Trevor F. Smith: Exterior

Books about Cities

A fair number of people have asked me for a reading list on the topic of online cities, so here is my Delicious Library generated list of related non-fiction which I've kept around. This doesn't include any texts on the technical underpinnings or political form of online cities, but it's a good starting place for understanding what cities are now and can be in the future.

People who know more than I do should feel free to chime in with suggestions.

Arquilla, John. Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy. RAND Corporation, 2002.

Bacon, Edmund N. Design of Cities: Revised Edition (Penguin Books). Penguin (Non-Classics), 1976.

Beth Simone Balkin Jack M. Noveck. The State of Play. New York Univ Pr, 2006.

Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Duke University Press, 1995.

Bartle, Richard. Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders Games, 2003.

Bollens, John C., and Henry J. Schmandt. Metropolis: Its People, Politics and Economic Life. Harpercollins College Div, 1981.

Boyd, S. Gregory, and Brian Green. Business & Legal Primer for Game Development. Charles River Media, 2006.

Caillois, Roger. Man, Play and Games. University of Illinois Press, 2001.

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Harvest Books, 1978.

Castronova, Edward. Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. University Of Chicago Press, 2006.

Chudacoff, Howard P., and Judith E. Smith. Evolution of American Urban Society, The. Prentice Hall, 2004.

Crawford, J. H. Carfree Cities. International Books, 2002.

Fujita, Masahisa, Paul Krugman, and Anthony J. Venables. The Spatial Economy: Cities, Regions, and International Trade. The MIT Press, 2001.

Gelernter, David. Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean. Oxford University Press, USA, 1993.

Glazer, Nathan. From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture's Encounter with the American City. Princeton University Press, 2007.

Hall, Peter. Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century. Blackwell Publishing, Incorporated, 2002.

Horan, Thomas A. Digital Places: Building Our City of Bits. Urban Land Institute, 2000.

Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Beacon Press, 1971.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage, 1992.

Jacobs, Jane. The Economy of Cities. Vintage, 1970.

Jacobs, Jane. Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics. Vintage, 1994.

Kotkin, Joel. The City: A Global History. Modern Library, 2006.

Lessig, Lawrence. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Basic Books, 2000.

Levy, Matthys, and Mario Salvadori. Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail. W. W. Norton & Company, 1994.

Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. The MIT Press, 1960.

Mccloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Harper Paperbacks, 1994.

Mitchell, William J. City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. The MIT Press, 1996.

Mulligan, Jessica, and Bridgette Patrovsky. Developing Online Games: An Insider's Guide. New Riders Games, 2003.

Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. Harvest Books, 1968.

Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster, 2001.

Reader, John. Cities. Grove Press, 2006.

Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Basic Books, 2003.

Rollings, Andrew, and Ernest Adams. Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design. New Riders Games, 2003.

Rollings, Andrew, and David Morris. Game Architecture and Design: A New Edition. New Riders Games, 2003.

Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. The MIT Press, 2003.

Sassen, Saskia. Global Networks, Linked Cities. Routledge, 2002.

Sterling, Bruce. Shaping Things. The MIT Press, 2005.

Tufte, Edward R. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition. Graphics Press, 2001.

Tufte, Edward R. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Graphics Press, 1997.

Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, and Nick Montfort. The New Media Reader. The MIT Press, 2003.

Whyte, William H. The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Project for Public Spaces Inc, 2001.

On The Demise of Google Lively

I don't have a lot to add beyond what has been covered by people like Sibley, but most people aren't calling for Google to do the right thing and open the code and content. From my comment on Sibley's post:

There’s another important aspect of this shutdown: What will happen to the Lively content and code.

Google is encouraging people to take screenshots and make machinima to save their work, but that’s pretty weak for a company with a track record for opening both content and code.

Google should immediately open source as much of the platform as possible and set out a clear path for developers (inside or outside of Google) to run Lively spaces on the Google App Engine.

They may be smart to shut down the Google managed 3D spaces, but they have an opportunity to completely change the face of 3D on the web by releasing Lively to the community.

A Tale of Two Online Cities

As I approach the two year anniversary of my first public post about the Ogoglio project, Foundations, I happen to be in a period of introspection; at a pivot point in my life. Coincidentally, I've also had the chance to spend a few hours in an online city not entirely unlike the online city I'm dedicated to building. Though this other city, Liberty City, was designed for a very different function than Ogoglio City, many of the techniques and technologies underlying it are the same and it was built in roughly the same period that I've been working on Ogoglio City.

A few points of comparison:

Point #1: Rockstar, the makers of Liberty City, had a budget of US$100M and a team of 1000 people. Those numbers includes marketing, distribution, licensing, and production costs but that's three orders of magnitude more money and more than 300 times the headcount than has been applied to Ogoglio City.

Point #2: Grand Theft Auto IV, the game in Liberty City, has grossed US$400M in about a week, making it one of (if not the) largest entertainment launch in history, and it is receiving top marks and kudos from industry rags and my gamer friends. Ogoglio City is basically unknown outside of serious virtual world wonks and the occasional Forrester report.

Point #3: I'm exhausted but recovering. This period of my professional life has been a mixture of optimistic public work and hectic business development. With my left hand I've been directing time and resources to the creation of an open platform for online cities and with my right hand I have been the fledgling chief executive of a startup aimed at merging 2D productivity web apps with simple online spaces. The efforts aren't entirely independent, but they're not entirely in sync and the balancing act has been hard on me physically and very hard on my personal life. I'm back on a good path, but there were costs.

When I look at the progress made towards Ogoglio City in comparison to what can be done with resources like those that went into Liberty City, it's clearly time to change organizational strategies. I have a clear picture of where the project needs to go culturally and technically, but the time for bootstrapping startups is past.

Option #1: Create a non-profit, raise money from VW companies, use that money to fund group events, a content library, and more open tools. This would require some group to immediately step in with a large enough donation to make this very low-risk for me, financially.

Option #2: Find a host company forward thinking enough to hire me to work on the Ogoglio project for some portion of my workday. The Ogoglio platform is already in use in a few internal projects at companies which are growing, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that they might find it in their best interests to ensure its continued development.

Option #3A: Recruit a new project lead and hand over control to someone with fresh ideas and resources, then go join a company with interesting problems.

Option #3B: Make Ogoglio City a hobby project, return to my previous career as a software engineer and geek wrangler for innovative software companies.

Right now I'm investigating the possibilities of options #2 and #3B. The companies in the running for the former are smaller and remote, while the front runner for the latter is huge and local, but is apparently excellent to employees. (No, it's not Microsoft.)

Based on the email and comments you've sent about various posts to this blog, I know that a fair number of VW pros read this feed. So what do you think? Fish? Cut bait? Go pro? Moonlight?

Change is the Only Constant

This past ten days has been a sharp, short shock to my system. Despite our best efforts, my wife and I have come to the conclusion that our marriage has come to its conclusion so we're switching to a binary household with my daughter and I staying in our house in West Seattle.

The life of a startup CEO is not conducive to that sort of arrangement (see previous references to travel and risk) so my time at the helm of Transmutable has come to an end. Cofounders Ian and Nicolas are considering a variety of directions for the company, and I have every confidence that they'll choose the best path forward.

As for me, I'm looking for a company in need of an experienced, results-oriented software engineer and technical leader with a history of shipping innovative, high quality software. If that's your company, I can be reached via my linkedin profile or via email at trevor at trevor dot smith dot name.

GL Teapot on the iPhone

Yep, Newell's old Utah teapot has made its way onto my iPhone:

The iPhone has OpenGL-ES, WebKit, mDNS, and radios for WiFi and EDGE.

I'm just saying.

Details of 3D as a Web Data Type

In the middle of a conversation about the future of VW interop I realized that over the past couple of years of developing the Ogoglio platform I've come up with a set of technical requirements for a sort of "promised land for web + 3D".

Here are the technical characteristics:

* The 3D view is an HTML element in the browser DOM. Think canvas tag with 3D APIs.

* The 3D element exposes the entire scene graph to the browser DOM.

* The 3D element gracefully fails to a lower resolution or good error messages on less capable browsers.

* The 3D element uses the same HTTP pipeline (complete with cache) as the rest of the page.

* Authentication is performed using HTTP auth, sessions, and cookies, and not in a side channel.

* The event protocol is Comet based so it passes through firewalls.

* The simulator exposes REST APIs for all people and things in the space, as well as for scene management functions like "create scene" or "boot user".

* Simulators run in standard web servers, not "beside" your web stack, giving you leverage with scaling tools like memcached.

* Simulator side scripting is either in Javascript or in one of the P's in LAMP (Python, PHP, Perl, or Ruby [ok, that's not a P]).

With these requirements satisfied, we could finally call 3D a true web data type.

Cookbook for Web 3D

If the easiest way to predict the future is to invent it then here's the plan:

2005-2009: Indies poke around with browser add-ons and plugins to figure out how we want web 3D spaces to act. Existing VW companies try to shove their fat pegs into thin holes.

MMOs churn out thousands of guild leaders who are used to managing 100+ people using the richest social technologies in existence.

Old people continue to shun all things ludic and non-textual.

2010-2012: Adobe finally ships accelerated 3D in Flash and Papervision3D et al enable someone to do to fat VWs what YouTube did to Real Player. Philip will live through both!

Browser engineers like Vlad will continue to refine the idea that the browser DOM should have something which looks a lot like OpenGL bindings. Javascript will continue to be the most popular coding language in the world.

Consumer-ready 3D cameras and editing software will hit the street.

2012-2013: Mozilla and Safari will ship accelerated 3D canvas implementations and it will crawl its way through WHAT-NG committee around the same time that OpenID and OAuth really kick into gear and suddenly the world has a default install capable of Chrysis level graphics hung together by hypertext and a common ID system, all of which can be built by legions of cheap web coders.

Acid6 will test that the smiley face has 6 DOF and some Finnish grad student's browser will be the first to pass with 100% validity, but it will only run on implants.

Mea Culpa

NOTE: There's been some confusion among my non-US, non-geek readers. This post is a joke, much like the one I posted last year on April Fools Day.

After much experimentation and thought, I've decided to move the Ogoglio platform off of the web. It turns out that I was misguided and in fact should have listened to the Virtual Worlds luminaries who have repeatedly told me that the web will never be as rich as custom 3D clients, that polygon count is the most important metric for shared 3D spaces (which I will now refer to as Virtual Worlds), and that accessibility is a red herring.

Over the next couple of days I'll be removing the browser based Ogoglio client and check in a DirectX+ActiveX client (Vista SP1 required) which taps into your Outlook and Windows Messenger address books. Finally, with one click you will be able to invite your company, rugby team, or XBox Live friends into your new world.

In addition, I'm focusing all future toolchain development efforts on integration with Maya and 3DSMax. I know the entrance costs in terms of artist education and software licenses are high, but it's clear that indie 3D is not going to happen any time soon.

Finally, I'd like to apologize to all of the people whom I've hurt with my web-centric approach to shared 3D spaces Virtual Worlds. The magic circle is my new master and I its new advocate.

Big Space

I've received feedback that people see the interior spaces of Tomorrow Space and think that the Ogoglio platform can't handle large scenes. So, I whipped up a "Big Island" landscape. It's pretty raw and unpopulated, but it's also bigger than an event hall!

Here I'm looking out from a scenic vista:

Here you can see the relative size of the space. That tiny black dot in the middle is me:

Inevitable?

I wonder about how I ended up working on distributed, web scale spaces and in retrospect it seems like I was custom designed for this work. I worked on a browser at Be, a large web app at i-drive, a massive ubicomp project at PARC, and my first indie product work was a photo geocoding tool.

Web + Ubicomp + GIS + Startup => Transmutable

Though the experience seemed like a random walk through interesting projects with good people, this morning it seems like there is a reason that I've landed right here, right now.