dreamshovel

Three things that are, literally, the stuff of dreams:

• levitation
• telekinesis
• teleportation

All of these will be common in the next decade via metaverse-based human augmentation.

The obvious and core component is the necessity to surmount the “interface plateau” and enable efficient, low-effort avatar manipulation and I/O. Over the next several years this will be done by crude EEG/EMG-driven controllers combined with very primitive haptics. Yet even such a coarse interface will be far superior to the mouse + WASD keyboard kludge common today. And those primitive interfaces will deeply catalyze the expansion of human experience to the greater mindspace, of which the physical form is just a part.

Assuming of course, that we can stave off the violence of ignorance and the pornography of authoritarianism for the next couple of decades.

Will the toddlers of today grow to regard these “elements” less as magic than just half-implemented features of Human technology? I hope so, if only because by reifying some dreams, some magic, we make room for more, wonderful things to come.

Metaplace is gone. Along with the site, thousands of user-created worlds representing untold amounts of time and creativity have collapsed into canned screenshots and video clips. Call it business imperative, another walled-garden tragedy, whatever, in the end (that would be NOW) it makes no difference. Things existed before and now they don’t.

For my own SlideMountain world (a work that I’m most proud of) I decided that the proper send off would be via a blaze of scripted destruction. Performance art, in a 2.5D metaverse.

After a maddening series of lag and connectivity issues, I kicked off the process today around 8pm or so.

The harbingers of doom arrived early

It seemed only fitting that I use the Multim0d script sequencer that I released a few months ago (and I have to say it worked pretty well :-)). The various effects plugins were written in an insane rush, between holiday obligations, etc, and could only be tested up to a point. Oddly it was not easy to guess exactly how long it would take to erode things from fully-running world down to bare tiles. Turned out to take almost an hour.

Yeah, you really “had to be there, XD”, but here’s how it went: First random clusters of objects were suffused with a blue-ish glow and then slowly pulled across the world into cluster of 4 moai surrounding a sparking lava core. Once there they were slowly deleted. Gradually, the clusters increased in size and the sliding speed was increased until all world objects had been destroyed. Then the moai vanished.
For the last stage the terrain began to “melt” in a multistage fading and leveling process, randomly distributed across the world grid. This was the one part which worried me a bit and sure enough the “erosion” process code caused a stack bust when tackling the 100×100 grid and a crowd of onlookers. I quickly flipped to a fall-back that spiralled through quadrants and everything completed nicely.

And that was that, weeks of work nuked in less than an hour.

It was a sad but strangely satisfying end to something I’d worked hard to complete and which was a source of amusement for many people. But to me at least, better than letting things evaporate at the flick of a switch in a server room.

And to all the avs who popped in to watch the “Meta Meta Immolation” let me just say thank you for your attention, camaraderie and support. Indeed, Best Wishes to all the MP community!

Metaplace is dead: the metaverse is just getting started. Onward.

For a long time I had a Metaplace invitation in a lonely corner my mailbox. I’m exactly not sure why I neglected it for so long but around last June, I finally logged in for a look around and quickly began spending a lot of time in Metaplace.

So several months later and I have gained a measure of fluency with the Lua-based toolchain and the art and gameplay idioms, met a variety of amazing and creative people, produced a number of effect and tool plugins via the MP commerce marketplace and have made a couple of well-regarded worlds.
Yesterday morning I finished a new, large and richly-scripted snow sport world that I’d been working on for a few weeks. It immediately filled up with enthusiastic and complementary players, and rocketed up the ratings charts. Good Times.

So when I popped over to the MP forums to post the official release announcement and saw the sad sad news that Metaplace.com was closing up shop Jan 1 2010, I may have stopped breathing for a moment. All worlds, all content to be lost to the winds.

And of course a big gut-wrenching loss is to the staff who lost their jobs in the middle of the holiday season.

Now, businesses come and go and the loss of a web platform is not unprecedented, to say the least. Various web sites and services have been lost in the past. But while basic web such as text, images and video are common media forms which may be copied to a variety of archival platforms, when a proprietary platform like MP goes down, the “content” may well go with it. Sure we can do screen and video captures, but the live part of the environments, the actual magic of metaverses, just evaporates.

And while it’s easy to smug sagely about the eeeeevils of proprietary platforms and walled garden architectures, the loss of all that creativity is deeply painful. It is not, after all, as if the ‘free’ time was spent watching TV or some other passive dissipation.

True archiving would preserve the platform as well. I know an audio engineer whose priceless archival recordings of live jazz are accompanied by the tape recorder(s) and monitors used to make them. Perhaps this trends to the obsessive audiophile stereotype, but for metaverse preservation it’s a fair bet that preserving the physical server platform is essential.

Perhaps in the future the Internet Archive will expand into the metaverse preservation domain, after all it would seem to be a logical evolution for them. But for now it’s a matter of well, loss mostly. Someone with deep pockets could simply buy the MP rackfuls and employ some curatorial staff to keep them running, but I doubt that will happen.

So, it ends: the venue, the domainful of art and assets and the friend/buddy cohort. And we’ve got just a few days, right in the midst of a major holiday/vacation season, to make our screencaps and videos, assure our scripts are saved locally, revisit our favorite places and exchange contact information.

And to recall some highlights that will probably fall outside of the rough archiving processes:

• The first screening of the excellent (best yet, IMO) virtual world documentary “Another Perfect World”.
• The groundbreaking “Rockin the Metaverse” series of live music performances., featuring (among several others) Grace McDunnough, Doubledown Tandino and Raph Koster himself.
• Various industry ‘celebrity’ speakers holding forth generously at The Stage world.

There are also a couple of things whose loss will only reinforce their importance:

• A soon-to-be-dissipated vibrant and creative community. Some of the more hard-core are likely already present in other metaverses, so they may well just change channels, so to speak. But the easy-access web-based MP platform was really good at bringing in fresh metaverse users who will find few acceptable substitutes at the moment. Their “outsider” perspectives are extremely valuable.
• The open User Created Game platform domain for which the loss of MP leaves a large and damaging void. Although in any such open system there is a lot of crap, there were also more than sufficient gems to compensate. So also tally up a loss to gameplay innovation.

As for my own modest contributions I’m most proud of the Multim0d “script sequencer” tool and API that allowed non-programmers to assemble in-world effects and manipulations into complex composites (e.g., disco floors, swarms of angry penguins, simulating snowboard-style avatar movement and all manner of tile animations.)
I also made a popular set of animated fire, the web-embed Isoasis and Regionware places and of course my comically ill-timed “SlideMountain” world, released literally hours before the closing announcement.

But the real talent of Metaplace can seen in these amazing, entertaining and insprirational works:

Happy, Dark City and Wonka (by Xuemei, probably my favorite MP creator)
Kyoto, Steampunk (Dalian)
Space1599 (TheBeeKeepers)
Thousand Rooms, Atlantis (J9scarborough)
GeoQuest, ZooEscape (John)
Fishing, Metapark (Legend)

And well, a great many more. Metaplace is still for the moment a living thing, full of creative expressions. Check them all out while you can

Usually, navigating the Metaverse means wielding a resource-sucking app that is the very definition of Fat Client. You see this with Second Life, OpenSim and other 3D-rendered virtual world platforms. The upcoming CryEngine based Blue Mars system, while visually spectacular, will likely require even beefier hardware support. Such is the cost of rich 3D rendering.

But high performance costs restrict adoption.

Not too very long ago embedding video in web pages was a big deal. A lot of client hardware wasn’t up to the task and in any event adequate deployment platforms were not widespread. The quasi-ubiquitous deployment of the Flash runtime has resulted in FLV video becoming the de-facto (though unfortunately proprietary) web video platform. Right place, adequate functionality, right time…
So, how about embedding a metaverse “player” in a web page?
There are various groups working on browser-based OpenGL and other 3D rendering, with some working toward eventual Second Life or OpenSim clients that run in-browser. Other efforts leverage Flash, such as Vivaty, Metaplace and the recently departed Google Lively.

Another technique is to run the heavyweight client app within the server farm, capture the user-screen, encode as video and relay to user. Basically app-to-video. You can then play the video in a lightweight browser plugin using Flash. User commands can be proxied to the “client head” at the server farm. This technique is performance-bounded by the video codec operations, but does allow for zero-deploy goodness.
Of course command latency can be a real concern, depending on the twitch factor of the game. But then latency and lag always cause problems.

Demos of this kind of thing have popped up now and again (including some by teams including myself). One notable effort demoed Second Life “running” on an iPod Touch/iPhone.

A more general solution has been recently shown by GaiKai. If they can deliver what they show in that exciting video it will be a Very Good Thing indeed.

Yeah, it seems almost a return to the days of remote Big Iron and local dumb terminal. But not exactly.

Since I’ve been spending some time there lately I’ll focus on Metaplace.
Metaplace is a Flash-based 2.5D browser based metaverse. By going with the simpler isometric environment Metaplace avoids beating their collective heads up against cutting edge browser performance barriers, while still establishing presence and refining system dynamics. Metaplace worlds are easily web-embeddable as shown below. From the embedded link you navigate and interact normally within the world. Unfortunately at the moment there is no provision for “guest accounts” so you can only see the actual embedded world if you are a Metaplace member.

As expected, Metaplace has relatively low requirements. Basically a box that can run a browser with the Flash plug-in appropriately fast to handle YouTube videos should be at least minimally sufficient.
This very low barrier to entry is a tremendous advantage. Another advantage of web-embedded metaverse engines is the seamless integration with the web. Links triggered from within a Metaplace world can just pop open tabs/windows on your browser, allowing you to easily move between contexts.

Overall I think the Metaplace team has done an excellent job, but see for yourself. I’ll leave the link up as a kind of companion metaverse for this blog, feel free to drop in anytime.
UPDATE: Jan 01, 2010: Embedded link removed since Metaplace is no more

Sometime in late 1982 maybe early 1983, I ran across True Names at the university library. It was a fairly quick read but when I finished I felt oddly out of sync with my surroundings, as if hours or even days had passed while I was reading. Such was the engrossing nature of the work. I must have sat there for another hour or so musing furiously about what I’d just read. And I was consumed for days, by the big ideas in that little book.

I recently re-read the novella and found it to be every bit as astonishing today, 25+ years on.
In terms of technology certainly things have advanced quite a bit since the 1980s, and all too often such rapid change dooms speculative fiction to quaintness. Occasionally however an author will really grok a technology progression and ride it right into tomorrow. Such is the case with Vernor Vinge, and True Names is notable for its descriptions of the emergence and leverage of mindspace, that particularly disruptive technology just now in its MMORG-3D infancy.

Once startling ideas become over time, commonplace. Today we are well along the path of integrating the “cyberspace” of the internet into our cultural fabric. And in these days when the “Singularity” concept is creeping ever into the mainstream (at least as half-baked trendy cliché), some of the mind-expanding aspects of True Names may not seem all that shocking. For example, in order to comprehend and manage data-streams beyond the handling bandwidth of basic humans, the protagonists learn to leverage extra-human sensory and processing tools, delegating lower level “awareness” to external computational processes much like the autonomic nervous system handles our breathing and other ‘background’ bodily processes without higher-level tending. It is at this point the flesh and blood protagonists transcend human awareness, in small steps at first, accelerating onward at an increasing rate. It is the cusp beyond which science, to the static observer, appears as magic. It is the seed of the Singularity.

Now this ground has been well-covered by a variety of authors in recent years, with notable efforts by John Barnes in Mother of Storms and Charles Stross in Accelerando. And probably even well before, in glancing blow, by Teilhard de Chardin. Indeed you could argue that this is an aspect of tool use that has been with us from the first fur jacket.

However at the time, as a punk kid knowing little about exotic phenomenology the “bootstrapping awareness” concept hit me like a lightning bolt. Even now it is, I think, one of the more powerful concepts illustrated by True Names. Barring self-extinction, Humans will continue to use, integrate and finally subsume a complex armamentarium of tools, ever increasing in power and ever decreasing in viable lifetime. Mindspace will inevitably exceed the mind.

In addition to their lush, adventurous prose Gibson and Stephenson gave us ‘cyberspace’ and ‘metaverse’, respectively, establishing themselves as visionaries of the modern internet-laced world. But prior to both, with his 1981 novella True Names Vernor Vinge provided a startling vision of extra-human mindspace, a vision that we are only now beginning to experience in the most primitive forms.

The fact that this classic and influential work was out of print for so long and remains somewhat obscure, when the shelves of your local big-box bookstore are larded with all manner of tedious crap is, well, a True Shame.