IBM's Peter Haggar on the Interoperability Alliance, Complete Agenda and Attendee List

After all the about IBM's secrecy surrounding the meeting it organized to set standards for virtual worlds, Emerging Technology and Standards Senior Technical Staff Member Peter Haggar wanted to set the record straight. Haggar was one of the leaders at IBM for the summit and helped organize it from the beginning. That makes him the target for some of the ire over perceived exclusions from the conversation. But that was never the intent. "The meeting was definitely a kick the tires type meeting to see if the idea of interoperability had legs," Haggar explained. "The invite list, there were companies and organizations that you could say we should have invited. But we didn't because we couldn't include everyone. And we didn't think we could have a productive meeting with 300 people there. We wanted a small meeting with key members and a broad representation of the industry. Now that we've had the meeting and are moving forward, we are in the process of creating, probably the best word is an alliance among the industry to start looking at it and figuring out what the best standards will be. That will be open to everyone."

And there are no more secrets about the meeting. We reported that Forterra had set up a placeholder site at Interopworld.org, but Haggar has just finished an official wiki for the group at Vwinterop.wikidot.com. It includes the full agenda for the day and a list of the 23 organizations that were represented at the meeting: ActiveWorlds,Anshe Chung Studios,Areae, AutoDesk, Cisco, Cornell University, Entropia Universe, Forterra, Google, HiPiHi, IBM, Intel, Linden Lab, Metaverse Labs, Microsoft, Motorola, Multiverse, Philips, Samsung, Sony, Sun, Transmutable, uWorld.

The agenda was a full day of 19 short sessions designed to not give an in-depth discussion on any one problem, but lay out the basic needs for interoperability and give attendees a way to decide which key issues to tackle first--or at all. Some presentations have their slides posted and Haggar hopes to add more from the remaining companies now that the wiki is live. The site is open to all, and he hopes it will draw more participants.

"Once we get it set up my plan is for all of us to reach out to everyone who wasn't included in the first meeting and bring them in," Haggar said. "We are working on it now. We just got the wiki set up on Monday. There are some things on there with placeholders, but we want to put together a group. When that will be set up, I'm not really sure."

The attendee list originally only included 20-25 people from a handful of companies, and it quickly boomed. Haggar says that's a sign that the timing is right for this sort of discussion. But while all of the participants agreed to continue discussing the issue, some observers have held back.

"There were two organizations that we invited that did not come," said Haggar. "That was the Open Croquet Consortium and the Immersive Education Platform. I haven't gotten any direct push back thus far, but I have heard people saying they don't want to do interoperability thus far. That's fine. There's no one pushing them. No one had a gun to AOL's head or Prodigy's head pushing them toward the Web. There may be specific walled gardens that are fine the way they are. That's why this was a meeting to kick the tires."

IBM sees it as a case of Metcalfe's Law, though. More users and more availability equals more value for the clients. That said, Haggar confirmed that IBM isn't approaching the interoperability alliance with any specific business model or product for IBM in mind. Interoperability won't be one service from IBM, but it will benefit all of its virtual worlds applications.

"Clearly it's where our customers want to go," Haggar explained. "IBM is a very customer driven kind of company. Take our customers who want to have a 3D Web presence. Today they'd have to pick a single world to go build their 3D Web presence. Then they're only exposed on the 3D perspective to a very small fraction of Web users even if they pick the world with the highest numbers. Or if they wanted to be in multiple worlds, their content wouldn't be portable, and they'd still only have exposure to a small fraction of Web users. Contrast that to the 2D Web users where you have access to everyone. What's in it for IBM? If we can enable the kind of enterprise class applications that our enterprise customers want to use, there's a clear benefit for them. And where it benefits IBM's customers, it benefits IBM. "

That's a rationale that some developers have already brought to their platforms. Companies like Multiverse have positioned themselves as focusing on open standards from the beginning. Others, like Croquet are entirely about open source. Multiverse has said it wants to promote open standards wherever they exist, but with Croquet standing out from the meeting, there might have to be a change in its business.

"Clearly some vendors' models would have to change," said Haggar. "If you look back to the early days of the Web with Compuserve and AOL, they either survived or they didn't when the Web became completely interoperable. We expanded greatly the number of users and created lots of new markets to make money. There's going to be a change in business model obviously, but to bring the most value for the customer, I think the market is going to drive this. I think interoperability is something that's going to happen one way or the other."

With that in mind,  Haggar says the alliance will look to embrace any existing standards that it sees as fitting. That may not be all current standards, but there's no goal here to reinvent the wheel. Work groups, for example one investigation file protocols, would be set to look for existing specifications. If it works, the group will adopt it. If it needs fixing, the group will work to adapt it. If there isn't one that satisfies the goals for the group, it will work to create one.

After explaining some of the details that  hadn't come  out yet about the meeting, there was one last thing Haggar wanted to set straight.  Some attendees and sideline commentators were ruffled that IBM and Linden Lab issued a joint press release on their own standards work the day after the meeting without including any information about the alliance.  Haggar  says that IBM's work with specific companies will only feed back into the larger effort without losing focus of the overall goals or setting one company over others in the organization.

"IBM works with a lot of different companies in this arena," he explained. "The work we do with all of them, including Linden that was outlined in this press release, is certainly intended that that work be complementary and feed into the work we do for standards and interoperability.  I think what's relevant for general interoperability will feed back in. What's not, won't. When we set up the alliance, I'm working on the details of that now, it will be set up in a fair fashion. I don't want to say too much before we get it worked out. I think others will be pleased with the way that it's structured."

There's been mixed reactions surrounding the interoperability conference, but all of the attendees agreed that it was time to look for standards. And that, says Haggar, is a success.

"A lot of people told me they were glad this meeting was occurring," he said. "That's not a pat on my back. I think the timing was just right. Now we have to step up the alliance and broaden our group."

Comments

[len]

A company with no products, no services, and no credibility in the virtual worlds market claims leadership for that market, then has a meeting that shuts out all of the standards groups, and issues a press release saying it will pick and choose among existing standards.

Isn't this precisely what IBM leads the charge against Microsoft for doing?

Well, you have to give them credit for enormous chutzpah if little else. They will sell a lot of iron if they pull this off, but once again they will be dealing another body blow to the processes of international standards.

Web 3.0: The Keiretsu Kingdom.

[Joey Seiler]

Actually, when mentioned existing groups like the Web3DC, Peter said he welcomed any and all existing standards groups to participate in the ongoing discussion. I cut this for space since we'd already discussed the open invitation more generally, but here you go: "If we think X3D is the best standard, we'd work with the Web3DC. Absolutely. If it's something completely different, we'd have to find a different consortium. When we set this up, it's open to everyone. We'd welcome them."

[len]

That would be good news. We'll watch to see developments of that kind. IBM has had talks but doesn't seem to know what is most valuable. That is a symptom of inexperience. Buyers need to be very careful not to confuse interest and a checkbook with technical proficiency.

Otherwise, it is difficult to take IBM seriously from the author's perspective. Without portable design time formats that can faithfully render and perserve scripted behaviors losslessly, the author builds for lobster trap worlds (lobster goes in but can't back out). This is the most critical lesson learned by the comp-sci industry in the last thirty years: data outlives software and hardware. Had VRML97 and 1.0 not had text-based lossless formats, the content would not be running today because almost every vendor who started there is no longer around, yet the content still is. At the cost of 3D content which continues to rise, that is not the right outcome for the customers.

Caveat emptor.

[bjorke]

Yay, top-down standards on a supposedly-growing and innovating industry to keep the status quo at current lowest-common-denominator levels. Greeat.

Currently, people who are "early explorers" often move around between a lot of different services. So interoperability might save them some typing. But average people will NOT.

More, at the last SD Forum IBM was trying to make hay out of the value of carrying around "reputation" -- but that's a straw man. Most people have no significant reputation. Much of human activity revolves around reputation's fluid and context-sensitive nature. If I walk into a crowded room in RL, no one knows me from Adam. Sure, I can have nice shoes, or a nice watch, a jacket, a BMW... all items whose desirability is largely driven by the LACK of some automatic social reputation system.

In commerce, my reputation can come from an American Express card. If I am within a corporate firewall, my reputation comes from the simple fact that I'm inside the firewall. And elsewhere, virtual or real, my reputation needs to come from WHAT I DO - not from some star chamber standards committee.

[Len Bullard]

Yes, but a bit of analysis helps.

1. VWs are applications for specific markets. One size fits all general applications don't sell and really, don't keep eyeballs.

2. Formats are applications. A format used in design time and for long lifecycle archival is best if it is a text format. Everything we learned in the last 30 years of comp-sci supports this. Exceptions such as PDF are exceptions because they are legal documents and the term there is "final fixed format", meaning, a record of authority of a transaction at a specific timestamp among authoritative parties (named entities empowered to represent a legal entity). Does that sound like a virtual world?

A runtime format is an application. You optimize that for the specific application (see Forterra's PTF). It is optimized for speed when using very large terrain aggregations (eg virtual earth). It is not optimized for small applications (the typical 5 acres and a mule world). For these, the text formats work just fine as runtime formats.

3. The standards have problems and advantages depending on generality. VRML/X3D is a very general scene-graph. It is a good design time format because it is text and it is human-readable. Collada is good for exchanging assets but so is VRML97. In fact, the most supported export format on the web for 3D by actual count is VRML.

Contrary to what some believe, authors do edit these by hand and in fact, the uptake of a format by groups of authors doing different applications depends on that. On the other hand, building a world in an ASCII editor is very painful, in fact, building ANY useful object in an ASCII editor is painful.

The early VRML editors and some of the current ones are generalized editors. They support the entire language and the scripting language. This is like using Visual Studio. But if worlds are applications, some of them need generality and some don't. Where you have a good application schema, a rapid-application designer is a better choice. This is like using Iron Speed Designer, a layer over VS. If you get the schema right, ISD will do 80% of the work. That is where Areae seems to be going but I've no sense that Rafe gives a good-golly about the portability of the assets. If he did, he'd be pulling for Collada or X3D. Instead he publicly disses them. That means someone else like Media Machines will win in the Google Worlds contests.

Ask yourself is a Virtual Conference World needs the same features as a Virtual Sex Shop. They really don't. Sometimes these are referred to as scene editors, but the point is, one can use the editor to bridge the gap of design time general languages and runtimes. But you can't go the other way.

The business models are the seriously variant piece. Each of these new keirestu setting out to be standards mavens has almost the same goals, but most of them have very little experience. They are attempting to pull together vendors of different applications with different business models and create standards. Unless they limit that mission, they will fail or they will simply be the same as the current standards groups (eg, W3C, W3DC, ISO). In fact, at this time, it is hard to see if they have a mission at all except to cull standards and organizations and that is very dangerous given those variant business models.

Who needs portable branded avatars? Business applications. That is where identity and recognizability are fundamental. They want to attach those to Facebook, etc., and make it the repository of all information, but the truth is, that can only be the 'business personna'. Most of us turn into different people at home, at church and on the highway.

Identity is situated.

So don't get your knickers too tightly wound yet. These people are mostly wonks who have built very little VR in their careers. They are of the ilk that believe a professional manager manages anything professionally. They spin, collect stock options, and move on to the next crop as locusts always do. The ones who have a real affinity stick around and become valued members of a community.

The forums and organizations that will be the most important to the future of virtual worlds will be the professional associations not the anyone-can-sign-up-for-this-wiki groups. The groups that last have lasting win-win contracts. The W3DC lasted this long because the vendors and the artists made a bond that lasted. That is why VRML97 worlds from 1997 still work on X3D browsers in 2007. Until the content owners and the content builders are able to stand up to the VCs, the equity investors, and what not and tell them to shut up and quit trying to choke the chicken for short terms, this market will not coalesce in any meaningful way. What we heard about in San Jose was a circus meant to drive bloggers like you and me to talk, and investors to buy iron on a promise.

Someone has to build these worlds and only a few people actually know how. They are the content artists. If you actually care, join a professional dues paying organization and support the vendors that support that organization. It is the single best hope you have of creating lasting content. Otherwise, as the bot says in Blade Runner says, your content will be like 'tears in the rain'.

[Raph]

"That is where Areae seems to be going but I've no sense that Rafe gives a good-golly about the portability of the assets. If he did, he'd be pulling for Collada or X3D. Instead he publicly disses them. That means someone else like Media Machines will win in the Google Worlds contests."

Actually, we're format agnostic. We like Collada and X3D as formats for describing 3d objects (not "worlds" however). But we also like Poser and Milkshape and whatever else. Once we go 3d, we will probably start with Collada. In 2d, we support the common 2d web formats.

I am not a fan of VRML as a way of describing worlds, for many reasons. But that's a separate debate for another day. :)

[Prokofy Neva]

No sale.

[len]

@Raph:

For the five acres and a mule world (small world, view-bound bots for pulling the user to events, plus free roamer) and ease of work in PFE (yes, we do that), VRML97 works fine. Also, when you look at the most common export format, it's VRML too. Remember, doc professionals hated HTML too. VRML is gnarly for scripting though. Event handling in ROUTEs is tricky until the author gets their heads around type compatibility and the idiosyncratic timers.

The question is scale. The X3D Earth group has a lot to prove there for Very Large Mapping Applications As Worlds. The question is one of markets. There is plenty of room for different kinds of real-time 3D apps between the spinning teapot and the Map of Mother Earth. This is where authors are still being blinded by the current SL-rage. (Sorry Prok, but this isn't a great time to fight that truckload of speeding money. It is a good time to be letting it go right on over the cliff.)

Yeah, we should have that debate sometime. Format agnosticism is a good deal for the vendor eggs, but content is the author's bacon on the plate. Vendors who commit to the authoring community take that seriously. That's the Deal.

[len]

Haggar has a link to the OpenAjax participation agreement as the model for the IBM-led VW keiretsu on the interop web site Vwinterop.wikidot.com.

Serious parties to this conversation should review ASAP. These are the terms that make the difference in how this alliance will be accepted by other organizations, and whether or not 3D worlds per this technology keiretsu are to be considered good web citizens. Kumbayah, y'all.