Curious Raven

In the early 90’s, Virtual Reality, or “VR”, began to get a lot of attention. Sure, the idea had been around for a while, and plenty of people were working on it to some degree or another, but like the Internet it really started emerging into the public eye in the early 90s. I myself got my first job in the “industry” working at a virtual reality arcade game company in Louisville Kentucky called Alternate Worlds Technology. I have lots of stories about THAT, but this post isn’t going to go there.

The appeal of VR was immense. Our imaginations ran wild with visions of cyberspace, immersive worlds where you were really there and the sheer potential of the technology was almost overwhelming. I remember reading a lot about different groups doing research or working on varying VR projects, but we felt like we were way ahead of the curve…we were doing multi-user VR. Sure, the graphics were terrible, the head-mounted displays were very heavy and bulky, and there were a host of other problems, but we were working on it. We were digital pioneers blazing new trails in entertainment and technology. The first game I ever designed was Cybertag…a multi-user virtual reality shooter. It was pretty awesome for the time.

Anyway, the big Achilles heel of virtual reality was that it was born too early. The internet was barely hatched, DOS and Windows 3.11 were the main operating systems, VGA (no hardware acceleration) was the limit of graphics, and you were doing good if you had a 486/66 computer. I don’t want to get into a history lesson here, or talk about the golden age of 1990 to 1997 (give or take), but technology (hardware and software) could not keep up with our imaginations. VR died “on the vine” quite quickly. You can still find some of the early VR celebrities hanging on to their glory days, having never moved on.

Virtual Worlds (VW) had a similar history, and a similar fate. If you look back, you can see the ground littered with virtual worlds of all types, most of them terrible quality, poor design, or build on old ideas and technology. Even worse are the lost millions and millions of dollars that were carelessly thrown at the “potential” while ignoring the practical. VR has never really recovered, and VW nearly died as well, except that its cousin, MMORPGs, caught on.

I’ll get to my point about augmented reality (AR) in a few minutes. A massive amount of money has been made on MMORPGs, and this will not stop anytime soon. Of course, vast amounts of money are still being foolishly invested in MMO companies controlled by people that have no idea what they are doing, but they have a lot of skill in acquiring money, so that will go on. Many people will lose their investments…which means that the good ideas by smart people will continue to be unfunded, and medoicre crap will keep being released to the market. Still, money will be made. The masses want MMORPGs and they will pay for the best they can get (regardless of how bad it is). 

As MMORPGs have made a lot of money, social networking has caught on (even though this is old news to most of the game and virtual world industry), and now a lot of attention (and money) is being thrown at virtual worlds and those “blends” of virtual world, social networking, and mmorpg. These are usually low tech browser based things targeted at kids and young teens. While the biggest MMORPG on the block has more than 10M users, the biggest social gaming virtual world (MapleStory I believe) has over 75M. So, everyone wants on that bandwagon and the flow of money is going in that direction. What people are missing (because they are focused on the NOW, and not the short term future) is that by the time these newly funded ventures are ready for release, that huge 75M number will be ready for more adult content. Massive opportunity for a smartly designed MMORPG in three to five years time I think. 

Anyway, I digress. This blog post is about Augmented Reality. In the last six months or so, augmented reality has emerged into the public view and you can almost plot the growth in the number of youtube videos, press releases, reviews, blogs, and so forth talking about Augmented Reality. Intel, Nokia, HP, Harvard, MIT, HITLabs, Total Immersion, University of Cambridge, UNC, Alcatel-Lucent, the list goes on and on. Everyone seems to be doing *something* with Augmented Reality right now.

The feeling of Deja vu is unmistakable. I have this tangible sense of history repeating itself. As VR was in the early days, so is AR now. Everything I have seen is interesting to be sure, and the potential is incredible…surpassing VR and possibly the world wide web in terms of scope and degree of change it could bring. But the thing that worries me, is that everything I am seeing reeks of novelty, not practicality. There is no vision, no real innovation, no real eye-opening technology or application. I’ve seen a few things that made me say “wow” but nothing that elicited a “OMG WOW”. 

I predict that what has happened before will happen again. There is still some time for things to percolate and gain some momentum. With Gartner calling augmented reality one of the top 10 most disruptive technologies coming soon , and Intel’s CEO spending his keynote speech at CES 08 almost entirely on augmented reality, it is just a matter of time before some Silicon Valley “suits” throw together a business plan, grab $50M and blow it all on some weak uninspiring AR application that launches with the fanfare of a dead roach on the kitchen floor. This will be followed up by someone else with a better idea or maybe a more all-star executive team, but with the same results. A few startups will find a measure of success and eventually get acquired, but ultimately, the industry will miss the boat again, and AR will go the way of VR for at least ten years.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again…the tech sector has lost its creative spirit and sense of American innovation and excitement. Nearly everything since the dot com crash has been a rehash of something old or some minor improvement. What does it say when the big “stories” are myspace, youtube, and facebook? Are those really billion dollar companies? Did they really develop something new and incredible? Did they advance technology in some fashion? No I don’t think so.

But I’m getting ahead of myself again. Back to AR. The potential of the technology is exactly what everyone says it is and will be. It can accomplish much of what our early dreams for VR could have done. One of the key differences is that the world is different. Computers are everywhere. They are fast, they can create incredible digital vistas and near photorealistic worlds in real-time. Our grandparents are blogging and sharing videos. IPhones are *everywhere*. High-tech has gone mainstream. The potential of AR can be realized now if someone simply brings together a vision, a team, a plan, and reasonable funding. There is so much that AR could be used for…it can be a total game changer. Nearly every industry can be changed radically with the right application of augmented reality. Am I the only one thinking about this? Vast riches await those that seize this with the right idea and approach and find funding enough to bring the first version to market.

My complaint is that I’m not seeing much (if any) vision out there and funding is extremely difficult to grab hold of unless you are really well networked and live on the West Coast (say what you want, but the East Coast VC community has a completely different mentality). In my own efforts, I either find that people simply do not grasp it (they don’t “get” virtual worlds, MMORPGs, or VR either), or they fear the risk so much that they are happy to remain “in the loop” but have no desire to be involved until someone else is either. I’m beginning to find some traction and people that do “get it”, but this is never an easy or fast process. This atmosphere is not conducive for the visionaries and the risk-takers that could change our lives for the better. Vision needs inspiration, funding, and believers. Lack of funding and lack of believers is a millstone around the neck of an entrepreneur, innovator, creator, visionary.

Even with all of my gloom and doom, there is some glimmer of hope. There are still people out there that hunger for innovation and have deeply ingrained ambitions to do, to create, to accomplish, and to inspire. To change the world.  I’m one of these people. Watch what I am going to do. It is going to be pretty damned cool.  The others like me have been hiding for a while, having suffered our own defeats or failures from the dot com crash (being an entrepreneur takes a LOT out of you, especially after a failed venture). The younger crowd has reigned supreme lately (web 2.0 cough cough), but there is an awakening happening right now. I’m seeing it on blogs and on twitter and in small techpreneur meetups. I think things are going to percolate for another year or two, and then WHAM, another cycle will start. We will move away from the weak business models, vapor tech, and community advertising masquerading as “social networking”. The innovators will come back…augmented reality, semantic search, meta-data, clean power, and advancements in medicine, farming, artificial intelligence, and so many other areas.

We must find our spirit again and leap into the unknown. There are risks to be sure, but we should not shy away from them as we have over the last decade. Find a visionary and fund them. Help them build their plans and cultivate their teams. Too many great ideas are being passed over for the mediocre and the safe bet.

Is it any wonder we still do not have flying cars? Or that we have not returned to the moon? 

Don’t let go of your ideas and your dreams. Hang on tight to them and never give up. Network. Then network some more. Refine, rewrite, revise, and recreate. Make your idea better, put it through the crucible. Then network again. Keep at it. The greatest visionaries, inventors, innovators, and leaders of history all faced failure at one time or another, and they all suffered through the soul-deep trials and sleepless nights it takes to give birth to something wonderful and life-changing.

Ok, thats the end of my late night rant. It didn’t quite work out like I was planning, but it is a decent braindump I guess : )

I attended the NASA MMO Workshop on Monday in Baltimore. I have a few comments on it that I’m going to post here, but first, I want to point you to my blog post over at killtenrats.com  There is a lot of misreporting about the NASA RFI/RFP and the project in general, and I thought it would be better to comment on that over there (more traffic hah).

Anyway, my overall analysis is that more than half of the attendees simply did not pay attention to either the original RFI, the website, or even the slides shown at the workshop. I guess everyone was expecting NASA to cut a fat check to fund a whole MMORPG and get a free ride. I was surprised at how few people there still seemed excited and full of ideas by early afternoon and the sheer amount of whining and complaining people who just didn’t get it. Not really shocking I guess if you have had any experience working in the industry. I complain about the stupidity a lot, and there is good reason for it. I’m not just being bitter, I speak from experience.

So, if you can look beyond the misinformation and all of the “space cadets” out there, the NASA MMO project is actually a pretty sweet opportunity for the right company, consortium, or team of people. 

I think the larger picture here is the chance to do something entirely different than the usual generic crap the game industry has been feeding us, and really make a difference. It isn’t every day that you get an opportunity to get deep access to NASA like this for one thing…and second, Space is one of those things that has a vast potential to really captivate the imagination. If done right, NASA and their partner could have a real blockbuster on their hands, as well as the chance to really make a difference and inspire kids and teenagers to aspire to greater things.

It won’t take $50M or $500M to make a solid successful MMORPG, and there are probably a dozen non-game industry companies that would be more than happy to join a consortium and provide funding…for either a percentage of the royalties, or simply the chance to contribute to a worthy educational effort (tax deductible maybe? or purely for the PR?).

The big risk here isn’t the business model, or even the graphic engine, but rather how fun and engaging it will be. There are half a dozen ways to approach this (I have my own ideas here, and yes, I have a team that is submitting a proposal…we welcome any interest in partnering from developers, publishers, or aerospace companies interested in funding)…the trick is to make it fun and engaging without *directly* teaching (no one wants homework right?). Also, scripted repetitive quests are a no-no. While there should be some guidance and direction, there has to be an equal amount of “sandbox” and freedom to experiment. And finally, the winner here will have a easy to use intuitive suite of tools that any educator or game designer wannabe can use to make their own content, missions, whatever. 

Facilitate! Learning will occur on its own in the right environment with the right content. Don’t shove it down the player’s throats, and make it fun.  I guarentee that the market is actually larger than just high school kids, particularly if it is designed *properly*.

Maybe we will get lucky and my team will get a shot at this. We have been building a killer platform (for augmented reality, mmorpgs, virtual worlds, and simulations) that would make this NASA project just SING. Seriously. I really want to talk more about the tech, but I can’t (at least not yet).

Ah well. Soon enough my friends, soon enough.

I’m going to be out of town for most of the next two weeks. I’ll blog more when I can.

Apparently Linden Labs, the creators of Second Life, have gone out and filed a trademark on the word GRID. For you virtual world folks, the word implies a lot of things and is usually interchangable with a number of other cyberspace related words. Anyway, I don’t have a problem with LL getting a trademark on “Second Life Grid” which is usually how it is presented but to try to trademark the word grid by itself is pretty damned cheeky. Personally I find it offensive, insulting, and unfair. They might as well try to trademark cyberspace, web, network, polygon, avatar, pixel, link, and a few other generic terms that are common words, terms, and phrases used in the virtual worlds sector (which includes your standard virtual worlds, mmorpgs, and simulations).

I’m pretty disgusted with this.

I’m beginning to sense a bit of desperation from Linden Labs these days. Their CTO left recently, and their CEO has decided to “step down” in the near future. The media backlash against their unrelenting PR in late 2006 through 2007 (studded with misleading and disingenuous stats about their active users and subscribers) is continuing, and SL is handicapped by many problems that don’t seem to be going away anytime soon.

I think that Second Life would have died a long time ago, but for the fact that there is no clear competitor. Sure, there are places like there.com or whatever, but Second Life has bent over backwards to wrangle a lot of big name corporate sponsorships and virtual presences, and catered to the explorer and tinkerer types. Of course, there are a lot of virtual world experts, luminaries, entrepreneurs, and researchers that have found a home in Second Life. To be sure, SL has been valuable to a lot of people, and to some degree has validated virtual worlds in business, research, education, and online collaboration.

But I still think that the Emperor has no clothes, and the SL house is a house of cards that is very shakey. The first company that comes along with a better offering…more functionality, streamlined performance, better features, etc. will marginalize SL and dominate it, much in the way that World of Warcraft came out of no where and smacked down most of the MMORPG industry (not to worry, that gorilla is getting old and someone will knock them off their throne soon enough).

Anyway, I don’t want to get too far into an anti-SL rant here (at least not without doing it comprehensively and backing up my opinions), but their desire to trademark grid is crossing the line and just one more straw on the camel’s back.

After an “unveiling” at the Game Developers Conference this week, Emotive Systems is making a lot of waves in game industry press and it is starting to crest into the mass market media.

Here are some samples of what people are saying about “Emotive Epoc Neuroheadset”:

“It was the hottest thing on the show floor and people were shocked.” (here)

“Startup Emotiv Systems is hoping to crack the code on human-computer interaction with a unique technology, based on “unfolding” the cerebral cortex (here)

“…World’s First Brain-Controlled Video Gaming Headset”  (here)

There is more but I don’t feel like linking it all. 

The emotive technology is nothing more than a lightweight and cheap EEG (electroencephagraph) that measures electric signals in the brain. This technology, used in interactive applications and games, has been around since the early 90s. I myself had hands-on experience with at least two systems around 1995/1996. The cool one was controlling a skiier going downhill.

The technology doesn’t read your mind. Do I need to repeat that? It doesn’t read your mind. It doesn’t connect to your brain, and it has no idea what you are thinking or feeling (press materials notwithstanding). What it does do, is measure electric signals, of which there are different types, locations, and strengths, that can be assigned (think key binding in your favorite FPS) to particular inputs.

So yes, it is absolutely possible to use this tech to do basic control of a game, but not much beyond that. You have to learn basic biofeedback techniques (breathing, concentration, temperature, and brainwave *type* generation) which is fairly easy to do with a decent feedback loop and sensitive equipment.

One of the things the technology is not suited well to, is movement. That is, getting accurate signals when YOU move around. Even flicking your finger fires off electric signals in the brain, and this can confuse or overload a typical EEG…this is why when you get your brainscanned (been there, done that) you have to stay completely still. Now, you might see the Emotive guys demoing their tech and moving around while doing it…that *might* (I don’t know, I haven’t seen their stuff first hand) be indicative of sensors that aren’t that sensitive, and the massive electrical impulses generated by movement might be needed to be registered. This would actually be a good thing, particularly for living room-based games on a console that require jumping around playing air guitar.

Their ability to measure “emotions” is a little high-tech fakery as well. They aren’t reading your emotions at all, but they are measuring verious signals generated by your body that change during different emotional states. Remember mood rings? Same thing. The electrical conductivity of your skin changes based on a number of emotional and psychological factors, as does your temperature, and a gazillion other factors.

All in all, the big thing to take away here, is that the Emotiv headset is a simple EEG that works, is very cheap (finally), and can be used as a gaming peripheral. I fully expect some VC to go nuts over this and throw a lot of money at them, but I caution you…this type of technology has a very high risk of becoming nothing more than a fad…remember the nintendo virtual boy? The Emotive headset can be used as a controller for just about any game (and I mean that in the loosest sense of the word) but what it really needs is a killer app (game) designed specifically for the interface. This is the same challenge that the wii had with its unique controller. You MUST have games designed specifically for the technology. Do that, and the market will adopt it much faster and you gain a lot of ground in avoiding the pitfall of becoming a gimmick or a fad.

PS, I would suggest releasing a free or opensource SDK. Let the innovators and hackers get their grubby hands on this and let’s see what they come up with. I’d like to see some easily accessible motion tracking tech out there as well (no, not limited infrared stuff like the wii…I need 360 6dof control!).

Seriously people…the reason we don’t have flying cars, true brain interfaces, and a massive virtual universe that is directly integrated with reality is because it is so damned hard to get funding to innovate or do R&D. Everyone is too busy trying to throw billions at things like myspace, youtube, facebook, etc.

Anyway, congrats to the Emotive folks…but don’t buy the media hype. 

Maybe it is just me, but my experience has been that most people I talk to don’t have their own websites anymore. Instead, they have a page on myspace, a profile on facebook, a gallery on deviantART, items for sale on EBay, or they have a blog on one of the hosted blog communities (like wordpress or blogspot). In a similar fashion, gamers usually have distinct characters in multiple MMORPGs (and not always the same class or even gender).

One of the problems that everyone faces, is trying to manage all of these identities and profiles. It is a real pain in the neck creating a new account on the latest social networking site (fad!) or some other website. In the Web 2.0 world, there are a few options for creating an ID once and using the same login for other places, and a few social sites make it easy to import your basic profile data or even entire friends lists (sometimes even sending out email invites to everyone in your address book).

In the virtual world sector (including MMORPGs) several ideas have been bandied about concerning avatars that easily migrate from one world or game to another (where you create a character or avatar once and use it anywhere), and some virtual world platforms boast the goal of breaking down the so-called “walled gardens” to create hundreds of thousands or millions of virtual worlds…one for every user.

This sounds good on paper, but I wonder if anyone is considering problems this approach naturally creates, particularly given the social and psychological natures of humans.

First, I should probably define what a “Walled Garden” actually is. The term, particularly in regards to the internet, refers to an exclusive or proprietary environment or community that is “closed” or that requires membership of some type. AOL is a good example of a walled garden, in that you had to be a subscriber to access most of its content, and the whole thing was pretty much setup as a network within a network. For MMORPGs, each of them is, by definition, a closed garden. You need a unique client application to access the servers and game network. The client handles everything from rendering the world’s graphics to acting as the interface for chat and gameplay interaction with other players. You cannot use the client software from one game to access the virtual world of another game.

There are more than a few benefits to the “walled garden” approach. A few examples include security, management and moderation, contextual consistency, advanced features, “uniqueness”, easier access to the flow of traffic of other users, etc. etc.

The problems are also plentiful, but generally ignored (or perhaps unrealized by designers and evangelists?). To help make my point, let me go back to web communities and social networks which are all technically walled gardens at one level or another.

• Ease of use and content generation

It is easier to setup a profile on any given social networking site or a hosted blog than it is to setup a server, register a domain, and set it all up yourself.

• Easier to network and find traffic

It is deceptively simple to do a basic search and find friends that are already on a particular site, find new friends with similar interests, share just about anything, and so forth.

• There is a strong sense of community or belonging

While the strongest feelings of belonging are based on smaller social circles, being a member of a particular site or community can engender similar feelings (even if they are very subtle or subconscious).

Remember, these are walled gardens…supposedly a bad thing in the minds of a lot of experts in virtual worlds, cyberspace/metaverse, etc.

But what are the problems if everyone can have their own virtual world? This is the same as everyone having their own website.

• Traffic is harder to find and drive to your site. Without an overarching and all encompassing community or world, you basically have to use the entire internet as the replacement. Instead of being able to leverage internal stats, tracking, referrals, and other features and functionality, you end up trying to compete with everyone on the web for attention.
• Client and Server applications must be open and freely available. The lowest common denominator wins the day for the greater market saturation and standardization. All content must be as simple and generic as possible for a truly open metaverse/internet. As soon as you start having to worry about downloading billions of modules, extensions, or versions so you can access one location over another, you realize that this misses the point, and it becomes a turn off for a lot of market share.
• Open = unregulated and unmoderated. If anyone can make an avatar or character that can go to any virtual world or game, it becomes an imbroglio of issues to sort through when e-commerce becomes involved, not to mention hacking and security headaches. Sure, this isn’t an issue with the internet so much right now, but we are talking about webpages, not immersive worlds…this is a whole magnitude of difference in complexity and elements.

The better approach, I think, is a walled garden of many gardens. Yes, I think that at some point there will be a truly open and ubiquitous platform that is pretty much ungoverned and the transition from web 2D to cyberspace 3D will occur, but I think it will quickly denigrate into chaos and become a useless mishmash of crap. The true successful ventures will be the massive ones that are indeed a walled garden, but are also composed of nested worlds/gardens. You belong to Myspace, but you have your own unique page that you can customize to your heart’s content…but ultimately, it is moderated and controlled by Myspace.

Maybe I’m drawing too much of a distinction over what might be nothing more than a fine grey line. I dunno…I just think that trying to make the whole internet into an open (in all senses of the word) 3D universe isn’t the great idea that it sounds like. While I don’t like the idea of one company pretty much owning and controlling the virtuality that we have been dreaming of (particularly if it isn’t MY company), I think that this is exactly what is going to be required, at least in the interim of the next decade or so to push the industry forward, establish the standards, build the market, and so forth. Also, at least as far as MMORPGs go, making them all so generic as to allow characters to move from one to the other seamlessly is a really stupid idea. Then again, most of the titles coming out these days are virtual copies of each other in the most generic way possible, maybe it isn’t so bad…after all, they are starting to look alike, and you can find the same old static quests, missions, creatures, and classes in each one. Perhaps I’m getting bitter in my cynicism.

I feel like the voice in the desert sometimes…I have a clear vision of how things could and should be done, what the missing pieces are, where the convergences of various technologies needs to occur, and how to build “IT”. But the money flow keeps going towards the same ideas, the same people, and the same failing models…both in design, business, and execution. I’ll say it again for the hundredth time…where are the pioneers, innovators, and dreamweavers? Ten to fifteen years ago there was a tangible sense of excitement in the air and new ideas were constantly being explored and pursued (not just in the internet sector mind you). Now? It seems like the only exciting thing is another social network, another mobile phone, another way to shove ads in your face, or another MMORPG that is more static and single player oriented than a truly immersive world full of engaging experiences and a sense of wonder.

One way or the other, I’m going to shake things up (or at least get a damned good start at it) this year. 2007 was pretty crappy in many respects, but 2008 still has promise.

Yes, you will see me using “hybrid”, “convergence”, “adaptive”, and “evolving” a lot this year. Good stuff is coming.

PS: Yes, I realize that I sometimes ramble my way through these blog posts. Most of them are brain dumps and they aren’t intended to be edited and polished articles that follow a strict outline. So, if I need to clarify something, or I missed a point, feel free to comment or email me.