Geek Gestalt

STANFORD, Calif.--Mitch Kapor, like many people, is well aware that virtual worlds are often very difficult to use.

The founder of Lotus 1-2-3, who also happens to be the first investor in Second Life publisher Linden Lab and its chairman, spoke at the Metaverse Roadmap meeting here today on the topic of what can be done to make using virtual worlds a better experience.

"I'm obsessed with what's going to make these things easier to use," Kapor said, his face lit with excitement. "I think a piece of hardware is involved."

And that hardware? 3D cameras, he said.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)

The idea, he suggested, is that 3D cameras would be able to provide a new kind of input as to what users are doing at any given moment.

He said that the today's graphical user interface standard input, a mouse and keyboard, don't really make that much sense, but that people don't question it because there's no alternative.

But he pointed to the futuristic graphical display made famous in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report that allowed Tom Cruise's character to move information around on a screen with his hands.

"Look at Minority Report," Kapor said. "I'm here to say that (technology is) going to be real in the next (few) years."

In fact, he said, he predicted that 3D cameras, which would be built into computers much like regular 2D cameras are today, will be available in as little as 12 months.

Basically, 3D cameras would allow the virtual world software to interpret how users are moving in the real-world and to translate that movement into the software. That could mean, then, that if the user raises his or her hand, so too does their avatar.

Kapor said he wasn't clear on what the interface would be like, but he suggested it could be based on something like that of the Segway, in which users move their body forward and the Segway goes forward, backward to go backward, and so forth.

"So, if I look to the left in the real world, I just want my avatar to look to the left," Kapor said. "If I smile, I just want my avatar to smile. The cameras should be good enough to pick that up. I think we're going to see an amazing jump in the sense of presence."

Another experiential improvement the cameras could offer, he said, could be a better way to edit 3D objects.

"It's going to change how editing is done in 3D worlds," he said, "if you can reach in and grab the handles of an object and pull them out with your hands and extend or change the shape of the object."

To demonstrate the value of the cameras, Kapor said he has a prototype already and is planning, within a few months, to start putting up a series of videos shot with it onto YouTube.

All told, the 3D camera could well make up one of the components of the augmented reality piece of the Metaverse Roadmap document that the Accelerating Studies Foundation put out last year.

For now, though, it's too early to tell if Kapor's excitement will be matched by a real-life manifestation of the technology. But with someone like Kapor, who has a stellar track record of picking successful technology and institutions--he helped found the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is the founding chairman of the Mozilla Foundation--you have to give him the benefit of the doubt.

STANFORD, Calif.--If one thing is clear about the immediate future of virtual worlds, it's that every toy company is going be setting something up.

That was the prediction of Raph Koster, the co-founder of Areae, which has created a virtual world platform called Metaplace, at a meeting of the Metaverse Roadmap here Friday. Koster got up to speak to a group of the leaders of the virtual world community and announced he was going to be the day's cynic.

"We (were asked) to talk about what's exciting," Koster said. "But I'm pretty sure the answer is that there will be 10 more kids' worlds...How much of the investment dollars is actually going to be going to making more versions of Barbie Online?"

The point, Koster continued, is that people who are expecting any immediate implementations of augmented reality technology or any of the other futuristic elements that came out of the Metaverse Roadmap project aren't likely to see the light of day anytime soon.

"The interesting question is, how much are commercial pressures versus idealistic pressures going to effect virtual worlds in the next couple years?" Koster asked rhetorically.

And the answer, in large part, is that the bulk of investment dollars are going toward entertainment properties these days, Koster argued.

And what that means, for at least the immediate future, Koster added, is that the most development energy will be going to creating virtual worlds aimed at kids--in large part because those worlds attract big audiences, and revenue.

It's not that the technology isn't ready, for some of the best-case technological scenarios, Koster added. He said that, in fact, some of the predictions for various "lifelogging" technologies, or things that can record just about anything that goes on around someone, are ready today.

But because the entertainment companies are more interested in creating large, captive audiences, we're much more likely to see an almost never-ending stream of walled-garden virtual worlds centered around entertainment than the "dream of the metaverse" in the near future.

Of course, Koster--who does seem to be a big fan of the futuristic predictions of the Metaverse Roadmap community--couched his comments under the rubric of informed cynicism. He implied that the best vision of the technological future of the metaverse and virtual worlds is actually coming from science fiction these days.

So, he said, if you want to see the best vision of where things are going, at least on a technological level, read the novels of Vernor Vinge and Charlie Stross.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--I was walking around the Virtual Worlds conference here this afternoon when I ran into Jerry Paffendorf, the co-author of the Metaverse Roadmap report and the current co-founder of a stealth start-up called Wello Horld.

inDuality is a software front-end that will allow users to access multiple virtual worlds through a single Web browser-based interface

(Credit: Pelican Crossing)

Paffendorf knows all, and so I eagerly asked him what was the best thing he'd seen at the show.

Without hesitating, he pointed me over to a small corner of the expo floor and to the little booth of a skunkworks project called inDuality developed by a company called Pelican Crossing and another known as IBM.

Well, when I finally found my way over to the inDuality booth, I was duly impressed. This is a very cool alpha technology that lets anyone--well, anyone using Internet Explorer in Windows XP or Vista--run a Web browser-based front-end for a whole bunch of different virtual worlds.

This is a pretty nifty little application. The idea is that you wander into a courtyard and are faced with a bunch of kiosks, each representing a portal into its corresponding virtual world. So, you could walk up to one and suddenly you're in Club Penguin. Back out--with a back arrow, since this is all Web-based--and you can then walk to the Second Life kiosk. Bam, you're at the sign-in screen for SL.

Pelican Crossing CEO Clive Jackson told me that by using an OpenID identity, a user could pop around the various virtual worlds with a single login, and that the inDuality client takes care of the grunt work of downloading and installing all the various virtual world applications.

Here, Second Life is seen being used from inside the Web browser.

(Credit: Pelican Crossing)

In addition, Jackson explained that it's possible to build little controls into the various virtual worlds, or onto the Web interface that can launch different actions. So, for example, you could have a button in Club Penguin that would launch Second Life. Or vice-versa.

This is not interoperable worlds, however. Once you leave one for another, you're gone.

Anyway, this is very new technology, and it probably will be awhile before it has any measurable utility. But for now, at least, it's a pretty cool thing to be able to click through all these various environments without even needing to run a single piece of stand-alone software.

Thanks, Jerry.