by Surfdaddy Orca
DR DOBBS ISLAND - According to Dr. Dobb's Life 2.0 keynote speaker Wade Roush of xconomy.com, we are in the middle of a new three-to-five year cycle of innovation in virtual worlds development and integration that began with the introduction of Linden Lab's (LL) Second Life and the release of Google Earth. He predicts at the end of the cycle that we will see a completely new virtual worlds environment, most likely from a source other than LL or Google.
Wade, who provided a keynote address on Monday September 17th, wrote a seminal article on virtual worlds integration entitled "Second Earth" for July/August edition of MIT Technology Review in which he argues that the World Wide Web will soon be absorbed into what he calls "the World Wide Sim: an environment combining elements of Second Life and Google Earth."
See https://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18911/
Could this new environment potentially come from Sun Microsystems? Tuesday's keynote speaker, Chris Melissinos, raised this very real possibility. Chris, who is Chief Gaming Officer for Sun Microsystems (a position that has to be the envy of every member of a generation that grew up on video games), talked about a new open source Sun server environment called Project Dark Star that is platform agnostic, enterprise grade, and fault tolerant. The corresponding client, known as Project Wonderland, is a 3D scene manager for virtual worlds. It is built on built using Sun's Looking Glass Java-based technology for 3D desktop windowing and visualization Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
Both Project Wonderland and Project Looking Glass are downloadable today.
See https://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net/ and https://lg3d.dev.java.net/
Both Wade and Chris provided extensive food for thought in their voice presentations (streamed via a SHOUTcast chatbridge rather than using Linden voice technology). The chat streams after both presentations consisted of extensive, fascinating, multithreaded, and often humorous dialog with the audience.
Wade asserted that the next step in virtual worlds development will involve cross fertilization between platforms. He sees a fusion between geospacial applications like Google Earth and virtual worlds like Second Life and Sun Microsystems' new platform (among others). He predicts that Neal Stephenson's vision of a metaverse will arise from “a community-based, open source effort to make platforms interoperable.”
Chris' presentation, "Many Worlds, One Planet," continued this theme with his assertion that proprietary systems have caused a "fracture" in the emerging metaverse. He argued for the development of common standards across platforms that address some of the bigger impediments to more extensive use: scalability, security, and open source APIs. He concluded with the thought that it is "not the fidelity of content, but the fidelity of contact" that will ultimately make the metaverse compelling to hundreds of millions of future users. In other words, a platform that brings users together in compelling ways will ultimately win out over platform content.
In addition to these keynotes, the Life 2.0 Summit so far has included a workshop on sculpties, panel discussions on search technology and metrics, and presentations on wikitecture and OLIVE, a unique and powerful proprietary 3D platform now being used by military, police, and emergency personnel, among others.
The summit continues tomorrow, Thursday September 20th, with a keynote by Scott Ambler of IBM Rational on agile programming.
See http://www.life20.net/program.php for a complete program.
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