Monday, August 11th, 2008...11:52 pm - Gary Hayes
MySpace becomes Ultrarealistic LivePlace - or pixel smoke & mirrors?
Hat ‘tweet’ tip to Pavig Lok for pointing me at this Tech Crunch for this story and spectacular video over on BlipTV of a new social virtual world that takes real time, multi user worlds to a new level of realism (well minus the smoke and mirrors in this clip). The footage below feels quite cinematic (well the 8mm shaky cam version at least!) and the tech crunch article suggests Liveplace will be a space for avatars to rent apartments in a virtual cityscape. Like the video of 50+ virtual worlds I posted a few days ago this is very similar to Twinity, vSide and Amazing Worlds as an urban environment you can populate and decorate - in fact not too different to a LAMP (News Interactive) project we did back in 2005 called ‘My Apartment‘ 
The technology used is known as OTOY technology for delivering real-time “cinematic quality” 3D rendering through the browser.
How does the OTOY technology get installed on the end user’s machines?
If a user views OTOY content on a system without the OTOY runtime (i.e.
it is a virgin machine), OTOY will then install itself almost instantly through a stub
mechanism (usually between 30-100k ) that is downloaded just once (with no
more than one click required by the user to install).
Users on thin machines (i.e. old cell phones), that cannot support the
native client, would instead be routed to a virtual session of the application,
hosted by an available node on the P2P network that scales the content for the
thin device in real time.
On a system where the native OTOY client is installed, the runtime
renders the content seamlessly within the host application (as an overlay, palette,
embedded frame, etc.). The user never has to quit an application, restart the
machine, leave a web page, or do anything other than click ‘OK’. All further
updates to the engine are handled transparently.
Leave a Reply