The OWorld Mailing List

Discussions on building an open, biologically inspired virtual world platform


About OWorld

A mailing list has been established for discussions about the building of an open, modern, extensible, multi-user virtual world platform that can support biological metaphors, avatars and powerful multi-user features, user extensibility, rich simulation and other functions, OWorld:


Nerve Garden I

Some background

Biota.org, a special interest group of the Contact Consortium, has been building biologically inspired virtual worlds platforms. The first platform, Nerve Garden, was debuted at SIGGRAPH 97. See a paper about nerve garden here. OWorld is a discussion of a new multi user virtual world platform capable of supporting multi-user worlds, and worlds with biological metaphors (as it is thought that nature is the best engineer). This project was initiated and discussed at Digital Biota2, the second annual conference on cyberbiology. See more on Biota.org at www.biota.org.

Some questions to consider

Oworld home page where you can find the open system software map.

See the OWorld digest archives for prior thoughts on the subject.

Nerve Garden was built with Java and VRML, would we build OWorld this way, with Java3D, with a custom renderer or what?

Does cross platform matter on the client side anymore, or is it all Windows? Is it too much work to try to support Mac/Unix on the client side when these platforms fall behind in tools, APIs etc?

Should the worlds be hubless (fully distributed peer to peer) or servered?

Build to hardware acceleration or not? What 3D standards to support or invent a new one? Stream 3D or enforce total scenegraph loading and therefore integrity and predictability?

What do you need a multi user virtual world with biological metaphors for?

Avatars, how to implement them, should they be the only representation of people in-world?

A complete compendium of multi user virtual worlds online today can be seen at the Avatar Teleport, what can be learned from the successes and failings of these worlds?


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