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Generation 3D: Living in Virtual Worlds

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Generation 3D: Living in Virtual Worlds ENTERTAINMENT COMPUTING US’s status as the free world’s premier superpower and caused the country to Generation 3D: suffer a crisis of confidence. President Eisenhower established ARPA to lead a mostly secret crash pro- Living in gram to turn the situation around. The investment worked: Within a decade, the US began circling the moon with manned spaceships. But ARPA’s legacy Virtual Worlds is rooted in its most public research pro- gram—the Arpanet—which began in Mike Macedonia, Forterra Systems 1967 to network mainframes at uni- versity research labs. Initially led by Larry Roberts, the project would even- tually become today’s Internet. Within decades,people For 25 years, the Internet grew slowly with the introduction of appli- could spend at least as cations such as e-mail and file transfer. Not until the Web browser’s appear- much time in virtual worlds ance did Internet growth explode as in the real one. (http://navigators.com/stats.html). In 1991, Tim Berners Lee tied a 2D graph- ical interface to the Net, providing a canvas for creating a whole new class of applications from AltaVista to ixteen years have passed 1990s. Further, wireless networking MySpace. The World Wide Web made since the World Wide Web has become a universal phenomenon the Internet accessible beyond the exploded and the Web for devices ranging from mobile shores of university computer science browser became the interface phones to notebook computers. departments, government offices, and S to the Internet universe. That Most important, a generation of the arcana of command-line interfaces. interface has remained largely computer users now in their twenties The combination of startling unchanged despite dramatic shifts in can’t recall a world without net- growth in computer usage, computer technology and culture in the inter- worked 3D video games like Doom, performance, and network perfor- vening years. Quake, Halo, or World of Warcraft mance provided the catalyst for the The world is about to be turned (WoW). It’s also a generation com- industry’s advancement in 1967 and upside down again. Computer perfor- fortable in cyberspace—able to again in 1992. The Arpanet became mance has increased 10,000-fold, while easily move between the virtual and possible because universities had home network speed has gone from real worlds because they are be- workstation-class computers with 9,600 bps to more than 1 Mbps since coming one (www.mnfuturists.org/ WIMP (window, icon, menu, pointing the early 1990s. In 2006, most homes PDFCurrent/Virtual%20Worlds%20 device) interfaces tied to Ethernet in the US had some form of broadband RealOpportunities.pdf). According LANs, a legacy of the Xerox Star com- that enabled the downloading of video to Gartner, by 2010, 80 percent of puter. Moreover, wide-area-network to iPods and YouTube. However, Fortune 500 global companies will speeds increased from 50 Kbps in streaming video has been an Internet have some form of massive multiplayer 1969 to 45 Mbps in 1992. The WWW feature since the creation of the MBone online or virtual-world presence. benefited from the culmination of in the early 1990s, when users needed ideas from visionaries and early a $50,000 computer and a leased T1 ARPANET ORIGINS Arpanet pioneers such as Douglas connection (M.R. Macedonia and D.P. The space race with the Soviet Englebart, who led development of Brutzman, “MBone Provides Audio Union gave birth to the US Advanced the Stanford Research Institute On- and Video Across the Internet,” Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in Line System, the graphical user inter- Computer, Apr. 1994, pp. 30-36). 1958. Its mission: Make the US a tech- face, and the mouse. Many personal computers produced nology leader. The Soviets had already today have graphical processing units launched Sputnik, making it the first SIMNET that offer graphics performance orders country to become a space power In the 1970s, the Xerox Star hosted of magnitude better than million-dol- capable of delivering intercontinental one of the first networked videogames, lar image generators could in the early ballistic missiles. This threatened the Maze War (http://articles.techrepublic. October 2007 99 ENTERTAINMENT COMPUTING virtual economies that eventually involved real money. Today, WoW, an Everquest succes- sor, is by far the most popular 3D vir- tual world, benefiting from the ex- plosion of broadband and 3D graph- ics performance. With more than 9 million subscribers, the game has at least several hundred thousand users logged in at any one time. WoW has seeped into popular culture, with the TV show South Park devoting an entire episode to the game—an episode that, as this issue goes to press, has just been awarded an Emmy. The growth in virtual-world com- munities has not gone unnoticed by large media companies. In August 2007, Disney acquired ClubPenguin. com for a minimum of $350 million (and up to $700 million). An MMORPG for children, this game was the 131st most visited Web site in the Figure 1.Virtual worlds for work and play.Forterra’s OLIVE architecture enables creation US in June 2007 (www.marketingvox. of 3D environments that can be used for classroom instruction,business meetings,and com/archives/2007/08/06/club-penguin- virtual socializing. snatched-by-disney-grew-329-percent- in-past-year/). com.com/5100-10881_11-5710539. virtual radios of soldiers in tank simu- Viacom’s MTV has also established html). But DARPA gave birth to some- lators across the US. a presence in the virtual world with thing more ambitious than just a game; Virtual Laguna Beach and Virtual it created SIMNET, or Simulator KILLER APP Pimp My Ride. Developed by Makena Network, in the mid-1980s. Led by Videogames have provided the killer using the Forterra OLIVE architecture Jack Thorpe, a young Air Force officer, app for 3D virtual worlds over the shown in Figure 1, MTV’s sites have the SIMNET program produced the past decade. SIMNET was not a per- pioneered the use of voice conferenc- first peer-to-peer 3D virtual environ- sistent world—it offered no central ing using VoIP and in-world stream- ments to operate over the Arpanet— server to maintain the simulation’s ing video (www.vmtv.com). and gave birth to the Internet’s multi- global state. Wolfenstein 3D and other player first-person shooter. Thorpe first-person shooter games followed A 3D INTERNET envisioned that one day soldiers and the same model. In a departure from more tradi- airmen would train in virtual battles But in 1999, Sony Online Entertain- tional videogames, some developers while deployed across the globe. What ment released Everquest, a massive have begun creating large-scale virtual looked like today’s videogames were multiplayer online role-playing game worlds such as Second Life (http:// deadly serious training systems. Yet, (MMORPG). Although this genre orig- secondlife.com) for social networking. many ideas implemented in SIMNET inated with the text-based multiuser Developed by Linden Labs, Second found their way into such networked dungeon-and-dragon (MUDD) games Life promotes the idea of a self-sus- games as Microsoft Flight Simulator popular in the 1980s, the graphical taining virtual economy in which and Doom. Everquest became an unprecedentedly users can produce and sell goods such DARPA also created a special net- popular and profitable game with a as virtual clothing or trade virtual work for SIMNET, the Defense Simu- huge subscriber base, even though properties. Moreover, Second Life has lation Internet (DSInet). In the late most players accessed it through dial- attracted advertising and an increased 1980s, researchers at USC Information up connections running at 56 Kbps online presence from businesses such Sciences Institute and Bolt Beranek or less. Because it was persistent, as IBM and Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, and Newman (BBN) experimented Everquest let players accrue points that as well as religious organizations such with the DSINet. They sought to they could trade for virtual artifacts as the Jesuits. explore the use of the voice-over-the- such as spells and materials. This form IBM has been a leader in experi- Internet protocol (VoIP) to connect the of virtual currency led to the creation of menting with Second Life, There.com, 100 Computer ENTERTAINMENT COMPUTING and other virtual worlds as a forum economic markets or social networks.” parisons of global climate models, for business collaboration. According One such example is the use of WoW and injecting discovery and innov- to a company report, “IBM believes to research the spread of viruses. As Eric ative environments into learning that virtual worlds and other 3D T. Lofgren and Nina H. Fefferman and training all use virtual environ- Internet environments offer significant reported (“The Untapped Potential of ments. CDI will develop new tech- opportunity to our company, our Virtual Game Worlds to Shed Light on niques for building and utilizing clients, and the world at large, as they Real World Epidemics,” The Lancet virtual environments, especially in evolve, grow in use and popularity, Infectious Diseases, vol. 7, no. 9, 2007, the context of cyberinfrastructure. and become more integrated into pp. 625-629), online game worlds many aspects of business and society” might be a useful tool for studying the If all this inspires visions of Neal (http://domino.research.ibm.com/ spread of human infectious diseases. Stephenson’s science fiction classic comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/ These researchers from Tufts and Rut- Snowcrash, it’s because we are inex- virtualworlds.IBMVirtualWorldGuide gers universities described how a pro- orably approaching the 3D Internet lines.html). gramming error in WoW, caused a full- portrayed in his Metaverse, which In many respects, Google Earth is a blown epidemic of a virulent, highly forms part of the Arpanet continuum.
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