ZnU wrote:
> In article <u9Ukh.30282$Rj.15756@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
> Lawson English <LawsonE@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
>> ZnU wrote:
>>> In article <VsCkh.30059$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.
>
> Probably for WoW-type games where most of the content is stored locally
> this is true. For Second Life type environments, where geometry and
> textures get streamed, bandwidth is going to still be an issue for a
> while.
>
So no content is stored on the client side?
> Are there headsets for consoles?
I would think so, especially for the latest ones like Xbox 360 and wii
>
>> [...]
>>>>> (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'm really not seeing anything particularly compelling there. Maybe
> MPEG-4 might gain some traction for the sort of simple little games
> people presently implement in Flash. This isn't exactly going to be a
> major shakeup.
Eh. SOmeone created a demo of one of the 1st person shooters using X3D
that is supposed to be pretty snappy. Uses DirectX/3D so I can't test it
(the concept of an open source "cross platform" project that requires a
proprietary library is a tad odd, IMHO.
>
>>>> 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.
>
> Sure. Just don't expect people to use this kind of thing as a substitute
> for web browsing.
For some kinds of browsing, it might be more efficient.
[...]
>>> 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.
>
> Because, you know, when a technology stagnates for a decade, coming up
> with a buzzword-compliant replacement with a new name always turns
> things around.
>
VRML was XML based also. My point was about the binary format. And there
ARE uses for VRML, even.
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