Alpha Tour of X3D-Built X3Daemon World

We first looked at The 3D Network Professional Virtual Enterprise Initiative (3DNPVEI) in November when we interviewed CEO Lauren Gauthier. Between the comments on that article and later on an interview with Trevor F. Smith, creator of another Web-based platform Ogoglio, the value of a VRML and X3D-based world has been hotly debated. This week, though, we got a first look at the alpha version of X3Daemon. It's obviously in an early stage and still has plenty of kinks to work out, but if the company can make good on its promises, it presents a promising alternative to current virtual worlds.

X3Daemon will, as COO Lisa Laxton explained, eventually work as a platform for individuals or companies to host their own 3D environments accessible through a Web browser that can be run on their own servers or hosted by 3DNPVEI and kept separate or interconnected. It will allow users to build, buy, and sell virtual goods in an open-source environment that is still guarded by encryption to protect intellectual property. 3DNPVEI poses X3Daemon as already doing "as much or more than competing servers even those with closed technologies" like Kaneva, Second Life, There.com, and Caligari.

It's got a ways to go—it's  got its share of understandable alpha bugs and is currently only operational in Internet Explorer (with a couple settings tweaks) on Windows machines—though Laxton was able to already promote and show off a wide range of features in the alpha:

•    Browser-based 3D multi-user client/server platform
•    Internal 3D Flash player (see image below)
•    Integrated multi-user chat
•    Environment simulations including dynamic sunlight, western hemisphere, constellations, and clouds
•    Animated realistic avatars
•    Point-and-click usability
•    World interactivity including the ability to add/remove objects dynamically from the scene
•    Ride animated elevators
•    Shared events
•    Moveable objects

I didn't take the opportunity to try them out, but Laxton adds that the current version also supports an internal 3D Web browser and plug-in capabilities for generating and integrating rich media.

If X3Daemon successfully integrates the feature set, it could go a long way toward dispelling a lot of the VRML hatred that seems to fill virtual world circles. Laxton herself admits that there are reasons to dislike past versions of VRML—bandwidth and hardware problems as well as " low usability, lack of IP protection, and lack of interactivity"—but she argues tech advancements have solved some problems and X3Daemon's current design plans are targeted at fixing the rest.

One advantage that she believes X3Daemon has over its competitors is open standards building. She says that builders will be able to design in popular applications like Maya and then import them in open standards to the virtual worlds. When asked how the openness would compare to Multiverse's use of SketchUp importing, Laxton said she was "not familiar with their server side technology in terms of where they are going."

It seems like a similar project, at least at the high levels. X3Daemon is meant to be infinitely scalable, allowing an unlimited number of interconnected servers.

"We are poised for growth and are not concerned about user limits as other servers have been in the past," said Laxton. "User limits as in limits of concurrent users on X3Daemon are not an issue. The environment will likely be a cloud concept, if you will. When you interconnect servers real time you are able to expand with however many servers you need to handle the user load."

Along with the open nature, that will allow users to determine their world's functions. Laxton says that the world is suitable for any use, but that the company's initial focus is on business and social networking. With integrated Flash ads that are unblockable as popups and a system that allows users to sell to each other on their own, X3Daemon intends to monetize on sales taxes and advertising.

"From a business perspective, we intend to market server applications, an active X3Daemon community, and, of course, advertising, since we have no doubt business will want to market to our users," Laxton explained. "Our users will have the unique opportunity to do business without X3Daemon, of course. We will only charge transaction fees on the transactions they make so it will not be like a pyramid like some of the others."

To provide a useful audience Laxton says the company is working on building an X3Daemon community while also marketing the server to allow businesses to build their own communities.

Right now the alpha is available for a 30-day trial at $9.95, but the company hopes to have a beta rolled out this year.

Comments

[len]

I'm not sure $9.95 to have a looksee is too expensive, but it won't get much traffic from the casual onlookers unless there is something on the outside that makes looking on the inside
inviting/compelling/titillating.

Where the 3D world owners usually go wrong is trying to sell technologies to technologists. They think too much like musicians who want the praise of other musicians, the least likely source or praise OR income. Ask jazz musicians about that one.

That said, I'd like to see this work. I've a world I'd like to put somewhere. So a cost breakdown analysis would be welcome. This is something one cannot get from the Web3D Consortium: a breakdown of the cost models for launching a world for multi-user applications, hosted and otherwise. If VirtualWorldsNews wants to do an interesting bit of journalism, a cost vs features vs technologies factoid for the competitors in this market would be a lot more interesting than short term predictions that tend to all merge into the same predictions.

[SuezanneC Baskerville]

I'm just now starting taking a look at this.

The opening screen that shows the female and male avatars has yellow lettering on a white background.

I can read the words female and male, but the 4 rows of 4 columns of text the sides of the avatars are completely illegible.

I have to wonder if one can have much hope of good things to come from a place that can't produce legible text. Will the incredibly poor judgement used to produce illegible text on the opening screen be carried though the rest of the interface and the rest of the system's design?

[len]

Probably not, Suzanne, but I agree that even in an alpha release, details matter.

Use of the text node is problematic with backgrounds when the author has no sense of contrast. That is why some early world builders abhored the text nodes and favored text materials. I used the text nodes in ROL a lot. Animated textures on texts produced nice effects, but most of the time I had to punt that away and use plain white and then NULL out the texture node so lighting wouldn't obscure it. There are also some tricks to learn if the viewpoint is moving. In X3D there are improvements but many of the artists are still using VRML techniques. It's a bit like HTML: build a language for the masses and individual talent (mostly mediocre) dominates. I see a lot of terrible web pages.

My bigger complaint with many worlds, VRML or not, is the poor command of camera vocabulary. Just a little time spent in front of a well-shot movie with the sound turned down improves the use of cinematic camera techniques. Bad camera work makes a good world less dynamic. Good camera work makes a bad world a little livelier.

Would you say there is a different set of skills required when someone builds the entire world from that where they are dropping objects into a landscape for other moving objects (avatars) to look at?

[Nootz]

One must agree with Lens comment number one. Put simply, it looks horrible, I dont think x3daemon is even ready for an angelfire webpage. There is skilled coding involved here, but there is no unified vision. There is noway I am going to fork out ten bucks when I can visit better looking worlds for free.

[Nootz]

The current standard of quality is defined by Second Life. Vrml can easily meet that, and there are Vrml worlds with realistic water (just like windlight) though the files are huge. But even without realistic water, Vrml
can produce very good scenes that are easily
comparable to any web3d.

I used to make tiny Vrml, but these days, it is well worth it to bump up the polygon count.
We no longer need to make files under 50k.
A world that is sized at half a megabyte
can already give a user full immersion
in the environment.

[len]

Unified vision comes hard, Nootz. I suspect many world projects out there starting these days are finance-led instead of being an artist's vision. I think the gamers are way ahead of the VR builders in knowing how the design/artistic team should be composed and managed, but they also have much higher costs as a result. What the X3DDaemon people can do is relentlessly improve those graphics, but yeah, I think I would bring in a strong art team lead.

Those of us working in any of the platforms knows it takes considerable effort to build up the objects which is why user-content became a hot model. From what I've seen, SL varies pretty dramatically in quality of the content as a result. On the other hand, any world that has top flight graphics artists and now sound artists working in them will be orders of magnitude better.

You are right about the vrml polygon budgets. Some have been building for the download times of the 1990s for too long, have libraries of low-poly objects and almost freak out when they try to incorporate sound. Building ROL, I think I got a good set of metrics for the sound and how much could work. I built it locally where the load times were acceptable, but never believed it would run well over the web. With broadband, I was pleasantly surprised that it did.

Our enemy is our habits.

We'll see more worlds break along the schools of thought between ultra-realism and visionary worlds making statements. That really is the fun of it, IMHO, for the artists. The whole 'avatar more real than my real life' thing is creepy. The business meeting world for rent model that Trevor and others are going after has legs. Just my opinions.

[niclas]

I've seen fantastic content produced in VRML by pro-artist during my time working at UMA. I especially remember the SGI demo that was produced in VRML (with some extensions of Cosmo) for SGI's first PC based platform. It was amazing and running in 80fps. And the quality of regular SL content just suck big time. I produced better and more efficient content for VRML 10 years ago.

BUT, until there is an affordable 3d virtual hardware device everything about "web 3d" will just be a chat with an irritating interface.
Anyone that have played Descent with and without shutters know the difference between 2D and 2 1/2 D. And they sure know it's not 3D.