Multi-user virtual environments, part I

RELease 1.0, June 27, 1994 by Jerry Michalski

Imagine a version of Maxis, Simcity (Release 1.0, 2-92 and 6-89) in which you can inspect the town hall and discover that it is an active simulation involving people playing roles in a MOO. As they evolve policy or decide to test hypotheses, they feed variables and events to the outside system.

Imagine a virtual plaza or cafe where you habitually meet your friends at teatime. Some of those friends really are in high-tech cafes; others are behind their desks, sipping virtual cappuccinos. When they want to, participants can "step" away to a game of virtual squash or to the electronic mall. They can also go to a private conference room and work.

"You need multiple people to fill a virtual reality;

otherwise, all you have is a virtual space."

-- James Durward, Virtual Universe

Out of breath in cyberspace

In case these ideas sound outlandish, consider Heartbeat, a startup that is working to link games to exercise bicycles and inexpensive heart rate monitors -- and then to each other over ordinary phone lines, using hybrid modems that permit simultaneous transmission of voice and data.

The resulting kit, the Heartbeat Personal Trainer, could put some fun back into exercising. You might "fly" the Personal Trainer over a simulated Venusian landscape, with your craft's performance tied to your heart rate. If you slack off, you might just end up in the drink. Or a few new opponents, other people on their bikes, might appear on-screen, with competing scores handicapped for each person. Heartbeat has licensed hockey and golf games from Electronic Arts.

The best of all possible worlds

There are many possible worlds to design (see box, page 5). They can be nested and interwoven: the virtual cafe can have doorways to America On-line or the Museum of Natural History. But today each environment does things its own way, with the exception of the World Wide Web on the Internet. To make this work, there will have to be some agreements. It's not clear that everyone must describe places or objects the same way. This is a good time for actual and prospective service providers to open discussions on what to agree on to maximize connectivity and preserve diversity, with access to a robust, legitimate and ubiquitous transaction platform.

There are many different ways to represent, store, transmit and render virtual environments on multiple platforms.(1) The choices best suited to design and deliver a static virtual world that one user can browse may not be the best choices for a highly distributed, dynamic world in which many players meet and interact, especially if they can all create new spaces or objects at will. To complicate things, some of those objects might be programmed, such as feature-rich telephones, X-ray goggles or magic sneakers that allow users to fly over the virtual terrain. Some objects will be avatars that represent other people online. Some will look like other characters, but be script-driven user agents or droids.

Framing the (virtual) space

A concept space for multi-user virtual environments itself would require at least five dimensions to describe such aspects of each environment as the following: