Well at the 2nd annual "Digital Biota" conference (Contact Consortium and Cyberlife) in Cambridge UK in sept 1998, there seemed to be a great brain trust of folks who were passionate about bringing biological metaphors into cyberspace. The OWorld list and SIG were born at that conference. I would like to see worlds where biological processes can express themselves, like Tierra, Nerve Garden and Karl Sim's evolving creatures (see http://www.biota.org). Heck I want to live to see a "cambrian explosion in cyberspace". These worlds have to be inhabited by users to provide the stimulus for the organisms.
Paul Sinnadurai -- Pn.Sinna@btinternet.com
[...] I left King's College London as an ecologist and eased nicely into a job with English Nature, the Nature Conservancy Council for England, as a Conservation Officer. [I want] to learn what the heck most of you are talking about, most of the time ... worlds within worlds. Put simply, our aims (my co-Director is Graham Allum) are to develop a product that can be predecated on a games play scenario, relying upon A-life, QTVR and motion capture to render a believable, cognitive environment based upon endangered species. Available on the Net, users will assume the identity of these creatures (seeing the world through their eyes), needing to survive and thrive.
Remi Sussan -- rsussan@geocities.com
I am fascinated in virtual worlds because I want them to help me to become more intelligent, by letting me visualize and manipulate things and objects of knowledge that cannot be apprehended intuitively in the real world. I remember Tom Ray's text about "Evolution as an artist", where he said that some evolutionary processes appeared as true works of art to evolutionary biologist: but he was alone to perceive them as such. By the way, Ray's tierra is the best example of the problem. fascinating, but almost unusable, because devoid of any kind of intuitive interface.
I'm convinced that the process of learning could be dramatically accelerated if we knew how to how to represent the field of knowledge we want to teach (or learn). I dream of "encyclopedic virtual worlds", not so far from the mental constructions of the Renaissance's "ars memoria", but less static, full if artificial life forms or agents able to help you and guide you in your travel. I'm also fascinated by the "augmented reality" concept: a virtual reality system which does not isolate you from the external world, but gives you insights about it. for instance, a surgeon who sees some of the patient data on his screen, surimposed to the picture of the body he is working on.
Glenn Proctor -- gproctor@info.bt.co.uk
Virtual worlds are boring if there are no inhabitants. Who wants to go and walk around a static, quiet world more than once? Not only do we need a living, growing, expanding environment, we need lots and lots of people and creatures to live in it. The only way we can get a critical mass of content and users is by going Open Source.
I was also lucky enough to attend Digital Biota II in Cambridge last year. While that conference was inspiring, there was little in the way of *real work* that came out of it. I see OWorld as a way of channeling some of that knowledge and enthusiasm into a real (well, virtual!) application.
Danny Ayers -- Danny.Ayers@highpeak.ac.uk
Vaguely anarchistic tendencies, I suppose... At home I'm working on a search engine in Java, the plan is to build in loads of AI features. I'd like to work on AI/Internet stuff professionally.
Jay Fenton -- jay@fentonia.com
I believe the only way VR will take off is as an open, multi-colaborator standard.
Margaret Corbit -- corbitm@tc.cornell.edu
Why did I join oworld? For the same reason that I have the Active Worlds browser set up to use Netscape on my NT desktop. I want to support development of a communications medium that will be universal, even if that isn't possible. At any rate, I see an interesting interplay between open source and commodity applications. The students want to work in open source, for philosophical reasons primarily and also because they want to get their hands into the guts of the software. It's the nature of the Internet that there will and should always be a free and open way of viewing all the file formats. Maybe once a concept has matured, it should be handed off as a product for maintenance and upgrading, afterall these things aren't fun and therefore cost money.
Sue Wilcox -- suewilcox@bigfoot.com
I was at Digital Biota 2 when Bruce proposed the idea of a list to shelter discussions on encouraging the production of inhabited virtual worlds and I thought it was a good idea. Most discussions of virtual worlds ignore the possibilities of creating lifeforms to live in these worlds. I think they’re essential parts of having captivating places to visit in cyberspace. The internet is a creatively chaotic place I believe in the dynamism of such community efforts and the way things emerge unexpectedly from such attempts. Digital Biota are a subset of the ALife universe and deserve special attention because they have the potential to be new life not just computer programs we can use.
Robert Bjarnason -- robofly@this.is
I joined oworld originally because I hosted the Icelandic arm of Avatars98 and got hooked up through that event. I´m currently heading the development of an open-source multi-user 3D client called BANG. Its 100% Java with support for VRML97 and native J3D for worlds and avatars. The next version of the client is due 15 of march and will include simple authoring tool for placing and manipulating 3D objects in the shared sector based persistence space. http://the.bang.is/
Bruce Campbell -- bdc@hitl.washington.edu
In fact, I hope to meet more people that can convince me that:
The use of biological metaphors for virtual environments is incorporated into all the work we do at our organization and is something that I believe is the most obvious next step in the evolution of virtual worlds.
Mark H. Shirley -- shirley@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov
I am deeply impressed with the ability of moving, 3D worlds to engage the mind (e.g., the best Nintendo 64 or PC games). I would like to use such worlds used for education and learning play. But authorship in the game examples is too centralized. I like the mud model, where lots of people create and share things. ActiveWorlds is a great start, but I'm interested in worlds with rich and interesting behaviors in them. I believe the best way to have worlds with these characteristics is from an open source foundation which can grow and change rapidly; there's too much still to work out to be bound by any company's api's. And naturally, I think that NASA has some of the coolest examples of subjects and places that it would be interesting to model in such worlds. So, in addition to what I am working on, I would like to be working on an oworld too.
Roberto Guijarro -- rgbelda@lander.es
Because I believe in people. I always have thought what really makes a software project be a success are the users, and if the users participate directly not only using but also developing, any kind of software project will be a success. And, after all, a virtual world is a piece of software.
Bernie Roehl -- broehl@ece.uwaterloo.ca
I'm convinced that the only way for multi-user virtual environment technology to progress is for there to be publicly available source code. [I want to participate in] designing an architecture for shared virtual worlds, and creating or joining a team to produce free software for that purpose.
Hamish Meares
After seeing Bruce's talk on virtual worlds at Biota, I was fairly blown away by the possibilities. I very much like the idea of an open platform with lots of people doing there own thing because I like the idea of freedom of information and interaction of people, and because it's basically a chaotic system, hence unpredictable, and therefore likely to be produce things that none of us could dream of.
Ruth Aylett -- R.S.Aylett@iti.salford.ac.uk
Open communities are likely to be inclusive: I am very wary of corporate ambition and look forward to the day when the technology can be used to cement local communities in which it is not just the computer literate, the educated and the well-off who have access to the technology. Open communities are also likely (I hope) to be willing to make access equal for those who do not choose to use Wintel platforms.
J. Eric Mason -- jem@vrtelecom.com
I was curious to see if the Contact Consortium was interested in producing technical specification documents to allow VEs to intercommunicate. OWorld was recommended as the most technically-minded list to join. I would like to talk about content representation, world database, and wire protocol standardization tracks.
Gerald de Jong -- gerald@beautifulcode.nl
It's becoming clear enough that Open Source Software will play a very significant role in the future of computing, and there has never been a movement in this domain that has represented "community" to the degree that OSS has. The core motivation behind virtual worlds scenarios is nearly identical: community and communication. It seems completely natural to me that an open source platform for virtual worlds will prove to be the fittest and will therefore survive all other efforts. The simple fact is that a virtual world scenario is to a very high degree an enabling technology, and as such there are few better candidates for successful open source development.
Alastair Channon -- A.D.Channon@soton.ac.uk
I now believe in taking a behavioural route to spotting emergent phenomena within evolving artificial worlds. It is simply too hard to work out what an organism's emergent behaviours are by looking at its inner workings, not least because you don't know what you are looking for. At least that's what I've found in my work, where the inner workings are artificial neural messworks (networks that work but I cannot tell how). Karl Sim's block-creatures work (albeit artificial-selection based) shows how easy it can be for a human to interpret evolutionary emergent behaviours (eg. the hockey-player) when they are embedded within a 3D virtual world. Hence I'm interested in all virtual world ideas that might be of use in such a venture, including block-creatures, Demetri Terzopoulos' artificial fish, Gerald de Jong's Struck, and anything I may hear about on this list. Oh, and I do believe in open community efforts to create virtual worlds and platforms, but that's not the main reason I joined.
Jane Prophet -- jane@cairn.demon.co.uk
Because I'd like to be part of making an online alife inhabited 3D World as part of developing TechnoSphere. I met Sue Wilcox and Bruce Damer in Banff last summer and then a whole bunch of alife heroes at DB2, loved the atmosphere and the networking and sharing of ideas. The beer drinking wasn't bad either, and for me the meat and bone people and social life behind the virtual community are most important. The open exchange of ideas was most refreshing, I left with an aching, stimulated brain and some new friends.
Steven Rooke -- srooke@concentric.net
I've attended both Digital Biotas, and strongly support Bruce's and others' efforts to create a shared environment. I've been writing genetic / evolutionary software for several years evolving images, and want to expand into wider territory. Just as in biological evolution, the good stuff in cyberbiology is going to happen when our software spawn can meet and interact.
Joy Hughes -- hughes@scruznet.com
I attended Biota 2 at Cambridge, and came away with the sense that the time is ripe for a synthesis of some of the ideas that have been implemented in the Alife community. The engineering problems associated with building a distributred Alife world are applicable to the engineering of a viable cyberspace. The net makes possible some truly vast linked virtual worlds, where Biota can become the seed of a larger shared universe, providing the sense of place needed and putting the 'there' there. And when it happens, it will be open source.
Dharmesh -- dharmesh.raithatha@cyberlife.co.uk
I have spent the last 7 years trying to use MUD'S, MUSHs and more recently virtual worlds and have still not found what I am looking for. I strongly believe that to create truly interesting useful virtual worlds, you need to have an environment that is completely open. Open in that everything in the world is definable by the community. The use of biological metaphors for virtual environments is incorporated into all the work we do at CyberLife and is something that I believe is the most obvious next step in the evolution of virtual worlds. This seems to be what OWorld is about and something I would like to be a part of.
Rodney Berry -- rodney@proximity.com.au
[I want to] hopefully allow for a deeper level of variety and also immersion on the part of the user [in virtual worlds]. I hope I can be useful to this list as a creative generalist (or maybe 'special generalist'?) looking at how sound might be handled in the worlds we are trying to make.
Kerry L. Bonin --kerry@vscape.com
I usually join lists like this to lurk - I'm a research junkie and love all the leads. I believe in open community efforts to create [very large scale] virtual worlds and platforms for two reasons: a) there's no viable business model for a company to build a good one themselves, and b) there's too much historical basis to mistrust any company that wants to "own" the standards. I came here to listen, now here to exchange ideas. I want to learn more.
Murat Aktihanoglu -- muratakti@usa.net
I saw the posting on the vrml list, checked out the website, liked it. At Cosmo, I was involved with many MU projects that didn't take off because the management didn't see how this could make them money and didn't put any resources into the project and eventually cancelled them and then said "the technology isn't there". I always wanted to have an environment free of management and with smart people that is really into this stuff.
Holger Grahn -- holger@blaxxun.com
[I want to] find other people with interest in creating a shared cyber underground popuplated with unseen experiences, strange creatures, algorithmic beauties ...
Tomaz Amon -- tomaz.amon@siol.net
Because I think now is the time to start working together in educational VRML projects. We are starting a working group engaged in 3D visualization projects in biology and medicine. I mention these two fields because I am a biologist, but if other experts join the team, we can adapt the area of interest accordingly. The participation is voluntary, but we shall try to sell our products and so obtain funds for survival. Technically we start in the VRML and HTML environment, but also other techniques for visualization are welcome. Welcome are all who can offer components for biomedical visualization projects like text, photographs, paintings, sound, 3D worlds and of course management. [...]
Rycharde Hawkes -- rycharde_hawkes@hp.com
A platform for creating a virtual environment is a complex beast. You might be able to do all the work yourself (though I wouldn't recommend it!) but it will be rather stale unless you get input from other people and open yourselves to other points of view, applications, etc. Why not share the work as well as the ideas?
Modesty B Catt -- modesty@io.com
Because:
Thomas Dudziak -- tomdz@first.gmd.de
Since I'm currently working on/with multi-user collaborative systems, I thought it might be a good idea ;-)
Andrew Gerngross -- agern@ix.netcom.com
The *only* way cyberspace will exist is through the collective wisdom and close cooperation of those who are interested in making cyberspace live -- not by those who wish to profit from it. I believe in evolutionary design and implementation. I believe in open and extensible standards. I want an immersive, interactive and life-like cyberspace to exist in my lifetime.
Cynbe -- cynbe@muq.org
In a proximal sense -- Bruce invited me! In a distal sense, I'm involved in a number of related things and at minimum find listening in on such groups to fire up my creative juices. My biggest computing interest is being observer and facilitator on the moving frontier where evolving computing technology meets mainstream society, in particular the evolving modes of computer-mediated human interaction, and Oworld is one facet of where that frontier is this decade.
Pascal Auberson -- pascal.auberson@pres.co.uk
Doing stuff on your own (even if you use free code as a base) only gets you so far. Collective work and idea sharing get you to your dreams far quicker (plus it's more fun).
Geoff Pack -- geoff@spike.com.au
Because the VRMLC doesn't seem interested, because I don't trust corporations to make open standards, and because I'm sick of the suits and the PR hacks setting the agenda.
Reuben Wright -- wrightr@oup.co.uk
It just seems natural to me that a virtual world will be a communal effort. Other people seem to express better the enlightenment of Open Source. I want to see this happen. I want to do what I can.
Tim Redfern -- tredfern@mindless.com
I think there's a qualitative difference in approach between something that COULD be produced by a commercial company and the approach possible with open source. I am interested in the kinds of projects that can be tackled by smaller teams and individuals rather than the mainstream stuff that can afford to be programmed from scratch each time (basically just games). VRML was a credible attempt at this, however now it is becoming somewhat fragmented and confused, it was always a bit caught up with a kind of wooly attitude that '3D is cool' that is starting to look very dated. I hope an open source approach to interactive web 3D can help to cut the dross and focus the efforts of 3D developers on the things that 3D is really good for...
Kristof Nast-Kolb -- kristof@blaxxun.de
I'm interested in all virtual world activities. And of course I'd like to know if blaxxun might be able to help support these efforts.