KnowSense

Full Second Life Viewer as Browser Plugin

neilC — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 18:55:00 +0100

There have been several attempts over the past year to create a viewer for Second Life and OpenSim based virtual environments that would run 'in a browser'. I've tried to write about them all, from Linden Lab partnering with GaiKai to provide a server-side rendered and streamed experience of SecondLife to Tipodean using the Unity 3D web player to render OpenSim. Every time I saw one of these I thought - if you have to download and install a plugin, why not just wrap the full viewer up as a plugin and install that? Well now SpotOn3D have done almost exactly that:

Voila - Second Life in a Browser

It isn't designed for accessing Second Life. It is mainly designed for embedding on Facebook pages along with Facebook user account integration to drive more adoption of SpotOn3D grids and worlds. What they have done is to create a browser plugin which launches the full SpotOn3D viewer as a separate process, and ensure that the viewer draws it's rendered frames onto the space that the plugin has reserved for it in the browser window. This means that the full viewer (based on the 1.23.5 Linden code base) is running, giving you the full experience. Even voice works. The fact that the viewer is running as a separate process is useful - it should mean that if the viewer crashes it won't take out your browser (provided that the plugin has been written to cope with the sudden disappearance of the viewer process). The plugin has been created using the FireBreath open source toolkit for creating cross-browser plugins, although it seems that right now there are no hooks for communicating from the page to the viewer other than to launch it.

To try it, head to http://3durl.com/world and install the plugin. After installation you get a choice of two grids

Choosing a grid after plugin install

If you don't have an account you'll need to create one, then return to that page and use the account info to log in. Then the viewer will launch magically in your browser. The viewport is fixed size unfortunately right now, but it works perfectly. There is a degree of sluggishness (I assume there is an overhead of sending mouse/keyboard input to the viewer process from the plugin) and overall everything felt somewhat slower than running the client natively. However, there's no denying that it is a full SL viewer-in-a-browser.

Arriving in SpotOn3D... in a browser. Yep, still in the browser

So just what has been achieved here, other than an interesting technical feat? Right now the drive seems to be to try to hoover up some of the Facebook herd. Reduce the barrier to entry for the curious. I can see that having some value, if you have a business model requiring lots of users, as SpotOn3D does I think. But those users must have a great initial experience. If you make it a few clicks to get in, the user will have little commitment and hence will just as easily flit off somewhere else. And if this thing takes off, SpotOn3D could get hit by hundreds suddenly dipping their toe in the virtual water - how will the grid cope? Is it going to load balance them off to copies of the sim? Will there be staff on hand to greet them all? It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

It is important to realise that having the viewer launched as a plugin does not bring with it the advantages that a true 'browser' based viewer would have. The full viewer is still running, requiring relevant permissions to install it, and all the same firewall requirements that the full viewer has. This is not going to help with adoption of immersive environments in enterprises, other than maybe providing a foot-in-the-door ("Oh, yes, it runs in the browser")

I guess I should mention Kitely in the context of creating easy to access OpenSim virtual worlds. In fact there's not so much difference between the approaches. Kitely installs a plugin, but their plugin launches a separate client rather than embedding it in the browser. However right now their account integration with Facebook is already done, and they give you your own region that spins up on demand.

So how did I log into SecondLife with it? By accident when trying to work out how to 'close' the embedded viewer - I wasn't sure that closing the browser tab would log me out so I used the viewer menu to log out - and there is a lovely grid drop down and manager, so you could connect it to any SecondLife or OpenSim server. Bear in mind that the SpotOn3D viewer isn't in the SL 3rd party viewer directory. And why not just launch the full viewer?

My home location in Second Life. Did I say this was in a browser?

Today's OpenSim News

neilC — Mon, 23 May 2011 12:55:00 +0100

Trying out KeepStream, a new rather snazzy tool for assembling collections of resources from Twitter and Facebook, this took literally a couple of minutes to assemble. Thanks to @botgirlq and @storytellin

Channels of Collaboration

neilC — Sat, 14 May 2011 19:48:00 +0100

I'm going to be discussing collaboration tomorrow evening on Tonight Live in Second Life. I remembered that I'd given a talk on the subject a couple of years ago, at the Beta Business Park in SL, and rather than let the presentation fester on my hard drive I might as well share it. It ends with a tour of the Roobaab CMS and 3D meeting tools. But the meat in the middle is some thoughts on collaboration and the tools for doing it. Maybe it is helpful to someone.

Channels of collaboration

View more presentations from KnowSense Limited

Appearing live on 'Tonight Live' in Second Life

neilC — Fri, 13 May 2011 21:02:00 +0100

They say you should try everything once, and since I've never been on a live chat show in any form, when I was asked if I'd like to be interviewed on 'Tonight Live with Paisley Beebe', the biggest live show in Second Life, I immediately thought "Er, erm, no, not really, well, what if, but, oh OK then".
So for your enjoyment and my toe-curling embarassment, catch the whole thing live this Sunday at 6pm SLT (BST - 8) in-world at the studios in SL or on Treet.tv or later archived on the Tonight Live web site. Yes, that means I'll be trying to sound roughly like I know what I'm talking about at 2am my time, having played at a live pub music session earlier in the evening. My mileage may vary.

Virtual Worlds - A People Place?

neilC — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 19:39:00 +0100

This blog is largely about 'serious' collaborative uses of virtual world and related technologies. However sometimes things touch you to an extent you want to share. I recently found this poem, it's not posted much out on the web as far as I can see - and it should be. The relevance or otherwise I leave up to you.

Kinect Motion Control of Virtual World Avatars

neilC — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 13:06:00 +0000

It has finally happened - the Kinect motion-sensing gadget from Microsoft has been hooked up to control avatars in virtual worlds that use the Second Life viewer:

Thanks to New World Notes for spotting this!

This kind of thing tends to get people very excited, and rightly so - making interaction with 3D virtual environments more intuitive and less clunky is key to bringing the benefits that these environments hold. I'm easily swept up by the giddy shiny too, imagining being able to have all my movements and facial gestures immediately reflected in my avatar, visible to everyone, under my control (turn down transmission of grumpy, accentuate transmission of happy, apply improve-posture algorithm etc). This is maybe a step along the way, but before getting too excited it's worth understanding exactly what is happening here and what the limitations currently are. Read on for detailed analysis...

The Tyranny of Virtual Choice

neilC — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 19:01:00 +0000

I've come close to being paralysed in supermarkets due to the overwhelming amount of choice on offer. Some people have full blown anxiety attacks. This is a well known phenomenon - increasing amounts of choice are not necessarily a good thing.

"Unconstrained freedom leads to paralysis and becomes a kind of self-defeating tyranny. It is self-determination within significant constraints--within rules of some sort--that leads
to well-being, to optimal functioning" - from 'Self Determination - The Tyranny of Freedom'

Clearly freedom as opposed to oppression is something to be valued, and you might find the 'optimal functioning' a little dubious, but the evidence is growing that too much choice can be bad for you. One research paper titled, 'When Choice is Demotivating' described how being given a much restricted choice (in that case, 6 types of jam rather than over 20) made people more satisfied.

So what would a life be like where you could do absolutely anything you wanted, totally free of any kind of constraint - constraints of appearance, geography, physics, relationships. What would you do today?

Smile, Your Avatar is on Kinect

neilC — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 15:16:00 +0000

By now most people with an interest in Virtual Worlds, avatars, gaming or Microsoft Kinect will have seen the Avatar Kinect announcement:

The key interesting techy feature here is the ability of Kinect to track not only your body movements but also your facial expression and translate those into movements and expressions of your avatar. This kind of technology available for commodity pricing is very exciting and of course has spawned a massive Kinect 'hacking' community creating ways to use the Kinect with PCs. Simple control of Virtual Worlds viewers and 3D games can be hooked up easily by mapping body movements to keyboard combinations. However the key thing for the whole immersive environments industry is that it could help make the use of 3D realtime animated avatars a more widely accepted normal way to interact.

Which begs the question that comes so often - why use avatars and shared artificial 3D spaces at all? In an interview for the book "Virtual Body Language", Bruce Damer, one of the earlest pioneers in Virtual Worlds with over 15 years 'avatar' experience was asked about the difference between video chat such as Skype and 'avatar' chat in a virtual environment - his reply perfectly reflects my feelings:

"Avatar chat places you in an interstitial place, a world between you and those who you are interacting with. Video chat very much anchors you in the place you are in real life. So they are really two different media altogether..."

I recommend reading the whole interview.

If there are just two of you, I'd suggest avatars and 3D immersive virtual environments won't do much to add to the experience you can get from the telephone or a video conference, unless you have inhibitions about your appearance or your speaking voice. However as soon as you have several people involved, as I've written before, most people find that a telephone conference or a wall of web camera images simply doesn't make them feel 'together' with their colleagues.

Once you have a 3D space, it is psychologically essential for there to be some representation of you, some avatar, in that space visible to others. 3D spaces without avatars can be useful when you just want to explore a 3D space alone but to socialise and collaborate, some avatar is needed. The question of whether the avatar should be made to look exactly like you or even be a realtime 3D scan of you, something the Kinect is also showing some promise for, is another discussion for another day, but I think shared 3D spaces are the ultimate way to be together while apart. Is the avatar era finally upon us?

Aliens, The Fermi Paradox and Virtual Worlds

neilC — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 19:02:00 +0000

I've seen a couple of interesting documentaries recently about the Drake equation and SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Got me thinking about the Fermi Paradox - if intelligent life is likely, then given that there are billions of stars there should be a huge number of alien civilisations, so we should have encountered them or detected them by now. Why haven't we? The most common ways to answer this are that actually intelligent life isn't very common, possibly even unique, or that civilisations always tend to self-destruct quickly after evolving intelligence. (an argument that sounds a little contradictory to me, depending on how you define intelligence!) However there is one other idea, one that I favour and that has a connection to virtual worlds and immersive environments. It is a weaker version of the Transcendence theory. What if all civilisations simply stop broadcasting and exploring, turning inward and going dark as far as the rest of the universe is concerned? SETI is based on the idea that we will be able to pick up radio emmisions from alien intelligences. Our own technological development has quickly seen radio transmission replaced by fiberoptics for vast swathes of communication, so we've already started to broadcast less, and as technology improves radio transmission, when required, is likely to improve in efficiency so that it doesn't spew energy needlessly into space.

What about the urge to explore, the primitive adrenaline fuelled pioneer instinct? Space travel is hugely resource intensive and expensive. We're getting better and better at stimulating our senses through technology and entertainment - and virtual worlds in all their forms are a huge part of that. So what if it's simply more exciting to play a game or explore a simulated reality that is increasingly convincing? It seems to me inevitable that any suitably advanced lifeform would try to find ways to stimulate and fool it's own senses to create experiences just as we do with interactive immersive technologies. Commentators love to say that Virtual Worlds have reached the end of the road, but maybe virtual worlds actually are the end of the road?

Whisper Voice for OpenSim source released

neilC — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 17:18:00 +0000

The 'Whisper' voice system for OpenSim has been released as open source and is available right now. Whisper is a tight integration of the popular Mumble voice-over-IP code with OpenSim for use with most OpenSim viewers. I've been using Whisper for some time now and wrote about it here - it provides far and away the best voice solution available for OpenSim with full support for lip sync and speaker indication, so having this now fully available to the community should really hasten the adoption of OpenSim as a virtual world platform for serious uses such as education, meetings, collaboration and training. Full details of how where to find the source and how to build both client and server elements are available on the Whisper forums

Visualising Software Projects using OpenSim Virtual World Server

neilC — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 11:50:00 +0000

Software projects are complicated. They usually don't start out to be, but inevitably even the simplest piece of functionality quickly ends up requiring numerous modules, versions, branches, all with various tests that can run against them and bugs that have been reported. Getting a good summary view of this complexity is one of the challenges of software engineering, and it is especially important for a project with a distributed team. The ability to see at a glance what has changed or what is broken is very valuable. At the same time, for someone new joining a project, the ability to see the landscape of the project is essential, picking up the shape of new projects is hard and time consuming.

Canvas Browser-based Virtual World Viewer - first looks

neilC — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 19:59:00 +0000

This week I've had a chance to try 'Canvas', the Unity 3D based viewer for OpenSim and SecondLife. The technology for the viewer has been licensed from IBM by Chris Collins, formerly General Manager For Enterprise at Linden Lab. Chris hopes that it will increase adoption of OpenSim and SecondLife for corporate and education sectors where the demands of the regular 'full-fat' client may be too much for the IT infrastructure. The current release is described as 'early access' or 'preview release' and access to the viewer is by request via the Tipodean website The 'preview release' nature of the product must be born in mind in what follows - the intention is to provide a realistic view of what Canvas can currently do for the benefit of those not able to access it themselves.

Virtual Worlds in the Browser - Spoiled for Choice?

neilC — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 11:06:00 +0000

You wait years for a virtual world viewer in the browser then suddenly they are everywhere. There has been a raft of browser-based 3D environment announcements over the past couple of weeks. Second Life trialled their cloud-rendering viewer, allowing you to drop into selected SL locations just using your browser and a suitably high speed net connection. Rezzable have been teasing the Web and LinkedIn communities with a 'coming very soon' browser-based viewer for OpenSim based on Unity 3D. Former Linden Lab employee Chris Collins company Tipodean Technologies made a similar announcement of their Canvas viewer for Second Life and OpenSim (licensed from IBM) again based on Unity 3D. The high fidelity virtual environments of Blue Mars, such as the business focussed virtual district of OnLand, will soon be available in a browser using server-side rendering and streaming. VastPark are also known to have done some work on a WebGL-based viewer for their virtual environments. Probably most impressive of all was the appearance two days ago of KataSpace built on the Sirikata virtual world server, using WebGL and requiring no plugins or downloads at all for cutting edge browsers.

Second Life running in a Browser

neilC — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 09:59:00 +0000

It's here - the much vaunted Second Life running in a browser - using cloud rendering / streaming service Gaikai. Here's a video of my first use, in Chrome. Worked remarkably smoothly, except that changing appearance didn't always respond to my clicks and even then sometimes just didn't work. First place I was dropped was not very interesting and empty (see video). However, it works - from the timer it seems you get an hour to explore select destinations, during which you can obviously sign up at any point for a full account. This is exactly as needed a way to drop into events and places of interest for 'a quick look'. Cloud rendering is expensive,so the one hour limit seems reasonable, given that there is as yet no measure of how many 'guests' will convert into real accounts - which has to be the ambition - there's no way to participate in the economy of SL as a guest.

If you want to try simply go to http://interest.secondlife.com/beta and wait. The only disconcerting thing is that you don't get to choose anything at all before being dropped in world, so I started as a girl. This is not quite purist "one click and you are in" - they are capturing your email so they can pester you to sign up later I guess.Normal 'ALT' camera controls work, and work very smoothly. I'm now a lot more interested in cloud rendering than I was 15 minutes ago.

**Update**
I've spent a bit more time with this now. Seems that going back in with the same email address resets the 60 minute timer, so right now you could effectively keep coming back as a guest as often as you like. Contrary to first reports, it is a flash based viewer, at least in Chrome. There are 30 destinations, very varied. Some are quite busy - just depends what timezone they are in and whether there is actually an event on at the time. It's still SL though, which is good and bad. The second time I jumped in, I landed in a shop underneath someone else. I could hear music, but there was nothing to indicate to me that actually this was also a concert venue and I needed to walk through the shop to the concert. Concert was busy - and therefore laggy - someone did eventually welcome me, and I typed 'thanks' - and the typing animation started 20 seconds later, and never stopped.

I then jumped to a Caribbean destination and the first to things that rezzed right next to me were pose balls labelled Massage M and Massage F. All quite disconcerting and confusing for new users.

This is a huge step for Second Life and virtual worlds in general. For me the jury is out on the business model - given the costs of cloud rendering - how do you pay for it? A clue is that Gaikai describe themselves as a game advertising service, not a cloud rendering service for games. Having tons of people connected for long periods 'really' playing would require them to pay a substantial subscription. Still, it seems the viewer technology is ready to bring lots of people into Second Life. But the Second Life world itself might not be.

OpenSim - How many people can you handle?

neilC — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 19:48:00 +0000

Exactly how many people can a region in OpenSim support? How many people could meet for business meetings or presentations in an OpenSim region? Allow me to illustrate with this piece of string and a tape measure. There are unfortunately many variables to consider, so much so that it is almost impossible to give any hard and fast rules. For example - how complex is the 3D 'static' environment (how many prims are there?), how many scripts are running in active objects, how many event listeners are running in those scripts? What will the people be doing - if they are constantly moving about and even crossing region boundaries, there will be a lot more load on the server to deliver new 3D data and textures whereas if they are simply sat in a chair in an office, there will be almost no strain, the only data being sent around typically being where the avatar is looking and maybe gestures (and of course voice traffic). Are the users interacting with in-world tools and obects such as display panels, noteboards or camera control objects? Finally we have infrastructure variables - what CPU is being used, how many cores, how much memory and what operating system (Windows and hence .NET or linux and Mono.)

All of this uncertainty is fine and accepted if your users are pioneers of virtual worlds, creating social spaces, playing with the technology, enjoying the feeling of being into something at the start. It may even be acceptable or at least accepted by educators who may be willing to deal with the uncertainty to get the well documented educational gains and low costs of OpenSim. But if you expect business users to pay to use a service based on OpenSim, you need some better answers.

The only real way to find out how many avatars your environment can handle is to log lots of folk into it and see what happens. There's nothing quite the same as a bunch of real 3D clients connected from a range of IP addresses all downloading textures and receiving updates. However, this may not be practical if you don't have a huge team of people to hand. You can try running multiple clients yourself, but a full 3D viewer such as Imprudence or SL Viewer 2 is a heavy weight beast, even the best of PCs may struggle with more than a few client instances. Another option is a lightweight non-graphical viewer such as Radegast. This allows you to log in, interact with objects and move about but consumes about a third the resources allowing you to run many more clients on each PC. Since it isn't downloading the textures this most closely resembles the scenario of users staying roughly in one place, as they might for a business meeting. The next option if you are technically adept is to use libopenmv - the C# client library that allows you to write your own clients that can connect to OpenSim and SecondLife (and that underpins Radegast and OpenSim itself). This comes with an example app 'TestClient' which provides the ability to log an AV in and do some simple things. From that starting point, you could go on to automate the process of logging in many accounts and log the resulting stats from the sim. You could also automate some typical actions such as sitting on chairs, changing presentation slides and so on.

At the end of this process you will have some numbers. Lets say that you find that on current hardware in the environment you plan to use you start hitting unacceptable performace with 25 users logged in. What to do? If your customer only needs a maximum of 20 users you can go back to the couch, but we need an option for when they come back and say "We love it, can we have 100 people meeting at once?". If those 100 people want to meet in the same space and all interact, then with OpenSim you may have a problem right now. However, if what you want is simply to have more people meeting in small groups, campus-like then here are two immediate options:

1. Create a grid - connect 4 regions each of which can support 25 users, ensure that when launching a meeting users are routed to a sim with capacity
2. Create stand alone regions - again with intelligent routing

Currently there is no mechanism in OpenSim for limiting the number of users who can attempt to log into a region - at some point the experience will begin to degrade for users already logged in as more people join, then at some point new users may find they can't log in or they can but everything has ground to a halt. This assumes that the route in is directly from the client. It would be nice if there was a configurable 'max_users' setting, resulting in a nice friendly eror messages for connections above that number, maybe I should write one. However, if you launch the viewer from your own web-client as we do then you have more options. Before starting the viewer, you could check how many users are logged in, and change the loginUri dynamically to another region in the grid. Or you could exploit a room reservation system - limit the number of users that can use each of several meeting spaces, and ensure that the total can't exceed your known limit (say 25, 40, whatever your load testing revealed) - then effectively the reservation system is looking after the limit for you. Once all the spaces in the first region are booked, people will automatically only have the option of reserving spaces in the second region. They won't even need to know that these spaces are in different regions if the spaces are reserved by name - "Meeting Room 1" etc. Even better, these regions could be spawned on demand since the reservation system knows in advance how they are needed and can fire them up (say on Amazon EC2) just before they are required.

Do you have experience with opensim hosting? How many avatars can you comfortably host on a region? Let me know, if enough people respond I'll try to summarise the results.

Guacamole - Painless Desktop Sharing for Browsers, SL and soon OpenSim

neilC — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 15:40:00 +0100

There are two ways of looking at what I'm going to describe in this article. One is the sober, enterprise collaboration value-add of a stunning simple piece of technology. The other is "Woah dude, that's awesome cool!" - which one will you be?

Desktop sharing is one of the staples of online collaboration - being able to bring up something, be it a document, a presentation, or a new application that you want to demo, preferably whilst talking to your colaborators on the phone or over VoIP is highly useful. VNC has long been one of the ways to do this, run a small server process on your machine and clients on the others, voila the clients can all see your desktop. Lately a number of flash or java based alternatives have appeared, as part of online collaboration suites such as WebEx and DimDim. Some of these have been used effectively in the 3D immersive environments of Second Life thanks to the Shared Media support that comes with Viewer 2. In all cases though these things require you to have an account, sometimes paid, and to rely on external services and plugins. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just ask your viewers to point their browsers at your machine and magically see it? Well now thanks to a remarkable little piece of open source software called Guacamole, you can!

Guacamole is a small java web application that you install on the same machine that your VNC server is running on. It talks to the VNC server and renders HTML5 from it. So the viewer connects their browser to the web app running on your server and as long as the browser is HTML5-capable they get desktop sharing. Just like that, no plugins at the client end. The Shared Media in Second Life and now being tested in OpenSim is HTML5-capable, so this means simple desktop sharing in our 3D environments.

Here's a quick video - the second half is the obligatory 'world-within-world' demo of logging into OpenSim using a panel that is on the wall in Second Life.

Your browser cannot play this video. Learn how to fix this.

This is a great way to do demos and training, everyone can access and interact with the desktop assuming that the Shared Media is set up to allow that. Also, it is possible to have dedicated 'virtual' desktops for your virtual office by running your desktop in the cloud (EC2 or some VPS) and adding Guacamole to it. I love it!

Whisper - New Voice Solution for OpenSim

neilC — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 09:14:00 +0100

Today vComm Solutions of Switzerland have released Whisper, a high quality voice solution for OpenSim based on the popular Mumble open source VoIP client. The key feature of this solution is that it enables avatar lip sync and speaker indication to work correctly, in addition to providing very stable, high quality voice. The code will be released as open source soon but in the meantime the client is being provided as a windows download that can be tested against a demo OSGrid region, kindly provided by Snoopy Pfeffer of Dreamland Metaverse.

Recently there has been a huge amount of interest in OpenSim, as an Open Source and low cost alternative to the kind of virtual world environments provided by Second Life. The server side of OpenSim is an open source framework for creating virtual environments, but crucially it supports the protocols used by the Second Life viewer, and the many third party viewers based on it, as well as supporting much of the same scripting functionality in the 3D environments. This has allowed low cost grids and stand-alone 3D regions to spring up as an attractive alternative to Second Life for educators and businesses wanting to explore 3D environments for collaboration. However, voice has been one of the few areas in which OpenSim suffered in comparison with Second Life. The voice-over-IP that is integrated in Second Life provides high quality spatial sound and is hooked into the viewer to give indication of who is speaking, body animations and a crude form of mouth movement or lip sync during speech. The voice solution in Second Life relies upon Vivox, and the client portion is managed by the SLVoice executable, separate to the main Second Life viewer process. SLVoice and the viewer then communicate with each other to provide the various speech related features. Ideally OpenSim servers would simply provide Vivox-based voice, but Vivox typically requires tens of thousands of licenses to be purchased, which is of no use to the majority of OpenSim deployments. There has been talk of a small scale type of licensing for Vivox but nothing has so far come of it as far as I know. Additionally, an open source virtual world server ideally should have an open source voice component to go with it!

Mumble is an open souce 'voice chat application for groups' popular for online gaming, capable of providing high quality spatial audio via it's server component Murmur. The Whisper solution from vComm was the idea of Volker Gaessler, founder of vComm, and works by replacing the SLVoice executable with a Mumble client that looks exactly the same to the viewer process. This new SLVoice executable then communicates with an instance of Murmur associated with the OpenSim region. If you need to use the same viewer with Second Life or with an open sim region that requires the original SLVoice, a script is provided to switch the old executable back. Management of the voice server is via an OpenSim region module that handles registering voice parcels and users, communicating with Murmur via the ICE remote procedure call mechanism.

So how does Whisper perform in practice? At Flying Island we've been trialling Whisper in OpenSim as part of our Roobaab collaboration product, and we've been very impressed. Currently the sound is not spatial and is auto-levelled, so wherever you are on the land parcel you will hear your colleagues with the same volume. For typical meeting scenarios, this is actually fine - we are able to drop straight into meetings and begin talking with no need to adjust sound volumes, none of the eternal fiddling with settings that seemed to plague most SL voice meetings. The quality is superb, and we've had no real issues. I can say that for our use case Whisper has really made a huge difference and I have no hesitation in using it with clients, integrated into Roobaab.

vComm plan to continue development to add the option of spatial sound, private voice calls in addition to the current parcel-wide voice, and compatibility with the modified voice element in Linden Labs 'Viewer 2'. There are also plans to automate the switch from mumble based voice to vivox or freeswitch. Right now you can try Whisper for yourself using instructions here and logging into the OSGrid sim "Mumble Sandbox" - you'll need an account on OSGrid of course, which are free if you don't already have one.

This is a big step forward for OpenSim adoption - congratulations to Volker and Snoopy and everyone involved.

Why virtual worlds shouldn't chase the shiny

neilC — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 18:33:00 +0100

One of the things that environments that use the Second Life family of virtual world viewers are often criticised for is poor graphics, compared to the latest games (or even games from 5 or 6 years ago). Usually this is defended in several ways - that the content is user generated, so isn't optimsed the way that game art is, that just dropping into a random space in a grid like Second Life or Reaction Grid isn't a fair test since again it's user generated, and there are beautiful and breath-taking places if you know where to look, that the graphics artefacts have to be streamed and aren't supplied preloaded on a DVD and so on. All of this is true. It is also true that the graphical environments rendered by games are typically richer and more detailed than even the best Second Life and OpenSim environments, if you have the necessary hardware in the form of a modern console or graphics card. So it might seem natural to respond by striving to improve the graphical quality, to compete. The futility of this approach was recently highlighted starkly during an 'office hours' discussion from a staffer at Linden Labs, the makers of Second Life. They posed the question "what percentage of residents (users) would you all guess have 'class 0' (basic Intel motherboard) graphics hardware?". Various guesses were proffered before the answer gathered from Lindens own connection data was revealed - a massive 60%. This is across the board as a percentage of all users. If you are in a more constrained environment, such as a corporate office environment, my experience is the figure would be substantially higher.

So aiming for graphical richness will have the effect of creating wonderful eye-candy that an ever decreasing set of people can access. The Blue Mars virtual world is a case in point - based on the Crysis graphics engine, it requires high performance hardware to participate. This approach also sets a precedent for constantly trying to keep up with the latest graphics developments which in turn keeps the potential audience low. In an ideal world the graphics would degrade gracefully across all platforms, giving a cutting edge look for the best hardware but still run on the low end. The challenge here is in the content generation, since to do that would require users producing content at a variety of levels of detail (this will be required to some extent in the forthcoming 'mesh imports').

Now I am aware that I'm ignoring one important sector of virtual world users - and it's one of the few strong growth areas of Second Life - it's use as a platform for machinima. I think the approach here should be the one that is already being taken - most people serious about creating machinima in SL use a customised viewer with improved lighting and shadows that needs some serious computing horsepower to run effectively. In any case, if the ambition is to increase the number of users of virtual worlds significantly and make such environments a realistic, desirable choice for collaborating and social interaction, we shouldn't be catering specifically for a narrow minority (leaving aside the undeniably positive effect that great looking machinima clearly have). But all things considered, that 60% is timely reminder that to produce social or collaborative environments we should be targeting the mainstream and not the elite if we want to succeed. Graphics alone do not make an environment engaging or immersive, something Nintendo understood very well with the Wii and DS. Content and ease of interaction are the key.

(This article is based on one I wrote originally for Flying Island)

SL Viewer 2.0 Guide to Shared Media on a Prim

neilC — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:12:00 +0000

Essentials: You can now display fully interactive, shared web content on any surface in Second Life including flash, javascript, and embedded movies. On any surface of any object. A different browser on all six sides of a cube if you want. When you change the displayed URL by clicking on a link, everyone else sees that change. Scrolling isn't shared.
Details: The new Second Life viewer is now officially in open beta and available to the world. Amongst the huge raft of UI changes, about which vast tomes will undoubtably be written, there is also the totally new media functionality. It is now possible to create multiple panels in the 3D environment each of which is a fully fledged web browser allowing scrolling, clicking on links, text entry, full javascript support and flash. Anything you can do in a browser you can do on a suitably configured panel. The old constraints of parcel media having one URL per parcel are gone. Any surface of any prim can be configured as a browser, and the closest 8 to your camera will be displayed at any one time. The media are shared in the sense that when the displayed URL changes, either through you typing in a new link or clicking a link then that URL is distributed to everyone else who will see the change within a few seconds. Sadly, scrolling is not similarly distributed, at least not in the build of the viewer that I tried. This slightly dampens my enthusiasm as it means I can't use a pointer to point at the browser and know everyone else sees the same thing. (If shared scrolling is something you need, contact me as my company Flying Island are enhancing the browser with shared scrolling for selected content).

I'll provide a separate tutorial on configuring a surface as a media player, and also how to script the media. Scripting is already there with new functions to read the currently displayed URL and set w new one, as well as changing other settings. Importantly you have good control over who can interact with the media, and this too is scriptable. You can also create and manipulate a whitelist of acceptable URLs - you don't want vistors leaving nasty suprises on the browser. The other thing you can do of course is script the panel to reset and return to it's homepage if there's no one near it.
The new UI supports several features to help interact with the new media features. When your mouse hovers over a media surface, a small icon bar pops up allowing you to enter a new web address, or go forward/back/home. At this point, the media surface does not have focus. However, if you left click on the surface, a faint green outline appears. It now has focus, and your keystrokes now go to the browser. In addition on the popup navigation bar there is a magnifying 'zoom' button - pressing this zooms and centers the surface for easier viewing.

If the surface is configured to display Quicktime-playable content, a different navigation bar appears, with volume control and elapsed time display

This new shared media functionality is provided by the new SLPlugin architecture in the viewer. SL Viewer 2.0 comes with 2 plugins, one for displaying web pages and one for Quicktime. The plugins launch as separate processes, on a windows machine you will see up to 8 SLPlugin.exe processes running. There are already other plugins being worked on, including one that supports VNC desktop-sharing protocol and since the API is public, the expectation is that people will develop more. Mind you, with the full browser support now available, a huge raft of possibilities open up even without new plugins - shared whiteboarding and collaborative reviewing and editing being the most obvious to me.

This really is going to make a huge difference to what can be done in SL, certainly for enterprise and education uses. Along with all the other changes in Viewer 2.0 this has me all fired up about SL again. Great work!

As if by Magic, a Conference Call appeared...

neilC — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:40:00 +0000

When we first formed Flying Island we would hold regular skype conference calls. It was useful (and free) but frustratingly clunky to use. If one party dropped out, as they regularly did, more often than not we'd have to restart the entire call. Sometimes I'd try to reconnect, only to end up in a one to one conversation. If some colleagues were already in a group call, I couldn't just join in. If we'd been in the same physical space it would have been so much simpler - just walk up to the group of people you need to talk with, and start talking... shouldn't a conference call be as easy?

The voice chat integration in SL gets slated but my experience has been overwhelmingy positive. The niggles that are there should hopefully be removed with the auto-level adjustment and echo cancellation that are due to be part of the Viewer 2.0 release in March. The huge 'aha' moment for me happened after a Show and Tell gathering at the Beta Business Park in SL - around 10 of us had been voice chatting, swapping our best discoveries of the previous week. When the meeting broke up, I noticed that some of the Flying Island founders were online in the office on the park. I walked my AV across the park and into the office, as I entered I could hear them talking, and I simply sat down and joined the meeting. Effectively I'd gone from one 'conference chat' with 10 people to another with 3 other people in exactly the same way I would have done in a physical space - by walking from one group to the other. No menus, commands, connections to negotiate, it just worked. The voice integration has other nice features too. Working out who is talking is quite natural, helped by many mechanisms built into the environment - spatial cues with the sound appearing to come from the correct place relative to your field of view, glowing 'vu-meter' above the speaking avatar and various animations during speech. Also, if you need privacy then lock the parcel of land you are on to prevent unauthorised access, and restrict voice to the parcel.

I should say that the VoIP in SL is provided by Vivox and it will be interesting to see what innovations the recent announcement of another $6.8m of funding for Vivox might bring. The transparent metaphor of forming chat groups by proximity of avatars within the virtual environment isn't confined to SL, it is true of many platforms and games based on Vivox or similar spatial voice servers. But it is a perfect reminder of how the use of 3D immersive spaces populated by avatars can make collaboration much more natural.

Oracle stops development of Project Wonderland

neilC — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:37:00 +0000

Ironic. A day after discovering this glowing oracle-branded summary of the amazing immersive collaboration platform that Sun had put together in Project Wonderland, the Wonderland developers tell us that Oracle have pulled the plug. They are putting a brave face on it - it didn't exactly come as a total surprise to the team or indeed anyone else - like most Virtual World developers, my heart sank the day Oracle bought Sun. Some of the existing team hope to create both commercial and not-for-profit enterprises out of the ashes, citing a few existing Wonderland commercial developers as proof that there is something to it. Well, there's certainly something to it technically at least. Unlike Second Life and OpenSim-based enterprise collaboration systems, Wonderland was designed from the ground up as a serious work environment, specifically to solve the problem of allowing employees who were out of the office to continue to interact with their colleagues just as if they hadn't left. The telephony features alone are really tremendous, and by leveraging the existing X-windows protocol, there is proper built-in application sharing with OpenOffice documents, whiteboards and web-browsing. This means real server-based shared web-browsing where I see what you see, not the Linden Labs style embedded browser client coming in SL Viewer 2.0 that is different for each viewer. What about dragging and dropping documents and resources from the desktop straight into a meeting? Yes, that's there too. The graphics have been criticised quite rightly in the past, but the 0.5 release leaps into far less cartoony territory, and looks ready to start creating a convicing sense of immersion. Both server and client are built on java, so there is a massive base of developers round the world who could get involved and development tools and environments for java are fantastic. If there's anything missing technically it's probably rich gesture animations and voice gestures/lip sync, and a browser based client. But technically, it looks great.
The problem is that like OpenSim all the intiaitives and developments around Wonderland have been technical. It is geek heaven. But if a potential enterprise user read the glowing summary and thought "Wow this sounds useful. Where do I start?" they would have a mountain to climb. What seems missing is the business perspective,the return on investment arguments,the convincing real world enterprise success stories. Also needed is a way to jump into a Wonderland world and start experimenting with it straight away, preferably in a private space you could invite a colleague to with a clean simple interface and good help resources in the form of newbie training videos and orientation, or even people available in the space to help you. The Amphisocial folk have to be given credit here for creating something that integrates Wonderland into a web platform for launching meetings and collaborating, and at Flying Island, the company I work with, we are also looking closely at Wonderland as part of our collaboration solution.
So I really hope that the team can put something together and I hope that it has a serious business focus. I'm really looking forward to the 0.5 release and a roadmap for the future, and that the promise of Wonderland is fulfilled.

Nobel Prize Winner fits Universe into Second Life

neilC — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:57:00 +0000

Working hard, both in the office and at home. Out of nowhere, an invite to a presentation by Nobel laureate John Mather, cosmologist and man responsible for one of the most important scientific findings of the 20th century. The lecture had just started. Fortunately for me, it was just a mouse-click away. Within seconds I had my seat amongst the audience of some 60 or so people who had come to listen to one of the discoverers of Cosmic Background Radiation present quite literally the history of everything that has ever been and possibly will ever be, live. Hearing his phenomenally clear and enthusiastic voice I watched him present slides and video, answer questions from the audience I was sat amongst and all the time we were all exchanging snippets of conversation - insights, jokes, links to related science. I was able in no time to invite other friends to join me and watched as they arrived and found seats too. We could chat privately about the presentation as it unfolded as well as engaging in the banter of the audience. The final section of the talk detailed the James Webb Space Telescope, an Infra-Red instrument which is the successor to Hubble which is going to be placed 1 milion miles beyond earth, away from the sun and will give us unprecendented vision of our universe. At the end, we all were able to applaud the speaker and he fielded a wide range of great questions.

For veterans of virtual worlds like Second Life this kind of experience might be taken for granted but for me despite the years I've been involved, these are the times when the power of shared social immersive environments still takes my breath away. The sense of involvement, engagement, interactivity and togetherness is unsurpassed. It seems lately that I'm having more and more such experiences, and my long-held belief in the power of shared 3D immersive spaces seems to be growing ever stronger.

A huge thank you to Prospero Frobozz and Curious George of MICA, the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics for running the event in Second Life and for their great amphitheare on the StellaNova sim. I am very grateful to have been there.

Second Life Affiliate Program - free advertising for Linden Lab?

neilC — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 13:05:00 +0000

I read about the new SL affiliate program, got briefly excited and signed up. The idea is that you run adds on your blog, and any click throughs that result in registration and conversion to a premium account within 30 days land you $5. Now $5 sounds a lot in the world of micro-payments and miniscule ad rates. So let's see if this is a good deal. Currently around 10000 people a day sign up to Second Life. Total registered users somewhere near 18 million. These sound like big numbers - so far so good. But according to a recent post on SL stats only 0.1% to 10% of users who sign up actually get through orientation and spend any time using their new account, the others find the experience too difficult, confusing, or lacking in goals. So now only 10 - 1000 people a day are becoming new users. Now the real sting - payment is only if the user signs up for the 'premium' paid account in SL, not the free account that most people use to dip their virtual toe. In theory those 'premium' accounts should be attractive as they are the only way to really own land. However, users on free accounts can rent houses or land, and the rental market is now so large and established there is little incentive for premium. So exactly how many people have premium accounts, and what percentage of new users take them? These stats are hard to come by, the only reliable figure is that the last time figures were released at the end of 2008 there were some 90000 premium accounts. Total, and dropping. Add in the fact that getting confident enough in SL to want to make the jump to premium can take a while and the user must convert to premium within 30 days - now that $5 is starting to look quite elusive.
Clearly Linden Labs want to try to revive the Premium membership - the current beta program for Linden Homes for premium members and this Affiliate program seem to indicate that. But I can't see how this affiliate program is going to work or help, and it appears to my naive eye as just free ads on blogs for SL. Anyone want to straighten me out?

Backchat Gets a Slap - noise, poise or joys from Back Channels?

neilC — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 20:00:00 +0000

Is there anyone in the world that doesn't get irritated by people talking in the cinema? You are mentally 'somewhere else', then you get dragged back into the darkened room with the sticky carpet and popcorn on the floor. You lose your immersion and sometimes the plot. Being asked about the plot, well that's another perfect way to make sure you miss something. This is all so obvious and so cliched that I shouldn't need to mention it. So why when we are engaged in a collaborative coming-together to watch a presentation or video livecast or some other info-share in the metaverse do we suddenly think that back-channels are the greatest thing since sliced time? The chat channel will be buzzing,IMs will be flying, people will be diverting each other off to tweets and plurks and various other trendy emmissions. And all of this is suddenly good, and I'm immediately a dinosaur for saying otherwise. Well there has been a big debate raging recently over this on the ThinkBalm Linked-In group. One post summed up my feelings perfectly, and with the permission of the author, Christopher Simpson, Professor of English at George Brown College I've copied it here:

The Power To Point - Why immersion can bring teams together

neilC — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:59:00 +0000

So Second Life Enterprise is launched, in beta at least (great moderation by Dusan Writer during the presentation too). More about that soon, but here's what I think an audience unfamiliar with this stuff should have been told. See, I've discovered that immersive environments are, erm, immersive. Maybe I should back up a bit. During the recent crazy round of activity which has kept me away from the blog, I spent some time giving presentations using WebEx. At the same time I got to give a presentation on Collaboration at the Beta Business Park conference in Second Life last week. I reflected on why it was that the WebEx presentations hadn't made me feel in anyway connected to the people I was presenting to, and how different that was to my experiences of presenting and collaborating in immersive environments.

Here's my thesis - WebEx feels less immersive, less like you are sharing a space with others than even a telephone call or IM chat. In a phone call you create a kind of mental shared audio space (teleconferences often fail to achieve this, for me at least), and pure IM can do the same, some kind of shared mental dialogue space. However, when you use something like WebEx to 'share' a desktop or give a presentation, you force yourself to be in your office interacting with the flat screen of the computer. When I present using WebEx I have to fight the urge on every slide I present to say 'OK, I've changed the slide, can everyone see that?', and it's a natural urge because I get no confirmation that the magic broadcasting is actually taking place. When I point at something on the slide, I don't feel like I'm pointing it out to the audience - I know logically that I am but I don't feel it. Even if the presentation has a quality audio channel, this interaction with flat stuff on my flat screen in my office at my desk drags me out of my shared experience. I'm going to suggest that if your aim is to make people feel closer, WebEx actually hinders rather than helps! Presenting in a virtual environment like SL is totally the opposite. The illusion of a shared space, of being together is so convincing, so powerful that I never used to check if everyone was seeing the slides or the movie or the web page - because "obviously" they are. It's utterly clear to me that when I use a pointer or even my avatars arm to point out something, I'm pointing it out to everyone. Why? Because to my foolish ape brain, we're all looking at the same screen in the same space! Except of course we aren't, it is just an illusion and I should be checking at least at the start that everyone is having the same experience. Indeed, the illusion is so strong that you don't have to be presenting anything, you can just 'be' together. This "Togethering" is the essential quality that distinguishes the immersive environment - so if you want to do more than just transmit information, you want to actually keep a team bonded and whole, look beyond the WebEx and explore the power to point.

Beta Business Park - Business Community Plus

neilC — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 21:57:00 +0100

I had the great pleasure last night of attending the launch night of the Beta Business Park in Second Life. Given that there are already a number of businesses established there, the 'launch' was more like an official public acknowledgement. The event itself was well organised with a constant stream of live music in the Black Sun club in the Park and demonstration tutorials in the lecture theare. Gwyneth Llewelyn and Gayle Cabaret were extremely helpful in talking me through the concept and it's an interesting model. Fundamentally they are setting out to provide businesses that want a presence in SL with everything they need in a community of other businesses. What sets this apart from other business-oriented communities is the services that the team can provide as part of the package. The most significant of these is the orientation services for new users, ranging from self-guided 'read and click' exercises to video tutorials to live classes. The team claim to be on hand more or less 24hrs a day, and can be summoned in a variety of ways. It'll be a while before I hit a huge gong again 'just to see what happens'...

More on this soon.

Media Plugins For SL (updated)

neilC — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:36:00 +0100

Mark Kingdon has announced a new Media Plugin API for the SL viewer. I know it's controlled for just this reaction, but I do like the sense of progress that this gives - only yesterday I was reading about the promised land of support for viewing documents, proper web browsing and new media formats in the presentations from SLCC, and thinking it'd be late next year, then the very next day this. Predictably the comments section of the post is a mass of 'Yay, awesome' and 'Boo this sucks'.

I think the plugin idea will advance media support much more rapidly - I can see plugins for remote desktop viewing using VNC, and displaying PDFs both coming quickly. For education and enterprise uses, this makes a lot of sense. For a social, open to all platform it makes less sense - now you can't be sure that everyone can see your content - what will they see if they don't have the plugin? But we'll get over that - we did on the web, Flash and Java being the obvious examples. The mechanism for downloading the plugins and keeping them up to date must be transparent and flawless. How this will work for large estates with tight policies on software rollout, like university campuses and corporations is another matter.

But where it gets interesting is to look at the details on the wiki. The announcement seems to be focusing on 'viewing' various sorts of media, as identified by it's MIME type. But looking closely at the messages that can be sent between viewer and plugin you'll find mouse, keyboard and scroll events as well as cursor and focus - so clearly the infrastructure is being put in place for properly interactive media surfaces. This is hugely exciting, and raises tons of questions - the concept of a surface having focus simply doesn't exist in the viewer right now to my knowledge, how will this be indicated and managed? How will I swap to chatting from entering text in my Google Doc? I suspect it will be quite a while before those things are implemented in the main SL viewer. Until then there is the Roobaab clickable, scrollable browser, of course :-)

Update 24th August...
Well it didn't take long - Aimee Trescothick has created a media plugin for SL based on the new llMedia API for viewing the VNC desktop sharing protocol.

Now we just need a release of the viewer that supports it, and we can view shared desktops in SL. Of course it is already possible with high quality video streaming, but you need a huge bandwidth and an expensive hosting account to do a desktop at reasonable resolution. So this is a big step forward for SL, and will bring it in line with realXtend that I believe already supports VNC, along with Wonderland and Qwaq Forums. Nice one Aimee.

Roobaab Season is upon us

neilC — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 11:21:00 +0100

Roobaab is a new collaboration tool to bring a team together without bringing the team together. Work collaboratively with a powerful, easy to use community collaboration and publishing tool, then when you need to meet your collaborators, launch a fully integrated 3D immersive meeting space, in either Second Life or a private OpenSim instance. The content to be discussed is immediately visible to all attendees on a clickable, scrollable browser. Participants can converse using built in VoIP and text chat is logged as meeting minutes back to the community site. Other tools include 3D pointers and an interactive notecard board. Read on for high quality video and detailed description

The Lab gets serious about work

neilC — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:26:00 +0100

Linden Labs have revamped their 'serious' virtual world marketing with the release of a new subdomain http://work.secondlife.com/ - and it is miles better than the old 'Second Life Grid' material. There are reams of examples, case studies and quotes, and much more professional looking graphics. One interesting ploy is mixing photos of real people over scenes from the virtual spaces, perfectly emphasising the immersiveness. I recommend anyone thinking of getting involved with virtual worlds for real work to check it out. It makes a compelling case. I guess this is all leading up to the release of the 'Nebraska' behind-the-firewall SL solution coming in the autumn. Rumoured to be priced between $50k and $80k, it will need a polished marketing campaign and a solid value proposition. One thing that for me is missing though is photos and videos of real environments in use. It's hard for those evangelists amongst us to realise, but a text description of this stuff almost never gets the point across to folk who haven't already experienced it.

IBM Lotus SameTime 3D - 4 Regions of OpenSim for $50k

neilC — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:29:00 +0100

An interview on Hypergrid Business reveals the pricing of the new IBM virtual meeting solution based on OpenSim. It's worth a read, and I'm fairly convinced of the usefulness of the product. I haven't yet seen anything describing content integration though - how are the presentations, videos, task lists integrated with Notes (or heaven forbid another 2D knowledge and organisation tool)? We think this is crucial, and we're working hard with Roobaab to bring about good integration with the 2D web.

One minor point - IBM say they chose OpenSim in order to allow writing on a prim - we've done that in SecondLife to create a notecard board, one prim per notecard. Video coming soon :-)