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Top 20 Sellers at Artstation: Artistic Squad
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VRML/X3D Return: Put your VRML worlds online again
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Many years ago, VRML was invented. The promise was to be able to put 3D worlds and models in a webpage. Even more than even today's technologies, the language allowed to create behaviors, sense the user, add sound, and many other cool things.

Even the name was cool: Virtual Reality Modeling Language. And "X3D Profile Immersive".

But we never had something that allows the original idea: just put your world in a webpage.

I have recently discovered (maybe many already know) that X3D V4 as said now in Web3d.org, is helping actively X_ITE to be developed, and that way, X_ITE now supports all VRML (or X3D Profile Immersive) completely. This means, that AT LAST! we can just put our worlds online again and no browser required, with all ecmascript and all VRML nodes supported.

So 23 years later, VRML is what it was supposed to be. We can finally get our worlds visited by people without having to install any plugin! And VRML becomes a modern solution again.

Imagine what we could do now, without having to optimize worlds so much, as now everybody has a fast connection and a fast PC. VRML has a lot of potential power, that was never used.

I have put some of my old worlds online at my personal page:

http://hipercubo.atwebpages.com/Mundos-VRML

These are worlds that you didn't see by that time, as we were doing them and then we abandoned the idea. There are still 4 that I have to adapt. Although X_ITE supports everything, the code has to be completely standard. For this, view3dscene has a nice console to see if everything is ok.

HOW TO PUT YOUR OLD AND NEW WORLDS ONLINE AGAIN

Once built, you must host your files on a server. There are free servers to host your website, some with very good service. For example:

Awardspace: very easy to use. You can upload your files by ftp (it gives you ready-made downloadable configuration files) or by using the file manager. Free subdomains like atwebpages.com and others. They guarantee 99.9% uptime.
Atspace: also very easy. It gives you a subdomain such as atspace.eu.
x10Hosting: it has FTP and a file manager that lets you upload a zip of your files and unzip it on the server, in addition to FTP. It can host your domain name for free.

Among the 3, I recommend Awardspace, for its simplicity, speed and reliability

Once up, create a website. This website you are on was created with Typesetter CMS. Typesetter doesn't use databases or anything complex, installation is very easy. If not, use one of the software that the server you have chosen has. Or make a simple web page. Of all these options, the simplest is to use Typesetter.

At this point, you will have:

A .wrl file (VRML) or a series of them joined by a .wrl file that loads them
A conventional web page

We need a bridge between the two. The way to do it is to create an .html document with this content:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
   <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8"/>
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="https://create3000.github.io/code/x_ite/4.6.16/dist/x_ite.css"/>
   <script type="text/javascript" src="https://create3000.github.io/code/x_ite/4.6.16/dist/x_ite.min.js"></script>
<style>
    X3DCanvas {
        width: 100%;
        height: 100%;
        position: absolute;
    }
    </style>
</head>
<body>
    <X3DCanvas src="folder/world.wrl">
      <p>Your browser may not support all features required by X_ITE!</p>
    </X3DCanvas>
</body>
</html>

As you can see, there are two parts to copy. The first one is put in the head section, and it is the load of the VRML / X3D viewer called X_ite. X_ite can be downloaded, it's just a couple of files, and use it from your own server if you prefer. If not, just paste these yellow lines inside the head section.

In X3DCanvas, you can see that the width and height of the frame displayed by the VRML is expressed. The width and height as it is in our example is for full window in your browser or mobile. You can specify a size as usual in html, but also remove the "position: absolute;" line if you do.

In the body part you have to paste the code that specifies which world to load. The first line is:

<X3DCanvas src="folder/world.wrl">

In this line, "folder" is the folder on your server that contains the VRML file. If there is no such folder, because the world is in the root, do not put anything, and directly put the name of the .wrl file for example:

<X3DCanvas src="world.wrl">

Here world.wrl is our .wrl file (VRML).

Once this bridge page already exists, you can put a link to it from your website. By clicking on the link, visitors will enter the virtual world.

HOW TO USE VRML CONTENT ON ANY PAGE:

Of course, you can also, on any web page or blog, put a VRML / X3D world. To do this, copy the code part of head to the head section of the page or template you use.

Then wherever you want to insert your .wrl file, just paste the body part.

If you create VRML worlds, I would love to link them in my personal page, Hipercubo, where you can also visit my own worlds built in 1998. Write to me at jordircardona@yahoo.com

How Do Virtual Worlds Survive
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Preface

I'm in the belief that this economical crisis is reaching an end soon, but none of our countries will have a fast recovery. In some, like mine I fear, there will never be good times again, at least until someone makes deep changes to the system. And not in the sense of increasing productivity lowering salaries and all that stuff we are used to hear, but in the sense of a wealthier population.

Business owners, rulers, economists, must understand that if everybody is unemployed or with a low salary, no one will buy anything that is not essential for life. The solution: pay more, make more money be injected in the system, but not to the banks - to the people.

Until they understand this and fix the world, owners of virtual worlds -let it be big businesses or independent programmers, if there's some- must understand that the era of "all for free" has reached an end. They will have lesser populations, and must be sure that those populations bring them the money to survive.
It is hard to accept this (less public, but of more quality), but if your virtual world is not sustainable at the medium term, it will prevent you from making a big bubble that some day explodes and ruins you.

Years ago I had the idea of building a virtual worlds platform myself. I built numerous worlds and started to program the server and client. I abandoned the idea as soon as I saw the enormous costs and low possibilities of return of the investment that you need to do. Now I am so happy that I didn't do it.

So if you are wandering into this dangerous adventure, the least you could do is avoid common mistakes. I really want virtual worlds out there, and I ask all the people behind them to not repeat those common errors.

Many have already fallen to the crisis (There.com, Metaplace...). You will make us happier if yours doesn't fall too.

Now, The Concept

When talking about their susteinability, there are 3 types of virtual worlds: doomed, unstable and stable. A world that does not reach a real, integrated and active populaton, is doomed to disappear.

An unstable virtual world belongs to the group of those which have not reached that population, or have exaggerated costs that are not covered (may be for an excess of initial costs or a lack of continuous funding, or too elevated costs of maintenance).

A virtual world reaches a stable state when it gets enough real population that is compromised and integrated and active.

See that I'm not simply saying "population". What I mean with real population is when people:

Friendly welcome newbies and motivate them to make roots in the community.
Actively enter and participate often in the virtual world life.
They understand the economical needs of the business behind their virtual world.
They have internal cohesion, as a good family, and treat others in the virtual world with respect friendship, and willing to help, not making ghettos.
Are not willing to abandon the virtual world because of their deep integration, no matter what new wvs emerge.

During the last decades, many of these that are stable nowadays appeared and reached this state, because they focused on building this kind of society, and were realist and humble in their plans.

This is often not possible, or is not easy, nowadays.

New worlds are forced to compete with very high requirements from new users of virtual worlds, that constantly compare them to videogames: they demand stunning speed, no lag, graphics of high quality, connection stability, features... plus a society and things to do (activities).

Businesses are reacting to this risk in many ways. One of them is using open source engines for their graphics, for example, Unity for Nurien. But this is not the key to success, just to reduce costs.

It is also essential to notice the following: you don't need only to attract people, you need to attract the right people.

As stated by Richard Bartle in his books, there are different kinds of users, that we will simplify in 3 groups:

Killers: are attracted by graphics and arcade features
Explorers (Builders): are attracted by building features and use to be too busy to talk to others or be involved in anything social, but are needed to make the virtual world alive, growing, and esthetical.
Socializers: basic for any social virtual world.

This last group is essential. They are people that enjoy talking and interacting with others. They are not attracted by anything but the features that make the world playable in a social sense, and allow social interaction.

A virtual world needs thousands to millions of this last group of users. They may be attracted by good graphics, but they won't stay if they can't socialize.

Virtual worlds are about people, not graphics (games are about graphics and playability). The key to failure is that many of the people that are attracted by graphical improvements are not potential real population. They are the killer type, and won't stay for too long.

Focus on features, not graphics.

Also, you need qualified builders. The more brain they have, the less CPU and GPU, and resources of connection, and server hard drive they will use, and lesser costs for any virtual world.

A skilled, geek-type of world builder can make an efficient use of resources. An inefficient one will waste your money and resources without limits, filling your world with poor quality structures.

Most of the today stable virtual world attracted their populations in times of lesser competition by offering features that made them unique or very complete.

Examples of stable type of virtual worlds: ActiveWolrds, Runescape, or Gaia.

Some possible advices for new virtual world are:

Have a sustainable economical model from the start. Ideally it must be something that brings money in a regular basis (a monthly fee). People that hate commercial ads, that don't want to pay for anything, and want all for free don't understand the economical needs of that project they are enjoying, and are not the kind of people you want for anything.
Focus on "game" features, not just graphics features. For the reasons stated before, plus that many of the socializers don't care about this and may have old computers that can't render them.
Get or instruct efficient worldbuilders from the beginning. Offer them a lifetime free membership, or hire them. If you hire them they will build more, as well as if you provide them with a recurring reward, not just something they get once. At least at the beginning, you must also limit the building rights or make them available only for paid accounts. This will avoid filling your virtual world with rubbish.
Have real socializers and make them understand and be compromised with your mision and needs. This happens in ActiveWorlds to high degree, and in Second Life in a lesser degree. Get charismatic leaders (i.e. Torley in SL). Their mission is to keep the community alive, active, to create cohesion around their figure, and even cooperate with their money to support it.
And the most important thing: don't oversize your project. It must grow progresively, and securing every step on financial sources. ActiveWorlds does it this way, and survived to the fall of many others.

Never ever forget that a social virtual world is about people. It's not the graphics, it's the people who are important. All the features should suppose an advantage for social interaction, cohesion, and good relationships between virtual citizens.

A virtual world must become real as a society. Must become something that ties together your citizens, yourself, and what they have created.

What Is Semantic Copyright
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Creative Commons License Abuse Consequences
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In the last times, in some countries, there is much social pressure, many times coming from public institutions and governments, other times from private institutions, to license everything people create under a CC license.

This is sometimes good, and sometimes it isn't. This article explains when it's good and criticizes the use of CC licenses for texts in websites and blogs. Then, after this simple example, we examine the consequences for 3D models under a CC license, and the economical consequences for content creators of the abuse of CC.

Creative Commons was created to share software documentation, as you can read here. For example, a manual about Linux, that can benefit of being a collaborative work.
That way, anyone using that software or project can extend the documents and manuals with his/her knowledge, so everyone benefits.

The CC license is excellent for some uses:

Software documentation of open source software, community works, and other documents that need to be shared between non-profit organizations of people.
Images, desktop wallpapers, icons, and clipart, when the author wants to get a wide diffusion of his/her work. Some excellent photographers license with CC some part of their work. They release some of them in low resolution for use in Internet as CC, but may sell big resolution copies under a non-exclusive contract.
Music if your primary financial source are concerts, and you don't have the support of a music company or marketing associate. Jamendo is an example of this kind of sharing. This way music bands and authors that may otherwise not make any concert and get no money in their life get to be known by a mass public, that go to their concerts and maybe pay the bills.
Manifests for altruist causes like I Want Peace In The World, etc.
Some articles or parts of a website or blog if you want them to be copied over and over and not just referenced by a link (e. g. a press release).

These are excellent uses for Creative Commons License. Specially when used as a promotion tool for image creators (designers, photographers).

But Licensing ALL the text content of a blog or website with Creative Commons is a rotund act of stupidity that harms the Internet, and we all are suffering the consequences right now. I will explain why.

Picture by Grégoire Lannoy

What does Creative Commons allow you to do?

By using Creative Commons License, you always allow people to copy the entire contents of your posts, and without modifications. They must say that you are the author, and link to the original source.

Commercial use can be allowed or not. You can also allow them to make derivative works based on it. This means from changing a word or line to changing or adding several parts of your documents.
These derivative works can be CC too, or not, as you decide.

What you always allow to do is to make a literal copy of all your content licensed with CC. If you use CC for your texts, you allow a full copy of your posts or pages.

In a blog, this means that people are allowed to copy your article as it is, and paste it in their websites, linking to you. If they don't link to you, they're breaking the license.
If you use copyright, they can't do this. They must comment something original of their own in their websites, and link to your post where people can read your content.

Consequences of Creative Commons abuse

There's a difference between use and abuse. If you use something with common sense and don't search for legal holes to take advantage over other people's work, then you do a proper use. Everything beyond that may not be illegal but it's an abuse.

As Copyright License has been abused by some people that raged when someone copied a small phrase from their sites, many websites adopted CC license. What they wanted was just to allow someone to quote some part (but not all!) of their work, without fearing to be denounced.

But unfortunately, CC license allows a FULL copy of your contents, and people do it.

So they abuse the CC License. One must be really stupid to think that someone wants all their text contents copied. They did it to allow a part to be copied, not to fill your blog with their content.

When you choose a license for your content or software, you allow people to do everything of what that license allows. So as CC allows a full copy, the consequences are:

When you search for something in Google or other browsers, you get thousands of results that are the same content copied and pasted endlessly.
As all the info you find is the same, the errors are the same. So you can't have your problem solved. The solution to your problem is buried in page 80 of Google's results. And you don't have the patience to go there.

For webmasters, these are the consequences:

People with websites with the original source are outnumbered by the copiers that have abused their license to get visitors without working too much.
Their websites with original content are ranked low because many times the original content is perceived as duplicated by search engines.
Original content producers loose visitors. The copiers get high rankings.

If you're going to use CC, think seriously if your content is suitable for that. If it's a manual or guide for an OS, for example, it may be great.

But for other uses, think seriously in the harm you may be doing to us all.

Also think, if you have a personal blog, if you would like someone to write a post using yours and adding things, and then say that it is based on you.

You shouldn't use CC unless you want to flood Internet with copied articles, and make all our searches harder.

Also consider that if you link to a post that is not the original author, or vote a copy or an article in social sites, you are encouraging people to copy, not to make original content that is what you really value. The solution is easy: as an user, go to the original author's website and vote it.

Copyleft licenses like CC were created to allow sharing, but not to feed a legion of abusing idlers.

CC is just for photo promotion, manifests, self-promotion or shared image resources and manuals. Please, let's use licenses in its proper context.

And what about 3D?

A CC may be applied to anything. There is also the possibility to license a 3D model or a virtual world under a CC license. You must be aware that some sites assume a CC license by default for all uploads.

When adding your 3D model to these sites or licensing your 3D content under CC, be aware about this:

You allow people to use and distribute your 3D model as long as they credit you, without paying anything. For example, it can be used for a 3D game, a TV ad, or anything. In these cases, as CC doesn't specifies clearly how to attribute the author, it can be easily abused. In my opinion you should specify how do you want to be credited (for example "in the game titles" or "in a scrolling marquee in a video")
Depending on the CC license you choose, commercial use may be allowed. Again, for example a TV ad of a company, or a commercial 3D game. You will perceive no money back.
Depending on the option you choose, derived works may be produced: this means using your model as a base of theirs, animate it or texture it differently. Again they must attribute you as author.

I suggest not to have your 3D creations under CC, except if they are part of a public domain tutorial or course, because it can be easily abused. In addition, between the time in which an user downloads a digital asset and uses it, he/she may forget were it came from. This way, the content license can be easily abused, many times without intention.

With software or 3D assets, most people just understand 3 types of licenses in their minds:

Those that allow them to use the content for anything for free, allowing distribution (free for all).
Those that allow to use the content for personal use, without distribution allowed (freeware for personal use).
Those that allow the use of the content for anything they wish, without right to distribute, for a quantity of money (commercial).

Most 3D modelers proceed this way, and it is often suggested that you don't offer free content except if it's an accesory of a commercial 3D product you made (a free texture for a 3D model that you sell, for example), or something that will only be used by a very reduced number of people, or that may help people without resources or with serious problems (for example, a 3D model or virtual world for people with disabilities).

Also, some content creators license models for free simply because these models don't reach a decent quality for being sold, or are models that are not well performed because the creator is in the process of learning something.

Some people say that every artistic creation should be given for free if it can be digitalized. This is a misunderstanding of the ideals of certain utopians, and often this opinions come from people that have very good economical situation and will never have to worry about unemployment, like for example public university teachers.

Obviously, you can produce something and give it for free, but it doesn't mean that it is free for you, because you are employing your time ( you could be doing anything else ), electricity, DSL costs, and hours of work, that is worth money.

Telling people to work for no money is not being progressive, it's being elitist, esclavist or worse things.

Giving everything for free may lead us to an unbalanced society with enormous social differences, where people with artistic talent and unusual skills can't earn for what they can do better than others, while the most rich parts of the society remain in mediocrity.

And this is not really progressive, this is a journey to the darker ages of the past.

State Of X3D For The Web Browser Today
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While researching trying to find a good software to recommend for X3D on the web, I came to the sad conclusion that most of the solutions, that initially were available, are in fact unavailable or have stopped their development.

We have come to the paradox that VRML has more effective software available than X3D.

As I plan to run a X3D course in the classic VRML encoding course in this site, I needed 2 kind of tools:

- One of standalone visualization, and debugging and easy error fixing in our files, that will most likely be Xj3D, because it gives very understandable error messages and has a strict syntax tolerance.

- Another to visualize the contents of a X3D file embedded in a web page. The reason to this is that Xj3D has not a browser plugin.

The problem comes with the last, as there is no decent X3D browser plugin, it seems. All of them have some probem.

For example:

Octaga: works great but shows a giant logo in a corner. Your visitors will have to buy the software to remove it, although it is not expensive (50 euro), but most of them won't do it, as browser plugins are universally conceived as free (do you imagine paying to see Flash content?), so your visitors will have a frustrating experience.

BSContact: The same as Octaga, but this time they ask you 300-2000 euro depending on the license type, which is exaggerated.

Xj3D: As said, it is a standalone, no plugin, application. There's an applet version that is rather buggy and no help docs. Passing urls from the browser to the application seems not easy, Firefox doesn't pass them.

Vivaty: Many people did not realize that it was a good browser plugin and just used it for Facebook. It was fast. Their shadow engine was not so good as BSContact or Octaga, but was quite cool. Unfortnatelly, Vivaty closed down, so this player may not be available soon. There is still hope that someone buys the code and makes a freely available X3D plugin, with no disturbing logos.

Cortona: Can't display X3D, just some nodes. Works great, although a bit slow, but only with VRML.

Instant Player: Has a plugin that hangs Firefox when you change of tab or refresh the screen. The plugin project was abandoned by the institution behind Instantreality. Can run a link in standalone when clicked in Firefox, although it's a little slow to open, because Instant Player is a heavy application.

FreeWRL: Recently, the project was abandoned. Anyway it had no browser plugin.

Kambi's View3DScene: Can open a X3D file when a link is clicked, not in the page but in a standalone window. It works great and has fantastic graphic possibilities, shaders and many custom nodes that can make awesome sceneries. The only drawback is the lack of sound. We hope they add it soon.

As things are now, there are still solutions, that may happen or not:

Kamburelis, the developer of View3DScene, may consider the addition of sound if he gets enough test cases for sound nodes (this is, worlds made in VRML or X3D using sound nodes) to include in his test suite. I plan to contribute making some. May be the best solution for now, at least it is easy to trigger into Firefox or IE.
The makers of BSContact or Octaga get enlightened and remove the horrible logo, getting thousands of visitors and becoming a standard de-facto plugin like Blaxxun did for some time.
The makers of Xj3D develop a browser plugin bridge, that embeds a java window inside the web page, maybe using JavaFX.
Cortona adds support for X3D.

This is the situation, and the paradox. Making something with VRML may be more visible to web users than making it with X3D.

I think this is more a marketing and planning failure than a development or technical failure. If X3D had been called VRML 3.0, many of the developers of the past had just upgraded their software and allow more or less powerful solutions. But they have perceived it as a different thing, just as many web users, and considered VRML 2.0 too old (who in earth had the idea to call it VRML97 ?) and X3D a not enough widespread thing.

Second Life Reinventing Themselves?
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Some days ago SL announced they were firing 100 people. They said it was because a restructuration of their business. Some said that this has to do with their strategy, some time announced, to integrate with social sites like Facebook and integrate SL inside web pages. The companies asserts that this has nothing to do with economical problems.

At the same time, they have lowered the exchange value of the Linden Dollar. This can have a double meaning: it can be a sign of weakness, or a wise move to reduce their vulnerability.

I decided to publish this some days later because at this time everybody knows this, and to have more time to think about it.

The immediate reaction is thinking that if they don't have problems, why do they fire 100 people? Well, let's accept they don't have them, and that people that lost their job have been well compensated. Then, it may be a wise move.

When I first knew about SL years ago, and heard all those news in the TV and radio, I had a very bad concept of SL, that was the unreal hype the media spread about them. I even was upset, because they image of virtual worlds that was being projected was that all in virtual worlds were a mad orgy (you know what I mean).

Later, inworld, I saw that all was just exaggeration, that SL was just like any other virtual world, even better that the majority. The application was not hard to use at all, the worlds were so many... There is an enormous creativity and beauty inside Second Life, and lots of creative people, that make music, movies, build worlds, create avatars... much more than in any other virtual world. You only find the negative side if you are looking for it, if you aren't, you don't even see it, just like in Google or the Internet in general. The good and bad is inside you, just like in this first life.

Photo by rafeejewell

I said long time ago that SL has a pyramidal structure, based on their hype. Now that the hype has ceased, they need to decrease their size, become smaller. Their costs must approach zero, because they don't charge their members to belong to SL, like Active Worlds does from the beginning.

Funding through advertising is hard, because people tend to be more blind to ads as time passes and they become used to them.

It's difficult for virtual worlds that don't charge a monthly or yearly fee (or have stopped charging) to start or return to charge for membership. They usually loose most of their members. Specially if it the difference between paid accounts and free accounts doesn't exist, or is minimal.

Another critical aspect is that SL charges big quantities of money to people that own land based on that they have an huge traffic and influence on people and in the media. If SL becomes smaller, this influence, hype, and traffic will be smaller too, and may not have this effect.

Virtual money. It was the base of part of that hype. Some virtual worlds try to get real money that they need in exchange for virtual goods. Piracy and excess of free content are the enemies of this politics. Limit the amount of free content uses to be unpopular, but maybe is just a matter of controlling what is genuine free content, and not pirated content or content of unknown sources.

Worlds that are not big enough, or didn't generate much hype, live from the fees that their members pay. If there are free accounts, there must be premium accounts that provide attractive features that make people embrace them. SL should create or restrict these features and accounts.

The problem with restriction is that make people angry because what was free now isn't, and no one likes that. On the other side, free accounts in SL are so full of features that no one in the world would want to pay for anything else.

Photo by rafeejewell

One solution may be to popularize building. Instead of having to pay a high fee for land and building privileges, make building more affordable even for those with less resources, give them more for less. The counterpart is that crappy content that make the whole virtual world look ugly may proliferate more. In addition, the fee for builder accounts must be high enough to pay the storage and generated costs of what is built.

To summarize, SL may be trying to be smaller, and this is good to survive. They may be trying to stop being a dinosaur, and start being a small sized predator, to avoid being a prey.

To avoid this, they are facing the same old decisions and alternatives as every virtual world, some things that every virtual world should decide before even starting their activity.

Their virtual citizens must understand that it's better changing than dying, and we've seen many virtual worlds die in the last times. Some of them we had suspected (There.com).

Second Life, as many other big Intenet businesses and even persons, are coming to the point of realizing that "everything for free" is not sustainable. But we will talk about this another day.

Revolution In 3D And Gaming
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OnLive Game Service is now available for users in the United States, and will suppose a revolution on how games are played.

This service consists in a catalog of the latest titles in video games, that you can play on any device, because the game is not running in your PC, but in a server, that streams the video of this game through the DSL line to your Desktop PC, Mac, Netbook, iPad or any other device.

Photo by SobControllers

It has taken 8 years of development to make Onlive Game Service. The base month-to-month service fee is $14.95 and includes:

Instant-play free game demos.
Multiplayer across PC, Mac and TV platforms.
Standard online games services such as gamer tags, user profiles, friends, chat, but with a twist: everything is live video.

To play a particular game of the top-tier, newly released games, you will have to pay to rent it or buy it. I suppose this will have a much lower price than purchasing or renting the game in your town, as costs of distribution are eliminated, and also avoids costs and danger of piracy.

Initially, they’ll be offering the OnLive Game Service for PCs and Macs through a small browser plug-in. Later this year, they will announce the public availability of a MicroConsole TV adapter, to play games in a TV.

Onlive Game Service is available for the USA since June 17. Other countries will have to wait, because the DSL connection in their countries is not fast enough. We may suppose that the service will expand first to those countries with faster DSL providers.

In addition to Onlive, there are other businesses that have not been launched yet, that promise to develop similar services to allow every game developer to publish their own catalog.

This new conception of video gaming means the application of cloud computing to video games, and will have some consequences, most of them good:

You will be able to play the most modern video games in any device, as long as it can be connected to a fast DSL.
If the use of these services becomes a worldwide trend, piracy will be significantly reduced.
Any computer will be valid to play any game, no more minimal requirements, at least you will only need a machine that plays video fast.
You won't have to carry your games with you or be at home to play.

This concept may at some point be ported to virtual worlds and other 3D-related things:

Virtual worlds that are run in a cloud of computers and show stunning graphics and sound, played in every device, from a TV to a laptop, desktop, Linux, Mac, or iPad.
3D rendering services in a cloud of computers, to get your files rendered in seconds, delivered to your PC in minutes.
Real-time 3D demos at top resolution without the risk of piracy.
Augmented Reality applications of high complexity executed in the cloud and delivered to your device in a streamed video layer that combines with the input of your device.

An exciting future has just started, don't you think?

eGovernment Test In Barcelona
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The Good Consequences Of P2P Regulation
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It seems that P2P is being internationally limited by different countries, and forced to respect copyright law. Legislations seem still very immature. Let's see the consequences that this may have.

The European law against bad use of P2P networks allowed that national authorities could exclude users from the internet without a court order.
We all may be happy that this has been stopped, but copyrighted materials need defense.

p2p law file sharing Photo by Lepiaf.geo

There's also a law in the USA that makes any P2P software used for transferring files from one computer to another to include a big warning and require the user to give "informed consent" when installing the software and every time it's used.
This is a big pain for the user, that will be prompted endlessly with warning floating boxes.

The trend is to control, limit and regulate P2P networks, and to protect materials that are released under copyright or other licenses that don't allow free re-distribution.

Obviously, this is to fight against software piracy. Also, now that electronic book readers are becoming better and cheaper, people will tend to buy more ebooks. If piracy is not controlled, this may suppose the ruin for authors of books.

In the last years, software developers have also suffered from too much piracy, making programming a ruinous activity. And that's because people not only download through P2P applications from big companies, that can overcome the loss of a part of their benefits, but also applications done by independent programmers or small companies.

In some countries of Europe, people have developed a very weak sense of what is the required effort to produce the things that they steal through P2P, and that if they continue doing this, they ruin the small developers.

On the other part, as new laws emerge, everybody can see that the amount of pirate content on eMule and similar programs is very low. If you search for any application you get very few results. And most of them contain viruses, mostly trojans.
Also, very often, pedophile content is hidden inside other files, and this may suppose being accused of that crime if you don't report it to the authorities.

Obviously, laws are going the wrong way, because annoying the user (as in the US) may damage software applications, and banning people from Internet without a court order (as in Europe) is against the individual rights.

But software developers, and now ebook authors, need protection.

If you don't agree with this, you should just think that Internet has popularized everything. An author of ebooks, a writer, is not a member of an elite anymore. Everybody can write a book, and hope to be read, and maybe get a life from that.

Also, many programmers may want to sell their applications, done with many months and years of effort. It is their right to charge for that work.

ebook reader sony ebook amazon kindle 2 Photo by Edans

And for users, everybody must understand that if you like a service, a software application or a book, you must support their creators. And this must be done directly, not through taxes, I mean buying their materials. If you pay for a software application, a book, or a service, as when you make a donation, you are supporting something that you like, and encouraging the author to keep on doing what you like.

We have to pay for things that we have never chosen, to our politicians, through taxes. Why is it so hard for everyone to support what they like? You have the control over all this.

Also, why do you need to get pirate software? There are tons of open source and free software. And if you need something better, that is commercial software, just buy that. There are tons of cheap soft out there, many times as good as the most expensive ones. Often we review them here.

The consequences of P2P regulation, if done the right way, are many and good:

Writing ebooks will be a profitable activity for anyone that has talent.
Publishing companies will not be ruined.
Programming desktop applications will be a profitable activity again.
Open source software will be more valued, and more downloaded.
Freeware programs will get more downloads. So companies that make a free version of their commercial software will get more visits and more sales.
When you go to your local video shop and copy the DVD that you have watched, at least you have paid for that. As there's already a tax on the CDs and DVDs, this may de-facto legal in Europe.
Open source projects will get more money, because people will support them more often.

And derived from the limitations and these beneficial effects, the most important consequence: people will learn to respect other people's work, and that they need their support to continue doing quality products.

When Do Computer Languages Die?
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Unless we think, as in a popular movie, that "Death is only the beginning", computer languages don't die, as long as people continue using them.

Contrary to what many people think, a computer language is not "dead" or "outdated" simply because it was originated many years ago.

These are the years in which some popular computer languages were born:

C: 1972. Used in the majority of computer software.
Java: 1995. One of the youngest.
Fortran: 1957. Widely used in scientific and engineering communities.Believe it or not.
Pascal: 1970. Object Pascal comes from this, and is from 1986.
Cobol: 1959. One of the oldest, but Cobol programmers continue using it in business applications.
JavaScript: 1995. Everybody uses JavaScript.
BASIC: 1964. Visual Basic: 1991.

You see that all these languages are from 50 to 14 years old.

Comparing to these, the first VRML is from 1994, and X3D is from 2004.

This is a graphic that shows the growth of forum posts listed in BoardReader for X3D:

And this is the graph for VRML:

Comparing the popularity of both languages, you can see, looking to the numbers on the left, that VRML is 3 times more popular than X3D.

This is something that Web3D should think about. Being much more older, people still use VRML much more than X3D. People don't see real advantages in their day-to-day to switch to X3D. And X3D has not reached the popularity of VRML. We may discuss the reasons in a future article.

If we go to Google trends and compare the popularity of VRML and X3D in searches, we get:

You can see that the searches that look for VRML are more than X3D. Curiously, in the year of launch of X3D, what people searched most was VRML. I think the reason is because there was no abundance of info and content about X3D, so people searched for VRML.

The bad news is again that X3D has been unable to reach the popularity of VRML in searches.

The graph also displays how X3D appears more often in the news but VRML still is more popular.

And if we contrast VRML and ActiveWorlds, we see that VRML is still more popular. We also see that the re-birth of ActiveWorlds can be noticed since 2007, as the "news reference volume" for AW grows.

ActiveWorlds is considered as a living and modern platform for virtual worlds, a technology that is very veteran but still very competitive. Why then, being more popular, is VRML considered as something from the past?

And finally, compared to Second Life:

Considering the enormous popularity of Second Life, this is a great achievement for VRML.

Second Life has passed through a similar cycle as VRML. In the beginning, everybody hyped about it, reached a top, and a demystification and criticism.

Now, Second Life has reached its maturity, and begins a stable level of popularity, because it reached a critical mass.

You can see that VRML reached this critical mass long time ago, and the line is straight. The same for the volume of news that reference to VRML, that keep a stable level.

There's more. Any decent 3D application exports to VRML, and it is still one of the main formats in science and architectural visualization.

In addition to all the exciting contents of Hiperia3D News, I will feature from time to time the comments that also appear on Twitter about VRML and X3D. These also offer some interesting information, and may be valued by VRML fans.

Big numbers of people got great satisfaction since its beginning saying that VRML was dead. Now we know they were not right.

Conclusions

Most of the computer languages that we use are very old. And as I said, a computer language is not "dead" or "outdated" simply because it was originated many years ago,.

The lesson that we get from this study is that a language (or a technology) is not dead if people continue using it.

Another lesson: people may choose to keep on using an old version of a technology. The reasons may be that the new one does not offer advantages for most people, or they are just ignorant of them, or the new one has something that discourages its use.

So if you liked VRML, next time that someone tells you that it is a dead technology, just say them that it is still mentioned, used and loved by a huge part of humanity.

Reinventing The Wheel: Mozilla Khronos, Another Standard For The 3D Web
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Some news have just appeared about the new project of Mozilla: Khronos, another "open, royalty-free standard" for 3D on Internet.

UPDATE: New info: I have contacted Alan Hudson (Yumetech, Web3D.org) and he said me that they'll be working with Khronos on this.

Khronos will be exposing openglES to ecmascript on a webpage. It's aimed for low level 3D graphics programmers, and not to world or 3D authors, like X3D.

So we're talking of different standards for different things. Good to know.

I can recommend you some external articles this project, to not bore you describing the same as others:

This new project will allow to use JavaScript (ECMAscript, to be more precise) to manipulate the 3D models and interact with the content. The 3D part will be rendered using OpenGL.

As you can see, this is not really new. It is like VRML (that also used ecmascript).

No one needs to invent another royalty-free standard for the 3D web, because it is out there already, and it's called VRML, and now X3D.

Please don't re-invent the wheel, or at least, don't make the same mistakes. Why not just use the VRML or X3D standard? Can someone explain me why?

I can see no reason to start again from the beginning. It seems to me that every 5 years someone invents a "standard" that is used by no one, instead of re-using what is already out there.

Please try to improve first, and if this is impossible, invent. But don't invent the same again and again.

I hope that Khronos doesn't make the same mistake and think in virtual worlds when they do their standard. People want 3D virtual worlds, and also games. For simple visualization, no new thing is needed.

Please don't mix again point of view and avatar, and add some collision detection. These are the the only things that are missing in VRML/X3D spec.

And again, why don't they do a new component or any other kind of extension of the X3D spec and simply provide a decent browser plugin? Can someone understand this?

Lively Disappears
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My colleague Bruce Lehmann, the Administrator of WBandD, told me that Lively was going to disappear from the virtual worlds scene. This December 31, 2008 Lively will be shut down, as you can read on their official web site.

For worldbuilders, this means that their works will disappear too. For this, they tell you:

"Embedded rooms in blogs and other web pages will continue to show an image, but users will no longer be able to enter Lively rooms and interact.

Between now and the end of the year we encourage you to capture all your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms." (Lively website)

This is something that is not enough for creators, as Len Bullard says on his site. I agree, people should be able to download their creations, but this is something, as Len says, that happens when one doesn't build using open standards like X3D: when there are problems, you can't take your work and re-publish it.

Other interesting article that speculate about the reason of closing can be read at RealityPrime. One of the possible causes that this article considers is that Lively was just an experiment for Google, and when they faced the complexity of virtual worlds they just closed it. The complexity of sane behavior (why people do what they do) and of insane behavior (how to stop the problems).

Worlds In Motion also offers an official answer that says that they just want to focus "on our core search, ads and apps business." This coincides with what RealityPrime suggested.

Many groups, forums, sections in big associations like the AVW where created featuring Lively and its users. Even virtual worlds gateways like Myrl have added support for Lively. All this work is now lost.

How Did This Happen?

Everybody knows that when I reviewed Lively months ago, it was one the worst of the options selected. I was forced to include it in my 6 systems review because it was so widespread since the beginning that not doing it would have been a crime. In addition, it was promising, because Google was behind it, and Google has great products like Adsense, Blogger...

The reasons are explained in the articles that I referred, but I can add that Lively had entered into a dangerous spiral that was damaging Google's brand itself. This is why they abandoned the project.

The reasons:

Google is a too popular, big and reputed company that can't risk damaging their brand launching poor quality products. For this reason, Lively should have been kept in closed beta (invitation only) for a long time before releasing it.
The excess of hype was unavoidable by Google. Everything that Google does provokes a lot of buzz. This worked against Lively, because we all expected a smashing app that may compete against the best ones, and Lively was just an early alfa application.
No one at Google wanted so much hype. It get out of their hands. It was too soon.
High expectations and the many bugs originated lots of bad critics to Lively. This, joined to the lack of security to control the kind of contents posted, damaged Google's brand.
Google realized that they would need a lot of resources (not only economical but also workers) to fix this quickly.

Lively would have lasted if they had perseverated, added original features, some sense of community... Also, even if it is not too much orthodox, returning to closed beta may have helped.

As others have said, Google realized the enormous task that developing a virtual worlds platform is. And competing with big established platforms or well-rounded solutions meant a big inversion of money and work. There was not enough motivation, so they just closed.

Developing a virtual worlds platform is not only making something that looks like a 3D game. It has to do with human behavior, and how we act in community. This is a very complex task that is not done in our free time.