NG Design Document/Introduction

From Rex community wiki

Introduction

realXtend is a non-profit Open Source project, whose goal is to advance the state of Immersive 3D Internet, also called 3D Virtual Worlds, by participating in the creation of technologies that enable rich interaction in virtual environments.

Goal

realxtend, in collaboration with like-minded partners, aims to bring about the development of a modern, Open Platform for the Immersive 3D Internet.

Open Internet

The design of the Internet is decentralized; based around interconnected but ultimately independent nodes. The Internet itself imposes no policy, and only serves as a medium to connect service providers and consumers. It is an open network based on open standards, largely free of walls or fetters. More information about the Internet and openness can be found in the Mozilla manifesto.

realXtend is committed to respecting these principles in its software design and governance.

Open Source

To be an Open Platform, open software design and governance is required.

The platform should be freely available and open for anyone to modify and build applications on top of. This increases adoption and participation, and thus improves chances of de facto standardization.

Openness is also business friendly, as the true business value lies in the applications, not the platform. A widely available platform means a large market for your applications.

History

The realXtend project was founded by Juha Hulkko, a Finnish entrepreneur who realized the potential of the emerging Virtual Worlds technology, and gathered a group of local IT professionals to start building a new platform that would be released under Open Source licenses.

The purpose of the platform would be to stimulate development of new kinds of business centered on the application of Virtual World technology.

Organization

realXtend is a non-profit organization currently hosted by Oulu Innovation.

Originally the project was funded entirely by Mr. Juha Hulkko, but when a number of new collaborators expressed interest in participation, Oulu Innovation was brought in to lend legal and fiscal structure to the project.

The highest decision making authority is the realXtend Steering Group. A Program Manager, employed by Oulu Innovation, oversees the project. Actual engineering is outsourced to member companies.

Basic development of the platform is handled directly by realXtend, and profit-making applications or projects are mostly handled by the member companies.

The realXtend Program Manager can function as the initial point of contact in all cases.

The Vision

Virtual reality technologies have been used in special applications for decades, notably in training and medical solutions, in which their effectiveness has been proven beyond doubt. In the recent years the availability of broadband connections and powerful consumer-level computers has made massively multi-user gaming and social virtual worlds popular.

Despite their popularity, online virtual worlds are still in early stages of development both as a technology and as a business. Proprietary content formats and hosting provided solely by a centralized entity who also has full control over authentication and security are only a part of the problem limiting the adoption of virtual worlds in many use cases. An open and freely available platform solves many of the issues, but there is one important factor that requires consideration: avatar portability.

Avatars are the users' virtual representatives, through which they convey their personality into the interactions between them and other users. Communication is a central selling point for virtual worlds, in the highly interactive environments it is possible to use text chat, voice, video or even body language to communicate and unlike the regular Internet, browsing the sites is actually a shared experience as all the users are visible to each other. The current virtual worlds set strict limits to avatar movement, since they are usually only allowed to travel between different parts of one single world.

In realXtend the avatars and user authentication details are stored separately from world servers, making it possible for any user to visit any service unless the service provider has chosen to specifically limit access rights to the site in question. In practise this means that virtual worlds will form an open structure anyone can offer their services in with full control over hosting and where the users may visit interesting services by typing a URL address or clicking a link. The success of the Internet is based on synergies of a multitude of different services forming a system where the total value is higher than the sum of its parts, something that the virtual worlds of today would benefit from as well.

The main goal of the realXtend project is to assist and be involved in creating software components that enable virtual worlds to be used for purposes that can make people's everyday lives better. Be it greener conferences through lesser need for traveling, more effective treatment for disabilities, greater possibilities for education, more intuitive user interfaces for common tasks or just the enjoyment of social interaction between people from all over the world, virtual reality technology offers very interesting potential. A lot of the technology already exists, but there is still work to do for us and everyone else reaching for similiar goals.

The Current Situation

At the time this chapter was written (February 2009), the realXtend project has reached a crossroads. The OpenSimulator project that has been the foundation of the realXtend world server is now two years old and still going strong. Their modular ideology has served realXtend purposes well and the Modular realXtend project – the effort of turning realXtend into modules that can be used with any OpenSim installation - is well under way.

The situation with the viewer isn't quite as simple, however. The Linden Lab(tm) open source viewer has been a good prototype platform for realXtend development so far but it is based on an architecture that is fundamentally different from what the realXtend is aiming to be, which makes creating new features costly in terms of money, effort and stability, because large portions of the code have to be rewritten for every new feature. The viewer's licensing is also considered unsuitable by most potentially interested parties, which makes community building very difficult. Building a new viewer is a major effort and a lot of this documentation is dedicated to viewer issues.

The avatar portability services are also in prototype stages and expected to improve in the future. There are several exciting possibilities ahead, namely the integration of OpenID to the avatar authentication services and a distributed content storage server for improving the virtual worlds' scalability. We are also looking into integrating truly global instant messaging and VoIP that could also be accessed through a light client on a mobile phone, for example. The realXtend project's general goal of advancing the Immersive Web necessitates our involvment in the very cutting edge of technology development. We are always looking for new ideas, contributors and partners interested in working with us for everyone's benefit.

This Document

This document represents a collection of the thinking and planning of the realXtend project, compiled into a form for dissemination outside of the living project. The document is a convenience to the interested reader, and not a strict specification.

The goals and ideals are considered constant, but the technological design will naturally be in continuous flux, and it is expected that they may not represent the true state of the platform at any given time. It is recommended that, when technical specifications are needed, the reader will check for the latest copy of this document, or directly with the open source project wiki or source code repository.