Interview: Metacrasher Talks Future Plans

The Metacrasher project has been generating a lot of buzz since it was announced earlier this week, partly for its ambitious goals of uniting the 3D Internet and partly for the apparent secrecy surrounding the project. When we spoke with one of the Metacrasher members for the company's first phone interview, he asked to still keep some secrets, citing himself only as Modem Metacrasher, but he did talk about some of the confusion surrounding Metacrasher, its project goals, future time lines, and, perhaps most importantly, famous people involved in the project.

Modem Metacrasher: The first thing that I have to say about the project is that we’re not keeping our details away from people for the purpose of any type of shady stuff. People on all the blogs seem to be thinking we’re hiding. They even outed one of our accountants who was listed on the WhoIs lookup. She emailed us and said she felt famous. 

It’s just that there’re a lot of parts of the project, and if you knew entirely who I was or who the partners were, you could piece it together. We’re in the NDA right now. For example, with the P2P, we have an announcement next week, but we can’t say who’s involved yet. 

There are basically three of us who are really deep into the project, and we have three other business partners who are not into computers at all. One we’ll name when we announce the P2P, is an ex-VP from Merril Lynch, and he’ll deal with the corporate people. Our background is animation. But we’re putting all of these technologies together. 

There’s animation and gaming, and then there’s networking, and, you know, there’s a content creation part of it. We’re putting together a set of tools, that allows you, in a nutshell, that if you’re selling something in Second Life, why should you only sell it in SL. We chose Ogoglio, because Trevor Smith has a very good understanding of the need to try things out without having to download a client and go through all this setup.  We’re trying to get around all that, and make it easy to get straight into 3D. 

Virtual Worlds News: So what’s next for the project? 

MM: The next part of what we’re doing is to get the avatar in those spaces. That’s by the 14^th, maybe sooner. You’ll have a female or a male avatar, and we have it set that you customize them minimally. And then at the end of the month, you’ll be able to talk to each other in those spaces. Minimal networking will possible. It’s possible, but we’re coding it still. 

VWN: Is it just the three of you coding? 

MM: There have to be about 10 other people really working on this. When we make our next personnel announcement, there are two people who are pretty impressive to anyone involved in gaming. One is a consultant, that we hired, but I can’t say who it is yet. 

We’ll give a timeline with the avatar creation in the spaces, then we’re going to talk about the networking at the end of the month. We’re also going to announce that you can buy one of these virtual spaces from within second life. You can buy a portal that will coincide with your listing and your space. When you click that portal, it will open that up. It’s a 3D space in a 2D web page. We’ll also announce who some of the people are. That’ll be the corporate partner and our networking partner. That’ll be after we get the avatar stuff set up. 

VWN: I know Raph Koster, among others, were surprised to hear you were working with the Areae textures. 

MM: I’m making a reply to that on his blog, because we mentioned Areae and Second Life. It’s a world that’s coming up, and the idea of our project is to move the avatar in and out of spaces. We never said that we know what the textures are. But if people want to take a Second Life texture and move it to a different UV mapping coordinate system, that’s what we want to do. 

If you have a virtual glass, the way it works is that it has some type of information that lets you see it’s transparent or has a picture on it. In Second Life maybe they use a 512x512 texture. What if I want to take my glass from SL into WoW, where WoW uses a different set of texture coordinates? That’s what we’re doing. We don’t need to know any proprietary information. 

We’re working on a tool set that takes a texture and says, “Okay this is how this texture maps onto this geometry, but it needs a different mapping for a different world.” We’re letting you slide it to a different texture. I’m going to explain that in the blog. 

VWN: What can you say about the P2P networking solution you’re working on. 

MM: We’re basically working on a way that you can do your transactions and interact with people on a P2P network. It’s proven. It works. You can have a lot of avatars, and that depends on what’s going on. You can have 1000 avatars, but how many of those people are going to have the graphics cards or power to deal with what’s being seen there. 

I can say to you that we’ve investigated Croquet very much. We’re going to make an announcement at the end of July with what we’re thinking about it. There are three different P2P technologies that we’re going to use, and one of them that we’re looking at is Croquet. 

VWN: It seems like a lot of people are still trying to get a grasp on what the project is. Can you give an elevator pitch? 

MM: We want it to be possible to see what a virtual content provider looks like right away. I want to understand what a virtual world is if I have no idea about it. First, we want to put forward this Web technology that will let people see your stuff immediately and get it. And that’s why we wanted to see Ogoglio. The second part of it is to link virtual worlds by means of graphical devices and technologies. 

VWN: Is that through portals to different worlds or porting items back and forth? 

MM: At the beginning, it’s the ability to port your information back and forth. How long does it take me to create an avatar in Second Life, but then I have to go through it in There.com? And then down the line, the idea is for your avatar to stroll through different worlds on the Metacrasher network, but it’s up to others if they want to be involved. 

We’re reproducing sims from Second Life. So if you want, people can see it right from your website, and they can either buy what you’re selling right there, or hit the SLURL, or investigate other worlds. 

Let’s say you have a mirror of your SL acre. Right next to it, you may be linked to someone’s WoW acre. And you have the chance to go between them and do commerce, either through Paypal or if it gets to the point of corresponding with everyone else’s, we might do that. Right now, we’re going to try and do it with real-life money, something that’s based on dollars. We’re working on that right now with the networking people. 

VWN: Are you looking for existing businesses or new individuals? 

MM: It’s for people that are in Second Life or want to get into virtual worlds. We have a client (a large enterprise business), and they like it, and they want to have their business that people can walk through. We’re making them a portal, and they’ll have a link to Second Life. They are people who are very interested in Second Life, but they’ve had problems. They don’t know how to navigate, their computers shut off, they don’t know what to do. You’re giving them a way to do business in both worlds. We’re hoping to launch our SL islands on Monday or Tuesday. 

You’ll see a lot of the same stuff as on the website and the other demos too. Maybe it should be Tuesday or Wednesday. We’re working with people in Europe, and they're great and think it'll be done,but they also take siestas.

 

VWN: On your site you say that you’re recruiting advertisers right now. Are you looking strictly at advertisers, or can private individuals get a space? 

MM: Anyone who wants a space can have one. We’re using professional modelers, and if you have a build in Second Life, someone needs to port it. Right now, we’re reaching out to people who have something to sell already, content creators and businesses. We give them tools to do what they’re doing much easier. It seems that nobody has downloaded Archipelis Designer. That blows my mind. People are more concerned with finding out our names. This tool is a revolutionary tool. I’m a computer animator, and it is making my life so much easier. But you can download it. When you get a space, you get a license for it for the rest of your life. Down the line, we’re going to open the network, and people can just walk into the space and buy tools. A creator is different from someone who is really casual. That’s the problem with Second Life. We’re focusing on people who have something to sell. 

But that doesn’t mean that we’re excluding people. If you want a space, you can have one. 

VWN: With Archipelis, is that a product you partnered to design or did you just find it and it met your needs? 

MM: This is a pretty good piece of technology news. The people who are writing that tool, well, freeform modeling is kind of a holy grail. Some of the most, how can I say this, the best minds in computing have been looking at how to do it. It was these guys out in France who came up with a product that did it really well. They looked at it from a different perspective and came up with a product. We’re basically a partnership. They’re coding Lightwalker. 

VWN: You mention on your site that advertisers can have a space on any virtual world they want. Have you been in talks with different platforms? 

MM: Right now we’re based in Second Life. It depends on the world’s creators and their willingness to participate. We haven’t spoken to them yet. We haven’t done any of our major releases. Our Second Life island should be finished Sunday or Monday, and you can look at it then. 

VWN: Have any platform developers gotten in touch with you? 

MM: Not yet, but we’re really happy that people think it’s interesting and a good idea. We’re going to contact as many as we can shortly and ask if they want to be involved. The idea here is to help everyone to make money and not to be competing. We quoted someone from the open Metaverse project saying, “When you raise the water, all the boats rise.” 

If Kaneva has a cool, Web-based MySpace thing going on, maybe we can incorporate that into Metacrasher. That said, I don’t know anything about what Kaneva is doing. I’m just putting it out there as an idea. 

It’s most important to know that we’re trying to put together a toolset that is really easy to use. That you can then show to the world and present your products and pull them into other virtual worlds experiences. It’s all about going through virtual worlds without being a super technician. 

VWN: So if it’s tying commerce together for other people, how are you making your money? 

MM: Ad subscriptions for right now, and then if we set up a financial system, maybe taking a percentage of those, maybe 5 percent. And we want to give people with spaces another level of income generation, which might be that they can put an ad on their 2D space or 3D space, and we’d get a portion of that revenue. For example, if Coca-Cola has a space with us, why don’t you have a big old Coke can twirling around that links to their space?

The last thing, the reason people should now is that they’re seeing this now because  we’re putting it out there for people to participate in. And then the tools will conform to the needs of the participants. With this tool we have, they’re using it to teach children. The idea is to grow and be simple. We can’t give you tools and say, “Now learn this new toolset.”

 Joey Seiler
www.VirtualWorldsNews.com   
joey (at) showinitiative.com
(512) 535-8650
skype: joey.seiler.vwnews