Intel's A Comin'!!! Sell Your Horseless Carriages

Rob Enderle says"

The more global and powerful the vendor, the better the view of the future…

Err… no. If you want a view of the future, you find the emergence events and this is post-emergence. Big company events like this are only held once they can safely say what everyone already knows.

As to Intel involvement, remember Intel was a board member of the Web3DC (X3D, VRML, Collada, etc.). Rankled by the participation agreements that prevented pushing encumbered-IP into the open standard, they resigned and worked their own consortium (see 3DIF).

Note something important here: if competition is important to this industry’s legitimacy, then the Web3DC people still have the only open competitive standards and technologies. For X3D/VRML, there are multiple clients and server systems available with a push toward virtual world standards for interoperating systems such as H-anim and the Network Sensor. While Koster, Intel, and Rosedale talk this stuff, the Web3DC is actually doing it.

Back to Intel:

The aim is of course, to sell hardware, and any good graphics professional knows the score: more polygons moving at the speed of light need more hardware. For that reason, I'm glad to see Intel parroting the rest of the industry about their discovery of the 3D Web. (Jeez... you just can't make this stuff up.)

The difference in 3D at AOL or the other failed attempts is that AOL had one bit right: a massive MU is a server-farm technology more than a graphics technology. Real-time on the web is not a real thing. Latency == Web. Real time MU is mostly a smoke and mirrors trick but it works.

The need for interoperable web 3D is quite real in the market. The reason is not thrills: it is thrills maintenance. 3D content is high cost content unless you pick your technology and the standards well. I do this stuff for fun but I do know how to do it cheaply until I have to host on an expensive server farm. If I have to throw it away for every client or client version, I can't afford it and neither can even deep pocketed companies. We learned our lessons from the early monolithic WYSIWYG systems for documents: translations, rehosting and scrubbing timely information is an expensive nightmare. Because X3D/VRML really is a competitive market, I may target one browser such as BS Contact, but then I adjust the content to make it playable on competitors even if in a downlevel mode. I learn how to make it more interoperable and the vendors flush out some bugs. Everyone wins. That is how a competitive ecosystem with more symbiotes than parasites works.

Fortunately, the beginning steps of VRML ensured that despite its highs, lows and outright cat fights, the community culture is a real survivor and healthy because it remains open and cooperative. So almost a decade and a half later, the content is still working and has improved substantially. That'd pretty good for amateurs. :-)

Where should Intel be going? Away from the data center concepts and into the peer-to-peer standards, or at least into local hosting. The reasons for businesses are easy as I've said before: don’t do private business in public phone booths.

Sell Your Soul to The Company Store

With the advent of free search came the sale of personal shopping information and the rise of mining search choices for psychological insights into the individual shopper. With the advent of virtual worlds will come an even deeper probing of the mind of the individual user. This is why I've asked questions and suggested researchers in VR (not the Metaverse Mavens: those are software hucksters looking to ride a wave to make a buck) spend time studying the literature on cueing (eg, onset and offset cues). It was obvious when doing the research for HumanML that behavioral modification would be an outcome of applying the techniques of situation semantics. That is a basic tenet of GUI design from day one: interact and evolve or devolve.

Note: http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2007/09/mind_reading?currentPage=4

which is weird science for predictive analysis but not outside the realm of possibility given suitable knowledge of applying cueing

and http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v3/n8/full/nn0800_827.html

which suggests to me that the theories of neuroscience could be tested and applied.

The rule of the road on the web is if it can be done it will be done and someone will finance it, and then sell the results.

DotNetNuke for VR: Areae

I note that R. Koster is unveiling his Areae product after a year of speculative hype build up. It turns out he is selling a framework for world builders.

Think DotNetNuke for a world platform. Maybe.

DNN's claim to fame is being a 'no-programming required' portal builder. The reality is it is a market framework (and a good one) into which those who can program on ASP.Net can add and sell modules to be dragged and dropped, skins for new looks, etc. There is a healthy market here for DotNetNuke developers. Being a real open source and free distro for the package with purchased add-ons, as long as the MS components have been purchased, installed, managed and maintained, these layered systems can do the job.

In short, there is no free lunch. Building and hosting virtual worlds or any hypermedia content for that matter always carry platform expenses. The more standard the components, in theory, the better the costs for the developers at the top or bottom depending on perspective, of that layer cake. That is the sale Koster is trying to make. His claim is he is creating a standard for this.

He is certainly creating his own specification. So is Linden Labs. The W3DC already has a standard for scene graphs, Collada for object interchange, H-anim for avatar bodies, and more coming for that family of technologies. Assessing Koster's chances here: I'd say poor for creating an accepted standard. For building a layer cake framework for non-pros to build worlds: pretty good. This isn't new territory technically. Getting a community of developers to create components for it will be the next hard sale. Then there is the problem of use. Stand-out 3D worlds tend to involve a considerable amount of handcraft. Drag and drop worlds can be a place to start, but eventually one is vertex twiddling and creating textures, so it still means learning what the average world user won't learn, but the market can fill those gaps quickly as long as there is 'natch on the transaction.

The question will be who is the customer for these layer cake worlds?

Answering a question on Tao Takashi's blog:

Standards are like roadsters, Baba. They are one part performance, one part replaceable parts, and no parts that only work on the car you happen to be driving. Specifications, the kind say the W3C or IETF make, for new technology can be blown glass from top to bottom with no hope of every replacing any broken parts. They can fail or succeed but they don’t have a legacy so they don’t have any promises to keep.

Koster complains today’s VR is based on 20 year old technology. He’s right. What else was that true of: HTML, DHTML, XHTML, SVG, XSLT, XML and more. The trick is that by the time something is ready to be standard, it is usually approaching or ending the middle cycle of age. That means it is roadworthy and there are lots of users who can benefit from the smoothing effect of standardization. It also means that initial burst of money from being the new kid in town is already earned and possibly spent. VC firms don’t like standards and they like monopolies even less. On the other hand, the market has been convinced to only buy standards-based technology.

This is where the dogs of the open sourcers unleashed early in the web history come back to bite the hands that held the leash. A VC wants open source because it is a cheap startup AND they want IP because if they can get a market lock, it is gravy money for years to come. They want standards to help them do that. That these are mutually incompatible positions bothers them not at all because they believe and have been shown that with the right combination of buzz, personality and paid placements, they can convince the public that their new entry in the market is *ta da!!*: standard. The truth is few people are actually professionally qualified to do real standards work. Thus ISO. They hate ISO.

So it is a good idea to evaluate Koster’s offering in terms of what it seems to be technically: the VR version of DotNukeNet except probably not BSD licensed. The first part of that will be a good thing for the types who build private business sites and don’t need to-the-metal handcrafted worlds, or for the newbs who just want a party house on the web.

Ultimately, however, the VR business is yet-another-data-center. The profits are in server space and services. The 3D stuff is just ‘onset cue simulated presence’ and while fun, not a big change. The right way to analyse offerings such as Areae once past the hype is to look at the services mix and determine which customers will pay for that and what they will use it for, and will they take over more IT responsibilities over time.

Onset Cues and Presence as an Emergent Property

Chris Ward talks about how much better it is to converse with his son in WoW than just on the phone.

Why does that work?

Onset cues. This is *the* engine of presence in virtual worlds or any simulation for that matter.

The fun question is: what effects do simulated onset cues have on a developing personality.

What is the right balance of the cues for the online personality and the meatspace personality?

People come to game 'cons' and use the cues of their online personality in the meatspace social world having become uncomfortable with using their own real names, etc., in a gathering of like-trained individuals. This is a key idea for applying VR sims to training environments or business environments.

See norms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_(sociology)

It comes down to the evolution of clusters of message types (norms) and affordances (behaviors) in disparate locations that share some property. Abstractly, that is what a situation semantic is. The sales and marketing heads use this concept to create business classes that may be physically located in different places but those places have some similarity related to the products, therefore, the arrangements of the cluster. For example, think of a franchise that sells in Texas and Florida. The shared property is the temperature of the region and that is a low-energy semantic force that organizes the product clusters.

An intelligent framework is sensitive or “aware” of these forces so that the emergence of situation semantics is at once both natural and directed. In short form, “smart enough to go with the flow”.

Presence is the belief in the norms of a situation as evidenced by the use of the affordances consistent with the norms. Go with the flow. Emotion engines for semiotes are a means to provide a 'bot avatar with believable presence by motivating acts given some situation which are consonant with expectations for that bot in that situation. That is in essence, character.

The physical aspects of onset cueing are also important. For example:

http://www.aec.at/en/archiv_files/19902/E1990b_159.pdf

That is a link to an article about flight simulation basics in which the concept of cueing is explained. Flight simulation pioneered much of the modern simulation systems to which VR owes its existence. Music systems are another area where there are ideas that can be harvested but flight simulation is the place to begin historically. It is often not possible to provide physical cues although commercial low-end haptic systems are available (force-feedback controls). What is important is to take the time to read the literature and to understand the basis for these controls and to implement them in the design of the world.

VR opens many possibilities for representation. Some are entertaining; some are fantastic, but only a limited set will be instructive. Understanding how and where to emphasize the real-world real-time nature of cueing is fundamental to creating effective VR training systems, and to creating self-directed norms based business systems. These are not new theories in either the instuctional or business system domains, but we do need to reconsider them in terms of the expansiveness of the real-time 3D media wrappers. We need to investigate the service mixes, how they can be represented in 3D (eg, what to do with VOIP given spatial sound), and what combinations are right for specific products.

It is good to play, but an hour in the library will usually save you a month in the lab.

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/10_870221
http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/humanmarkup-comment/200110/msg00128.html
http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/humanmarkup-comment/200110/msg00128.html

Where it goes wrong:

http://www.up4.com/archives/000088.html

*Dis*believers have no place in the lab or at the emergence point of innovation.

Hints for open implementations

http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/humanmarkup-comment/200206/msg00057.html