Basal Omni-Presence

The web has always had an element of place and 2D meshes well with a 3D environment

… the Meshverse(which is more than a 3D web) will subsume text-based stuff and then transform it. This is already happening in Second Life as the Mozilla based uBrowser technology brings web pages in world as functional decoration on the surfaces of 3D objects. When there’s a need to scroll through traditional text we’ll zoom full screen onto a window. This is just an evolutionary twist on maximize/minimize controls and the Dock(Mac) or Task Bar(Windows). Over time, we’ll see less and less text and most images will be snapshots of 3D models. There will also be more functional sound and Tangible User Interfaces(TUI). Text will remain but in a secondary, support role.

End of The Text Based Internet

But the web and social networking need a greater sense of sight and interaction with other people and so we’re seeing a growth in embedded text chat clients:

• AOL - WIMZI
• Google Talk Gadget
• Same Place
• Meebo Me
• Meebo Rooms
• Radius IM

As this trend takes root, web pages will either become virtual world places or virtual objects within them while instant messaging and chat will become the means of facilitating presence within these virtual worlds. Until BOPSpace, there’s been no infrastructure for this - no standards, no RSS and XML-RPC. Implementations are still a bit rough around the edges but the idea just makes sense to many people because being social means interacting with other people. BOPSpace aims to facilitate this for everyone without need for a server or even an IM account. Your pages, your world should belong to you.

BOPSpace uses the Coral Content Distribution Network(CoralCDN) to distribute static content for it’s virtual worlds.

CoralCDN is a free peer-to-peer content distribution network, comprised of a world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers. It allows a user to run a web site that offers high performance and meets huge demand, all for the price of a $50/month cable modem.

I’m also using it for media here on this site so wherever you see urls with .nyud.net appended to them, you’re accessing the content via CoralCDN.

I have loaded BOPSpace using a Squeak 3.9 VM recently and it appeared to work just fine but all of my testing has been done in 3.8.1. Since a Croquet version is in the pipeline, I’ve chosen to stay with 3.8 but there are many reasons to build a 3.9 specific image going forward. Once the source is available hopefully some people on the Squeak community will take it and run with it.

Knowledgeable Squeakers will note the absence of a .changes file in the current download but shouldn’t be alarmed. BOPSpace is an open source project and full sources will be available in the next week or so. This will be shown on the upcoming Roadmap.

There are three videos depicting the BOPSpace hosting environment available for download(additional descriptions are available ). For people who have or willing to learn how to install Squeak 3.8, there’s a pre-alpha image file there which you can drop into your Squeak installation and become a virtual property owner! It is pre-alpha but reasonably stable with regard to the things shown in the videos and How-To pages. I’ve had BOP spaces running continually with no crashes for days at a time on low-end hardware(iMac 266mHz, 160M RAM).

No support is available at the moment and there will be lots of frequent changes going forward.

In the sidebar of this page you’ll find links to pages which provide illustrated tours of how to do various things with BOPSpace.

bopspacedemo11.mov

In the upper left portion of the screen there is a 3D scene with flat images as avatars. This is the root space named funkoffice. To the right is a popped out Google Chat window running in Firefox. Below these two are iChat windows. When the movie starts, you can see me typing in the Google Chat window and when I hit return, what I type is shown in the 3D world as well as the iChat window. On another computer a Google Chat session is open and this is seen there as well. On yet another computer 3D window is open and it shows the identical activity. Next up Croquet and Second Life.