7 ms·

What is VWRAP? (Linden's ten year old open Virtual World protocol)

74 points by dingosity 5y ago

wayoutthere 5y ago
There we have it, metaverse solved.
- capableweb 5y ago
  We finally have the hard part done (the idea), now it's just the easy part left (the implementation).
  - foobarian 5y ago
    FB^H^H Meta buys Roblox, mark my words.
    - retrocryptid 5y ago
      It's probably better for Roblox than an IPO and extends FB/Meta's reach into the youth market. Weirder things have happened.
      - foobarian 5y ago
        The thing is, most Roblox players that I've seen have FB Messenger (the kids version) video/audio calls running in the background so they can talk. With the new focus on metaverse the combo really makes sense. On the other hand Roblox could really pull a coup by replicating this functionality natively.
        ianbicking 5y ago
        I assume they don't do it because they are scared of being responsible, not because it's technically difficult. It probably helps that the communication is separate from Roblox because it's harder to manipulate a kid on two separate channels together (in the same ways it's hard to actually get two kids connected that want to be connected). Though Facebook also has some advantage because they are already maintaining a bunch of relationship information and they use that to bootstrap Messenger For Kids since one of the common patterns is parents become Facebook friends with clear identities and then they connect their children.
      - kaibee 5y ago
        Roblox already IPO'd.
    - jazzyjackson 5y ago
      Would love to see Meta step into the "child labor" controversy. Isn't that an episode of Silicon Valley? Their videochat platform is a hit but all their users are underage - they agree to sell to the bad-guy-VC just before the lawsuits show up.
  - retrocryptid 5y ago
    Even harder... Convincing corporate entities to open even just a small bit of their metaverse / virtual world. At Linden, we pitched OGP/MMOX/VWRAP as "If the Metaverse is the next big thing, then its better to be Google than AoL." That message resonated well with Linden, who saw the "Open Metaverse" as a place where their existing customers building UGC assets could find new markets for their goods. Linden could then jump in and take a percentage for cash transactions or hosting or whatever other services people would pay for. I honestly don't know how FB/Meta sees their market / business model. Selling ads in a virtual world? Content to justify selling head-mounted-hardware? But it does sort of seem like walled gardens are in their DNA.
Communitivity 5y ago
An old decent writeup on the history of VWRAP (formerly Open Grid Protocol, and MMOX before that) can be found here: http://www.metaverseink.com/blog/standards/virtual-world-interoperability/ http://www.metaverseink.com/blog/standards/virtual-world-int...
echelon 5y ago
If Linden launched now instead of 20 years ago, they'd have tons of funding and almost certainly be a unicorn. Compare https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/secondlife https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/secondlife https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/vrchat https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/vrchat They were well ahead of their time. Or even if they weren't, the market simply wasn't ready for them. As an aside, I have a few anecdotes about Second Life: - I remember IBM paying money for virtual real estate in second life. They set up a marketing presence, too. It seemed like such an IBM thing to do. - My university was giving class credit to a grad student for building a virtual mock up of our campus in Second Life. It was a thesis project, I think. I remember thinking he was rather late to the game, as Second Life had already dropped in popularity versus MMOs such as WoW. I wonder what those events would have been like today, with VRChat and the emergence of the "metaverse". Everything old is new again.
- geoelectric 5y ago
  I think the biggest issue was that bandwidth wasn't ready for them, and their hype came early because it was one of the first instances of people profiting from, well, the equivalent of NFTs with the real estate land rush. By the time bandwidth caught up, that was old hat and they had a rep for largely being a place for "alternative communities" to meet up. I was a super early adopter of things like virtual communities and MMOs, myself (and a huge Neal Stephenson fan to boot, so immediately recognized that they were using the Metaverse as their inspiration) and Second Life held very little attraction to me because of the performance. I tried it a few times, but there wasn't much immersion happening at the standard 1.5Mbps DSL speed, never mind modem. If they'd come out at a point where the asset streaming worked smoothly for most customers, and the hype came after that--and especially if they'd come out after things like Dreams or even Little Big Planet or Mario Maker had prepped people for the idea of crowdsourced assets--I think they'd have absolutely smashed the market.
  - Animats 5y ago
    I tried it a few times, but there wasn't much immersion happening at the standard 1.5Mbps DSL speed, never mind modem. It needs about 50Mb/s and a GTX 1060 or better to work well. With gigabit networking and a GTX 3070, it's pretty good. Now once the viewer becomes multi-threaded...
danbmil99 5y ago
It's amusing and a bit gratifying to see how 2008 wants its metaverse back
- retrocryptid 5y ago
  Chip Morningstar always liked to remind me Second Life was just an updated version of Habitat... So maybe it goes back to 1986.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- pram 5y ago
  Even a decade before I was “playing” Worlds, Active Worlds, and 3D Anarchy. Those were just 3D chatrooms like SL. The charm had already worn by the late 90s though.
- drzaiusapelord 5y ago
  I think FB and a lot of VCs are going to learn that virtual worlds are boring, if not awful, unless they're tied to an addictive game loop. It'll be six years since the Vive came out, possibly the first "realistic," open-ish, mm tracking, high performance, modern VR set and there's still no killer app for VR. Worse, the VR market has decided its all nonsense anyway and is fine with buying headsets that just run mobile phone chipsets because that performance and graphics is "good enough" and no one is demanding a photo realistic world to lose yourself in. All they care if the games are good enough, that is to say if the loop addictive. Those pushing out past games in VR are brave and I'm thankful they are there. Maybe Meta will figure it out, but I'm skeptical.
  - lostmsu 5y ago
    Many of the top games in this list do not require photorealistic graphics: https://store.steampowered.com/stats/ https://store.steampowered.com/stats/
Animats 5y ago
Interesting. Linden Lab went through a period when they envisioned a 3D web, where the same client would talk to multiple virtual worlds. Around 2011, they backed off on that. But others went on, and to the surprise of Linden Lab, Open Simulator was developed. The Second Life simulator is proprietary, while the client is open source. Both are in C++. Open Simulator is in C#, and it's roughly compatible, although totally different internally. I've been writing a Second Life / Open Simulator client in Rust for the last year or so, so I know the wire protocol. VWRAP seems to be an attempt to define a more portable wire protocol with roughly the same information. The current Second Life wire protocol has two parts, events via binary UDP messages, and assets via HTTP. The UDP message formats are defined here.[1] This is a painful system. Both ends have to use exactly the same message template file, because messages do not contain length information. You have to parse each message perfectly just to find the next message. This makes adding new messages very difficult. No new messages have been added in years. That's one problem VWRAP was intended to solve. Assets come in from ordinary web-type servers, and complex ones are encapsulated in Linden Lab Serial Data Protocol, which is documented and has multiple implementations. Those are reasonably straightforward to deal with. The conceptual problems of interoperability are much tougher. There are some metaverse standards organizations starting up, but they're working more on diversity, inclusion, and safety than wire protocols. Content standardization is making progress. Content standardization seems to be settling on some subset of GLTF/USD formats. NVidia is pushing that, and the major tools (Maya, Blender, Unity, Unreal) all speak it. That's a file format, not a wire protocol. Enough standardization to allow portals between virtual worlds would be a big win. There's talk about this, but not much is happening, except in the Open Simulator ecosystem, where it works now. One company, Ready Player Me, has an interesting concept - outsourced avatars. Avatars are created on the Ready Player Me site. Cooperating games have a module which renders such avatars, going out to Ready Player Me for the assets. This gives Ready Player Me a lock on avatar appearance and wearable items. For now, this is free. For now. "Wolf3D has the right to amend the Terms unilaterally." Some smaller games are using this, but the big studios have mostly stayed away. If that catches on, those guys have control over the air supply of the Metaverse. [1] https://vcs.firestormviewer.org/phoenix-firestorm/files/tip/scripts/messages/message_template.msg?at=tip https://vcs.firestormviewer.org/phoenix-firestorm/files/tip/...
- 5y ago
Animats 5y ago
At a higher level, here's the real problem. Consider the web today. We have web pages that display some text and a few pictures. Yet viewing one requires downloading tens of megabytes of data, perhaps a hundred network transactions, a few gigabytes of RAM, a CPU or two running at upwards of 3GHz, a little help from a GPU, and several seconds of loading time. This is an awesome level of inefficiency. Today's web browsing uses at least an order of magnitude more resources than it should based on what appears on the screen. We cannot afford that level of inefficiency in good quality 3D worlds. Just doing a good 3D world with every known optimization is at the upper limits of what available hardware can do. Watch the Unreal Engine 5 Matrix demo to see what's possible with the best known techniques. Then read up on what's done to put those meshes into Nanite format, an appallingly complex, insanely optimized, and very clever representation. One full of internal offset fields, so hostile content would be a huge problem. That's the problem with adapting web technology to virtual worlds. If you make the system as general, portable, and robust as web services, it's too bulky, too slow, and too low-rez.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  The "web" today is effectively a basic virtual machine, and pages are containers deployed onto it. Which means you get all the bloat of re-shipping an OS (js libs), because the ecosystem as a whole would rather have diversity, speed of framework iteration, minimized developer time, and absolutely minimal client friction. And by and large, those have been good choices! Look at how far the web's come in just the last 30 years. But as you note, many of those goals are incompatible with game engines, which have seriously tight minimum performance requirements. So what do you think are the most important priorities for a 3D world format? I'm assuming performance (rendering and network) comes first, but what gets optimized for after that?
  - Animats 5y ago
    Fun. We know how to build user-created virtual worlds, but we don't know how to make them fun. I could say more on this, but not right now.
    - 5y ago
dingosity 5y ago
Oh. I forgot to mention this... Marketplace / Make Me Smart did a podcast on the metaverse last week: https://www.marketplace.org/shows/make-me-smart-with-kai-and-molly/lets-get-smart-about-the-metaverse/ https://www.marketplace.org/shows/make-me-smart-with-kai-and...

74 points by dingosity 5y ago

wayoutthere 5y ago

There we have it, metaverse solved.

capableweb 5y ago
We finally have the hard part done (the idea), now it's just the easy part left (the implementation).
- foobarian 5y ago
  FB^H^H Meta buys Roblox, mark my words.
  - retrocryptid 5y ago
    It's probably better for Roblox than an IPO and extends FB/Meta's reach into the youth market. Weirder things have happened.
    - foobarian 5y ago
      The thing is, most Roblox players that I've seen have FB Messenger (the kids version) video/audio calls running in the background so they can talk. With the new focus on metaverse the combo really makes sense. On the other hand Roblox could really pull a coup by replicating this functionality natively.
      - ianbicking 5y ago
        I assume they don't do it because they are scared of being responsible, not because it's technically difficult. It probably helps that the communication is separate from Roblox because it's harder to manipulate a kid on two separate channels together (in the same ways it's hard to actually get two kids connected that want to be connected). Though Facebook also has some advantage because they are already maintaining a bunch of relationship information and they use that to bootstrap Messenger For Kids since one of the common patterns is parents become Facebook friends with clear identities and then they connect their children.
    - kaibee 5y ago
      Roblox already IPO'd.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    Would love to see Meta step into the "child labor" controversy. Isn't that an episode of Silicon Valley? Their videochat platform is a hit but all their users are underage - they agree to sell to the bad-guy-VC just before the lawsuits show up.
- retrocryptid 5y ago
  Even harder... Convincing corporate entities to open even just a small bit of their metaverse / virtual world. At Linden, we pitched OGP/MMOX/VWRAP as "If the Metaverse is the next big thing, then its better to be Google than AoL." That message resonated well with Linden, who saw the "Open Metaverse" as a place where their existing customers building UGC assets could find new markets for their goods. Linden could then jump in and take a percentage for cash transactions or hosting or whatever other services people would pay for. I honestly don't know how FB/Meta sees their market / business model. Selling ads in a virtual world? Content to justify selling head-mounted-hardware? But it does sort of seem like walled gardens are in their DNA.

Communitivity 5y ago

An old decent writeup on the history of VWRAP (formerly Open Grid Protocol, and MMOX before that) can be found here: http://www.metaverseink.com/blog/standards/virtual-world-interoperability/ http://www.metaverseink.com/blog/standards/virtual-world-int...

echelon 5y ago

If Linden launched now instead of 20 years ago, they'd have tons of funding and almost certainly be a unicorn. Compare https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/secondlife https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/secondlife https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/vrchat https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/vrchat They were well ahead of their time. Or even if they weren't, the market simply wasn't ready for them. As an aside, I have a few anecdotes about Second Life: - I remember IBM paying money for virtual real estate in second life. They set up a marketing presence, too. It seemed like such an IBM thing to do. - My university was giving class credit to a grad student for building a virtual mock up of our campus in Second Life. It was a thesis project, I think. I remember thinking he was rather late to the game, as Second Life had already dropped in popularity versus MMOs such as WoW. I wonder what those events would have been like today, with VRChat and the emergence of the "metaverse". Everything old is new again.

geoelectric 5y ago
I think the biggest issue was that bandwidth wasn't ready for them, and their hype came early because it was one of the first instances of people profiting from, well, the equivalent of NFTs with the real estate land rush. By the time bandwidth caught up, that was old hat and they had a rep for largely being a place for "alternative communities" to meet up. I was a super early adopter of things like virtual communities and MMOs, myself (and a huge Neal Stephenson fan to boot, so immediately recognized that they were using the Metaverse as their inspiration) and Second Life held very little attraction to me because of the performance. I tried it a few times, but there wasn't much immersion happening at the standard 1.5Mbps DSL speed, never mind modem. If they'd come out at a point where the asset streaming worked smoothly for most customers, and the hype came after that--and especially if they'd come out after things like Dreams or even Little Big Planet or Mario Maker had prepped people for the idea of crowdsourced assets--I think they'd have absolutely smashed the market.
- Animats 5y ago
  I tried it a few times, but there wasn't much immersion happening at the standard 1.5Mbps DSL speed, never mind modem. It needs about 50Mb/s and a GTX 1060 or better to work well. With gigabit networking and a GTX 3070, it's pretty good. Now once the viewer becomes multi-threaded...

danbmil99 5y ago

It's amusing and a bit gratifying to see how 2008 wants its metaverse back

retrocryptid 5y ago
Chip Morningstar always liked to remind me Second Life was just an updated version of Habitat... So maybe it goes back to 1986.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
pram 5y ago
Even a decade before I was “playing” Worlds, Active Worlds, and 3D Anarchy. Those were just 3D chatrooms like SL. The charm had already worn by the late 90s though.
drzaiusapelord 5y ago
I think FB and a lot of VCs are going to learn that virtual worlds are boring, if not awful, unless they're tied to an addictive game loop. It'll be six years since the Vive came out, possibly the first "realistic," open-ish, mm tracking, high performance, modern VR set and there's still no killer app for VR. Worse, the VR market has decided its all nonsense anyway and is fine with buying headsets that just run mobile phone chipsets because that performance and graphics is "good enough" and no one is demanding a photo realistic world to lose yourself in. All they care if the games are good enough, that is to say if the loop addictive. Those pushing out past games in VR are brave and I'm thankful they are there. Maybe Meta will figure it out, but I'm skeptical.
- lostmsu 5y ago
  Many of the top games in this list do not require photorealistic graphics: https://store.steampowered.com/stats/ https://store.steampowered.com/stats/

Animats 5y ago

Interesting. Linden Lab went through a period when they envisioned a 3D web, where the same client would talk to multiple virtual worlds. Around 2011, they backed off on that. But others went on, and to the surprise of Linden Lab, Open Simulator was developed. The Second Life simulator is proprietary, while the client is open source. Both are in C++. Open Simulator is in C#, and it's roughly compatible, although totally different internally. I've been writing a Second Life / Open Simulator client in Rust for the last year or so, so I know the wire protocol. VWRAP seems to be an attempt to define a more portable wire protocol with roughly the same information. The current Second Life wire protocol has two parts, events via binary UDP messages, and assets via HTTP. The UDP message formats are defined here.[1] This is a painful system. Both ends have to use exactly the same message template file, because messages do not contain length information. You have to parse each message perfectly just to find the next message. This makes adding new messages very difficult. No new messages have been added in years. That's one problem VWRAP was intended to solve. Assets come in from ordinary web-type servers, and complex ones are encapsulated in Linden Lab Serial Data Protocol, which is documented and has multiple implementations. Those are reasonably straightforward to deal with. The conceptual problems of interoperability are much tougher. There are some metaverse standards organizations starting up, but they're working more on diversity, inclusion, and safety than wire protocols. Content standardization is making progress. Content standardization seems to be settling on some subset of GLTF/USD formats. NVidia is pushing that, and the major tools (Maya, Blender, Unity, Unreal) all speak it. That's a file format, not a wire protocol. Enough standardization to allow portals between virtual worlds would be a big win. There's talk about this, but not much is happening, except in the Open Simulator ecosystem, where it works now. One company, Ready Player Me, has an interesting concept - outsourced avatars. Avatars are created on the Ready Player Me site. Cooperating games have a module which renders such avatars, going out to Ready Player Me for the assets. This gives Ready Player Me a lock on avatar appearance and wearable items. For now, this is free. For now. "Wolf3D has the right to amend the Terms unilaterally." Some smaller games are using this, but the big studios have mostly stayed away. If that catches on, those guys have control over the air supply of the Metaverse. [1] https://vcs.firestormviewer.org/phoenix-firestorm/files/tip/scripts/messages/message_template.msg?at=tip https://vcs.firestormviewer.org/phoenix-firestorm/files/tip/...

5y ago

Animats 5y ago

At a higher level, here's the real problem. Consider the web today. We have web pages that display some text and a few pictures. Yet viewing one requires downloading tens of megabytes of data, perhaps a hundred network transactions, a few gigabytes of RAM, a CPU or two running at upwards of 3GHz, a little help from a GPU, and several seconds of loading time. This is an awesome level of inefficiency. Today's web browsing uses at least an order of magnitude more resources than it should based on what appears on the screen. We cannot afford that level of inefficiency in good quality 3D worlds. Just doing a good 3D world with every known optimization is at the upper limits of what available hardware can do. Watch the Unreal Engine 5 Matrix demo to see what's possible with the best known techniques. Then read up on what's done to put those meshes into Nanite format, an appallingly complex, insanely optimized, and very clever representation. One full of internal offset fields, so hostile content would be a huge problem. That's the problem with adapting web technology to virtual worlds. If you make the system as general, portable, and robust as web services, it's too bulky, too slow, and too low-rez.

ethbr0 5y ago
The "web" today is effectively a basic virtual machine, and pages are containers deployed onto it. Which means you get all the bloat of re-shipping an OS (js libs), because the ecosystem as a whole would rather have diversity, speed of framework iteration, minimized developer time, and absolutely minimal client friction. And by and large, those have been good choices! Look at how far the web's come in just the last 30 years. But as you note, many of those goals are incompatible with game engines, which have seriously tight minimum performance requirements. So what do you think are the most important priorities for a 3D world format? I'm assuming performance (rendering and network) comes first, but what gets optimized for after that?
- Animats 5y ago
  Fun. We know how to build user-created virtual worlds, but we don't know how to make them fun. I could say more on this, but not right now.
  - 5y ago

dingosity 5y ago

Oh. I forgot to mention this... Marketplace / Make Me Smart did a podcast on the metaverse last week: https://www.marketplace.org/shows/make-me-smart-with-kai-and-molly/lets-get-smart-about-the-metaverse/ https://www.marketplace.org/shows/make-me-smart-with-kai-and...