As 2009 comes to a close, and we can look back and see what happened this year, I’d like to make some predictions for what will happen next year.
#1 – Consolidation continues throughout the first half of 2010.
Platforms with relatively simple feature sets will continue to face increased competition from free products and their more technologically complex brethren. Many will survive on one or two large clients – but as a whole they will languish with a dearth of new clients.
#2 – Most tele-work virtual world initiatives fall flat on their face.
Customers of tele-work virtual worlds will find after protracted usage that Virtual World clients are no match for something like WebEx. While many instances will be sold – only those with a genuine requirement for a 3D environment (such as safety training) will actually succeed. The consequential failure of these business users will lead to yet-another-media “Are virtual worlds over-hyped?” rush.
#3 – Average World Concurrency Improves.
The shift towards doing less on the server will continue, but the servers & software will continue to get better and more scalable. OpenSim will be handling a minimum of 200+ concurrent users per region by the end of 2010 – likely a lot more. Dynamic load balancing becomes a hot feature in new virtual worlds. (Side prediction: with better protocols OpenSim could be looking at 2500+ users per server)
#4 – Entertainment Worlds continue to quietly succeed year-after-year.
I’m not talking about MMORPG games here either. The consumer entertainment virtual worlds will continue to grow, or at least will not stagnate as fast as business worlds. There.com, IMVU, Second Life will all continue to see growth — although at a smaller percentage than they have previously (5-15%).
Blue Mars will languish for the first half of 2010, but may gain serious pace in late 2010 as usability problems are fixed & average user hardware specifications continue to improve.
#5 – Greater Cooperation between Open Source Virtual World Frameworks
OpenSim, Sirikata, Wonderland and realXtend begin talking to each other. Initially this will likely be support for the various clients across platforms, but eventually this could lead to common adoption of a standard protocol. Commercial incentives for a common VW standard however will continue to languish due to complex conflicts of interest between member parties.
#6 – realXtend Naali becomes functional & useful.
Building a new viewer from scratch is a complicated process, but Naali will become modestly functional towards the middle of 2010 and competitive by the end. OpenSim developers will likely begin to standardise around it (rather than Idealist et al.) as a way of making “viewer-required” changes and improvements.
#7 – OpenSim begins a formal release process.
Sometime in Q1/Q2 2010, OpenSim begins seeing a formal release process where major improvements & features occur on one branch, while a fixed programming target occurs on a stable branch; API changes will only occur on the development branch. OpenSim also begins finalising some of the internal interfaces on the path to a 1.0 release. It is likely that a version “1.0″ will not be released in 2010, but a release candidate (or “0.9″) will appear in Q4.
#8 – Content Repositories such as Turbosquid sign licensing arrangements with VW operators.
Hot off the heels of the Turbosquid’s arrangement with Autodesk – world developers integrate content stores linked to royalty-free services such as Turbosquid to provide their worlds with content. Leads to benefits for both world operators and users alike as the general visual quality of new worlds improve. Content-related middleware providers such as Xfrog & SpeedTree see their technologies integrated into more and more worlds (Evolver.com might succeed here too).
#9 – Virtual World Content Producers slowly begin a shift to a Royalty Free Licensing as an option alongside the traditional “Item” approach.
Top end content designers realise that business users are willing to pay extra for royalty free licensed content – and are willing to pay a lot more for it. As Meshes are added to Second Life® – producers begin making and releasing content not just simultaneously in multiple virtual worlds, but to places such as Turbosquid under royalty free licenses. Visual quality in Second Life® improves dramatically – but still falls short of a new release video game title (Shaders would fix this.)
#10 – Cost of world platforms decrease as competition sets in.
The average price of a virtual environment begins to decrease – commercial standalone deployments fall dramatically from the current $50,000+ fees down to rates under $5,000. Consumer worlds will likely remain priced fairly high, but will begin a slow inevitable drift towards a functional environment at a fairly inexpensive $14.95/mo price point. (But don’t expect it to hit that until 2012 at the very soonest.)
There we go – I think some are more probable than others, but it’ll be interesting to check back next year and see how I did.
I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas & happy new year!
> OpenSim will be handling a minimum of 200+ concurrent users per region by the end of 2010 – likely a lot more.
Are you saying that by the end of 2010, OpenSim will significantly surpass Second Life’s server technology in this benchmark?
thought
24 Dec 09 at 12:12 pm
I think your predictions have good chances, and I agree with them all.
most especially #2 though. grin
hypatiaa
24 Dec 09 at 2:03 pm
RealXtend better be properly cross-platform by the end of the year. I’m getting sick and tired of new VW’s that are windoze-only.
Zauber Exonar
24 Dec 09 at 5:29 pm
What I’d like to see with OpenSim is addressing issues that will enable better communications and group functionality.
1. Groups implemented as a concept
2. Profiles totally functional
3. Ability to send IMs and inventory to offline entities
4. Working Estate Tools with function assignments by group role
5. Ability to send group notices
Without groups and communications, the potential of OpenSim is greatly limited.
Wayfinder
24 Dec 09 at 7:22 pm
Wayfinder, while it is not in core, there is a functional groups module which does permit group notices, group IM and more (there’s currently a bug that requires all roles to be visible in search for group IM to work, though). Furthermore, there is an offline messaging module as well; many regions in OSgrid have both of these enabled.
Warin Cascabel
24 Dec 09 at 9:17 pm
First off, let’s hope numbers five and six happen ASAP! I’m all for a better, standard protocol. As for Naali, what I’ve seen of it is super-promising. Rough around the edges at the moment, but nifty.
Number eight… I dunno. 2010 might be too soon. I’ve been under the impression that we won’t see mesh from LL for quite a while yet, and if modrex is going to go mainstream on grids like OSgrid soon, I’d really like to know. And as for Xfrog or Speedtree, as much as I would love to see technologies *like* these used, I’d personally prefer open ones that allow me to continue compiling and fiddling with open sourced VWs like OpenSim.
@thought:
OpenSim has already seen 85 users this last October, and 100 soon isn’t out of the question at all. With more optimization and bug stomping, a 200+ goal by the end of 2010 doesn’t strike me as unreasonable with appropriate hardware and connection.
Marcus Llewellyn
24 Dec 09 at 10:00 pm
@Marcus:
Assuming that is true, how do you explain the fact that Second Life’s performance will be so much worse?
thought
25 Dec 09 at 10:24 am
I think surpassing SL on that angle is not only possible, but quite achievable. I suspect we could be doing 150 today providing we were fairly careful about how we set the system up and put some modest hardware in play.
Adam Frisby
25 Dec 09 at 11:56 am
@Adam:
Then let me repeat my question to Marcus from above: What are the technical deficiencies of Second Life, or the technical advantages of OpenSim, that would make that possible?
thought
25 Dec 09 at 2:27 pm
Marcus, you are confusing OpenSim with OSGrid. I use OpenSim but I run my own sims standalone. I suspect standalone and private network usage outnumbers those who connect to a grid.
hypatiaa
26 Dec 09 at 4:13 am
@thought: I’d say it’s probably not any single feature – but I would say that our multi-threaded model gives us a good edge over SLs single-threaded daemon as processors come equipped with more and more cores.
I would say most of the bottlenecks that exist today are just a matter of classifying which threads should be doing exactly what and when. Which is something I know is getting a lot of close attention lately (and the reason I’d feel confident attempting to break 150+ users at once).
Adam Frisby
26 Dec 09 at 7:18 am
In regards to user base and content production…
OpenVW’s needs to attract content creators to sell their goods and vice versa where as OpenVWs need a large attractive user base willing to purchase items to pull content creators/salers overs. But, there’s something I am wondering about…
With all the “real” money spent over in the Second Life grid, I would be curious to see how people react to the thought of creating a whole ‘nother avatar considering all the real-world money spent in SL as it stands already. Of course, this doesn’t speak for everyone but people do spend a LOT of real-world money in SL.
I doubt there is a way to transfer content over to OpenVMs with SL content permissions in place. I was thinking of some sort of cross world “proof of purchase” mechanism but not quite sure on that.
This also sort of touches on the prediction to Royalty Free Licensing. It will be interesting to see how that turns out.
Redshift
29 Dec 09 at 12:01 am
@thought: I’m neither willing or honestly competent to comment on LL’s server technology. Since their server is a closed technology, any comparison is speculative at best. I can only say that OpenSim has delivered on many of it’s promises, and gives every sign of continuing to do so.
@hypatiaa: I wasn’t trying to confuse the two. I do recognize that there are many use cases for the OpenSim platform, and that OSgrid is but one of many.
I really was not aware that modrex has seen all that much use. Not saying it isn’t used, only that I haven’t seen it. Believe me, I’m all for meshes making headway into OpenSim, and I would *love* to start using it myself, but am simply holding back until OSgrid has full support for it.
I also did not mean to imply that people should not be able to use closed, proprietary technologies with OpenSim. The BSD license is meant, in part, to enable such use and I support that 100%.
On the other hand, as a hobbyist over at OSgrid, I’d hate to be left drooling over nifty trees or awesome new terrain possibilities but be unable to use them myself without forking over hefty fees.
Marcus Llewellyn
30 Dec 09 at 3:59 am
Adam,
Those concurrency figures for Opensim: are those for OpenSim in standalone mode, i.e residing on the same PC as the viewer, or do you also include OpenSim residing on a VPS or dedicated server as well?
Rock
Rock Vacirca
5 Jan 10 at 2:21 pm
Both. Although your going to get a lot better performance out of the dedicated environment than a desktop PC or VPS. (Really I make those calls based on a dedicated hosting environment.)
Adam Frisby
5 Jan 10 at 2:39 pm
It seems your first prediction already came true: http://www.prod.there.com/info/announcement
Vanish
3 Mar 10 at 8:32 pm