White Noise

Will the real Metaverse please stand up? #SecondLife

 

Over the years I've continually heard how many different virtual environments are "a Metaverse" or (shudders) "the Metaverse". Recently I read the question "Is Minecraft the Metaverse?" on a random blog post somewhere.

 

From my point of view, this is a train of thought that makes me twitch every time I hear it. While I understand that virtual world participants have the best intentions, I have to admit that their notions of "Metaverse" are woefully misguided at best.

The Metaverse is a singular construct much in the same manner as The Internet or the World Wide Web. I cringe whenever I hear people refer to different virtual worlds as "a Metaverse" or "The Metaverse" because it reads/sounds to me in the same manner as if one were to say many things are many Internets. We don't state the Internet in plural form, nor should anyone state the Metaverse in plurality.

 

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Cyberpunk History

I get my notion of the Metaverse from many sources, but most importantly the genre which spawned it overall. To this end, we're talking about Cyberpunk culture.

The construct of a Metaverse within this genre was varied but held a common theme altogether. In the book Neuromancer by William Gibson, it was a matrix - an endless sort of digital void with blue grid lines extending forever. Things were constructed on this grid at varying points and complexity, programs ran on this grid, etc. Then came Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, which for all intents and purposes is the cited inspiration for most virtual environments in the industry - at least if we look at systems like ActiveWorlds or Second Life.

In this same genre also existed systems like you would see in Shadowrun, and this is one of my favorite descriptions for a Metaverse construct. There were things like nodes, virtual FTP systems - a three dimensional free-space with ICE security and more.

 

 

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Shadowrun on Sega Genesis | Hope you brought a decent deck, chummer

 

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What I see in The Metaverse, a real one anyway, is not a singular construct but a contextual and decentralized construct which defines an overall system. While Neal Stephenson may have eloquently described The Street in Snow Crash, I believe that in a true Metaverse, The Street was simply a main gateway world (possibly the oldest and most popular). That being said, I don't believe the entire Metaverse was The Street. It wouldn't make any sense to assert that if we put it into context with its predecessors - The World Wide Web & Internet.

However large or popular a singular destination on the Internet is, no single destination comprises the entire Internet. When we put it into context with the genre of Cyberpunk, and not just a singular destination view of a particular novel, we see that the Metaverse is just a 3D Internet.

Existing in The Metaverse were many gateways of entry, many destinations, and many contexts, but they shared a common protocol and standard. In this context, then, places such as Second Life consist of similarly The Street context, but then other destinations in the Metaverse existed such as (in context) Open Simulator, and related spinoff systems utilizing similar variations. We also would say that maybe destinations such as Kaneva, There, and (at least minimally) Blue Mars were destinations in the overall Metaverse but not a single one was the Metaverse itself.

 

I have to momentarily pause and mention that even in The Street context, Second Life fails miserably. In order to have The Street, a virtual environment must be a contiguous virtual land mass which is traversable in circumference. As in, I could start walking from the entry and eventually travel around the virtual world to return to my starting point.

 

Google Earth I suppose lets you pull that off, at least the contiguous sphere of a planet, and with Sketchup I suppose you could place rudimentary models. However, that being said, Google Earth is a Paraverse at best. Minecraft, then gets a second look because it almost comes close to meeting the requirements. However, it’s a single destination among many possible destinations, and no manner by which to seamlessly traverse them all under a passport – yet.

 

I give Minecraft the “yet” because you do have a singular login, and with that login you can join many servers. So the passport is rudimentary implemented, and the planet twice the size of Earth is there as well, but I couldn’t walk around the virtual world and return to where I began. I couldn’t seamlessly transport from one space to another, and (to wit) the concurrency rate of any of these systems is still miserable. Even after all of this, I’d still dismiss Minecraft simply because it isn’t able to talk to any other system but its own.

The problem with virtual worlds and virtual reality is that there seems to be no clear differentiation as to what constitutes them - except in the minds of futurists like myself who make such distinctions and state merely:

 

 

 

The Metaverse is a decentralized construct of three dimensional virtual environments whereby the environments themselves are the product of the end-users which inhabit such spaces. Each virtual space may behave differently or be controlled by differing interests, but they share a standard methodology of ubiquitous access. Within these multiple contexts exists ubiquity of access and interoperability whereby a single means of access can traverse all spaces within the connected Metaverse.

 

 

To put it into better light, we continue to compare the Metaverse to the World Wide Web.
When you are online using the World Wide Web, you have a web browser program which follows standard protocols for communication and rendering the content. HTML5, PHP, Javascript, WebGL, and more. For proprietary functionality these web browsers accept "Plugins" which the end-user may install as they see fit much like modules installed on a Shadowrun Deck. No single website on the web constitutes the entire world wide web, and looking at the situation in the proper perspective, we obviously would think it's absolutely asinine to state a single website is the entire web.

Now you understand my frustration with the semantics of The Metaverse terminology and usage today. These virtual environments are destinations in a possible Metaverse in the same manner as Google and Yahoo are websites on the web.

 

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I state possible Metaverse because to this day nobody is talking to each other in a standardized fashion, and that bothers me for different reasons. For now, what we have is decidedly not a Metaverse but a lot of proprietary stand-alone virtual worlds. I hate to burst people's bubbles, but there is no Metaverse.

The distinction between Metaverse and Video Game is also fairly straight forward, in that a video game differentiation is a matter of contextual insight. World of Warcraft is not a Metaverse enabled system because the virtual environment itself is a closed construct whereby the participants are interacting on a linear model. The environment and media is predefined, with only the variation of interaction within that predefined space being the dynamic aspect. In the Metaverse - the context itself is open to interpretation by the participants, as well as the very construct itself which begins with a totally blank slate.

 

Therein is the major reason that Minecraft is not a Metaverse, let alone the Metaverse. By definition what you may create within the construct of Minecraft is limited by the recipes which are predefined. I’m sure you can build things there, but you are severely limited still compared to a virtual environment such a Second Life wherein you have LSL and Mono scripting. I call that a definite step up, but not quite total freedom.

 

 

As far as reaching for a true Metaverse designation, Linden Lab would first have to understand that the idea of “Shared Experience” is absolute bullshit. If you want to define yourself as the Metaverse, or at least the first major construct within the Metaverse, and set a precedent for others to join on, you have to take a hard look at the Web Browser itself. There is an underlying “shared experience” that is HTML5, much in the same manner that Second Life would have assets. After that, it’s up in the air as to how the end-user experience plays out. Plenty of customization options and contextual modifications make no two experiences totally the same – and in the Metaverse those plugins are the same as slots used on your deck, or third party additions which fundamentally change your viewer to add or remove features even if those changes differentiate the “shared experience”.

This differentiation is very important to understand because it's a metaphorical context understanding, and it is the underlying definition which drives social media altogether. A gaming context is predefined, and the experience is set up for you like an interactive choose your own adventure novel. There is a linear flow to the experience, and it is a controlled manner. In the Metaverse, there are no options other than to say that the participants are expected to define their own experience in totality. The company which controls the destination does not (or should not) be defining the in-world experience, but instead the participants should be.

 

If we look at Linden Lab policies, you can begin to understand that whenever that rule is broken when dealing with a Metaverse context, there is backlash for obvious reasons. When we really think about it, the Metaverse is a 3D Social Media outlet of experience. This however doesn’t insinuate that trying to redefine the rules of social ecosystem is a good idea – which is why the social media integration aspect of Second Life has largely failed. Not because integrating social media like Twitter, Facebook, etc into Second Life is a bad idea, but because the particular methodology and thinking behind that implementation particularly was poorly thought out and is a prime example of otherwise intelligent people acting incredibly stupid.

 

Twitter provides the platform, the participants provide the flood of content and experience for the ecosystem. Social media in general works like this as well, and it’s only when the service provider company decides to personally meddle in that ecosystem that the proverbial shit hits the fan. Hands-down, this has been the case time and again for Linden Lab, Active Worlds, and every company which started as a sandbox environment and later decided to start stepping on toes in their own ecosystem or other ecosystems by offering the same content options that their own participants where already handling. It’s sabotage at best.

 

 

Metaverse Checklist

 

I’m going to rattle off some prerequisites that should be met prior to anyone describing anything as The Metaverse or a construct within The Metaverse, just to set the record straight.

 

 

Decentralized

 

There is no central server for assets, or specifically for authentication. A virtual world within The Metaverse is akin to setting up a web server. Certain spaces may be gateways, but overall they are not the choking point of control no more than any single destination online in the world wide web would constitute a singular entry into the online world. Authentication may be centralized for your “passport” or you may have multiple “passports” which can be used within the virtual environment altogether. So when you log into the Metaverse, your credentials are universal across all participating constructs. The assets themselves also are decentralized, meaning no single datacenter houses them, and in fact the participants themselves are part of that asset storage and retrieval system.

 

 

Contextual Experience

 

A singular viewer which is extensible through third parties, and provides a standardized basis for interaction only, while additional functionality can be “plugged in” at the user’s discretion. In short the experience is modular and the interface is minimalistic by default. Just like I can access FTP, HTTP, etc through a web browser, and plugins by third parties extend the functionality for my web browser, and third parties are free to build their own web browsers with whatever abilities they choose – so would a Metaverse Viewer achieve. One viewer, modular, extensible, and very capable to meet the needs of many.

 

 

Standardized Protocols

 

They should all be a collective construct. Not just Second Life and OpenSim, but every virtual environment that wishes to call themselves “Metaverse Compliant” should be talking the same language and together be considered a contiguous space.

 

 

Concurrency

 

The centralized server methodology for glass ceiling concurrency is not acceptable. Lessons Learned from LucasFilm’s Habitat eloquently defines this issue and states the solution since 1991. It is an absolute travesty that not a single company in twenty years has actually implemented it, and more so that their concurrency issues directly stem from that blatant ignorance of the subject.

 

Dynamic Content Creation/Consumption

 

There are no preset goals, no predefined recipes. You are given a toolset and encouraged to define all aspects of your virtual world from the ground up. The experience is asynchronous and fluid, with little if anything to hinder this ecosystem. Even the viewer/program is up for interpretation by the ecosystem – with only some base definitions of standards to work from in order to maintain a minimal expectation of ubiquity. In this context “shared experience” is far too broad of a term to invoke.

 

There is no such thing as a producer or consumer in this ecosystem, but instead only the new social media breed known as Prosumers.

 

 

Epilogue | Final Thoughts

 

 

That’s not to say the Metaverse will never exist. Far from it, actually. What we’re seeing today are the beginnings of that Metaverse construct forming, gaining ground, and experiencing growing pains through every phase in this evolution.

 

I understand that the population really wants to see the Metaverse, and they are at least partially right for identifying at least the base components of what will make up the actual Metaverse when it exists. That being said, we must not confuse the sum of the parts for the whole.

 

Systems like Second Life, ActiveWorlds, Kaneva, There, and even (possibly) Minecraft are merely individual parts of a greater whole that is the eventual Metaverse. They are one of many modes of context, experience and immersion in a sea of many which are interconnected under a single ubiquitous access and protocol of interoperability.

 

Since that doesn’t exist yet, it is safe to say there is no Metaverse – but we’ve at least begun to correctly identify what will comprise it when somebody decides to actually go ahead and build it.

 

What we have today is simply the inkling of the many things that the Metaverse ultimately would be, but spread out among countless systems and never all in one spot. What the Metaverse would be, is all of those things in one program, wherein the “companies” provide service access points and facilitate content creation under the premise that each company is a “Burbclave” in the digital world. No single entity has yet to put the puzzle together, and such far I have seen only many years of companies snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The program would be built as a modular expansion system inherently, the interface would be minimalistic and intuitive, contextual for everything. The Metaverse will seamlessly integrate into your real life as well through Augmented Reality, creating a hybrid of the two and blurring the lines between real and virtual.

 

The Metaverse will be many things to many people, but what it is not is what we have today.

 

 

Y.T. (Yours Truly) Picture courtesy of

Shelby Rasmuson in Second Life

 

 

 

 

I thought today’s post deserved a soundtrack :)

Pixel Perfect

Exploring the premise of an ideal virtual environment | #Secondlife

 

If you spend enough time in virtual worlds, eventually you come to a number of realizations concerning pretty much every conceivable facet involved. This could be from the very basis of the hardware foundations to the high level sociological implications. For the most part, we partake in virtual worlds initially out of curiosity, and then invariably move on to more complex interactions such as creating items for a marketplace or scripting. There is, of course marketing, building and quite a lot of other “services” that one could get into for their virtual existence such as the jobs of host, manager, DJ, dancer (exotic or not) and maybe even the more extreme situations where you enter into the sex industry in some fashion.

 

Underlying all of this, however, there comes a point where you’ve reached a plateau in experiential synthetic environments and turn your attention to the underlying aspects of what makes such a place tick. I like to call this a pixelated enlightenment.

 

What this post will involve is precisely this train of thought as an exploration into how to make this synthetic environment culture better overall by making some fundamental changes to how the structure works. For all intents and purposes, let’s say this is an article about what I personally believe would constitute the Perfect Virtual World.

 

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An image from the upcoming game RESET from Theory Interactive. This is real-time, in-game.

 

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Resource Based Economy

 

On the surface, the problem with virtual environments which are sandbox based is that there is a lack of perceived value and scarcity of resources. In Second Life, for example, the only resource you have are prims and land impact coupled with your financial depth. This works in a rudimentary manner to create a sense of worth for items created, traded and sold in the virtual environment, but does little to instill a sense of actual worth to those items.

 

When you purchase or create items in Second Life, those items are essentially infinite. without the scarcity of restriction, those infinite items therefore rapidly depreciate in perceptual value – and I am often boggled by how people can apply worth to virtual items that are infinite to begin with. It’s not like a resource that is scarce, and therefore in limited supply or availability – so as long as the listing exists on Marketplace or in a store, you can always get a copy of that item just as perfect as the first one that the creator made.

 

I believe in the grand scheme of things that this methodology has to go.

 

I play a lot of Minecraft myself, and I believe that one of the most telling aspects of that game is that despite the rudimentary graphics, this game is highly popular. So clearly, there is an element at play which is compelling enough to bring in players. In this notion, I’d like to state that the underlying idea which I believe is compelling players to continually take part in this game happens to be the idea of resources and what you can do with them.

 

As a game, it takes into account by its very nature the underlying principle of resources and limits the players to being able to make only what they can afford in harvested resources. While this is compelling in a basic form, I still see an issue with this methodology.

 

Minecraft is still a static game world, and so the players are mostly limited for what they can create based on the predefined “recipes” in the game. We can see why a majority of the creative process in Minecraft falls under building structures or Redstone circuitry in this model, because those are the two main options for creative exploration – assuming we ignore the modding community, which I will do for the moment.

 

In a sandbox virtual environment such as Second Life, it would be better to tie various means of creation to built-in resources in the virtual world. While this is very unlikely to happen given the structure of the current system (limitations of perceived spatial occupancy in regions and terrain mechanics), I believe that if one were to sit down and reconstruct an entirely new synthetic environment system from the ground up, that resource scarcity should be an underlying priority.

 

Economics at the very core are defined as efficient management of resources on a regional or global scale, and it is monetary incentive/substitute which ties any homogenized meaning. But in a virtual environment, we’re not managing resources of scarcity other than processing impact, so the “prim count” structure is really just the benefit of how many CPU cycles you are allowed to utilized on any given instance.

 

So let’s take into account a set of resources up front in order to better manage an actual economy. After all, the things we create in a virtual world should be made of “something” and those somethings should be in limited supply based on the harvesting of the users within that system.

 

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The aspect that I like about Minecraft and resources is not the recipes for item creation but instead the resources idea itself. In the context of a sandbox virtual environment like Second Life, where you can create anything, it would be pretty stupid to limit people to pre-defined recipes.

 

That being said, the element of natural scarcity and resources should remain when building anything in a sandbox virtual environment. So, let’s say we pre-define only resource types for which items can be made from or which can be used for things such as certain elements of scripting.

 

This is a very good foundation for our perfect virtual world scenario, because now we’ve tied inherent value to items created in the system with nothing lasting “forever”. Items would come with a built-in durability, resource cost, and scarcity based on how many of a certain resource is available at the time of purchase/creation which, in turn, is based on how much the population of the virtual environment are spending their time to collect/harvest those resources to sell to the system or keep for themselves internally.

 

In this manner, we define our resources as:

 

1. Mundane – Wood, Stone, Plastic, Glass, etc.

2. Rare – Precious metals/gems

3. Exotic – Imaginary type resources (float-stone, alchemy, etc)

4. Energy – Resources used for the production of electricity, fuel or food

 

Mundane items are abundant but have lower durability. Clearly wood, stone, etc in this case. Wood would be the lowest common denominator for fuel source (burning) and maybe Coal. Rare resources have a much lower probability of being found and constitute higher durability or “worth” such as gems or precious metals. Exotic materials like “float-stone” would be exceedingly rare but hold exotic properties like the ability to allow unconventional flight to an object that is built using it. Then there is the Energy resource which can be mundane, rare or exotic – in this case we state Wood/coal is mundane, Refined resources like Gasoline or whatnot are Rare, while Exotic energy sources could be from Crystalized sources like Zero-point Crystals.

 

Here’s the more detailed breakdown:

 

Let’s say you want to build a house in Second Life. Every prim or mesh you use will have a setting for resource to be made of (and technically they already do with Materials). In the context of link sets, the cumulative resources of all of the prims is the final resource cost for that particular item and the overall durability of that item is the average of all durability ratings.

 

The only time that the resources are in play are for the initial creation and the subsequent copies. But other than that, they are essentially used for the calculation of scarcity, durability and behavior of the item.

 

In the context of a house, it is made of many different types of resources – though I’m sure people would think it is clever to make them entirely out of an abundant resource like “wood” or “stone”. With the resource comes the underlying properties of durability and availability. So when you make the item, even if it’s a bunch of link sets, the pieces first have to make sure that the central economy can support deducting the resource for the instantiation of that item before it can be “rezzed”.

 

If there is a run on a particular resource that the item is made of, then the item cannot be copied into the virtual world space until such time as the resources become available to do so – either by the world economy or via your own personal resources. This is why you have the option of either keeping your resources to yourself as you harvest them or selling them back to the world economy for resource credits. It’s a choice as to what path you want to take with this and each has benefits and detriments.

 

Of course, I’m also hearing people crying bloody murder already about what if they just want the freedom to create without these resource restrictions much like they already do in Second Life?

 

I did think about this, and to that end figured in an infinite resource called Omnite which is essentially the universal resource of abundance and high durability. The caveat of using Omnite for your creations is that while it comes with a high durability and is always plentiful, the trade off is cost. Omnite is the most expensive resource in the economy because it can substitute for any and all resources.

 

Omnite isn’t an infinite durability resource either, however high the durability of it is. In order to obtain Omnite from the economy, you would have to spend more resource credits (which you can earn or buy outright). Resource credits being the universal currency in the virtual environment.

 

What you would have in the end are items made of conventional resources as harvested by the population (and having varying durability and qualities) which end up being less costly as the incentive for items made with these resources, versus items that skip the resource requirements and are purely made with Omnite at a higher cost for the end-item.

 

Therein we maintain a balance between a real resource economy and traditional style “creative” forces in a virtual environment.

 

Certain commands in a scripting environment would also come with a caveat of resources as well in order to perform a scripted task – such as in order to fly the item would need X amount of Float-Stone and X amount of Energy Units consumed per minute to maintain flight. So you could script the item accordingly but it would eat resources, and also break down over time.

 

Scripters could still substitute Omnite for any or all components since it’s the universal resource, but that would make their creation more expensive to operate and purchase. This being said, the other thought on this resource based economy is that when a particular resource is not abundant enough to facilitate the creation of an item, you can always substitute Omnite at the point of copy/sale for a higher resource credit cost.

 

Now we have a reason to maintain a healthy resource economy, while putting vast amounts of people to work in various endeavors. The healthier the economy is with resources, the lower the cost of goods within it. The worse the economy of resources are, the more items end up defaulting to Omnite and thus costing more.

 

There’s our fair trade for both ends of the spectrum.

 

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Graphical Fidelity

 

Without a doubt, graphical fidelity should be as close to photorealistic as possible with as little hardware requirement as it takes to do this. Photorealism is a hallmark of an advanced Metaverse system not because it is photorealistic quality but because it implies a top-end capability with the inclusion of every possible lesser quality at the same time.

 

Photorealism does not exclude lower quality virtual environment spaces, but instead simply widens the premise of the entire system fidelity.

 

There is two schools of thought for how this is going to be accomplished, and both are likely to achieve it over time. On one side we have polygons which are taking the brute-force approach to increasing graphics, and then we have efforts like Atomontage and Euclideon in the procedural and point-cloud data approaches.

 

Personally, I’m in the cheering section for Euclideon – mostly because they aren’t using a brute-force approach to graphical fidelity but instead intelligent framing of the problem. In the grand scheme of things, I suppose the analogy is thus:

 

Polygon Methods are the Jocks in Highschool. The answer to everything is brute force. Gets the job done, but not very intelligently. Euclideon is like the geeks in the chess club – they’re taking their time analyzing and working smarter, not harder, to find an elegant and less expensive solution to the same problem.

 

Regardless of which methodology reaches this point, it is assured that photo-realism is inevitable over time in either scenario. The real question is really just how much time to get there and will it require a super-computer to pull off?

 

 

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Binaural Audio

 

If you’ve never hear binaural audio before then you’re in for a treat. Essentially it’s 3D Audio that takes into account the Head Related Transfer calculations to create positional audio. It’s a manner to specifically record stereo audio without the stereo fatigue.

 

Use Headphones for the following audio tracks.

 

 

 

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Decentralized Nature

 

The underlying structure should be a hybrid decentralized structure to avoid any particular choke points of access or failure while still maintaining some semblance of control for the important things.

 

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Data Agnostic

 

Everyone has a cache, nobody is sharing. A central datacenter instead is too busy trying to serve everyone with redundant information and eventually (inevitably) failing over time. A perfect virtual world wouldn’t need to constantly ask a central server for data but instead ask other users in the network. Not only that, but if the data itself is agnostic (without meaning) then the local cache of the individual user could first be scanned when making requests before downloading anything from the network – essentially meaning that over time there will be less need to download individually because their caches already hold relevant data for new items.

 

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Real World Inclusive

 

Items in the virtual context should have ties to the real world context. This is where the virtual world comes together with augmented reality to create a hybrid space. Virtual items brought out of online inventory and placed in your real world living room digitally via augmented reality. Why not? We can scan real life into the virtual world, so why not make it asynchronous?

 

More importantly, it’s a marketing/advertising opportunity that has yet to really blossom.

 

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Academic, Non-Profit and Commercial Licenses

 

There is absolutely no reason to charge full scale commercial licensing or costs for personal or academic usage of such a system. It’s downright ignorant on all levels to lump them all together like that. In a perfect virtual environment, Non-Commercial and Academic usage of the system would be free or severely discounted while commercial usage would carry standard pricing tiers.

 

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The platform that scales itself.

 

One system for every possible device and scenario. Not stripped down or reworked for each context. How things look on a standard computer is how it looks on a cell phone and tablet. High definition on the native client for your desktop also means high definition and nothing different for the embedded client in Facebook – aside from interface changes to accommodate usage abilities.

 

Procedural technologies inherently built in to allow automatic fidelity scalability into the future.

 

 

These are just some of my thoughts about what points would create a perfect virtual environment for the next phase of this industry. Clearly this isn’t something you’re going to get in the current generation such as Second Life, so the best I can hope for is the next generation to pull this stuff off.

 

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Comment Question

 

What things would you like to see in a next-generation synthetic environment that would help make it perfect for you? Drop some comments below and let me know.

 

 

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3D Virtual Worlds and the Metaverse:

Current Status and Future Possibilities | #SecondLife

 

On December 1st, 2011 there arrived in my email quite astounding news from Dr. Dionisio and Dr. Gilbert that the Association for Computing Machinery had not only accepted our research paper 3D Virtual Worlds and the Metaverse: Current Status and Future Possibilities for publication in their next  journal, but that the reviewers had given the best praise of the paper that the editors had ever seen. As I read through the critiques from each reviewer, I was humbled by their responses.

 

As Dr. Gilbert succinctly put it:

 

After my recent return from the European Summit of the Immersive Education Initiative (I'm still jet lagged as you can see from the early hour I'm writing this!), Dondi sent me the news that ACM Computing Surveys had accepted our paper with relatively minor revisions.  Even more significantly, the impressions of the editors and individual reviewers of the paper were outstanding with all the reviewers suggesting that the work be considered for a best paper award, the main reviewer viewing the work as a  "seminal" contribution to the field, and the Associate Editor calling the first round reviews the best he's ever seen! 

 

What I've also learned is that ACM Computing Surveys is one of the most cited and respected journals in the field of computer science (I had no idea that Dondi had decided to reach so high in submitting the paper). To get accepted into this journal, especially with such high praise, is a great honor and once the article is published our work will be widely read and could have a real impact on the field.  After we submit the revisions in the next few weeks you can crank up all your social media expertise and begin to distribute the article as "in press." 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s definitely an honor, and quite humbling to receive that caliber of review from not one but four independent sources across the industry. My understanding of the process was that we should have expected multiple rounds of revisions before being considered for publication, so having it accepted immediately after the first round of peer review is astounding.

 

In the words of the Associate Editor at ACM:

 

These actually are the most positive first-round reviews of a journal article I have seen. If you revise this and include a document that explains how you did, and did not, address comments, I will not need to send this out for further review if it looks satisfactory to me.

 

Let’s put aside the banner waving for a moment, because despite how groundbreaking this all is, it is only a prelude to a bigger picture concerning the Metaverse as I usually provide in articles like this.

 

The Down Low

 

There is a lot of subject matter covered in the paper for ACM Journal, but the title says it all: Current Status and Future Possibilities.

 

Essentially, what we wrote was a comprehensive survey paper looking into the various areas of virtual environments, or immersive environments as some refer to it, and addressed the fundamental challenges and technologies that can further the progress. There is also discussion in the paper concerning what areas are deficient and in need of further research initiative in hopes that those areas will be focused on by some of the countless people reading and citing the paper.

 

Literary influences that led up to the current state of affairs are also outlined, in order to give a proper history of the subject while framing the further understandings as the paper continued on. As one reviewer put it, we presented the most comprehensive paper on the subject that we could short of writing an entire book about the subject.

 

As the message from Dr. Gilbert suggests, I will be making the entire paper available as a PDF when it is sent off to ACM for publication. While there are a lot of topics covered in the paper,  I’ll only be addressing one of them here in this blog.

 

The Take-Away

 

One of the biggest things that can be taken from the paper concerning the future direction of the Metaverse (in my opinion) is the implicit understanding that centralized networking is our Achilles Heel. It always has been, even before we really got into the hardcore 3D Immersive Environments like we see today. All the way back to Lessons from Habitat in 1991, Bandwidth being a scarce resource has always been a concern in something like this, and centralized networking was pegged as a culprit.

 

Yes, we can alleviate that stress by offloading across a datacenter, or buying more powerful servers. But the limitation is still there, and all we end up doing in the process is kicking the can down the road instead of actually trying to solve the problem at the root.

 

Whatever the future holds for immersive environments, it is likely that decentralized networking will be a major part of it in stark contrast to our massive datacenters today and centralized bandwidth.

 

To Boldly Go…

 

There is also a hint toward the data itself, in that the distribution of that data would likely not be the same as how we are accomplishing this task today. I’d like to say that in order for a powerful Metaverse to really evolve, the data has to be agnostic. The best way to understand this is to imagine the replicators in Star Trek and how they work.

 

When the captain walks up to a replicator and says “Tea. Earl Gray. Hot.” the replicator isn’t looking for a cup of tea in its inventory. Nowhere on the ship is there a room with thousands of cups of hot tea on a shelf waiting to be beamed to the replicator. Essentially, there is a holding tank of sorts on the ship which contains the raw molecular “soup” of materials, and the replicators are simply using a digital recipe to pull the components and “replicate” that molecular recipe.

 

 

A replicator works almost like magic. Just like the plot to every Star Trek series.

 

 

If we apply this understanding to purely digital files, the same process works. Let’s say that the replicator is a software program on your computer whose sole purpose is to reconstruct digital files based on digital fingerprints (keys) that you give it. Since we’re already talking about a decentralized network as our future, the “holding tank” full of agnostic data to be used for those reconstructions of files should be spread across every user of the network.

 

Why not? We all have a cache folder sitting on our computers from virtual environments and web browsers. What if that cache folder was simply agnostic data and available to the entire network of users in a P2P manner?

 

First off, it would mean that our cache’s are meaningless to human interpretation. Completely random data not representing anything in particular until we give it the fingerprint to reconstruct the file we need. Secondly, it would mean that the data becomes multi-use data.

 

That last point is very important. It means that 1GB of multi-use data represents or contains any file that is 1GB or less. We can say that Photoshop CS5 is under 1GB for the installer, correct? So that multi-use data would contain Photoshop CS5, and anything else that is 1GB or under. The key, so to speak, is that while such a system just about invalidates the premise of current copyright law, making it impossible to prosecute somebody using such a system, it brings up something even more interesting.

 

11 Herbs and Spices

 

It’s not the data that is really copyrightable, but the means by which such data can be arranged in a unique configuration as a representation of a work. What is really copyrightable happens to be the unique fingerprints which tell the system how to reconfigure multi-use data for a specific file output that is no longer multi-use, or in layman terms – it’s the digital recipe.

 

Another interesting side effect to multi-use data is that you’re not storing a 1:1 representation of anything. Since the data is multi-use, that means (for the most part) that you don’t need the storage equivalent for a copy of every single file in the system. All you really need at the very least is enough agnostic data available in order to cover the largest file on the network.

 

If the largest file you have on the network is about 50GB (and I’m being very generous here), then on a multi-use data system, you would need no more than 50GB of data total for everything you ever store into that network. That’s the bare minimum. Yes, at that level it would take longer to reconstruct the data, but it would still work. the more agnostic data you have in storage, the faster that reconstruction goes. Think of it like over unity…

 

Needless to say that a multi-use data structure in combination with decentralized networking would mean that, in example, the entirety of the Second Life asset servers could be housed in about 100 terabytes or less (for redundancy), and the reliability of that system would mean that the odds of anything in your inventory ever disappearing would be so close to nil as to make no odds.

 

And that, is how you solve the root of a problem instead of addressing only the symptoms.

 

 

 

diaspora*

How #SecondLife may find their social media answer blowing in the wind…

 

 

Social Media Networks are essentially all the same on the surface. You’re connecting with friends, relatives, co-workers, and sharing information on a feed wall. Of course there is the addition of games, applications, and other plugins which give our social networks a sense of further connectivity, but in the long run they are all essentially laid out the same. When we take a look at the varying social networks, we have to ask ourselves what it is that makes one better than another, and at first glance we are hard pressed to see any real differences.

 

Take for instance, Facebook. It’s essentially a three pane layout with your controls on the left side, different information feeds in the center (wall) and on the right hand side are advertisements, and other things.

 

 

 

 

I’m sure the image above looks familiar. To me, this is a social media network that is showing its age in the amount of clutter that has managed to cram itself into the interface over time. If we take into account the addition of the Chat Sidebar view (which I’ve turned off) the far right side of the screen becomes a contact list. Aside from aesthetics, this sort of feature creep has turned what once was a clean layout without too much clutter or distraction into the digital equivalent to an advertising back-alley. Myspace had the same issue as well before its demise, when NewsCorp initially bought it up and then opened the flood gates for marketing. Now that Myspace is trying to be the place where musicians and artists can connect (read: spam) you, it is little wonder why anyone uses it any longer.

 

For the longest time, Facebook was the center of the social media world. Everyone was compared to them, and their 500+ Million users. Even today that happens, because that’s where everyone is at this particular moment. But there is always a paradigm shift on the horizon, and even Facebook knows that, which explains why they are looking for an IPO – the cash out. This can be seen in Zynga’s (Farmville, etc) sudden interest in an IPO as well.

 

Of course, this can also be explained in conjunction with the behemoth of media, Google, gaining ground with their Google+ Social Network. But something isn’t quite right…

 

 

 

 

With all of the hype surrounding Google+, for those that actually have gotten into the service have likely noticed that there is little difference between Facebook and Google+, other than the obligatory integration of Google services. Yes, Google+ has Circles and Sparks, and Hangouts, but Circles are a fancy way of saying “Groups”, Sparks is a fancy way of saying “RSS Search” and Hangout is just a Group VideoChat. Are these the killer features of the Google+ service? Sure they’ll throw in Games, because that’s obligatory for a social media network, and they’ll probably use their acquisition of Aardvark to offer a “Live Answers from Real People” service powered by the network.

 

I’m still unconvinced this is anything to really be excited about, especially when we take into account the Google+ stance on the use of pseudonyms as your profile identity, which you are not allowed to do based on their terms of service. People leaving Facebook based on privacy concerns to go to Google+ are finding out that they’ve essentially jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire as Google has decided to make all profiles public without an option to make them private, and they also insist you use your “wallet” name – that is a birth name on your profile or come under the scrutiny of the digital inquisition.

 

While the media has been focusing attention of Google+ and whether or not it will be a Facebook killer, there has been an ongoing development called Diaspora* in the background. A tech startup that is taking a different approach to all of this. But diaspora* isn’t a fly by night sort of operation that suddenly came out of nowhere; They’ve been around for a few years now, working diligently to create a social media network that is very different than Facebook or Google+.

 

 

 

We already know from the pictures that there is essentially little difference to the layout of these social media networks, so what are the underlying things that make these social media outlets different, and why should we care?

 

Privacy is Dead. (Or is It?)

 

When it comes to Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg once said “Privacy is dead” and when it comes to Google+ they are taking a similar stance in that your profiles must be tied to a real person (wallet name) and they will be insisting on making all profiles public. Aside from this very telling stance, Facebook and Google have a very large incentive to keep you public and “authentic” in that they earn their money on the zeitgeist advertising metrics. In this case, there is no room for the myriad of other ways we may present ourselves online, such as anonymously or through a pseudonym; Whether the pseudonym is a pen name or of your virtual world avatar is irrelevant, because they both act like a digital inquisition when challenged – asking for a cell phone number or other “approved” methods by which to validate your identity, which in turn defeat the point of anonymity or pseudonyms because those validation methods divulge private information about yourself that you had no intention of divulging – and more often than not shouldn’t be legally forced to divulge for something like a social media network.

 

Diaspora, on the other hand is the polar opposite to this “Privacy is dead” approach by stating it is specifically designed to facilitate your privacy in a decentralized and agnostic manner which each person is free to control entirely, while also giving users and entities the right to start their own “pod” in the network with the source code. This is a stark contrast to Google+ and Facebook where your information is housed centrally (thanks to Google and Facebook) and where Google and Facebook control what privacy (if any) you are allowed to have.

 

So while on the surface, these social media networks look essentially the same, the ideals of Diaspora and how it works are in stark contrast, almost in total defiance, to mainstream social media networks.

 

While Diaspora isn’t as fully featured as Facebook or Google+, you have to hand it to their small team in that they are diligently working on the code and making it better over time. Their greatest concern isn’t whether or not you can play Angry Birds, or beg for CafeWorld items on your stream, but in making the underlying system secure and privacy aware, even with encryption. Unlike Google+, they aren’t subject to corporate sponsor (or even intelligence agency) pressures to make everyone “authentic”. No, they simply care about whether or not you can control all the aspects of your privacy and persona.

 

Personally, I believe this is a “killer" app” for social media. It’s not the widgets, it’s not video games, it’s not a little “Like” button on websites. The killer application of social media is (and always should remain) the ability to represent yourself with privacy and security in whatever manner you decide. Advertisers and corporate entities will realize that reaching demographics is a privilege and not a right, and more so that the individual right to privacy will always trump their right to make a buck.

 

As of this moment, think about all of the information you voluntarily give them. Photos, videos, comments, likes, and all manner of user habits as they keep an eye on you. You’d think that would be enough to satisfy them, but now with Google+ they are extending that boundary further by insisting on a real name and not anonymous or pseudonym. If they challenge your “name” on a profile, they ask for a phone number to verify your identity or any other amount of “approved” identification methods such as maybe ID cards, or mainstream media references where your name is shown. Maybe a home address too?

 

Is it just me, or is all of this invasion of privacy becoming too much? If you use FourSquare, you’re already broadcasting everywhere you go, and I made a joke on Twitter about this to the tune of how the NSA can essentially track you without needing a warrant: Just make it into a game called FourSquare and you’ll be volunteering your whereabouts.

 

It’s one thing to make these privacy options… optional. But it crosses the line when these companies begin demanding instead of asking. That’s the one thing I will not stand for… will you?

 

Is there a SecondLife for Diaspora?

 

By now you’re probably wondering what any of this has to do with SecondLife since I’ve tagged the article for Twitter as such. Actually, this article has quite a lot to do with SecondLife and Linden Lab if we think about it.

 

Linden Lab wanted to create some sort of social media connection between their existing users and social media services that they use outside of SecondLife. Their initial thought on the subject was to find ways to integrate into Facebook (Skylight, etc) but found that when they put all their chips on the table to make that happen, they were shot down. Facebook decided to enforce their T.O.S. and wiped out quite a lot of Avatar Identity Profiles on the Facebook service. Since connecting SecondLife to Facebook would require Linden Lab to follow the Facebook terms of service, they would be forced to only allow “authentic” users to connect, which is a very different reality to what sort of user they already have of their service in Avatar identities. With Google+ the option wasn’t even on the table, as Google began enforcing their T.O.S. even in closed beta, removing “fake” avatar identities which were really SecondLife citizens looking for a privacy aware alternative haven for social media.

 

It is possible that the push for “Display Names” came about as a short sighted workaround to address the “authentic” names issue on Facebook, but then it was realized that not many people were going to change their display names to a real name, thus making that idea bunk. However, Display Names does have at least the side effect of allowing people to choose a name – so whether that is putting your real name over your head or just choosing something less arbitrary than the name you were assigned on rez-day is inconsequential.

 

The answer, at least in the short term, for Linden Lab has been to simply develop Social Profiles for their citizens – a walled garden social network for their own avatar users where they can have a safe haven. If you can’t join them, then you make your own… But this isn’t entirely the best idea either, even though it shows that Linden lab is at least thinking forward on this in terms of their own users. I mean, if we ignore the acquisition of Avatar United and shutting it down in the first place.

 

The problem still remains that the avatar identities are still blacklisted from mainstream social media, and those that are not have either given their real names, are on borrowed time, or have invented some plausible name that will escape detection from the digital inquisition. Creating an entirely new network specifically for just avatar identities is not solving the overall problem either, because the situation is reversed – in that instead of avatars being persecuted on social media, now “real people” are persecuted since they have to have an avatar to participate in Social Profiles.

 

This is where a stroke of genius comes in.

 

Diaspora is open source, and they wholly encourage people to set up their own “pods” in the decentralized network. They are privacy aware, and don’t care if you are anonymous, pseudonymous or authentic. Why build a social media network from the ground up that will only service a walled garden, when you can connect to an open source framework that prides itself on privacy and user identity in all forms?

 

I propose, then, that the SecondLife Social Profiles run on Diaspora as part of the decentralized social network infrastructure. This is the secret as to how we can bring the “authentic” people and the “avatar identities” together under a single banner, while remaining accessible to the outside world and cross platform. Why not? Diaspora seems to be the social network of choice gaining favor quickly with Avatar identities. It meets all of the needs for a Social Profile in SecondLife, and for the needs it does not meet, the code is open source and extendable freely as needed.

 

Diaspora + SecondLife, think about it.

 

There is also the main reason why I really believe that SecondLife should be using Diaspora as their Social Profiles system, and it’s the biggest reason:

 

Time and again I find myself writing about interoperability and the future of the Metaverse. More recently in the context of research papers and now as the Object Interoperability Lead for IEEE Virtual Worlds Standards Workgroup. The most consistent thing I find myself saying, and getting agreement on, is that open formats and methods are favored over proprietary methods at all points. The agnostic descriptions usually state things such as that the methods must be available via open source, without patents or litigation, and must be implementable by anyone who wishes without royalty, fee or restrictive license.

 

In the recent research paper with Dr. Dionisio and Dr. Gilbert, there exists a chart to illustrate how Social Media and virtual Environments offer two different forms of ecosystem, in that social media freely shares with each other, and while virtual environments sometimes connect to those social media outlets, it is often a one way street as virtual environments remain within their walled gardens.

 

Social Profiles as they exist today do not qualify for standards compliance, however the introduction of Diaspora as the backbone method by which to integrate Social Profiles for SecondLife would have far more benefits and easily qualifies under standards compliancy, while truly offering a method to reach outside of the walled garden, and reach back in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dcentralized Content Distribution Network

What would happen if a single web server were suddenly inundated with an abnormally high amount of bandwidth, such that the cost of serving the content far outweighed the acceptable cost per user ratio intended by the publisher? This is known as the "slashdot" effect and can be applied to a number of scenarios across the digital publishing realm.

What inevitably happens is that, a small publisher of content creates a particular amount of media (be it an article, graphic, executable application, etc) that somehow finds massive appeal and favor among millions of people around the world. This in turn opens a virtual floodgate of people trying to access the content online, and thus the servers (of which the publisher is more than likely leasing) are collectively bombarded with content requests.

For a fortified server, such is usually not a problem as bandwidth is appropriated accordingly. But for low bandwidth servers (or say, publishers who cannot afford large bandwidth) we see either that the website in question is obliterated under the weight of the traffic, or that the host charges massive overages to the publisher - of which the publisher many times cannot afford.

Decentralized Content Distribution in this scenario can easily alleviate the major cause of this, while using very little of the network resources individually, but overall serving the content as though it were from a high speed server. Undeniably, 10k/sec from a large amount of servers adds up in the end just as pennies can add up in the large scale of things.

So say your server was being requested of 10k/sec. On your access per month, this amounts to very little and is inconsequential. But now multiply that by 200 servers, and you see that the content can be served at around 2000k/sec or higher (depending on the actual Kb/sec each server is appropriating). So, like a vest of Kevlar, when the bullet (the millions of requests) hit the main server, the Decentralized Network intercepts the bullet and spreads the traffic across a large area in small doses.

For websites, this seems to work amazingly well and, in fact, some websites currently handle their traffic this way (with 25 million users even though the main server remains low on bandwidth usage). The idea here is that I got to thinking about how this could be used in order to solve an age old problem concerning online Virtual Reality.

In one of the earliest written synopsis for an online virtual community (Habitat) Morningstar and Farmer pointed out that in order for a wide scale virtual environment to continually grow the servers of the content could not be centralized. Decentralization was key to the continued advancement and growth of virtual environments. I would like to believe also that this pertains to the "environment server" as well as the content server (many times these two are seperate), though I am currently focusing on a solution for the content end (with the environment server being a consideration well into the future).

When I muse of this, what I am thinking is that while current systems can easily handle tens of thousands of simultaneous users, the price per user begins to see an exponential increase in cost proportional to the amount of users. In essence, we see an exponential increase when the system is centralized.

Taking this into account, even the best planned and programmed system will begin to see an ultimate limit as to how many users can co-exist per centralized server before the costs of that system become prohibitive to it's expansion. And herein lies the point of Decentralized Content Distribution Networks.

While I am unfamiliar with the detailed mechanics of systems such as Second Life or There, I do understand that they take a fundamentally similar approach to the content that is served in their virtual environments. While Second Life effectively "streams" content using a derivative of the RealMedia system (as Phillip Rosedale was one of the creators of the format) I am want to believe that the content still comes from a centralized system of servers. In this much I am certain, though it is quite possible that the Second Life system also groups persons by node in order to offload the distribution of the content. I could be very wrong in the last aspect, but the behavior of the system seems to warrant such node grouping.

In recent months, I have read such articles wherein a self replicating object in the Second Life environment has managed to disable their servers, so in light of this new information I am now leaning toward the idea that they are attempting to run the Second Life environment on a centralized system.

This in itself is fine if a company in this field wishes to establish a user base of no larger than 100,000, but around such time, the cost per user will begin to skyrocket out of control as the numbers increase past this threshold.

In the end, seeing as I am interested in the theoretical applications of virtual environments and it's advancement, I have found that the Active Worlds environment seems to be the most receptive to this line of testing, and have continued toward attempting to find solutions to problems outlined in the synopsis "Lessons Learned From Lucasfilm's Habitat" Morningstar & Farmer, of which happens to be attempting to address the centralization problem.

Over the past few months I have indeed found a very plausible candidate for solving this Decentralization aspect within the Active Worlds environment by routing the Object Path through a server-side P2P network which self replicates and organizes the information from a main server across 260 high bandwidth servers around the world as a specific type of hash file. The more bandwidth that the Object Path requires, the more efficient the CDN will become, even though in beginning to use it I have noticed variable speeds (but not enough testing or time has been given to this in order to gauge it's overall ability).

One thing that I have immediately noticed is that it actually works in the Active Worlds environment, though entering the specific address to begin with in the World Properties Dialog and hitting apply will crash your browser, after you restart the browser you immediately realize that while it crashed your browser the change in address did take effect and the Object Path is being redirected through the CDN, thus beginning the hash replication and self organization across the whole network (server side and not user side).

After some various testing in the virtual world, I have noticed that it has a 99% accuracy when downloading the various files from the distributed network (99% as in that maybe 5 or 6 files will randomly time out while trying to be located and thus not properly loading, though simply exiting and re-entering the world seems to automatically correct this problem).

While I will not disclose exactly how this method is accomplished, I will say that for the most part it works just fine. I would imagine that it would perform much better under much higher stress than a few users entering at random, so this method would be best used for virtual environments where you are expecting a much higher stress on the Object Path (hundreds, thousands or more users). In theory, it would be possible to minimize the overall bandwidth consumption of an entire universe server's set of Object Paths even if it were to be filled to the brink with users (possibly serve every Object Path in a universe from a single cable modem and a home computer with low latency).

So from the theoretical application to the proof of concept, at least the serving of the content part can be decentralized as suggested by Morningstar and Farmer.