Raph’s Website » Trevor Smith predicts the VW future

Trevor Smith predicts the VW future

April 8th, 2008 (Visited 1484 times) Tags: 3d web, daniel james, metaplace, ogoglio, tomorrow space, trevor smith, web3d

Trevor F. Smith is, of course, the prime mover behind Ogoglio and Tomorrow Space, and he has a pair of posts that lay out a bit of a roadmap for the development of a 3d web.

Don’t run away screaming– it’s a lot more plausible than you think! But of course, I have some thoughts on his thoughts, too.

First up is his Cookbook for Web 3D, which lays out an only slightly tongue-in-cheek timeline:

2012-2013: Mozilla and Safari will ship accelerated 3D canvas implementations and it will crawl its way through WHAT-NG committee around the same time that OpenID and OAuth really kick into gear and suddenly the world has a default install capable of Crysis level graphics hung together by hypertext and a common ID system, all of which can be built by legions of cheap web coders.

Well, cheap web coders will never be able to make Crysis-level assets, but let’s assume that the assets are available.

More interesting is Trevor’s prescriptive list of features required to make 3d a basic web data type. It’s interesting because it’s a very grounded and straightforward list. I think a lot of the items are debatable:

In general we don’t embed databases in web servers (though we can), we run them alongside, for a number of reasons; why put a virtual world server in a web server?
Is a browser the only home for a client? (Obviously, we’ve said at Metaplace that we’re client-agnostic, so I have a bias here).
And is Comet fully baked, and performing well enough for real-time interactions?
And of course, whether the current web scripting languages are the right tools for the job at the moment. There’s 25 years of best practices to learn from over on the virtual worlds side, and web scripting has evolved under a different set of constraints.

But as a general roadmap, there’s a lot there to indicate a path to the future that is very different from more versions of closed kids’ worlds (though not exclusive of them). The whole “let a thousand flowers bloom” meme (which I think was can attribute to Daniel James at AGC a few years ago, at least in its current incarnation) is alive and well — though as Kill Ten Rats points out, 1000 bloom and 900 wither.

To me, one of the underlying questions of all this is the adoption question, more so than the tech question. Lots of tech to sort out, no doubt, but the real issue is whether the audience gets it and finds it useful and/or fun. We in the industry have a bias towards assuming that yes, of course, the benefits are obvious — but the Jon Stewart video (and the derisive article in the Washington Post) about the recent Congressional hearings illustrates that we have a ways to go before everyone really sees the potential.

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Gamedev Planet wrote on April 9th, 2008 at 6:31 am:

Trevor Smith predicts the VW futurePosted on April 8, 2008 by Raph

VirginWorlds.com - Exploring Massively Multiplayer Games wrote on April 10th, 2008 at 1:22 pm:

[...] to 2.5 finally. Sheesh. I see I now have this nifty tagging feature. I need to figure out a [...] Trevor Smith predicts the VW future Posted by Raph’s Website on 8 April 2008, 3:32 pm Trevor F. Smith is, of course, the prime mover [...]

len said on April 8th, 2008 at 12:46 pm:

Poor Trevor. Sometimes it is bad to use one’s real name:

http://www.news.com/8301-13772_3-9910962-52.html?tag=bl

See the screen shot of the 2005 IRC back channel. wayBack blast!

It seems that unlike other technologies that burst as the next big thing, 3D did that in the 90s. Since then, 3D, being a technically and artististically challenging artform, is a creeper. It’s been on the web since the early 90s in various forms. From the 2Dvs2.5Dvs3D battles, vector vs raster, curly vs pointy, static vs moving worlds, and all the other battles, Web 3D is an industry for the committed or soon to be committed.

I think one day we all look up and it will just be there in lots of different forms and everyone will yawn and go back to work. We’re close to that now. What we have learned is that it is a no-size-fits-all-comfortably medium.

Ola Fosheim Grøstad said on April 8th, 2008 at 3:13 pm:

Is a browser the only home for a client?

The browser is a client…

Raph said on April 9th, 2008 at 12:14 am:

The browser is a client. For the web. But it’s a pretty poor client for virtual worlds. On the other hand, it’s a decent host environment for an embedded client for virtual worlds (albeit one with many limitations).

Morgan Ramsay said on April 9th, 2008 at 1:13 am:

Raphsta wrote:

But it’s a pretty poor client for virtual worlds.

That depends on what you consider a virtual world. MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn?

Ronin said on April 9th, 2008 at 3:16 am:

The browser is a poor client for graphical virtual worlds. But not for text & pictures-based virtual world.

Of course, one could also start to debate whether Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn could be defined as Virtual Worlds in the first place…

Which brings me to a question..
What is the definition of a virtual world? Do you have to be able to walk around in it? Like with an avatar? Second Life is without doubt a virtual world in this context.

Or can you define Facebook and then also the rest of the internet as a virtual world?

I would think the answer would be both.
Graphical virtual worlds typically need an extra client besides the browser to enter it(Metaverse etc.), or a client completely separate of the browser(Second Life etc.).
But that may change in the future.. Who knows? Maybe browsers will adapt in the future, an that way we will have one portal to the Virtual World which is the internet, instead of several different portals like we have today.
*shrugs*

Raph said on April 9th, 2008 at 9:03 am:

Nope. I’ve posted my definition many times, and a spatial simulation is part of it.

That doesn’t mean that those services couldn’t edge over the line quite easily, of course.

What is the definition of a virtual world? Do you have to be able to walk around in it? Like with an avatar? Second Life is without doubt a virtual world in this context.

I have one definition here: http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/book/3c.shtml

There was also a whole post about it here http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/03/31/are-muds-and-mmorpgs-the-same-thing/

To be clear, the reasons why I consider a browser to currently be a poor VW client have mostly to do with some technical choices regarding asynchronicity, means of caching, etc.

Trevor F. Smith said on April 9th, 2008 at 9:05 am:

Raph wrote: “cheap web coders will never be able to make Crysis-level assets”

Web coders don’t necessarily take beautiful photographs, but they do make sites like Flickr. I definitely agree with Raph that the big open questions for pop 3D are less about display and delivery and more about creation.

Morgan Ramsay said on April 9th, 2008 at 11:43 am:

Trevor F. Smith wrote: