Dream Designer

On Second Life and How We Live in Cyber Space

Glyn Moody’s recent article on Second Life published on Linux Journal summarized the latest news on 3D internet and invited open source community to join development of 3D applications like Second Life. Following the article there were some wise thoughts on questions like; will there be a true need for 3D internet, or what is the role and meaning of a computer generated simulation in our real life, and finally what role should open source development community take in this new software development area.

Following the original article and the debate over 3D internet applications, I felt that there are two extremes about the future of 3D internet. Which I believe neither is true but both views support a common direction of internet that will have a more pervasive role in our daily life.

Services that are supplied over internet have many forms, and there will be many more in the future. 3D applications and services will sure have a place in the future of internet. This type of applications will have definitive advantage when it comes to simulation of physical world. Gaming, entertainment, education and any type of physical world simulation will be the primary areas that this technology will create many new applications and services.

On the other hand I doubt about 3D becoming the primary form of service or application creation and delivery. The world which we live in and increasingly record and simulate in electronic form, has more dimensions than the pure physical dimensions. Human knowledge is not in 3D form, but rather expressed in written form. Internet technology has been following and will follow this route to create new services to simulate different parts of our every day life; from messaging to e-commerce, from research to socializing.

I see that a larger portion of our every day life will be simulated (and in fact be actually take place) in an electronic network in coming years. Our perception of real world will be enriched by the applications and services of the internet, no matter whether they are 3D or not. For some this new era will be perceived as only arrival of new tools to ease daily routine, and still for some others, it will be the “life” itself. Like, for some, good literature has been observed as more real than the life itself, for hundreds of years.

Coming back to original question if we need open source applications like Second Life, I believe there should be an interest from open source community on such applications. But instead of creating a new full scale application developed open source, developer community should focus on underlying technologies, and evolve these technologies to become more open and participative in nature. Server side software to simulate and manage 3D worlds, and serve thousands of clients simultaneously can be developed by open source community. Server side tools are the most mature software component of open source tradition.

One particular area I find interesting is to develop network software for communication between clients and servers. If we can develop an open set of protocols and an open stack of services to facilitate communication between different type of clients and servers and create different services needed to run such a 3D application, than commercial applications will be developed very easily. Even more important, those applications will than be able to communicate each other forming a real 3D internet.

One way of developing communication and server side software is to employ Service Oriented Architecture. SOA will let us develop services that are needed to construct an online 3D application. Later developers will freely choose from these services to form their own application without worrying about inter-operability issues. A client, on the other hand, that supports these open standards will be able to connect many different 3D worlds. The end result will not be different than today’s World Wide Web that a universal browser is capable of handling many applications delivered over internet.

We should still be aware that 3D content needs to be created on a project basis and this part still accounts for the majority of the effort of creating an online 3D world. Tools that facilitate easy 3D content creation, and encouraging user created content in these worlds may also help to speed up the content creation process. I believe the real differentiation will come from the content itself when technological barriers are lowered.

If open source community wants to liberate this emerging area, it should start forming projects that addresses key technological advancements that are needed to make the 3D internet a reality.

03 December 2006, Istanbul

posted by Kaan Bingol @ 8:18 PM