Places, a new initiative from the Multiverse Network, will offer users the ability to connect through Manhattan's Times Square. Earlier this year, the company first demonstrated the Times Square environment, at the time to showcase its graphics capabilities and to explain how many users it could fit on a single server.
(Credit: Multiverse Network)The Multiverse Network, a developer of virtual world platform software, announced Wednesday that it was unveiling what it calls Places, two related social elements that tie Multiverse users together.
Essentially connective tissue for users of the Multiverse platform, Places has two separate components.
The first is a social networks application that automatically connects people using Multiverse virtual worlds together with others who are also friends in social networks like Facebook.
The second part of Places is a new virtual world centered around a digital representation of Manhattan's Times Square. Now anyone who installs Multiverse's World Browser--the basic Multiverse virtual world software--will be able to enter the Times Square environment and connect and socialize with friends, play games, view interactive entertainment, and meet and greet in personal, private destinations.
This is notable for two reasons, and seems to be a culmination of much of what Multiverse has been working on the last couple of years.
On the one hand, until now, Multiverse has fashioned itself strictly as a platform provider, offering others the ability to build virtual worlds using its software. On the other, Multiverse last year unveiled a prototype of the Times Square environment as a showcase for its ability to host large numbers of people on a single server.
But from the beginning, Multiverse offered the promise of tying users of all the virtual worlds built on top of its platform together. It was never entirely clear how that would work, and to date, there had been no publicly available, completed worlds made using the software.
Now, however, it is clear Multiverse is using the Places model to showcase its technology and demonstrate that its platform is capable of supporting a 3D social virtual world, somewhat along the lines of Second Life.
Disclosure: My wife works for Second Life publisher Linden Lab.
Another interesting piece of Places is that it is, as Multiverse puts it, "an open-source virtual world." This means, the company said, that developers can "access, modify, and add to its user interface, avatar behaviors, menu system, art assets, avatars and--most importantly--its game play or structured interaction capabilities."
This would seem to indicate that Multiverse will be allowing users to make wholesale changes to the Places virtual world along the lines of the kinds of modifications and content creation that is possible in Second Life.
What's not clear is the scope that developers will have with these tools and whether they will be able to make adult content.
This is interesting because one way that Multiverse has tried to position itself to corporate clients wanting to build a virtual world on its platform is that those clients wouldn't have to worry about their own users encountering objectionable content.
In a separate announcement also made Wednesday, Multiverse said that Oscar-winning filmmaker James Cameron--a member of the company's board of directors--plans to use the platform to build a virtual world based on his film, Titanic.
Called Places in Time: Titanic, it will be structured as an educational environment in which users can explore much about the voyage and fate of the doomed ship.
The Titanic virtual world will be a "destination" for users of Places and is clearly meant to demonstrate how third-party developers can expand upon the platform.
Multiverse's new virtual Times Square demo showcases the company's latest technology, including the ability to pipe YouTube videos directly into a virtual world.
(Credit: Multiverse Network)I spent part of Friday afternoon in New York's Times Square, but something wasn't quite right.
On the one hand, things looked very realistic, with the many digital video screens blaring high-fidelity but inane content out at me. On the other, there was only one person in evidence.
So, OK, this wasn't really Times Square. Rather, it was a new technology demo from Multiverse Network, a leading virtual-world platform developer.
In general, Multiverse just makes its platform available to any development team that wants to use it to create a new virtual world. But in this case, the company created the Times Square demo itself as a way to showcase some of its newest innovations.
In point of fact, the demo is pretty impressive, as evidenced by the video (click here for Windows Media format) Multiverse put up on its site.
Even though there's only one avatar in the demo, Multiverse's technology can support up to 1,000 on a single server.
(Credit: Multiverse Network)A couple of things make this special.
First, if you're familiar with virtual worlds like Second Life, this takes the graphics to another level of realism, and that's a nice thing. Second, even though there's only one avatar in the demo, it would be possible using its technology, Multiverse says, to populate the Times Square scene--or any using their platform--with up to 1,000 avatars, all off a single server.
But there are some other little bits of magic going on here.
One is that all the video boards in the virtual Times Square are running different pieces of content, including at least a couple piping in video directly, and seamlessly, from YouTube. That's not something I think we've seen before using any other platform.
Another nice element is what Multiverse calls its high-dynamic range lighting system, which can display the best possible lighting effects on a high-end gamer machine or lesser effects on a lower-end machine. The system determines the CPU and GPU power and adjusts the effects accordingly.
All in all, this is just a demo, and certainly not anything regular users can yet play around with. But to Multiverse, it's indicative of what's possible with its platform and therefore what any virtual-world developer using that platform can do with it.
Of course, I'm not really that big a fan of Times Square anyway. Now, if we can adjust that demo so I can bop over to Eighth Avenue and catch a bus from Port Authority to New Jersey, that would be impressive.
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