My recent travels and thoughts on IMML’s value for interoperability

Recent virtual world conferences in London and trips to both Korea and Finland have been great as we talk to more people about how our open markup language IMML can help platforms like VastPark, RealXtend, OpenSim and others interoperate.

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LuaInterface also google-coded

Some of you may know that I’ve recently added the role of LuaInterface maintainer to my repertoire and after some minor changes to the codebase, it’s now available over at google code for your viewing pleasure:

http://code.google.com/p/luainterface/

VastPark uses LuaInterface as the bridge for Lua scripting, which is our scripting language of choice. Its proven to be a great option for scripting for many game development houses worldwide and we have to agree, its flexibility and speed are much appreciated

Apply VW conference video

Here’s the 4minute video presentation which ran at the Apply Virtual Worlds conference run recently in London…

It begins with some general predictions on what will happen in the virtual worlds market over the next 12 months and then gives an intro to what we’re releasing soon with VastPark version 0.94. All 3D footage is inworld footage from VastPark demos. Enjoy.

Welcome to the early days of VastPark

Thanks for your interest and excitement! You can now download our preliminary toolset. These tools are free and always will be. We’ll also have pro versions and encourage 3rd party developers to release extensions which they can sell at whatever price they choose.

Right now, we’re flat out fixing bugs, making improvements, demos and documentation. Any help that you as the community can provide to one another is appreciated by everyone. We’ll have a public forum online before our Stress Test#2 on the 22nd April.

We’re really looking forward to working with you now and as things progress.

cheers,

Bruce Joy, CEO (April 10th, 2008)

Creativity above consumerism

Somehow it seems more nourishing when we create things ourselves whether we share it with others or enjoy it alone without fanfare or external validation. This seems to be true of cooking, writing and pretty much any creative endeavor. Ultimately creativity is what nurtures us and enriches our culture; as a counterpoint, consumerism offers instant gratification, but lacks nourishment.

There is that wonderful proverb*: "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime."

This quote has been a truism for 3rd world aid activities, but we can apply the same philosophy to consumers seeking to co-create their entertainment and online social experiences. Let people be storytellers, creators, publishers of entertainment and managers of online communities and they will have nourishment "for a lifetime".

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GDC 2008 Post-mortem

GDC 2008 has just finished. I enjoyed it all immensely. The Worlds In Motion Summit sessions were generally packed out. Judging by the event, virtual worlds have arrived in the heartland of the games industry. But what does this mean and is the games industry ready for the changes in mindset?

Raph Koster made two terrific presentations. The second one was a post-mortem on Metaplace to date. I was very pleased that VastPark stacked up very well against Metaplace. Feature for feature we're both terrifically similar and fundamentally compatible. We've both favored LUA, REST, XML (where it counts) and a web-like framework. Although there's obviously much work yet to do on productization and solving playability issues in more physics intensive worlds, Raph and his team have created a very consumer friendly product that is lightweight and lends itself to becoming a standard interactive web stack. On the other hand, it wasn't clear that they had elegantly solved the complex problems of automated distributed content delivery and copyright when enabling users to remix high quality 3D assets into their virtual worlds. The issues of distributed content delivery and copyright are critical to enabling professionals to release their libraries of content into the system so the content can be used and monetised. That's a big part of what we've sought to solve with VastPark (and particularly with our MetaWSS specification). We think that solving these content issues have much wider application across media syndication and delivery because it works for new media formats but it also works for any digital file, no matter what the format.

It seemed obvious to many in the crowd that if we are to use game technology to grow a web, we need to get rid of proprietary system stacks. IMHO, the fact that game technology has generally been proprietary has significantly hindered the growth of the ecosystem built on game technology.

What I took away from the post-mortem was that everyone on this "game tech as a web" crusade are headed away from the traditional games industry's mindset towards an open standards thinking mindset. An irony is that if the games industry doesn't do it, others will.

Until now the game industry has had a game-centric ecosystem, but now a whole host of new industries want to reach in and help themselves to the communication, presentation and real time feedback possibilities inherently available in game technology. Many people feel that game tech can be used for other things: training, teaching, group communication, real time workplaces, general entertainment and casual immersive experiences. Get ready to game more.

An entrepreneur-friendly EULA?

Warning: Graphic imagery, mixed metaphors and mad linkz

Most people think themselves reasonably intelligent and a humanitarian at heart until they read documents written by lawyers and wish that they had the power to stain the pavements of the world with the blood of obtuse, stuffed-shirt lawyers. Of course, I'm not somebody who thinks like that but I do have sympathy for their viewpoint.

Baron, a user from our community, had some questions in the closed beta forums about our current licenses in terms of what they allowed an entrepreneur to do with our platform. Confusion? It cannot be! Personally, I think legal documents ought to be so clear and simple that savvy folk can read them and grok the concept. Baron is definitely a member of the "savvy folk" so I went and did some reading of my own documents. Yikes, a legal quagmire! What's the lawyer's address and where is my .38 Special? Damn, I don't reside in the US *yet* and Australia has normal developed-world gun controls so I don't have access to a gun and thus both my lawyer and I are statistically safer. Watch out legal eagles, I'm heading stateside in February. Anyway...

Reading our current terms of service, etc, they seemed out of touch with what VastPark is aiming to become: a virtual worlds platform that enables any community or individual to create, publish, share and even profit from their own virtual worlds (without needing years of 3D experience or programming skillz).

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“Virtual Worlds Industry Forecast”

I was lucky enough to be included in the Virtual Worlds Management Industry Forecast 2008 (Download the Report). The report gives valuable insight into 45 different industry CEOs and experts in the virtual world field. Thanks to Chris Sherman and Joey Seiler for conceiving and compiling the report.

The report revealed some of the things I was thinking about in this last month while I haven't been blogging, so I've decided to reprint those excepts here.

The other news is our implending Beta 2 release of our Creator tool and some news about the markup language that now drives it.

Anyway, on with the show. Here were the questions we were given and my answers are below each one:

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Will Virtual Worlds lead to an Ergonomic Web?

Today, Virtual Worlds are generally built with a static geography. For instance, Second Life is essentially a virtual city that has grown in size over time, but long term residents are familiar with the general layout. This follows the concept of a Metaverse that everyone can join.

My questions are: Is copying real life effective? Can such a virtual world scale to enable every user, every computer agent, every device, every language to be included and still feel personal, user-driven and a controllable, convenient experience? Hasn't the Web already solved a lot of problems that the current concept of virtual worlds fail to answer?

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OpenSocial vs OpenSocial.com

This week Google announced their OpenSocial project. We immediately starting to get a lot of enquiries. Why? I'm the registered owner of the opensocial.com domain. My service business EIN bought it because part of the broader "big picture" aim we have to participate in the foundation of a fully distributed social network platform. OpenSocial was the perfect name! We were keeping our OpenSocial project fully under wraps, but now I want to clear up confusion before it happens.

Our project may get a new name to avoid confusion when it's ready to go into the market, but that's irrelevant for now. We will let you sign up for an early invite when the time comes but that might be a year away! It's going to stay under wraps until users can start getting their hands on it. By the way, VastPark is now partnering on that project.

We've received a lot of requests from people to sell the domain name so they can onsell it to Google. I wish them luck and I don't doubt they would get a terrific price. We'll make up our minds what to do with it in the fullness of time.

As far as Google's OpenSocial project is concerned, VastPark *will* create a widget using Google OpenSocial that our users can then do what they like with it.

Thought of a slightly random sprite

It just amazes me how the "game balance" of the emerging Web develops and alters so quickly. There's always a new "Level" with a new, fast loading landscape. The only lag occurs in our own client brain. There's probably even more "grinding" to do than WoW (it's called your Inbox). But there's always new content and new people to add into your social network. And the way you explore the content and deal with your network is entirely up to you. Yep, in the world of "First Life" interesting times just keep rolling on! It's worth sticking around and paying the subscription for as long as your credit will last... Or are you considering cancelling your account because you've realised the game makers are just going to keep releasing new levels off to infinity? Don't worry there is an even bigger game outside!

Enabling a distributed virtual goods marketplace…

...that everyone can engage in.

As you may have already realised, VastPark is offered as a white label platform providing you with all the tools we have and delivering the power into your hands so you can own your own virtual world and do what you like with it. We're interested in offering developers a solution that is profitable for them to resell and an extremely affordable solution to clients who want to be able to trial Metaverse and Intraverse projects without spending a million dollars upfront. That's what people need today. But right from the start we've been thinking a lot about what sort of platforms will be needed when there are millions of virtual worlds.

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A message from the Founder of VastPark

Welcome to VastPark!

VastPark’s tools are digital crayons for a new medium. Although VastPark suits creating virtual worlds, you may find it useful for many purposes including: digital puppetry, interactive 3D ‘powerpoint’ presentations, game creation and immersive exploration of architecture.

The question is: What are you going to do with it?

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The 9 new rules of the virtual web

We have come up with 9 rules about the next generation of virtual worlds. Let's start with a prediction:

In five years the virtual web will be dominated by networks of independent virtual worlds that interlink with websites and mirror worlds... and are accessible via a number of browsers because they utilise open specifications for content discovery, content display, human and widget interactivity, social networking and world linking.

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