Generation 3D: Living in Virtual Worlds - ufesyteesyteimvy20112

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Oct 1, 2007 - for devices ranging from mobile phones to notebook computers. Most important, a generation of computer users now in their twenties.
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Generation 3D: Living in Virtual Worlds Mike Macedonia, Forterra Systems

Within decades, people could spend at least as much time in virtual worlds as in the real one.

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ixteen years have passed since the World Wide Web exploded and the Web browser became the interface to the Internet universe. That interface has remained largely unchanged despite dramatic shifts in technology and culture in the intervening years. The world is about to be turned upside down again. Computer performance has increased 10,000-fold, while home network speed has gone from 9,600 bps to more than 1 Mbps since the early 1990s. In 2006, most homes in the US had some form of broadband that enabled the downloading of video to iPods and YouTube. However, streaming video has been an Internet feature since the creation of the MBone in the early 1990s, when users needed a $50,000 computer and a leased T1 connection (M.R. Macedonia and D.P. Brutzman, “MBone Provides Audio and Video Across the Internet,” Computer, Apr. 1994, pp. 30-36). Many personal computers produced today have graphical processing units that offer graphics performance orders of magnitude better than million-dollar image generators could in the early

1990s. Further, wireless networking has become a universal phenomenon for devices ranging from mobile phones to notebook computers. Most important, a generation of computer users now in their twenties can’t recall a world without networked 3D video games like Doom, Quake, Halo, or World of Warcraft (WoW). It’s also a generation comfortable in cyberspace—able to easily move between the virtual and real worlds because they are becoming one (www.mnfuturists.org/ PDFCurrent/Virtual%20Worlds%20 RealOpportunities.pdf). According to Gartner, by 2010, 80 percent of Fortune 500 global companies will have some form of massive multiplayer online or virtual-world presence.

ARPANET ORIGINS The space race with the Soviet Union gave birth to the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in 1958. Its mission: Make the US a technology leader. The Soviets had already launched Sputnik, making it the first country to become a space power capable of delivering intercontinental ballistic missiles. This threatened the

US’s status as the free world’s premier superpower and caused the country to suffer a crisis of confidence. President Eisenhower established ARPA to lead a mostly secret crash program to turn the situation around. The investment worked: Within a decade, the US began circling the moon with manned spaceships. But ARPA’s legacy is rooted in its most public research program—the Arpanet—which began in 1967 to network mainframes at university research labs. Initially led by Larry Roberts, the project would eventually become today’s Internet. For 25 years, the Internet grew slowly with the introduction of applications such as e-mail and file transfer. Not until the Web browser’s appearance did Internet growth explode (http://navigators.com/stats.html). In 1991, Tim Berners Lee tied a 2D graphical interface to the Net, providing a canvas for creating a whole new class of applications from AltaVista to MySpace. The World Wide Web made the Internet accessible beyond the shores of university computer science departments, government offices, and the arcana of command-line interfaces. The combination of startling growth in computer usage, computer performance, and network performance provided the catalyst for the industry’s advancement in 1967 and again in 1992. The Arpanet became possible because universities had workstation-class computers with WIMP (window, icon, menu, pointing device) interfaces tied to Ethernet LANs, a legacy of the Xerox Star computer. Moreover, wide-area-network speeds increased from 50 Kbps in 1969 to 45 Mbps in 1992. The WWW benefited from the culmination of ideas from visionaries and early Arpanet pioneers such as Douglas Englebart, who led development of the Stanford Research Institute OnLine System, the graphical user interface, and the mouse.

SIMNET In the 1970s, the Xerox Star hosted one of the first networked videogames, Maze War (http://articles.techrepublic. October 2007

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Figure 1.Virtual worlds for work and play. Forterra’s OLIVE architecture enables creation of 3D environments that can be used for classroom instruction, business meetings, and virtual socializing.

com.com/5100-10881_11-5710539. html). But DARPA gave birth to something more ambitious than just a game; it created SIMNET, or Simulator Network, in the mid-1980s. Led by Jack Thorpe, a young Air Force officer, the SIMNET program produced the first peer-to-peer 3D virtual environments to operate over the Arpanet— and gave birth to the Internet’s multiplayer first-person shooter. Thorpe envisioned that one day soldiers and airmen would train in virtual battles while deployed across the globe. What looked like today’s videogames were deadly serious training systems. Yet, many ideas implemented in SIMNET found their way into such networked games as Microsoft Flight Simulator and Doom. DARPA also created a special network for SIMNET, the Defense Simulation Internet (DSInet). In the late 1980s, researchers at USC Information Sciences Institute and Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) experimented with the DSINet. They sought to explore the use of the voice-over-theInternet protocol (VoIP) to connect the 100

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virtual radios of soldiers in tank simulators across the US.

KILLER APP Videogames have provided the killer app for 3D virtual worlds over the past decade. SIMNET was not a persistent world—it offered no central server to maintain the simulation’s global state. Wolfenstein 3D and other first-person shooter games followed the same model. But in 1999, Sony Online Entertainment released Everquest, a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Although this genre originated with the text-based multiuser dungeon-and-dragon (MUDD) games popular in the 1980s, the graphical Everquest became an unprecedentedly popular and profitable game with a huge subscriber base, even though most players accessed it through dialup connections running at 56 Kbps or less. Because it was persistent, Everquest let players accrue points that they could trade for virtual artifacts such as spells and materials. This form of virtual currency led to the creation of

virtual economies that eventually involved real money. Today, WoW, an Everquest successor, is by far the most popular 3D virtual world, benefiting from the explosion of broadband and 3D graphics performance. With more than 9 million subscribers, the game has at least several hundred thousand users logged in at any one time. WoW has seeped into popular culture, with the TV show South Park devoting an entire episode to the game—an episode that, as this issue goes to press, has just been awarded an Emmy. The growth in virtual-world communities has not gone unnoticed by large media companies. In August 2007, Disney acquired ClubPenguin. com for a minimum of $350 million (and up to $700 million). An MMORPG for children, this game was the 131st most visited Web site in the US in June 2007 (www.marketingvox. com/archives/2007/08/06/club-penguinsnatched-by-disney-grew-329-percentin-past-year/). Viacom’s MTV has also established a presence in the virtual world with Virtual Laguna Beach and Virtual Pimp My Ride. Developed by Makena using the Forterra OLIVE architecture shown in Figure 1, MTV’s sites have pioneered the use of voice conferencing using VoIP and in-world streaming video (www.vmtv.com).

A 3D INTERNET In a departure from more traditional videogames, some developers have begun creating large-scale virtual worlds such as Second Life (http:// secondlife.com) for social networking. Developed by Linden Labs, Second Life promotes the idea of a self-sustaining virtual economy in which users can produce and sell goods such as virtual clothing or trade virtual properties. Moreover, Second Life has attracted advertising and an increased online presence from businesses such as IBM and Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, as well as religious organizations such as the Jesuits. IBM has been a leader in experimenting with Second Life, There.com,

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and other virtual worlds as a forum for business collaboration. According to a company report, “IBM believes that virtual worlds and other 3D Internet environments offer significant opportunity to our company, our clients, and the world at large, as they evolve, grow in use and popularity, and become more integrated into many aspects of business and society” (http://domino.research.ibm.com/ comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/ virtualworlds.IBMVirtualWorldGuide lines.html). In many respects, Google Earth is a 3D virtual world, albeit without avatars and no direct group interaction. However, Google enables usercreated content that can be created with its SketchUp tool, then shared via the 3D warehouse. Users now share thousands of building models and even their furniture. Meanwhile, the Web3 Consortium’s X3D Earth project is creating a standards-based 3D visualization infrastructure for visualizing all manner of real-world objects and information constructs in a geospatial context (www.web3d. org/x3d-earth/).

DEPARTURE FOR DISCOVERY Educators have recognized the power of collaborative presence for students in the virtual world. More than 200 universities—including Harvard and Princeton—now experiment with MMORPGs as learning environments. Forterra Systems has been pioneering the development of virtual worlds for training and education programs using its OLIVE platform. Recently, the company began a project to integrate OLIVE with learning management systems (LMSs) such as Blackboard (http://forterrainc.com). These virtual worlds have also become the focus of new scientific research. William Bainbridge of the National Science Foundation wrote in the 27 July issue of Science (pp. 472476) that scientists are now using several tools to explore aspects of MMORPGs, including “formal experimentation, observational ethnography, and quantitative analysis of

economic markets or social networks.” One such example is the use of WoW to research the spread of viruses. As Eric T. Lofgren and Nina H. Fefferman reported (“The Untapped Potential of Virtual Game Worlds to Shed Light on Real World Epidemics,” The Lancet Infectious Diseases, vol. 7, no. 9, 2007, pp. 625-629), online game worlds might be a useful tool for studying the spread of human infectious diseases. These researchers from Tufts and Rutgers universities described how a programming error in WoW, caused a fullblown epidemic of a virulent, highly contagious disease among avatars.

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o further advancements in the research of virtual worlds, the NSF also plans a major effort with its Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation program (www.nsf.gov/news/ news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=108366): Virtual environments are important mechanisms to enhance discovery, learning and innovation. They permit collaboration among diverse populations spread across geographic distances and at different times. Scheduling and operation of distributed facilities and sensor arrays, data extraction and analysis, international, real-time com-

parisons of global climate models, and injecting discovery and innovative environments into learning and training all use virtual environments. CDI will develop new techniques for building and utilizing virtual environments, especially in the context of cyberinfrastructure.

If all this inspires visions of Neal Stephenson’s science fiction classic Snowcrash, it’s because we are inexorably approaching the 3D Internet portrayed in his Metaverse, which forms part of the Arpanet continuum. If current trends continue, by 2047 these MMORPGs could well be as much a part of our everyday reality as cell phones and e-mail are today. We will slip into them and never completely slip out. These new worlds, which will be just as radical as the Web was to the Arpanet, are not that far away. ■ Michael Macedonia is vice president of Forterra Systems and the former chief technology officer for the PEO STRI, the US Army’s simulation technology organization. Contact him at Macedonia@ computer.org. Editor: Michael van lent, [email protected]

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