Virtual World Winter?

Bruce Damer, a guest blogger on TerraNova suggests that we may already be seeing the early sign of a Virtual Worlds downturn that may lead to a "winter" as severe as the one in the period 2000-2003. In his column, he poses eight provocative questions including one that asks: "Are open source efforts the inevitable shape of things to come (ie, creating standardized protocol layers which would lower the cost of entry and operation of the whole VW ecosystem) or simply an expression of frustration with or fear of the long term prospects of commercial platforms?" Perhaps the question should really be: "Are open source efforts the inevitable shape of things to come (ie, creating standardized protocol layers which would lower the cost of entry and operation of the whole VW ecosystem) and an expression of frustration with or fear of the long term prospects of commercial platforms?" In that case, the answer would most certainly be yes.

Cobalt Updated!

John Dougan and Mark McCahill just announced the 2008-06-08 pre-alpha release of Cobalt that's downloadable here. Here's whats new in this release:

• Cobalt can now punch through the NAT firewalls.

• Cobalt now has an OpenAL null device class that will be used if the OpenAL libraries are not installed or if they have a startup problem (special thanks to Mike Klein for this code).

• Hitting the Esc key while the mouse is over the menubar no longer causes the menubar to disappear.

• A patch to make embedded applications work is now integrated into Cobalt.

• "Message not understood" no longer thrown when closing the 3D Painter tool in Cobalt.

• Cobalt's harness classes and their support are partially refactored.

• A race on quitting was removed by carefully timing the Tweak shutdown relative to the morph delete.

• Various packaging clean-ups were done.

• Minor fixes to the ASE import around some of the texture name handling code and more logging to aid in future fixes.

• New code to import a new mesh collection for the avatar (switch avatar functionality) has been updated to handle ASEs as well as the obsolete MDL format.

NSF SGER

I've just been awarded an NSF Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) to advance exploratory work towards a more complete open source Croquet-based browser application and toolset that can support the large scale needs of the scientific community.  With this support, we will be helping to advance the Cobalt effort by 1) making general improvements to the user interface which includes the more complete buildout of Cobalt's menus as well as improvements to basic navigational control, 2) fully implementing and testing of the ability for end-users to tag and electronically store their Cobalt-created worlds to online directories, 3) designing and implementing methods for finding and contacting other users of Croquet spaces by leveraging XMPP/Jabber as a presence registration and rendezvous mechanism, and 4) designing and implementing of methods that enable Cobalt users to browse a directory of all registered and active Cobalt spaces and to make it possible for users to contact current participants of those spaces by leveraging XMPP/Jabber and institutional IAA infrastructures as a means of defining user permissions by group affiliations.  At the end of this, we hope to have a full Beta of the Cobalt application available for download to all.

Moyers at NCMR 2008

Here is a video of legendary journalist Bill Moyers who this morning electrified an audience of more than 3,500 at the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis as he declared the media reform movement and Net Neutrality to be the most significant citizens' movements to emerge in this new century. "The fate of the cyber commons is up for grabs here," he said. "We'll lose that fight without you because the only antidote to the power of money in Washington is the power of organized people at the netroots." Moyers asserts that what we need to know to make democracy work is compromised by dominant media institutions that are becoming more deeply embedded in the politics of our society, and whose interests are more about manufacturing profitable consumer commodities than they are about helping fulfill the social compact. Interestingly provocative and well worth the 40 min runtime.

Turning the Cog

Qwaq Inc. has recently engaged Eliot Miranda (a deeply experienced developer of Smalltalk-based VM implementations) to write a fast Croquet VM for release under the open source Croquet license. Named Cog, this VM will dynamically compile Smalltalk bytecodes to machine code and execute this machine code instead of interpreting bytecode. All of this will be transparent to the programmer and should execute pure Smalltalk code 10 to 20 times faster than the current Squeak VM used by Croquet. With planned further optimization, the new Croquet VM should significantly exceed the Smalltalk-based VisualWorks VM performance. Eliot expects to release the first fast version within a year and has set up a blog so that you can follow his progress.

MS-OLPC?

Nicholas Negroponte just posted the following announcement:

"One Laptop per Child is announcing an agreement with Microsoft
to make a dual boot, Linux/Windows, version of the XO laptop. In addition, our intention is to engage one or more third parties to port Sugar to run on Windows in order to reach a wider installed base of laptops. In the meanwhile, OLPC remains fully committed to our goal: a completely free and open learning platform for the world's children. The mission statement of OLPC has not changed in three years.

Sugar is the first user interface specifically designed for children and teachers to learn and collaborate, and remains central to our strategy. Broadening Sugar's reach to as many children as possible remains key to OLPC's mission.

To enable the Sugar environment to reach as many children as possible, particularly in the poorest areas of the world, OLPC must be able to bid on educational technology contracts, some of which require that Microsoft Windows be able to run on our hardware. The increased volumes will lower the XO-1's price, already lowest in the industry with capabilities no other laptop shares.

OLPC is substantially increasing its engineering resources and all software development continues entirely on GNU/Linux. We will continue to work to make Sugar on Linux the best possible platform for education and to invest in our expanding Linux deployments in Peru, Uruguay, Mexico and elsewhere.

No OLPC resources are going to porting Sugar to Microsoft Windows, although as a free software project, we encourage others to do so. The Sugar user interface is already available for Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu Linux distributions, greatly broadening Sugar's reach to the millions of existing Linux systems. We continue to solicit help from the free software community in these efforts. Additionally, the Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu software environments run on the XO-1, adding support for tens of thousands of free software applications.

Open Firmware V2, the free and open source BIOS, is now capable of running Linux, Microsoft Windows XP and other operating systems, and was developed by Firmworks with support from OLPC. This will enable dual boot of OLPC XO laptops with Microsoft Windows XP in addition to the existing Fedora-based system and will become the standard BIOS/bootloader for all XO systems when completed. With this "free BIOS," the XO-1 continues to be the most open laptop hardware currently
available."

For more information, see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/AnnounceFAQ.

Machinimascope

Gamecaster is a new company that has developed a way to let you shoot 3D animation as if it were live action. This specialized capture technology called the Cybercam S3 was developed for use during broadcasts of video game competitions for sports games like Madden football and numerous combat titles. Using this device, camera operators are able to smoothly pan, tilt, truck, crane, and even zoom the camera lens within 3D virtual worlds in realtime.