Virtual Worlds

You are in a cave... in front of you is a small table with a lantern... to your right, you see two coins on the cave floor. "Go North." This is what virtual reality was like in the seventies. Adventure games gave us the world in lines of text. Our imaginations filled in the pictures. The mother of this genre of games was called "Adventure" and it spawned games such as "Zork" for the PC and "MUDs" (Multi-User Dungeons) online.

Of course, we have experienced virtual worlds in one form or another since the beginning of human history. Stories told around camp fires provoked rich worlds of gods and demons that echo down through the centuries. When writing was invented, we passed our stories through books. However; worlds created in books are imaginary worlds, not virtual worlds. In an imaginary world you, or the world's author, is in control. If it's your fantasy you can do what you want. If it's a book or a movie, you, the reader or viewer, are just along for the ride. But in a virtual world you aren't in control . The world goes about it's business whether you're there or not. Just like the real world. In fact, virtual worlds are the same as real worlds. They differ only in the technology that renders them. Since current technology can't render a world anywhere near as realistic as the world we live in, people who don't regularly visit virtual worlds see them as something fake. As though they were a movie shown in three dimensions instead of the usual two. Of course, a 3D movie wouldn't be a bad idea. When I say 3D, I don't mean what is currently called a 3D movie. You know, that red and blue tinted stuff that tricks the eye into a perception of depth. I'm talking about an environment where you could move your perception, or your virtual self, around inside the movie. Instead of being stuck out in the audience watching the screen, you could walk around in the movie and maybe have to dodge that speeding car. We probably will have true 3D movies one day but we haven't seen any yet. I think this would be a good direction for machinima to take. Instead of mimicking 2D movie making, machinima developers could go in directions that traditional filmmakers can't go.

The major difference between virtual reality and all media that has come before is interaction. And that is exactly what a virtual world shares with a real one. We act on the world and the world reacts, and vice versa usually. We move in three spacial dimensions and along a forth dimension that we consider to be time. We interact with objects and other people in the environment. This is the same thing a character in a virtual 3D world experiences. However; since 3D characters aren't sentient, we don't usually make these comparisons. An avatar is a representation of a real person in a 3D world and through the avatar, we see the virtual world as a real place. It may not seem real because we're viewing the world through a tiny window, the pixel resolution in no way matches that of the real world, and the only things we can feel is a keyboard and a mouse. But, even with such a small amount of sensual input, our minds fill in the blanks. We get involved in the virtual world and forget that we are sitting in a chair looking at a computer screen. This phenomenon is called immersion.

One important science fiction story of the late seventies that introduced us to virtual worlds was "True Names". In this story Vernor Vinge plunges us into a totally immersive world of witches and warlocks that is a metaphor for the real world of data processing in the near future. The protagonists were a group of hackers who used there talents to frustrate "the man", which was big business and an oppressive government. Back in the seventies hackers were the good guys. That was before a few hacker pretenders learned how steal credit card numbers and gave them all a bad name. In Vinge's story these hackers were called "vandals". They used and interface to the net that was called an "Other World gate" or a "portal". This portal used EEG get signals from the brain and somehow fed data back to the senses. Vinge didn't give us enough info to actually build a portal but with one the immersion was complete. Armed with portals, the vandals wreaked havoc on the datanets. The complete text of "True Names" can be found here.

Two other books that I think were very influential in forming our present day concepts of virtual worlds are "Neuromancer" and "Snow Crash". "Neuromancer" was William Gibson's first novel in which he invented the term "cyberspace" to describe the world's dataspaces represented with a 3D interface. He didn't describe that world in much detail but called it a "consensual hallucination" and let our imaginations fill in the rest. On the other hand, Neal Stephenson in "Snow Crash" did give us detailed view of what his envisioned 3D virtual world looked like. In Stephenson's world all business, communication, and entertainment was transacted through a 3D virtual environment called the "Metaverse". This world was a solid black globe with a circumference of 65,536 kilometers. While most of this vast virtual space is unoccupied, a central spot along the circumference called "The Street" was abuzz with activity 24 hours a day. Though neither Vinge's, Gibson's, or Stephenson's vision accurately predicts the network we have today, I think that today's network builders were inspired by those visions.

There's lots of stuff happening in virtual worlds today. Much of it is in games known as MMORPGs or Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing Games. These games create a persistent virtual world where the players assume an in-game identity and live in that world as that character. This in-game representative is known as an "avatar". The most popular of these games today is World of Warcraft, often called WoW. In this game users can build a character from one of several different character types, such as Warrior, Hunter, Priest, etc.. As the player plays, he gains experience levels and is presented with increasingly difficult tasks and awarded greater powers and privileges. There are many MMORPGs out there. Games of many different themes but with one thing in common, they are all tightly controlled and highly scripted environments.

There are some environments that are not scripted, and cannot be called games, like "Second Life". This is an online user community that is presented to us as an open pallet for us to do with it as we please. The users, or as Linden Lab, the developers of Second Life, refer to as "residents", create the content that is the Second Life world. A lot of the content is boring, just like the real world, and much of it is created for commercial purposes. Money raised in the virtual world can be converted into real money and many of the Second Life residents enter SL just to make money. However; just like in the real world, it takes a lot of effort to make money in SL and many residents who do make money just make enough to support their in-world spending habits.

I think, the significant thing about SL is that it's real. The adventures you may find yourself in are interactions with real people. The virtual businesses you patronize are just like the coffee shop down the street or the boutique in the mall. I hear people comparing SL and WOW claiming that the content in SL is much less interesting, the world is sparsely populated, and that there is very little to do. True true true, but SL is also free. You can wander around SL like a virtual homeless person with a generic body and generic clothes. Other SL residents will give you free stuff and you can even earn money by "camping". SL businesses will pay you to sit around their site for hours at a time to make the venue look more popular. The pay for this is about 4 cents an hour so it's not going to pay your broadband bill. If you get tired of living like this you might want to customize your avatar's looks, invest some real money into buying someplace to live, some decent clothes and maybe even some sex organs.

Linden Lab makes it's money by leasing virtual real estate to residents. The residents can in turn create homes and businesses as they see fit. This is a somewhat unique business model for a virtual world. Almost all the others charge a monthly fee for access. A scheme similar to the SL model could be used to propagate virtual world environments throughout the Internet. Entrepreneurs running virtual world venues would offers goods and services to users via a common virtual world client. Linden Lab has released it's client as open source. Of course, if anyone used this code to develop an application they could only use it on Second Life. What needs to happen is for a client AND a server to be put into the public domain. What is needed is a universal client/server architecture. The state of virtual worlds today is that every application has both a unique client and a server. I believe this is the main reason we don't have a 3D infrastructure on the Internet today. Imagine what the Web would be like if you had to have a different browser for each web site you wanted to visit. Non-existent, that's what it'd be like!

The concept of Virtual Reality has been around for several decades but not until the recent popularity of 3D computer gaming has the power been available to render a virtual environment on the desktop. The operative idea in virtual reality or virtual worlds is virtuality. Something that seems to be real but isn't. The idea of virtuality has been in computer architecture for some time in the form of virtual memory and of a virtual machine. Virtual memory is a technique by which a computer program can address more memory than is physically present in the machine. The data in the non-existent memory is actually on the hard disk and is dynamically swapped into place as needed. A virtual machine is an environment where a program or an operating system known as a guest executes instructions as though it were running on hardware but may in fact be emulated in software. A program called a hypervisor which is running on the hardware examines each instruction of the guest program and determines if it should be executed by the hardware or emulated. Both virtual memory and virtual machines serve to isolate a computer program's operation from reality.

Computer programs can potentially contain a lot of errors. Errors in coding, errors in logic, and even errors in design plague computer programs. Operating Systems are also computer programs and have the same types of problems. When these problems manifest themselves during operation a program can stop and even take out the OS thats running it. This affects other programs and users that may be running on that same machine and can even affect other users on a network.

Running applications in a virtual environment can isolate a computer facility from the affects of a problem program. If a program running in a virtual environment fails it has no affect on adjacent environments. More and more data centers are running virtual environments to protect users from application ups and downs. This concept is called virtualization. Disk storage is also virtualized, that is, the logical storage that you use is separated from the physical hard disks in the data center. The physical storage could be some sort of RAID device with failover so that the data is automatically recovered in the event of a failure. These techniques give the user a protected, persistent, virtual environment for running all types of applications. Those applications include, of course, 3D virtual worlds.

As we move into the future more and more of our computer infrastructure will be virtualized. Even in our homes. We will use virtual environments in our homes for the same reasons businesses will use them, reliability, security, and persistence. The idea of turning our computers off will be as foreign to us as that of throwing our home's master circuit breaker when we go out to dinner. The big three OSes that we use, Windows, Mac, and Linux, like to be restarted from time to time for housekeeping but thats not a problem because they'll be virtualized from the Operating System's point of view it's running directly on the hardware but in fact it's running in the virtual infrastructure. It also won't matter what OS we're running. We can run the OS that best fits the application or our whim. The virtual infrastructure, however, will probably be running some open source hypervisor. Many of the applications that will run in that infrastructure will be our virtual worlds.

But why do we need a 3D virtual world when our 2D applications, such as the Web, serve us so well? And what do we need avatars moving in 3D settings for, when moving a mouse cursor on a 2D plane is much more efficient? Well, we don't need avatars and 3D settings for every 3D application. Just as a bar graph can show us more information in three dimensions than in two, I believe that adding another dimension to many of our flat application interfaces will add much more utility. For example, Web browsers use Tabs to create multiple browser sessions without opening multiple windows. As confusing as this sounds, it's actually quite useful. You can page back and forward in each session without having the confusion of keeping track of several windows. With a 3D interface you could use an "in" and "out" dimension instead of Tabs, I think, it would be more intuitive. Even if there are no apparent benefits to rendering a 2D application in three dimensions, they look better. Take a look at the Youtube link below showing Vista's new Aero interface and Linux's Beryl.

In 1991, David Gelernter wrote a book entitled "Mirror Worlds". This book spoke of a time in the near future when much of the complexity of our modern would be mediated through 3D virtual environments. He called these environments"Mirror Worlds". The main components in these worlds are tiny programs that analyze the small chunks of data that permeate our information environment, convert them into larger chunks, and pass them on to other programs. Eventually these chunks are big enough and important enough to have meaning in our lives and are presented to us in a 3D virtual environment. For example, suppose you are interested in how your local tax dollars are being spent. You mosey your avatar over to your local City Hall Web site. Of course, it's not a "Web" site per se because mirror worlds have nothing to do with the application we call "The Web", but the Internet connection we are using is the same and the addressing mechanism we use to get there is the same. What we experience through our avatar is a seamless transition from what we were doing before, possibly having coffee with a friend in a virtual Venice, to the relatively boring corridors of City Hall. What you see in Virtual City Hall is dollar sign icons of varying sizes hovering above icons representing schools, roads, sewage works, public data infrastructure, etc.. Floating next to the dollar signs are captions showing the actual amounts and other pertinent textual information. By strolling through different corridors you can get more or less detail in the areas that interest you. This a generic environment that you're strolling through is designed for the majority of users that are likely to visit City Hall, you may be more interested in what's going on in that big hole they've dug right outside your front door. For that, you send in your own agents. Not your own programs, nobody is going to let you run your software on their machines, even if it's virtualized. You will be able to select from a laundry list of clean, green, low impact programs that are designed to collect and process low level information. This medium level stuff is sent back to you for further processing on your own servers and presentation in your own virtual environment. If you don't know how to put all these pieces together, I'm sure you'll be able to find someone who will do it for you for a small fee.

Electronic sensors are getting less and less expensive. As sensors get cheaper we are more likely to gather more data, but we won't gather that data if we have no way of turning it into information that is important to us and that can be used to enhance our lives. For instance, I would really love to have a stream of packets streaming from my home thermostat telling me when my furnace/air conditioner was turning on or off. But the expense and effort required to build an infrastructure to capture that information would be more than I care to invest. And what would the resulting data look like? A list of log entries with timestamps followed by the word "on" or "off". And what could I do with this information? Batch it up daily and look at it in a spreadsheet? No, I would have had to write software that would somehow present this information to me in some sort of intuitive form. In other words, this application ain't gonna happen!
However; if I already had a 3D environment that I regularly visited, adding another data flow would be a minor exercise. I would probably buy a new thermostat that sends XML packets containing the furnace on/off state, the detected room temperature, and the desired room temperature, down the thermostat wire to the furnace. Such a thermostat would probably cost a little more than a "dumb" one. I'd then have to put a tap between my furnace and one of my servers to collect that data. If I didn't know anything about furnaces and/or servers, I'd probably spend a little more money and get a thermostat that will put these packets on my home wi-fi network with no wiring required. I'd then go looking for a freeware 3d widget that would show me some meaningful interpretation of that furnace data. Months later, while strolling through my virtual utility room, I might hit the history button on that virtual furnace widget and notice some interesting things, like, how much energy (money) I spend heating or cooling the house when nobody is home. I also might notice that I'm spending $15 a month cooling the house between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. when I'm in bed. Under a blanket! I might find that this little luxury only costs $2, in which case it's well worth it because I love being warm and snug in a cool room. The fact is, without a Mirror World, I just don't know. Virtual environments will make the millions of pieces of data, that are now incomprehensible, not just comprehensible, but useful.

The Mirror World will not be the result of a big software project. The individual software agents that collect the data are only as complex as are needed to collect the data and post it to a type of software "bulletin board". Any agent with the proper authorization can pluck a copy of the data off the board. Not much complexity needed for that either. In fact, the most complex program in a Mirror World is the part that presents the 3D virtual world to the user. Much as it is with today's 3D game technology. The hardware and software platforms that Mirror Worlds will be built on need not be compatible between clients, agents, and servers, as long as standard message formats and protocols are selected.

Gelernter contends that Mirror Worlds will enable us to make sense of the deluge of data that surrounds us by collecting that data in small chunks and compiling, analyzing, and presenting it in a manner that will us to better control our real world. These virtual worlds will give us what Gerlernter refers to as topsight, or seeing the whole. By having the values and relationships of numbers reflected in the shape and movements of a 3D widget, we will enlist the enormous computing machinery of our right brain to give us an instinctive, intuitive feel for the data. Information displayed as text or numbers can be easily misunderstood with key items missed, thereby rendering it effectively invisible. With an effective Mirror World, data that is theoretically public, such as the statistics that document our governments performance, is actually public. David Gelernter wrote his book in 1991 and we haven't seen these worlds yet. I think what has been missing is a solid 3D architecture that can support the Mirror World environment. This architecture is being built today with the games and 3D worlds that are coming on line. Mirror Worlds may be just around the corner.

I believe that Virtual Worlds will soon be the primary interface to our computers and, through those computers, our interface to the technological world. But even that is only the beginning. The latest research in nanotechnology is blurring the lines between biological molecules and electronic circuits. I'm sure that in the far future that distinction will be non-existent. At the atomic level all atoms are peers.
When this bridge between our computers and our senses is built virtual reality will be completely immersive and the impact of virtual worlds on our lives will be profound. It is likely that virtual worlds will become more important in our lives than the real one. As long as we are physically carrying these bodies around with us and subject to their needs of food, rest, and exercise we aren't likely to be confused about which is real and which is virtual, but on a philosophical level things might not be so clear. Quantum physicists are already asking the same questions that philosophers have been asking for generations, "Is the world real?". When philosophers asked that question it was just a thought experiment but when physicists ask it they are desperately trying to understand experimental data that suggests that it isn't.

As I write this, many many themes suggest themselves that this lens can't even begin to address. But one thing is clear, virtual worlds will be a big part of our future.