3D Virtual Worlds and the Metaverse:

Current Status and Future Possibilities | #SecondLife

 

On December 1st, 2011 there arrived in my email quite astounding news from Dr. Dionisio and Dr. Gilbert that the Association for Computing Machinery had not only accepted our research paper 3D Virtual Worlds and the Metaverse: Current Status and Future Possibilities for publication in their next  journal, but that the reviewers had given the best praise of the paper that the editors had ever seen. As I read through the critiques from each reviewer, I was humbled by their responses.

 

As Dr. Gilbert succinctly put it:

 

After my recent return from the European Summit of the Immersive Education Initiative (I'm still jet lagged as you can see from the early hour I'm writing this!), Dondi sent me the news that ACM Computing Surveys had accepted our paper with relatively minor revisions.  Even more significantly, the impressions of the editors and individual reviewers of the paper were outstanding with all the reviewers suggesting that the work be considered for a best paper award, the main reviewer viewing the work as a  "seminal" contribution to the field, and the Associate Editor calling the first round reviews the best he's ever seen! 

 

What I've also learned is that ACM Computing Surveys is one of the most cited and respected journals in the field of computer science (I had no idea that Dondi had decided to reach so high in submitting the paper). To get accepted into this journal, especially with such high praise, is a great honor and once the article is published our work will be widely read and could have a real impact on the field.  After we submit the revisions in the next few weeks you can crank up all your social media expertise and begin to distribute the article as "in press." 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s definitely an honor, and quite humbling to receive that caliber of review from not one but four independent sources across the industry. My understanding of the process was that we should have expected multiple rounds of revisions before being considered for publication, so having it accepted immediately after the first round of peer review is astounding.

 

In the words of the Associate Editor at ACM:

 

These actually are the most positive first-round reviews of a journal article I have seen. If you revise this and include a document that explains how you did, and did not, address comments, I will not need to send this out for further review if it looks satisfactory to me.

 

Let’s put aside the banner waving for a moment, because despite how groundbreaking this all is, it is only a prelude to a bigger picture concerning the Metaverse as I usually provide in articles like this.

 

The Down Low

 

There is a lot of subject matter covered in the paper for ACM Journal, but the title says it all: Current Status and Future Possibilities.

 

Essentially, what we wrote was a comprehensive survey paper looking into the various areas of virtual environments, or immersive environments as some refer to it, and addressed the fundamental challenges and technologies that can further the progress. There is also discussion in the paper concerning what areas are deficient and in need of further research initiative in hopes that those areas will be focused on by some of the countless people reading and citing the paper.

 

Literary influences that led up to the current state of affairs are also outlined, in order to give a proper history of the subject while framing the further understandings as the paper continued on. As one reviewer put it, we presented the most comprehensive paper on the subject that we could short of writing an entire book about the subject.

 

As the message from Dr. Gilbert suggests, I will be making the entire paper available as a PDF when it is sent off to ACM for publication. While there are a lot of topics covered in the paper,  I’ll only be addressing one of them here in this blog.

 

The Take-Away

 

One of the biggest things that can be taken from the paper concerning the future direction of the Metaverse (in my opinion) is the implicit understanding that centralized networking is our Achilles Heel. It always has been, even before we really got into the hardcore 3D Immersive Environments like we see today. All the way back to Lessons from Habitat in 1991, Bandwidth being a scarce resource has always been a concern in something like this, and centralized networking was pegged as a culprit.

 

Yes, we can alleviate that stress by offloading across a datacenter, or buying more powerful servers. But the limitation is still there, and all we end up doing in the process is kicking the can down the road instead of actually trying to solve the problem at the root.

 

Whatever the future holds for immersive environments, it is likely that decentralized networking will be a major part of it in stark contrast to our massive datacenters today and centralized bandwidth.

 

To Boldly Go…

 

There is also a hint toward the data itself, in that the distribution of that data would likely not be the same as how we are accomplishing this task today. I’d like to say that in order for a powerful Metaverse to really evolve, the data has to be agnostic. The best way to understand this is to imagine the replicators in Star Trek and how they work.

 

When the captain walks up to a replicator and says “Tea. Earl Gray. Hot.” the replicator isn’t looking for a cup of tea in its inventory. Nowhere on the ship is there a room with thousands of cups of hot tea on a shelf waiting to be beamed to the replicator. Essentially, there is a holding tank of sorts on the ship which contains the raw molecular “soup” of materials, and the replicators are simply using a digital recipe to pull the components and “replicate” that molecular recipe.

 

 

A replicator works almost like magic. Just like the plot to every Star Trek series.

 

 

If we apply this understanding to purely digital files, the same process works. Let’s say that the replicator is a software program on your computer whose sole purpose is to reconstruct digital files based on digital fingerprints (keys) that you give it. Since we’re already talking about a decentralized network as our future, the “holding tank” full of agnostic data to be used for those reconstructions of files should be spread across every user of the network.

 

Why not? We all have a cache folder sitting on our computers from virtual environments and web browsers. What if that cache folder was simply agnostic data and available to the entire network of users in a P2P manner?

 

First off, it would mean that our cache’s are meaningless to human interpretation. Completely random data not representing anything in particular until we give it the fingerprint to reconstruct the file we need. Secondly, it would mean that the data becomes multi-use data.

 

That last point is very important. It means that 1GB of multi-use data represents or contains any file that is 1GB or less. We can say that Photoshop CS5 is under 1GB for the installer, correct? So that multi-use data would contain Photoshop CS5, and anything else that is 1GB or under. The key, so to speak, is that while such a system just about invalidates the premise of current copyright law, making it impossible to prosecute somebody using such a system, it brings up something even more interesting.

 

11 Herbs and Spices

 

It’s not the data that is really copyrightable, but the means by which such data can be arranged in a unique configuration as a representation of a work. What is really copyrightable happens to be the unique fingerprints which tell the system how to reconfigure multi-use data for a specific file output that is no longer multi-use, or in layman terms – it’s the digital recipe.

 

Another interesting side effect to multi-use data is that you’re not storing a 1:1 representation of anything. Since the data is multi-use, that means (for the most part) that you don’t need the storage equivalent for a copy of every single file in the system. All you really need at the very least is enough agnostic data available in order to cover the largest file on the network.

 

If the largest file you have on the network is about 50GB (and I’m being very generous here), then on a multi-use data system, you would need no more than 50GB of data total for everything you ever store into that network. That’s the bare minimum. Yes, at that level it would take longer to reconstruct the data, but it would still work. the more agnostic data you have in storage, the faster that reconstruction goes. Think of it like over unity…

 

Needless to say that a multi-use data structure in combination with decentralized networking would mean that, in example, the entirety of the Second Life asset servers could be housed in about 100 terabytes or less (for redundancy), and the reliability of that system would mean that the odds of anything in your inventory ever disappearing would be so close to nil as to make no odds.

 

And that, is how you solve the root of a problem instead of addressing only the symptoms.

 

 

 

An Island Unto Themselves

#Marketing in the Prosumer Culture

For many of you, this post will seem a bit dull, but the implications from it are far reaching and profound. I'd like to state up front that this sort of topic is my forte' and I regularly advise on this to what often seems like an entirely baffled room full of executives (not to mention lawyers who are ready to grab pitchforks and torches) - but as I've often said in those situations: Bare with me, because what I'm about to say is probably the most important thing you could hear on the matter.


We live in a digital culture of sharing and mashup, where 1's and 0's are interchangeable and cheap. It doesn't matter to the prosumer culture whether those ones and zeros are configured in a manner that yields a photo, mp3 or streaming video - what matters is the sharing of ideas and media that pertain to their topic of interest at that moment.

On the subject matter, the best advice I can give stems from what I like to refer to as the Gospel of Virtual Environments, but for most you would know it as Lessons Learned From Lucasfilm's Habitat. Written by Chip Morningstar and F. Randal Farmer in 1991, this synopsis addressed the lessons they learned from running a massive multi-user virtual environment in the late 1980's on the Commodore system known as Habitat, and while the graphics were definitely paltry by today's standards, the lessons are just as important today as they ever were - because they address the underlying nature of technology as well as the attitudes of people that use those types of systems.


One of the most important lessons from that synopsis was simply:

Work within the system

And while this lesson is open to interpretation, the story that accompanied it really set the stage for understanding how not to address prosumers in a digital age if your goal is to protect IP, or system type mechanics/rules.

I won't go into the entire story here (it’s available at the end of the post as a link for reading), but I will address the fundamental understandings that came out it, and how they still apply today in the digital world context.

Essentially what it boils down to is this:

If you are a company with a brand and IP to protect, you have more options today in order to enforce it than you did twenty years ago utilizing traditional methods. The landscape has changed quite a bit, and the 1's and 0's of today are agnostic, while the mentality of the prosumers is that of simply sharing for the sake of conversation or furtherance of devotion to a particular brand or image. In modern context, this still holds true on a much wider basis than it did twenty years ago, and so our defacto arsenal of "cease and desist" and litigation often times is met with an outstanding backlash in the wider sphere of digital culture, causing more damage and loss than had the entity utilized the "Work within the system" lesson.

No better example of this sort of backlash (humorously named the Streisand Effect) can be given than that of the RIAA and MPAA with many years of fighting and litigation efforts to curb or eliminate the acts of piracy among Peer2Peer networks. It is now over ten years later and such an approach has not only cost those entities more than it's worth to enforce, but has had the opposite effect to curbing the "violations" worldwide - eliminating single file P2P systems like Napster, Limewire, etc but giving rise to massive file collection P2P systems like BitTorrent where no longer single files are shared but large quantities of files as a single "set".

Where the RIAA wanted to stop music piracy by shutting down places like Napster which offered single tracks per download, they ended up fostering a worldwide backlash that is BitTorrent where finding a single track is unlikely versus searching for the entire discography of the artist for download. Clearly, this is throwing gasoline on the fire and acting surprised that the fire did not go out.

The interesting thing about all of this is simply the fact that digital culture and mashup mentality often do a much better job at proliferation of ideas and content than even multi-million dollar marketing campaigns, creating new content from multiple sources that transcend the originals – beneficial to multiple entities all at the same time, as we see in the Gwen Stefani vs Britney Spears music mashup below titled “Tick-Toxic”.

Whatcha’ waiting, whatcha waiting, whatcha waiting for? Prosumers aren’t as Toxic as you think.

Working within the system entails an unorthodox methodology, in that the proper approach to "infringement" no longer is a black or white scenario, but instead many shades of grey for the negative approaches (and in methods that offer mutual gain, 16.7 million colors of awesome) - often entirely dependent on the situational context. While cease and desist options and litigation are still a part of that arsenal of enforcement, it no longer constitutes the cut and dry option, and in fact should be the absolute last option to be enacted - instead of the first or only.

When you find yourself looking to protect IP or a brand, the first question that should be asked is no longer "How do we stop this infringement?" but instead should be "How do we monetize this situation, foster its growth and make it work for our own benefit?" - aka: Working within the system.

Working within the system entails a willingness to work with the people involved in that system on the same grounds and foundation that those people utilize within that particular system, whether that be business or individuals (prosumers) in order to foster a mutually beneficial situation while limiting the constraints that would cause a backlash and do widespread harm. Think of it like trying to disarm a nuclear weapon - you wouldn't go in and bash it with a sledgehammer for fear that you could cause a massive explosion. Instead you handle it delicately and with foresight for the bigger picture. Cease and Desist (litigation) is your sledgehammer, and should only be used as a last resort.

Instead we should first think about ways to work within the system at hand, for our own benefit (because we are still self-interested as companies) but also in a way that addresses the underlying and fundamental need of the prosumer mentality to spread and share IP, Brands and derivatives of those properties.

One of those many shades of grey happens to be simply allowing the proliferation of the IP or brand to continue while adding only monetization or supplemental marketing to the situation. This can be seen today in the general approach by Youtube where music in the user created videos is now more likely to come with a link saying who the artist is, the name of the song, and a direct link to purchase that music. This, in turn, offers a solution to working within the system and IP infringement in that the question answered was no longer "How do we stop this infringement?" and instead "How do we utilize this infringement to our own and their benefit?".

In the case of Youtube, however, while the approach is sound there is still no method to actually handle the mashup and derivative offerings that spawn in abundance from this culture – as we can see from the Tick Toxic video where both Tick Tock from Gwen Stefani and Toxic from Britney Spears is put together for a new take on two songs, Youtube only recognizes the Gwen Stefani part as the music to tag and offer for purchase (catching only half of the potential).

In the long run, prosumer integration of your IP or brand in derivatives or outright is the best form of free marketing for your brand or IP that you could ever hope for. You would never think to shoot down free marketing on your behalf, especially when things like videos on Youtube have this wonderful habit of "going viral" wherein hundreds of thousands if not millions of people share and view those videos, giving the brand or IP massive amounts of free exposure. The trick to all of this is to look at it from a marketing perspective and not a legal perspective.

Prosumer culture is the predominant force in the digital age, and we are best served by allowing that system of understanding to proliferate with little or no negative intervention. While this flies in the face of the crack legal team on call at most companies who want nothing more than to fight the good fight, the benefits far outweigh the costs in the long run - and only serve to offer additional revenue models, and widespread marketing and goodwill among this global system if approached properly with complete understanding.

What we have today are companies that essentially shoot first, and ask questions later (if they bother asking at all) with their DMCAs, Cease and Desists and litigation. This is detrimental on the whole because of the prior notion of the Streisand Effect, moreso because it fosters an "island unto yourself" mentality, cutting you off from the system in ways that would otherwise be beneficial on a massive scale, turning instead to a methodology that actually harms you and your brand/IP.

In order to succeed in the digital age, we must understand that we are not an island unto ourselves. This is true not only in social media of all types, but in the greater scope of the digital culture we rely on today. The rules of engagement here are different than we were taught traditionally, and we need to be willing to think creatively and innovate if we want to truly excel. While cease and desist, as well as possibility of litigation still remains, we need to keep our perspectives in check, resorting to that route only when all other possibilities are exhausted and explored in context.

Remember: Prosumers aren’t as Toxic as you think they are. They could very well be the fountain of youth to invigorate your brand and IP on a global scale.


Further Reading
Lessons Learned From Lucasfilm's Habitat: http://bit.ly/oPbUdr
The Streisand Effect (Wikipedia): http://bit.ly/r5FY8L
Prosumer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosumer#Producer_and_consumer

Dcentralized Content Distribution Network

What would happen if a single web server were suddenly inundated with an abnormally high amount of bandwidth, such that the cost of serving the content far outweighed the acceptable cost per user ratio intended by the publisher? This is known as the "slashdot" effect and can be applied to a number of scenarios across the digital publishing realm.

What inevitably happens is that, a small publisher of content creates a particular amount of media (be it an article, graphic, executable application, etc) that somehow finds massive appeal and favor among millions of people around the world. This in turn opens a virtual floodgate of people trying to access the content online, and thus the servers (of which the publisher is more than likely leasing) are collectively bombarded with content requests.

For a fortified server, such is usually not a problem as bandwidth is appropriated accordingly. But for low bandwidth servers (or say, publishers who cannot afford large bandwidth) we see either that the website in question is obliterated under the weight of the traffic, or that the host charges massive overages to the publisher - of which the publisher many times cannot afford.

Decentralized Content Distribution in this scenario can easily alleviate the major cause of this, while using very little of the network resources individually, but overall serving the content as though it were from a high speed server. Undeniably, 10k/sec from a large amount of servers adds up in the end just as pennies can add up in the large scale of things.

So say your server was being requested of 10k/sec. On your access per month, this amounts to very little and is inconsequential. But now multiply that by 200 servers, and you see that the content can be served at around 2000k/sec or higher (depending on the actual Kb/sec each server is appropriating). So, like a vest of Kevlar, when the bullet (the millions of requests) hit the main server, the Decentralized Network intercepts the bullet and spreads the traffic across a large area in small doses.

For websites, this seems to work amazingly well and, in fact, some websites currently handle their traffic this way (with 25 million users even though the main server remains low on bandwidth usage). The idea here is that I got to thinking about how this could be used in order to solve an age old problem concerning online Virtual Reality.

In one of the earliest written synopsis for an online virtual community (Habitat) Morningstar and Farmer pointed out that in order for a wide scale virtual environment to continually grow the servers of the content could not be centralized. Decentralization was key to the continued advancement and growth of virtual environments. I would like to believe also that this pertains to the "environment server" as well as the content server (many times these two are seperate), though I am currently focusing on a solution for the content end (with the environment server being a consideration well into the future).

When I muse of this, what I am thinking is that while current systems can easily handle tens of thousands of simultaneous users, the price per user begins to see an exponential increase in cost proportional to the amount of users. In essence, we see an exponential increase when the system is centralized.

Taking this into account, even the best planned and programmed system will begin to see an ultimate limit as to how many users can co-exist per centralized server before the costs of that system become prohibitive to it's expansion. And herein lies the point of Decentralized Content Distribution Networks.

While I am unfamiliar with the detailed mechanics of systems such as Second Life or There, I do understand that they take a fundamentally similar approach to the content that is served in their virtual environments. While Second Life effectively "streams" content using a derivative of the RealMedia system (as Phillip Rosedale was one of the creators of the format) I am want to believe that the content still comes from a centralized system of servers. In this much I am certain, though it is quite possible that the Second Life system also groups persons by node in order to offload the distribution of the content. I could be very wrong in the last aspect, but the behavior of the system seems to warrant such node grouping.

In recent months, I have read such articles wherein a self replicating object in the Second Life environment has managed to disable their servers, so in light of this new information I am now leaning toward the idea that they are attempting to run the Second Life environment on a centralized system.

This in itself is fine if a company in this field wishes to establish a user base of no larger than 100,000, but around such time, the cost per user will begin to skyrocket out of control as the numbers increase past this threshold.

In the end, seeing as I am interested in the theoretical applications of virtual environments and it's advancement, I have found that the Active Worlds environment seems to be the most receptive to this line of testing, and have continued toward attempting to find solutions to problems outlined in the synopsis "Lessons Learned From Lucasfilm's Habitat" Morningstar & Farmer, of which happens to be attempting to address the centralization problem.

Over the past few months I have indeed found a very plausible candidate for solving this Decentralization aspect within the Active Worlds environment by routing the Object Path through a server-side P2P network which self replicates and organizes the information from a main server across 260 high bandwidth servers around the world as a specific type of hash file. The more bandwidth that the Object Path requires, the more efficient the CDN will become, even though in beginning to use it I have noticed variable speeds (but not enough testing or time has been given to this in order to gauge it's overall ability).

One thing that I have immediately noticed is that it actually works in the Active Worlds environment, though entering the specific address to begin with in the World Properties Dialog and hitting apply will crash your browser, after you restart the browser you immediately realize that while it crashed your browser the change in address did take effect and the Object Path is being redirected through the CDN, thus beginning the hash replication and self organization across the whole network (server side and not user side).

After some various testing in the virtual world, I have noticed that it has a 99% accuracy when downloading the various files from the distributed network (99% as in that maybe 5 or 6 files will randomly time out while trying to be located and thus not properly loading, though simply exiting and re-entering the world seems to automatically correct this problem).

While I will not disclose exactly how this method is accomplished, I will say that for the most part it works just fine. I would imagine that it would perform much better under much higher stress than a few users entering at random, so this method would be best used for virtual environments where you are expecting a much higher stress on the Object Path (hundreds, thousands or more users). In theory, it would be possible to minimize the overall bandwidth consumption of an entire universe server's set of Object Paths even if it were to be filled to the brink with users (possibly serve every Object Path in a universe from a single cable modem and a home computer with low latency).

So from the theoretical application to the proof of concept, at least the serving of the content part can be decentralized as suggested by Morningstar and Farmer.