Van Gogh and the User Generated Content buzz 7
Inviting you into a metaverse without user-generated content would be a little like inviting Van Gogh to a paint-by-numbers party. Individual creativity is the key to a thriving, evolving online community; it’s also the lifeblood of a virtual world, even a young one. Of course Just Leap In will support our users’ content; the big question is how we’ll do it, and how we plan to set ourselves apart.
In our Just Leap In world (the InVerse) UGC can take many forms, ranging from personalizing spaces and props with pictures, textures and video (as we currently support) to the ability to leave comments and communicate with other community members (coming soon).
Then there is the deeper form of UGC where people can create original 3D geometry and textures for their use, or to share with others. It’s this last aspect I’m posting about today.
In the near future, we will be releasing a set of tools to a small beta group that will allow 3D content creators to add new assets into the JLI world, and we’ll do it in a way so that we’re not building a walled garden. Our direction is to leverage open standards and existing professional tools and skillsets—not to create yet another set of modeling tools and techniques for people to learn.
By using industry-standard tools for data transport and shader visualization, we can enable creators to be quickly productive at a high level of quality and use their familiar, mature commercial 3D authoring products or free/OSS packages. Following this path also allows content created in other contexts to be easily adapted and imported in to the JLI world.
Ultimately, as we roll out our pipeline over time, it allows us to focus on the creative new features for users in the JLI world, and not writing expansive 3D tools and reinventing wheels.
Our published toolset will be a twin of the tools our internal artists use, which means content creators will have the same ability to create content that we do. Since we are all using the same tools, we will be more responsive to fine tuning and expanding our users’ productivity and keeping them up-to-date as the tools they use evolve.
For the technically inclined, our first release of UGC 3D tools will include a set of XSI properties, RT shaders, a custom fbx exporter that adds some JLI ‘sauce’ and a Mac/PC JLI viewer, with full documentation. Users of Maya/Max/Blender/etc. can tap into our fbx pathway to create JLI-compatible data as well. In subsequent releases, we’ll be considering adding Collada support, which in combination with fbx will further broaden the number of 3D packages that can be supported. We are also open to collaborating with third party tool creators to broaden further the abilities for our users to create.
Let’s continue this conversation in the comments. Let us know your thoughts, and what you’d like to see.
-Nereus
Director of Visual Development | Leap In Entertainment
Graphics & Performance in our 3D worlds
Almost all “virtual worlds” lack the rich beauty that we’ve come to expect from 21st-century visual effects, and we believe this is one reason why more people don’t play in 3D worlds.
Many of them look (and taste?) like cardboard. For instance, we don’t feel that Second Life’s Welcome Island seems like somewhere you’d enjoy a vacation, or an adventure, or a dance. (What exactly are you supposed to do there?)
Recent personal computers are perfectly capable of delivering a richer, live, immersive, and interactive 3D experience over the Web. They just need someone (that’s us and you!) to create a 3D world to make them sing.
We’ve been at this for the past year, trying to balance graphical quality against accessibility and performance. This post is about what hardware you need to see Just Leap In at its best.
To push the boundaries of what’s possible in a web-delivered 3D World, you’re going to need a fairly modern computer. This doesn’t mean that you need the absolute latest, fastest, meanest, game playing machine out there (wouldn’t hurt). But it probably means if your machine is older than 2-3 years, it may not have what it takes for you to enjoy our Just Leap In world at its best (though we encourage you to try it out: you may find your hardware to be perfectly acceptable, and we’d like to hear how it works).
Our world requires fairly high-powered machines. We could pursue a lower common denominator, but doing so would mean you, the Explorer, wouldn’t experience the visually rich world we know we can bring to life.
The bottom line: if your computer is a few years young, belonging to the 2004 era or later, our 3D spaces should look beautiful (at least in the eye of the beholder). If your computer was already “old” a couple of years ago, you’ll still be able to explore our universe. But it won’t be as pretty – there will be fewer visual effects, as our engine will ‘fall back’ to simpler rendering techniques.
As we get more data, we’ll be describing detailed specs on our webpage. We need to gain more real world feedback from our beta testers, so we can be precise and give better advice. Whatever your hardware is, let us know how we perform for you. We would really appreciate your feedback as a beta tester.
