OpenSim turns two
The 3D Application platform Open Simulator, or 'OpenSim' for short, turns two years old January 29th 2009.
The consensus is that this date 2007 OpenSim was 'born' when Darren Guard (aka MW) made his prototypical C# 3D world server publicly available.
You can help celebrate this joyous occasion in a number of ways;
- Read OpenSim History for some recap of the early days, and help continue documenting it.
- If you're in the position to run a region or grid, or already do, this is an excellent opportunity for you to further OpenSim and yourself by
- taking the opportunity to demo and publicize noteworthy services or content.
- set up what we call a 'hypergridded dmz storefront' - in effect, a public standalone region not connected to the main grid services - and be part of the hypergrid link-fest
- blog about this joyous occasion, draw attention to OpenSim, the second birthday, and tell your own OpenSim story.
- set some demo content up, demoing your grid and what's going on there
- establishing a media parcel url going to a live voice feed so that you could hold voice demonstrations, dj sessions and panel discussions on topics relevant to your grid.
- some avatar appearance/merchandise items that you are ready to give to the public domain
- Attend the party, dressed to kill, socialize, go hypergrid club hopping, generally helping out and enjoying what will still be referred to in the history books as 'back in the early days of the 3D web'!
This is a great opportunity to acquaint yourself with OpenSim and what it means to run a region, optionally hypergridded - and we hope to see lots of cool stuff happen and scare a bunch of ugly bugs out of their holes in the process!
Regardless,
If you're planning on doing anything for OpenSims second birthday, be sure to post it on
http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Second_Birthday
If there is no heading suitable for your project, just make one - it's a wiki!
Love,
Stefan Andersson aka 'lbsa71'
Tribal One: Picture Frame Web App
Now for the third video showing an example of the Tribal Server Web API and how you can create custom applications with it - in this case a simple Facebook Picture Frame for Tribal One.
This Video Clip shows the user 'entering' his own home region (which is created on demand as he does it) and clicks on a picture frame to set what pictures are shown; then adds another and finally re-arranges the frames .
Points of interest:
- User Data is fetched thru the "Community Provider", the simple interface that you need to implement to enable the region to pull data from your community or intranet.
- When the user clicks on the picture frame, the viewport action 'OnOwnerClick' is invoked, setting the hybrid web page to the 3D-aware 'choose facebook photo' application web page - in this case, an aspx page.
- The photo album data and photos is fetched from facebook.
- When the photo is clicked, the web application posts an "UpdateTexture" xml message to the Tribal Server, setting the photo frame texture of that object. The UpdateTexture command takes an object, surface and an web image url, which is internally converted to an SL texture.
- When the user pulls a frame from the inventory onto the wall, he's really pulling a command object, with a URL pointing to the web application that will create the picture frame for that exact user, with the configured image, frame type and OnOwnerClick/OnNotOwnerClick actions.
- The pictureframes are viewports, and therefore 'snap' to compatible surfaces; every 'viewport' has a set of 'ranges' on which objects of compatible types 'snap' to with an 'orientation' - so books could snap into a bookshelf, for example, and cutlery to the surface of a table. Even if it's not showed in the clip, the frames snap to all walls and flip thru corners. Quite neat!
Tribal One: Darren Arrives
So, time for clip two in the Tribal One concepts series;
This video clip shows how a user arrives on a public island (islands created on demand, as users crowd them) - bringing with him his "garden" which is a 'viewport' (a web-based parcel-on demand which exists only as long as the user is online) and how the 'viewport' content is restored and the terrain smoothed out to accomodate it.
Points of interest:
- The white line demarks the "garden" - anyhing placed within it is private and will move with the garden as it's taken down and re-created on next login. Anything placed outside will be stored together with the island, as that too is taken down and re-created.
- The garden terrain is smoothed with the surrounding terrain.
- The garden is a 3D "viewport", defined by a cube and a web url pointing to either an (read-only) xml document, or to a REST service that manages updates within that cube. In this case, we implemented a generic "Viewport Content Storage" that would serve and manage content nodes over the web.
Tribal One: Entering
I've promised a few people to show you what we've done with integrating web and 3D. It's a good example of what can be done with OpenSim as it's so modular.
This video clip shows how a facebook user checks a friend out, and decides to enter Tribal One.
Points of interest:
- The 'Friends' list on the facebook app page shows "join" and/or "visit" depending on whether that friend is online in the world. "join" places your avatar next to your friend. "visit" lets you visit that friends on-demand home region.
- When the user presses "Enter Tribal Net" a client is launched, and the user is seamlessly logged-thru into Tribal Net.
- The avatar information is taken from Facebook.
- The left and top panel is web content - the left panel is the web hybrid mini-browser, initially contains Tribal One-aware facebook applications and your facebook web profile/friends and photos.
- The 'Gazebo' next to the avatar is content placed on it's 'garden', a parcel-on-demand that only exists while the user is in-world.
- When an island is full of "gardens", another island is created "on demand".
On Browsers
Recently, there's been an "Cambrian Explosion" of various takes on 3D social world user interfaces.
UgoTrade posted an excellent interview with Avi Bar-Zeev of Microsoft, and the post touches on a number of outstanding issues with regards to the metaverse.
When Darren and I started working on OpenSim, we quickly found out that we had a shared vision of where we wanted the 'metaverse' to go;
- It should be about applications, where social networking would be one. The metaverse will never bloom if it never offers any value beyond 'hanging out'.
- There will be a period of experimentation. For this there will be a need for an open, modularized and available codebase for creative people to use in their prototyping.
- This platform should be as mainstream as currently possible, even over technical finesse. Darren chose .NET and the SL protocol, as these are available technologies with large user bases.
- People will go thru with an installation if the percieved value outweighs the install. So, if you do lightweight value, you need lightweight install.
All this has to do with adoption; you want to make the server side as simple to set up as possible, the client side so easy to deploy and install as possible; the content production tools as available and simple as possible - but still retain enough flexibility so that people can tailor it to create services with percieved value.
We did a concept on this a year ago, called "Tribal One" - but we never published it, as the technology simply wasn't mature enough. Now, a year later, OpenSim is much stabler, and stuff like Adams Xenki looks promising.
I would suppose that we will continue to see hybrids and tests, tailored for specific usage cases, until the 'rock solid' cases fall into place - the ones people find actually useful - then we can start merging those solutions.
I have no problems seeing a world where you have a plugin-based app for viewing scenes anonymously, then switch to a full-featured client for collaborative content authoring, then switch to something a little lighter for swift shopping or a quick virtual conference call - and in between, touching on a couple of scenes embedded in applications.
In the UgoTrade blog, I was quoted asking
"what about the user experience in a new browser hosted viewer? How should the user ‘be’ in several places at the same time, the way he is on a web site? How would you have a shared-space continuum like SL operate over several ‘pages’?"
This question shows how I think we all need to think: the percieved application value first, the user experience second, the technical solution last.
Thus, one answer to my question is "Sometimes, you don't".
Using XBAP to embed the Second Life(tm) browser in a web page
Adam Frisby just posted about his XBAP based embedded browser; an excellent idea - so after a bit of Darrens late-night hacking we just had to share this screenshot with you.
The setup is mostly the same; XBAP on Firefox/IE, the difference being we launch and embed the Second Life(tm) viewer that is already installed on the system (if there is none, you get an option to download and install the latest)
This is using our non-published 'Tribal One' concept client code (embedding the viewer as a facebook application - hey Vivaty!) so with Tribal Server, you just seamlessly log thru from the website into the world.
(I guess this is very close to what Pelican Crossing are doing with inDuality - with the difference that uses the installed browser.)
I’m in ur region, controlling ur assets
One main thing to remember is that, as long as things go over UDP, the region has to be trusted.
As it stands today, you have to trust the region you're currently on to
- manage your inventory.
- create the map you see in the client
- fill in avatar profile information
- decide when and where to teleport you.
You ok with that?