CyberTech News

What if you wanted to do some business using open source software? You are most probably already doing that even if you may not realize it. Open source virtual worlds have different licenses and they are briefly covered here.

Consider this example: You pay to a developer company to make you an e-commerce web site. They do it and you launch it with a marketing campaign, everything is rolling smoothly, money flows in. Most probably almost everything is done using open source software components. Why? Because it is cheaper and easier that way. 

Let’s see what software (just an example) is needed to run your e-commerce web site:

• Web site runs on Linux operating system (GPL) – you save in average 5€/month when compared to proprietary operating systems
• Apache web server (Apache open source license) – de facto standard web server
• MySQL database (GPL)
• Joomla content management system (GPL)
• VirtueMart shopping cart (GPL)
• And your customer may use Firefox web browser (GPL)

To put it briefly, business is possible. The above example is good in the sense that virtual worlds are used fundamentally the same way:
You make a virtual world and add some e-commerce aspects to it. Users use a virtual world viewer and come to browse your world and spend some money. In addition to that, you can sell your virtual world to another company if you wish.

Why licensed? Can’t the software just be available and used? 

If a company writes software, they hold the copyrights to the code. License defines how this company want to make the software available for others. License can be purely commercial, like is the case with Microsoft Windows. License can give the binaries for free use, but give no rights to the source code, like Skype. Open source licenses give users access to the source code too. Licensing does not mean transfer of the copyright.

A company can license a software using as many licenses it wants; for example Linden Lab Second Life Viewer is licensed in GPL, but it also has a commercial license for 3rd party developers. In both cases, the copyright owner of the viewer code is Linden Lab.  

How are different virtual world software distributions licensed?

OpenSim, the apache of virtual world servers, is using BSD license. BSD license is liberal, and some consider it business friendly. You can modify, split, chop, extend, deep-fry, wok, shrink wrap and sell it. Only thing to remember is to distribute the contributors.txt file with the software, so that the customer knows who made the original version of the software. No other strings attached. 

For example OpenLife is using Opensim to run their virtual worlds and they have developed the code further on their own. Openlife may publish their version of the virtual world server software using GPL license later, and this all is perfectly legal and in harmony with Opensim BSD license. realXtend server and Modrex Opensim extensions are using BSD license as well. 

Second Life Viewer is using GPL license, but is also available with a commercial license. The commercial license means that you get the source code and can develop your own version of the viewer, and use the result without giving the source code to your customer. 

realXtend viewer is using GPL license.  It is using GPL, because it is a modified SL Viewer. GPL license demands that if you use the source code to make a derived work, then the derived work must be licensed in GPL. GPL says that I can use the software for any purpose, even sell it, as long as I provide source code for my customers without any charges. Darkstar and Wonderland are also using GPL.

GPL makes some business cases unusable. If I made a better viewer for Second Life using the SL Viewer source code, I am obliged to give the source code to my customers for free, who can then continue to enhance the viewer. So I lose the rarity power which I gain from my own changes to the software because they are easily copied on. This is the area where many companies have made expensive mistakes.

Why companies choose to develop open source software in the first place?

Usually because the resources are limited and the task at hand is big. Using suitable open source license allows other companies and interested parties to join the effort.

Incompatible licenses

It may be very hard to mix software that use incompatible licensing. If you have GPL software and your own closed source application, there is no simple way to bundle them. If you do, you need to put your own application under GPL too, because it becomes part of the derived work with the GPL software – this is simple, but may destroy your application business.

Summary

Open source is a smart way to use resources and distribute effort. It is here to stay, increasingly so. It enables business, but it also changes some business models.

All the open source virtual world software available today, enables the basic business model, which is familiar from the web: You can build your own world on top of open source software, and generate income. 

Resources:

GPL FAQ: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html
Wikipedia page about open source
Book how to produce open source software (free)
realXtend web site: http://www.realxtend.org
Opensim web site: http://www.opensimulator.org
Darkstar web site: http://www.projectdarkstar.com

Uncategorized bsd, business, Darkstar, gpl, modrex, OpenSim, realXtend, wonderland

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM – March 06, 2009 – The Immersive Education Initiative today announced that it will launch its series of Immersive Education: Europe events in London this April. On April 23rd and 24th the London School of Economics (LSE) will host the Immersive Education Initiative’s London Summit, a special two-day event showcasing new and emerging virtual worlds, learning games, educational simulations, and related tools, techniques, technologies, standards and best practices. Designed specifically for educators, researchers, and administrators, the London Summit consists of presentations, panel discussions, break-out sessions and workshops that provide attendees with an in-depth overview of immersive learning platforms and technologies such as The Education Grid, Project Wonderland, Second Life, Croquet and Cobalt, realXtend, Alice, Open Simulator (OpenSim), augmented and mixed reality, and more.

The per-seat cost of the two-day London Summit is £195 (pound sterling), or $275 USD (U.S. dollars). Seating is limited and expected to reach full capacity almost immediately after registration opens to the general public at MediaGrid.org/summit.

Preliminary speakers and panelists include faculty, researchers, and administrators from The Grid Institute, Boston College, Loyola Marymount University, M.I.T. Media Lab, The Smithsonian Institution, Sun Microsystems, University of Essex (United Kingdom), realXtend (Finland), Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), BalticGrid (Baltic states), Holon Institute of Technology (Israel), Duke University, Montana State University, University of Central Missouri, Southeast Kansas Education Service Center at Greenbush, Boston Media High School, and more.

The London Summit is modeled after the breakthrough 2008 Boston Summit that was hosted by the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College. During the 2008 Boston Summit educators, researchers, administrators and students from Boston College, Boston Public Schools, Amherst College, Federation of American Scientists, MIT Media Lab, Harvard University, Duke University, United States Department of Education, New Media Consortium (NMC), Johnson & Wales University, NASA, Sun Microsystems, Synthespian Studios, and Computerworld gave a series of presentations, panel discussions and workshops that provided an overview of how virtual worlds and game-based learning technologies are used in and out of the classroom today. Immersive Education Day at Harvard University was a precursor to the 2008 Boston Summit.

Similar to the Boston Summit, London Summit speakers and panelists feature an array of Immersive Education experts, researchers and practitioners from around the world. In addition to showcasing new and emerging immersive learning technologies a number of new Community Groups (CGs) and Technology Working Groups (TWGs) and will be launched at the London Summit including groups for: K-6 and K-12 educators and students; virtual world builders; assessment, evaluation and grading; psychology and mental health; and augmented and mixed reality.

During the London Summit status reports and demonstrations will be given by previously launched Immersive Education groups, such as the Library Technology Working Group (LIB.TWG) and Open File Formats Technology Working Group (OFF.TWG).

To register for the London Summit visit MediaGrid.org/summit or ImmersiveEducation.org.

Darkstar, OpenSim, realXtend, wonderland alice, cobalt, immersive education, opencroquet, OpenSim, realXtend, Second Life, wonderland

Glasshouse by Green Phosphor is a gateway which can take a database query or a spreadsheet and place a 3D representation of it into a virtual world. Users can see data, and drill into it; re-sort it; explore it interactively – all from within a virtual world. Glasshouse produces graphs which are avatars of the data itself. 

Virtual worlds are environments where avatars can observe and interact with eachother. This is a wonderful advance for human to human interaction; and it is also a wonderful advance for human to program interaction. Imagine a useful program residing somewhere on the Internet… and to interact with it, all you need to do is invite its avatar into a virtual world with you. The avatar of the program is its 3D user interface. 

Imagine the program is architectural software and it can generate into the environment anything you are designing. Suppose you have it put a house into the virtual space, and all the components of the house are interactive – you can click on a door and change the type of door; you can click on the floor and choose a new kind of tile from an actual inventory database out there on the net. Imagine interacting with a molecular model of a protein and when you click on various amino acids and ligands they present menu options for modifying the model or cross-referencing with others.

Imagine a program which searches the web for you. The program’s avatar looks like a librarian and follows you around, and when you say “find me the most authoritative website on bodybuilding” it injects a web page into the virtual environment. Imagine interacting with software as you would with a personal assistant.

All this is possible through the use of protocols such as CICP and MXP, which allow external entities to place interactive content into virtual worlds. All the logic and machinery stays outside the world and just the user interfaces (objects) go inside the world for you to interact with. This is the vision that led me to create CICP – and the particular way Green Phosphor is using CICP is to create interactive representations of data.

Green Phosphor’s product is called Glasshouse, and it is a gateway which can take a database query or a spreadsheet and place a 3D representation of it into a virtual world. Users can see data, and drill into it; re-sort it; explore it interactively – all from within a virtual world. Glasshouse produces graphs which are avatars of the data itself. We’ve tailored the system for the use of biotech companies, specifically for drug discovery and development. Dr. David Resuehr, a molecular biologist, recently joined Green Phosphor as our Chief Scientist. We’ve just now entered our marketing phase – for more information please visit http://greenphosphor.com/?location=Biotech.

The power of interacting with data in 3D has to be experienced to be believed. Some day soon many people will have jobs which require SQL skills and virtual world skills; these ”data wizards” will turn information into intelligence within the 3D environment. They’ll facilitate a data-driven decision-making process which will hopefully reduce some of the short-sightedness and stupidity we’ve seen lately in many of our critical institutions.

Jani: What do you refer to when you say: “…will hopefully reduce some of the shortsightedness and stupidity we’ve seen lately in many of our critical institutions.”? Could you give an example?

Ben: I have a couple examples which I’m sure won’t offend anyone and a third which may. First off I believe that visualization of money in/money out could have turned authorities on to the fishy accounting Enron was up to, and caught them earlier. Perhaps better visualization would have revealed Madoff’s ponzi scheme as well. It’s a matter of seeing the big picture; money must come from somewhere and be tied to intrinsic value at some point. My third example is similar, but rather than money in/money out it is about energy in/energy out. I believe proper visualization of the process for producing ethanol fuel, including energy cost of fertilizer, would reveal the uselessness of subsidizing cornbased ethanol as an alternative to fossil fuels. Much of the value of looking at data has to do with getting in touch with history rather than trying to look at realtime feeds with everfiner granularity. There is tremendous value in looking at the past in objective ways – and the best objectivity comes from hard, unadulterated data. Combine data visualization and visible process simulation with massive collaboration – crowdsourcing, masterminds formed by teams – and the human race can be more intelligent.

Jani: I’d like to get a quote from Dr. David Resuehr.

DrDavid: For science, the 3-D environment may really have a very prosperous future. We know that the discovery of many drugs was more or less coincidental like for instance when Fleming discovered Penicillin. Others were specifically and tediously designed, tested and created. Insufficient testing can – as it happened with Thalidomide – have terrible consequences. During the 50’s and early 60’s thousands of children in Africa and Europe were born with severe malformations because their mothers had been given this drug against morning sickness.
What does all this have to do with virtual worlds and 3D environments? The connection lies in the fact that molecules are not flat but have a (sometimes very elaborate) three dimensional structure. Here is the anecdote: Thalidomide exists in two  isomers (enantiomers), which are mirror images of each other, like your right and left hand. The problem was (as was found out later) that one of the versions, the ‘S’ enantiomer, was teratogenic [causes malformations]; but the ‘R’ enantiomer was an effective sedative. I like to refer to the ‘S’ enantiomer as the ”evil twin”. Had the developing scientists been able to display and most of all discuss this and its possible implications with their peers, maybe they would have been more diligent and could have prevented the release of this cocktail and its devastating effects for thousands of people. Clearly it is impossible to recognize and tell apart a “bad” molecule from a good one by just looking at it, but having it dangling right in front of your nose in cyberspace may make you think about it a little more thoroughly and prime discussions about it.

DrDavid: Virtual worlds like Wonderland and OpenSimulator offer never before available possibilities for researchers from all fields to interact with each other and display and scrutinize their data in new and more intuitive ways. This platform also offers a link from the people in the lab to the people at the desks and enables everyone to give their input, from wherever in the world they are – many brains are better than one and sometimes it may take a non-scientist to come up with a great idea; after all it’s about collaboration and working as one strong team.

DrDavid: A long-term goal is, in collaboration with bioinformatics and cell biology specialists, to create a complete virtual cell. If we can accurately display and simulate cellular pathways, we may be able to better understand drugs’ molecular actions, explain adverse effects, predict risks, and discover potential therapeutical targets for the development of new drugs.

Ben: I believe one of the keys to intelligence is the elimination of bias and preconceptions. This elimination opens the door to truth. One of the great features of looking at raw data in a virtual world is you can start without any labels or explanations of what the data is. You simply see the patterns, the outliers… then click in and see what the actual datapoints are, and be prepared to accept what is revealed. I’d like to close by mentioning a pilot project in Second Life which is using the free version of Glasshouse to show the effects of various companies’ customer loyalty efforts on revenue. The data was provided by Leslie Pagel and the graphs are on display at Gronstedt Group’s Train for Success2 region. Here’s a slurl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Business%201/211/48/33.

Darkstar, OpenSim, realXtend 3D models, avatar, cicp, glasshouse, green phosphor, mxp, OpenSim, platform, protocol, Second Life, visualization, wonderland, www

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

In the last two years since Linden Lab released the source code for their client, a vibrant open source community has grown around the Second Life protocol. With projects such as the first version of realXtend, the possibility of moving beyond the limitations of that protocol are starting to be explored. Features such as inverse-kinematics-based avatar control and mesh-based prims extend the platform in ways that go beyond the capabilities of Second Life. There are also parallel open source virtual world efforts, such as Qwaq (based on Open Croquet), Sun’s Wonderland platform, and the Web3D/X3D set of formats and runtime tools.

One of my core interests in this space has been to find a way to bring some of my and other’s work in robotics, AI, and advanced simulation into this arena of shared virtual worlds. There are numerous reasons why this would be beneficial. Firstly, it would allow researchers to leverage a common set of tools, fostering collaboration and improving our ability to reproduce and critique each other’s work. Perhaps even more importantly, it could open the way for large numbers of people to interact with virtual entities (AI’s, if you prefer). This is a potentially major advance in AI research, as it represents a real-world, renewable source of training data, which many researchers think is critical for advancement in the field. It would also be ultra cool.
(Editor’s note: See also earlier article What do virtual worlds have to offer AI?)

Before I describe this work and the unique requirements it presents, let’s clarify some of the jargon. Linden Labs uses the term ’sim’, short for simulator, to signify a portion of virtual space supported by Linden’s servers. Opensim, the open-source, mostly Second Life-compatible server, inherits this usage. When I talk about simulation and simulators, I mean something quite different. In my work in robotics, I build software to simulate complex robots. This software uses some of the same underlying components as a Second Life or Opensim simulator – a physics engine, 3D representation of objects, and so on. However, the level of detail is quite different. The simulators I use in my robotics work are generally operating at a much higher degree of realism than a realXtend or SecondLife vehicle or avatar. They require proportionally greater resources in terms of CPU and memory, and of course the development time to get a simulation of this sort working is considerable.

While my own work in robotics requires a high degree of physical realism, there is work being done in this field that may have different requirements, such as robot swarms, where navigation and interaction are more important than physical realism. There is also a body of AI research into subjects such as language comprehension that may not need physical realism at all. However, my work is on physically realistic simulation, so I will be focused on that specific issue in this article.

There are several related issues that come up in the course of attempting to integrate ’serious’ simulation into the Second Life-derived model:

Basic Architecture

In Second Life (and related platforms), the user’s visual representation of the world consists of three major parts: the background (land, sky, sea); a set of objects (called ‘prims’ in Second Life); and avatars, representing the human (or possibly scripted) players. These three major elements have very different architectures, and present an almost mutually exclusive set of features to the system. Putting aside the background elements, let’s look at the prim and avatar systems.

Prims

Prims are physical objects that are described as a primitive shape (cube, cylinder, pyramid, sphere etc.), with various possible modifications such as cuts, tapers, skews, and hollows. Prims are controlled by the server software. Static prims, which generally don’t move unless they are being edited, make up architectural elements such as walls and other building elements. Other prims are allowed to move around the environment. They can be controlled by the physics engine (balls that roll), scripts (doors), or both (vehicles). They can have arbitrary textures, but do not have the ability to utilize deformable meshes, skeletons, or client-side animation.

Avatars

Avatars are always defined as skeletons with deformable mesh (skin and clothes). Their motion is usually controlled by the user’s input (walk, run, fly etc). They do react to the physics engine, but in a rudimentary way: avatars are represented at the physical level as ‘capsules’, egg or pill-shaped shells that provide basic collision with walls and other avatars. This is an important point: there is no physical representation of, say, your arm extending out and touching an object. Complex avatar motion is achieved through client-side animation, which in our case is based on the .bvh file format (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biovision_Hierarchy). Again, it’s important to realize that the animation of an avatar is not reflected at the physics layer, at least not in the present implementation of Opensim.

There is one more subtle but critical point to keep in mind about avatars vs. prims: avatars, by definition, are associated with a user account. Users have abilities that go outside the physical and graphic simulation layer – they can buy and sell things; they can chat with each other, join groups, get banned for TOS violations, and so forth. They represent an entity within the social network of Second Life (or one of the Opensim grids, or the emerging hypergrid). There are complexities – avatars can have ‘prim’-based attachments – but fundamentally, if you want to be part of the Second Life society, you need an avatar.

Users

Users, through their avatars, can interact with each other (chat, give/receive items…). They can interact with prims, by creating and editing them (if they have the permissions), or through menus and scripts. It may seem obvious, but it’s worth pointing out the heirarchy: Prims cannot create or edit avatars (!); they cannot buy, sell, give, or receive assets on their own behalf. They are, by definition, owned and controlled by at least one user, which is by definition represented by a single avatar.

The problems this heirarchy and separation of capabilities poses to those of us working in AI is hopefully becoming evident. If I design a robot using prims, scripts, and physics, there is no obvious way to give that entity the same rights and privileges of a “real” user. I also can’t take advantage of graphics abilities such as skeletons, deformable skin, or animations. On the other hand, if I design a robot in the typical ‘bot’ fashion, by pretending to be a user (using libsecondlife for instance), right at the start I must accept a number of constraints that may not be desirable: I need to look roughly human (because of skeleton constraints); I must have skin; I can’t interact physically at a fine-grained level with the rest of the system; and my behavior must be animated – I cannot generate low-level behavior on-the-fly.

Distributed simulation and synchronization

Second Life started as a proprietary system run by Linden on a local server farm. They made the choice to divide up the simulation by geography; in essence, each 256×256 meter region of land is assigned its own processing stack (set of CPU threads), and operates in parallel with all the other regions. Interactions between region modules are achieved through network communication.

There are obvious objections to this model, the main one being that popular sims get overloaded, and sparsely visited sims waste resources. Some of this can be addressed with load balancing and clever thread management, but in my opinion it represents a fundamental flaw in the Second Life architecture. Putting the resource issue aside for the moment, there is a deeper flaw in this state of affairs. To build a useful and reliable simulated world for AI research, it is critical that you not introduce major defects (artifacts) into the simulation. Learning algorithms are notorious for finding devious ways to “cheat” researcher’s goals. If something in the simulation is non-physical, you can pretty much bet that your genetic algorithm or neural network will find that defect and use it to its advantage, avoiding the more difficult, “honest” approach you are trying to develop.

Boundaries between regions in Second Life, especially in the case where the regions are separated by network lag, are places where the physics of the simulation break down in nasty and difficult to predict ways. One reason for this is that events in Second Life have no concept of operative time. An event is sent over the wire, and the receiving node assumes that this event is happening ‘now’, in relation to that node’s local concept of time. This creates some issues on the client side (perhaps I’ll post about that later), but more fundamentally, it’s a problem at the server level. Region modules in Opensim pass messages back and forth between each other, for instance posting the position, rotation, linear and angular velocity of objects, so that you can visualize what is happening across region boundaries. Since these messages are subject to server lag, each sim in effect has its own version of reality. In my sim, your objects are delayed by the average network lag time between our sims; in your sim, my objects are similarly delayed. Clearly this is not acceptible if our goal is to have a coherent, realistic, detailed simulation of the environment.

Open Croquet, an alternative virtual world platform, has developed a concept of distributed, synchronized simulation that sounds pretty good to me (I haven’t actually deployed it, so I’m taking some of this on faith. Decide for yourself: http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/TeaTime_Architecture).

In summary, I hope I’ve managed to outline some of the features and requirements that need to be considered for the development of sophisticated, high-fidelity simulated worlds in the context of a massively distributed, shared environment. In the future, I hope to post some ideas on what we can do to support these concepts in future releases of Opensim and realXtend.

Artificial Intelligence, OpenSim, realXtend agi, avatar, bot, hypergrid, lag, network, opencroquet, OpenSim, physics, qwaq, realXtend, robotics, Second Life, strong ai, vehicles, wonderland

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.

Darkstar, OpenSim, realXtend cicp, download, green phosphor, mxp, network, olive, protocol, RL control, Second Life, wonderland

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

Darkstar, OpenSim, realXtend, wonderland cicp, forterra, gpl, olive, OpenSim, protocol, realXtend, Second Life, sl tos, wonderland

Wonderland is SUN Microsystem’s open source virtual world platform. It is developed in Java, which is not surprising. The server side utilizes Darkstar, Sun’s Java MMORPG engine.

Lecture hall at Sun Microsystem's Wonderland World

Steps you need to do in order to “follow the rabbit”:

1. Download the newest Java SE, at least version 5 is needed (be sure to take the 32-bit version, otherwise you don’t get the webstart technology)
2. Open your web~browser to view Wonderland Nodes on the education grid…
3. If you get login screen, you can use any username and leave the password field empty

Simplest experience ever – no registration, no hassle… other technology providers should consider similar approach… And the performance? Framerate was set to 30, no hiccups, but the content was really simple as well. The user experience? Hmm, they could use game programmers, UI was quite clumsy – even when compared to SL.

These instructions were extracted from Immersive Education initiative’s workbook about how to get started with Wonderland:   http://web3dbooks.com/wonderland/discovering/index.xhtml

You can find the user guide to Wonderland from here: https://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net/user-guide-0.4-toc.html

wonderland howto, immersive education, wonderland