Open Community

Diamond Park was first deployed on the SGI platform. It was exhibited at COMDEX '95. Since then, Mitsubishi Electric ITA's MERL and HSL labs have brought Spline technology to the PC through the Open Community effort.

From The IEEE Spectrum, March '97
Reproduced with permission.

To explore possible uses of a distributed virtual environment (DVE) for leisure, learning, and work, a group of researchers and artists at MERL, Cambridge, Mass., created a prototype DVE called Diamond Park in 1995 using the Scalable Platform for Large Interactive Networked Environments (Spline). Accommodating both bicycling and social interaction, the DVE was designed as an amalgam of landscape park, village, and World's Fair covering an area exactly one mile square. Besides its visual details, the park encourages live conversation and is rich in audio effects, including birdsong, music, and sound effects cued by particular actions. (All images in this article are screen captures of live action from Diamond Park.)

One of the first things a visitor sees when entering the park is a colonnaded structure.

Situated high on a virtual hill, its three-dimensional tabletop map helps orient park visitors, who can move about the park in two ways. Those who ride an actual computer-controlled stationary bike see the park on a wide screen where they are represented by avatars riding bicycles. Others use mouse-keyboard inputs and a regular computer monitor; they appear as avatars on unicycles. Both groups use a headset to talk with each other and hear the park's audio effects.

Moving into the park, they come to an open-air cafe whose ambient noises include jazz and the clink of china. There they can stop to chat, maybe practicing a foreign language with a visitor from another country.

Two visitors on unicycles overlook the park from one of the peaks surrounding it. The figure standing near them is a 3-D model, added by the designers to lend a populated feeling to the park even when visitors are widely scattered.

The salmon-colored building is a velodrome, which can be reached by hover-bus. The bus driver is a bot--a character controlled by a simple program--that stops the vehicle to take on and let off passengers, all the while delivering a patter about the park's sights.

Inside the velodrome, a sports-official bot in a black-and-white striped shirt asks entering bicyclists if they would like to race on the Olympic-sized track.

With more programming, this bot could be made to act as the starter (once he has assembled a group of competitors), keep track of each racer's time, and declare a winner. Race statistics could also appear on the scoreboard on the wall.

If they decline to race, visitors on the customized stationary bikes can simply ride one of the many paths through the park, talking with each other while enjoying the park's other sights.

Or, they can tackle an obstacle course [middle], whose obstacles can be repositioned to suit the rider; leaning to the left or right on the stationary bike steers the on-screen rider around the pylons.

If more vigorous exercise is wanted, visitors can enter the Desert House [also the glass structure seen from afar in the image at the top of the page].

The Desert House's steep hills, although only virtual, create realistic physical effects for bicyclists. As visitors ride up a hill, the pedal resistance on their computer-controlled stationary bikes increases, giving the riders a thorough workout.

Those touring Diamond Park may encounter several "entertainers." The checkered fellow standing on his hands is an automated acrobat, a software construct that owes its extensive repertoire of animated tricks to software from Boston Dynamics Inc., Cambridge, Mass.

Software-based joggers and baseball players are also common in the park, and visitors are encouraged to bring similar "friends."

To explore some of the non-Euclidean possibilities of virtual space, the park's authors created the futuristic Outer Space Building, which from the outside seems relatively small.

Nevertheless, visitors entering the building find themselves on a platform [bottom], looking out at a vast universe of orbiting, rotating planets, complete with astronauts who drift weightlessly through space. Cosmic electronic music is a finishing touch.