Open Community Exhibit at Siggraph '97

The Three Apps

We are pretty busy making Open Community itself to make much new to go in it. And except fro the nearlife folks, we are not much at content development. So for Siggraph, we cobbled together three different sets of applications and content into a single virtual environment:

• We chopped out a piece of MERL's Diamond Park: The Desert House. Frankly, the entire Diamond Park model, which was originally built as one locale, was just too big to render as one piece on a PC at present. So we carved out the Desert House, converted the models rather routinely to VRML 2.0, and converted the terrains to the new format of Open Community (we made the y,z orientation change to conform to the VRML spec). The Desert house has a central mountainous area for hill climbing exercise for walkers or cyclists, or you can just hang out and watch the pteratactyls.... don't worry.... they're fed regularly and really don't bother folks without food in their hands. Noisy brutes, though.

  Diamond park content was originally authored by John Barrus, Stephan McKewon, and Ilene Sterns for the SGI platform. Adaptations to Open Community and VRML 2.0 were done by David Anderson and Bill Yerazunis, with special thanks to David Rataczyk for his work on the unicyclists and the terrains. Model conversion tools were either freeware off the net or homegrown.

   

• Our friends at Nearlife, Brian Knep, Henry Kaufman, and Tinsley Galyean (and we understand some of Tinsley's close relatives) made the Nearlife Disco. You can get there either through the central transporter, or over that creaky bridge in the northwest corner of the Sculpture Museum near the duck pond. The disco is the real fun spot of the exhibit, and we can put your face on an avatar and you can dance (probably much better than you ever danced before) with some of the beautiful people there. The Nearlife folks did a great job with the content, but their taste in music sucks rancid pond water.

  

• The SchmoozeShop Sculpture Museum is a place where folks can build sculptures using VRML primatives and enter them into the virtual world for all to see, and in real-time to boot. Even, more than one person can work on the same piece at the same time. We also have a Softimage plug-in that allows us to use that tool to make and edit content (this really isn't all there yet, as we only started making the tool interfaces about a week before the conference. It sort of works in a crude fashion. Anyone have a VRML to Softimage converter plug-in?). Many of the sculptures here in the park move in strange ways and you can ride them if you like, so take a spin on the broom or wear the droog's hat . . . if you're into that.

  The ScmoozeShop application was originally conceived by Bill Yerazunis and Evan Suits, and built by Evan. The museum content was built using Fractal Design's RayDream Designer by Bill Lambert, with ideas, animations, and integration by The Evil Derek Schwenke. Sam Shipman is the keeper of the Open Community audio when he isn't busy working on the core, and Bonnie Boyd made the SoftImage plug-in in about a week or so, and began it just a week after starting with us.

   

The Avatars and Movers

The power of Open Community helps application builders bring life to their virtual worlds. As long as they have designed their app with an interface to the Open Community world model, then any avatars with any movement scenarios can exist together. Few if any existing platforms can be inclusive of such flexibility, which is a major reason why some folks from the Universal Avatars group like Open Community a lot.

In the virtual space of this exhibit, we have three different avatars: the highly articulated Nearlife dancers, the speedy unicyclists, and the rather dumb (but cute) alien gnomes. Each has a different UI for their control, and each has different capabilities (or deficiencies, depending on how you look at it :-). The nearlife Directable Characters (tm) can shimmy and boogie with Salt 'N' Peppa, but they can't ride the pteradactyls. The unicyclists have to stay on their vehicles, but they can easily outrun any of the other avatars. The alien gnomes don't do much but blink, but they're the only beings in this world that can get off the ground.

[Actually, a fragment of additional power becomes evident due to the inability of the SchmoozeShop browser to render transparent textures (ah... it's borrowed and we don't have the source to fix it). When a nearlife avatar is seen through that browser, we just substitute a non-textured avatar object. It's rather ugly, but shows we do have the potential, if not for ourselves, at least for our avatars to be all things to all people.]

Movers (we call them Dynamic Simulations when we're being formal) are relatively simple programs that manipulate objects in the virtual world. In this exhibit, you can see a broom, a derby hat, Jimi Hendrix' guitar, a flying bone and oribiting planet, a stupid looking duck, an egg about to hatch, the Mitsubishi logo, and a flock of pteradactyls, all animated by very small programs with very low computrons. Message traffic for the moves is kept to a minimum due to a smooth motion mechanism that is part of the Open Community core, where only a start and end point, a trajectory, and a time are needed to set it off. Derek Schwenke programmed the complex dance of the Mitsubishi 3 diamonds in less than a half day (or it would have been a half day if he stopped playing with them).

It is this program based model that we believe in, and we think it does dovetail well with the present needs of applications developers. We actually doubt Open Community solves all the virtual world's problems, but we do think it works well enough to start to define them.