New Virtual World Framework demos
Giulio Prisco
http://telexlr8.net/2013/01/18/new-virtual-world-framework-demos/
Take a look at these new VWF demos, which show the awesome potential of the Virtual World Framework, a web-based architecture for creating and distributing secure, scalable, component-based, and collaborative virtual spaces.
The Virtual World Framework (VWF) “is a fast, light-weight, web-based architecture for creating and distributing secure, scalable, component-based, and collaborative virtual spaces. It leverages existing web-based standards, infrastructure, and emerging technologies with the intent of establishing a powerful yet simple to use platform that is built on top of the next generation of web browsers.”
I fell totally in love with Second Life one minute after joining in 2005, then with OpenQwaq virtual meetings. I thought Neal Stephenson‘s Snow Crash vision of a highly immersive consumer virtual reality Metaverse would soon become a reality. As we all know, Snow Crash crashed, Second Life went out of fashion in only a couple of years, and 3D virtual environments for “serious” (non-gaming) applications have not attracted many users, but the Metaverse may still become a reality with next generation systems like the VWF and next generation immersive 3D interfaces.
The Virtual World Framework is open source, based on the open standards WebGL, HTML5 and JavaScript, and runs natively in the browser. Though it is based on different technical choices, the VWF can be considered as a “Croquet 2.0,” a next generation of the Open Croquet, Open Cobalt, and OpenQwaq technology, because it is based on a similar distributed instruction model, originally envisioned by David Reed in his dissertation.
“When a user does something (like presses the arrow key on his computer) the system creates and sends the instruction to a central location,” says 3D ICC‘s Ron Teitelbaum on the OpenQwaq mailing list. “That system timestamps the instruction and sends it out to everyone. Every computer then plays the instruction in order so that the consistency of the environment is maintained. Since the tiny instructions are much smaller than rendering graphics and sending them out over the wire, this is a very efficient way to maintain a consistent state. VWF is a new version of this sort of client with some really cool new concepts added in by [the key developer] David Smith.”
Rob Chadwick has a good technical explanation of the demos on the VWF website, with the video below. The demos are just simple proofs of concept, but they show the awesome potential of the VWF technology.
Chadwick has recently released a new VWF demo with a set of in-world editing tools. I played with the new demo and took these two pictures, reminiscent of Second Life circa 2003. While building these basic shapes I had the same WOW feeling that I had when I first tried to build in Second Life. The demos are slow, not very reliable and don’t work on all browsers (there are some differences between implementations of WebGL on different browsers and operating systems), but they show a huge potential. In a few years, the VWF may become a robust, open source and easy to use equivalent of Second Life in the browser, suitable for all sorts of gaming and non-gaming applications. Predicting the future is always difficult, especially the near future, but this seems to me a solid Metaverse technology contender.