Was without a doubt the phrase I heard most often yesterday, especially if you include variants like “Not Like Second Life”, “A bit like Second Life” and “Unlike Second Life”. Whatever else it’s achieved, Second Life has definitely become the frame of reference for the small and somewhat myopic crowd that made up the delegates at the sparsely populated Virtual Worlds Conference in London yesterday.
Vastpark is not like Second Life because it works in a web browser. Everyone on the web integration panel seemed to agree that virtual worlds in a browser is the next step, so I was glad to be there to question the TechCrunch consensus. How does having a world in a browser help? What does back and forward mean to a virtual world? What does it mean for presence to have 10 tabs open looking in to different parts of the same virtual world? Why would you want your view further constained by extra web browser widgets? Isn’t 3D in the browser going to be a blood bath for the next few years? Aren’t you really just using the browser as a download path? I suggested that the final question was the real reason that developers are pushing virtual worlds on the web and that the integration that most people want is to be able to use existing web and 2D media while using virtual worlds and use web services as a universal data bus between virtual worlds and other web aware platforms.
MPEG-V is not like Second Life because it’s a standard defined by 35 companies which is much better than the emerging Linden led standard according to Dr. Yesha Sivan in what was the worst talk I’ve heard in a long time. Not only did he make the standardisation process sound like a 3 year political bun-fight by people who didn’t know much about virtual worlds and who might come up with a bad standard, he managed to spell MPEG and Google incorrectly, called Sun’s Darkstar, Blackstar and attributed a Ugotrade quote to Philip Rosedale amongst other clangers. He was roundly rebutted by a large part of the audience including Tara5 Oh who questioned the need for old fashioned standards processes in the web era. Thank goodness for rough consensus and running code.
Most of the virtual worlds talked about in the investment panel were not like Second Life, but were nearly all Club Penguin clones. This copy the big exit attitude was called out by one of the audience as it seemed to be at odds with a lot of the talk about wanting to back the first in a market, but at least one of the panel is still looking for a successful 18+ social world play. The panel ended with a show of hands from people wanting money and people wanting to invest, but the economic climate made the whole affair very muted with lots of the panelists saying that they are slowing down rates of investment as it’s difficult to get existing companies off their books.
As with Virtual Policy 08 and the Virtual Worlds Forum the most valuable parts of the conference were the spaces between sessions. I had another very worthwhile discussion with Adam Frisby of OpenSim about C# script compatibility between OpenSim and Second Life. The straw man design we talked about was to have an idiomatic .NET interface for event handling that can be used by C# scripts and adapted for LSL scripts and a set of static library methods for manipulating the world that would be used directly by LSL scripts and wrapped by user created libraries to provide an idiomatic object oriented interface. Adam was particularly interested in the idea of user created wrapper libraries as it would allow the creation of an OpenSim interface library that could be ported to Second Life and implemented in terms of the ll* static methods. OpenSim could then agree to support the common behaviour of this library in Second Life and OpenSim instead of having to support the gamut of ll* methods some of which don’t map well to OpenSim internals. As well as defining a common set of events and ll* static methods that are supported on both platforms there would need to be a way of extending the interface with new events and library methods. In addition Adam was interested in making the event propogation configurable so that a single script could respond to events on many objects in a scene. This would effectively add a script interest management layer to OpenSim’s scripting interface. Where platforms provide differing interfaces to scripts we would also need to decide how scripts query the available interfaces or how they behave when interfaces are not available.
Overall a worthwhile trip, but not because of the conference. This Friday I’ll be talking at the online head conference about conferencing in Second Life which has the advantage of requiring no travel making marginal conferences like the Virtual Worlds Conference less risky to attend while allowing all of the serendipitous networking opportunities that make real life conferences worthwhile.
Last week I was invited to talk at JAOO Denmark. Originally a Java conference, JAOO is now a very broad software development conference covering everything from agile to language design to distributed systems.
The stand out talk on the first day was Gregor Hohpe‘s Programming the Cloud which enumerated some of the problems with building distributed systems without call stacks, transactions, promises, certainty or ordering constraints and then outlined some approaches to overcome them including looking at real life situations which also have to deal with the lack of distributed transactions. For example at Starbucks your coffee is made concurrently with your payment being taken and then problems are fixed up afterwards if you can’t pay, they can’t make the coffee or they get the order wrong. The throughput gained from optimistic concurrency is greater than the loss of having to fix things up, even if it means that sometimes you end up giving away free coffee.
Unfortunately I missed Lars Bak’s V8 keynote on Tuesday, but was really impressed by Successfully Applying REST by Stefan Tilkov which enumerated REST patterns and anti-patterns shining some light on the subtleties of a technology which initially seems straight forward but turns out to have some pot holes for the unwary.
The highlights on Wednesday were seeing Guy Steele and Dick Gabriel give their 50-in-50 talk again (which is still not available on-line, but one of the highlights is here) and seeing the new WeDo lego robotics platform for kids which will be available next summer. The most relevant talk was Test Driven Development, Take 2 by Erik Doernenburg which got me thinking about how to do dynamic mock objects in C++. My talk on embedding Mono in Second Life went down well and elicited some good questions, although as a fringe topic it wasn’t heavily attended.
Other highlights included Erik Meijer’s keynote on fundamentalist functional programming, Bill Venners talk on Scala, hearing Patrick Linskey conclude that the way to make Java scale is to use Scala or Erlang, James Copland reinventing OO, playing guitar at the jam session and hearing Erik suggest to Lars that we compile LSL to CIL and run it on V8 modified to capture thread state while Erik was spilling half bottles of Champagne over people and Lars was swaying and stumbling around the room.
A couple of weeks ago I went to a damp Coventry to talk at the Serious Virtual Worlds conference at the Serious Games Institute.
Christian Renaud gave the opening keynote on the first day and started with the observation that traveling to conferences sucks, predicting that virtual worlds conferencing will see a huge expansion in the near future due to concerns over climate change, the economic downturn, fuel prices and the inconvenience of real travel when virtual worlds can provide the same serendipitous meeting and networking. The Serious Virtual Worlds conference itself is a great example of mixed reality conferencing, with every session streamed in to Second Life, questions taken from Second Life after every session and a number of sessions given from a variety of virtual worlds. It’s also great to hear people besides epredator, the Dopplr crew and myself talking about serendipity in social software. It’s a huge, but not obvious benefit.
A large part of the conference was given over to demonstrating serious uses of virtual worlds. Dave Taylor gave a great demonstration of Second Health, but the most amazing technical demo was by Henrik Ekeus from Edinburgh University who showed his mixed reality dancing with avatars work. It was good to see this come out of the VUE project which I’d first heard about at Eduserv a couple of years ago. At the time they didn’t seem very clear on what they were going to do in SL, it’s good to see that they’ve allowed Henrik’s experimentation to take place.
The theme for this years conference was interoperability and it became much more apparent on day 2. Analyst Rob Edmonds gave a great enumeration of the possibilities for interoperability ranging from the grand unified interoperable virtual worlds, through islands of interoperability to incompatible virtual worlds connected to a common bus like the web which he judged as more important, wondering whether talk of the grand unified vision was supply lead rather than demand driven. John Burwell from Forterra wrote off the grand unified vision of virtual worlds and open source being important in virtual worlds, focussing on the terrain, collada 3d model and SCORM interoperability that Olive provides. Rohan Freeman provided the counterpoint to John’s views, highlighting the successes of the OpenSim open source platform and it’s use to business. Bernard Horan also presented Wonderland, another open source virtual world platform built on Java.
It was great to see a number of promising virtual world platforms on display at Serious Virtual Worlds, but a quick walk around the exhibition showed that Second Life is that platform that people are building successful serious virtual world applications on right now. The exhibition also highlighted the most valuable aspect of the conference: the meetings between virtual world solution providers and those interested in building and commissioning the next wave of serious virtual worlds that we’ll be seeing in the years to come.
At the recommendation of John and Alice I took a break from Develop Online to listen to Jon Blow‘s talk at Games:Edu this week and was totally blown away.
Jon talked about whether games are poised to enter a golden age similar to films in the ‘30s, when they transitioned from visual spectacle to an art form capable of touching people emotionally. Currently many games are broken by the conflicts between the game play rewards and the needs of the story. The canonical example is Metal Gear Solid, which pauses all interactivity to deliver exposition, but even more nuanced games suffer from the lack of control over the framing of the story. A narrative is likely to be much less powerful if the protagonist is jumping around while another character opens their heart. Equally the illusion of interactivity is completely broken by a character that refuses to acknowledge the player’s actions by simply reeling off scripted dialog.
I wonder whether games too often sacrifice interactivity in the pursuit of realism. When you can simulate a city full of cars, the desire to populate it with people is almost overwhelming, but without solving the hard AI problem the only way to add people that say anything nuanced is to script them. The world seems more real, but adding scripted people to the center of the world compromises the interactivity that should be fundamental to a game. When we read a book we accept a lack of agency as we are empathizing with a character and following their journey through the narrative. When we’re in a game the story should be ours and the world should respond to our actions. There will be limits to our freedom, but placing scripted characters in the world rubs those limits in our face. Many forms of art touch us without having to realistically represent people. No one would mistake the people in Guernica for real people, but the work touches us and the image could be interpreted as a game environment without solving the hard AI problem. Maybe games should spend more time trying to be Guernica and less time trying to be The Godfather.