CyberTech News

Here is a comparison between virtual world avatars and how realistic they can be. Generally it is easier to make cartoon-like and harder to make photorealistic. Commercial games and many closed virtual worlds are not included. Barack Obama is used as an example as he is widely known.

Wikipedia says that an avatar is “a deliberate descent from higher spiritual realms to lower realms of existence for special purposes”. When I go from my reality to the artificial digital reality, I present myself as an avatar. 

Some want to use fantasy avatars, some want to look like they are in the real life. If you don’t want to look like you are, it is easier. Photorealism is the hardest because human eye is most trained for that and easily senses any deviations.

Realistic-looking avatar is especially important for virtual meetings and business purposes. 

Second Life avatar

 SL Avatar is based on a mesh and skeleton, the modifiability is achieved using morph targets. The SL Avatar has respectable 144 modifiable parameters. See here how you can export and import SL avatar settings to/from your own computer.

Second Life girl caLLie cLine was the first Avatar that was selected to the “Top 100 Hottest Females of 2007″ in Maxim. The avatar model can’t be too bad! 

Opensim users usually technically use Second Life avatar if they are using SL Viewers. This has worried some people as the licensing of the avatar model is unclear. There is an effort that has started to create universal free human avatar models that could be used also in Opensim, Tommi Laukkanen wrote about it here.

Barack Obama in Second Life

Second Life avatar is cartoon-like with exaggerated muscles and forms – although this is something everyone can adjust themselves. 

Olive avatar

Forterra’s “flagship product, OLIVE™ (On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment) is an open, distributed client-server platform for building private, realistic virtual worlds.” – excerpt from Forterra web site.

Barack Obama avatar in Olive

Olive avatar is even more cartoon-like than Second Life avatar. Also, the rendering quality of Olive is optimized for low-end hardware because of the wide user base at US government projects. 

Wonderland avatar

Sun Microsystem’s project wonderland is working to enhance their avatars. The next release is coming and there should be something better available at that time. Take a look how you can try out Wonderland, it is really easy.

Avatar in Wonderland 0.4

Wonderland’s current avatar model is really simple and low polygon. According to their web pages there are significant improvements coming.  I hope that Wonderland project joins to define universal avatars.

realXtend avatar

realXtend avatar can use Facegen’s photofit feature to make surprisingly real looking models. It is also possible to use any 3D mesh as an avatar, some examples being shipped with realXtend are a snowman and a mushroom. 

Barack Obama's avatar in realXtend

realXtend avatar can be made to look cartoonish, too as is the case with Rex Ping. Avatar has more than 10k polygons and it has both morph target based modifications as well as individual bones can be scretched in the skeleton – which can lead to many very funny avatars, see video below.

While realXtend avatar clearly looks realistic, realXtend is still an early phase software. As an interesting note, Ludocraft hinted at realXtend mailing list that they are working to bring face tracking and facial animation to realXtend. 

If you have screenshots of an avatar in other virtual world platforms (Barack Obama would be good!), please send them to me (jpirkola@gmail.com) with some explanation and I will publish them as a continuation to this post.

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The Meta-Mole, created by the Centre for Design in the Digital Economy (D-LAB) based within the University of Teesside’s Institute of Digital Innovation, will ultimately be a dedicated searchable online resource for the 350 plus virtual worlds currently existing on the Internet.

Philip McClenaghan, Deputy Director of D-LAB explains: “We were analysing virtual world platforms and realised that there doesn’t appear to be a comprehensive service offering to list and compare key data for major 2D and 3D environments. This surprised us, considering the current popularity of virtual worlds. We intend to fill the gap with the Meta-Mole.”

The Meta-Mole will help both new and experienced users looking for a virtual world environment as well as platform developers who want to gauge competition. “The Meta-Mole seeks to increase the uptake and success rates of Virtual World ventures by providing a searchable directory of available platforms, easily definable according to the need of the user”, says Dan Riley, a Metaverse Architect at D-LAB.

All data contained within the Meta-Mole is provided by the platform developers themselves along with high quality official images and videos. The Meta-Mole allows for the sharing and comparing of information and provides access to the latest core, technical and specialist features on current virtual worlds, as well as those in development.

Platforms listed at Meta-Mole

In addition to the digital industry, the team at D-LAB believe there are a range of potential users for this service such as businesses seeking a platform for new commercial opportunities and academia.

The Meta-Mole will initially be released as a Beta version focusing on 3D virtual world platforms. Future developments will cater for all platforms, including 3D, 2D and MMO environments.

Platform developers are able to participate in the Meta-Mole by contacting developers@Meta-Mole.com. Meta-Mole will become more and more useful as platform providers start to add details of their own platform. Go and update your platform!

Darkstar, OpenSim, realXtend database, meta-mole, olive, OpenSim, platform, realXtend, Second Life, wonderland, www

The purpose of this article is to publish a provisional patent application I filed back in March 2008. The provisional covers Content Injection and Control Protocol, which I created to allow Green Phosphor’s data visualization application to interface with virtual world platforms (see previous article on CICP here).

I recently asked the Slashdot readership whether I should fork out the additional $10k it would take to properly complete the app, since I am releasing CICP to the public domain anyway. Despite a large number of trolls saying I was stupid to ask such a question on Slashdot, I received a lot of very good advice; and it sums up to this: publish the work, and as prior art it protects the protocol. I think this is important. Not only is CICP useful for business applications to produce 3D user interfaces within virtual worlds; it is a predecessor to MXP (see previous article on MXP here). MXP has the potential to tie together many worlds and programs into one metaverse. The MXP project is seeking developers… go to http://www.bubblecloud.org.

Without further ado, here’s the publishing of the provisional patent application for CICP. CICP is for all.

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My involvement with virtual world protocol design began with a very practical need.  I had used Second Life to develop a prototype of a gateway for querying a database and producing a three-dimensional representation of the query result within the virtual world.

For business reasons, I wanted my gateway to be able to work not only with Second Life, but also with Sun’s Wonderland, Forterra’s OLIVE, OpenSim, realXtend, and any other virtual world platform.  This cross-platform requirement caused me to design a protocol called Content Injection and Control Protocol, and to implement the protocol in both Second Life and Sun Wonderland.  I call the program which implements the protocol for a given virtual world platform an “adapter” for that platform.

In addition to the cross-platform benefit of the protocol, which enabled me to create one version of my gateway which is able to work simultaneously with both Second Life and Wonderland, I discovered another significant benefit: the ability to shield a proprietary, closed-source program from attachment by Second Life’s Terms of Service, and Wonderland’s Gnu Public License.

By releasing the protocol itself to the public domain, conforming to Second Life’s Terms of Service with the Second Life adapter, and contributing the Wonderland adapter back to the Wonderland project for release under GPL, I created a communication mechanism which my gateway can use to generate temporary artifacts in the worlds. The gateway itself never resides within a virtual world and is never linked to a virtual world at a code or library level.  Rather, it simply communicates with CICP adapters using sockets and a simple text-based protocol much like HTTP. It is of course important that I do not desire to protect the temporary artifacts, which happen to be representations of data, from any intellectual property issues; I am only concerned with protecting the algorithms and processes contained within the gateway program.

I believe the most useful aspect of my CICP work is a way of looking at virtual worlds from the perspective of an external application which must place content into them for viewing and interaction by other entities (users) who are also external to the virtual worlds.

Looking at a virtual world from this perspective can lead to the development of a universal protocol: an HTTP for virtual worlds.  There are few who would dispute the usefulness of HTTP in the development of the World Wide Web.  The presence of a well-defined protocol has enabled various groups to develop client software (browsers, for example) and server software (web servers, for example) which work together.  Closed-source servers work just fine with open-source clients, and vice-versa; one company’s client software works well with another company’s server software.  One of the aspects of HTTP which enables this interoperability is its simplicity.  HTTP is a very simple protocol and is concerned with the mechanism of transferring commands and content from one place to another, rather than with the meaning or structure within the content.

For more information please visit http://greenphosphor.com/?location=Developers

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Forterra created a Barack Obama avatar in honor of the new President of the United States. Forterra’s “flagship product, OLIVE™ (On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment) is an open, distributed client-server platform for building private, realistic virtual worlds.” – excerpt from Forterra web site. The screenshot from Olive inspired CTN to create a Barack Obama avatar in realXtend to compare the results:

Left: Barack Obama avatar in realXtend. right: Barack Obama avatar in Olive.

For the realXtend screenshots, rex_bloom post processing effect was enabled. You can find postprocessing effects from the viewer view menu. The effects can also be enabled from a python script. Also it helps greatly to have the possibility to save and lock camera positions, the functionality can be found from the view menu -> “Edit camera view”.

Another screenshot of Obama.

The Barack’s face was done using Facegen modeller, and it was manually tweaked after it was automatically generated from photographs. The resulting Facegen file was then imported into realXtend with Facegen2rex tool, which can be downloaded from the realXtend downloads page.

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