First, what is our general scope of activities?

We design 3D online virtual areas, we make virtual objects, we build virtual areas, we run 3D online scenes for visitors and we incorporate some social web features in real-time to make it most engaging.

Design

The design part is still good old paper, pen and flipcharts. We are seeing a need for more activities to engage users rather than just drop them in interesting spaces to explore and chat with friends. We have some new ideas rolling out now on Heritage Key for quests and virtual field trips for educators. Part of the design is to also share achievements beyond the virtual area to the broader web social action via things like facebook apps, wall postings.  Check out the contest for winning £1,000 to get an idea of how this is working.

Make

This is about creating high quality virtual objects that can be combined later into complete scenes. Main things needed here are textures, meshes, animations, sounds and scripts. There are quite a few tool options for creating these individual elements such as photoshop, maya,  zbrush, qavimator and many more.  Unity3D has a studio set for object creation as does the opensource Second Life Viewer and the SL-compatible third party viewers that modify and extend that code.

Build

Once the discrete elements are ready, then they need to be put into a 3D space for build. The 3D space also has land to be shaped and other virtual world features to consider. Unity3D allows for this build work to be done offline, where the Second Life model is online connected to the server, in our case our own OpenSim grids. Unity handles, presents 3D meshes, where OpenSim is based on its own class of pre-configured meshes called “primitives” (aka “prims” which is why we love prims).

Run

Once the build is ready then it can be published to visitors. The major issue here is dealing with changes after the scene is published. This is where the Second Life model is strongest in allowing for changes to be streamed out to all the connected users. Someone changes anything in an area or rezzes a new object and then it gets sent quickly out to all the people nearby. Unity deals with content in a more static way and also runs game physics locally on the users pc. OpenSim will deal with the concurrency where Unity needs to connect to a service, such as smartfox server,  to deliver the MMO side.  The big opportunity with Unity vs SL-compatible viewers (we suggest Imprudence btw) is to deploy 3D scenes to the browser and mobile devices (iphone, ipad and android).

Social

Then of course we need to deliver all the Social elements including avatar identity and communications for chat, IM and voice. For both games and virtual area access there is also a need for rights, roles and points of some kind.  Ideally the social elements should be available across the web, mobile touch points and integrated with social networks (where possible and not annoying). It looks like Freeswitch is a good enough voice solution even though it is not spatial. Drupal is our core community solution (simple diagram for our tech layout here).

The OpenSim plus Unity3D Issues and Strategy

On the one hand, it would be useful to make everything around an OpenSim region. This seems to give us the greatest flexibility for content creation within the existing limitations of minimum target graphics cards, bandwidth and computers. Actually I think more interactive, smaller scenes are currently more engaging than larger, more expansive areas. It seems to be more interesting for users to see a lot of intimate detail within the context of “placeness” than have them flying across bigger online spaces. This also helps to push users closer to each other and increase social activities.  (see my notes on 3D Web about key features here) Certainly for iPhone, Android and even pc’s wifi access, tighter scenes will run better for more users.

On the other hand, the SL-compatible viewers do not deal with real meshes currently. Although OpenSim can hold the mesh assets, the viewers cannot show them.  Meshes from Unity3D studio and other standard tools are easier to make more photo-realistic as far as I can tell. There are also tons of existing meshes out there to use as parts for scenes.  Yet, getting to high quality complete builds also requires workmanship in either environment and each has its own eccentricities and I guess we currently understand OpenSim a lot better. The definition/boundaries of a single region at 256m x 256m isn’t a major constraint until better physics can be deployed.

The other big open question is how to deal with the avatar in Unity3D. In OpenSim it is possible to customize the avatar with skins, textures and attachments. I think this is also possible to make customizable avatars within Unity, but is quite a bit of work and will make the Unity scene a lot bigger. Unity3D for the browser plug-in also also tied to the browser cache which is a pain. Scenes will reload on a refresh and you cannot create specific content folders to allow for content caching independent of the session.

Unity also does not stream media onto objects–so watching video, slideshows won’t work currently from a live streaming source. Although you can play media if it is shipped as part of the scene contents.  Then again, you can have a stream window in your browser next to the Unity scene if that were useful.

So it all comes back to the fundamental question — how big a deal is using a web app to connect to an engaging 3D virtual online area? My sense is that it is more about the ultimate user experience than making them download something in a few minutes (ok, a massive download is a show-stopper for mainstream users).  It would be a large, challenging undertaking to shove something like the SL-viewer into the browser completely–and what would you really gain vs just making a new generation web app purposely built for OpenSim? Seems like a lot of effort for little real gain. People download things like skype,  openoffice even large videos because they perceive the value in having it running.

Is then our current approach to using Unity3D for an on-ramp to the more immersive offerings still valid. Show them what they are missing and then invite them in? Even if that means the Unity browser sessions will have kind of  monotonous avatars? It seems so today. So we are looking at mashing the concurrency of the Unity sessions with the SL-compatible viewers over OpenSim regions.  In this way people can share some parts of the experience, see who is near them and communicate. Again our goal is to get out to mainstream audiences and we know they are all already on browsers, so this is an important step toward them. The concern is to still pull them into something unique and engaging.

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I was hoping to keep the list to 5, but I think following seem to be the 6 main roadblocks on why mainstream online users are not diving straight from Farmville, GTA, WoW into OpenSim-powered Virtual Online Experiences:

1. HOT ISSUE: Hard to Access

I was with some Noobies the other day and it was painful to watch them try to get oriented on using their avatar.  They were not gamers and the whole 3D spatial thing was a big shock. I was about to puke on the floor as they spun their camera all over.  However, after about 45 minutes helping them get around and customize their avatars, they seemed to get the main ideas. Some people think this is part of the “1 hour” experience challenge, but actually it is the first 10 minutes where they get so frustrated they close it all down and swear about how impossible it is.  I guess even with 3D movies, people complain about getting headaches and you don’t need to navigate anywhere.  The reworked SL viewer, while usable-ish, really is not an ideal solution. We are hoping our plans for using Unity3D will help here.

Even beyond all the tech issues, the people I was with had a lot of trouble with figuring out where to go and what to do. They wanted web pages to explain it all (which we even have and with video tutorials), even when there signs and info inside the virtual areas. They really just have too much coming at them all at once.

And people are wary about downloading new stuff–even if they have skype, java, virus protection, air apps  and other stuff on their machines. People don’t even like to get new browser plug-ins, which is way Unity3D is trying to get pre-loaded as part of Chrome.

Nonetheless, I think people would deal with this HOT ISSUE if point 2 below were  clear to them–>

2. HOT ISSUE: Compelling Content

In general, the gripe from the uninitiated is that there is not enough to do and/or that the content created is low quality.  The content in total though, is probably not any worse than the rest of the web. Really what people seem to be saying is that they can get content other ways and dealing with the 3D, immersive is not worth the hassle (see point 1).  I call this factor the “so what?” which challenges the early adopters to answering the reason for why something is interesting to these followers.

We have a lot of new, amazing content on the Heritage Key grid–more than 6-8 hours worth of high quality fun learning stuff.  We are also running live events regularly. But people don’t know what they are missing and then when they give a try they hit point 1…

3. Improve Performance

Once you can get Noobies over the line to being at least basic users, then they will start to hit some of the performance issues.  Even though some causes for crashes are due to firewall or are bandwidth related and require other types of admin support.

While OpenSim has made a lot of progress in the last year in terms of how well it works, there is still a long way to go. I am sure a better matched viewer would also make the complete experience better. We can design around a lot of the weaknesses, but frankly a better physics engine would also be…a lot better. Improving the concurrency at reasonable content load will also help a bit.

The avatars are also still quite limited and stiff.  In the first instance this isn’t a major turn-off, but certainly more fluid, smarter and more realistic avatars will increase interest.

4. More Interesting Places to Visit

People will need to have a stronger sense of the broader, more varied set of experiences out there for them. The only way this can really scale out to the web is by having more and more content across more and more grids made by more and more people.  It will need to be more than just empty regions to get people engaged.

5. Increased Features

OpenSim is short on a few key features right now — micro-payments and voice in particular. Sure there are ways around this, but it isn’t that easy or works in a very robust way.  There needs to be a larger developer community thriving as part of the ecosystem.

6. Movement Between Grids

Once each Grid is more capable, then people would probably find it exciting to move between them. Moving between grids is a lot more complicated and potential more rewarding than zapping between web pages.  The “closed world” destination is just too constrained.  We are not sure that hypergrid is the right kind of solution as it doesn’t give the grid owners the right set of management or security tools.

Massive Numbers of Users

My guess is that there will be 600 million people around the world that  by 2012 could potentially access 3D Web experiences. It will be really hard to sit next to all of them and pull them across the first 10 minutes of their virtual skill and orientation ladder.

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From our view, OpenSim could become the Apache of the 3D Web serving up 3D scenes to hundreds of millions of daily users in the near future.

Below are my notes on OpenSource: what it is, why it is changing online and how it has become so significant a force.  Plus, how people make money around Open Source–which is not necessarily free or a charity effort at all. Also watch the short video below where I hit some of the key points on why we are investing so much time and effort into using, developing and trying to make money with our mix of OpenSim, Drupal and more.

Watch video above: Jonathan Himoff, CEO Rezzable talks about why Open Source Software is so important to online innovation and the 3D Web

Not Just About Coding—Using Something That Works

We come at the Open Source topic from the user side, not the coding side. Wouldn’t it be great if software just did everything we wanted it to? Well, that never happens. We want to make new user experiences without having to deal with the technical issues—just in the way people make website and don’t have to first create their own database application etc.

Using a big software application, especially if it is core to your operations, is making a relationship with the developer. This is more critical in innovative, uncharted areas–like virtual online.  And it is not just about the present (unless the software is good enough as it is) it is about where the development roadmap is heading, the people leading the efforts and how fast progress can be made.

When software works,  it keeps working without fatigue, without rusting.  New hardware often makes old software perform better too. So really it is about enhancing and making applications meaningfully better over time. People can keep challenging the software with new uses, many of which can be accommodated and some which need new code to run.

Open Source Software is Seriously Big

If you have a computer you are already using Open Source. For people not familiar with the software industry and online it might be a surprise to note the following data-points:

• Apache celebrates 15th anniversary and proudly boasts 112 Million servers running the software, something like more than 50% of all servers
• Java went 100% open in 2007
• Firefox / Mozilla went open in 1998 and is by far the most popular browser today
• Linux released by several companies including Red Hat (market cap $5.0 billion+), Debian
• Google purchase the initial developers of Open Source Android and now their new browser Chrome is based on Chromium which is partially OSS.
• MySQL – coveted and purchased by Oracle for billions
• More than 225,000 open source projects on SourceForge with tens of thousands of downloads per day.
• OpenSim has something like 500,000 lines of code – Ulysses by James Joyce has 22,941 sentences in it.
• Drupal a web content management (WCMS) and publishing system has 500,000 installs and runs the Economist, the Onion, NASA and many university sites. Check nice whitepaper by Acquia on why Open Source is best.

What is Open Source Software?

The code can be read openly.  You can see the lines of code and comments. Developers can review, study and understand how the applications and modules function. It is also possible to make your own changes to the code and then (try) to compile it and run in your flavour.

Yet, OSS is not necessarily free to use or without usage restrictions. You can’t just do anything you want with opensource code – just like you can’t read a new book and then go off on your own and make a movie out of it.

Opensource is developed by a community with vested interests in using the software and having it work well. Collaboration with a community of developers and users can be organized and is not necessarily anarchy.

OSS is a very different way of solving problems, designing solutions and developing software. It is done out in the public. It is global collaboration at web-speed. There is also a balance between what the coders write and what the users contribute and each party gets access to the codebase for their participation.

OSS is released under a variety of licences such as GPL and BSD which restrict usage and how code can be modified and republished.  According to Black Duck GNU GPL licence is the most widely used.  There are a lot of commercial and philosophical points on why certain licences are better or worse. There is also a hot debate regarding Free  and Open Source Software.

More info on Open Source:

• the Open Source Initiative
• Opensource.com news and articles
• list of top 50 OSS blogs
• IBM describes OSS
• City of San Francisco goes only Open Source
• GPL vs BSD blog post by Paul Ramsay

Why Open Source is the Way to Go –

• More Users Faster
  Users, especially early adopters, seem to jump on good open source a lot faster than proprietary software. More users means more attention to bugs, more comments on roadmap and more stress testing.
• Share the Load, Build Momentum
  Making great software take a lot of time and an enormous amount of effort. Many people using and working on  improvements is better than a small team in stuffed into corporate cubicles somewhere. Typically there is a core coding team, but also there should be lots and lots of other developers and users involved. It is an extended team activity and leverages the web in a great way. The developers can get massive, immediate feedback and then make rapid updates further building trust and momentum within the community. Users are part of the process—not just the recipients of what comes out of it.
• More Flexible Architecture, Faster/Smaller Iterations
  As OSS has a collaborative approach built-in to the development process, the systems should have more modular design to allow people to work independently on functions without impact each other or degrading the core performance. This also enables faster/smaller new code releases. Each release then is also easier to debug and track uplift.
• Easier Integration
  Integration is more than just pushing XML files around. Complex online systems share data and resources in more detailed often delicate ways. Replicating data is not efficient either and impacts scalability. OSS allows for new small applications to be built into the code, often as modulars that can be shared also,  or accessing data in tables already existing.
• Focus on Core Performance
  Ultimately there should be a set of core functions that should be common across all the use cases. People can then work on making  those critical areas work better—ie serve pages faster, be more secure, scale better. This then benefits all the users significantly.
• Create an Ecosystem
  While the OSS might be free/low cost there are still many opportunities to add commercial value and build value in a business that has expertise around deploying, running, customizing, integration and creating content. As a network effect, more users lifts the benefits of each participating in the community.
• Less Risky to Use
  You always have access to the code you are running. While it might not be practical for non-technical people to do anything with this, it does mean that you have the opportunity to pay for changes or at least port your content over to an alternative in the future. You are not at the mercy of a single software publisher—many of whom are bought and sold or become so profitable as to neglect the interests of their users. I don’t know that in all cases using OSS is necessarily cheaper, although it certainly seems to be, but as a user or a business you have a lot more control of what you put into it.

How to Make Money Around Open Source Software

The main point is you can add value to something that already works and performs, it is a foundation for your new intellectual property. You don’t need to create a web page server to make a great website—use Apache and then focus on what you can do best. Your starting point is much further than if you had to build everything or if you had to pay lots of money to get the basic online stack (like LAMP).

Depending on how mature the code is, you should prepared to invest some effort in the Community – it doesn’t have to be writing code, could be in using software, flagging issues, reporting bugs and also giving active coders good use cases.

Then understand where you want to add value and build a business in an open source ecosystem

• Premium modules
• Services – at a lot of different points
• Support
• Using a mix of opensource in unique ways to do amazing stuff – like 3D Web!

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3D graphical representation of digital information that is interactive and delivered within an online social environment.

The 3D Web is a lot more than a single virtual world. It uses some of the virtual world technologies, but goes way beyond to integrate with web and mobile.  It is a new way to engage with information and people across the global internet.  A lot of major forces are coming together now to enable the 3D Web to go mainstream. Following is a short video were I outline some of the key points about the 3D Web as we see them. Below are my more detailed notes on why that is happening, what is the 3D Web and how big are some of the opportunities.

Above: Watch Video Jon Himoff, CEO Rezzable Describes 3D Web and why it will be a serious factor online

3D is the Hot topic

The movie Avatar is the biggest grossing film ever, pulling in more than $2 Billion in box office (the franchise is planning sequels etc). 3D Movies (including Alice in Wonderland, Clash of the Titans, Train Your Dragon)  in the US market were more than 33% of all box office sales since mid-December. You can bet that there are a lot of new films being planned for this amazing format now. Some interesting detail on how Dreamworks makes 3D movies.  (check Intl 3D Society for industry info).

Beyond the big screen of course is your home television, where 3D is also headed fast and furious. Expect to see a lot of new  consumer electronics and digital cameras for capturing 3D and sharing it back online (some gadgets now for sale). Samsung is betting big that the market will be 85 million 3D televisions units sold in 2015. The 2010 Masters Golf tournament had a special 3D broadcast so there are even some experiments for 3D native content.

I think people love 3D because it is so much richer. You can absorb a huge amount of detailed, stunning, energizing, detailed information very quickly. Your brain is working a lot harder to assemble all this data into something comprehensible.  It is a much more stimulating time. Once you get into3D,  consuming flat content is like looking back at old Polaroid pictures.

Yet, it won’t be reruns of “I love Lucy” alone (ok, I would actually watch that) that will people will want to see after getting all their kit sorted in their home. This new format will also need new types of content (Cameron is urging TV to get into gear and start making new stuff).

For online consumers, the drip feed of single thread content is too slow=boring.  Active online consumers already don’t have the patience to sit passively still and slowly swallow 10 minutes blocks of shows in-between tedious ads. Already people are augmenting their tv viewing with twitter and facebook to make it more dynamic and social. They want to drive their own action. The want to be the stars of their own shows. They want to get to specific or related content fast.  They want to have a lot of chats, interactions flowing as part of their viewing time. It is a tough audience with increasingly complex demands to meet.

Collision of Gaming and Social Web

Games already grab the attention of millions of committed users. Online games are of course interactive and offer something to do online. It is a seriously big business. World of Warcraft (WoW) has more than 14 million customers paying about $10 per month. WoW owner Activision (ATVI) is blowing its numbers posting $1.3 Billion in revenues for the last Quarter. ATVI has a $13 Billion market cap today.  Farmville, a rather thin social game,  has attracted more than 75 million players–Zynga boast more than 230 million players across its games.  Zynga may even have an enterprise value itself of $5 Billion. Then there are the console games which have the kind of dedicated fans that sit out in front of stores waiting for new releases. (on its first day, GTA IV sold 3.6 million copies and generated $310 million in sales.)

• ITunes is projected to grow from $6 Billion in 2009 to $29 Billion in 2013 — and a huge portion of activity and revenue is from games.
• IBM is rolling out a corporate leadership training game called “CityOne“

Aside from the fun of playing them,  online games are also very social. One of the drivers for Zynga is the integration with Facebook to not only attract new users, but to give a sense of status back to the participants. So social is not just about meeting/making friends, it is also about staking and enhancing your identity in the online realm.

Game guru Koster teases out the impact of social games as: ” The value in these networks lies in the connectivity to friends, the easy distribution of content across the social graph, the web accessibility.”

The potential of the 3D Web is to deliver then the next level of rich media that takes the best of gaming and social web–but also delivers this for mainstream content (ie not the ole ultra-violence first-person shooter, porno, gambling or fantasy role play).

What is the 3D Web?

Elements of the 3D Web have already been imagined in science fiction and key parts are out there on the web today.  It is more than a lone virtual world–it is an ever-growing web of content that can be viewed via 3D graphics and eventually in 3D.  This will be a lot more complex than clicking between websites and browsing pages or watching videos.

In the near future, the best of the 3D Web will probably be described as combining all of the following factors:

• 3D Graphics and 3D
  3D scenes that you can move into in high quality and very detailed. It will need to be more than cartoons and 2.5 kid stuff to grab mainstream users. 3D graphics, in contrast to 2D photos,  are like videos you can walk (or fly) into in some way. It will also be possible to present these scenes in 3D to users with new viewing software– the content is already good to go for the glasses and just needs new viewing software.
• Synthetic Places
  There already are streets, cities, locations modelled from real or created new that have a digital geography and are bound by a sort of gravity and physics. People get to know them and understand areas within them just in the way you would know a public park or mountain trail. They can get crowded or be empty. When you log-off these synthetic places are still there and evolving. When you come back they may be different. Or they may disappear.  I like the term “Placeness” which sort of captures the real and the ephemeral nature of these digital venues populated by real people.
• Your Avatar
  This is your navigation, your presence and your guide to the virtual online areas. You control your Avatar like a sort of puppet. It is very tedious now to push it along with a keyboard and mouse. Our trusted computer companion the Mouse is on the verge of extinction.  New natural movement interfaces like Natal from Microsoft and Omek will remove that strain from users by allowing control from simple human movements. Further, the look of your avatar can be customized to reflect your real personality (or not). Personalizing avatars is also a big digital content sales opportunity that some are valuing in the $billions already.
• Real-time Social
  You are connecting with people in real-time across the web. It is much more immediate than swatting messages around the net. Meet/make friends and also establish yourself within the global communities that you want to dip-in/dip-out of.   The 3D Web pulls together the visualization, light interactions and status factors in a completely new way.  For many this phenomenon is very threatening, but also very liberating. It will open the entire world to itself — fast and dramatic.
• Useful & Varied Things To Do
  Mainstream users are seeking activities online that help them do something meaningful. And they also want enough variety within easy access to give them the freedom to dip-in and out of experiences. Hot online transactions today include things like tracking news, buying travel services, buying media and dating.  This is a key distinction from the gaming world or virtual worlds as they are today. People will use the 3D Web to add value to their real life and help do important things better.  Just in the way that people us Amazon to buy stuff or Expedia to book travel, the 3D Web will offer more efficient ways to do things online. As an example at Heritage Key you can learn about history in an entertaining way and then even plan a trip to a real world site.  Modern life in 2010 and beyond will be increasingly complicated (and maybe dangerous?) and the visualization, interaction and social capabilities of the 3D Web will be the platform to survive.
• Easy to Use
  Within the next 2-3 years all the clumsy, stumbling technical issues will be solved somehow. Already we see that software like OpenSim has made major progress in the last 12 months. The more people use it, the more chance things will get sorted. Then the complicated parts of the technology will be invisible. People can access the 3D Web across pc, mobile, tv.  Also the big improvements in natural movement control will allow users to enjoy their online time more.
• New Types of Content/Experiences
  It is a more complex environment and needs a more goal-oriented path to keep people from getting overwhelmed. Just because it is there, does not mean people will stay around any more than they hang-out on web pages after they scan them.  The 3D Web offers more and visitors will demand more, just in the same way you have an expectation that on vacation the real world place you visit should be better then the one you departed from.

Net Net: the results of the best of the 3D Web will be Immersive. This is where a switch in your head is released and you believe in the digital content that you are using. The engagement here is very high. It has a personal impact way beyond anything on the web today.

Massive Market Opportunities

• Reach 600 million connected users by 2013
  1.7 Billion PCs in 2013 and 1.82 Billion mobiles means probably more than 600 million users will have access to good enough systems and connectivity to tap the 3D Web usefully.  Intel is betting big on 3D Internet: Sean Kohl: “With the availability of all this computing power, we’re only beginning to exploit it. Now we’re adding more intelligence and more capability.”  That total market will continue to grow dramatically (add the 85 Million 3D televisions also!). More market statistics on the 3D Web here.
• New Online Use Cases
  The 3D Web will enable completely new things online especially around groups of people enjoying shared experiences in real-time. This will change how education is delivered and open new opportunities for people to work together on projects.  Visualizations will also be very exciting as well as role play and simulations. In general it is all the same kinda stuff that spurred the internet forward in the early 1990′s but in a more complex, intense format.
• Premium Customers
  The quality 3D offerings will be something that people will be willing to pay money for. There just won’t be that much good stuff and there will be tremendous demand.
• New Companies
  This is a fast moving space. New companies can focus in on creating new users experiences and tools to answer the challenges.  It is still amazing to remind yourself that Google and Amazon are only around for 15 years. Facebook was started in 2005. There are tons of 3d Web opportunities across technology, infrastructure and new content experiences.

The 3D Web is the newest Frontier

We have taken the first steps down the 3D Web road with Heritage Key.It is a new online community with a totally unique virtual experience. We think it can be the basis for a new range of “real-time, online communities.”

From our side, we are focused on delivering a powerful mix of educational and entertaining content (edu-tainment?). You can transport yourself to the Valley of the Kings and enter King Tut’s tomb. You can understand how small a tomb this is and then go to a surreal cosmic gallery to see dozens of the most incredible ancient world artefacts every discovered. Your only other chance to see the artefacts better is to actually go to Cairo and visit the museum. The best pieces of the discovery do not travel as part of any of the Tut touring exhibitions.

Online you can get up close to see the details with your friends or participate in a live lecture. And the virtual environment lets you even travel across time to go back to reconstruction of a day-in-the-life of King Tut (check our highlights video here). You can wander a stately home in Amarna and get a feel for how the Nile supported the vibrant Egyptian culture for thousands of years. Watch Heritage Key coverage on CNN here. The market for people that buy culture travel services and related media is global and large. We think Heritage Key can add something useful to actual visits as well as helping people learn about why the ancient world is relevant to their lives today.

I would point out that the main take-away on Heritage Key is that we are trying to mix the online community which has the broadest reach via web and mobile with the 3D, virtual experience which has the deepest possible engagement. It is early days on this, but we can see that the combination makes sense and has huge potential.

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We have been working on this test now for about 4 months and results are very promising.  (Stay Tuned or RSS’d: also here as we will post the running Unity test shortly so you can see for yourself how it really works. )

Starting Point

Unity + OpenSim Test Results = A Good On-ramp Now

My initial view is that Unity is a very serious option. It works with OpenSim. We can use our OpenSim content without having to rework it at all. It is also really different from a Web App like the SL-viewer–and that is both good and bad. Unity isn’t trying to be that big a solution, but is more of a toolset.

I think in the short-term Unity can provide a great on-ramp to our amazing King Tut, Stonehenge and other content-rich virtual online areas. Many more people will take a look at our stuff, if all they need to do is click a web page and get into it. This way they will know what they are missing–from tasting what is out there in the richer experience.

Further, we should be able to do a lot more exciting stuff than the poky 2.5D Farmville areas (ok poky olé Zynga  is worth $5 Billion = a lot more billions than WoW). Which is one of the reasons why game-gurus like Ralph Koster say “you will have to be on Facebook even if you don’t want to be.” We should be able to engage users as well as have a more accessible entry point from both browser and Facebook.

Is Unity the basis for a robust, 3D immersive viewer? Dunno atm, and maybe that doesn’t matter either as something like WebGL is perhaps the ultimate nirvana on this topic anyway and all we need to do is wait around a few years for that to be usable? On the other hand, Unity also supports iPhone (until Apple either flashes them out or buys them) , so that opens up a lot of options for repurposing assets into premium content. And in the web, who has time to wait around?

The first objective was to present existing OpenSim content in some useful way inside the browser.  The graphics are quite close to what we get via the SL 1.23 viewer.  As the physic are on the Unity client, the performance over the web is very snappy by comparison.

Unity + OpenSim How It Might Work

In general the Unity viewer can be connected to an OpenSim region just like an SL-compatible viewer. It needs a bunch of modules to deal with the content as well which is where the dev effort was needed. That is the part we are still working on. Unity reads mesh information so the prims need to be converted.  For our test we have generated a static scene from a Region, but in future that could be dynamic.

Of course the interesting part here is that visitors using a Unity viewer and visitors using a SL-type viewer can actually be in the same region at the same time. I can see how we could also connect iPhone users to the same region.  The user experiences will be different depending on the viewer and connection, but the real-time social will be delivered. For example people could do sort of quests together regardless of how they connect to the content and then we could send status and badges over to Facebook.

I think we could be (finally) heading toward the heterogeneous avatar environment envisioned in Snow Crash’s metaverse area the Street. This area for those of you un-initiated, sorta like the Matrix, has levels of realism, interaction based upon how the users connect. It breaks the constraint of the lowest common dominator and opens more interaction across more people. This is a major hurdle for market adoption today (see my notes on top 5 issues here).

Next Set of Unity + OpenSim Issues to Look At

Our prototype/test covered the presentation of prims and sculpted prims and results looks good. Our next wave will work on things like: Avatars, scripted interactions, pushing into Unity strengths, improving lighting as well as connecting up things like chat, IM, user log-ins.

One of the big opportunities is to be able to use mesh objects directly with Unity. From a content creation side this is a huge lift in productivity and photo-realism capability.

More Images from the Unity Test:

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Go Check it out,  OpenSim works.

OpenSim works, is getting better and will be the future of the 3D Web.

First thing to point out is that we are using OpenSim in combination with Drupal as the core user and even grid admin system.  So your own usage may not be the same if you are just working with OpenSim all by itself. We also have about 10 servers cranked-up to support all of this on a cluster sharing 50mb bandwidth.  Info on the tech layout here.

In general OpenSim has come quite a long way in the last year. There is still quite some road in front to get it to be a sort of 3D Web Server like Apache. It is very complex–maybe too much so, but nonetheless it works. And it works a lot better than it did a year ago.

The greatest strength of OpenSim is that it is opensource and has a smart enough set of committed developers beating on it.  We have been luck enough to work with a few of them and meet even a few more.  Because it is opensource we have been able to create our own integrations and services around the core.

The core dvelopers have cleared-up a lot of real problematic stuff like cross-region boarders, assets vanishing, general caching/grey-goo. You can give folders now! The regions are snappy. The build issues are still there on some level, but the workarounds are also better understood. The most painful build issues lately have been with scripting (and not overloading scripting).

The use cases that Rezzable is focused on, try to aim for the what OpenSim does right now and not steer directly into known gaps. So, again you own use cases might trigger different issues.

Below is my list of Top 10 Issues we see with OpenSim —

OpenSim Issue 1: Physics is still weak

Physics engine options are not that good right now. This causes a lot of problems and work-arounds.  Shooting, dropping, collisions and driving are basically to be avoided.  The physics engine also seems to create a lot of issues with the bounding boxes and sometimes you can’t walk through doors easily or phantom prims get solid-ish.

The obvious solution here is to find a way to plug-in better physics engines. It would seem that OpenSim will support this, but so far I have not heard of anything implemented in the last year that changes the performance.

OpenSim Issue 2: SL Hangovers

OpenSim seems (and we really try to avoid most of this stuff) to have a lot of SL-oriented functions especially around land, parcels that are more interesting to SL-copycat virtual worlds than our interest in 3D online experiences.  Net Net is the core code isn’t as performance-oriented as we would like to see it.

The biggest gap vs SL is that OpenSim does not have a commerce feature and of course no $L which is still a trusted micro-currency.

OpenSim Issue 3: Perms are Not There

We did quite a bit of work to implement a fairly basic permissions concept, mainly using Drupal roles. This works fine for Heritage Key, and we also have a separate “sub-grid” for build work. On the Rezzable grid it will require a lot more manual switch-flipping to have quasi-group/collaborative control on access and prim-perms. We have not implemented any commerce concepts (and may not either). I think the whole issue of perms/DRM needs a more complete architecture to avoid the issues beleaguering/demoralizing SL content creators.

OpenSim Issue 4: Lack of Docs

I suppose if you like to read code, you should have all you want with opensource OpenSim–but for those of you, like me, that like something with pictures and some summary, we are out of luck. It is more of a Ouija-board process with the developers to understand what it is, does, might be. And of course things are also changing as new releases flow through–but getting a roadmap certainly would require a crystal ball and some incense.

OpenSim Issue 5: Admin Tools

We have made quite a few tools to track users, manage resources. I think we should even be able to share these (once we write-up what they do somehow).  I have seen that there are some basic tools also floating around to make some reports/alerts, but these are quite simple.  I would hope to see more user info and logging–especially relating to inventory and server memory.

OpenSim Issue 6: Voice

Vivox apparently has a OpenSim implementation. I have not seen it, but the gang at IBM seems to be messing with it. It would seem to make sense that it works. It is not free, so there is more of a cost consideration than a functional one.  We have been more focused on lectures and talk-show use cases and are using skype-to-stream solutions which works fine and also has the advantage of being broadcast to the web.

OpenSim Issue 7: Mesh Support / SL Viewer

Being able to deploy mesh assets is also a gap on the SL grid (although not on Blue Mars). Main points about this are 1) more cost-effective production for sculptural content 2) more realism for objects. I think Mesh will also need careful design and usage so as not to kill performance, not of asset serving, but of the user experience with viewing/streaming. Blue Mars looks great, but has apparently great than 1 gig client with all the meshes inside it.  The Mesh topic also hits on the Issue of OpenSim not having a native viewer. All the viewers are basically SL viewers in the first instance.  So there is a lot of overhead, random issues and workarounds to get the SL viewer to work — but our guys at Imprudence have done it for us! They rock! And even the new Imprudence code we are using on HK/Rezzable viewers works much better in the last 3-4 months.

OpenSim Issue 8: Concurrency

Concurrency on light interaction areas we think will scale out at 20-25 concurrent on a region. Now, this is a lot different than on SL for a couple of key reasons. First if you are running your own server, a region is less of a cost issue than it is on SL. So you can have more regions each with less content. I think the main focus is on server-loading then. We are running as much RAM as we can get on a machine and hope to see server concurrency at 400-500. The best news about OpenSim vs SL here is that you can have cross-region tps scripted. If you visit our King Tut Virtual you will basically visit 6 different regions on OpenSim that was just 1 in SL. So on a cost-basis OpenSim has better cost per concurrent user than SL by far (SL $300/month for 50 concurrent and OpenSim $350/month for 400+ concurrent).

OpenSim Issue 9: Scripting

We just had to unravel some scripting to get a new project to run with even a target of 10 concurrent. The good news is that the OpenSim modules allow for server-side coding instead of scripting. The bad news is that coding is more complex and of course see Issue 4 about about lack of docs. Scripting will still be very important, but I am hoping we can get a lot done in the code and create modules/integrations that way. We are making more Bots now that so far seem to work nicely. These Bots will access our CMS and have AI features for NPC interaction (= they will do smart stuff with our existing .com content).  Again, benefit here is that Bots will be also accessible from the web pages, iPhone etc.

OpenSim Issue 10: Cross-Grid Movements

Maintaining identity, roles and assets is still the biggest isssue holding back larger adoption of the OpenSim platform.  We are aware of other work and have our own initiatives in the area. I would think that within 6 months it will be a few clicks to move an avatar with inventor between grids effectively. I can see where a facebook connect will work well and I also am hopeful that DRM issues can be addressed as well.  Right now we are testing mechanisms to move avatar between our own grids (ok, that isn’t too sexy, but it proves a point).

So there it is. Stay tuned we are working on these issues as are many other OpenSim project, developers and enthusiasts. I think a year from now it will be even a bigger step forward than over the last 12 months.

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