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Within decades, people

could spend at least as

much time in virtual worlds

as in the real one.

S ixteen years have passedsince the World Wide Webexploded and the Webbrowser became the interfaceto the Internet universe. That

interface has remained largelyunchanged despite dramatic shifts intechnology and culture in the inter-vening years.

The world is about to be turnedupside down again. Computer perfor-mance has increased 10,000-fold, whilehome network speed has gone from9,600 bps to more than 1 Mbps sincethe early 1990s. In 2006, most homesin the US had some form of broadbandthat enabled the downloading of videoto iPods and YouTube. However,streaming video has been an Internetfeature since the creation of the MBonein the early 1990s, when users neededa $50,000 computer and a leased T1connection (M.R. Macedonia and D.P.Brutzman, “MBone Provides Audioand Video Across the Internet,”Computer, Apr. 1994, pp. 30-36).

Many personal computers producedtoday have graphical processing unitsthat offer graphics performance ordersof magnitude better than million-dol-lar image generators could in the early

1990s. Further, wireless networkinghas become a universal phenomenonfor devices ranging from mobilephones to notebook computers.

Most important, a generation ofcomputer users now in their twentiescan’t recall a world without net-worked 3D video games like Doom,Quake, Halo, or World of Warcraft(WoW). It’s also a generation com-fortable in cyberspace—able to easily move between the virtual andreal worlds because they are be-coming one (www.mnfuturists.org/PDFCurrent/Virtual%20Worlds%20RealOpportunities.pdf). Accordingto Gartner, by 2010, 80 percent ofFortune 500 global companies willhave some form of massive multiplayeronline or virtual-world presence.

ARPANET ORIGINSThe space race with the Soviet

Union gave birth to the US AdvancedResearch Projects Agency (ARPA) in1958. Its mission: Make the US a tech-nology leader. The Soviets had alreadylaunched Sputnik, making it the firstcountry to become a space powercapable of delivering intercontinentalballistic missiles. This threatened the

US’s status as the free world’s premiersuperpower and caused the country tosuffer a crisis of confidence.

President Eisenhower establishedARPA to lead a mostly secret crash pro-gram to turn the situation around. Theinvestment worked: Within a decade,the US began circling the moon withmanned spaceships. But ARPA’s legacyis rooted in its most public research pro-gram—the Arpanet—which began in1967 to network mainframes at uni-versity research labs. Initially led byLarry Roberts, the project would even-tually become today’s Internet.

For 25 years, the Internet grewslowly with the introduction of appli-cations such as e-mail and file transfer.Not until the Web browser’s appear-ance did Internet growth explode(http://navigators.com/stats.html). In1991, Tim Berners Lee tied a 2D graph-ical interface to the Net, providing acanvas for creating a whole new classof applications from AltaVista toMySpace. The World Wide Web madethe Internet accessible beyond theshores of university computer sciencedepartments, government offices, andthe arcana of command-line interfaces.

The combination of startlinggrowth in computer usage, computerperformance, and network perfor-mance provided the catalyst for theindustry’s advancement in 1967 andagain in 1992. The Arpanet becamepossible because universities hadworkstation-class computers withWIMP (window, icon, menu, pointingdevice) interfaces tied to EthernetLANs, a legacy of the Xerox Star com-puter. Moreover, wide-area-networkspeeds increased from 50 Kbps in1969 to 45 Mbps in 1992. The WWWbenefited from the culmination ofideas from visionaries and earlyArpanet pioneers such as DouglasEnglebart, who led development ofthe Stanford Research Institute On-Line System, the graphical user inter-face, and the mouse.

SIMNETIn the 1970s, the Xerox Star hosted

one of the first networked videogames,Maze War (http://articles.techrepublic.

Generation 3D:Living in Virtual WorldsMike Macedonia, Forterra Systems

100 Computer

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virtual radios of soldiers in tank simu-lators across the US.

KILLER APPVideogames have provided the killer

app for 3D virtual worlds over thepast decade. SIMNET was not a per-sistent world—it offered no centralserver to maintain the simulation’sglobal state. Wolfenstein 3D and otherfirst-person shooter games followedthe same model.

But in 1999, Sony Online Entertain-ment released Everquest, a massivemultiplayer online role-playing game(MMORPG). Although this genre orig-inated with the text-based multiuserdungeon-and-dragon (MUDD) gamespopular in the 1980s, the graphicalEverquest became an unprecedentedlypopular and profitable game with ahuge subscriber base, even thoughmost players accessed it through dial-up connections running at 56 Kbps or less. Because it was persistent,Everquest let players accrue points thatthey could trade for virtual artifactssuch as spells and materials. This formof virtual currency led to the creation of

com.com/5100-10881_11-5710539.html). But DARPA gave birth to some-thing more ambitious than just a game;it created SIMNET, or SimulatorNetwork, in the mid-1980s. Led byJack Thorpe, a young Air Force officer,the SIMNET program produced thefirst peer-to-peer 3D virtual environ-ments to operate over the Arpanet—and gave birth to the Internet’s multi-player first-person shooter. Thorpeenvisioned that one day soldiers andairmen would train in virtual battleswhile deployed across the globe. Whatlooked like today’s videogames weredeadly serious training systems. Yet,many ideas implemented in SIMNETfound their way into such networkedgames as Microsoft Flight Simulatorand Doom.

DARPA also created a special net-work for SIMNET, the Defense Simu-lation Internet (DSInet). In the late1980s, researchers at USC InformationSciences Institute and Bolt Beranekand Newman (BBN) experimentedwith the DSINet. They sought toexplore the use of the voice-over-the-Internet protocol (VoIP) to connect the

virtual economies that eventuallyinvolved real money.

Today, WoW, an Everquest succes-sor, is by far the most popular 3D vir-tual world, benefiting from the ex-plosion of broadband and 3D graph-ics performance. With more than 9million subscribers, the game has atleast several hundred thousand userslogged in at any one time. WoW hasseeped into popular culture, with theTV show South Park devoting anentire episode to the game—an episodethat, as this issue goes to press, has justbeen awarded an Emmy.

The growth in virtual-world com-munities has not gone unnoticed bylarge media companies. In August2007, Disney acquired ClubPenguin.com for a minimum of $350 million(and up to $700 million). AnMMORPG for children, this game wasthe 131st most visited Web site in theUS in June 2007 (www.marketingvox.com/archives/2007/08/06/club-penguin-snatched-by-disney-grew-329-percent-in-past-year/).

Viacom’s MTV has also establisheda presence in the virtual world withVirtual Laguna Beach and VirtualPimp My Ride. Developed by Makenausing the Forterra OLIVE architectureshown in Figure 1, MTV’s sites havepioneered the use of voice conferenc-ing using VoIP and in-world stream-ing video (www.vmtv.com).

A 3D INTERNETIn a departure from more tradi-

tional videogames, some developershave begun creating large-scale virtualworlds such as Second Life (http://secondlife.com) for social networking.Developed by Linden Labs, SecondLife promotes the idea of a self-sus-taining virtual economy in whichusers can produce and sell goods suchas virtual clothing or trade virtualproperties. Moreover, Second Life hasattracted advertising and an increasedonline presence from businesses suchas IBM and Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream,as well as religious organizations suchas the Jesuits.

IBM has been a leader in experi-menting with Second Life, There.com,

Figure 1. Virtual worlds for work and play. Forterra’s OLIVE architecture enables creation

of 3D environments that can be used for classroom instruction, business meetings, and

virtual socializing.

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economic markets or social networks.”One such example is the use of WoW

to research the spread of viruses. As EricT. Lofgren and Nina H. Feffermanreported (“The Untapped Potential ofVirtual Game Worlds to Shed Light onReal World Epidemics,” The LancetInfectious Diseases, vol. 7, no. 9, 2007,pp. 625-629), online game worldsmight be a useful tool for studying thespread of human infectious diseases.These researchers from Tufts and Rut-gers universities described how a pro-gramming error in WoW, caused a full-blown epidemic of a virulent, highlycontagious disease among avatars.

T o further advancements in theresearch of virtual worlds, theNSF also plans a major effort with

its Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Inno-vation program (www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=108366):

Virtual environments are importantmechanisms to enhance discovery,learning and innovation. They per-mit collaboration among diversepopulations spread across geo-graphic distances and at differenttimes. Scheduling and operation ofdistributed facilities and sensorarrays, data extraction and analy-sis, international, real-time com-

and other virtual worlds as a forumfor business collaboration. Accordingto a company report, “IBM believesthat virtual worlds and other 3DInternet environments offer significantopportunity to our company, ourclients, and the world at large, as theyevolve, grow in use and popularity,and become more integrated intomany aspects of business and society”(http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/virtualworlds.IBMVirtualWorldGuidelines.html).

In many respects, Google Earth is a3D virtual world, albeit withoutavatars and no direct group interac-tion. However, Google enables user-created content that can be createdwith its SketchUp tool, then shared viathe 3D warehouse. Users now sharethousands of building models andeven their furniture. Meanwhile, theWeb3 Consortium’s X3D Earth pro-ject is creating a standards-based 3Dvisualization infrastructure for visual-izing all manner of real-world objectsand information constructs in ageospatial context (www.web3d.org/x3d-earth/).

DEPARTURE FOR DISCOVERYEducators have recognized the

power of collaborative presence forstudents in the virtual world. Morethan 200 universities—includingHarvard and Princeton—now experi-ment with MMORPGs as learningenvironments. Forterra Systems hasbeen pioneering the development ofvirtual worlds for training and educa-tion programs using its OLIVE plat-form. Recently, the company began aproject to integrate OLIVE with learn-ing management systems (LMSs) suchas Blackboard (http://forterrainc.com).

These virtual worlds have also be-come the focus of new scientific re-search. William Bainbridge of theNational Science Foundation wrote inthe 27 July issue of Science (pp. 472-476) that scientists are now using sev-eral tools to explore aspects ofMMORPGs, including “formal exper-imentation, observational ethnogra-phy, and quantitative analysis of

parisons of global climate models,and injecting discovery and innov-ative environments into learningand training all use virtual environ-ments. CDI will develop new tech-niques for building and utilizingvirtual environments, especially inthe context of cyberinfrastructure.

If all this inspires visions of NealStephenson’s science fiction classicSnowcrash, it’s because we are inex-orably approaching the 3D Internetportrayed in his Metaverse, whichforms part of the Arpanet continuum. Ifcurrent trends continue, by 2047 theseMMORPGs could well be as much apart of our everyday reality as cellphones and e-mail are today. We willslip into them and never completely slipout. These new worlds, which will bejust as radical as the Web was to theArpanet, are not that far away. ■

Michael Macedonia is vice president ofForterra Systems and the former chieftechnology officer for the PEO STRI, theUS Army’s simulation technology orga-nization. Contact him at Macedonia@computer.org.

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Editor: Michael van lent,vanlent@ict.usc.edu

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