There's been an active push from within the industry to establish standards for virtual worlds that would promote interoperability. Jean H.A. Gelissen from Philips, which is a part of the interoperability group, is also working with the ISO MPEG working group on the Information Exchange with Virtual Worlds project, or MPEG-V. The group recently issued an extended call for requirements, now looking to create a standard for architecture, interfaces between virtual worlds, and interfaces between the virtual world and the physical world.
The summary of the call looks at three example use cases that would be improved with interoperability, virtual travel (ranging between worlds), interaction and rich communication with the physical world through a variety of systems and interfaces, and developing avatars that better show human emotion.
The requirements draft goes into much more depth, but here's the abstract:
The ‘Information exchange with Virtual Worlds’ project intends to provide a standardized global framework and associated interfaces, metadata definitions and the like, to enable the interoperability between virtual worlds (as for example Active Worlds, Second Life, IMVU, Google Earth, Virtual Earth and many others) and with the real world (sensors, actuators, vision and rendering, robotics (e.g. for revalidation), (support for) independent living, social and welfare systems, banking, insurance, travel, real estate, rights management and many others).
Virtual worlds (often referred to as 3D3C for 3D visualization & navigation and the 3C’s of Community, Creation and Commerce) integrate existing and emerging (media) technologies (e.g. instant messaging, video, 3D, VR, AI, chat, voice, etc.) that allow for the support of existing and the development of new kinds of social networks.
“Would it not be great if the real world economy could be boosted by the exponential growing economy of the virtual worlds by connecting the virtual - and real world”; in 2007 the Virtual Economy in Second Life's alone was around 400 MEuro, a factor nine growth from 2006. The connected devices and services in the real world can represent an economy of a multiple of this virtual world economy.
Virtual worlds have entered our lives, our communication patterns, our culture, and our entertainment never to leave again. It’s not only the teenager active in Second life and World of Warcraft, the average age of a gamer is 35 years by now, and it increases every year. This does not even include role-play in the professional context, also known as serious gaming, inevitable when learning practical skills. Virtual worlds are in use for entertainment, education, training, getting information, social interaction, work, virtual tourism, reliving the past and forms of art. They augment and interact with our physical world and form an important part of people’s lives. Many virtual worlds already exist as games, training systems, social networks and virtual cities and world models. Virtual worlds will change every aspect of our lives: the way we work, interact, play, travel and learn. Games will be everywhere and their societal need is very big, it will lead to many new products and it requires many companies.
Technology improvement, both in hardware and software, forms the basis. It is envisaged that the most important developments will occur in the areas of display technology, graphics, animation, (physical) simulation, behavior and artificial intelligence, loosely distributed systems and network technology. Furthermore, a strong connection between the virtual and the physical world is needed to reach simultaneous reactions in both worlds to changes in the environment and human behavior. Efficient, effective, intuitive and entertaining interfaces between users and virtual worlds are of crucial importance for their wide acceptance and use. To improve the process of creating virtual worlds a better design methodology and better tools are indispensible. For fast adoption of virtual worlds we need a better understanding of their internal economics, rules and regulations. And finally interoperability achieved trough standardization.
As stated in the w9424 “Information exchange with Virtual Worlds 'Context, Objectives and Use Cases'” output document of the 82nd MPEG meeting (Shenzhen, China, October 22 – 26, 2007) the intended standard for ‘Information exchange with Virtual Worlds’ will consist of at least three parts (see also the illustration below):
• Part1: Architecture
• Part2: Interfaces between virtual worlds
• Part3: Interfaces between virtual worlds and the physical world
The first part (Part1) will describe an overall architecture that can be instantiated for all the foreseeable combinations of virtual worlds and real world deployment. This architecture will be derived from the requirements defined by a set of use cases (a number of these use cases are presented in the appendix of this document) that will be chosen to cover the entire foreseeable virtual world / real world combination application domains (see the illustration below for an example of the foreseen architecture and related interfaces for interoperability). The architecture positions all the related technologies, endorsed technologies and the MPEG technologies defined in this project. (This includes the interfaces between virtual worlds (Part2) and the interfaces between virtual worlds and the physical world (Part3)).
As an example for Part2 (Interfaces between virtual worlds), imagine that a user want to change his activities from one virtual word to another virtual world for instance due to a change of interest. With current technologies this means that the user loses all the effort and value invested to create his avatar and environment and has to start from scratch in the other virtual world. If a format can be defined that allows the export of specific characteristics from one world and import of this format to another world a lot of the user invested effort and value is preserved.
An example for Part3 (Interfaces between virtual worlds and the physical world) would be the interfaces with peripherals that allow for the extension of the experience created in the virtual world into the physical world and vice versa.
Keep up with the MPEG releases here or just check out the MPEG-V Summary or the MPEG-V requirements draft.
I think MPEG V and the Web3D Consortium have shared interest in this regard. Another Use Case involving the construction of VW is dating and aging of virtual objects to minic the wear and tear of the physical objects in the real world. I wonder if there will be attributes in the standard to standardize the birth and death dates of VW elements, especially for humanoids and natural elements simulated in the VW. I think the governments, corporations and citizens should be able to manage the virtual objects they own in the real world that are represented in the VW unless they outsource their management to some entity. It will be interesting to see if the ontologies for humans, nature (minus humans), and manufactured goods can be harmonized to allow AI applications to visually query the scene graphs in the VW or the OODB behind it for resource management and culling out VW objects for other purposes. I have an initiative to persuade manufacturers and service providers to provide the X3D versions of their goods and services for an application that intelligently integrates the scene graph in to a mirror world with minimal effort by the owner/purchaser of the good or service. A OODB application reads the meta data in the X3D scene graph and updates a lifestyle portfolio for lack of a better term with the data from the newly acquired good and/or services. The users can transverse their VW in time (pre-natal to post-mortem) and query their VW visually and/or textually because standardized ontological models for human physiology, pathology, psychology and psychriatry are used by the manufacturers and services providers for humand bodies and minds; likewise the manufacturers of man-made goods excluding those for the human body (e.g., implants) use an extensible ontological model of the 3D geometry and volumetric properties for AI editing or integration into a real(date)time-based mirror VW; lastly a standardized ontological model for nature (e.g., SEDRIS) is used by land/water/air resource managers so those properties traded are integrated too. The business model for enabling the millions of service providers and manufacturers to create an X3D file format of their goods and services is still under development but I can say it uses the idea of selling back authenicated behavior patterns customized by the owner or aggregator of X3D scene graphs into their mirror world back to manufacturers and service providers. This depth and breath of information from the individual willing to disclosure it for a fee they set will compete directly with businesses who are allowed by their customers to sell their data to manufacturers and service providers wanting it for product development and after sales support solicitation.
I love the idea of having my life inventory accumulated with little to no effort and being able to access it for review, planning and legal purposes in my hand because it's a mobile application with the OODB able to be stored on a SDIO, say 128GB card, which is not too far away. The power to reduce the time for informed decision making as someone lives, shops and learns by not having to stop and say, "you know I have that data/info back at home, the office, or the gov't has it" will be worth the few hundred dollars to pay for the application needed to intelligently receive, integrate, edit/author and render your VW, which mirrors your life as defined by auditable financial transactions. I think this is a Blue Ocean (Strategy) here, which means there are NO goods or services for these tens of millions unseen customers I have alledgedly identified. Would you want your life in your hand to able to visually squash anyone's allegation about your finanically based behavior, your medical/health/fitness stats, your land holdings, and your man-made possessions and services for all the former? I would and I want to be able to interact with that history and plan my future using it in 3D using highly reliable Ada and X3D technologies.
Posted by: William Oliver Glascoe III | August 25, 2008 at 10:50 AM