On a web page I wrote about the history of computer animation, I charted how the industry went from cutting edge to mainstream in about a decade, wearing off the novelty, but still producing quality from time to time. I believe that is the present state of SL today.

Second Life is becoming “mainstream”.

I have said on a few occasions that SL is like a 3D AOL before the world wide web exploded. In the early days of the web it was fun exploring new web sites to see what people were posting. As the web progressed, the number of web sites exploded, and the overall quality improved.

At that time I was a reader of PC Magazine and they were doing an annual “Best of the Web” list each year. They had to stop when the web reached a saturation point. I feel like we have reached that point in Second Life.

We used to go to really original places like Svarga, Straylight, and Insilico and be amazed. Now dozens of new servers pop up monthly with similar looks to these places. It is getting harder and harder for builders to trump the latest, and even if they do get something amazing built, it gets lost in the noise.

The overall quality of SL region builds is going up, which is a good thing for us players that love to explore, but it is getting harder and harder to find places unique and original and wonderful enough to blog about. My next post is going to be the my second annual best of SL, and it will probably be my last best of list.

At the same time SL is changing its business model. Recent xstreet changes have been made which have upset casual merchants, but at the same time should help keep the copybot pirates from making a quick buck. SL is also limiting scripts people can run simultaneously, and making other changes that hurts the “freedom” in SL, but should make the platform more attractive for casual users.

All of this is following the same trend we saw in computer animation and the world wide web. We are reaching a saturation point. Second Life is no longer cutting edge, instead it has dulled a bit.

The cutting edge is in the Open Sim community, which still is working on improving the platform to match SL, and hopefully surpassing it soon.

The potential cutting edge can also be seen in Blue Mars, which recently added the Caledon “steam punk” community from Second Life to Blue Mars and is opening stores.

My current plan is to keep this blog going, but instead of pushing myself to post every week, I may post only when I find something to post about. Hopefully there will be enough to keep me busy.

Metaverse News, Virtual Society 3D Web, blogging, secondlife

Blue Mars has officially gone into open beta so I can now talk about it in full. So where to start?

First I need to say that I am reviewing a beta product. There are many bugs, which I wont discuss, and there are many missing elements I will discuss that I assume will get fixed eventually. My initial impression was not very good but I met with one of the admins in world and he  says many of my concerns will be addressed in future releases as noted below.

What I can see now is the overall game plan of the admins.  Could Blue Mars be the Second Life killer everyone is looking for?  Short answer: no. Long answer I’ll address in a future post.

I decided to break down my review by looking at the various components I expect to see in a 3D Virtual World.

3D Graphics - So once you get past the avatar creation step (which I will talk about later) and pick a destination to visit, the first thing you notice is that Blue Mars looks fantastic. It is by far the most realistic 3D virtual world out there. I took a walk on the virtual beach and the waves and surf as it hits the sand is damn close to the real thing. You know how when you walk on a real beach the water gets repelled from your feet? They simulated that on the virtual beach. Lighting, weather, everything, just looks fantastic.

Avatars – Now here is where things start to get a little messy. The first thing you are greeted with is the avatar creator, and it is one of the least intuitive avatar systems I have ever seen. Trying to get your skin tone and eye color right is down right frustrating. Whats wrong with just letting us choose these options right up front? Then they have three different ways of adjusting your head and facial features, none of them are very good.  If you play other 3DVWs I highly recommend going to “advanced” and using the good old slider bars. Even here, the slider bars seem to have a mind of their own.

The avatars were done by e-Frontiers a Japanese company that owned Poser for a while.  Unfortunately, the adjustments you can make here are no where as flexible as Poser. They seem to have designed it to keep “fugly” avatars from being created, but at the same time make it difficult to make really attractive avatars as well.

Previously, I wrote an essay on what makes a good avatar: the looks of PS3 Home avatars, the interactivity of There avatars, and the flexibility of Second Life avatars. The avatars got the PS3 home looks down, but still lack the interactivity of There  and flexibility of SL.

Another virtual world fan has a way to measure avatars from game to game by simply asking 3 questions. Can you get naked? Can you make your avatar look like yourself? Can you be something other than human? The answer to all 3 is NO! You can only look like yourself if you happen to be a petite 15 year old. Body shapes types and even heights cannot be adjusted at all. Apparently the reason for this is to make sure all animations work the same for everybody.

User Created Content - You can sign up for the development program to design original content for Blue Mars. They will give you some off the shelf tools compatible with the CryEngine2 platform, but it is up to you to figure out how to use them.  All content has to be submitted for approval, and I have no idea how long that takes. Most of the tools that are available are very high end for 3D artists who know what they are doing. If you don’t know what a LOD is, you will probably get frustrated quickly.  Considering how building stuff is a major component of all successful virtual worlds, I’m not sure how well this will go over.

This is a weakness of any platform built from “off the shelf” software.  Second Life, There, and IMVU were designed from the get go with user created content in mind.  CryEngine2 was designed for professional game developers, and most of us amateur designers, are likely going to find the process a bit overwhelming.

Stuff to Do – Blue Mars is built on a gaming engine, and thus there are a few games available. The first one I tried was a fly a hover ship (a helicopter without blades – this is set in the future after all) through a series of rings. Controlling the ship was so unintuitive that I did not bother with the game and just decided to fly around the scenery. There is a golf game too, which looks good but not as fun as dedicated golf games. I assume that over time there will be a lot more stuff to do. The Admins to their credit are giving all the tools they can to developers, its only a matter of time before people start making some really cool stuff.

Interface Notes – Things that need some work to make the game more usable and playable for typical players:

Avatar Movement -  Your avatar can do two things, walk and run, and there do not seem to be any easily accessible vehicles to do anything else. Worse, moving around Blue Mars is frustratingly unintuitive.  Movement is all based on clicking the ground and having your avatar walk to that point. MMORPG fans are used to this. ASDW keys do not work because of the need to type text, which is fine, but the arrow keys behave very weirdly. Your avatar turns, but the camera does not. Pressing “up” is the equivalent of clicking on the ground a couple of feet ahead of the avatar, but without the camera following, it is very difficult to “steer” your avatar.

Each zone seems to play by its own rules too. You can fly in New Venice. Press escape and your camera will fly around using ASDW keys,  Press Q and your avatar will land where you flew to.  There is no flight in Beach City yet, it is all point and click to navigate there which is annoying because of the size of the city.

Camera Movement – Using scroll to zoom does not function normally (it did in hover ship mode, but not avatar mode).  The only way to zoom is in the “camera” menu and even then there are only 4 preset zoom settings. You can pivot the camera around by holding the right mouse button.  Basically the camera controls do not make up for the lack of an auto following camera when using arrow keys to control. The Admin that I talked to says cameras are being worked on.

Graphics Compatibility – The incredible graphics of Blue Mars comes at a price. You have to have a pretty robust computer to run it (nvidea 8800 or higher), limiting the number of players right from the start. According to the admin, the Beta test currently runs in the highest graphics settings for testing purposes. Later they will allow lower settings and lower graphic requirements.

Blue Mars currently runs in a window with a set resolution that looks a little small on my 2048X1170 monitor.  Currently, only  the Developers version has graphic adjustment settings, future player clients will eventually allow you to change the graphics settings.

The “Very Beta” State of the game – The following are things that are missing or sub-par at this time. Hopefully they will be coming soon:

Communication Systems - Currently local chat only. The chat tool consists of either bubble text or chat window by people in close proximity with you. They have a primitive “Friends” system to keep track of people you meet and find out if they are online or not. There does not seem to be any IM system or player search or teleport system at this time.  The Admin that I talked to in world says that there are plans to implement these things in future releases.

In Game Web Content – None at this time.  The admin I talked to says they plan to eventually enable in-game flash players for streaming audio, video, animation etc.

Out of game Web Content (i.e. Website, Social Networking, player profiles etc.)  - Currently a player forum and a developers blog are available. They have basic player profiles now too.

Bottom Line – The makers of Blue Mars seem to have taken an off the shelf graphics engine, an off the shelf gaming engine, and off the shelf avatars, put them all together in hopes of being the next Second Life.

What we get is incredible graphics, weak gaming elements, and nice but uninteresting avatars mashed together with little common purpose or interaction.  One of the most common VW activities, Building, is only available to developers, and done outside of the game. There are no web services yet, no streaming audio for clubbing, no built in browsing or linking. Even though this stuff may eventually get fixed and improved, it is destined to always have a patched together feel you don’t get with virtual worlds built from scratch.

This is more obvious from a developers tool standpoint as different components have to be developed using different tools. It is going to seriously limit what is possible in game, and eliminate any possible contention as a “3D web standard”.  The graphics are great, I admit, but as I previously mentioned in a past post, great graphics do not make a great game.

At this point, Second Life and There have nothing to worry about.

Metaverse News 3D Web, bluemars, reviews, virtual world

This is a detailed follow up to my earlier “comic” post about Open Sim.

The Paradigm:  The Open Grid

For those who do not know, Open Sim is an open source clone of Second Life. The Second Life download client, itself an open source program, can connect to an Open Sim almost as easy as it can to Second Life.

Open Sim networks run the same way as Second Life runs. You set up an account with a first and last name, log into the grid, decorate your avatar, possibly buy some land to build on, attend events, make stuff, sell stuff, etc.  So far there is little difference between OS grids and the SL grids.

Except there are differences. SL runs SL server software, OS grids run OS server software. OS has some advantages over SL, generally less lag, megaprim support, etc. But, as of right now, SL is the superior and more fully supported system. For example LSL scripting is not fully supported in OS yet.

The first thing you notice when you go to an open sim is that you are starting from scratch again. There are legitimate ways to get some of the SL stuff over to Open Sim, but it is time consuming.

Within a year, the OS project hopes to be at parity with Second Life, meaning if you can do it in SL, you can do it in OS. Soon after that, it is hoped the pattern will be reversed and it will be Second Life playing catch up. Among the things being worked on:

• “Mesh” imports made from 3rd party 3D models (Maya, 3DMax, Blender, GMAX, Lightwave, Cararra, etc.). Complicated models would generate serious lag, but simple models could do more than the current “prim” system with even fewer resources. This is what There uses.
• New avatar meshes, allowing more detailed form fitting clothing, or  even non humanoid avatars.

The Paradigm: Region Archives

I mentioned before that Second Life’s fatal flaw is the lack of virtualization of real estate. Open Sim has an archive system (so does Second Life, but the Open Sim one is better). With some improvements, it could be used to store unused regions in storage, instead of taking up server power.

A system could be designed to work as follows:

1. Player picks a region they want to travel to. System looks to see if the region is active, if so, player is sent to a server running the region, unless region exceeds maximum occupancy, in which case proceed to step 2.
2. An inactive server is activated, as soon as possible, player is moved to the server. Items are loaded from archive file while simultaneously “data” is streamed to player’s client. If this is an “instance” copy, player may be prompted to move to original once room is available.
3. When the last person leaves a region, temp items are deleted, foreign items are returned to owners, the region data is backed up (if changed by an authorized person), and sever is freed for later use.

Such a system would eliminate the need for so many servers, and would make expansion easier and less expensive, and also allow events to run across multiple servers with potentially thousands of players.

There is also the potential of people to run their own private servers on their own hard drives. People could build their region privately without needing to use web resources. People could share region archive files with one another allowing another method of group cooperation. Maybe people could even participate in certain events (concerts, lectures) on private sims by downloading copies of event venues and NPC data.

The Paradigm: The Multi Grid Marketplace

Under the Open Sim paradigm, there are multiple networks acting independently. Second Life could be like AOL of the early 90’s, and all the other networks like other web sites.

Under such a scheme there needs to be trade channels set up between networks, so stuff I make can be sold for use in any other network. In the 3D market place today there are web sites that sell 3D models for use in various 3D programs. Daz3d and Renderosity are ones I have used for my Poser work, but there are other big ones used by 3D artists using more professional programs (3DMax, Maya,  etc.). Artists can sell their original works for commercial and/or non-commercial use, via “brokering” arrangements. It wouldn’t be difficult to change XStreetSL into a multiple network market site.

Moving the SL model into the wider Open Sim model requires a lot of work, and involves a lot of hammering out of issues, chief among them being copyrights.

In future posts, I’ll discuss some of these issues, as well as an even broader 3D web paradigms (who says there has to be only one standard?).

Metaverse News 3D Web, opensim, secondlife, virtual economy, virtual real estate

This is part 2 of an ongoing series about what works and does not work in 3D Virtual Worlds (3DVWs) in hopes of educating anyone thinking of building their own. In part 1, I discussed the importance of avatars. For part 2, I want to discuss the silly but strangely popular idea that if we could access a 3DVW from a web browser it would be a huge hit, and finally bring 3DVW programs to the masses.

The primary attraction for even attempting to create a 3DVW that runs in a web browser is from looking at all the success the 2D virtual worlds have been getting.  Conventional wisdom says that the primary obstacle standing in the way of 3D virtual worlds having the same level of success is that people do not like downloading and installing a separate program just to play.

There is some truth to that, studies have shown that only one out of 10 new visitors to a 3DVW website will bother to download the program. So requiring a download apparently drops your audience 90% right off the bat.

I believe this is only an obstacle initially. People will download a good program that promises to benefit them, especially if it is free and comes from a reputable source.

From what I have seen so far, and from what I have heard is in the pipeline, there is no real point in trying to run a 3D virtual world in a browser, its bad conventional wisdom based on faulty logic.

There may be some good reasons to have 3D displays embedded in a web page, if nothing else its an attention grabbing novelty.  But 3D multiplayer worlds with chatting and building capabilities do not fit into the web page model the same way they do with 2D virtual worlds.

The state of the art

A quick note on the state of the art (in case you do not follow my blog): There are a few 3DVWs that can run in a browser already. Among the ones currently available are Exit Reality, Just Leap In, and Vivaty. All three still require either a small download or a browser plug-in to work. I have tried all three and they all feel like novelties rather than full fledged 3DVWs. If the primary goal is to add a 3rd dimension to the 2D Virtual World, none of these come close.

There is a largely unrecognized truth in all this: 3D virtual worlds are not 2D virtual worlds with depth. The two attract different kinds of players. Play style and activities are of a very different nature. 2D is much more social, 3D is a more creative outlet. 2D is “point and click” just like the web. 3D is played like a video game.

Once you accept this truth, it logically follows that a 3D virtual world designed to play in a web browser will never work. Playing inside a web browser is too limiting, too simplistic.

A good example is Google Lively. It was probably the greatest 3D virtual world ever to reside in a web browser. It was a failure, because people found it too limiting. Outside of chatting, the two primary activities in 3DVWs is building stuff in 3D, customizing your environment.  Lively provided a simple but inflexible interface for building, and no real ways to customize. Exploring what other people have built was not that interesting due to limited content. Every room was variation of the same 5 or 6 rooms. Lively’s legacy is that it mostly killed the dream of browser based 3D worlds.

A downloadable full fledged client may limit your audience, but it makes your world much more flexible, usable, and customizable.

Alternate approach #1: Put the client in a browser

Since it seems that every browser based 3DVW requires a download anyways, maybe the approach is to embed a mini client in a browser.  This is the approach being used by Pelican Crossing and 3di. This allows you to create an embed on a web site that opens the Second Life client inside the browser, the user of the embed is taken to a location specified by the embed.

The primary question that comes to mind is “why?” Linking to Second Life locations is already possible via SLURL. There.com and other 3DVWs have ways of creating links to specific locations as well. A client embed looks cool, but it is limiting the size to a part of a web page (which you can click to full screen) but does not add functionality to the client. Multiple embeds on a page are unworkable unless you have a really good computer.

Now what would be cool is a way to convert Second Life places to VRML and embed them so you can show non SL users your creations. People would not have to have an SL account to see it, nor have a full SL client, just some generic VRML viewer. This is actually possible. There are tools available to convert SL objects to XML files for backup purposes, and these could easily be converted to VRML files.  The biggest obstacle to this idea is the lack of wide access for SL to XML converters. This is a very sticky issue (maybe you have heard of the copybot controversy?).  Still it is a cool idea.

Bottom line it is easier to add a browser to a client, than a client to a browser.

Alternate approach #2: Accessing 3DVRs via interactive streaming video (Cloud gaming)

Cloud gaming via embedded video is coming very soon. At least two companies OnLive and Gaikai are developing interactive web video technology allowing you to play (nearly) lag free video games remotely through streaming video.

Most online games works like this:
1. your computer or console “renders” your environment from game data stored on your computer.
2. you take action
3. action is sent to gaming server
4. gaming server decides outcome which is sent back to your computer
5. go to step 1.

“Cloud Gaming” works like this:
1. Your computer gets a streaming video feed from an online server.
2. you take action
3. action is sent to gaming server
4. gaming server decides outcome, renders the outcome from game data stored on the server, and converts it to streaming video
5. go to step 1.

That seems like an awful lot of work for the game server to handle, but if they can get it to work, there is no real need for powerful gaming computers to use the service. Theoretically, I could play Crysis in high definition detail on my ipod. There would be no need to get the latest hardware, or constantly updating your console.

Sounds pretty good, but unfortunately it could not work with Second Life as it is currently designed, because there is no way the service could handle all the custom textures. Handling the bandwidth of the streaming video is one thing, handling the bandwidth with the Second Life Servers as well would be a networking mess.

Just because SL will not work in a cloud computing environment does not mean another 3DVW could not.  If models and texture data were hosted on the same physical network as the rendering, it would eliminate the extra bandwidth. The 3DVW would have to work via submissions like There.com does, rather than instant feedback like SL. Building could be done with offline tools, then submitted. Since the whole technology of “Cloud Gaming” is in its infancy, I do not expect to see a 3DVW built with it for at least another 5 years.

Sounds difficult, but that may be the only way to get a usable 3DVW to play in a web browser.

Really, I don’t see the point.

Metaverse News 3D navigation, 3D Web, cloud gaming, exitreality, justleapin, onlive, secondlife, virtual worlds, vivaty

I recently launched Google Earth only to be told I need to upgrade to version 5, so I did. I reported in December that the southern half of Manhattan was converted to 3D. Well playing with version 5 a ton of other cities have been converted to 3D as well. Check out the above Washington DC. Still a lot of missing texture maps, but a lot of buildings appear in exquisite detail.  The columns of the Capital building are 3D columns.

Many other cities are in 3D. I checked out the Las Vegas Strip in 3D, and my hometown of Phoenix (pictured above) looks great.

Google is promoting the ocean detail available in the new version, but another less promoted (probably because it is still a bit buggy) is LIVE WEATHER MAPS!

Yes, with the Weather layer enabled, not only can you see global temperatures, but clouds overhead from the most recent weather sattelites. As you can tell from the first two screenshots, it is a clear day in Washington DC and it happens to be partly cludy in Phoenix today.

Those familiar with the book Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson know that he describes a piece of software similar to Google Earth where the user can even track the movements of an approaching fleet of ships. Google Earth is not quite that sophisticated yet, but it is quickly getting there.

Metaverse News 3D art, 3D navigation, 3D Web, googleearth, mirror worlds

So I decided to follow up the kind of negative post about Lively with something more positive. There have been a few small positive news stories on the 3D Virtual World front: XBox Live has added their own Avatars similar to Wii Miis, Football Superstars is now in Open Beta so anyone can sign up, Playstation 3 Home will be opening as well in December, Project Blue Mars has announced plans to go beta in January 2009. A new casual gaming site called Moondo opened up this month. The only negative news is that Awomo is putting their 3D social game on the back burner to focus on their streaming gaming platform.

What all of these stories have in common is that they point to the future of 3D social virtual worlds, namely 3D game integration. I have been advocating this for 5 years now.

The basic pattern is this: Group meets in 3D social world and decides to play a multiplayer online game. Group migrates to that game and plays. When they are done, group moves back to social game to chat about experience.

The result is that it enhances the gaming experience in both ways: The problem in social virtual worlds is there is not always stuff to do or talk about. The problem in multiplayer gaming is you do not get an opportunity to chat with your co-players. With integrated 3D gaming, you get the benefits of both.

As I see it, this is the future of the 3D web. If you can also move your ID or better yet avatar from game to game even better.

Despite all the news stories above, we are not there yet, but that is the direction we are headed. Lets start with the Xbox360 live story. One of the fun little “toys” that came with the Wii was the ability to make mini avatars. They are very simplistic, but there are enough ways to change them that everyone can make unique ones. Then once you create a Mii, you can use the character in some Wii games, particularly Wii Sports. These have proven so popular that Microsoft decided it would do something similar for the XBox360, and their avatars are now available to live subscribers starting this month.

Two years ago, when the latest console wars began, Sony announced Home for the Playstation 3. The closed beta has gone on for a year and a half now, with apparently a lot of internal drama. The primary role of PS3 Home is to do exactly what I described above, the multiplayer games being limited to Playstation 3 titles.

Two new online multiplayer games also demonstrate this concept, though incompletely. First is Football Superstars. This game is a combination multiplayer football (Soccer) game and 3D social virtual world where you can live the “lifestyle” of a pro athlete, cashing in fame for goodies.  This an excellent proof of concept that could be expanded to other online games, or multiple online games could share a social virtual world.

A second demonstration is at moondo.com. There is no “social” virtual world on this site, but it does have the ability to design avatars that can play multiple 2D and 3D online games with the same character/avatar and again gain rewards for avatar add ons.

Finally, there is the upcoming Project Blue Mars, which I wrote about earlier, starting a beta test in January and aiming for April for full release. Built on a gaming engine platform rather than a VW platform, integrating video games into this social virtual world should be easy.

What I do not see happening yet in any of the above programs is a true combination of 3D virtual world and 3D gaming. The makers of PS3 Home insist on no user created content, and no accommodation for “role play”, making it purely just a meeting and shopping world.

The ideal will be a 3D world that does everything, and if the transfer protocols are done right, there can be more than one 3D social virtual world, just a simple protocol to move from one game to another, alone or in a group, via some teleport hyperlink.

That would be the true beginning of a 3D internet!

Metaverse News 3D Web, bluemars, footballsuperstars, moondo, PS3home, virtual worlds, xboxlive

Last night, the Google blog announced the end of Google Lively. This may rank as the shortest lived 3D virtual world ever, less than 6 months.

The first sign of trouble was the sudden jump in popularity, followed by the fairly consistent drop in popularity within a couple of weeks after release. It never picked back up, and apparently there is a ton or never released content waiting in the wings. The second sign was Google shutting down its offices on the ASU campus that served as the primary development location of Lively.

So what happened? How did the internet’s biggest developer release a cool product like this and fail? And what does this say about the future of similar projects like 3dxplorer.com, vivaty.com, exitreality.com, justleapin.com, scenecaster.com, and any other 3D worlds designed to work in 2D browsers?

(And may I also note, this is not the only high profile closure I am aware of. Cyworld is closing its US operations to focus on its Asian business. I wrote about it a couple of years ago, but heard diddly squat about it since then.)

I posted earlier that I thought Google Lively had the potential to be the progenitor of a 3D internet.  Guess I was wrong. In fact, this may require a rethink of the whole concept.

Here is my rethink: The idea of a 3D internet built to work in a 2D browser shall never succeed beyond the “novelty” phase. There will be the “ooh thats cool” exceptions that some advertising team does for some product, but the die has been cast. The concept is a failure. Lets move on.

Furthermore, and let me change to bold type, The failure of Google Lively puts the last nail in the coffin to the idea that any 3D virtual world can succeed under the same business model as 2D virtual worlds.

2D virtual worlds that run on 2D browsers are doing very well, but the additional overhead and useability of 3D kills much of what makes 2D virtual worlds successful. In 2D worlds you can buy a room and decorate it with purchaseable pre-designed items. The fact that is only 2D means that it is so simple a young kid can figure it out, and young kids love these 2D worlds.

The added dimension to 3D makes things harder. To build stuff in 3D requires understanding perspectives, camera controls vs avatar controls, size, yaw/pitch/roll, 3D texture mapping, etc. The people that cope best are experienced 3D gamers which instantly limits your audience. Then any useful 3D virtual world is going to require a seperate client download, which limits the audience further.

The successful 3D VWs (Second Life, There, and IMVU) allow users to create their own content and sell the content to others, something even 2D virtual worlds don’t do. This is the fundamental difference between 2D and 3D.

Google lively attempted to bridge the gap. They succeeded in creating a 3D web embeddable viewer, They made building and arranging your “room” amazingly simple and offered a large inventory of free stuff to put in the rooms. That, and the fact they are Google, offered the best hope of bridging the 2D and 3D gap. But, ultimately the useability wasn’t satisfying to the 2D crowd, and the lack of custom content wasn’t satisfying to the 3D crowd.

Hence the end of the experiment. The 2D and 3D virtual worlds are likely to evolve even further apart now that they have proven incompatible.

Metaverse News 3D Web, closed, lively, philosophy, virtual economy, virtual worlds

I have been keeping track and trying many of the 3D Virtual Worlds and even related 3D websites out there, and I have been noticing a trend: Most of the newest 3D web programs have focused primarily on creating what amounts to 3D web pages.

The list keeps growing: scenecaster.com, 3dxplorer.com, vivaty.com, lively.com, exitreality.com, and the latest is justleapin.com. They all take differing approaches, but their goal is the same, they want to be the “standard” 3D web page program.

What each is about is letting people build a customized 3D web page like a “room” that can be explored via a browser (and ultimately a browser plug-in since nothing is standard yet), and allowing others to visit as well. If two people are in the same 3D room at the same time, they will see each other and can chat with each other. Like 2D web pages there should be conventions for connecting and linking rooms together, embedding media, allowing comment posting, etc.

3D web pages have been a goal for a while now. VRML has been around for years, and was supposed to be the 3D equivalent to HTML. You could even create VRML using a simple text editor, if you knew what you were doing. Most tools to create VRML were hard to use, and VRML took forever to load, especially in the age of dialup that everyone had in the 90’s. The technology was never there to display properly either. VRML is still around: As mentioned in my review, Exit Reality is based on it.

After VRML failed to catch on widely, the trend moved towards “persistent” worlds, like Active Worlds, Second Life and There. These are separate programs designed to access a “grid” where players rent space to build what they want. You can travel between spaces if you want or teleport from place to place.

Maintaning the “persistence” turns out to be very complicated, and as players of these programs know, buggy as hell.

So the later 3D virtual worlds simplified things as much as possible. IMVU came out only to do 3D chatting, the most popular activity in these earlier worlds. But building and decorating was number two, and most of the latest 3D virtual world programs, like Kaneva and Twinity, provide a “house” you can decorate as you please. They just drop the complication of house to house travel, every player has their own space to use as they see fit.

The websites in the second paragraph attempt to offer something even less complicated. They allow you to build 3D “rooms”, often as many as you want, that can be viewed in a browser, embedded in a web page. They replace the separate executable download with a browser plug-in that is generally easier to get the viewing audience to accept.

For all intents and purposes, we have come full circle; these sites deliver the 3D web page experience that VRML promised only with better graphics, with rooms that are easy to build, easy to load, as customizable as possible, and accessible by all.

If the idea of a 3D web is to catch on, everything must be customizable, it must work like HTML, and must be as simple as HTML. You must be able to start with a blank slate, or a pre-built template, navigation must be intuitive, and interactive. Quality should vary from simplistic to photo realistic depending on the computer capabilities of the viewer. Special effects (weather, particle, lighting, animation, water, physics, reflection and refraction) should be optional to both the builder and the user.

Eventually, one of those websites listed above may become the new defacto standard for “3D web pages” which will eventually lead to a 3D internet. Lets face it, if any of them do, it will be decided by advertiser dollars more than users. That means it will be Google Lively.

Except that Google Lively fails in most of the criteria listed, especially in the customizable part.

The program that inspired me to write this post in the first place was justleapin.com, now in open beta. It is lacking somewhat in features at the moment, but shows great promise in doing exactly what a 3D website program should do. Currently instead of avatars, you can add, animated people. Room navigation is simple mouse view. I dont know if avatar support is forthcoming, but I like the idea of adding animated people the way you add an animated gif to a 2D web page. You can customize any texture in the room, or embed videos, music, sounds, etc. There is a small library of 3D objects you can add, which could grow in the future. It also displays the room in decent graphics quality without being a resource hog.

I think that the decoratable “room” or “house” may be a popular model right now, but I know from my SL explorations, that thinking in just room terms is too limiting. Ultimately creating a 3D “space” should not have form limitations.

I do not know when or even if 3D web pages/sites will catch on. I do believe that expressing ideas should not have to be limited to 2D text or pictures or video, and that sometimes 3D may be a more effective and desirable way to express them sometimes.

Metaverse News 3D Web, 3dxplorer, exitreality, justleapin, lively, metaverse, scenecaster, vivaty, VRML

I have been playing with Exit Reality for a couple of months, but I’d thought I’d wait to review it until some of the more serious bugs were worked out of it, which they have been. This is still a beta product and still has lots of annoying bugs, but it now qualifies as “useable” at least, assuming you are using IE7 or FF2 (FF3 still not working yet).

Despite the stupid name, Exit Reality is based on three really cool ideas for the 3D web, unfortunately they add up to a fatal flaw I will get to soon. First, I want to describe these three really cool ideas:

Cool idea #1: Give people who are visiting the same website the ability to chat with one another. This idea has been around a while. I found similar 2D programs like weblin which do the same thing.

Cool idea #2: Do everything in VRML (aka X3D).
Why? First of all, it has been around for years, and thus you have tons of instant content to bring to your program. Exit Reality is essentially a 3D chat program built on top of a VRML viewer. Many early 3D virtual worlds, like Cybertown, were built in VRML. Keeping with the standard means that user created content definitely has a place in Exit Reality, assuming you know how to build stuff in VRML.

Cool idea #3: Create a handy “2D website to 3D VRML website” converter, so you can surf the whole internet in 3D if you want. Now the results of such
an ambitious undertaking, will obviously not be perfect because the vast majority of the web was designed to be viewed in 2D not 3D. But the Exit Reality people have thought of that and created special templates for some of the more popular social websites.

For example, going to my My Space Page in Exit reality brings up a nice studio apartment with my picture on the wall, and doors leading to some of my friends “apartments”. I also have the ability to move the 3D furniture around, though other visitors can come in and move the furniture around for me.

So these three ideas add up to a pretty cool concept.

Here’s the fatal flaw: 3D avatars built in VRML, have always, and probably will always, suck! Avatar animations are low rez and goofy looking, this is because VRML was never designed for human like avatars, and the ones that exist are the result of hacks that were not designed to use bvh animations, or in general live up to standards set by other 3D chat programs.

Exit Reality has yet to prove me wrong, and in fact the avatar system currently in place is where a lot of the most annoying bugs exist. The default avatar is what I call “boring doofus guy” with dark gray pants and a light gray shirt. There is an avatar selection tool and the list of avatars is large, but everytime you open up the list it does not remember where you were last time you opened it, and starts from the beginning. Everytime you open Exit Reality you default to boring doofus guy, and when you switch to other 3D pages, you run a 50-50 chance of reverting back to boring doofus guy. The pictures above used the “Candace” avatar, which starting with a “C” is not too far down the list of avatars in the alphabetically sorted list.

The cheesy avatar problem cannot be overlooked unfortunately. All avatar
based chat programs need cool customized avatars. Their avatar is their identity. Selecting from a list of lame ones won’t cut it for very long.

Kudo’s to Exit Reality for a cool idea in 3D web surfing, and as a side bonus, providing a top notched X3D viewer plug in, but the 3D chat side of this program will largely be ignored due to the crappy VRML support of avatars.

Metaverse News 3D Web, avatars, exitreality, reviews, virtual worlds

On Monday, Google released their much anticipated virtual world Lively. With a big company like Google behind it, thousands of people jumped in, which caused quite a few problems.

I downloaded it first day and could not get into any room, just a persistent “Joining Room…” message at the bottom. I redownloaded and reinstalled and was finally able to get in. This is an early beta program, so I wont rag on the many bugs, since they are likely to get fixed eventually. Let me just say that this program is not the “Second Life Killer” some bloggers have called it.

 If you try the game yourself, I highly recommend going to the All rooms page, and select a vacant room. This will give you the ability to edit your avatar as you see fit.

Right now there is shopping in place but all items are free for now for testing purposes. Not sure if they will put an economy in place eventually.

The head designer of Lively is Mel Guymon, Google’s Head of 3D Operations — former There.com developer and IMVU Co-Founder. Playing in this virtual world has qualities of both There and IMVU, especially the cartoonish looking avatars.

One thing that Lively has that neither of its predecessors had is animations you can perform on others. Click on another avatar and you can hug, kiss, hi5, and a dozen other things. I have not seen this in a virtual world since The Sims Online. The only annoying thing is you can do this without the others avatars permission. So while wandering the halls of Lively High School, I got some random kisses.

Voice is also available through GTalk if you have that program.

If you are not into randomly cavorting with others, you can very easily create your own room, pick a setting, and add some furniture. There is a lot to play with here. and according to an interview, only 20% of what they will eventually have is in the game.

The downside is that there is no user created content. According to the Lively website:

Most of the avatars, clothing, and objects were created by vendors working for Google. We’re also working with a small number of trusted testers, vendors and creative agencies as part of a test for creating custom items.

We hope to enable user-generated content and even more ustomization soon, but until then we’ve given you tons of choices from the catalog to help personalize your Lively experience.

That in itself is a major negative, and why the program does not have a chance of becoming the “virtual world standard” despite the Google name. Without user created content, the program is destined to be stuck in the “novelty” category, although the Google name will assure it will be a popular novelty.

Another negative is the inability to customize avatars beyond the clothes and hair. I’m using the “Heather” avatar, and while I am able to pick my own hair style and hair color and eye color, my face looks like the thousands of other “Heathers” in the world.

Metaverse News 3D Web, google, lively, reviews