opensim & realxtend: meeting tools in the opensim community conf prep session

[Toni Alatalo]

Long title but a quite brief note:

As mentioned earlier our talk about realxtend & opensim dev was accepted to the upcoming opensim conference, organised on opensim itself which I find great.

Yesterday there was a speakers Q&A, a couple of remarks regarding meeting / presenting tools:

There was a nice setup for presenters, similar to earlier opensim confs and what admino & spinningwire have made on Tundra. Speaker goes to podium and gets control of the big display etc.

Two important features were mentioned lacking, which we would have on the realXtend side:

1. Web page display is not synchronised. It is shared, the presenter can open a view and others see it, but no actions with the page get synched. So if you want to show a page where you do something, you must just ask the audience to do the same.

2. No voice moderation. Hence the organisers, based on previous experience, are just going to disable in-world voice all-together. Someone in the audience would forget their mic on anyway. The talk is made via Skype so that it's streamed like radio to the world. IIRC again the Admino-Spinningwire meeting tools, or is it even in the default Meshmoon voice tools, have the option for a moderator to silence any participant.

I think the situation is quite like the classic VHS and Beta video in history. One is better technology but the other is what is used. That all is a longer discussion (and we can have it here, perhaps as a part of the conference session too) but I don't time for it right now, just wanted to make this remark. Shortly put I think the reasons are:

a) People are sticking with opensim as they already use it, now it, their friends use it etc.

b) It is ready with the basics as open source so you can just start running your home or school server -- whereas with realXtend now you'd have to configure more yourself (to e.g. setup avatar app, chat and voice) and you'd still miss authentication, and all your apps and guis would be poorer than on Meshmoon as they have their enhanced proprietary versions etc., so not many people do it and are perhaps easily disappointed if they try.

It still stands that the opensim land is with many problems, the reasons why we quit using and developing it + sl based viewer. I think we still have a chance with reX for virtual worlds if we are clever but otherwise probably something else comes later and takes over .. or miraculously in the opensim+slviewer slowly develop to be good, like they already have improved (meshes, web page display (MOAP) etc). Meshmoon hosting caters for a certain (perhaps even the largest) audience but not for the opensim crowd -- hobbyists and school admins who want / need to run their own servers (at least when building and experimenting, then they perhaps move to hosting).

This thinking is (obviously?) focusing on the SL-type VW usage, not about using Tundra or other reX things as a plain SDK to make a game or so (in that discussion we need to contrast with unity+netplugins, not opensim).

~Toni