Workshop at Stanford - January 29th 2009

Intro

Henrik Bennetsen

• Dev and community mailing lists are up
• sirikata.com is started. Efforts will aim at building technology and community.
• Sirikata will be published under BSD license (wikipedia). (Second Life (SL) is out under GPL license (wikipedia); hence devs on projects like OpenSim cannot look at SL viewer. Sun's Project Darkstar is also out under GPL.)

Sirikata Architecture

Daniel Horn, Ewen Cheslack-Postave (Stanford dev team, programmers) Architecture of the project. Guiding principles:

• scalability --
• security - secure exchanges, proper ownership, access control
• federation - networking networked worlds
• extensibility - allow users to add content, scripts, plug-ins
• flexibility - different types of things can be built on top of it
• standardize protocols - interoperability

Design decision (split project into three aspects):

• space simulation (physics, collision detection ... on one set of computers)
• object simulation (scripts ... objects on another set of computers - "simulated elsewhere")
• storage - split out variable storage from static storage (CDN). Saved with different time resolutions and technologies. Variable storage involves things that change a lot (location of objects, e.g.) and static storage involves the long-lived objects that change infrequently. Static storage is the solved problem, e.g. S3 from Amazon.

Geometric segmentation and object segmentation -- how are the entities distributed among the servers?

Scripting language that makes it easy to create content is very difficult to write. Problem for SL, but also a more general problem.

Question: Problem of authentication locking out content. Can this be solved for archiving? No easy answer

missed name -- also part of dev team

specific problems that need to be solved at a lower level of development work.

Open Source Virtual World Overview

James Neal - Open Metaverse Foundation

review of different projects. Problem of incompatibilities between OpenSim, Darkstar, Croquet.

Question: Separation of assets and game engine -- historically solved problem of having to hack code to make changes.

Stanford Humanities Lab themes and content-oriented issues

Jeffrey Schnapp - Lab founder and co-director

• collaborative authoring and content producers -- struggle with limitations of SL.
• how to extend practices in education and scholarly institutions that involve virtual worlds, e.g., museums and universities.
• humanities lab as like a technology lab but driven by humanities and arts agendas
• archives, the past, records, history -- core to concerns of SHL
• animating archives
• how can we use virtual worlds to create records of events, either time-based or space-based, that allows them to be recorded and observed for future use. Example: Museums. Virtual worlds could be a method for delivering the installed exhibition experience to the future. Perhaps change the contents. Many obstacles to this -- e.g., content creation tools that are available in a world like SL. Aim is to capture content that is not easy to capture.
• conservation objective is to preserve digital materials, e.g., virtual worlds, indefinitely.
• also interested in virtual worlds that are different from historical worlds; exploration of fantastic worlds. Animation studio.

Preserving Virtual Worlds

Henry Lowood

An Artist's perspective

Chris Platz - art lead for Sirikata

Lessons learned:

• Even at Stanford: getting quality contributors is difficult
• rapid prototyping: allow high-level content import early
• real-time design environment is quite a rush. Very appealing aspect of working in these spaces
• technology that is not ready is very difficult to work with
• goal-oriented approach -- deadlines are needed

Chris brought in about ten students to work on the project.

Snapshot into virtual world design. "scary slide" Captures all the work that had to be done to create assets and graphics.

Most tools available are far too complicated. So what is needed in a simple tool?

• education design that can be used for teaching
• collaborative runtime environment
• an elegant interface that is easy to use

goals:

• real-time collaborative importing and manipulation of 3d objects
• real-time collaborative vertex editing
• real-time collaborative digital painting
• sharing and connecting to other virtual spaces and worlds

Funding Opportunities

Gordon Knox

Projects:

• RES project (Puglia, Italy) and others
• Talked about fund-raising for projects that could be mounted in a virtual world