Steve DiPaola
OnLive! Technologies
Designing Internet-based 3D virtual communities quickly becomes a tradeoff between the given technical limitations and the social design aesthetic you are striving to achieve. We have taken a design approach which tries to emulate natural social paradigms to anchor users to reality-based metaphors. This approach relies on 3D attenuated voice and sound, 3D navigation, an immersive first person U.I., individualized 3D head avatars with emotions and lip sync, and 3D space design. These techniques, which borrow from disciplines including group dynamics, facial animation, architectural design, virtual reality and cognitive sciences, allow the system to "lean on" the natural social neural programming inherent in all of us rather than creating artificial social enabling mechanisms. The main goal of all these techniques is to support multi-participant voice communication.
Yet another facet of virtual community designing is building a group of hyperlink spaces into a community. We try to accomplish this by supplying community building tools that allow the users to know about their neighbors, and communities.
We now have in beta testing, Onlive Traveler, a specialized Pentium-based VRML browser that allows multi-participant real-time voice communication between users in shared 3D virtual environments. These shared 3D communities are fully integrated with the World Wide Web and can be accessed over any TCP/IP network, including dial-up, Ethernet and the Internet.
In the talk I will first present an overview of the underlying technologies that make up Onlive Traveler, then discuss several issues involved in designing Onlive 3D virtual communities, and finally, give a real-time demonstration by dialing up and joining the current set of beta OnLive communities.
Steve DiPaola is Lead Architect and Director of the Design Group at the Cupertino startup OnLive! Technologies. For several years he was a member of the Advanced Technology Group at the San Mateo electronic entertainment company, Electronic Arts. From 1984 to 1992 he was a member of the computer animation research group at the New York Institute of Technology where he specialized in 3D character animation. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from SUNY at Stony Brook and an M.A. in Computer Graphics from NYIT. His current email address is steve@onlive.com.