A little bit of history first:

The guy who started it in 2008 was Balaji Sowmyanarayan (known as labsji on twitter). He started Sim-OnDemand based on Amazons EC2 services.

Then came Pixelpark with the OpenSim-in-a-box which was partly funded by the KoPIWA research project (see Justin Clark-Caseys blog and our blog for some details), opening up OpenSimulator based worlds to the cloud and open source.

Now, according to New World Notes and HyperGridBusiness we have a tenant-capable cloud based solution with Facebook Connect: Kitely.

I didn’t have a chance to test it myself yet, but according to Maria Korolov it rocks. Big time.

Check out her articles

• When do cloud-based sims make sense? and
• Tipodean and Kitely should talk. Seriously, guys!

Kitely - all the best of luck to you!

Minecraft world of my daughter - I am so proud of her in so many ways

For those of you who lived under a rock for the past year – here’s the news: one bold developer (Markus ‘Notch’ Persson) had the idea of a voxel-like,  cube-based virtual world that is procedurally created by some clever algorithm of his. Any business person would have called him crazy if he pitched this to anyone – but as a matter of fact he simply did it all on his own.

So he created Minecraft. A virtual world containing cubes that make up the world. A day lasts 10 minutes and at night the monsters come so you have to craft yourself into a self shelter.

Doesn’t sound like fun?

As of the beginning 0f 2011 3 million people registered on his website to play the free alpha. And over one million decided to pay for the beta. Which cost 10 Euros when it came out and 15 Euros now (will cost 20 Euros when it’s ready so you better hurry up). Ok, one million users shelling out something between 10 and 15 Euros on a beta game from a single developer? You do the math.

Ok, besides being a great game developer he is rich now.

Oh, and you can run a minecraft server and invite other play

And this must scare the [DELETED] out of the triple A game publishers.

I can’t stress enough how important the role of this game is, business-wise. You don’t need a team of 200++  people working for a year. You can go into your garage, develop your game and you have the chance to be rewarded for it without a big publisher.

If this can be done with a game, it can be done with virtual multiplayer worlds.

I cite Justin Clark-Casey (of OpenSimulator fame):

“The build tools in Minecraft are simpler and better.  I think the constraints of building blocks really help here, as well as the fact that Notch is an excellent interface designer (I love the crafting box, that idea is a work of genius, though very game-oriented).

Minecraft also doesn’t inherit other constraints, such as security.  Anybody can come and burn down your house, it’s very wikipedia.  Yet this simplicity gets rid of an awkward interface layer and makes the flow experience far better.”

’nuff said.

Let’s create the virtual world of the decade.

Consequently, to see any WebGL demo you need a so-called nightly build. Here’s a webpage that describes where you can get nightly builds of browsers that already support WebGL (namely Webkit/Safari, Firefox and Chrome).

There are a number of 3D ‘engines’ making it easier on the web developer to include 3D artifacts in their sites. I especially came across MrDoobs outstanding blog and the three.js engine.

It fancies the ‘Or so they say…‘ WebGL Demo (video preview – must see!):

Other ways to create WebGL is to do it directly in JavaScript, of course. You will want to check out the resources on the Learning WebGL pages if you go this way.

The Cubic VR 3D engine is about to be ported to WebGL, with the fantastic (albeit somewhat older) ‘Flight of the Navigator’ demo video:

For Blender users, GLGE might be the path to take.

Also the Google Code WebGL samples are worth a look, featuring the Aquarium example that sports a winning software combination IMHO, that might make web3d finally arrive in 2011:

node.js, socket.io and WebGL.

If this has anything to do with how the SL viewer will work in the future – I’d say this is the right direction :

Deferred Rendering 1

Deferred Rendering 2

Deferred Rendering 3

Screenshots stem from a link from this (open) conversation which lifted some NDA for about 5 minutes (propably a world record).

How ths goes together with the thought about an web based viewer? I don’t know. Clearly the above is not the result of some fancy HTML5 mangling nor did it happen on your average office PC.

Stats

The pictures come from this extraordinary picasa photo stream sporting 93 images all worth watching. On the other hand some of the pics are from 2008 -I didn’t learn from them until today so I don’t know how this fits in any roadmap.

Here is an video regarding meshes in the SL viewer.

Another issue is that it is not mega-region enabled and, after all this time, it is not the latest stable version.

Some time ago I talked to Maria Korolov of Hypergrid Business fame who is a big fan of the famous ‘Diva Edition’ of the OpenSimulator - and now I know why.  Having played around with it the other day it solves the issues I mentioned before. This particular version is not only mega region enabled (and hypergrid enabled of course) but comes with freebie content.

Updating the OpenSim-In-A-Box is easy as pie just follow the instructions on Divas page.

Here is a screenshot of two freebie avatars standing in the environment by the OpenVCE project (for more environments check out OpensimWorlds).

And here all three with a screen from the KirstenLee viewer.

Just to wrap up, the story so far:

Open-Sim-In-A-Box, pt 0 – voices in the amazon cloud
Open-Sim-In-A-Box, pt 1 – setting it up in the cloud
Open-Sim-In-A-Box, pt 2 – enabling hypergrid

Kudos for this goes to the KoPIWA project, which also starred part-time Justin Clark-Casey, OpenSimulator Developer supreme.

Dirk Krause and Justin Clark-Casey on the KoPIWA Symposium

Turns out it was ‘project of the month’ on the DLR website as of February 2010 (via). The results are available (german) and a paper (english) will be published soon.

There is also an extremely interesting follow-up project on the UDE (Universität Duisburg-Essen) which is described in greater detail on the KoPIWA Serious Games in 3D Blog (german, english).  This project will be finalized this month, so there should be interesting results coming up.

Justin Clark-Casey: Talking about OpenSim at the Kopiwa Open Innovation Symposium

Stefan Andersson: OpenSim unfinished symphony

Robo^2 (Sienna)
Customisable Bot Client for SL and OpenSim.

3D Explorer
Plug-In-Less (hmm … Java)  Browser-based Web3D collaboration Service.

Educators in Virtual Worlds on Open Sim – the pioneers … (Learn 4 Life)
Great article about eLearning in virtual worlds.

The Interface: 2D to 3D (Larry Rosenthal)
Title say it all.

Evaluating Blue Mars (Gwyneth Llewelyn)
Very informal article about Blue Mars.

Original White Paper from Philip Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka on Gamasutra in 2003
A blast from the past.

With the latest buzz on Adam Frisby’s success in adding Megaregions to the OpenSimulator (see the original posting here and more info there on Adam’s Blog) we decided to make a giant leap (sic!) by switching to an even newer version then we intended that will feature this great acchievement.

For obvious reasons we will wait a bit until it is more stable and documented but this whole development is very exciting … and Megaregions add up so nicely to Hypergrids .

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Die MFG Innovationsagentur betreibt selbst einen Blog zum Thema Second Life. Außerdem dient die Agentur als Inkubator für kleinere Projekte in Second Life. Sie betreiben die Baden Wuerttemberg-Regionen, auf den Interessierte Institutionen mit geringem Aufwand virtuelle Luft schnuppern können. Über die MFG berichteten wir bereits des Öfteren.“