RealityPrime

So my friend Cory Ondrejka (co-creator of Second Life) started an interesting thread last week that I didn’t see covered as widely as it should. Here are his slides — alas I didn’t get to hear the narration that went with it, but I can guess.

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What he seems to be describing is apparently not too far from what I’ve been writing about for a while. The part I’m still skeptical about is the life-logging, and probably because of my own preference for privacy. You’ll notice I don’t twitter. I have a hard time believing anyone would even care to follow what I do from moment to moment. And I think careful editing is the secret to any compelling narrative. I just don’t want to put gigabytes of sub-standard, often mundane, prose out there into the digital firmament.

But putting that aside, the germ (and/or gem) of what he’s saying, and the part I totally agree with, is this notion of a pervasive synthesis of augmented, mirror, and alternate realities — no need to distinguish between those arbitrary categories. Turns out, there’s an old word for this which I think we can now safely revive to summarize the intent:

magic

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So I haven’t had much time over the last six months to blog, in case you hadn’t noticed. That’s going to change in the near future, I’m happy to say. I should have plenty of time once I’ve finished up my last bits of work on this Big Stage launch, a few weeks from now. And, in fact, I’d be interested in hearing from any of you about new and interesting things going on. Feel free to drop me a line and say hi. It’s about time I come up for air and survey the landscape.

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Virtual Worlds News: Feature: Industry Reacts to Linden Lab CEO Shuffle with Cautious Optimism

So Philip Rosedale is stepping down as CEO, and my prediction following Cory’s "resignation" was at least half-right. I figured that pushing Cory out was a move designed to make the company more attractive to Wall St. I’d guessed that Philip would step down as CEO (correct) and take over the CTO role (thus far, incorrect — he wants to be Chief Vision Officer, or some such).

The reasoning was simple, and apparently other industry insiders agree — a new CEO and/or CTO would be more focused on profitability and growth than on chasing cool ideas or open sourcing key elements — not that either is necessarily bad, but Wall St. likes one slightly more than the other — guess which…

But now it makes much less business sense that he canned Cory first, since the new CEO might have loved Cory and even welcomed the added continuity. It seems to me that the real reason for canning Cory first might be just that — Phillip knew he was soon giving up substantial day-to-day power — a strong CTO with developers on his side can trump a Chief Vision Officer with a portfolio of, um, grand ideas (and a dwindling majority of stock — proxy fights suck). Basic board-room politics, or preparation thereof. I predict the new CTO will be someone with good management skills, strong loyalty, and not much of a technical visionary.

Or, maybe it’s all just part of the same house-cleaning some investment bankers might have urged him to do.

It’s all speculation on my part. But despite my continuing respect for Phillip and everyone at Linden for all they’ve done, I’m quite glad I didn’t actually wind up working there again. I found out at GDC that with all the stock dilution and prolonged wait for a "liquidity event," the company had to issue another round of stock options to the key employees, with another apparently four year vest. Eight plus years of waiting to fully vest is pretty out there. Talk about dedicated employees.

Well, I’m looking forward to seeing what Cory does next. Alas, Linden is now more of a morbid curiosity.

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Sometimes, when I work on a project, there’s nothing we can publicly show until the product launches. And sometimes, by the time the product gets attention, I’m off working on the next big thing and can’t enjoy the show, except by proxy.

In this case, Big Stage has partnered with SonyBMG & YouTube to bring you a free sneak preview of our technology. Needless to say, we’re all very excited to see how it goes.

The process is pretty simple from your point of view: you take and upload three slightly different digital photos of your face to MichaelJackson.com (account registration required), wait an hour or so while our big iron servers do some really heavy math, and then you receive an email telling you the YouTube URL of your finished personalized Thriller video, which you can share as you wish.

That’s it.

The result will be something like this — though imagine your own face in place of my 7 month old son’s — and note: it’s not really designed for kids’ faces:

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From the blog of Roman Ormandy (CEO of Caligari) :

Dear Caligari community members,

I am pleased to announce that Caligari Corp has become a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation. Specifically we will be working with the Virtual Earth team which is in the process of building out an immersive 3D Web experience. If you haven’t seen it yet check it out using the 3D mode at http://maps.live.com

I am deeply convinced that union of Caligari technologies and the scope of Virtual Earth project and vision behind it creates the perfect home for us and new opportunities for each one of you as part of the Virtual Earth community.

You know me and my ambitions for trueSpace and web-based 3D collaboration. Let me tell you right away that there were no compromises I had to make to accommodate our vision within the Virtual Earth platform, in fact I was challenged to increase the scope of our vision. I talked to many people at Virtual Earth group and I am convinced that the technical team behind Virtual Earth has a significant, long-term commitment to the 3D Web.

At the same time you will be pleased to hear that our development team and tightly knit community of Beta testers will stay the same as before, only now we will have more resources to rely on, larger market to consider and I hope more fun doing that.

The future is bright for all of us!

Roman

This is a pretty big deal, and congrats to Caligari for the new lease on life. 3D Modeling companies generally don’t make money (which is why I haven’t gone that route, despite my strong interest). They ultimately get sold to Autodesk, or Multigen-Paradigm, or Microsoft after some cash flow problems. I’m not saying Caligari was in that state — I have no idea. But this much is clear: the world doesn’t need is yet another 3D polygonal modeler, no matter how good it might be or how loyal its customer base is.

What it needs is one that everyone can use.

Well, Google has done its best with the SketchUp acquisition, going for the simple-n-easy approach. Caligari isn’t as simple, but it is richer in terms of output, which perhaps matches Microsoft’s apparent goal of more detail for the 3D world at any price.

I personally wouldn’t go with either. If only there was money in 3D modelers, you’d see something totally new. But for now, I’m content to see what will happen with Google and Microsoft racing to build mirror worlds of unprecedented quality and richness. Even if the content they’re rushing to roll out lacks all the key semantic information to make it really useful.

It’s as if we were seeing the construction of the world’s largest movie set, where the big players expect us to just step in and live there and not notice the doors don’t work and the walls are propped up by 2×4s.

Well, at least when the real 3D world comes, we won’t have to re-model all of the polygons and textures.

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Well, those of you who keep checking back for this have been very patient indeed. The delay in making the announcement was that I was waiting for the official company press release so as not to jump the gun. But that won’t come for a few months, and so I got the green light to disclose this now.

The company is called Big Stage, or sometimes Big Stage Entertainment. Never mind those acronyms. My colleagues have developed some of the best 3D facial reconstruction and animation I’ve ever seen. They recently demonstrated it at CES during Intel’s keynote, and more public demonstrations are on the way. It tends to blow people away. And the first application is way more fun than most uses of 3D on the web that I’ve seen.

My new title is "Principal Architect, User Created Content," which I’ll leave to your imaginations. As part of the deal, I sold IP from my R&D company to Big Stage in an all-stock deal. I could therefore say that I’ve successfully sold my first company (on my own anyway — I was long gone from Keyhole by the time it was sold to Google). But I don’t want to overstate things — my decision was less about the potential profit and more about whether to join this company or several other interesting options to occupy my time and bring my grander ideas to market better than I could do alone. And note, it will absolutely take additional time and resources* before you get to see those ideas come to life. For now, I’m spending a big chunk of my time helping the company launch the first product, while building a team* to take it to the next level, so to speak.

^{________________
(*) if you’re a top-notch coder and into the kinds of things I like to discuss on this blog, drop me a line. I do have a budget, and I will be holding interviews for a handful of key positions at GDC.}

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http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/01/080129-bionic-eye.html

Well, for me and Ted Chaing, I’m sure this is welcome news. We debated how this might be done several years back. Looks like this new lens doesn’t do much yet, but they can at least build some of the components now. And a rabbit was able to wear the lens for at least 20 minutes without going blind. (btw, I thought we stopped testing eye products on rabbits…). I figure what it really needs is a DMD laser to shine straight on the retina vs. trying to make a correct virtual image at such a close distance.

Anyway, for anyone who hasn’t contemplated the benefits of the VR contact lens, it’s the ultimate in augmented reality. Wherever you look, you could see a mix of real and virtual objects — when the technology is sufficiently advanced, you couldn’t even tell the difference. Phone conversations will then include a "ghost" image of the person you’re talking to, real as if they were standing there with you.

And the interface to more abstract virtual worlds becomes pretty easy too — just close your eyes and you’re someplace else entirely.

Well, we’re not quite there yet. But soon, perhaps.

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I was very disappointed to hear the latest news from Linden Lab(s), maker of Second Life. In various purported internal Linden emails (which look legit to me, knowing their respective styles), Cory Ondrejka is out, apparently by Philip’s hand.

[Note: everything here is speculation, as I haven’t talked to anyone involved, nor do I want to wade into the alleged technical disputes at this juncture.]

Now, I don’t worry for Cory — I figure he’s fully vested and that stock should easily be worth many [non-virtual] millions by this time next year, not to mention the nice severance package I’d expect them to offer — Linden would need to do something to get him to agree not to compete (or say anything) for a year or two at least. And I imagine he’ll either start or be recruited to join a promising small company within milliseconds of hitting the street (but maybe take some time off to be with the kids — you’ve earned it).

But what I worry about is Linden itself. To be upfront, I’m not exactly happy with them lately. It might have something to do with my offering to come back to help solve some of those lingering technical problems everyone complains about, and my subsequently getting snubbed for whatever reason. But it might also have to do with my long-term disappointment in some design decisions they’ve made over the years, decisions that actually kept me from joining the company as an employee in the first place, way back in 2001.

I can safely say that of the decisions I do roundly applaud, most of these came from or were championed by Cory. He’s the kind of leader that anyone would love to work for or with. He listens and understands. And his ego does not extend beyond his skin.

My best guess is that this has more to do with the rumored liquidity event for 2008 than any technical dispute. I expect that Linden will soon bring in a CTO with a Wall St. pedigree, if they haven’t lined that up already, or Philip will take over the CTO role and bring in a shiny new CEO to guide the sale or offering (not that Philip isn’t capable of doing either role, but to investors, money is money and more is more).

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Google Body Education Video

This is purported to be a video of "Google Body," allegedly available next year, though I don’t see any evidence of Google branding or an official press release. If it was a leaked video, I’d think it would make more of a splash on the internets. More likely, it’s an existing 3rd party app or a research project that someone just assumed would be tied to "Google" because people now [finally] get why 3D search, visualization and user-markup is really part of Google’s mission.

The video is also lacking the usual Google simplicity in UI — having to click a body part and then a button to remove that body part each time is cumbersome at best. But the 3D rendering, on the other hand, is very nice.

You can read my previous comments on why making a "Google Body" or "Google Human" for individual body shapes is much harder than just rendering. But this is a nice start. What I really want is something that lets me zoom down to the cellular level, complete with annotations and the ability to overlay personal data. But that’s still a ways off, I think.

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On a related note, I mentioned a while back that I’d be making a big announcement about RealityPrime. Well, we’re not quite ready to announce. But I can say this. I’ve been very busy since October, including an upcoming move to LA. In the search for my next interesting gig, I passed on several really cool options, including being software lead on an academic 3D brain/body viewer that would, in fact, handle those individual differences I discussed. I passed on forming a group to re-invent 3D avatars for ultimate portability. And I passed on joining a group that’s blazing a path to use virtual worlds in a serious way.

So what gig did I accept? We’ll announce something soon.

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