ZnU wrote:
> In article <VsCkh.30059$Rj.10342@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
> Lawson English <LawsonE@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
[...]
>> For some stuff, keyboards are essential. But for other stuff,
>> console-level controllers (which are getting more sophisticated all the
>> time--look at the wii wand controllers), will be quite adequate.
>
> For anything involving interacting with other humans at a level beyond
> shooting at them, keyboards are necessary. At least until voice chat is
> pervasive in interactive environments.
iChat conferencing apparently already uses H.264 compression. It should
be possible to limit which voices are sent to which person in a
conferencing chat based on how far away someone is within the VR world
so bandwidth issues and whatever else might look like a potential issue
here isn't really.
[...]
>>> (You'd need a centralized system to keep track of geography, I
suppose,
>>> but, then, mapping between coordinates in virtual space and specific
>>> servers is not conceptually very different from what DNS does.)
>>>
>> I see no reason why such content couldn't be displayed via MPEG-4. Did
>> you ever play the original Marathon game from Bungie? The game playback
>> was a QuickTIme file that basically recorded the player's moves, even
>> over a network. The codec itself was the actual game engine of
Marathon.
>> You could switch camera-views and even switch player-views while the
>> game was playing back and change the playback speed as well.
>>
>> It seems plausible that a Second Life-like codec could leverage MPEG-4
>> features from inside MPEG-4 itself and allow for the creation and
>> interaction of all sorts of distributed worlds.
>
> My reading of the do***ent you linked does not suggest the format is
> anywhere near flexible enough for this. Anyway, it's basically a
> container format -- how much sense does it make for live interactive
> environments (rather than static content) to be contained?
>
The BBC probably wasn't analyzing MPEG-4 from the point of view of
implementing some kind of EverQuest-like game or SL world.
Hmmmm... googling MPEG-4 game...
http://graphics.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~firebird/download/2001gtc.pdf
http://www-artemis.int-evry.fr/Publications/library/Tran-ICME2003.pdf
>> I can see an obvious interaction between Google Earth and Second Life
or
>> a meta-Second Life: The ability to travel quickly to foreign "lands" or
>> worlds or universes or dimensions or whatevers. GE allows you to see
>> progressively more details of the local terrain as you zoom in and this
>> would be quite useful for traveling from one virtual world/land to the
>> next. Web-surfing via geometric interface. Apple's old Project X tried
>> this, but the available graphics and bandwidth only allowed for clouds
>> of URLs. An extended version of Google Earth could allow you to
navigate
>> a terrain of the VR equivalent of URLs in a more entertaining, or even
>> more comprehensible way.
>
> It would be a gimmick, and people would play around with it for a few
> minutes and then never bother again. Seriously. We've seen all this
> before.
Maybe. However, the Second Life players are actually discussing this
kind of thing (using Google Earth or something like it with SL) in their
forums.
>
>>> [snip]
>>>
>>>>> What do you mean by 3D movies? You mean stereoscopic stuff? That's
>>>>> another gimmick that has never caught on, and if it ever did, you'd
>>>>> probably be better off with pre-rendered buttons anyway.
>>>> I was referring to the 3D space that MPEG-4 movies can (does?) render
>>>> into. Current MPEG-4 video uses MPEG-4 capabilities in much the same
way
>>>> Quartz uses OpenGL textures to draw windows.
>>> OK, but why are you going to use this?
>>>
>>> [snip]
>>>
>> Who knows? Usable distributed 3D media is still a chicken and egg
issue
>> because of the steep learning curve for the tools. And even when the
>> chickens are hatched, they're more like puffer fish: extremely tasty
(at
>> least for some) when cooked precisely the right way, but only a handful
>> of cooks have the talent and training to use them.
>
> I remember playing around with VRML 11 or 12 years ago. I can think of
> several significant web standards (Flash, CSS, RSS, etc.) that didn't
> even exist back then and are pervasive now, yet VRML has been almost
> completely stagnant.
>
> The tools are primitive because there's no good use case for the format,
> not the other way around.
>
VRML has given way to X3D which is the new basis for MPEG-4 3D scenes.
There's even an Ajax3D based on Ajax + X3D. I think that the situation
you describe is about to change. The current generation of low-end video
cards (even the built-in graphics of the Mac Mini!) are more than
capable of handling Second Life type graphics. X3D is an XML-based
language. I don't know that there is a binary version, but likely one
will be devised if the text version proves too slow for Virtual Worlds
use.
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