Enter the Qubic Sphere — Or Build Your Own
There’s 3D all over the place these days. Its latest manifestation is Qubic Sphere, which bills itself as “the first dynamic, easy-to-use three-dimensional Web browser,” according to a press release. First? I’m not clear where the company has been for the last five to ten years or so, but it wasn’t There.com, Second Life or ActiveWorlds, apparently. Qubic Sphere president David Montour says, “While there are a few other products that enable users to open a small 3D window while on the Net, there is no other browser that allows you to be fully 3D and interactive with the Net at the same time.” Hmmmm. Qubic Sphere isn’t that browser either, but it is worth examining slightly more closely.
When I downloaded Qubic Sphere, it was impossibly clunky and laggy to use, so I’m not sure if you can click through the placeholder advertisements to reach company Web sites, but that seems to be the intent. Hard to tell, too, whether it’s a multi-user environment. And there’s very little in the way of documentation or privacy assurances.
The thing is, this kind of thing is a vague signpost of the future. Qubic Sphere is actually a virtual environment built using an FPS (first-person shooter) engine, probably made with a tool like FPS Creator or Garage Games‘ Torque engine. It was clearly thrown together very quickly, and it seems as though it does actually work, if fairly crudely.
The point is, though, that it’s easier to cobble together your own corner of the virtual world than most people think. I could easily imagine someone on an FPS server using one of these tools to throw together a social space that quickly became a blindingly popular destination on the Internet. Now, Cory Ondrejka of Linden Lab would no doubt argue that a couple of bedroom programmers could never put together something as robust as Second Life, and he’s right — almost. But remember that the most popular online action game in the world, Counter-Strike, is a user-created mod built atop the Half-Life engine. Remember, too, that the Internet and the World Wide Web didn’t catch on and grow after a company built them out and then introduced them to the world. They grew organically, with their users adding destinations and functionality along the way.
I’m obviously going to be waiting a long time, but I think the metaverse won’t truly start to take off until building a 3D online space is as easy as putting up a Web site. Corey Bridges at Multiverse has the right idea in this regard, letting users build their own virtual worlds, any of which can be accessed through a single client. I’d argue the metaverse needs to be even more open than that, although this won’t happen until we have some kind of metaverse protocol similar to TCP/IP, which is the glue that holds the Internet together.
Meanwhile, I’m hoping we see many more experiments. Are there any social FPS spaces out there already? I wouldn’t be surprised to hear there were. Send news if you’ve been hanging out in one. Second Life may be the hottest and best virtual world out there at the moment, but we still have a way to go before we really reach the metaverse, I’d say. Maybe we never get there in the end, but it’s certainly an interesting ride.
Feeds
> Are there any social FPS spaces out there already?
Sure, there’s the Pussy Cat Doll Lounge, which uses the Torque Engine. Seems to be a pretty easy tool to roll-your-own virtual world with. There are enough Torque developers out there that assembling a small team wouldn’t be too hard, if a solo effort was out of the question. The PCD lounge (and therefore the Torque Engine) seems capable of supporting more simultaneous users in a single area than Second Life, but it doesn’t seem capable of supporting a true MMO space.
Well, the Lounge isn’t FPS though, right? Isn’t it third-person?
I guess what I’m really looking for is the grassroots 3D social space, like the Unreal Tournament map that someone has built for him and his friends to just hang out in between matches on other maps.
And the thing is, “a true MMO space” will never encompass the entire metaverse, right? I’d like to see interoperable spaces on many scales, as well as a few walled gardens here and there.
Of course there is Gary’s Mod which lets you do all kinds of fascinating things with Half Life 2. One could create there own “level”, essentially a sim, and invite their friends to come hang out. I don’t think you can jump between servers which is what would be required to hop around levels and meet other people but perhaps a mod for that is not out of the question.
So while I’m not a part of the Gary’s Mod community and have no idea if anyone has created a grass roots social space it certainly seems achievable.
Mark, my recollection is that you could go into FPS mode in the PCD Lounge, but I could be rememebering wrong.
As far as ad-hoc socialization in FPS games goes, I’ve seen that happen alot. Sometimes there’s no action and all chat. Or the action is just a side-effect of being in gamespace.
While I’m thinking about toolkits, there also Virtools, which is a dev kit for all sorts of 3D games, and includes a multiplayer server aspect. It can be used as a stand-alone or web-based application.
ah, didn’t realize you could go into first-person in the Lounge, thanks Tony. And thanks for Virtools ref, I don’t think I’d heard of that one before.
Walker, in what way can you really characterize There or Second Life as being “browsers”? They aren’t “browsers”. They don’t browse. You go into them with a log-on, and while there are a few things that link to the Internet now, I hardly think you could qualify these worlds as “browsers”. They don’t go anywhere but into themselves pretty much.
Very true, Prok. But I see the two converging as time goes on.
I am spending some time exploring the Entropia Universe, built on the game engine Gamebryo. All links in my EU wiki page here:
http://uvvy.com/index.php/Entropia_Universe
EU started as mainly a shooting game but users are (slowly) beginning to use it as a social space and a VR venue for “serious” activities, especially in new in-world places such as Club Neverdie and New Oxford.
Thanks for the pointer to the Loungs, I will check it out. Did not think you could achieve that with Torque. Tony, if the Lounge can support many avatars in the same place, in which sense you say that “it doesn’t seem capable of supporting a true MMO space”?
The Multiverse approach (using one application plus ad-hoc plugins to access all MMOG built on the platform) is interesting and a step in the right direction. But I think it should be “using one application plus ad-hoc plugins to access all MMOG - full stop”. In other words, a full 3D version of today’s web, where you use one application (IE, Firefox, Opera etc.) with appropriate plugins (flash, svg etc.) to access all web pages.
And of course this can only be done with a common open standard, so perhaps the X3D approach is the best (we used to say the same things at the tme of the late lamented VRML). Of course, developing mature X3D tools and content without losing too much performance wrt proprietary solutions will take its time.
G.