IBM and Sun Launch Intranet Metaverses

wjamesau writes "Sun and IBM have launched intranet metaverses designed for business and built to work behind their corporate firewalls, so their worldwide employees can use them to collaborate together. Most interesting to game developers, IBM (which also runs a private, no public access Second Life island as a development lab) created their intranet world from the 3D Torque engine from Garage Games. Will the metaverse actually be thousands of gated community metaverses?"

Try Croquet

[MarkWatson]

Check out http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page [opencroquet.org]

Open source and well funded, based on Squeak Smalltalk.

Re:WTF?

[Andrew Kismet]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse [wikipedia.org]

I will use Google and Wikipedia before asking stupid questions.
I will use Google and Wikipedia before asking stupid questions.
I will use Google and Wikipedia before asking stupid questions.

Re:metaverse???

[bennomatic]

First time I heard it was in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Worth a read.

Re:Sun and IBM?

[hutchike]

Sun and IBM are not collaborating on this. Sun is using its Darkstar [sun.com] gaming server to deliver Menlo Park 2.0 [sun.com]. IBM is using a private island in Second Life [secondlife.com]. No connection - just a similar initiative.

No, no, and no.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Throwing out a guess: I'm guessing that croquet is slower than torque, given that croquet is written in Squeak, and I can't get Squeak to run on my 64-bit machine, haven't even considered trying dual-core. Guessing (again) that Torque is written in something like C++ or C#, and thus, will be able to do both of these things -- and it's probably easier to port a game engine than an entire language.

Also, Second Life is not what you should be using to measure how much horsepower this takes. Pretty much anything that can do compositing (Vista, Beryl, or OSX), and probably a few things that can't, are capable of playing World of Warcraft. Worst case, you'll have to turn some settings down.

Consider, also, that most offices tend to have standardized hardware that they upgrade every now and then anyway, and I'd say it should be easily possible to have some sort of "virtual reality" going on. I'd argue further that the reason most people seem to think this takes hardware is because all attempts I have EVER seen at "virtual reality" that weren't directly tied with a commercial game (not a "game" like Second Life, but a GAME like Counter-Strike or WoW) simply had sucky 3D engines. Embarrassingly sucky ones.

Let me put it this way: Take Half-life. The original. As in, released in '95, and can run at full quality at several hundred FPS on just about any computer since 2000. Now consider a mod for this game: Natural Selection. Now, NS does have somewhat higher graphical requirements -- it might lag slightly on a computer made it 2000, maybe. Run it on anything made in the last 3-5 years, and you'll be able to easily play games with teams of 25-30 people. And it takes at least two teams to make a game. And you're not just standing around a boardroom talking, you're using voice chat, a HUD, you're shooting, building stuff, gathering resources...

Any 3D "virutal reality" app that is forcing a hardware upgrade is either sloppily written or overly detailed, probably both.

But hell, we're in an age where ACT requires a gig of RAM to run comfortably. (Tell me again why Outlook/Kontact/Evolution isn't enough?)