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!

There’s a very fundamental problem facing many content creators in Virtual Worlds these days (such as Second Life™, IMVU™ and others), and that is the problem of Piracy – where one unscrupulous individual takes content from a designer or developer, and then attempts to resell it as their own.

It’s a problem – no-one can deny that, but the solution to the problem is not ‘deep’ DRM. There are a few reasons for this, especially when it comes to content (scripts and backend programming are another matter entirely and something I will get to in a moment)

Three reasons why this wont work for visual content

First, the obvious one – content must be displayed on the users screen. This means it must be presented to the video card in an unencrypted form. I’ve heard a few silly ideas to prevent this one, such as encrypting the texture and using a shader to decrypt it on the video card (just run the shader in a virtual machine).

At a very fundamental level, the laws of mathematics do not allow you to say “This number cannot be copied.”, computers which are based on very high level mathematics are still subject to these immutable laws. There’s a parallel law here which states that you can always modify something – sure you can make it a house of cards that breaks if you make a change, but someone can always employ superglue to prevent that.

It’s technical, but it’s worth reading the examination of the Skype binary (PDF) done by a security analysis team, the Skype developers know their stuff, exactly how to use cryptography properly, how to try prevent debuggers from being run, etc. Every single one of their protections has been examined and detailed specifically in that document – no matter how clever you think you are, there are cleverer people out there and not all of them have good motivations.

Second reason why this wont work – You hand the legitimate user both the content and the key to decrypt it to display it – there’s no way to avoid this without disallowing the user to view the item (which defeats the purpose of content). There’s nothing stopping them from making a copy of both parts, and once the schema is broken, there’s no going back – it’s out there. You cant revise the encryption scheme after it’s been broken, your content is now available unencrypted.

This has been a big problem with things like DVD encryption, because to release a new encryption scheme you need to get every user to update, and titles released under the old scheme are still broken. DRM used in popular products tends to have a life somewhere between a week and three months – assuming point #1 doesn’t hold, this still means you have to assume all your content more than at most 3 months old is piratable – how many content producers produce enough content every month to make their old lines completely redundant from a sales perspective?

Third reason – DRM tends to annoy customers. Consider the possibility where you want to teleport your avatar around a hypothetical super-grid the size of the internet. You enter a sim which hasnt been authorised (and I’d say in the long term, most will fall into this class – similar to only how a small % of sites have SSL certificates), and bam, your avatar vanishes.

Well, what can you do? Not much – but you arent likely to buy avatars from this user again that’s for certain. There is likely going to be a commercial incentive towards content which after you buy is free to do what you want with. (With copyright law enforcing violators and pirates).

So – how the hell do you protect your revenue/sales in an environment where anything goes?

This question is the real question that should be asked, the answer hasnt yet been determined (market forces will likely be the ones to figure out which models work, and which dont)

• Custom Content – in a world where everything is mass produced and cloned, unique content that has been hand crafted for what you want is a drawcard. It’s unique, it’s yours, it’s $50.00/hour design fees.
• Keep on keeping on – The current model is unlikely to collapse, brands seem to matter and people like being able to say they have legitimate content. Systems will likely appear that allow you to verify whether someone has paid for a piece of content or not. Piracy goes on in virtual worlds today, but sellers seem to keep making sales (I’d like to know more from specific sellers how their sales have gone when a piece of content has been pirated significantly).
• Mark your intent - Tying in with the above point is the idea that you can mark your intent – this is ’shallow’ DRM – it’s nothing that cannot be removed, but it does signify what the creator wanted you to do with this content and has licensed you to do. If someone violates these terms, you can deal with them the same way copyright infringement is handled in the real world, courts. For all the complaints that go on about the DMCA, the act does provide a relatively sane way to deal with IP infringement from a content creator perspective (however beware, filing a false DMCA claim IS perjury).

So what about scripts?

Well, if your script is going to be transmitted from host to host – you have the same problems that commercial web scripts have – and all of the above applies. With sufficient bandwidth and processor time however, it is possible to run scripts on your servers for other peoples (the “hosted” model). OpenSim supports this hosted model via the ScriptEngine that can be run as a grid server – hopefully these kinds of things will become easier to setup and maintain, and perhaps a giant such as Akamai will take to the role for other people.