Intel talks virtual worlds

JUSTIN RATTNER TALKED a lot about virtual worlds today at IDF, and in some ways, the less said about this plague the better. They have their place, but enough with them being the best thing since sliced bread.

The first point he made as there is a difference between the gaming type of virtual world and the realistic/functional ones. WoW would be an example of the former, Second Life is ostensibly the latter. There are many other business oriented virtual worlds and meeting rooms, all of which have the commercial success of a car based microwave/jackhammer combo.

My big bitch about these virtual worlds and their proponents is that they take something that is perfectly well achieved with a conference call, or in extreme cases a video conference, and add a lot to it. Unfortunately what they add is complexity, annoyance, miserable controls, hoops to jump through, cost and incompatibilities.

Ever since I was shown Gopher 3D prototypes in the early 90s, I realized that he whole virtual worlds idea was a miserable substitute for the real one, as long as you were trying to accomplish real world things. Dragon slaying is just fine in cyberspace.

20+ years later, the same problems apply, the virtual worlds add nothing positive to what you want to do, but do it in a truly annoying way. All the problems of a badly written MMORPG can at your beck and call for you next meeting, for the low price of $999 per user. Wow, be still my beating heart.

The fact that Intel is interested in this is no surprise at all, this technology is really in their best interest. Why? Because it requires a truly massive amount of CPU power. Justin threw out some numbers, basically the number of users per server on various games. Eve Online is about 30,000 users, WoW is at about 1/10 that, or 2500. Second life, fully 3D and more interactive is sitting at about 160.

Virtual worlds that are more realistic tend to require 10-100x the server power of a less realistic world, and probably millions of times more power than a MUD. At least in MUDs you didn't have people coming up to you in crotchless raccoon outfits and asking you to [edited for sanity preservation].

It only makes sense that Intel wants this genre to take off, they will have quite a financial windfall if it does. Society will suffer, but hey, that is not a technical choice.

Then Justin turned to a more technical area, raytracing and graphics. He brought up Intel researcher Daniel Pohl, the guy who did raytraced Quake IV. They showed off a new version that went from the 768 * 768 shown off a few months ago to 1280 * 720 running at 90+ FPS on a dual X5365 system. If 8 cores can run it now, it will be a realistic goal on the desktop soon enough.

The last important point is identity, and here I think Intel got it wrong. They were saying that identity must remain fungible on the net, things need to be able to change and not be tied to a real person. The example they gave was a wheelchair bound child roaming the virtual world, a laudable escape.

The problem is that for every one of those, there are hundreds of our crotchless raccoon suited friends. There are 'girls' and 'children' and.... and... you get the idea. Fungible identities are a horrendously bad idea, opening up the door to scammers, nuts and generally people without your best intentions in mind. If there is one thing that will bring the whole concept of virtual worlds down more quickly that a CEO stuck on a piece of bad geometry, it is a raccoon trying to hump his leg when he can't get away.

In the end, it comes down to this, the tech for virtual worlds is there, and there is little more that needs to be done. The problem is the same old one of 'can' does not mean 'should'. In this case, no one has got the picture, you can tape a rotting mackerel to a drumstick, but it won't make a concert any better. If Wired declares mackerel drumsticks to be the next big thing, and VC money pours in, anyone with common sense will still avoid them. Virtual worlds are a mackerel drumstick. µ