NICTA and VastPark Launch P2P Virtual Worlds Platform to Private Beta

NICTA and Vast Park announced today the launch of their decentralized virtual worlds platform, the product of their partnership announced in March. Beginning today, the pair will launch a private beta for virtual worlds developers. If you already have content on Vast Park, it could be up and running by the end of the day, said Santosh Kulkarni, NICTA's project leader on the peer-to-peer effort.

"NICTA and Vast Park have been working together for quite some time now, and the whole idea was to put this alternative platform together for developers and publishers," said Kulkarni. "It's a combination of a couple of things. We have the Badumna network engine developed by NICTA,  and that has been integrated for Vast Park's platform. It's a complete package for all those who want to develop virtual worlds. When they use the VastPark browser, they can go to a traditional provider or switch to Badumna and save about 80% of their hosting costs."

"Let's go through a real scenario: for a community to enable their users to run sites online, they could choose to host them themselves in a traditional client-server solution, but this, of course, can be quite expensive," explained Vast Park CEO Bruce Joy. "If you're allowing them to create user-generated worlds or remix your IP to create these worlds, there will be a strong appetite in some communities to do that and bring friends in. This could create surges of traffic that people could struggle to cope with and it could end up being expensive. That's a daunting thing if you're looking to start a project right now. I think that with the really strong savings you can get from the peer-to-peer network, if you're doing something like that it's much easier."

The solution is the same, at heart, as we discussed back in March, the two explained, but now some users will have the chance to experiment with it for serving up their worlds. While virtual worlds--specifically on the Vast Park platform--are the focus right now, NICTA is also interested in other applications that revolve around sharing vast amounts of spatial data.

"I expect Badumna to be used in different applications," said Kulkarni. "Because of the way it's structured for spatial technology, we've been working to create this virtual worlds architecture. The other applications are in mobile for geospatial applications. That's quite a new thing, but I think that's a future. And consoles is something else I always want to do, but at this point I just don't have the time. Any application that has spatial aspects to it, it would make sense to use Badumna to add flexibility. Virtual worlds is a good start for us because it's a 3D world, especially in the user-generated space. We see that as our first target market. When we get into that, I'll see about other application areas."