Sirikata

Just setup a Sirikata account at Flickr for our pictures. You can also get to this from the Pictures link above. For the first image I used a recent one from one of our devs Daniel Horn who sez:

I’ve gotten some pretty neat Ogre effects into sirikata including a dynamic interior and exterior cube map.

Here is the shot:

Cube map reflections

As of writing these words in late July 2009 our project is now about 6 months old. With an emerging public framework including this blog in place it might be good to tell a little about the background of Sirikata.

The project got started when a small group of people came together at Stanford. In the group were people from Computer Science who had spent a few years looking into how to build a better platform for collaborative 3D spaces. The work had lead to a reasonably well described architecture as well as a prototype. The other party was from the Stanford Humanities Lab who had done work on a bunch of platforms without ever feeling they found the right one. They now had some new projects emerging and a need for a better platform to build these on.

A collaboration was established around a few basic principles:

• We need to grow Sirikata to be fully community run and owned open source project.
• The platform technology needs to be open and neutral like the World Wide Web itself.

A major effort during these first 6 months has been to refactor the entire system. This basically meant starting from scratch but with the benefit of having built one prototype as well as reusing code from it when appropriate. We have jokingly called this our ‘walk in the desert’ phase: Nothing much to show except for a strong belief that we were working towards something that matters.

We are now starting to feel that we are getting to a place where we have something of interest. From this blog we will be starting to talk in a more public way as part of our continued efforts towards becoming better at the distributed thing. We should be able to soon share some early builds for you to check out along with visuals and other signs we are moving forward. So please pop us in your reader and stay tuned!

With the possible exception of Wikipedia there comes a time in every project’s life where it is time to say goodbye to having our wiki as a frontpage. That time has now come for our little Sirikata platform.

:)

Sirikata is slowly improving the infrastructure surrounding the project: we’ve had the mailing lists and a code repository since the project started, added the wiki soon after, we have an IRC channel, and most recently we added this blog.  Today, we’re making the new bug tracker public.  We’re using an instance of the excellent Trac software.  Calling it a bug tracker may be giving it too little credit: it also allows you to track milestones, versions, feature requests, commits to the source code repository, and much more.  A lot of the services we need are already provided by GitHub, so we’ve turned many of those features off and are focusing on using Trac specifically to handle bugs and feature requests, with just a little bit of milestone tracking thrown in for good measure.

We still need a bit more documentation on how to file good bug reports.  A short list of items to keep in mind:

• The version or revision number which the bug was discovered on. Bonus points if you can track down the revision that introduced the problem.
• The platform you are working on.
• The features you have turned on and/or plugins you have loaded.
• A minimal test case if applicable, or a minimal set of steps needed to reproduce the problem.
• A backtrace if you are reporting a crash and can obtain one.

So if you’ve encountered problems compiling or running Sirikata, please take the time to file a bug report on our new system.  It does require an account to avoid spam, but anybody can register.  And if you run into any problems, email me and/or the developer list for help.

The Silicon Valley ACM SIGGRAPH chapter has kindly invited Daniel Horn and myself to come talk about Sirikata. The event is open to the public so if you find yourself near Apple’s Cupertino campus on Thursday, October 15th then I hope you are able to join us.

Here is our abstract:

Sirikata (www.sirikata.com) is an BSD licensed open source platform for games and virtual worlds. We aim to provide a set of libraries and protocols which can be used to deploy a virtual world, as well as fully featured sample implementations of services for hosting and deploying these worlds. The platform has grown out of a several years of research at Stanford University and the current ambition is to expand into a fully community run open source project. In the talk we will describe the technology and its application and explore some possible roads ahead.

Full scoop and logistics

Greetings from New Orleans SIGGRAPH 2009.  I just gave a talk about using the COLLADA format in Sirikata at the COLLADA Birds of a Feather event at the Hilton.

I started with a high level description of our system architecture and then went through the rationale for choosing COLLADA as our interchange and display format.  Our reasoning is that Sirikata is essentially a 3d environment editing program and we wish to make the entire model available to users to edit and change its form in much the way as the “view source” option is available when visiting a webpage.

Clearly there are discussions to be had about whether to bake down this format to something specific to the renderer at hand, but we right now view that baking process as content-aware caching, because the original COLLADA format is the only container that will support the wide range of devices and viewers that we want to render our scenes.

Taking this further, I was chatting with Philipp Slusallek today and he reminded me that even providing pixel shader 2.0+glsl compatible shaders for a given model may be insufficient to both rasterize and raytrace it.  So some thought will need to go into using COLLADA as a multidevice, multirenderer-capable format such that users generate very compatible models that utilize the capabilities of their rendering environment.

Back at GDC in March Mozilla and Kronos launched the initiative to create open royalty free standard for accelerated 3D on the web. Since I have been very excited about the prospect of having support for open 3D built into the web. It would be nice to put an end to seperate clients and random plugin downloads once and for all and I think this could be our best bet. Imagine just having your space just load when you click the link.

Haven’t heard much since March until yesterday when some exciting news came out of SIGGRAPH:

JavaScript Binding to OpenGL ES 2.0 for Rich 3D Web Graphics without Browser Plugins;
Wide industry Support from Major Browser Vendors including Google, Mozilla and Opera; Specification will be Available Royalty-free to all Developers

AMD, Ericsson, Google, and Opera have now joined Mozilla and I imagine that other major players can’t be far behind. The project is now called WebGL and has a target of a first public release in first half of 2010.

The good people at DIKU (Department of Computer Science) have invited me to come give a presentation. It is open to the public so if you find yourself in the Danish capital on Monday September 14th 2009 (and can get past this blatant self promotion :)) then please come say hi.

Full scoop and logistics

Ps. Remember DikuMUD?

With the 3rd post in a row about giving a talk I do realize the need for variation but I had to share that MediaX have invited me to come speak. The event will take place on Thursday, November 5th at noon.

My focus will be on the work I have been involved in on the content side of the Sirikata equation (long winded way of saying less technical). Here is the abstract:

The platform has grown out of a several years of research at Stanford University, initiated by Media X, and the current ambition is to expand into a fully community run open source project. At the Stanford Humanities Lab we have built practical projects that explores potential futures of collaboration, cultural institutions and musical performance. Bennetsen will demonstrate and discuss this work in context of new technological possibilities offered by Sirikata.

The whole deal over at Events at Stanford