Interview and Demo Video: VastPark CEO Bruce Joy

VastPark has opened its closed beta last Friday, but today CEO Bruce Joy released a demo video (after the jump) of the new creator tool, so we sat down to talk through the goals and status of the 3D virtual world creator. Right now the worlds are visually impressive, single-user environments, but that's changing. "Where we're headed is that we're initially enabling people to very easily create," Joy explained. "You can imagine Quake games in the system,. So it could very easily be multiplayer. Within four months you're going to see multiplayer where one person will create an environment, an office or a bedroom or whatever, and then connect it to someone else's. They can link and unlink them however they like, but when they're linked they can move from one to another. It's kind of P2P, not in the technical sense, but in the idea. It's sort of like moving from website to website."

"We've had internal testing of about 16 players, moving from virtual worlds for quite a long time," Joy continued. "This is build number four. Build number 2 was focused on multiplayer and the virtual world connections. But there were other aspects that we knew wouldn't scale or make it the virtual Web that I was aiming for. It wasn't able to support the distribution of virtual goods, 3D widgets, and interactive characters that I wanted. The aim is to eventually enable third-party marketplaces to sell these goods that are portable between these worlds and allow for an economy or a series of economies to be created between these sub-worlds."

Joy doesn't see VastPark as competing with Second Life or There or Forterra. Those all provide singular large worlds. His goal is to create an ecosystem. The creator tool will be free for personal use, but as the commercial goals grow, some costs will come into play. The main goal, though, is "white labeling our entire platform to allow larger communities to achieve independence to create private worlds as well as the ability to create subgroups." Some media companies have apparently already expressed interest.

"We'll have a series of properties—MTV is an incredibly model for the future of this sort of thing, and they have The Hills and all these things, and they are representing the properties the audience wants to engage in," explained Joy. "We can enable a company like that to take it further and allow the users to create their own sub-worlds and remix the content and create their own communities. And then there's the potential for third-party content that's actually advertising or branded goods."

It's an interesting approach. One main explanation that companies like Trilogy and Makena, the developers behind MTV's virtual worlds, offer for their success if the control the world offers to the content creators. The brand is condensed in an entertaining, interactive way, but the environment still reflects exactly what the producers want.

Joy think that relationship might be ready for a change. As the market evolves and more worlds come out of the woodwork, he thinks companies--and not just entertainment brands--will want a distributed, ad hoc network of public and private worlds that still offers some content control.

"We have had a range interest in our platform," he explained. "People can see it delivers something different from other virtual world platforms. In particular, companies who want to strengthen and empower their online communities and allow them to be more interactive as a community see value in the more distributed aspects of our platform. While somewhat similar to Metaplace, VastPark is unique in enabling virtual communities to have both an official 3D virtual world and offer virtual items that enable users to run their own virtual room, game or world that is separate and can be run offline and disconnected from the main virtual community. VastPark’s going to allow these communities to offer more viral content as users directly visit and play in each other’s worlds like they currently share and comment on each other’s MySpace page."

And Joy doesn't want VastPark to be doing all the work. Instead he wants developers to serve as resellers, creating content for the clients and licensing the creator "to release branded versions of our tools and access source code to made the user interface suit the community they are delivering for."

Joy's eager to bring more developers into the beta to start working on providing content, but what about the rest of us?

"As for our release schedule, you’ll see an open beta version of our Creator tool released this year," he offered. "Active members of our beta community will also have access to an early beta of the Asset Publisher so they can start to release their own 'virtual goods' and we’re hoping to have the first beta of the browser released by Christmas."

Joy said he hopes to have the Asset Publisher released to the public by early 2008, potentially by the end of January. His goal is to have the content distributable as an open media platform in 2008. While he couldn't go into too many details, Joy compared his goal to providing a way for virtual worlds developers to distribute content as easily as Web developers do over RSS.

A lot of the ideas behind VastPark come from a Web mentality. The public/private connected worlds offer a Web-like experience, but it's not enough to go all the way. That said, VastPark works with Lua, just like Metaplace, and Joy said he's interested in working with any successful platforms or standards to really drive a virtual world Web.

"I think [the VastPark approach is] one way of achieving a virtual web, but it isn’t the ultimate solution," Joy explained. "Some of the infrastructure is clearly still missing  to make a scalable virtual Web. For instance, I think all these new announcements about standards is critical for the overall growth of the industry. Developers want standards because clients want worlds that will continue to have value in and be accessible in the future virtual Web. We’re definitely interested in adopting emergent standards on these things. I think between Multiverse, Second Life, IBM and others we can expect to see adoptable implementations by the end of 2008. Standards will take longer, but by early 2009 a de facto virtual Web will already have sprung into existence. That’s phenomenal! If we don’t do this, we’ve wasted a huge opportunity."

Comments

[Prokofy Neva]

I took a look at Vast Park and saw that they said all the worlds created from their client have to hang off the same domain. They proclaim that they aren't a walled garden and it's easy to jump over the hedges. But this refers -- so far, anyway -- to the worlds made within their system. So from a user's perspective, it doesn't seem any different from sims in Second Life, which you can make open or closed to the public.

[csven]

From what I've read so far, VastPark sounds something like "LittleBigPlanet" for corporations, with the PC/browser replacing the console. If it sounded less targeted to corporations and more open, I'd be more interested. Joy might say he's not competing with Forterra, but it sure does seem like he is (and with Multiverse, as well).

Definitely worth watching.

[Richard]

How is this different from Metaplace?

I see major competition between the two, and I'll have to see what the major differences are...

which one to use?
possibly both, but can't they simply merge into one project!