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The Plug Proposal
3D virtual worlds for millions of people
Plug [1] is a way to find and keep contacts with friends within many inter-connected 3D virtual worlds. Users may search for interesting people, chat spontaneously with voice and gestures, and play with friends within shared virtual spaces. By combining the looks of 3D online games and the accessibility of instant messengers, Plug makes it easier to search and interact with friends, while taking interactive virtual worlds to a larger audience.
Project Description
Finding the right persons to talk to, whether for fun or for work, is a difficult yet important issue. Existing search utilities such as Google are very good at finding relevant information, but when it comes to making new friends through real-time interactions or having someone knowledgeable to answer a question, there's not yet a recognizable online mechanism. There are at least three main obstacles: 1) finding the relevant person, 2) having a spontaneous remote conversation, and 3) discovering shared interests to break the ice between two initial strangers.
We begin this project by noting that the best way to communicate between people is through face-to-face conversations, and that people usually learn of new acquaintances through mutual friends or co-location in the same space, when facial expressions and body languages are at play. However, time and space constrains in the real world often prevent us from having face-to-face contact with potentially interesting acquaintances. When such contact isn't possible, an alternative is to replicate face-to-face experiences as much as possible.
We find inspirations from the interactivity and popularity of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) [2] and instant messengers (IMs). MMOGs are virtual worlds made of hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. Users in a MMOG assume 3D representations called avatars, and navigate the world while interacting with other users. The experience can be very immersive as both body languages and a sense of space are provided. Given current hardware and broadband trends, it is not difficult to imagine such virtual environments will grow in both scope and scale, providing rich and diverse types of interactions. However, a specific game context may not appeal to all users, preventing virtual worlds from being universally used. On the other hand, IMs have proven to attract a wide range of users via its simplicity and non-invasiveness. For example, AOL and Microsoft's instant messenger service each has over 150 million registered users and over 30 million peak concurrent users [3]. If virtual worlds such as MMOGs can be made as easy and accessible as IMs [4], potentially more people may use the medium to interact.
Plug is designed to be an IM-like application that can be easily installed and minimized when not in use. It has the following elements:
plugfile -- a personality profile of the user. plugspace -- a virtual world created and hosted by a user that can be interlinked via portals. plug -- a user avatar that acts autonomously when the user is not in direct control.
A user first creates a personality profile (plugfile) that contains an avatar (plug), the user then navigates via the avatar through virtual worlds created by either the user or others (plugspaces). When the user is not controlling the plug, it becomes an autonomous agent that wanders around various plugspaces to meet and exchange information with other plugs. A plug determines its behavior according to user setting, preference, or usage behavior. To search for people with similar interests or particular backgrounds, a query can be sent to the plug, which then attempts to find matching plugfiles by crawling various plugspaces. Recommendations from other plugs or plug-owners may aid in the search, much like how new friends are met via existing ones in the real-world. A plug could initiate observable conversations with other plugs, and if its owner finds the conversation interesting enough, he or she may join and take over the plug to act or ask questions. When two plug owners are in a conversation, they can communicate via both text and voice. To stimulate initial conversations, plug owners could play simple games provided by the creators of plugspaces. The size and content of each plugspace is determined by its creator, and can be linked through teleportation spots called portals. In summary, plug provides these main functions:
- Search for people of similar interests or backgrounds to initiate conversations. - Chat with people via voice and gestures as in the real world. - Play to familarize with new friends in simple games.
We plan to build an initial version of Plug based on the open source Second Life client realXtend [5] and server OpenSimulator [6], the P2P overlay VAST [7] and P2P 3D streaming library FLoD [8].
References
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