blog@Yantrajaal

2006 is the year when the idea of Virtual Universes went mainstream. Massively Multiuser Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) like Everquest has been around for about three years and three dimensional virtual reality, whether with physical devices or with technology like VRML, has been around even longer, but it had always been a niche market -- at best adopted in the gaming community. However with the advent of Linden Labs and the release of their SecondLife platform, the concept of a virtual universe has now become the defacto platform of the future. What the World Wide Web was in 1996 is what Second Life is in 2006 ... and this time, the rate of penetration and adoption is even faster. Describing SecondLife is an exercise of (a) redundancy and (b) futility. It is redundant because almost every magazine and journal has now described it in great detail and Reuters has a full time bureau chief reporting regularly from SecondLife. It is also futile because Second Life is an experience ....

As the year 2006 draws to a close, it is interesting to take stock of things that happened and speculate on how these will impact the year ahead .. and in this exercise the one single thing that stands out is SecondLife - The Emergence of Virtual Worlds. Milestones and signposts are seldom recognised when we whiz past them on the highway .. it is only when you have traversed some significant distance, do you realise how important that fork in the road was ... both for those who have taken the right fork and for those who were left behind on the wrong one. To appreciate, the enormous significance of this tectonic movement, one must go back to the year 1995-96 when Netscape went public and the Internet, for all practical purposes was born. The world had not been wired up as comprehensively as yet and we in India got wind of this techTsunami in 1996 when the first few intrepid cybernauts in India set sail on a voyage of discovery. It was voyage of discovery as well as a voyage of faith. V...

MMORPGs in general and SecondLife in general has now become a hot favourite with relatively large parts of the population. As a concept and technology it has few peers and there is no doubt it is at the vanguard of a new wave that leads to the 3D Internet. What next ? The clue lies in the word 3D ! SL is essentially a 3D world that avatars live in, but the limitations of the computer console / video display unit means that 3D has to be represented as 2D grid of pixels. But today, we have technology that can display artefacts in a real 3D format. You can look up the following websites .. http://www.sharp3d.com/products/ or this website ... http://www.research.philips.com/newscenter/archive/2004/3d-display-cebit.html there are other technologies that support such technology .. for example see this http://www.seereal.com/en/index.php These are monitor based 3D technology which can enhance the SecondLife experience signficantly. Moving forward, laser based technology like the one from AIST...

PANIIT2006 - the mega IIT Alumni meet that is scheduled for next week in Mumbai has raised a lot of decibels in the media. There are a lots of articles and discussions on the IIT - the hype, the mystique and myth associated with India's best known educational instititutions. As an IIT-ian ( genuine B.Tech product - Mechanical, Azad Hall, Kharagpur) it is my misfortune that I would not be able to attend this megaMeet ... so let me share some of my thoughts on these unique institutions. At the risk of being politically incorrect, let me state upfront, that even though anybody who has enrolled in IIT is a dejure IITian, many of us believe that the defacto IITian is one who has qualified through the JEE Examination and has gone through the undergraduate ragging program -- does not matter if you were Mech or Chem or Agri or Electronics or Physics. The motley crew of M.Techs and Research Scholars do not qualify as genuine IITians .. despite their pretensions to the contrary. This may sou...

Google has a habit of coming out with extremely user-friendly and innovative products and I wonder if they could do something for distance learning. In the explosive growth of the knowledge economy, nothing -- bar nothing -- is more important than new and innovative ways of imparting knowledge. Google would do a significant service to humanity ( and perhaps to their shareholders as well ) if they could design a hosted, web-based tool to further this activity. The broad functionalities of my proposed system is as follows .. a] A hosted presentation server, that would allow a teacher to broadcast a set of educational slides over the internet. Streaming video is good, but we would need far higher broadband penetration before that can happen b] A white board ( or screen sharing ) application for the teacher to communicate to the students c] A way for students to join a particular session and a way to manage the interaction with students. A way for a student to "raise your ha...

Movie making lends it rather neatly in SecondLife. Here is a platform where you can create sets any which way you like and then you can populate the sets with actors and actresses who can be tailored to look just as the situation demands. So the same set of human 'actors' or manipulators can work with avatars who can take on any shape and size , including fantastic ones. The behaviour of the avatar-actors have to be defined in terms of animation scripts and this calls for signicant programming, but the best thing is that these animation scripts can be both reusable and incrementally improved. What this means is that while the first movie can have an avatar-actor who delivers a jerky slap that lands on someone's shoulder, the next version of the script can create a smooth slap that hits the intended victim right on the cheek ! And what can be done for a simple slap can of course be extended to any other action ... depending on the directors imagination. The 3D sets are of co...

A short movie set across three 'worlds', namely Planeshift, Real life in Calcutta, and Second Life that explores the boundaries of real and the illusory. Based on the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, as articulated by Sankar, the 8th century Hindu philosopher, this movie seeks to explore the boundaries between the worlds that are thought to be real and those that are believed to be illusory. [ this movie may initially take some time to load, and the first pass may be jerky, but if you are patient, then from the second replay onwards, it is quite smooth ]