From: alexia!gbnewby@uunet.uu.net (Gregory B. Newby)
Subject: APPS: MUD/shared worlds
Date: 12 Mar 1996 21:03:54 GMT
Message-ID: <4i4orq$ls@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana


From: alexia!gbnewby@uunet.uu.net (Gregory B. Newby)

(Probably someone is under the impression that I'm giving away an
original idea of theirs.  Sorry...it's obvious.  But exciting.)

The idea isn't to create yet another game/interaction environment per
existing MUDs, IRC "doom," etc.  But to develop the infrastructure so
that shared worlds of any type could be developed for any purpose.

JAVA doesn't seem quite ready yet, but it's almost ready:

	- a shared virtual world
	- qualities of MUDs, IRC, and VR
	- able to interact with others and with objects
	- can customized/extended  by building new objects/rooms/regions/etc.
	- interaction by keyboard/mouse or microphone/speakers or
		whatever

Graphics rendering and interaction would happen on the home computer,
per WWW browsers of today.  Ideally, people with all levels of
computers, network bandwidth, and I/O devices would be able to get a
decent level of interaction.

The most obvious architecture, which Java and current net browsers
seem capable of (I think -- it's not clear if security limitations
might make this less than straightforward) is to "cache" images,
sounds, HTML, Java .class files, etc. locally.  But not a temporary
cache, rather just a regular directory with files.  So, newbies would
download a collection of files to start with, then collect more as
they go.  Updated files would be downloaded when encountered.

As people interacted with rooms/people/sounds/images/programs they had
seen before, a local copy would be loaded and run.  This would make
interaction much much faster.  It's not totally clear how easy this is
to do with the current state of Java, but the ability to access files
on the local computer has always been a part of Netscape, Mosaic, and
friends.

Enough for now...I was surprised to see no one discussing this
particular area of application.  Yet, it's one of the obvious goals
for developers in the 3 newsgroups I'm posting this message to (Java,
MUD, VR).

If you know of active work in this area, especially the balance of
network-based and local files for Java, images, etc. mentioned above,
I'd appreciate hearing about it.  Drop me a line.

  -- Greg

PS: In case you're not a science fiction fan, Neil Stephanson's
"Snow Crash" is an excellent vision of how this could all turn out.

// Gregory B. Newby, Assistant Professor & Assistant Dean.  Graduate School of
// Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
// 501 E. Daniel Street, Champaign IL, 61820-6212.  E: gbnewby@uiuc.edu
// V: 217-244-7365  F: 217-244-3302  W: http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~gbnewby
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