In a recent U3DA Forum post from Community Member "carlpatti" (aka: "Patti") which I recommend everyone here read ( at vi ... 6594#p6594 ) Patti coined a new term for "Shared Space" based on enthusiasm (which fortunately many of us now share) at the Community here pulling together, collaborating so much on all this development work, and emerging thereby from what had been a most difficult year and a half for us all as a Community prior to our very recently focusing together on transforming "shared space" (as Caligari had taught us all to call it) into something far more meaningful to US... claiming it at last together as "OurSpace."
Indeed "shared space" should rightfully be "OurSpace," the natural extension and truly unifying primary collaborative venture of this Community. Not as this Community once was, unified largely by the fact we were all Caligari Customers, but unified anew by the fact that together we have genuinely grown past that stage altogether to arrive at a greater unity, a unity forged through our having overcome a Corporate Takeover together, our having pulled together tighter now than we ever had in the past toward our common desire, seeing the dawn of the fruition of our collective hopes at long last materializing before us.... a new unity drawing us together by our shared focus and energetic collaboration for the good and for the growth of the Community as well as that of each of us as individuals.
It took a fresh set of eyes to coin this term, a fresh set of eyes to be so impressed by our working so hard together on behalf of each other tirelessly, and a fresh set of eyes to become so enthusiastic about the vast potential arising now from our focusing together as a Community on our future, our "shared space".... OurSpace.
Somewhere, I think for each of us, in the long and often bumpy history of this Community, we had begun to lose our self confidence as a Community, that sense of "we can do any damn thing we set out together to accomplish," and for some of us, myself included, the willingness to "bury the hatchet," "put the past behind us" and move on together with greater resolve for having endured what we have together.
This conceptual shift is a vital one I believe. I believe as Patti pointed out that shared space is in truth at long last finally "OurSpace." This is not something we need strive toward one day accomplishing, it has arrived, it is already now beginning to stand accomplished. It's a fact.
We see the Pioneering efforts of Froo and Stan pushing hard to bring us shared space servers that are viable and a Community focal point of growth, collaborative discovery, and Community accomplishment. We see the renewed efforts of many here pitching in their time and energies on scripting, new scenes, reworking old interactivity scripts vital to the development of our own shared spaces, we see the tireless effort of those running and maintaining this new Community Forum, and we see the fact that new faces, new sets of eyes, are becoming drawn to what THEY rightfully call the "Vast Potential" of this Community working together as one on shared space development, they see their bright future, and their bright future is ours.
Accordingly, I propose to the Community that we start an "OurSpace Project" together, all of us as a Community, a project we each devote as much time as we possibly can to, a project to create a rapidly-growing global set of new online inter-connected shared space scenes for this Community, with an eye toward each Member of this Community being able to freely draw from the vast repository of related assets we accumulate in the process.... scenes, scene object elements, scripted objects, methodologies, all of it.... designed by us and for us to use together and to use as individuals.
What I propose is that all we create in "The OurSpace Project" belongs to us all as a Community, and that we pull together on establishing new servers often with "OurSpace Project" scenes available on them, new interactivity scripts and related collaboration, and new immersiveness approaches in our scene designs. Also that we seek ways of utilizing these same "OurSpace Project" Community assets as focused toolsets to enable each of us as individuals to start 3D Businesses of our own to meet our own personal needs and reach our own individual goals in life.
It can be said that we already have this in place without any need for name or formality, and that is true to a large extent, so why the artifice of adding a name and some formality to it? In a word... "focus." The focus of others.
We already have "OurSpace" developing naturally on it's own, that fact led to this new term in the first place. Still, I feel it is not enough to simply drift along without us recognizing in the same terms the accomplishments we are now achieving as well as the focused nature of our collective work now on behalf of the future of this Community and each of it's Members personally.
"Back in the day".... Roman Ormandy had his famous thread he started at the Caligari Forum entitled "Let's build trueTown," as for me, I say "Let's Build OurSpace." Let's build dozens (and more) of "OurSpace" scenes together, deeply interactive and immersive scenes we will place online on trueServe servers and make available to this Community inspiring NEW server hosts to arise among us often, growing the scope and quality of "OurSpace" with every new development we achieve together.
"trueTown" ( see http://forums1.caligari.com/truespace/s ... .php?t=768 ) fell victim to many things over time and simply never really materialized... it was a dream, but "OurSpace" is not merely a dream, it is already clearly forming now of it's own momentum and growing daily... it isn't constrained to the dictates of any one, nor to any corporation, it is a natural phenomenon, a sign of the maturity of this Community, we grew up.
Each of us in this Community has the potential now of taking 3D Scenes we create, adding a sense of immersiveness to them in many ways, not the least of which is adding very cool avatar-interactivity to them. We can place them offline and test them in truePlay alone, place them on CD's or DVD's and share them for others to use alone with truePlay, or we can place them inside trueServe and make them available online to a few people or the whole world as we see fit. Aside from the obvious need as a Community to have places which we can meet in together often for many reasons, we can also utilize trueServe as individuals... selling the usage rights by license to our content... our own scenes. I can show you each how to do that, it's easy, and you can charge 100 dollars a year or ten thousand dollars a year or more... the price is up to you based on whatever the specific markets will bear. Who would pay ten thousand dollars for custom content (branding) to utilize on a server (trueServe) which is free? Plenty of potential clients, hundreds of thousands would. Online Casinos for instance, but there are many many more types of businesses than any of us will ever even try to reach. What we can create has DEFINITE value, so if you are looking for a paying career in 3D, you need not look very far at all now.
This is not to say that I am envisioning us creating online casinos for "OurSpace," lol, rather that the same scripting and objects (ocean water, skydomes, avatar transport ships, etc) which we create for one type of scene in all our "OurSpace Project" Community endeavors together are scripts each of us as individual Members of this Community may also utilize in our own personal content business sales as well if we like.
Anyhow.... I like the idea obviously, hahahaha, and the great thing is it is happening anyway so there is no real need to formalize it with a name or specific objectives I guess, other than new focus on the part of outsiders on our Community perhaps, the convenience of those referring to the phenomenon due to it's recent and growing emergence here among us.
As for me, I will refer to shared space increasingly as "OurSpace" anyway, which it is now becoming finally, and I will be seeing all our Community based collaborative projects as a whole being a part of "The OurSpace Project." Where the term goes from here we shall see, I have a feeling it will grow with the very significant collaboration which now defines us.
