Interview: Vivaty Co-Founder, President, and CEO Keith McCurdy

Vivaty, the virtual scenes creator that came out of Media Machines, launched of stealth mode late last month with a private beta for its Web-embeddable worlds. Right away the ability to load rooms into a Web page caught the attention of the New York Times as an option for chat and real-time socializing, but Co-Founder, President, and CEO Keith McCurdy explained to Virtual Worlds News that Vivaty is about much more: "What we’ve been working on for a couple years now is building a very small, efficient, and fast platform that enables full 3D worlds n a Web browser. The word platform is big in a variety of meanings, but we’re using it in the old-school Silicon Valley sense: it’s a separation of content and function."

The Vivaty Scenes application is just a starting point. It's meant to show off the functionality of Vivaty's platform, but not serve as an ending point.

"Over the last 4-5 months, we’ve also built an application on the platform since we got our funding [ed: as Media Machines] that’s for personal scenes in a social networking environment," McCurdy explained. "While that has a lot things in it—chatting is one of them, but it’s only one, 3D chat is a small part of Vivaty Scenes—Vivaty Scenes is a small part of what we plan to do with the platform. It can do game environments, virtual world environments, branded environments, and, like the Web, it can link it up in interesting way. That’s the goal, instead of providing a contiguous MMOG or virtual world, it’s a Web style architecture."

While almost all virtual worlds offer some ability for users to change their surroundings, there's a definite trend (in development, if not yet in practice) moving away from a vast world with user-created objects and islands to a vast Web of user-created spaces that are connected, but still independent. Multiverse, VastPark, Metaplace, SceneCaster, and even The Second Life Grid all seem at least partially aimed at tapping into the desire for individually owned and collectively shared spaces.

While McCurdy doesn't want to criticize any of the other projects and says he isn't familiar enough with them to do so anyways, he believes Vivaty is unique in the complete nature of the package it provides.

"We’ve created an end-to-end solution. For a brand, partner, or ourselves, if you want to create a 3D environment that’s connected to 2D Web content, it’s all there. You don’t have to use Flash or these other options," he explained. "Ours is just a little more of a consumer-style experience. Lighter weight, faster to load, easier to integrate, more game-like content, more social—it integrates with your Facebook friends and content that you can bring in and share and comment and feedback to your social network."

Why 3D?

One of the other trends in development right now is to eschew 3D in favor of lighter-weight 2D interfaces that may be more familiar to some users.  Many think that's a short-term proposition, though. Users aren't familiar enough with 3D digital environments yet, but they will be. McCurdy thinks it isn't an issue of familiarity, though, just barriers to entry. That's why Vivaty is committed to 3D--even in 2D environments like Facebook.

"We want 3D to be anywhere," he said. "We’re just starting with some of the larger communities that have an open API, and Facebook is the poster child of that opportunity. We believe that the reason the numbers on the 2D side are so high is because the barrier is so low. We believe it’s about the barriers, not the experience. If all the barriers are equal, consumers will migrate towards the richer experience."

As an example, McCurdy points to EA, where he was a former VP.The company sells millions of  DVDs per year, and they're all in 3D. Users were resistant to the jump from 2D in the 1990s because, McCurdy argues, PC hardware requirements were too high for 3D. Once the PlayStation rolled out, all the users needed were a packaged console and a disc. The barriers were gone and 3D ruled.

"The problem is that the barrier is just too high for the 3D experience right now," McCurdy said. "We don’t think customers like smaller avatars or isometric views. They don’t care about that. They just care about barriers to entry."

Vivaty Scenes on Facebook

Although there's more to come in the near future, the first product out of Vivaty is Vivaty Scenes, now in a private beta showing off connections to Facebook. Users can create individual spaces and host up to 16 friends, all from their Facebook profile.

"It’s basically using our engine a 3MB plugin that gets installed on your browser," he said. "Once it gets installed, you choose a scene, an avatar, go into a scene and decorate it to make it uniquely yours and then have a shared interface with your friends. Your buddy list is automatically imported from your Facebook friends. And it integrates back into Facebook with invites, and all the traditional viral memes."

Others have experimented with adding real-time interaction on Facebook as well as 2D or 3D scenes--SceneCaster, for example, has seen major activity--but Vivaty's deeper connection to Facebook's existing social network and inclusion of both synchronous (chatting) and asynchronous (wall notes) interaction could be winning qualities. The app also makes it possible to add media, environment, plants, photos  and more from Flickr or Facebook into the scene, making it even more attractive to users that have invested time in the rest of their social networking life.

Facebook certainly has a large pool to draw from, but it's also only the starting point. Users can interact in a Vivaty scene regardless of where the enter it from.

"We’ll see how many people want to adopt it [in Facebook]," said McCurdy. "And people who are not on Facebook can interact. I don’t look at the world as you’re a Facebook user or not. Wherever you are on the Internet, you should be able to access your virtual scene. If people spend a lot of time on Facebook, why should they have to leave Facebook and close their browser and launch a client for a virtual world. It’s more about ease of use.  Where you enter it is just the entry point."

Future Moves

McCurdy doesn't have a very specific time line for future Vivaty announcements or roll outs, but he does believes that "sooner is better." There are firmer plans, though, including spaces that can hold more than 16 users.

"You’ll definitely see branded versions of Vivaty content in the near future," he said. "You’ll also be able to jump to branded environments and other types of entertainment and media environment. It’s not all about scenes, just as the Web is not all about personal profiles in 2D."

The business model for Vivaty is still being developed, but one option is to look for partners interested in branded spaces. The company hasn't been ready to name names, but McCurdy says that there are partners already involved in the project who come from "across the board."

"It’s an alternative to a Second Life-type model, or a portal or application-type model where a brand has to go into another world," he explained. "We’re saying we can offer that same immersive experience on their own site."

McCurdy promises more information this summer and over the course of the year.

Comments

[len]

That's a smarter business model and application model than we've seen lately. It enables 3D within the power of the social network instead of trying to drive it. It enables the 3D scene to be the nexus of a cluster of other services. It can combine *inner spaces* or the room scenes into *outer spaces* or the mirror world maps enabling navigation.

Primarily Vivaty gets what has been true since the beginning: the web abjures roadblocks. The web prefers enablers to disablers.

Just disappointed I was not selected to be part of the beta. I have this nice editor from Media Machines, have written tutorials, and I was turned away. WAAHHH!

But best to their efforts anyway. This is smart stuff.

[Mark Hull]

Hi Len,

Thanks for the nice words of support.

I'm Mark Hull, the head of product for Vivaty. We've had tremendous interest and applications for our beta, and we've been letting people in gradually. I apologize that we haven't gotten to you yet on the list, but if you want, email me directly (mark [at] vivaty [dot] com) , and I'll bump you up so you can get access today!

Thanks,

Mark

[Dennis]

Is Vivaty using the Unity3D plug-in or are they still clinging to the old crappy Flux player?

[len]

Thanks Mark. I'll do that from home. I appreciate the invite.

Dennis: Flux is lightweight as X3D players go. I did extensive comparisons between it and the competitors last year when building River of Life. There are more powerful browsers but they are also heavier. It is true of X3D in general that it is a heavy language and if you want to use the immersive profile, you live with the implementor's choices about how to optimize. For example, Flux like Octaga and Cortona loads a big scene fairly quickly but isn't doing as much optimization for culling. BitManagement loads very slowly but optimizes like crazy. Other differences are there such as support for texture formats. Bit Management once supported gif animation and I used the heck out of it. Then without a word, they dropped support for that and I had to freeze development at the pre 7.1 version.

The good news is that all of the browsers now process that scene. I stayed online with the developers on the open lists, got plenty of code and suggestions. That is the big advantage of X3D: an open community where if one browser vendor goes belly-up or stops supporting the community, another picks up and it keeps going. As a result, ten year old content is still running.

Can you make that claim for Unity3D? This is where the younger developers fail to grasp what WILL happen to their investments and their customer's investments in 3D content. Without a language-based royalty-free standard, they have a snowball's chance of keeping content alive. Open source does NOT fix this problem.

What is going on at the grassroots level away from the big interoperability forums and announcments from BigCos is the liaisons among groups like the Web3DC, Khronos, OGC, W3C, ISO and so on are building the real and solid basis for 3D systems interoperability. This is what is going to work and the VCs who invest here may have to be a little more patient, but they are making a safer bet.