Virtual Worlds Platforms

More notes from the Virtual World Conference, please pardon my mistakes, and although I am employed by Linden Lab my opinions are my own.  Click here for a list of speakers with correctly spelled names and titles.

Platform Technologies Panel.

Jerry Paffendorf, resident futurist at ESC. The aim of this panel is to look at a few different virtual world (VW) platforms.  what are policies for partnering, doing branded and sponsored content, etc.  There are lots of different virtual worlds, vws have a long history, its the element of sticking lots of people in a shared space.  Social networks may be included, but there's never anyone there when you go there, to myspace, it's ice cube trays of pretty pictures.

corey Bridges, cofounder of multiverse
joe miller of linden, vp of platform and tech development
Rick Giolito - President of Trilogy Studios
John Bates - Entropia

Corey - it's great to see virtual worlds as a medium get this kind of attention.  Multiverse was founded by a group of pre-ipo netscape guys, internet enabled platforms our whole career.  We're platform makers, that's what we do.  CEO Bill Turpin is a serial entrepreneur, first company acquired by netscape, came up with the idea of javascript.  I was early at Netflix, I like to jump into new spaces.  We're committed to virtual worlds as a medium. 

WOW has 8 million subscribers, it's a billion a year in recurring revenue for this one video game.

You can use virtual worlds for education, socializing, business collaboration... just like you can use any medium.  It can be used for multiple purposes.  We make our technology available for anyone, we'd like to anable the independent developers to get in.  Anyone can download our tech, build a world-class enterprise virtual world, with as many users as they want, they don't pay us a dime until they charge, and then we do a revenue share of 10%.

I've talked with people who don't want to do revenue sharing - yes, you can do an enterprise deal with us.

This is a blank canvas.  People say, "I just want a nightclub."  or - you can have an entire world where you create and set all the parameters.Make a standalone world or integrate.  Whatever the range of individual - use blender, google sketchup to create models - our servers are written in java, we base our technology on existing standards.

Trilogy - Let me show a couple slides.  A group of 20+ developers formerly of Electronic Arts, very experienced in games business.  Specialize in bringing game-play sensibilities to traditionally community and social interaction-based worlds.  Working on virtual worlds for Hollywod media companies.  We currently are building on There.  Client is Raj Modi (sp?) of MTV, and Michael Wilson at Makena, utilizing There technology to build a virtual Pimp My Ride and marrying it with the existing world.

I'm going to step back and be objective about tools and technologies.  When we looked at There we were blown away by the depth and complexity.  an economy with physics, ai, the ability to build things quickly.  I am used to working on stuff that takes 2-3 years.  We started in dec. and we're launching in April.

We look for: pipelines that are about ease of workflow and content  insertion, tools supported by teams of developers by discipline, pipleines that are "art centric" and allow for realtime debugging.  I've looked at all the technologies, we're having a terrific experince for There.  These pipelines are developed by engineers for engineers.  that's a nono in terms of getting stuff done quickly.  There's a lack of easy to use GUI's.  Pipelines that have more developer based testing and debugging.

We need toolsets designed for quick prototyping and rapid iteration, one-to-one workflow that minimizes recompiling, end-user based world creation for development teams and easy-to-use tools for consumers to create good content.  The result will be higher quality across the board.

This feels like pre-PS1 where everyone was saying "oh! 3d!" and it really wasn't,  but we will see more and better stuff, because of companies like MTV that want deep experiences, long-term, professional quality. My opinion - you want a good experience over time, so if the consumer has to wade through it all to find the nuggets of goodness, it won't be as good (IWH comments: you prefer AOL to the web, then?)

John Bates from Entropia.

This is user-crerated video coverage shot in fracts (sp?) which is a way to shoot in world.  Entropia - the basic point is you are a colonist going to Entropia, you are colonizing a new world, that's the storyline.  This video will give you an entree.

(cool video. ) "Humans are not safe here."  The animals make dinosaurs look tame.  opportunities to profit everywhere, which means suvival of the fittest.  Fights and wars.  There is an advanced base of robots here trying to kill us all.  "You can transfer real life currency to your real-life bank account".

10 Peds equal $1, it's backed by mindarc (sp?), we have a real cash economy, the platform has been built from day one to enable real commerce with real money. Last year we ran $360M USD through the universe.

A lot of the things you've heard are "coming" from other panelists already exist in entropia.  Galleries where you can buy real art.  Real commerce.  We're more locked down than Second Life, nothing's going to disappear.

MC: you can get a debit card and do direct bank transfers?

John: it's easy to put your money in and easy to get it back out, like a bank.  We had someone buy a virtual asteroid a year ago for $100,000 USD, he made his money back by renting out space on it, and he's been cash flow positive ever since.  When some folks opened a virtual store they sold $20,000 worth of real products within the first two hours, far better than their real-life store.

Joe from Second Life:  I'm going to atually talk about technology and platforms.  We are about community - we're about the people that live in it, not the technology we use to present it.  Everything you see in world is created by the people who come there, and it's a marketplace.

The notion of creating a permanent presence in the 3d internet deserves a deeper look.  Let's look at the value prop that's emerged from web to web 2.0 (democratization of collaboration or participation) to 3di (the modernization of co-creation).

Platforms have changed as we've made each of these transitions.  Initially purley an access platform, commerce.  access, find, share, participate, collaborate, now it is co-create.  True alternate currencies may emerge.

The relationships between the employee and the employer.  a focus on the endeavor, not the employee.  employees asked to work as entrepreneurs.

How has the SL plaform grown?  210 square miles equivalent. Over 520 unique items sold or traded per month, 15 million concurrent scripts.

Who's using SL?  43% female, avg. age 33, 60% of user base are from outside the US.  What do you do?  you make your own stuff, you make your own software.  People who come in take the time to personalize their avatar.

I'll give you a little info on the tech, we have clients that run on your desktop, it talks to a simulator process that talks to an asset database.  The client is opensource.  Want to fix that bug?  Please do.  The simulator grid today, all machines are hosted by LL and trusted, all the sims have to be updated at the same time. future: we'll support multiple copies of the same simulator, we'll deliver assets through a different method, we'l be oepn-sourcing the back end of the sims, we'l be using open protocols, we'll have multiple link grids.   It can't succeed as long as only one company controls the grid and we recognize that.  We're only just getting started.

Trilogy: With There techonology, the user-generated content is vetted.  So we can help them to create great content.(IWH thinks this positioning sounds paternalistic - admit that the "vetting" is for your business, your clients and your other customers, but not to "help" the creator, who likely doesn't appreciate it when their work does not pass muster.)

Entropia - we're interested in our experience being not part of your first life, quote me on this.  if content is king, then context is emporer. We want a hollywood style, let users create their own content within that beautiful context.

Joe: I'm not sure you can go halfway with a user-created world.  Our users have their own context.  companies want to speak to employee base, residents want to find entertainment.  IT would be inappropriate for us to define them, the tapestry is so broad.  The content finds its own audience whether or not it's created by someone who has made something they want to share with just one other person.  Over 100 companies exist that create this content for SL on a daily basis.

Giolito - There vets it, Second Life has decided not to do this. You can go either way, because there is content that will offend someof your consumers, so you have to be willing to bear that cross.

MC: which platform is the superset of all other possibilities?  Can you have a system that is capable of doing things in 3d, but can also do things in 2D?  The company that creates the superset, you can create that locked world inside if you want to.

Bridges: the opportunity here is bigger than user generated content, that's a buzz thing.  The opportunity is to open up this medium.  not just you go into this world and build interesting stuff.  There's going to be a bunch of metaverses... a Multiverse... it's not just indies making content and functionality.  companies like AOl, compuserv, nobody can compete.  It's so expensive to build what we made.  Netscape came along with the browser and changed the entire economy.  This enabled the indies to get inand start building interesting stuff.  the indies were Jeff Bezos.  Who couldn't afford to come here this year?  They are the Sergei and Larry ten years from now.  It's changing the economics so the indies can get in. That's what I think is the real opportunity here.

Audience:  Whyville staff, 3 of them are programmers, the rest invent process, not content.  The platforms you described are platforms to create content.  If you give people the tools they'll build something interesting.  When you give developers the opportunity to run amok, they do.  Virtual worlds are not real worlds, it's a new kind of design that's necessary.  Some people are just punting thiss responsibility off to the indies.  A major telecommunications company just hired a bunch of developers in India.  Here, you guys make it.  When will your tools make it easy.

Bridges.  We have over 9,000 teams using the multiverse technology creating a wide range.  a group of students made an underwater 3d mermaind game about reforesting the sea floor.  A gesture -based interface. They repidly developed a radical new idea in one month.  I've seen interesting stuff in second life.

Joe: you're right, the tools are not there, this is early days.  It's frustrating if you're interested in getting in and creating a place.  There are 8300 separate simulators running completely separate experiences.  We are at the silent movie stage of this industry, our seams are showing, we need to become much more accessible to the creative users that want to build.

audience: is this b2C, b2b, business to employee?  And context is the kingdom if content is king, you're creating kingdoms.
audience: you didn't talk about infrastructure and huge bandwidth that's needed.  Won't your competitor be google plus avatar?  MASN plus terrain?  All they need is to add the tools, you're all struggling to do it, it's hardest to build the infrastructure.

Joe: The challenges are not technical.  We're working to significanly scale SL to webscale, 2 orders of magnitude for concurrency is on the near horizon.  How do people get what they want out of the community they join?  The answers are not found in some of the existing large search players that are out there today.

Audience:  You mention and gloss over ecommerce.  I watch the SL blog, everyone complains my transaction disappeared, the object I bought is now gone.  6 months ago the US killed online poker.  How long until they kill you because I can move millions of dollars through an unregulated system?

Entropia: we have safeguards, we're a public company in Sweden, they are difficult to convince and have ruled that we aren't gambling.  We have made from day 1 this is a stable and a secure platform. For our users, we have banking licneses on auction right now.  Our focus has been stable, secure.

Giolito.  You're talking about companies that are trying to skirt existing laws, as opposed to there are no laws.  Nobody will come in and say these people are "playing poker".  The US does not want to inhibit revenue generation.  They may shut down poker parlors in SL.

Bridges: we have companies building casinos on our technology.  The government will regulate it, it's gonna suck.  This is small potatoes, but there is money changing hands, they will try to tax it.