July 22, 1996
Issue: 911
Section: The Profession -- Interactive Engineering
By R. Colin Johnson
Campbell, Calif. - Virtual reality continues its momentum, as 3-D habitats pop up on on-line services. Three-dimensional "chat" rooms appear on Japan's People World-a joint venture among Hitachi, IBM, Mitsubishi and Toshiba-with World'sAway on CompuServe and other Internet-based services, such as Electric Communities (Cupertino, Calif.), expanding into the third dimension as fast as they can write the server software. Visit http://www.communities.com/habitat.html for an up-to-date listing of avatar "habitats."
The next generation of habitats will use 3-D avatars-icon-like representations of users as well as artificial personas of cyberspatial dimension. To determine what characteristics will be used to imbue software-based personas-* la Max Headroom-engineers are already collaborating with Hollywood artists to gain the "entertainment" expertise needed to design convincing characters for automated avatars. If collaboration with Hollywood is outside your budget, then you could start with the Dramatica software from Screenplay Systems (Burbank, Calif.). Dramatica enables ordinary engineers to design a complete set of Hollywood-caliber characters to hawk any point-of-view (see related story, page 41). Unfortunately, Dramatica only tells you what behaviors your characters should perform to get the point across-it's up to you to program your automated avatars with these characteristics in, say, Java.
One company, however, got a three-year head start on U.S. software companies by designing its own Java-like language in 1993. Instead of collaborating with Hollywood, ParaGraph International (Campbell, Calif.) hired its own artists and is already creating automated avatars for People World using its Dynamo-language. With the D-language, ParaGraph thinks it has the formula down for "populating" cyberspace.
Behind the 2-D brochures
Surfing today's 2-D sites is akin to reading stacks and stacks of brochures. Sure they are colorful, informative and pleasing to the eye-mostly-but how many brochures can you read before becoming fatigued? The first thing you notice when entering cyberspace with GopherVR or any of the Web-based 3-D browsers is its expansiveness. Now there is infinite space behind each 2-D brochure.
That leads to the second thing you notice about 3-D-that cyberspace is mostly empty space.
To remedy that, the on-line services have begun offering avatars-user-selected thumb-nail sketches to represent users in cyberspace. These 3-D images-yes, others can sneak up behind you to get a look at the back of your head-populate cyberspace much like pedestrians populate city streets. When you enter a busy 3-D site, you will see lots of other avatars. When there are no avatars visible, that's because you are the only one viewing that site now. If you see an avatar you like, often you can "walk" up to it and "chat".
Even if you don't initiate a chat, in the next generation of 3-D, automated avatars will greet you and offer to give you directions, escort you through new procedures interactively, leaving you to dream your dreams unimpeded by navigational details.
Moscow dreaming
It may sound like a dream but it's magic, according to the visionary chief executive officer of ParaGraph, Stepan Pachikov. Pachikov was voted the most influential member of the Russian computer industry. He helped persuade 12 PhDs formerly with the prestigious Russian Academy of Science to work at ParaGraph's R&D facility in Moscow, as well as the world chess champion Garry Kasparov and 105 software engineers.
How can software engineers create convincing automated avatars for users to interact with? One way is to use the Dramatica software to design a set of characters-from "hero" to "villain"-who together portray all the various points in your site's "argument."
For instance, an "FPGA room" in a 3-D online forum might be populated with avatars that volunteer information about the advantages of designing with gate arrays. A complete argument there, according to Dramatica, consists of 28 total interactions-chosen from 128 possibilities--with at least eight avatars who would together present all the objective facts (such as faster, easier, but more expensive) and the subjective feelings (such as the elegance of a small-chip-count VLSI solution) associated with using FPGAs.
Dramatica suggests using eight "archetypal" characters:the main character ("good guy"), the obstacle character ("bad guy"), the sidekick, the skeptic, the emotional character, the rational character, the antagonist and the contagonist. The eight archetypal characters can also be broken down into 128 component parts, so that users can reshuffle the pieces to create modern "complex" characters-such as bad-guy heroes.
"Since we started selling through Egghead, we've lost track of all the different ways that people are using Dramatica, but basically it is useful wherever you need to present a convincing argument," said Screenplay Systems president Stephen Greenfield.
The other way to create characters is to hire writers with experience in creating characters for the entertainment industry. U.S. software creators are currently peppering Hollywood with joint ventures between artists and multimedia developers. Russian software creator ParaGraph is also collaborating with artists, but it is hiring them outright.
"In the U.S., there is more of a clash between artists and engineers, but in Russia both share a common cultural heritage," said Pachikov. At ParaGraph's multimedia development lab in Moscow, the company is sitting artists alongside engineers to create characters to "populate" cyberspace.
"The artists in our company are even better than our brilliant engineers," Pachikov said. "They work together, engineer and artist, to get the maximum from the technology and to yet satisfy the artist's vision-which is to make our VR worlds appear like magic."
So far, the ratio of artists to engineers in its multimedia division is 3.5 to 1, in favor of engineers-after all, the engineers have to write hundreds of lines of code each time an artist describes his or her "vision." Together, they are creating more than human characters with which users can interact. "For instance, we can drop a cat into 3-D space and its character is just to look around for a good place to curl up and go to sleep. But if we then drop a dog into the scene, its character is to chase the cat. Besides your own viewpoint, you will be able to switch to look out of the cats eyes or the dogs eyes too, or drop in a butterfly for an aerial viewpoint," said Pachikov.
The secret weapon in the company's arsenal is its Dynamo language, which was developed entirely in Russia. "We wrote the Dynamo language in 1993, before VRML and Java were developed. We had to have a language with multiprocessing and very powerful libraries of classes. The D-language, which is interpreted or compiled, is a C look-alike, but includes all the VR extensions you need. It is more powerful than Java and eventually we will offer it as a 3-D extension to Java," Pachikov said.
Mitra gets the call
In the D-language, each character-human, dog, cat or whatever-is a D-program. All the D-programs together represent all the objects in cyberspace. The trick is to get all the D-programs to run in parallel. To manage the massive interprocess coordination task, Pachikov hired the most famous programmer of all time, Mitra. "Mitra is developing the scalable multiple-server networking technology that the D-language needs to support it," said Pachikov.
ParaGraph's first commercial tool is the 3-D Home Space Builder, which enables 3-D home pages to be built in the virtual-reality modeling language (VRML). Its development goal was to make building a 3-D home page easier than building a 2-D page. "Our tool had to be very easy to use and yet very powerful," Pachikov said.
With the next generation of 3-D at ParaGraph, a more sophisticated tool will be offered to webmasters. "Our next generation beyond the 3-D Home Space Builder is our Internet Space Builder, which will be a native VRML 2.0 tool for very complex 3-D site development," Pachikov said.
ParaGraph's motivation for creating 3-D spaces for its automated avatars-called its Alter Ego-isn't slated to debut commercially until the generation after the Internet Space Builder. Alter Ego is ParaGraph's seminal vision.
"Always on the horizon for us is our dream world-the Alter Ego-a virtual time machine that you can use to go back into time to experience history first-hand by meeting and interacting with past historical figures," Pachikov said.
To do that, ParaGraph is creating convincing automated avatars of important historical figures. "This will not be a game. It is what is driving our company forward. It is our own personal vision of how to build a cultural bridge between Russia, the U.S. and the rest of the world," Pachikov said.
Screenplay Systems
(818) 843-6557
Reader Service No. 424
ParaGraph International
(408) 364-7700
Reader Service No. 425
Copyright * 1996 CMP Media Inc.
