What Might Have Been

[Délé]

Hey guys,

I was searching the net for virtual worlds to see if there was anything new, and I came across this:
http://virtual.mtv.com/homepage/

I'm sure that most of you are aware that Caligari always had secret projects going on behind the scenes. Some of which I was lucky enough to be a part of. Since there is no more Caligari, and MTV has their virtual world up and running now, I figure it should be ok to talk about this.

When MTV was first looking into building a virtual world, trueServe/truePlay was an early consideration for a platform. Tom, Heidi, Parva, and myself put together a demo scene for an advertising company that was working with MTV. This demo was to be shown to the MTV executives in hopes that they would choose trueServe/truePlay to build their new virtual world. Obviously they went a different route (IMO largely due to the fact that Microsoft had stopped development). Seeing the MTV virtual world up now, I can't help but imagine what might have been, if only Microsoft hadn't killed the development. I know that there were many people that doubted the shared space technology and it's appeal to large companies. It was behind the scenes projects like this that had me convinced the technology did have potential, and that there were large companies interested in using it. Which is why I'm really sad that it was thrown away before it had a chance to be completed.

Anyway, below is a video showing a walk-through of the scene. It is a courtyard area and a tour bus where folks could hang out and interact with others, even purchase merchandise via interactive objects inside of the bus. Tom modeled the building. Parva modeled the bus. Heidi modeled most of the bus interior, the avatars, and she also did some work on the outside area. I worked on the courtyard, a few objects in the bus, and scripted all of the interactivity. It was a fun collaborative project, and I'm going to miss doing stuff like this.

http://www.delevinci.com/ForumImages/MTVwalkthrough.wmv (16mb)

[Benji]

I'm sure that most of you are aware that Caligari always had secret projects going on behind the scenes.

I take it one of them wasn't the "render glass in vray" project, transparency was never Caligari's strong point.

Anyway, this looks like it would have been fun to make and it looks very nice, it's a shame MTV went a bit more down-market for the final release.

[Dragneye]

I also worked on a project that was supposed to have interactive media. Though the project fell apart, it sold me on the HUGE potential of the virtual world concept. Stuff like Second Life and, Metaworld(?), are just like the Wright Brothers first flight. I believe this IS the future of interactive computing. This is the direction we will inevitably be going in the future. There are almost endless avenues to follow, possible profit around every corner. What's needed is correct foresight, thorough planning, and a stable group environment.
Some say 'it's old hat', some say 'no one's buyin' ', etc.... I say, they're all wrong. It just has to be focused development, and salesmanship.

[Benji]

Well, I'll believe it when I see it.

[LeonRegis]

Another reason to say: Microsoft sucks!

[marcel]

I think it is to late for real time rendering with TS without update! sorry.
Look at these 3d realtime made with iRay (and fully GPU-accelerated servers for futur cloud computing):

[RAYMAN]

i saw that i the last 3d World copy.....
looks great ... the world doesnt stop..

[Benji]

Although these are nice images for sure, there are other engines capable of doing this kind of quality, including most modern game engines. Mental Images has had a lot of trouble trying to gain credibility for their online offerings, and I think this illustrates how bloody the web3d game truly is.

Also, what this technology represents is real-time 3d, I haven't read about any trueplay style interactivity associated with this.

I wouldn't get too worried if I was on the shared space project. It will be years (if ever) before anyone else enables personal 3d servers such as trueserver - a game engine hack would be the most likely alternative, and I can't see that happening (too expensive).