Interview: VastPark Partners with NICTA for Peer-to-Peer Virtual Worlds

Back in the days before Outback Online shut down, it was looking to run on a peer-to-peer system developed by NICTA.  Fortunately, that technology isn't going to waste. Today VastPark announced that it had entered into a partnership with NICTA to provide a peer-to-peer option for serving its user-created virtual worlds. "We've been working on this network engine for a while," explained Santosh Kulkarni, NICTA's project leader on the Peer-to-Peer project. "At that time we were working with Randal [Leeb-du Toit] and Outback. I happened to meet someone from Multimedia Victoria, and she mentioned VastPark and Bruce [Joy, CEO]. I was looking at possible virtual world plays, and having someone ten minutes away was very exciting for me. Australia's a big country, and we're the two players right next to each other.  It's been about a year since we've been talking."

It's not clear when the partnership will show off a product--VastPark is set for a public beta in April--but they're aiming for the first really decentralized virtual worlds platform by Q3 or Q4 of this year. Regardless, it's been on VastPark CEO Bruce Joy's mind for some time. When we interviewed him in October, he pointed at P2P as one of the solutions for a virtual world Web. That's still his thought.

"I think one of the big issues that's a problem for really making virtual worlds as common as the Web is we have to make multi-user support online incredibly commoditized," he explained. "If everybody has to essentially pre-build infrastructure that allows them to handle 50,000 or 100,000 people turning up suddenly on their worlds, that's going to be untenable."

There are two options, though. One is the grid approach of tying privately hosted virtual worlds together, which VastPark is also looking at, but Joy thinks P2P gives users more flexibility and more social options.

"Users can discover out of the 50,000 people that descend on a world that's had the SlashDotting effect, the 50 or 100 people that are friends, acquaintances, or interesting," he said. "Rather than having to render the 50,000 people that have turned up, they can see the people that they find most interesting.  NICTA is providing the ability not to shard, but to handle a large community of people that arrive on any site, anywhere. On top of that, you can layer social values, which means finding people more interesting to you. I think that's fundamental to a future, dynamic virtual Web."

Users, though, ideally won't ever have to hear of NICTA again. The goal is to use NICTA's P2P network as a complement to the servers running virtual worlds to keep the experience smooth and seamless.

"As far as the end-users are concerned, they really see the actual application platform," Kulkarni explained. "They're really not concerned about the model; they just want a very good user experience. What P2P allows you to do is the scalability thing. It also takes the single point of failure out of the equation. With server models you see often they've gone down for maintenance. In P2P as long as you have a base population of users, it keeps the consistency using."

For an alternative example the two point to Second Life, where for large projects and events, developers need to spin up extra servers in advance based simply on an estimate of how many avatars will show. With VastPark, there will be Apache-style servers (today also saw the announcement of VastServer),  but any flash mob activity could kick the content over to the P2P network. All in all, the two estimate that it will provide up to 80% savings.

"There's a great advantage of control for somebody that's creating their world to very easily run a multi-user server that they control themselves," said Joy. "As a first node, a central server is a great thing. VastPark's creator tool is headed towards being a multi-user experience, even when  you're just building the world itself so you can collaborate across a LAN or the Internet or wherever. You certainly don't want thtat to be a P2P arrangement where you don't have control over who's getting in. When you're looking to open it up so that everyone can get in, that's when you want to avoid servers overloading and you want to do it at an incredibly low cost. I guess it's a bit like having a turbo on your engine in your car. You want it to kick in at a certain point, but here the turbo is incredibly decentralized and spread out."

Kulkarni says that the network, under the brand of EccentroTech, could eventually be used by other virtual worlds and game developers--and he expects interest--but that the network meshes particularly well with VastPark.

"What will be involved for integration is that VastPark has their platform," he said. "They've got an interface for networking. So this will involve customizing the API to use VastPark's API to interface with that. [...] When I was talking with the lead technical develoiper and getting into details, it came out that there was very little change necessary."

Joy agrees, looking at NICTA as a sort of middleware giving consumers--and his customers--more options.

"Inevitably, what the NICTA technology will becomes is a way where any platform using it will be treating it like middleware, like any other middleware like Vivox or Speedtree or whatever," he said. "We want this kind of simplicity of approach. I believe absolutely everyone should be able to run virtual worlds as easily as they run blogs today, but in an entirely decentralized form of hosting. They can choose their provider for hosting, applications, and how they handle mobs."

Both companies will be exhibiting at Virtual Worlds 2008, April 3-4 in New York City, Booth #25.