blog@Yantrajaal

  Since Zuckerberg and Nadella is talking about the Metaverse, I thought I should do the same. After all, great minds think alike!

James Cameron's Avatar is old wine in a brand new and spectacularly brilliant bottle. There is nothing new in the plot -- especially for those of us in India who have been following land acquisition battles in the tribal belt -- that pits the indigenous people as the underdogs who are battling to save their forest-based way of life from the clutches of a global ( universal ?) megacorp. Latched on to this main plot is a cameo sub-plot of a cute little love story between two individuals Jake Scully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) from the two opposing camps, which again is nothing to write home about. But what makes the movie remarkable and memorable is the concept of transferring identity and consciousness ( "soul" ? ) across two bodies -- one of which is a genuine human and the other a synthetic Na'vi humanoid. Cameron has referred to this synthetic humanoid as an Avatar which periodically receives -- and is animated by -- the hero, Jake's soul. The...

Massively multi-user on-line role playing games (MMORPGs) may, in India today, be restricted to teenagers who have access to broadband but there are two powerful reasons why this is about to change : first – broadband is becoming ubiquitous, more so with 3G and WiMAX on the horizon and second – the teenagers themselves are becoming adults and hence significant ! But the advent of MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and EverQuest are harbingers of a far more subtle but significant shift in the way we humans perceive ourselves and the world around us. If you think that social networks like Orkut, Facebook, MySpace and professional networks like LinkedIN have changed the way people know and keep in touch with each other then 3D virtual worlds like Second Life represent the next generation ( or the third generation !) in relationship management. Based on the technology that is responsible for the intense and immersive 3D experience of MMORPG, and offering the flexibility and personalisatio...

A change of job – or affiliation – is of course no headline news in today's vibrant economy, but even this otherwise simple event opened my eyes to a new way of looking at the reality of departure and absence ! A mail from an erstwhile colleague mentioned that the reality of my departure has become evident, not so much because of my physical absence from my place of work, but because email – on which I was on the cc: list – was bouncing back to the sender ! Which set me thinking ... what if my company had graciously allowed my email ID to exist ( in total violation of all corporate procedures) ... would it have meant that a lot of people would not have known that I had left ? And what if my erstwhile secretary had continued to respond to these mails .. in the manner that she knew that I would have ? In the globalised mega-corporation – which is anyway quite faceless – would anyone, other than a close group of friends, have known that I was no more associated with the company ? But...

The news that SecondLife will become opensource is a big step in the development of 3D Virtual Environments. Should it become a genuinely open platform then evolution of the resulting architecture could become very interesting .. Individual organisations maintain their own physical servers and these can be accessed through the TCP/IP protocol. Currently, on these servers, we run the same HTTP application server (the 'web server') .. and anyone anywhere in the world can connect to the HTTP application server through the HTTP client ( the 'browser') Similarly, going forward, organisations can run their own SL servers on their own hardware and and allow ( or disallow ) individuals to connect their SL clients .. and this 'visit' SIMs ( just as we visit websites today) On current HTTP application servers we run fancy stuff like java applets, Flash animations, RealAudio and YouTube style specific applications ... provided they comply with correct protocols a...

or "Why you cannot create a camera in-world in Second Life" It all began with a simple desire, to know who was visiting my Mahamaya Temple in SecondLife and the first step was very simple. I created a phantom, nearly-invisible, trip-wire around my teleport point and sent out an email to my blog whenever someone passed through it and this helped me track who all were visiting the Temple. But then I got ambitious and decided to see if I could create an in-world camera that would take a snap of the individual instead of just sending the email. I thought that it would be easy but it is not. The more I thought about it, the more difficult it seemed to be until I realised that it is IMPOSSIBLE .. and here is why. Objects in SL are represented as pieces of data and it is the SecondLife client software that assembles this data and gives it a visual representation. So if I had to create an in-world camera, then I would have to use LSL to create an full fledged SecondLife client itse...

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...