As luck would have it, the guys at Java Code Geeks wrote about using Oracle/Sun Microsystem’s Virtual Box, which I have extolled in the past. So, I’m going to follow their tutorial, download the live CD, and have a go. If it’s really all that great, maybe I’ll even try my hand at developing an app for that platform, perhaps as a warmup to writing an iPhone/iPad app, who knows?

Now the wait. Naturally, I “need” the version with 3G, otherwise what’s the point of a mobile device? That won’t be available for around 90 days. But in the meantime, I am downloading the SDK with iPad emulator from the Apple Developer site, and who knows? Maybe I’ll even get around to developing something for it someday? In my copious spare time, of course.

However, while it is not possible to get the hardware accelleration normally available from the GPU, it is still possible to use vReveal to clean up shaky, low-contrast videos. It just takes longer since it will be processed by the CPU instead of the GPU. Much longer — in some cases it can be up to 20Xs slower on the CPU. But if you have the time, it can be done with just one click of a button.

While investigating CUDA, I was bemused to see a whitepaper in the Nvidia CUDA Zone called “Fast N-body Simulation with CUDA”. If you’ve been following this blog for awhile, you may recall an item I wrote about a year ago, called Virtual Worlds Galore, that included a video made by the guys at Genkii in cooperation with the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics, or MICA, on this subject. Apparently n-body simulations are all the rage now that desktop computers are capable of displaying them, thanks to virtualization and graphics acceleration architectures like the Nvidia CUDA. They’re a bit over my head, since I’m neither an astrophysicist nor a 3D visualization expert, but its fascinating to follow what’s being done by people who are. And it is more than a little interesting to see how so many of the topics I cover are connected one way or another in unexpected ways.

The ability to put a 3D world in a webpage has some intriguing potential.

That was discouraging. The Wonderland software is available for Mac OS, but only up to version 10.4, and I’m running 10.5. Maybe I can compile the source code for 10.5, since Apple claims “Leopard can compile and run all your existing UNIX code”, but I’m not quite ready to do that just now.

However, a day or two after the Wonderland test I was reading the documentation for OpenSim when I saw that they offer a Subversion (SVN) download for MacOS X, and mentioned that OS X 10.5 (Leopard) has SVN pre-installed. So, what the heck, I pulled up a Terminal window to verify that yes, SVN is there, and keyed in the command to download OpenSim. It worked like a charm, although I should probably have done it on my external hard disk so I can play with it on Phil’s laptop while we’re driving tomorrow. Maybe I’ll do that anyway. It’s about 68 MB, which is smaller than I expected. It would certainly be fun to have my own region available to play in while we’re traveling and not online!

My own efforts toward implementing a home VW server have been progressing, but slowly. Wonderland is installed on my OpenSUSE VM after finally getting Java6 JDK to work properly, but I haven’t been able to get them to talk to each other yet. I suspect I need to roll back Java to the earlier release (update 5 instead of 6), since some dependencies seem to have fallen off the edge with the later one. I remember seeing a note about that in the Wonderland site a few weeks ago, but had forgotten in the excitement of finally finding the link to the JDK software. Sun does not make it easy to find things on their website, mainly because they offer so much that deciding exactly what it is you need can be very confusing for the uninitiated. I do have the older release downloaded, so I’ll try installing and running with that next.

One of the things people have been clamoring for in SecondLife for as long as I can remember (back to about July 2005, when I first rezzed into that world) is “Web on a Prim”. A prim is a primitive object, like a representation of a 3D cube or sphere or cylinder. These are the building blocks out of which all the incredible representations of physical objects are made in 3D virtual worlds. By combining them, twisting and resizing them, “painting” them with textures, linking them together and embedding little scripts in them, all the wonders of the grid are made manifest.

All, that is, except for a functioning Web browser that an avatar can share with others in the world. The latest version of the SecondLife viewer, the client software that enables one to enter these virtual worlds, offers at last a rudimentary Web viewer, but it can only display a single page with no live links. Hypertext without hyperlinks is almost useless, but of course it is a step in the right direction, and better than anything that preceeded it.

In one of the derivative VWs I’ve joined recently, though, they have taken LSL a step further. As well as implementing most of the commands from that scripting language, a few home-grown functions are added. One specifically enlarges the ability to display Web pages on primative objects, chosen by anyone in the world, not just someone who has control of the media on the land parcel where the object exists as is presently the case in SecondLife. For the geeks among us (you know who you are), this function is called osSetDynamicTextureURL() and it allows a “voice” command to be used to surf to any given URL. Where native Linden LSL commands follow the convention of having their names preceeded by “ll” (two lower-case letter Ls), as in llSetText(), the OpenSim scripters have used os[Function name] to identify those that are not from Linden Lab. I’ve tried out an object that uses a script with this function, and it works quite well. However, when I tried to make my own Web display object using a copy of the script I found in the user’s forum on the OSGrid.org website, it did not work; I don’t know why. Perhaps the copy has a typo I’m not proficient enough to spot, or maybe the grid was just being a bit unstable at that moment. It is still alpha software, after all.

Still, even if I couldn’t make my own Web display (yet!), the fact that LSL is being extended in OpenSim grids is very encouraging.

Also encouraging is the fact that I heard from a friend tonight that a mutual acquaintance is also planning to install Sun Microsystem’s open source Darkstar server to run a Project Wonderland region on his own computer, as I hope to do soon. This is becoming the favorite indoor sport of the really extreme VW addicts on the block! I’m one step closer now, since I finally located the package I need to install Java6 SDK on Debian Linux, a requirement for running Darkstar.

Sure enough, one can buy a whole region (equivalent to a SecondLife sim, or 16 virtual acres, 256 meters square) for just USD $90 for the first month, and $75 per month thereafter. That’s compared to Linden Lab’s new low price of USD $1000 set up and $195 per month land use fees. Of course, not much is working in OpenLife yet, and there are almost no residents, but I got so enthusiastic at the thought of a viable alternative world that I went ahead and signed up to become a “Foundation Resident” — one who owns a region in the first wave of land sales. My region is called “Queenstown”.

The text on the sign in front of the big ISM logo block reads:

This land was purchased on behalf of the International Spaceflight Museum R&D expeditionary force.

The International Spaceflight Museum (ISM) was created in Second Life in September 2005.

For information, IM Kat Lemieux in either Open Life or Second Life

But first, I should tell you how I got into the world. User accounts are free, just as in SecondLife. The client application in the OpenLife website is for Windows only. I did boot up my WinXP virtual machine, and dutifully downloaded their client, but I couldn’t get it to run. However, when I went looking for help I discovered a page in their wiki that described how to use the Second Life client by adding a single line to a file in the “Resources” folder in the Mac OS X application’s contents. It worked like a charm. It’s just as easy to do this on Windows or Linux by adding the same target definition to the application’s shortcut or (in Linux) command line.

However, while rummaging around in the OpenLife website, I found information about the OpenSim Standalone server code. This software does require Windows, though, and while one can set up a sim or a region of up to 4 sims using it on your own server, at present this cannot be connected to the OpenLife grid. What is more, according to one of the residents I met in the world, the plans to enable linking a server to this grid are far, far down the road.

While I was in the world, playing with my new region, I met someone who is also a member of the Association of Virtual Worlds. When I went to the association’s website to add him to my friends list there, I joined a new group on that site about Central Grid, which is described as “… a virtual world platform where recreational and business users create 3D communities or grids which are all interconnected.” Naturally, I had to try that one out, too, and see what was there. I instantly was overcome with buyer’s remorse over my OpenLife (OL) region purchase, since Central Grid appears to be much further down the development road than OL. However, their prices are rather higher than OL, although still far less than Second Life. Central Grid also uses the SecondLife client, with a one-line change to define the target definition, just like OpenLife. The only difference is the URI. Maybe I didn’t make such a gross mistake after all.

But I wasn’t through. From there I went to the OpenSim website, where I discovered a page that lists several more open source projects based on the OpenSim server. OpenLife is listed there, but Central Grid is not. However, another VW, OSGrid, looked very intriguing because according to its description, “Sims are all owned by individuals, companies, universities and are connected at no charge. [except the plazas, which are community regions]“. So, I made yet another copy of the SecondLife client, changed the line in the target definition, and went to have a look. I was impressed! This may be the place where I recommend the ISM put our efforts once we figure out how to create a Standalone sim. In the meantime, we can play in Queenstown to see what we will be up against when we try to recreate some of the ISM in another VW.

it occurs to me, though, that since all these worlds are based on the same code, and eventually all of them say they will allow 3rd party servers to connect to their grids, maybe we can just use one server for them all? Or perhaps it would be necessary to have a copy for each grid, but the group could do its work in one Standalone iteration, and the administrator could copy it to connect to the other grids on a regular basis, or better yet define a cron job to do it, in effect creating mirror sites. This might be the way all these grids are eventually connected to one another.

Someone speculated that in future your personal inventory would be saved to your own hard disk rather than being in a central asset database, thus allowing you to carry all your “stuff” from world to world. Being a person who tends to log in from different computers, I would hope that instead we would find some data grid in the cloud to store our things, so we aren’t tethered to a single machine. Since the inability of Linden Lab’s asset database to keep up with demand seems to be one of the major problems with scaling Second Life, maybe this would be just as difficult for an open source community to manage, but maybe it would be planned out in advance better for all the OpenSim based grids, since now we have a better idea of what the metaverse probably is going to look like for the immediate future than Linden Lab knew when they were designing their system.

One can hope that we will be able to learn from Linden’s experience, even as we take their open sourced code to go beyond the SecondLife world. However, given the unfinished state of all these worlds and the limited number of people using them, I think we (the ISM) will be in SecondLife for a long time to come, even if we experiment with additional virtual locations.

I naturally immediately signed up for an account (katlemieux) and briefly explored this Web-based world, which only opened to the public this Monday. So far, they have two types of “rooms” available which one can rent on a daily basis and invite people to join you for free, and two generic avatars, “Joe” and “Jane”, which can be customized to a limited degree. With a Pro account, one can upload textures to create a better looking avatar and wardrobe, etc., but so far I haven’t found any specifications for those.

In general it looks promising. The idea of a low-cost, Web-accessible virtual meeting space has some real possibilities, even if it’s not visually rich yet. Already one can link to a folder of images to display as a slideshow, or a video file, and a voice chat tool is available. Adding voice to a meeting room rental (US$5.99) costs an additional fee (US$4.99), but that’s not horrible considering that people you invite to your room don’t have to pay a cent.

So far I’ve only tried browsing this site with Firefox on Mac OS X.5, but (after adding a line to my computer’s Java settings, according to Transmutable’s very clear instructions, and restarting Firefox), it worked very well. Later I’ll fire up my virtual machines with WindowsXP® and Debian GNU/Linux, and see how it works on them.