Solipsis P2P 3D

Solipsis is a free and open source system for a massively multi-participant shared virtual world. It was designed by Joaquin Keller and Gwendal Simon at France Telecom Research and Development Labs. Its goal is to provide the infrastructure for a “Metaverse-like” public virtual territory. Once again taking scalability into account it relies on a (P2P) peer-to-peer architecture sothat the virtual space has the potential to be populated by an “unlimited” number of participants.

Solipsis is Funded By:

ANR - French National Agency for Research
The French National Agency for Research (ANR) is a public administrative institution. It was created on January 1st 2007 as a funding agency for research projects. It aims at increasing the number of research projects coming from the whole scientific community. The projects are assessed by peers and go through a selection process based on their competitiveness; the selected ones are then funded. ANR addresses both public research institutions and companies with two main goals: generating new knowledge and promoting interactions between public and corporate labs by developping partnerships.

I&R - Media and Networks
A “cluster of clusters”, “Media and Networks” brings together actors from higher education and academic research institutions, SMI/SMEs and large companies mainly from Bretagne and Pays de la Loire regions, who are leaders in the media and networks fields. Encompassing the three markets of audiovisual, telecommunications, and information technologies, the Media and Networks cluster helps its members develop tomorrow’s world-competitive innovative technologies.

Open Source Make-up

The Solipsis project includes the use of a number of open source projects that it supports, or that makes up its DNA. Currently the list of supporting tech include:

OGRE (Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) -OGRE is a scene-oriented, flexible 3D engine written in C++.

Navi - Navi is a new library for Ogre3D developers. In this implementation think of making a GUI with HTML. Pretty simple.

Lua - Lua is a powerful, fast, light-weight, embeddable scripting language. It combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics.

Breplibrary - An implementation of a topological data structure similar to the WINGED EDGE data structure, representing the boundary of a polyhedral solid.

ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) - ODE is an open source, high performance library for simulating rigid body dynamics e.g. vehicles. It is a mature and platform independent that utilizes a C/C++ API.

TPG Tokamak Physics Engine - The TPG SDK is a high performance real-time physics library designed especially for gaming interaction.

XmlRpc++ - A C++ implementation of the XML-RPC protocol based on py-xmlrpc. The XmlRpc protocol was designed to make remote procedure calls simple: it encodes data in a simple XML format and uses ubiquitious HTTP for communication.

TinyXml - Very simple, and light weight C++ XML parser designed for easy integration. It reads XML and creates C++ objects representing the XML document. The objects can be manipulated, changed, and saved again as XML.

Note: So I don’t get too acronym happy–

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a standard for creating markup languages which describe the structure of data.

HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) isthe protocol used to transfer web pages written in HTML. The protocol is used to follow links from one web page to another.

SDK (Software Development Kit) A set of programming instructions, points of access and guidelines for plugin developers.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) A markup language designed for the creation of web pages with hypertext and other information to be displayed in a web page. Not an actual programming language.

GUI (Graphical User Interface) The use of pictures rather than just words to represent the input and output of a program. Hails from the days of mice, windows, and icons invented at Xerox PARC (not by Apple or Microsoft- they looted it.) in the 1970’s. DOS, if you are old enough to recall it, used a CLI (command line interface)

From Wikipedia on Solipsis

Strolling through a magnificent virtual world can now be casually experienced in massively multi-player games. It somehow corroborates the concept of a massively shared public virtual world depicted by Neal Stephenson in his science fiction novel Snow Crash. In these worlds, users’ interactions are not only allowed but empowered, so, in some ways, they outperform the current Web and appear as a possible evolution of our networking experience. However, some issues still need to be addressed.

In a virtual world, every object — avatar of a player or a virtual object — should be aware of all objects within its virtual surroundings. Yet, objects are dynamic: their virtual position can change. Therefore the system should ensure that an entity is aware of all events occurring nearby. The simplest way to implement such a system is to centralize the management of the virtual world. If a “god” knows, at any time, the positions of all entities, it can easily alert entities about important events happening nearby.

However, this architecture relies on costly server(s), mostly owned by some private companies. These virtual worlds are not public at all! They just are some private worlds having some rules that are unilaterally decided by a company. The behaviours of inhabitants are strictly monitored and some non-expected tendencies could result in banishments.

Moreover, a centralized virtual world adopts a common graphical appearance that is initially designed by owners. Even the most customizable systems where users can build their home will impose limits on the creativity of users. There is no clear consensus on the graphical shape of a virtual world and there will probably never be.

Furthermore, these systems fail in creating a complete ecosystem for the virtual world. The presence of an unsustainable owner prevents the raise of business opportunities.

Some recent initiatives attempt to implement a peer-to-peer virtual world. Algorithms based on collaboration between participants ensure the consistency of the virtual world that is a public place because nobody owns it, except its inhabitants.

The Open Source Metaverse Project builds a world seen as the union of several separate worlds, each one being managed by one user which could be potentially anybody. This edonkey-like architecture supports some 3d graphical routines. Solipsis is a one-layer peer-to-peer system in which there is definitely no manager, nor a precise implementation yet. Briefly speaking, Solipsis seems to have a greater potential because of its pretty open design, but it is far less enjoyable by now. Both approaches suffer from a bootstrapping issue. A world becomes attractive when it is crowded although they currently are quite empty.

No Escaping Snowcrash

Seems one cannot escape the Snowcrash metaphor these days. At any rate while researching Solipsis I came across some interesting documents- one in particular that readers might find worthy of study- The P2P Manifesto and I quote again because it ties directly into some recent and somewhat abstract exhibits to highlight our notions of economy, genetics, memetics, scarcity, abundance and perhaps even authenticity.

From the P2P Manifesto this opening piece.

Our current political economy is based on a fundamental mistake. It is based on the assumption that natural resources are unlimited, and that it is an endless sink. This false assumption creates artificial scarcity for potentially abundant cultural resources. This combination of quasi-abundance and quasi-scarcity destroys the biosphere and hampers the expansion of social innovation and a free culture.

In a P2P-based society, this situation is reversed: the limits of natural resources are recognized, and the abundance of immaterial resources becomes the core operating principle. The vision of P2P theory is the following:

1 ) the core intellectual, cultural and spiritual value will be produced through non-reciprocal peer production;

2) it is surrounded by a reformed, peer-inspired, sphere of material exchange;

3) it is globally managed by a peer-inspired and reformed state and governance system.

Because of these characteristics, peer to peer can be said to be the core logic of the successor civilization, and is a answer and solution to the structural crisis of contemporary capitalism.

Plenty more interesting points in the P2P Manifesto…

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I am not saying educators do not! The system does not get it and when I see this

The Immersive Education Initiative is an international collaboration of universities, colleges, research institutes, consortia and companies that are working together to define and develop open standards, best practices, platforms, and communities of support for virtual reality and game-based learning and training systems.

Immersive Education combines 3D and virtual reality (VR) technology with digital media to bring distance learning and self-directed learning to a new level. Unlike traditional distance learning, Immersive Education is designed to immerse and engage students in the same way that today’s best video games grab and keep the attention of players. Immersive Education combines interactive virtual reality and sophisticated digital media (voice chat, game-based learning modules, audio/video, and so forth) with collaborative online course environments and classrooms. Immersive Education gives students a sense of “being there” even when attending class in person isn’t possible, practical, or desirable, which in turn provides faculty and remote students with the ability to connect and communicate in a way that greatly enhances the learning experience.

Immersive Education and the Media Grid public compute utility on which it is built were recently recognized with a national award by Computerworld as “…innovative, promising technologies which hold the potential to significantly affect society in the near future.”

A) No kidding. Second Lifers have known this for a long time.

B) I do not need pixels to get immersion…(they are fun though)

SOME LOWER TECH EXAMPLES:

LISTENING TO STORIES AROUND A CAMP FIRE

Which is why I try not to ever get to immersed in some mechanical “college marketing books”.

Why? FORWARD THINKING FICTION or ADVENTURE IS GREAT FOR IMMERSION and EDUCATION….and where I get my blue prints.

Phillip Jose Farmer
The World of Tiers: Volume One (World of Tiers)

In the World of Tiers we meet earthlings Robert Wolff and Paul Janus Finnigan (alias Kickaha) who through strange circumstances are “gated” into a parallel pocket universe. These pocket universes are maintained by mostly insane “Lords” who are paranoid and spend most of their time trying to kill each other to stave off ennui. The World of Tiers is just that, a multi-tiered world that spans a virtual garden of Eden and changes each level until we come to a deadly palace at the top. I won’t spoil it, but the first three are really good, old-fashioned rip roaring reads.

Farmer’s books went on to inspire the late Roger Zelazny who wrote The Chronicles of Amber. He was so inspired by The World of Tiers Zelanzy actually dedicated one of the books in the series to the main characters Jadawin and Kickaha. I have found Amber to be an incredibly accurate metaphor for Second Life. (Matter of fact you might find the quixotic Chevaliers names and behavior to be quite similar to those of Amberites at times.). In the Amber stories, Amber and the Courts of Chaos are the only two “true” worlds. Everything else, even Earth, are called or simply the byproducts of “shadows”. The royal family of Amber that negotiates the Pattern, and the equivalent Chaos nobility who have walked the Logrus, can freely travel through the shadows and alter them at will. The obvious metaphor for Second Life being that of some arbitrary static reality and the existence of an infinite number of “negotiated realities”. Furthermore we have the metaphor of a scripter or builder who can literally “create” whatever they choose- it is nothing but Shadow and really quite malleable- even the physics.

The books are narrated by Corwin who suffers from amnesia, escapes, tracks down his sister Florimel, and discovers that he is a prince of Amber. He is taken by his brother Random to walk the Pattern. The Pattern is the construct which gives the multiverse its order. Walking the Pattern restores Corwin’s memory and his powers to travel through shadow…I won’t spoil the rest and since it is late I will let the Wikipedia hammer at the metaverse concepts within.

Amber and Second Life Parallels

The series is based on the concept of parallel worlds, domination over them being fought between the kingdoms at the extreme ends of Shadow—Amber, the one true world of Order, and the Courts of Chaos. Amberites of royal blood—those descended from Oberon (and ultimately his parents, Dworkin, formerly of the Courts of Chaos, and the Unicorn of Order herself) —are able to “walk in Shadow”, mentally willing changes to occur around them. These changes are, in effect, representative of the Shadow-walker passing through different realities. There are apparently infinite realities, either found by the Shadow-walker locating such worlds or by creating them (we the readers are never sure; neither are the characters).

Within this multiverse, Zelazny deals with some interesting philosophical concepts about the nature of existence, compares and contrasts the ideas of Order and Chaos, and plays with the laws of physics—they can differ from Shadow to Shadow; for instance, gunpowder does not ignite in Amber, which is why the characters all carry swords. Other Shadows have green skies and blue suns, cities of glass and Kentucki Fried Lizzard Partes, and worlds out of our own fiction can come to life.

In short, as I have maintained, reality is what we mutually negotiate- like modems we will find a common protocol. A game is what we choose to make out of it and if left idle humans will create their own rules and games to satisfy their needs.

Pixels, Mud, Time and Collaboration…oh yeah and Permission to break the pattern. Oh yes and teaching us how to think…

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Dell shipping Ubuntu- this is truly the technological war of my generation… You don’t have to be a genius to see where this all leads.

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Ubuntu, the Linux distro led by Canonical Ltd., a private company founded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth- a South African entrepreneur who was the second self-funded space tourist and first African national in space- has launched a community magazine called Full Circle. (Mark also gets my Kwisatz Haderach seal.)

The current issue of the magazine is available as a seventeen page PDF [Click to Download Issue#0 of Full Circle PDF]. Full Circle is easy to read, chock full of color (really) and a great introduction to Ubuntu newbies. e.g. myself

Issue#0 covers the history of Ubuntu’s various releases running all the way up to Ubuntu 7.04, a.k.a. “Feisty Fawn”. There is also an installation guide and an invite to contribute section.

The name of the distribution comes from the Zulu and Xhosa concept of ubuntu, which means “I am what I am because of who we all are”.

Ubuntu’s slogan – “Linux for Human Beings”, encapsulates one of its main goals – making Linux more available and easy to use.

Yes even Waynebuntu can do it. So can you. Have an ailing box? Try Ubuntu. It is like a B12 injection for your PC.

I want my hat Sam…wait- three converts and then a hat. heh- my kids are in for a treat.

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Extremely ironic since I cut my first “Vlog” and it checked in at 39 minutes and the lighting sucks. I have dedcided to simply kill it.

Long time collaborator Brian Flemming writes in response to my open source media find. (And hello to Brett for checking in and clarifying a bit of that fuzziness… )

Wayne Porter on open-source cinema. (Once in a blue moon Wayne writes something I can comprehend instead of stuff like this. WTF? I don’t understand the value of Twitter. I hate being left out, but I’m too lazy to figure out why it’s the greatest thing since the last greatest thing I didn’t understand.)

Just to make it clear in the example above- I was talking about virtual gateways- a project a colleague and I had put together to let someone make a note in say the metaverse of Second Life and send that note as far as a cell phone from inside the virtual world using a heads up device. Neat huh?. It it full duplex too. In the long term I hope to see it mixed with scripts to simulate disabilities and the HUD as a research device.

So Brian to make it easy- Twitter is to Blogging as your argument, based on this piece, here about the temporal aspects / challenges of vlogging to blogging (see below). It is a function of attention and how much of our finite time we want to give up before we are dead.

Brian said…

The challenges of a temporal medium

I agree with this critique of video blogging. A major flaw in the vast majority of vlogs is that they take, say, 10 minutes of rambling to say the same thing that would probably take me 2 minutes to read…
April 01, 2007

Think of twitter as “micro-blogging” or even “nano-blogging” (here is a sample of one of my twitter accounts in RSS format)- think of our usual blogs changing in the future and becoming “canons” for these micro-streams and other “micro-chunks”. Actually if you think about it our “blogs” will probably contain a number of different type of media sources from RSS to Photos, to video chunks to graphics, to text, to tweets, widgets, to our friends stuff, etc, so forth and so on. A good read would be colleague Sam Harrelson’s take on the Tumblr and Twitter as disruptors…also note Google’s move into CPA and the rise of the attention economy and “new metrics”.

As an aside- another neat use of twittering and blogs are plugins for Word Press (notably Alex King’s) that allow you to “twitter” to your stream the second a new blog post is made. I would not be surprised to see a search engine acquire twitter, because it makes perfect sense to search for things, and twitter about what we find in real time. WE WILL RELY ON SEARCH LESS and MORE ON SOCIAL INTERACTION.

What Would Help the Revolution…

To Brian: I have no doubt that you would be able to whip out very cohesive, and poignant vlogs- perhaps a post on how to do that for the rest of us? A crash course in micro-film production. I mean do you story board it? After having just cut a long piece on the history of Revenews, I realized that I meandered around- which ilong beta podcasts ok- it was a beta cut. Sam and I actually did a that went almost two hours and to our surprise it had quite a few downloads- not sure how many (I’ll ping him on that) but we went in with no real agenda except to talk and let it go until we felt “done”.

To Brett: I liked your collaborative project, even more so I am curious if you would “open source” the platform in which we used to assemble it? I have been looking at ways to collaborate with other filmmakers in such a manner and it would seem what you have cobbled together a neat technological platform to do this. Are you willing to not only “open source” the media, but open source your collaboration platform?

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