Sirikata

One of the things I have been really excited about was when I get to write about some of the interesting projects that is propelling the development of our little platform forward. This first one, a mixed reality performance, I am very involved in myself. Just got word from Matteo Bittanti that his piece Mixed Reality Performance: An Evening on Sirikata will be featured in WIRED Italy’s September issue. The article describes our upcoming performance at the MiTo International festival of Music in Milan, Italy, on September 12 and 13 2009.

From Matteo’s blog:

Mixed Reality Performance is an experiment in which physical spaces and Musicians from different continents encounter one another on-line. Promoted by MITO SettembreMusica in collaboration with the Stanford Humanities Lab and the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, this production is an experiment in on-line interaction among musicians in different locations. While a pianist plays their music is manipulated by other musicians on-line; from across the ocean other acoustic realities are manipulated and appear projected in 3-D on walls. Spectators are immersed in a recreated world of sound in an installation that marks the birth of the performance spaces on Sirikata, the most recent open source platform on the web.

In the post you can also read a bit about some of the tech that will drive this performance. All the work code and art asset work we do for for this will be made available under open licenses so if you have an interest in collaboration around music performance in Sirikata then please be in touch as we already now start the planning for future projects.

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.

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