a cool stuff collective T shirt and skinny jeans So we actually have more virtual t-shirts than real ones for the show? Anyone out there want to do some merchandising for the show then please contact archie productions. I am sure there is a market there!
It was interesting to be technically making live machinima too. It was an extra element of complexity that we had 2 cameras in world, a composite screen in the studio as a feed and also two real camera pointing at us. Now we have the studio in Opensim though we could do a whole show from there

It has taken 26 shows to get to do Opensim. I had been using it as the emergency backup for any tech failures, but the 2 tech fails we have had on future tech did not fit nor would a quick piece do it justice so I am glad we waited.
Anyway, one more show left in the series next saturday. A Big Gadget Adventure piece. There is also a rather awesome gadget in the studio!
You can catch up on the clips of the shows here, or if you are quick you can watch entire episodes on the ITV player here

I was just replying to a note asking about Opensim and Freeswitch based on the fact I have it working(ish) on Ubuntu on a cloud server. I have been meaning to share where I am up to, though I have not found a complete solution to the problem I am having. However this snippet may help someone, or they may be able to help me

My Opensim and Freewswitch are running Ubuntu Karmic on a cloud service. Both opensim and freeswitch get built rather than binary distributions. However the ini files and config should be the same (as thats the beauty of this).

Freeswitch works by really just opening a conference call which any avatar will dial into. I am not sure how much digging you have done into the problem but there are a few things to look out for.
I am assuming you have followed the main instructions for config etc http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Freeswitch_Module

I had this all running from 6.8 onwards but recently moved to 0.7 I noticed in bin/config-include that there was now a line in StandaloneCommon.ini for Freeswitch not just the Opensim.ini. I think I had to uncomment that when I moved to 0.7

The main thing is to make sure that Freeswitch is started first and ready , then spark up opensim.

The default for the region in Opensim is to not have voice enabled at a land parcel and region level. In Hippo I enter god mode and set both the estate options and the parcel options to allow voice. Having done that (only needed if reloading the terrain or something major, I usually logoff and log on again with the view and it gets enabled. That one has caught em a few times.

The other thing to consider is some of the viewers, in particular the more recent open source ones are not allowed to package the SLVoice components with them. That one caught be when I asked someone to use Hippo on windows. The Mac hippo is old enough to still have the voice DLL but the newer windows one did not have it! SL Viewer 1 should of course be OK, but I think it is still not advisable to use SL Viewer 2 on opensim. Imprudence discusses a patch http://imprudenceviewer.org/wiki/How_to_Re-enable_Voice_Chat which is how I found out the root of the problem

The server firewall is another thing to check, as is the client firewall. As the ports are potentially different as freeswitch is a completely different application to opensim and the viewer can get blocked.

Should all of the above be ok then its console time for both Opensim and Freeswitch. There are some spurious errors it seems as things try to establish connections. However if you get a couple of clients connected (assuming you get the voice enabled in teh client) you can go into freeswitch and use the sofia commands. sofia status and sofia status profile internal both give a bit of information. I am no expert on the commands but I have been able to see if clients have connected from opensim.

This is where we get to a problem I now have. Freeswitch seems to not be working for everyone who comes to my sim. In my testing I used a mac and a windows machine on my own network at home but both talking to the remote cloud server. That has always worked (though technically it shows as the same IP address twice). I patched in someone else across the country who was using SL viewer 1 and we had a conversation, so I thought it was all working. However a few other people, when we have tried a larger meeting, have experienced problems.

It has been a mix of using a viewer with no SLVoice in it, firewalls but also some strange timing behaviour. It is quite difficult to test but that is why I have been using the sofia commands.

The first person to connect will generally get hold music playing. The second person to connect will enter the call, there is a beep as that happens the hold music ends. However you cannot always hear anyone speaking.
I suspect this is the client firewall operating. i.e. Opensim will talk to freeswitch at a server to server level to patch the person in. the Sofia status tends to show me all the users patched in to the freeswitch console. After that its the SL clients doing the work. When I get no voice response it tends to break the call for everyone. I have not found out how to check that or tell freeswitch to ignore bad calls. Getting the once that break it to logoff so there is only 1 person (i.e. me) in the call sometimes takes a few minutes before the hold music kicks in again. There are some sofia reset commands for the profile that I have dabbled with.

It was only a few weeks ago I hit this snag, the people using my freeswitch are not always in a position to mess with their company firewalls so it has been hard to get a test rig that fails consistently to try and debug it.

I have been meaning to write this down somewhere to help others but wanted to try and fix the problem first, but not many people are using or trying freeswitch.

Having said that if you get the voice connected (probably the god mode parcel audio solution at the start of this) you may find it just works. It could be my server having some bandwidth or memory issues etc. Its a tricky one to spot.

The team at rezzable have a live demo up and running using Unity3d talking to Opensim and getting some of the geometry and packages from the opensim server.

It is good to see this sort of experimentation happening and will lead to yet more people trying things out I think. I know there are more out there too so maybe there is some sort of unity3d coalition or opensource style federation that could get together and share to drive this forward?
As I have written before there are all sort of options(my most read post ever so it must be of interest) for how this can me mixed and matched, some of it is smoke an mirrors for user experience but none the less immersive.
The key is to consider other ways to achieve the goals of a particular virtual world expereince, from immersion to whether things need to be user created or not.
So well done Rezzable, and thankyou for sharing it so far

I actually get asked a lot about how Unity3d stacks up against Opensim/Second Life. This question is usually based on wanting to use a virtual world metaphor to replicate what Opensim/Second Life do but with a visually very rich browser based client such as Unity3d.
There is an immediate clash of ideas here though and a degree of understanding that Unity3d is not comparable in the usual sense with SecondLife/OpenSim.
At its very heart you really have to consider Opensim and Second Life as being about being a server, that happens to have a client to look at it. Unity3d is primarily a client that can talk to other things such as servers but really does not have to to be what it needs to be.
Now this is not a 100% black and white description but it is worth taking these perspectives to understand what you might want to do with either type of platform.
Everything from an Opensim style server is sent to all the clients that need to know. The shapes, the textures, the position of people etc. When you create things in SL you are really telling a server to remember some things and then distribute them. Clearly some caching occurs as everything is not sent every time, but as the environment is designed to be constantly changing in every way it has to be down to the server to be in charge.

Now compare this to an “level” created in Unity3d. Typically you build all the assets into the unity3d file that is delivered to the client. i.e. its a stand alone fully interactive environment. That may be space invaders, car racing, a FPS shooter or an island to walk around.

Each person has their own self contained highly rich and interactive environment, such as this example. That is the base of what Unity3d does. It understands physics, ragdoll animations, lighting, directional audio etc. All the elements that make an engaging experience with interactive objects and good graphic design and sound design.
Now as unity3d is a container for programming it is able to use network connectivity to be asked to talk to other things. Generally this is brokered by a type of server. Something has to know that 2,3 or many clients are in some way related.
The simplest example is the Smartfox server multiplayer island demo.
Smartfox is a state server. It remembers things, and knows how to tell other things connected to it that those things have changed. That does not mean it will just know about everything in a unity3d scene. It its down to developers and designer to determine what information should be shared.

In the case above a set of unity clients all have objects numbered 1, 2 and 3 in them. It may be a ball, a person and a flock of birds in that order.

When the first client moves object number 1 smartfox on your own remote web server somewhere in the ether is just told some basic information about the state of that ball. Its not here now its here. Each of the other unity clients is connected to the same context. Hence they are told by the server to find object number 1 and move it to the new position. Now in gaming terms each of those clients might be a completely different view of the shared system. The first 2 might be a first person view, the thirds might be a 2d top down map view which has no 3d element to it at all. All they know is the object they consider to be object number 1 has moved.
In addition object number 3 in this example never shares any changes with the other clients. The server does not know anything about it and in the unity3d client it claims no network resources.
This sort of game object is one that is about atmosphere, or one that has no real need to waste network sending changes around. In the island example form unity3d this is a flock of seagulls on the island. They are a highly animated, highly dynamic flock of birds, with sound, yet technically in each client they are not totally the same.
(Now SL and Opensim use principle this for things such as particles and clouds but that is designed in)
For each user they merely see and hear seagulls, they have a degree of shared experience.
Games constantly have to balance the lag and data requirements of sending all this information around versus things that add to the experience. If multiplayer users need to have a common point of reference and it needs to be precise then it needs to be shared. e.g. in a racing game, the track does not change for each person. However debris and the position of other cars does.
In dealing with a constantly changing environment unity3d is able to be told to dynamically load new scenes and new objects in that scene, but you have to design and decide what to do. Typically things are in the scene but hidden or generated procedurally. i.e. the flock of seagulls copies the seagull object and puts it in the flock.
One of the elements of dealing the network lag in shuffling all this information around is interpolation. Again in a car example typically if a car is travelling north at 100 mph there if the client does not hear anything about the car position for a few milliseconds it can guess where the car should be.
Very often virtual worlds people will approach a game client expecting a game engine to be the actual server packaged, like wise game focused people will approach virtual worlds as a client not a server.
Now as I said this is not black and white, but opensim and secondlife and the other virtual world runnable services and toolkits are a certain collection of middleware to perform a defined task. Unity3d is a games development client that with the right programmers and designers can make anything, including a virtual world.

*Update (I meant to link this in the post(thanks Jeroen Frans for telling me but hit send too early!)
Rezzable have been working on a unity3d client with opensim, specifically trying to extract the prims from opensim and create unity meshes.

Unity3d and voice is another question. Even in SL and Opensim voice is yet another server, it just so happens than who is in the voice chat with you is brokered by the the main server. Hence when comparing to unity3d again, you need a voice server, you need to programatically hook in what you want to do with voice.
As I have said before though, and as is already happening to some degree some developers are managing to blend thing such as the persistence of the opensim server with a unity3d client.
Finally in the virtual world context in trying to compare a technology or set of technologies we actually have a third model of working. A moderately philosophical point, but in trying use virtual worlds to create mirror worlds at any level will suffer from the model we are basing it on, name the world. The world is not really a server and we are not really clients. We are all in the same ecosystem, what happens for one happens for all.

Once again for my pitch at metameets I used a little bit of virtual world technology as a mental aid to help me figure out what it was I was going to say and in what order. I am finding thins an increasingly useful technique, so as this is the second time around for it I thought I would explain it again.
I created the presentation in the usual fashion a set of keynote/powerpoint slides, mostly because I had ones from other presentations that I wanted to thread in and re-use. Once I had the single threaded narrative sorted, and the slide in the right order a structure, for what is in effect a story, appeared.
In order to preserve this structure I took images from all the slides and put them into my local Opensim.
Once in there these simple flat panels take on a relationship to one another that just does not happen when you are flicking from slide to slide.

In the picture above the pitch really started at the back. The back row is the underpinning, an introduction. Seven related slides to go through at any pace, but ideally quite quickly.
Next is a challenging step forward, as the next row comes forward. To support that is a another row, which is held to the side a little as it is really optional. In this case its a slide about how it feels to attach things to your avatar. That allows free expression, no script but just a memory of a feeling.
Then the next row is group into three groups. This is a change of pace, a set of ideas with an example in each of the three.
Then the penultimate row as you come forward is the tying it all together picture. Ideally by the time I get here the other 3 ideas have started to make a little sense.
Then there is the final slide to finish on.
Rather than sit and read the slides or over rehearse I just had this image on my iphone of the layout. It is enough that I can see the sort of pages I had created and when presenting I can think where I am in the flow. So if there is some sort of distruption, or an idea that comes to mind whilst talking I can think quickly as to where it will fit in or if it has missed its chance.
This is really just storyboarding meets mindmapping, but the multiple dimensions of it and the visual memory of having been there is incredibly powerful and I recommend anyone try and structure some thoughts or ideas or keypoints in some way like this to see how it feels.
Does anybody else do this, I would love to hear stories about it ?

I have now had this conversation several times with people about the potential future that a mix of open source and open minded development may bring to the virtual world industry. Much of what is happening seems to be driven by some of the direction Second Life has taken or is taking, though not so much to follow it into corporate lockdown but to breakout and provide the flexibility and creativity that is needed for the next generation of virtual worlds.
In the early days of 2006 many of us said it would be great to be able to run a Second Life server, our own one under out control. That has taken a while to start to emerge, but it has emerged as an expensive product aimed at corporate IT departments. Luckily the opensource community had rallied and created the excellent Opensim. This ticks all the boxes of being able to be run locally, be run in the cloud, be provided as a service. So we have an extensible virtual world server ready to be built upon.
The other component missing was a more controllable and rich interface. Yes there is the Second Life Snowglobe open source client but the need to certify and lockdown variants to align with the product needs for Second Life means that lots of the flexibility is lost. Likewise the initial open source Linden based client was under a GPL licence which caused all sorts of development to not happen at the time it really could have done with it.
This is where Unity3d steps in I believe. It was Rob Smart who first started to show me this way back. Unity3d is a great front end, very flexible in how you build games and content for it.
This was a movie form back in September 2008, using a message from Second Life to several unity clients to create a cube. This is loose integration, telling one place something has happened and letting the other place get on with it.

Unity3d has a plugin architecture too. It runs in a browser or deploys to application platforms like mac and windows. The visuals can be made very good very quickly too. Unity3d needs a server of some sort to operate as a multiuser platform (though it does do some peer 2 peer) hence applications like Smartfox are ideal for producing Unity multiplayer and MMO style games.
However Opensim has all the other layers of things needed to maintain a virtual world. It has assets databases, chat, positional awareness, server side scripting (as does Second Life that is was originally based on of course).
So we have an extensible and easy to get hold of Unity3D client engine, and extensible and easy to get hold of Server/Persistence VW engine in Opensim. There may well be challenges in making the two understand one another but with the flexibility both sides of the equation that makes them very solvable. This is a high level view, Rob has some more detail here on the challenges. Add in some interoperation definition with Vastpark to help bind the two and make some mappings.
Throw into the mix an open minded avatar wizard such as Evolver. There we can build avatars that we know definitely can be dropped into Unity3d.
So…..I create an Evolver avatar, dropped as a resource bundle into a web deployed Unity3d client that tells the opensim server where I am in the coordinate system, and which bundle I am using. Other people with a Unity3d client see the rich detailed avatar and the shiny Unity3d environment. However we do not have to stick to that one client. Other people using a Second Life style client see the Second Life style rendering of the world?
This is already happening in some respects, the Iphone application Touch Life lets you logon to the public Second Life. In a sort of bugblatter beast of traal moment everyone can see you, but you cant see them. You navigate your avatar around the map, have full chat, inventory and economy access, but a very different view of the world to everyone else. (Of course Unity3d runs well on an Iphone too, so imagine that as an extension to Touch Life?)
Once there is an acceptance that there can be more that one view of the data, one where people without the full equipment can still see what is going on and participate things get a lot easier to consider. Whilst a gaming assumption tends to be we all need the same view at the same speed in order to be able to have balanced gameplay (lag gets you killed) in collaborative spaces, education, meetings and art galleries this is less of an issue.
As the parts of the jigsaw come together over the next year the ability to have the same experience will re-emerge.

Yesterday the enterprise 2.0 conference saw the official release and announcements relating to Second Life Enterprise and of course featuring some preferred content in the form of Rivers Run Red’s Immersive Workspace and more to come via the Work Marketplace. It is interesting to see this happen both at something like an enterprise 2.0 conference and focussed as a packaged product in the way it is.
Back in April 2006 thru to Dec 2006 (which seems a very long while ago now) we said to one another as we (those early eightbars) realised that there was a huge scope for internal corporate communication…. wouldn’t this be great behind our firewall?
By September 2006 (after the first Wimbledon in Second Life) the US based CIO office had realised the potential and a few of us from places not just in the US ended up on that growing project to understand SL and all the other platforms and their implications to an internal corporate audience. This also started to lead to the more commercial based business unit forming, which interestingly is now part of the CIO office according the communications out of IBM.
This journey and the things that happened on the way (good and bad) all form part of the story I share with people in various ways including the in progress book on the subject.
Linden Lab focussing on enterprise and producing a product, however it is priced and packaged is an important further catalyst to this industry, one that those of us in IBM, Cisco, Sun etc. started to generate corporate and public interest in through our patronage. However this is now happening (unlike in 2006) in an era that has very many more potential direct competitors. many have been there for a while but will now be dropping into even more invitation to tender conversations, Proton Media, Forterra Olive, Teleplace, web.alive…. Equally there will be an increasing drive in take up of the hosted and self hosting services based on Opensim (SecondPlaces, ReactionGrid, Rezzable and SimHost ). Other platforms and standards such as Vastpark, or Wonderland for those who want to still explore and drive forward and develop things for themselves and get a step up on the packages. Services such as Venuegen, specialized in providing a particular quick access service also start to take a share of the market.
It is of course a huge market, business/enterprise communication relates to every employee in every company that has any form of electronic or remote communication. Like email, web and increasingly instant messaging and voip and social media in general it is essential business addresses the communication gaps we have generated. All these options may be confusing, but just pick one and get on with it!
I also still expect an actual games company to realize that their middleware and massive scaling and runtime abilities can be applied to a spin off market. So rather that enterprise business trying to figure out how to use games, games will figure out how to use enterprise business. With some of the developments this week too such as Unity3d becoming free to develop with and also Unreal 3 doing the same to some extent the future looks very rosy and very interesting.
However….. remember that the problems and challenges are not wholly technical. We are dealing here with social and cultural change. Something else I have experienced both the good and bad of and happy to share if you need to talk about the implications to your business, industry or life.