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VastPark and NICTA: Badumna beta

October 22, 2008 By Lowell Cremorne

The title of this story would have to be one of our most obtuse, but the story behind it is hopefully a little more transparent.

VastPark is a developing virtual world platform well known to regular readers. NICTA (National ICT Australia) also has a number of years pedigree in some of the technological underpinnings of virtual worlds. In the case of the collaboration with VastPark, peer to peer (P2P) is the focus. The joint project announced this week involves the release of the beta version of an MMO P2P engine, christened Badumna (which incidentally are a genus of spiders). It’s a promising development and a further shot in the arm for VastPark.

The issue of being able to have more than 50-60 people in one area of a virtual world is one that’s received a lot of attention. Some argue that having many hundreds or thousands or avatars in one smallish space would bring a much-needed buzz to popular virtual worlds. Others argue it’ll just become a crowded mess (imagine voice capabilities in such a scenario). What partnerships like this do is ensure that we’ll actually have the option of finding out what population level works best:

According to NICTA’s P2P Project Leader Dr Santosh Kulkarni, Badumna can support millions of users with minimal infrastructure. “It provides a significant competitive advantage over traditional network engines,” he maintains. Badumna has already been successfully integrated with the platform of 3-D virtual worlds platform provider VastPark.

Of course, this claim has been made before by multiple developers – a notable Australian example being Project Outback. That said, NICTA have serious credibility in their area and VastPark have a lot more development runs on the board than Project Outback ever did (though there was a NICTA connection involved there too).

I think it’s safe to say that P2P as virtual worlds network engine has plenty of life in it yet – check out the NCITA project page for more details.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Filed Under: Alternatives, Australian News Tagged With: , ,

Virtual Worlds London lineup finalised

October 7, 2008 By Lowell Cremorne

As mentioned previously, we’re a media partner for Virtual Worlds London. It’s looking like a dynamic get-together, with quite a list of speakers finalised.

Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon is one of the many notables. If I were attending myself, I’d love to ask some questions of Niniane Wang, Google Lively’s Engineering Lead, on how Google perceive Lively’s performance to date. Australia’s own Bruce Joy, CEO of VastPark is on the speakers list as well.

So if you’ve got a spare few thousand dollars and a couple of weeks to go to London – why not register to attend?

Popularity: 3% [?]

Filed Under: General News Tagged With: , ,

VastPark release Immersion player

September 3, 2008 By Lowell Cremorne

VastPark have been a littler quiet on the news front recently but they’ve changed that today with the announcement of a virtual worlds’ player called Immersion. The player, which will be open source, will allow for VastPark-created worlds to be embedded into websites. VastPark themselves mention Google Lively as the obvious comparison.

CEO Bruce Joy’s take:

“We think that virtual worlds will start to become more utilitarian: you can create a room in minutes and decide to have a VoIP based meeting in there. This will lead to many businesses wanting to host their own micro worlds just as they host their website. We want to make that easy, low cost and provide an open source and a commercial white label software choice.”

Immersion will have scriptable “PowerPoint-style” controls and the current Browser and Viewer technology used in VastPark will be merged into Immersion.

The open-sourcing of Immersion comes on top of the VastPark server code being open source, so it’s an overt strategy by VastPark. It’s probably a necessary strategy as well given that behemoths like Google Lively are now competitors. That said, the open source route is being pursued with some protections built in for the company. Lead Developer at VastPark, Craig Presti, explains:

“VastPark is built for developers, by developers. The whole system is easily extended by developers creating plugins that can remain proprietary or be open sourced at the discretion of the developer. We’ll continue to release binaries under an entrepreneur friendly end user license. That’s much better than being essentially forced to open source your widget or your plug-in by the GNU GPL. We think there’s a middle way.”

Whether this middle way is the path to success is obviously up for grabs. What’s encouraging is that a smaller (and partially Australian-based) player is remaining in the game and not being fazed by the ever-growing competiition in the marketplace.

We’re waiting on confirmation from vastPark on Immersion’s release date.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Filed Under: Alternatives, Australian News Tagged With: ,

Australia Council announces latest funding winners

July 4, 2008 By Lowell Cremorne

The Australia Council have announced the winners of their MMUVE IT! project. The project had thirty thousand dollars up for grabs for a virtual world arts initiative.

The winners this time are visual artist Andrew Burrell from Sydney and artist and science researcher Trish Adams from Brisbane. The third real winner this time is startup virtual world platform VastPark, which will be the co-host of the final exhibition along with Second Life.

A previous Australia Council event in Second Life

The winning proposal involves “an inter-disciplinary artwork  exploring brainwave activity and body movement and its relationship to virtual environments in both Second Life, and the recently released Australian virtual platform, Vastparks* (sic) …. a human/computer interface system that explores the artistic possibilities of neuroscience studies. The system will allow viewers to interact with artificial life created in virtual worlds through sensor readings of bodily functions including physical gestures, breath, heartbeat or electrical brain and nervous system activity”.

Also involved will be Professor Mandyam Srinivasan, head of visual neuroscience at the Queensland Brain Institute of the University of Queensland (Trish Adams is currently an artist in residence there).

We’ll catch up with at least one of the team behind the project in coming weeks – after the artistic success of Babelswarm, it’ll be interesting to see a further evolution of Australian virtual world-based arts.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Filed Under: Art, Australian News Tagged With: ,

vBusiness Expo line-up announced

June 27, 2008 By Lowell Cremorne

Virtual world business advisers Clever Zebra are continuing their relentless schedule of events and products with the announcement of the line-up for the July vBusiness Expo being held on the 30th July:

- Steve Prentice from Gartner will provide the opening keynote address: ‘Virtual Worlds in Business – Are we virtually there yet?’, “where he will summarize the state of the virtual world business in mid 2008, and explore the opportunities and pitfalls of virtual worlds in business.”

- Dr. Tony O’Driscoll from Duke University will provide the second keynote: ‘ “Webvolution” and the iWeb Singularity.’ – “Dr. O’Driscoll will focus on how 3D internet technologies are redefining how we live, work and play.”

Clever Zebra’s pitch to business for the day is:

Learn from the real experience of organizations using varied platforms with a wide variety of use cases. (These use cases will also help you justify virtual worlds budgets as well as help you better understand the value of virtual worlds). Our panel on “Virtual Worlds @ Work” led by SRIC-BI’s Eilif Trondsen Ph.D promises to be one of the high-value highlights of the day.
Learn about new platforms and technolgies about to affect the enterprise virtual worlds market during our “Clever Zebra Virtual Radar” panel led by me, Nick Wilson.

I’ll be speaking with VastPark CEO Bruce Joy and Sun Microsystems Wonderland’s Nicole Yankelovich among others and discussing the technologies likely to affect the enterprise market within the next 3 – 18mts

Finally, although details will come a little later, we are working together with our partners at Forterra Systems to provide a range of educational sessions that will run concurrently at varied times throughout the day. This means that you’ll be able to catch just the sessions that will help you the most.

The feedback I received from a couple of businesses that participated in the first vBusiness Expo was positive and it’s good to see Aussie startup VastPark getting a guernsey on this one.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Filed Under: Business, General News Tagged With: ,

Virtual worlds prominent in BRW’s Top 100 Australian Web 2.0 Applications

June 19, 2008 By Lowell Cremorne

BRW have run a feature listing the ‘Top 100′ Australian Web 2.0 applications.

The list is a co-production with Ross Dawson’s Future Explanation Network and you can see the full list here.

The Australia-based virtual worlds that made the list were:

1. VastPark at number 22.

2. MojiKan at number 32.

3. My CyberTwin at number 65.

4. Mycosm at number 69.

That there are four projects in the list shows the strength of the Australian virtual worlds sphere. We’ve covered VastPark extensively and will be profiling the other list entrants in coming weeks. If you’ve used any of these products, what has your experience been?

Popularity: 6% [?]

Filed Under: Australian News, Business Tagged With: , , ,

VastPark tools go public

April 11, 2008 By Lowell Cremorne

VastPark today announced the public release (albeit an alpha release) of a number of its tools. You can now download a browser to view creations dynamically, a Viewer for “viewing the virtual experience in a static and controlled environment”, an Asset Publisher to get everything online and VastServer for real-time, multi-user interaction.

The release is to get the tools into as many hands as possible prior to the second stress test being held on the 22nd April.

If you’re brave enough to use some alpha release tools, let us know what you think of VastPark so far. I can’t actually do it myself as there’s no Mac version as yet.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Filed Under: Alternatives, Australian News Tagged With: ,
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