The current SL Viewer based rexViewer is going to advance into 0.5 release early 2009. It will most likely run on top of Modrex+OpenSim. Most of the work for the 0.5 will be bug fixing and stability improvements work to make it suitable for business use throughout 2009.
Fish talk from realXtend 0.4 demo content
The realXtend team is planning to make the new from-scratch viewer during 2009. During the planning phase this new viewer is called rex-NG to distinguish it from rex-legacy.
“0.5 is intended to be the last release of the current system, and should include a set of important stabilizations, and work with modrex”, says Ryan McDougall, realXtend software architect, “reX-NG will likely take a while to make useful, and 0.5 will be recommended for use until then.”
However as growing number of teams outside of immediate realXtend core team are starting to work on current realXtend viewer, it will also gain new features and improvements. One of the teams working with realXtend viewer during 2009 will be 3DX.
Steve Sima from 3DX comments that “”3DX will continue to build on the current RealXtend viewer work integrating into our future R17 & R18 viewers. This effort will be in parrallel to the new viewer project from RealXtend which we welcome and support, until a suitable time to cross completely to the new viewer platform is viable.”
A virtual radio station was built using realXtend 0.31 platform. It was connected to a real amateur radio station to enable remote control.
The text at the web site states that: “In this live demonstration new techniques of Internet and the first ever global community of amateur radio will allow mixing the edge of virtual world and real life when operating remote located HF-radio station thru virtual world. In demonstration virtual world is executed with realXtend, next generations open source platform for virtual worlds.”
radio Arcala antennas, aerial view
This kind of use of virtual worlds for real world control is also demonstrated by Implenia, a swiss construction firm. I believe that the real world control cases offer interesting possibilites for virtual worlds in the future. One of the realXtend project’s core missions was, and still is to enable good interfaces between real and virtual, to enable applications just like this.
After you have successfully set up your realXtend world for the rest of the world to access, you soon start to wonder who is visiting the world. Even if the world is for private use, it may be nice to see how many times you have accessed it and when.
Samuel L Jackson takes a look at how many visitors saw realXtend 0.4 demo world
The best way is to use traditional web tracking tools. realXtend example world “beneath the waves” uses statcounter from www.statcounter.com to track visitors. And yes, it even works from local server installs!
Statcounter offers free set up and free log up to 500 entries. The data is presented nicely so that you can for example take a look at world map and see where your visitors are coming from.
How does it work then? Follow these intstructions to set your own world visitor counter:
First, you need a publicly accessible web page. There are free hosting services that you can use for that, for example 000webhost.com, they even provide a free domain for your web pages. Make a nice web page with words “Hello World!”.
set up a new statcounter project www.statcounter.com and copy paste the resulting code snippet to your web page. You can define whether you want to show the visitor count or if it is hidden.
Start the realXtend viewer and go to your world you want to track, upload image (any jpg will do, but do not use png!) and find it from your inventory
edit properties of the texture (the image you uploaded) and edit it’s media url to point to your web page with statcounter code (for example http://www.example.com/trackmyworld.html).
Create a prim, and drag and drop the texture on that. Hide the prim or show it somewhere, it does not matter technically (ethically I think it does and people should be either seen the visitor count or some explanation that they are being tracked).
Start watching from your statcounter project page how the visitor count evolves over time! You can create more projects for all of your worlds in case you have many.
One drawback of this method is that it does not track where people are coming from (virtually, for example if they are teleporting from Second Life or OpenLife). Another drawback is that if you want to show ads, people can not click the ads and you don’t get any revenue.
Hannu Hollström, Tomi Kujanpää and Antti Ilomäki, the new program manager.
The long time program manager Jani Pirkola resigns. “I could not put enough time for the project anymore, after we got a new baby to the family. Being the program manager for realXtend is really a 24/7 duty, which does not mix well with small children. The family deserves me and the realXtend project deserves a full time leadership.” says Pirkola. “This was the dream come true project for me. I am proud of the realXtend team and all the hard work they have done. I got the dream team for the project.”
Jani Pirkola, the old program manager.
The new program manager for realXtend is Antti Ilomäki. Antti is the first employee of the realXtend project, as he started during July 2007. After the initial planning phase, the realXtend development project started September 2007. The program manager Jani Pirkola started at the same time with the development team.
The realXtend project has successfully achieved its goals for 2008. The long term goal of the project is to gain the de facto standard position of the new 3d Internet. realXtend is working with Deepthink to make the realXtend server to run as a dll on top of OpenSim. The first versions are already running, although they are still lacking many of the features. This is seen as a remarkable milestone.
In my experience, copying Real Life environments and work methods to a Virtual World does not work. In theory there is nothing wrong with that approach, but in practice all the limitations we have due to hardware, software and network latency, you can usually get a better user experiece by having a meeting (or whatever you plan to do) in Real Life.
This realXtend meeting area is not copied from Real Life
I still believe that Virtual World applications can be made efficient and enjoyable to use - and even to degree that they are better than Real Life counterparts. To make this happen, we need to carefully take advantage of all the benefits we get from using a virtual world, while avoiding any obvious shortcomings.
Benefits:
The use of space; it is expensive in Real Life to use a lot of space. In virtual worlds, the space is practically free (although Linden Lab is seriously trying to limit this aspect in Second Life - but they need their business, right?)
The use of objects; it is expensive and difficult to move around big/huge objects in Real Life. In Virtual World environment you can create and throw around house-sized rocks if you wish.
Moving around; In Real Life, it takes hours to move back and forth from a meeting room to lunch and back, to home and to office - not to even mention long haul flights. In Virtual Worlds, the whole working team can be teleported to another working location to do something else. You can fly from a place to another. Physical location loses its grip (but you need to eat, lets not forget that).
Shortcomings:
Communication; In Real Life, much of communication is said to be non-verbal - included in tone of your voice, body posture, movements, tiny change in your eyes. Virtual Worlds are not even close here - in better ones you can use voice over IP, in most, you need to use bare text chat. This is getting better over time, though.
Fidelity; When using desktop virtual reality, we are bound by the size of the monitor. When compared to reality, it is like looking world through a small box. Sound may not be spatialized. In other words, the experience is of low quality. This is something which will get better over time - there will be new hardware, better software and faster networks.
When the technology matures, we will see more and more applications being possible and appealing for virtual worlds. The technology is already at such a level, that many applications become possible. I will post about these applications in the future as I have many interesting ideas to share with you.
In case you want to add benefits/shortcomings, please comment below or mail me and I will edit the post to contain them (in case I agree!).
Ryan McDougall, realXtend technical architect wrote an open letter to OpenSim-dev mailing list. The letter said that realXtend is planning “…a from-scratch BSD-derived viewer.”
realXtend
Current realXtend viewer is a fork from Linden Lab Second Life Viewer, and it is GPL licensed. The SL Viewer causes problems as OpenSim contribution policy explicitly states that OpenSim can not accept code from developers who have seen or developed SL Viewer. This policy is widely discussed in SL-Dev and Opensim-dev mailing lists and it seems unsolvable.
“We will begin this new process in January and continuing until February of 2009, with a feasibility study.” wrote Ryan McDougall in his letter. “That process will conclude with a proposed road-map as a result, what will be able to take us through 2009 and beyond. The process will begin internally with RealXtend, in order to solidify a unifying core set of principles, but very soon move outward to include a call for proposals and comments from all of you. With a clear road-map and a successful consultation process, we are confident that we will birth an cross platform Open Source community that will be at the forefront of the 3D Virtual World revolution.
“We invite you to give your feedback by visiting the RealXtend website, trying out our software out, signing up for our mailing lists, or joining us on IRC.”
This is an exciting move and from what we have seen from realXtend, we can have high expectations.
“realXtend 0.4 which was released a week ago has a significant optimization regarding avatar movement packets. The number of packets has been reduced, the size of them made smaller and more movement updates are combined into one packet from multiple avatars. With this optimization and the new rexbots, we have been able to have over 300 bots on our LAN servers. Here’s a video to prove it.”
via http://community.rexdeveloper.org/
This is unexpected, totally. My experience with OpenSim is that when the user count goes over 30, or even 20, things start to degrade. The article said that there were optimizations done for the protocol, so that has been the real bottleneck.
Having 300 bots is not the same as having 300 avatars - there is a significant difference in the resulting amount of network traffic. However this is a big step to right direction!
How many simultaneous avatars realXtend supports? After the optimizations, my guess is: around 60.
It also looks that the rexviewer is quite well optimized, because it could render those 300 avatars in the video, all at the same time.
Neo, left, needs to grow his hair when compared to Keanu, right
One of the really fun features of realXtend is the possibility to generate new realistic faces for the avatar. You can use two photos to make a face - one from front and one from side. See the video below to understand what happens:
To use your own face, you need to:
find or take two photos from yourself - front and side
download and install facegen modeller free version
Launch facegen and use “photofit” with your photos
once you are happy with the new face, save it into a .fg file
download and install FaceGen2Rex, launch it and follow instructions (from the readme file) where to put the resulting files (and what else to do)
start your rexviewer, go to a world with your avatar and select view->avatar generator
Select different head by using arrows at the bottom + change skin for the head
After you have success fully imported your face to realXtend, you can continue and bring your favorite celebrities to the virtual world - guess who are modeled below (note: the SI stamp is removed from the forehead when imported)! Go to downloads section to get the facegen files.
Famous persons made into 3D from photos
I also tried to make Martti Ahtisaari and Elvis but they did not look as good. You can get some interesting results by using drawn characters and using side photo from a different person. If this is not enough, you can always use the huge amount of tweaking possibilities of Facegen.
Have fun!
Welcome to my first Blog entry! I intend to report my findings, take notes, collect tips and tricks as I continue to examine the realXtend platform. For those who don’t know already what realXtend is, you should check their web page before continuing!
Beneath the waves content from the 0.4 release
To get started with realXtend yourself, you need to do the following steps:
download the server and install it: the latest release 0.4 seems to be a zip file - so extracting that should be good enough. If you use Vista, you need to right click the starte bat file and “run as admin”.
download the viewer and install it: a decent installation is provided - only for Windows for now, but I read from the maioling lists that Kirstenlee Cinquetti is working on a mac and linux versions!
Start the servers
Start the viewer and connect to your server - and enjoy “Beneath the waves”
If you wish to go and visit your friend’s world, you can create an avatar account at realXtend web site (or if you’re a pro, you can set up the avatar service at your own server)
You can use the realXtend viewer to go to SecondLife or OpenLife as well.
My next blog post will concetrate around using Facegen to create a new head for you avatar - I already made Lucy Liu and Arnold Schwartzenegger faces, and they look like the real thing! Elvis was a harder one…
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