Update on my VR project
Update on my VR project
Also, adventures in the decentralized internet.
Greetings to all readers and subscribers, and special greetings to the paid subscribers!
Please scroll down for the main topic of this newsletter. But first:
On May 28 at 18pm CET I'll give a talk (in Italian) about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and futurist philosophies including cosmism and effective accelerationism (e/acc) at an online event organized by SingularityU Milan chapter.
I heard the call of the wild palms (see “The spirit of the internet. Also: revisiting Wild Palms and waiting for the metaverse”) and finally got around to building a new iteration of my Virtual Reality (VR) project.
Last year I said “I’m pausing this project for a little while, but I’ll restart it in two or three months,” but (of course) it has been longer than two or three months. I had other things to do first, first and foremost completing the draft of my new book.
But now (besides editing the book draft and preparing it for publication, which remains my first priority) I’m reawakening my dormant 3D/VR design skills and building a nice social VR microverse (a small VR worldlet) with Croquet Microverse World Builder.
I’ve praised Croquet elsewhere (e.g. here). I consider it the most promising (by far) VR platform. You can deploy nice VR worldlets (microverses) for free via GitHub Pages, and users can access them in the browser on computers and phones.
Using Croquet Microverse World Builder, I’ve put together a preliminary version of a virtual spaceport. The name spaceport9684 refers to the default port used by the software.
I wish to thank Yoshiki Ohshima, co-founder and chief scientist of Croquet, for implementing some tweaks in the Croquet code.
Enter the spaceport9684 microverse.
If you want to take a look without enabling voice chat, enter with this url instead.
You can use a predefined avatar like Ava in the picture, or build your own custom avatar with Ready Player Me. This is how I’ve built the Giulio avatar in the picture. His face has been generated from a picture of my face.
If you find the ambient sound (wind blowing) annoying, you can disable it in the settings (go full screen to see the full settings menu).
Tests indicate that this microverse should work well enough for five to ten avatars (depending on the devices used). It works well enough with a relatively recent iPhone (tested with iPhone 11). It coud be too heavy for an older iPhone or an old computer.
If you enter this microverse from the urls given above you’ll join a private session. To invite others to join, start a session and give them the full url with the session id.
The spaceport is located on a long strip of land in the sea. The offices and social facilities will be on one beach side (near the hangars and the cars in the pictures). The launch area will on the other beach side (near the rocket in the pictures).
The terrain is a modification of the terrain used in the Mythos demo by Croquet (see the credits and attributions therein). New land, water, and live grass that blows in the wind are generated procedurally where and when needed (so the long strip of land appears infinite). A side effect of this is that the terrain looks better when viewed in first person, otherwise some artifacts are visible.
I changed some parameters and used a new height map. The height map is a smooth gradient descending from a small elevation in the center to the sea on both sides, with some twirling noise added to make it more realistic.
That the long strip of land appears infinite creates conceptual room for other linked microverses that use the same terrain: one can think that the other microverses are located far away on the same strip of land and could be reached with a long drive, but a teleport link is faster.
In the hangars there are a few demos, including a demo of how to teleport to other Croquet microverses.
At this moment spaceport9684 is almost empty. I only added a few free 3D models. I plan to add code for custom behaviors and custom 3D models - not too many and with a low footprint, for efficiency and also because I like minimalist, understated design.
I want this to be a boutique creation, lightweight and efficient but visually appealing and inspiring. Won’t be easy, but I’ll find the time (don’t expect it soon though, this is a hobby project that will take a few more months at least).
If you have 3D/VR design skills and want to participate, or if you want to give design input, or if you just want to be involved, please join the Github repo spaceport9684.
I’ll also build a virtual Turing Church in this or a linked worldlet. So I’ll be able to give a short and clear answer to the question, WTF is the Turing Church??? Answer: it is a virtual church in my VR worldlet! Stay tuned for my first public lecture on irrational mechanics in the virtual Turing Church.
I’m a big fan of the concept of a decentralized internet. I think the world needs a decentralized, distributed, uncensorable internet and I have experimented with many projects to build proofs of concept and prototypes. Stella R. Magnet told me about a very promising platform called Radicle, and I’ve been experimenting with it.
Radicle wants to be a decentralized version of Github. The description reads: “Radicle is an open source, peer-to-peer code collaboration stack built on Git. Unlike centralized code hosting platforms, there is no single entity controlling the network. Repositories are replicated across peers in a decentralized manner, and users are in full control of their data and workflow.”
Github is mostly used for collaborative code development. I used to code in several previous lives but now I prefer to leave coding to younger people (I still know how to code though). But Github can also be used for other applications. For example, see this Github repo with archives of the late lamented Extropy magazine. See also my personal Github website.
A Github repo is a bundle of related and connected content. And a website is also a bundle of related and connected content. So Github (and Radicle) can be used to manage and distribute websites, and Radicle can manage and distribute decentralized websites. Radicle does much more and so using Radicle for this seems an overkill, but still, Radicle seems to do this better than other platforms that I've been experimenting with.
As a proof of concept I used Radicle to build a simple zine called radiclette. This is a web view of today’s version of the zine.
The post “Trigger warning: this is O-U-T-R-A-G-E-O-U-S” (here’s a web view of today’s version) explains why I think this is a very good idea.
I insisted on “today’s version” because the web view links above show a specific commit that is not necessarily the current version of the content (which may have changed since). But if you install Radicle and clone the radiclette repo, you’ll have the current version synced locally and distribute it to other users. You’ll also be able to open an issue to comment.
To do this, at this moment you must use the command line in Linux or in the Mac Unix shell, which is not for everyone. But I'm sure future versions of Radicle will be much more user friendly.
I have great expectations for this project. Install Radicle, clone the Post-Web Zine repo, and the Post-Web Zine will live and thrive on your local device.