The River of Life

I have released my new virtual reality world, The River of Life.

This is a Hindu influenced world of temples made of design information I found on the web and in some cases, textured from photos. I have tried as best as I can within my limited understanding to honor the Hindu religion of which I am a sincere admirer. Not having been born Hindu, I cannot be Hindu but I can love the light I see in the faces of the devotees. Ekam sat. It centers around the goddess Saraswati because she is the goddess of learning and of music, both the central themes of my life. I am always her student and doubt I shall ever become more, but that is quite enough.

This world was created because of a woman I met many years ago who practiced her faith with deep devotion giving me a painful but very necessary mirror when my world view and my faith were being stripped away and reborn in her luminous eyes.

To Mrs. Singh: This is to repay your kindness to me and and to honor your unfathomable beauty born of your love of God. The light within you both enlightens me and gives me joy to this day and those that follow. Namaste, Alka ji. Shukriya.

I’ve applied several animation and sensor techniques to make this more fun to move around in. There are also poems attached but you’ll have to find them. The rule of thumb is to click on things that move. Over time, I will hide more cookies.

Turn on your speakers or put on your headphones. The world is an experiment in animation and sound to progress toward what I call an “immersive album”. Real-time 3D spatialized sound combined with real time 3D visuals provides unique ways to combine motion and sound sources such that the music mixes depending on settings and one’s location in the world, or the objects one is near. I am just scratching the surface of this new unique art form. For this world, I used samples of Hindu musicians for reasons of theme and because raga-based music is very suitable for this application given its basis in scalar constructions (ragas are scales) over Western-influenced harmonic construction. Think loops if you must, but really, it is a matter of how distance and motion combine to create ambient sound in virtual space just as it does in meatspace. For download bandwidth reasons, these are 22khz mono samples and not very long. Because 3D sound is spatialized, stereo is redundant.

If you want to visit The River of Life, you need a VRML97 conformant browser. I use BS Contact. You can download a Contact browser at http://www.blaxxun.com. I suggest version 6.1 or higher. Since I will later convert this world from VRML97 to X3D format, the new version of the VRML language, you may want the Bit Management beta version of Contact (7.n). Note that it displays an irritating floating logo that will try to take you to their site if you click on it, and is otherwise a nuisance. But free is free.

Once you have the browser, I highly suggest you go to the VRMLWorld site and download River of Life into the lobby function of that chat server. It is great fun to tour one of these worlds with friends in multi-user mode as can be provided by Rick Kimball’s ABNet software. This link will take you there.

http://vrmlworld.net/abnet2/indexc.html?x3durl=http://home.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/rol/riveroflife.wrl

I will register this world there soon and I encourage other VRML builders to do the same so that we can create a true metaverse that is open to both authors and the public without paying rent. I never liked rental property. It builds no equity for the tenant. Besides, the VRMLers invented virtual reality on the web and ought to get a bit more boo for it. The press only notices big investments so Linden Labs gets a lot of press these days, but VRML looks better and it is free to develop. I suggest we pick up the prize.

Some notes for the newbie to VRML:

In Internet Explorer, VRML plug-ins are usually Active-X controls. Because of the EOLAS lawsuit, you will get the annoying security warnings about scripted content. Select the option in the yellow bar to accept the content. It is scripted but it is safe.

This is not a small download when it first starts up due to the heavy texturing and the sound files. So it is good to have broadband but if you are still on dial-up, expect about 10 minutes of downloading. I have not compressed the files yet (I will) so that those who like to poke around the code quickly can. If you take things and use them, please give propers where due. That is the only way any of the VRML artists can afford to share their code to ensure the growth of the art. Otherwise, it’s all going to be binaries.

Because scripts start to run as they download, you may open up in a foggy world or not. The fog will go away when the skies change. The skies are not synced to the time of day. They just change. I am having fun with these and may make them more natural over time, but why bother with virtual reality just to make it more real?

If you are not familiar with VRML, you can get a menu by a right click in the window. This allows you to select viewpoints and to select your navigation mode. In WALK mode (the default for the world) with gravity enabled, you move following the ground. In FLY mode (more fun ) whatever height you are at remains the height until you collide with something; then you will climb to its height and remain there. This mode is good for jumping off tall buildings or hills with a single bound. More people like to fly than don’t. It’s the brachiating monkey blood in our genes.

Viewpoints in VRML worlds can be jumped to using the right click menu or by using the PAGE UP/PAGE DOWN keys on the keyboard. Some viewpoints are animated and you travel with the object to which they are bound. Try clicking on these but if you move away from them while bound to them, you will fall to the ground unless you have set your browser to FLY mode. You will begin to hallucinate that you are being pushed through the Earth where the view is very strange. 

This has been a long haul project. I’ve been working on it on and off for ten years. I’ve received an enormous amount of help in the last few weeks from the VRML community that always pulls together and helps out when a new world is being released. Many many thanks! You are still the best online bunch of crazies and artists on the web. Inside the world, there is a WorldInfo node that gives propers as due. Other artists have been leaving samples up for people to use for a decade now and I’ve incorporated and adapted some of these. That beautiful sun is Paul Hoffman’s work from our IrishSpace project. Chakor and Chakori are Robert St. John’s Dove from his Temple of Love project that was released as a sample with the V-realm Builder editor (sadly no longer available).

To build this world, I used the V-Realm Builder, Professional File Editor and the demo of Internet Space Builder from ParallelGraphics. These are old tools but they do a good job when one knows the language.

I hope you enjoy The River of Life. It is purely art for art’s sake which is fun for fun’s sake. As my mentor in VRML, Paul Hoffman used to tell us, “keep on wrl’ing”.

cheers,

len

The Elves and the Shoemaker

God exults in creation. Give voice to this.

I read that religion is a pernicious practice that is ultimately bad for the mammals. I dispute that. It seems to me that anything that brings them together in hope and joy as fellows is ultimately good where it is not a means to suborn their spirit to some other cause. The small country church is often the center of a community, the place where they come to raise their families, try to set good examples and find in fellowship relief from the torrid political climate of work and economy. I’ve never worked at a job that gave as much cheer or wonder as I find at the church and I am not exactly a devoutly formal worshipper of any faith. I like the company and I like the way they handle themselves in that setting. That’s all I need to know about it.

Last weekend the children performed “The Elves and The Shoemaker” at church. Even small country churches build community halls with stages any civic center would be proud of these days. Where city facilities would be too expensive and sometimes too dangerous given their locations in city centers for keeping and corralling 30+ small ones in full dudgeon, these church centers are better secured, adjacent to the sanctuary and kitchens, so safe. When working with children, safe is a major consideration.

I was asked to write and record the music for the show. Most of the time my music is composed for myself or my band of the moment to perform, so when it is performed, I am inside that performance. It is a different experience to sit anonymously at the back of a theatre and watch others perform my composition or act their roles while it provides the emotional space within which they perform. I quite like it. Children don’t know when something is hard. They only know if it makes them feel good. When the tiny 14 year old soprano was given a piece written in 5/4 time that my professional trained soprano friends gasp at, she just stepped out and did it beautifully. When the ballerinas spun on stage to the short ragtime, they were amazingly funny and precise. As all the smaller children who were the elves tittered through the shoemaker song, “shoes made by elves are REAL NEAT”, I realized this experience is an infinitesimal glimpse of what it must be to be the creator of a universe, to create an emotional space within which others can feel and share their feelings. That joy is inexpressible.

God exults in creation. Give voice to this.

Flipping Out Over YouTube and MySpace?

Considerable press is being devoted to the YouTube purchase. Some press is being devoted to the falling numbers for the last flip-up darling, MySpace. The web developers and their investors are beginning to see that the web did not change the dynamics of the entertainment industry any more than it made business frictionless. Entropy has a way of shaking its finger in the faces of those who accept the proseletyzing pundits pronouncements of the next new thing being somehow bigger better and newer than the last new thing. The dynamics of business are determined not by the distribution channel but by the reasons for the transactions themselves.

1. YouTube provides content of a different quality than MySpace. As long as it can provide that, it can grow. The dynamics of user-generated video and the long tail of talent determine its limits. The long tail will cause stars to emerge and their longevity and productivity will determine the stickiness of YouTube.

2. Teens want to be alone as much as they want to be in company. They are the most fickle audience of all as any musician or actor can tell you. Sites like MySpace may evolve into business sites just as high school get togethers evolve into business oriented cocktail parties. Corporations have more reasons to create and keep conversations going with the same people than teen-agers do.

3. The objective of a site builder is to drive enough traffic to a site to make it worth purchasing for several orders of magnitude of its development value. This is precisely the model of pop music and for exactly the same reasons. Some sites are one-hit wonders that are worth visiting for a summer, and others last for several decades.

What happens? The big dollar buyouts are the blips not the recurring peaks of the purchasing cycle.

The flip costs will be reduced proportionally and will evolve toward the same kind of deals made with bands for points where the initial investments don't go straight to the pockets of the band but to the producers, in this case, the VCs. To make the big dollars site developers will need the kind of legal help that enables them to renegotiate their contracts after they prove the sustainability of the traffic to the site just as music lawyers renegotiate with music labels after the third platinum album. Until then, the developers live on subsistence wages just as the bands do with million selling hit songs and just enough money to get to the next gig.

Reinventing HTML 2.0

It will be interesting to see if many care about this and who they are if they do. In some ways, this flurry coming from the W3C stalwarts is the reality test of the continuing or discontinuous relevance of the W3C to the evolution of standardized web systems on the Internet.

It is possible that without much fanfare and little notice, the control of web evolution has passed back to the industrialists who quietly sponsored it and insisted on its primacy in major acquisitions. At least in the USA, those institutions passed into the control of MBAs from B-schools whose dominant computer literacy is with spreadsheets.

So the question is, can spreadsheet-augmented intelligence fix the mess made by Tim Berners-Lee et al with the launch of HTML and the Mosaic web browser if Sir Tim and the W3C can't?

This will be fascinating to watch. The mammals are relentlessly innovative in their messmaking and the means they deploy to clean it up or to avoid cleaning it up. In the latter, the well-financed announcement is usually something to the effect that the mess is actually a clever, simple solution and simple is always preferred.

In technology and politics, the best approach is always slow and steady with diplomacy preferred and guns kept unlocked but loaded.

A Faster Horse

In an article on mastering complexity while innovating, Henry Ford is quoted as saying, "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse."

In the quote is the dilemma of innovation for companies that use surveys, product planning, consultants hired away from their customer base and like strategies. It is expensive and it doesn't work reliably. Over the years, the best results I've seen come from those who talk to the customers casually. This accomplishes what the article recommends: you get to understand the heart of the customer.

The devil in the stone is getting developers to trust those who do talk to customers and getting those who talk to customers to translate that faithfully. In commission-driven sales environments, that is tough to achieve. In any management suite where numbers and the promise of numbers drive the day to day operations, it is almost impossible.

A colleague who was a field representative to a major American city related that sales efforts for an account with that customer were doomed because over lunch she had heard the decision maker relating to another co-worker that our company wasn't even being considered. We took that information to management who promptly discarded it as gossip because a consultant had assured them that our company was indeed the front runner. With that positive relationship spinning, we went on to spend a very large sum of money and company resources on a bid that we did lose just as our field rep told us we would. Why? No one believes bad news when hope marries propaganda. Numbers are often just that: propaganda from the management suite. See Iraq.

Another problem is incrementalism. After our new General Manager made her reputation for being 'customer-focused', development became saturated with requests for product changes. In the past, development could decline these as non-strategic, meaning they added no value for the majority of the customers. Under the new GM, technology didn't matter. Keeping customers happy so they wouldn't generate bad press did. Once the customers understood that, bad press and liquidated damages became the topic of every conversation and of course, we slipped further behind the broad market requirements and deeper into the technology chasm because we did not have the resources to rapidly educate ourselves and develop new products.

Filtered views and closed doors are barriers to innovation. It is one thing to say we are listening; it is another to actually hear what is said. Understanding requires patience in conversation and that means time. Those who are ‘time-sensitive positive relationship managers’ can open their doors to their employees or their customers, but they will only hear what they think is important, and then they will demand a ‘faster horse’.

To solve problems like these, more conversations need to be had with more of the players most of the time. Companies need new ways to talk to customers often and casually and at every level of the company. Blogging companies know this and they are wining in the market. They understand that there is no such thing as an inward facing and outward facing set of communications. That strategy is the buggy whip of today. In a network-savvy company, ALL communicators face in ALL directions ALL of the time. That they may not use them is apparent, but they have them when they need them.

Blogs are one means but blogs tend to be ‘one guy on a soapbox talking loud and gathering a crowd’. That is fine for topics that require depth, but the hints the lead to understanding the heart of the customer are typically discovered in casual conversations. For that the web offers chatrooms.

Chat rooms have a mixed reputation given the problems of Ally Oxen Come Free chat rooms that are the majority on the web. Corporate chat rooms are a different beastie. They are corporation sponsored and corporation hosted. They can have corporate policies just as corporate bloggers heed, and they produce server logs that can be mined. While this flies a bit in the general wisdom that less control is better, and it usually is, a corporate chat room is not a public web site. With the right technologies, it is also a corporate communications center, a branded face on the corporate conversations, and can be a means to show off products new, old, and emerging.

An innovation for this is to move the corporate chat world into a virtual world using free and relatively simple real-time 3D technology such X3D and ABNet. The advantages are exactly as promised: presence and branded identities for customers, employees and press. As long as the conversations are casual, the encounters unhindered, and the style is entertaining, these corporate 3D rooms can serve as a place of fun, familiarity and business without the bar tab.

It is a cheap experiment to conduct given the available technologies. Given these technologies can be applied to other customer needs, it is also a cheap means to move a company up the learning curve fast before the spreadsheet nazis can send out a memo or tell the customer that this technology is ‘just a toy’. When the Macintosh and the PC were introduced, they were also ‘just a toy’. Virtual worlds like other innovative technologies need time to find their markets, but the potential for them to be a means to understand and find markets is already there.

Why Not X3D on Macintosh?

A colleague says, "… until someone makes a decent player for the Mac, you'll never see all the amazing content created on a Mac in the VRML world. You must realize that most high end content is created on Mac. 90% of high end Hollywood 2D and 3D content is for sure. Besides, even if most of the world owns PCs, pretty much every "creative" I talk to about VRML is on a Mac for their real work and they all wish we had some decent players for Macs.”

Snob. ;-) Let me be my curmudgeonly self...

Really. X3D is not a high end format and VRML wasn’t one when it started. Lots of creatives are on PCs, but more importantly, the vast majority of web customers are, and that is what the web as a marketplace is about: customers. Savvy creatives adapt to the customer base. Hollywood is not that customer base. It is a high end production town with high end developers. If they want to put content on the web, they adapt to the web or they adapt the web. It won’t happen by promoting Macs unless the Mac becomes a TV the way iPods became transistor radios.

I’ve never seen a decent Mac VRML client. That is the point. If Apple owners want them, they need to bug Steve Jobs. He built a closed system and is satisfied with his high-end developers and architecture. If he wants to put 3D on the web, he has to develop a client. If he wants that client to be standard on the web (something Apple isn’t famous for doing in the majority of cases), he steps up to the web standards for 3D or does what he always does: launches yet another closed system, in this case, Safari’s canvas tag. Who gets to see that? Safari users who own Macs. PC owners? Jobs doesn’t care about PC owners.

That’s the problem of the Mac vs The Web. Job doesn’t have to care about Mac content or Mac customers; he owns them both. iTunes is a splendid example of how well that strategy works. It took him all of two years to slam the doors on indie musicians and production and open them up to the middlemen. He managed to reconstruct the BadOlMusicIndustry with lightning speed under his control.

And that is what you want for X3D content and the 3D user community?

Say anything you like. That is how the Apple market shakes out. PC owners just don’t care and never will. They can’t. It would mean giving up their chance at the Big Break to The Man from Cupertino.

If Mac owners want X3D, they can demand it. They are the customers but they have to demand it from the boutique dealers where they buy the rest of their stuff because the guys selling commodity products know full well that Macs ain’t commodity products. And they never will be because that isn’t what Jobs wants to sell or else he would be Bill Gates. Talk to any Mercedes dealer about Fords. Who invented the car and made it the best it could be at the time: Mercedes. Who put the masses on the road? Ford. Who took the market away from them both? GM. Why? Smarter than both at both jobs. Who took it from them? Toyota. For the same reason. Who’ll take it next. Who knows.

Would production quality X3D editors and viewers for the Mac result in high-quality X3D? Heck yes, but it will only happen when the boutique content makers decide they want to sell lower-cost knock-offs at Wal-Mart.

That day may come sooner than some think. The web-based portals are becoming gazillion-channel broadcast networks. YouTube is a fluke the way that HTML was: a low end access point to lots and lots of content but that matters. Over time, people want more and better and new and different and eventually in any flat-market a talent longTail begins to rise up and dominate the landscape. It’s sad for the rest of the talent community when that happens, but competition is a reality of markets. As that point is reached, Hollywood and their evil zombie cousins in New York, Atlanta and Nashville will do as they’ve always done: dominate the management of the talent by paying them lots and lots of money. And then they will all buy Macs.

Web business sustainability evolves toward controlling the sources for resources just as any commodity market differentiated by limited sources does. This is where Radar O’Reilly and Mark Cuban lose it with the ‘real sharing’ riffs. At the point of maximum uncertainty, forces are applied to hold an object in orbit. $$$ is the strong force. Egoboo is the weak force. Guess which one wins as the customer locale expands in reach and scope?

So would it help X3D quality if the professional Mac talent began to work on X3D content at night when they aren’t working for the moguls? Sure. But meanwhile, the web is the land of opportunity for the hobbyist and the visionary and the deeply irrationally persistent junk yard dogs that just won’t lie down or roll over when told to.

Unless given a bit of petting AND a treat. A pretty enough dog always gets both because dogs will be dogs.

3D is today where the video tape market was when the owners of video stores discovered that storing more tapes on low-rent shelves sold more rentals. Who were the losers? Makers of boutique art films. Who were the winners? Pornographers and major releases. The difference is major releases stayed the same, but porn quickly became much better porn.

That is how the long tail actually works: the best get the point and the rest get the tail.

A War Lyric

War is only understood by those who fight one. The rest of us are witnesses.

My Son's Time To Go

Two men stood on the platform
Watching the train pull away
In the diner car their only sons
Waved goodbye that day.

One was going to Canada
One to Vietnam
Two fathers sharing wordlessly
Sorrows yet to come.

Two men fought in another war
And served there side by side
Not for flag or apple pie
But to keep each other alive.

Their sons grew up together.
They tried to raise them right.
Now one would go to speak his truth,
And one would go to fight.

No one knew if they'd come back.
Their Momma's cried and prayed.
Goodbyes break the brave and few
When a father has to say:

"Son, just fight the good fight.
Be true to who you are.
Don't try to be a hero.
Your faith can take you far.
Though I've been there and I came back,
I want you to know
How proud I am to be your Dad.
It's my son's time to go."

A soldier returned to an angry world
His cousin was standing in line
Among some far-out people
"Singing songs and carrying signs".

The grunt Marine put out his hand.
The hippie shook his head,
"Man, I don't think I know you."
The soldier wearily said,

"Kiss my ass. I'm not proud
Of all the things I've done,
My country called. I had to go
To a war that couldn't be won.

I only want to see my Mom.
If you'll kindly step aside
I won't call you 'family'.
Remember that I tried.

I went to fight the good fight.
I was true to the cause I served.
I lost my friends in the Mekong,
But I never lost my nerve.
Peace and love and all good things
Have a price, they tell me so.
I paid that price, but I'll be sad
When it's my son's time to go."

Two men stand by the window
Watching a plane pull away
Ferrying their only sons
To a place they wouldn't say.

Thirty years without a word
These men have lived apart,
Now one holds out his palsied hand
To the one with the broken heart.

"Will you come to my house, please;
So, we can kneel and pray?
The Lord will keep our sons alive
And bring them home one day.

Peace and love and all good things
Have a price, but I didn't know
How sad I'd feel to be his Dad
Now its my son's time to go.
How sad it is to be the one.
It's my son's time to go."

len bullard
10/26/1006

Virtual Worlds with ABNet

I've been looking at the products available for real-time 3D chat worlds. While Blaxxun continues to be the commercially licensed leader, other vendors are stepping up to provide communications servers and hosting. Today I am looking at ABNet from Kimball Software. The main man at this company is Rick Kimball. You can click on this blog title to go to the VRMLWorld site and play with some sample worlds in their chat windows. It requires an Active-X control and as usual, thanks to our dear friends at EOLAS (#@#@$), you have to accept the control using IE.

I'm running on a 56k dial-up here (yes, Virginia, some of us still do), and had no problem running these worlds. However, I was the only one in there so this is not a very good test. For those who want a low-cost/no-cost approach to building 3D chat worlds, ABNet is a good place to start and may prove to be a commercial survivor. The site describes the software thusly:

ABNet is a communication framework that happens to let you create 3D multi-user chat worlds. It isn't limited to this application but 3D chat shows its flexibility. The communication framework of ABNet provides an asynchronous low-latency publish and subscribe environment using XML messages.

The communication server of ABNet is written in Java allowing for deployment on any platform running a Java VM. The client side of ABNet uses Javascript on an HTML page to turn a single-user VRML or X3D world into a Multi-user Virtual World environment. 3D Avatars can interact and use shared events to provide a virtual experience much like the old blaxxun community platform. ABNet is the software that powers http://vrmlworld.net

ABNet can be used to build your own chat site that uses very little bandwidth. It is feasible to run a 3D chat site from your personal computer.

The software supports both the Contact 6.1 and MediaMachines browsers.

Some useful URLS:

Forums:
http://vrmlworld.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=118

Setup the Software

http://vrmlworld.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=105

Download the current ABNet 2 ActiveX client from here:
http://kimballsoftware.com/abnet/abnetclient2_002.exe

Download both the client and java server from here:
http://kimballsoftware.com/abnet/abnetserver2_002.exe

XML Knitting and Stitching

At the XML conferences I attended that Lauren Wood organized, there were walls of XML cross-stitching and knitting. I wondered about that until I was sitting here for the first time in a while doing some XML data design work for a new project.

Developing XML data systems is like knitting and stitching: it is only tedious if done for hire. When done for a topic that one has a passion for innately, it becomes a relaxed passion.

I'm not an expert, but I suspect that this relaxed passion is one reason that many knit and stitch to relax and others can relax when they do data design work on documents with content they love. It is satisfying to work with the threads one loves for passionate content.

The real-time memory that captures this for me is Lynne Price at SGML standards meetings knitting her dogs' hair. That was an ultimate expression of making structure from the threads of the universe productively and passionately.

Stuck On Standards?

Stuck on standards?

When it was ISO, it wasn't a standard because it wasn't the W3C. When it is ECMA, it isn't a standard because it came from Microsoft.

The not so deep but ever abiding truth about standards is that either some group of self-selected companies and individuals are or are not making money applying technologies conforming to some standard or specification. The right or wrong of which organization produces the standard was forfeit with the rise of company-organized and pundit supported consortia such as the W3C. When these groups began to pillory existing organizations such as ISO and burgled the standards they had produced shifting both the center of standards activities by nations and the leadership in favor of the individuals so inclined by their own careers and goals, they derailed any chance that the Internet would evolve toward fairly constituted groups in favor of their own.

That set the rules by example and everything that has followed has followed predictably and logically from those examples.

So how does a company, agency or individual choose among the offerings of these more or less equal offerings? By doing what has been working successfully since HTML and its siblings were offered: select by the size of the following. If one is using Microsoft products and the majority of one's peers are using Microsoft, use the Microsoft specifications and standards. If one is using Sun products similarly, choose what Sun supports.

It quit being about fair and balanced for all parties when the XML Working Group and ERB blew off ISO in favor of their own self-selected parties. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree. Any XML can be transformed into any other XML with some degree of loss. That was the promise; this is the outcome.

Sad, but so. Quit whining about it.

How To Beat YouTube

Here's a challenge: build a GUI for a sign event system (code list dispatcher in the scene and in each avatar) selectors that can route the code to any and all objects in the X3D scene.

The problem of X3D in the current technical offerings is the very large gap between authoring intelligent geometry and scripting scenes in it.

Character-building should be be simple variations on code lists of avatar-gestures that are reacted to differently given the avatar's interpreter (event behaviors).

The authoring system tool should enable a high-level character builder that sets emotional ranges coupled to ranges.

The avatar is not a passive reactor. All events/links aren't inbound; the avatar as an actor is seeking events and will navigate towards clusters containing the search terms in Topical Vector Space (the vectors among the terms in the XML metadata create clustered attractors). Where locations in geometric space contain these terms, the avatar navigates toward it or away from it.

The DeepGeeks will note that these are both Hamiltonian coordinate systems subject to the same transformations. In energy terms, the search term clusters act as attractors. Create a search set that returns the demographic desired and it pulls the search engine to the location. The world metadata (searc terms) is pulling the search engine, therefore, the avatar toward it. While this is trivial in terms of search engine ad placement support, it is non-trivial in creating a real=time situation comedy.

That is how you beat YouTube.

Darkstar Works With X3D

As it turns out, X3D can be applied with the DarkStar server kit. Aaron Bergstrom [Aaron.Bergstrom@ndsu.edu]answered on the X3D Public list:

Yes, X3D can be deployed through Darkstar.

Immediate Mode Interactive (www.imilabs.com) is developing an X3D-based game engine called Cosmic. I refer you to the Cosmic Blog page: http://cosmic-game-engine.blogspot.com/

I demo'd IMI's Cosmic Birdie video game based on the Cosmic game engine at the X3D Tech Talk - Siggraph 2006. All the content in Cosmic Birdie was created using RawKee, the X3D exporter for Maya.

IMI demo'd Cosmic Birdie using the Darkstar server in the Sun booth this year's Game Developers Conference.

If you look through the Darkstar documentation you'll notice that Darkstar supports HTTP requests for communication, so theoretically, it's probably possible to use the XMLHttpRequest/Ajax3D techniques outlined by Tony Parisi (http://www.aja3d.org/whitepaper/) to do multi-user environments with Flux and Darkstar.

Of course, licensing is another issue. And they last I heard from the IMI guys, Darkstar is still in the development phase, though supposedly, Sony has some sort of arrangement with Sun to deploy Darkstar as a game server for the PSP. I have no idea about the current status. You may want to check out the following URL: http://www.projectdarkstar.com

The Cosmic Birdie demo is available through the darkstar website.

Aaron

So free-to-develop server software and open source X3D clients using AJAX techniques can now be applied to serious games (think training and scenario generation). There is a nice startup opportunity here or several.

A key thing to remember as Eric Maranne pointed out on the X3D list: don't sell syntax and languages. Sell applications. But the development costs are shifting away from licensing costs to server hardware and personnel. Figure out how to live within your means there, and as the DealNews guys proved, you can start and sustain a company long enough to become profitable even in the face of bad times (which BTW, times are good right now).

Project Darkstar

Wow! THIS is pretty dammed cool. Sun is building a shareable server and tool system for games with five 9s reliability. That is awesome.

When I worked for public safety, we loathed to guarantee five nines for mission critical real time dispatch systems. Five nines is awesome for massive multiplayer games.

Two of the reallyDumbMistakes made while I was in that field are worth relating. The first was having two Development VPs in a row stating that real time 3D was of absolutely no interest to the company or to the public safety market. (Actually, the dumbest was a former company president making the absolute statement that XML was only Microsoft FUD and in no way would affect the public safety market, but I digress). The second reallyDumbMistake was a decision made with the formation of an Innovation Team charged with getting new ideas into Development. One of our senior staffers boasted proudly that when the first batch was submitted, they quickly eliminated any that mentioned games.

A few years later, a major and very significant RFP for public safety required the application of the XML 3D standard application language, X3D, in a game simulation environment for massive multiplayer training. Of course, the company had to license code from two developers in France just to get started because a "leader in spatial graphics technology for fusion of real time information" was caught flat footed.

Now Sun (Notice, Sun, not Microsoft that is twaddling along with the public safety industry) can provide THE key component for these serious 'games'.

And so it goes. It will be interesting to see if X3D clients can use the services of Project Darkstar. Given the open source Java implementations of X3D toolkits, I'd be surprised if the answer is no. If so, there is a very neat opportunity for some of the public safety vendors to get a fast leg up on their front running competitors.

Lead By Example

Let's take this out of the comments.

http://news.com.com/Colin+Powell+urges+corporate+philanthropy

General Powell gives a good speech. I watched a video of this speech when he gave it to my last employer's conference in Orlando. Just a few points in response:

1. If the corporation is making the claim and receiving the credit for philanthropy, the donation needs to come off the bottom line: corporate profits. Since stockholders tend to object to that and rebel against executives who are generous in this regard, this doesn't happen often or in quantity.


2. That leaves employee contributions. We are all familiar with the scene where the office geishas send out memos asking us to contribute to some charity in a city where our company wishes to do future business. We've all heard the speech from the guy representing the PAC of a favored local politician and seen that after the employees contribute, that guy gets a very big promotion. We are familiar with the math of large bonuses for executives based on performance numbers built on employee-contributed hours of unpaid overtime while these same executives tell us that the company can only afford a 2% raise for those who shouldered the burden of the miraculous turn around.

So it really comes down to picking someone's pocket in these corporate initiatives unless contributions are matched in kind by all and by percentage of income. Otherwise, the next time the call goes out for these contributions, tell them that you are happy to do your community work, but that you will donate where the branding of the effort does the most good: give at church. Advancing the career of your minister seldom increases his or her income, career potentials, or customer base. It just goes to where it will do the most good with the least claims.

And if your employers subtly or overtly insinuate that contributions and company-brandable effort are required for consideration of leadership potential, do as the subject of the cited article, General Powell, did when faced with such: seek other employment. That is the hallmark of leadership: lead by example.

It's Good To Know. It Feels Like Me.

Being unemployed is scary. Being unable to find work would be a lot scarier. Scary can be good though. I'm out finding gigs to play. So far, so good. It seems my kind of act is back in vogue. There are all of these little coffee shops and new classy joints opening in town, and they are all looking for the soiled smoky voice sound that too many years of screaming over the top of electric guitars produces, except they want it over the top of an acoustic guitar so they can talk.

They're conversing. That's good. It's a sign of the times. I've seen this before. This was the mood when I was 18 and first playing in the bars. There was an unpopular war on then, trust in the government was low, and there was the sense that maybe people should stop watching the news and start talking to each other. Culture is marvelously adaptive. Businesses and art somehow blend into the need for a place to talk, furnish the sounds, the coffee, the magazines and the comfortable chairs. This possibly scares the lunatic right wing fringe. It should. It means common sense is overcoming fear, one coffee at a time.

Here is something personally neat for me. I'll quote it and those of you with some understanding of the Southern music scene can relate:

From: Dbluebird@aol.com [mailto:Dbluebird@aol.com]
Sent: Monday, October 09, 2006 2:51 PM
To: cbullard@hiwaay.net
Subject: Re: [BlueBirdCafe Calendar Request]

>>Do I need to audition again to be included in the rotation for Sunday Writer's Night?

Len,

Though it's been 10 years since you played on a Sunday Writers Night, you scored well enough not to have to audition again. Just call any Tuesday - Friday from 11 AM - 4 PM to rebook on a Sunday.

-Fran (Bluebird Cafe)

It's good to know. So, May 13, 7:30 CST, back to the Bluebird with three original songs and no chatter. It is the scariest gig in the world for reasons you'd have to be a solo songwriter/singer to understand. And one of the best.

Scary can be good. I may be unemployed, but I'm working, and yanno, it feels like me again and that feels good.

The Mean Drum

Most nightclub music pros can tell you about gigs where the crowd is large, the drinks are flowing, the dancers are frenzied and heat and humidity push them all to a sort of madness. At that point, a band can choose to mellow them down for the trip home, or push the beat harder and louder. I call that pumping the Mean Drum. The drummer snaps as hard on the snare as he can and we play sounds that are as raw and fierce as flesh and electronics can emit.

If we play the Mean Drum, fights break out either on the dance floor or in the parking lot afterwards. Experienced bands don't do it. They've paid the price for it in smashed gear, broken jaws, and occasionally sending a mate or friend to the hospital or the morgue. At the point of that kind of crazyiness, we play ballads, turn down, or end the performance. It's just smart.

In America, for the last eight years, we have been pumping the Mean Drum. Yes we were attacked on 9/11, but it started before that. It's been a dominant beat in American society for years.

If we continue to beat the Mean Drum, mean is all we will see and experience.

Look at the rise in social violence lately. Society resonates like a drum head and all of the other drums in the kit resonate with the snare if it is pounded hard enough. This pushes the edge cases closer to and off the edge.

Then students shoot principals, psychopaths shoot young students, and so on. We saw this same movie towards the end of the Vietnam era as the political rhetoric ratcheted up the 'us OR them' thinking. Accepting it as a norm of modern politics as both Cheney and Clinton suggest we do in the Washington Post article is not only dumb, it is social suicide with the innocents sacrificed first on the altars of egomania and the lust for power.

It is time to quit beating on the mean drum. As we learned from the early years where all we used were email lists, ignore trolls and they go elsewhere. Laughter is still the best medicine. That is why the most important political pundit for today's youth is Jon Stewart. That's a clue.

The More Stuff You Own

The more stuff you own, the more your stuff owns you.

It is the undeniable fact of modern life that we obsess over what we have, where we got it and how big a space we have to control to keep it. We work longer, harder and consume more than we thought we ever could when we were 12 years old and believed a well-read comic book collection was the ultimate expression of our mojo.

Cultures are classified by the stuff they throw away. Ask any archaeologist and they'll tell you their careers are made by digging through ancient garbage dumps. So your fame after this life is defined by the garbage you dispose of. Consider that the next time you and your significant other are arguing about keeping Great Grandma's piano that can no longer be tuned and therefore played. Maybe it is time to memorialize her in the museum of greatness: the local town landfill. At least then you could start on your own memorial by purchasing the spinet the family down the street is keeping in their minivan because they've run out of room in their four bedroom split level with the unattached garage and 3000 square foot basement.

I've read that an American Indian tribe had a custom where members would give away all of their stuff and start over. Today we call that a garage sale and get more money to get more stuff. Garage sales replace malling as one gets older in America. They say the richer we get the more we obsess over quality stuff but corporations have to spend billions every year tearing down malls that are less than ten years old and rebuilding them to keep us coming to shop there. Do you replace your garage in the same location that often? No. You have a garage sale but you rarely sell the garage so it can be hauled away and you definitely never give it away. Somewhere in the function of trading stuff for more stuff, real economics take over.

Except for the uber-wealthy in America. They are the biggest garage sale buyers in all history reflecting a culture that has found it can buy and sell anything except taste and a reasonable government.

If you can get to Christies' next week, you can buy original parts of the Star Trek set (original series) although Paul Allen already owns Captain Kirk's chair. Someday maybe Paul will have the world's highest quality garage sale.

And so it goes.

DealNews! You Rule!

I went to a fun job interview today. To understand why, you have to understand that unlike Silly Valley or Vain Vancouver, I live in one of the hearts of Eisenhower’s military industrial complex. Some interviewers and interviewees wear clothes that at their most liberal would be conservative-gotta-meet-a-client Monday in Silly Valley. Targeted selection questions modeled, scored and integrated into a politically-correct and technically empty script determine rat fir color to confirm that one is the right kind of rat fit to be on a team of rats who have spent more time obtaining degrees than time spent with their spouses or children.

Cheese, please?

Today, I was interviewed by a real web company. woooh... It reminds me of the first West Coast conference I went to after years of East Coast conferences. The differences are profound.

This was not a startup. These middle school buddies started in a garage ten years ago a few doors down from where my much older middle school buddies used to hang in their bedrooms hooking Christmas tree lights to a stereo and listening to the Allman Brothers while swapping the wisdom of the Furry Freak Brothers. These guys hooked up MACs, learned to code, and built web pages. They didn't go for venture capital. They budgeted, invested and published. They found a niche, survived the dot.bomb, stuck to their business plan, implemented LAMP not because it was cool but because it was everywhere they needed to be, and hired an accountant who doubles as an office admin.

They offer you a Diet Coke before they get around to brewing coffee, have machines sitting next to the office door and office furniture stacked against the wall because they need the space to spread out and work, and otherwise, remind me of garage bands that play their axes, sharpen their chops, record their originals and make it happen while having a helluva good time together. They build multi-platform web pages and enable their customers to buy office equipment cheaper and faster. In other words, without a deep sales teams, planning committees who write studies, scads of ads, moribund meetings and polyphonic professional e-mails, they provide a service and make a profit.

SWUUUUHHH! Take a deeeeeep breath....

It was humbling. I'm not web-ignorant and I certainly have been on the pioneering end of some stuff, but I've never had the moxie these kids have, and that is why they have a successful company interviewing me instead of the other way around. They are completely the opposite of the dour sour greedy little buggers I'd come to know in other circumstances. The guys who interviewed me today were ALMOST apologetic that they were still building their own tools, didn't have ASP.Net, didn't need it and had no intention of buying Ferraris with their first millions if they could buy more gear for their business. They laughed, carried on, swapped stories and all the while asked questions one needs to hear to know this is a serious business but not a religion, a pipe dream or an ego trip.

It was a breath of fresh air.

I may not get the gig but I hope I get to visit with them again. It's good to smell ambition mixed with sweat equity and hard headed practical programming chops instead of meetings drenched in lattes and sarcasm. I've seen a few bands like this web company. They were the ones who made it and kept it and enjoyed it. They take their angsts to the skateboard park rather than the shrink. They succeed the old fashioned way: turn, burn and return.

Hey DealNews! You rule! Thanks for a great morning and the Diet Coke and the cup of coffee!

Feeds and Seeds for Thoth

Tim Bray posts http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/09/21/Atomic

That is worth a read if any of my ex-company colleagues are keeping up with this blog. I suggest you follow his link to that review he cites by a US agency. It is a thorough piece of work and relevant to your product lines.

I promised a blog on targeted selection techniques. A good friend gave me some literature to review and I will post that blog when I finish the review. It's an easy system to game but interesting in what it sets out to achieve.

Getting Credit: Fight for It

Tim Bray writes that WikiPedia is trumping other more authoritative resources. I've noted this myself some time back and have been commenting on the effects of PageRank since it was introduced on XML-Dev and elsewhere. Inbound linking is a popularity contest. It doesn't confer authority. It confers perception. Perception is NOT reality. Reality requires sustainability. Let me give an example.

Kurt Cagle writes a blog on XML and eXist. He uses a comparison. Should he cite others or can one assume the idea, once out in the wild, can be claimed by anyone? Is it plagiarism? (I'm not accusing. Kurt is a friend. This is just an example.)

http://mailman.ic.ac.uk/pipermail/xml-dev/1998-August/005720.html

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/xml-dev/1397752

http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200602/msg00130.html

Those are three of a number of hits in order of idea emergence provided by Google and I suppose, PageRank. What does this mean?

Credit isn't just about 'showing up'. It is about checking sources. This is why PageRanking works and why it doesn't. In the end, you don't have to be 'given' credit; you have to fight for it. I mentioned some yerars ago on XML-Dev that a program that abstracted ideas from various sources and did a thorough comparison against all published resources would yield a different history of the sources of the ideas than are commonly accepted. Given the potentials in our ranked search systems and overreliance on the web, it's time the search vendors developed such a utility. It would answer a real need and might be a competitive discriminator if the definition of 'authoritative' rougly equals 'original'. It doesn't but that's a different discussion.

Credit is sustainability. Sustainability trumps authority.