Virtual Communities I: Building the Technologies
Dateline: 11/24/97
Virtual worlds as gathering places, communities, playgrounds, fan-clubs,
and tributes are coming. The technology necessary for distributed interoperable
virtual worlds isn't quite there but is coming "real soon now". VRML as
an extensible language for the representation of these worlds is being
pushed towards this new cyber-horizon. In this weeks feature we will look
at some of the technical foundations being built. In next week's Virtual
Communities II, we will look at the types of prototype communities and
environments being developed.
In the technical community, building the infrastructure, the two "big"
efforts to create Distributed Virtual Environemtns or DVEs, are LivingWorlds
and Open Communities. Of course
creating a virtual environment isn't enough, you have to be able to populate
the world with people, or virtual stand-ins, otherwise known as avatars.
Some of the avatar work has been covered previously in "Humanoids
Among Us." The major avatar efforts are Universal
Avatars and the Humanoid
Animation Working Group of the VRML Consortium.
Inside of the Open Communites specification are the classes spAvatarInfo
and spAvatar which are intended to support the implementation of Universal
Avatars concepts. Open Communities provides the environment and an open
API in which avatar builders can place their avatars. The Universal Avatars
can keep their built-in behaviors inside of an Open Communities world.
A good introduction to avatars can be found at the Avatar
page written by Abbot Brush of IBM.
Living Worlds is being developed in the context of some long-standing
goals developed by the early VRML community. These are (from the Living
Worlds spec):
1.Defining appearances: how things in cyberspace will look
2.Defining behavior: how to make things move
3.Defining distribution: how moving worlds will be shared
In the Living Worlds
spec a key concept is the MUtech (pronounced mew-tech not moo-tech...unless
you're from farm country). A MUtech is the main virtual community server.
It is the place where all the avatars and syncronization necessary to let
everyone share a consistent virtual space, takes place. According to the
Living Worlds spec:
In order to separate out the information only relevant to specific
networking
technologies. We define a concept called a MUtech (pronounced mew-tek),
the MUtech is the code which manages sharing the state of
the world, its exact characteristics will vary from supplier to supplier.
The choice of MUtech is made by the author of the world, who adds
at least one Zone node, a PrivateZone node, and a MUtechZone to their world.
The term "MUtechZone" is used to mean any one of the vendor-specific nodes
for handling networking. For example a ParaGraphZone node.
Space is partitioned using three concepts, a World, Scene and Zone. A Zone
the lowest level, i.e. smallest area, of these three is the "range of control
of a MUtech". Different vendors supplying different MUtech with different
application capabilities, such as electronic commerce, or games, will still
be able to function in the larger distributed world. If you're really interested
in all the complexity, and there is plenty of it, check out the Living
Worlds spec.
Two key players in the creation of these virtual worlds are Sony and
blaxxun interactive. Sony's Virtual
Society on the Web page offers the Community Place browser and server.
The blaxxun folks have the most robust collection of tools and offer the
CCpro client and the blaxxun Community Server. Stay tuned more discussion
of the worlds people are creating with these tools in next weeks issue,
same web station, same web time.
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