Saturday, November 29, 2014

Lucidscape -- learning from SL?

By now you may well have heard of Lucidscape, but just in case...Lucidscape is an attempt to create the metaverse that looks like it's trying to avoid  aspects of Second Life that keep it from scaling. To demonstrate scalability, they simulated ten million participants on an 800-server cluster. The "participants" are a mixture of movable but largely stationary emitters and constantly moving drones that the emitters control and communicate with and which are constantly communicating across server boundaries.

(One could very well argue that one of those aspects is user-created content--people can and do create things without concern for efficiency--but that's too important a feature to forbid; on the page they say "the [emitters and drones] were purposefully crafted to be inefficient [emphasis in original] in the same manner we average user-written code may be.")

I especially like this:
We are a team of developers who are passionate about creating a future where massively multi-user virtual reality is pervasive and everyone can participate in a Metaverse which is:
  • Free and open source so everyone may add their own worlds to the Metaverse the same way anyone can run a web server today.
  • Devoid of any form of centralized control, free of gatekeepers and censorship under the guise of curation. Because if anyone can tell you what you are allowed to do in it, then it is not the real Metaverse.
I hope to see more from them.