Virtual reality and mobile phones, do they mix?
via Maxping.org (original article)
Maxping wrote a while ago about the special requirements 3D web places to Internet and the end user hardware. This is a focused article how things look from a mobile device’s point of view.
When enterprises start to take virtual worlds into serious use, they will require mobile device connectivity to their virtual applications. Many business people are traveling a lot, and will continue to do so also in the future – at least until virtual world technologies enable as good fidelity as the real life.
During the travel, business people attend to meetings with their mobile phones. Virtual world meetings are not an exception to this rule and there needs to be an access to those from a mobile device.
Even today’s virtual world solutions allow a degree of connectivity for handhelds. In the near future, I expect to see a full range of solutions for mobile virtual worlds – from full blown virtual world clients to simple presence status messaging.
Sun Microsystem’s Wonderland has the possibility to visualize an attendad who is calling to the meeting. The caller is shown as a sphere, and her voice is spatialized to come from the object. Avatars can take the sphere and move it to a suitable location – even for a private talk if that is needed.
realXtend allows avatars to define their skype addresses. You can initiate a skype call by right clicking the avatar, and selecting “skype call” from the pie menu that appears. You can even set up your real world phone number as your skype address. That allows you to start receiving skype calls to a mobile phone from a realxtend world. The world can be your virtual shop, where your avatar is waiting for customers.
Genkii, a japanese virtual worlds company, recently launched an Instant Messaging client for Second Life and Opensim. See more about Sparkle IM for iPhone.
Technically there are some special properties of mobile devices that differ them from desktops.
- First, and maybe the most important is battery life (With heavy CPU, network and 3D chip load it is easy to drain small battery fast)
- CPU is selected on the basis how good it is to conserve energy and may not perform well
- 3D graphics support is still coming, even it is already present on the newest models
- Network speed is low when compared to desktops, but may be already on megabit range
- Network use is expensive in terms of battery life, radio transmission power consumption is huge when compared to anything else
- Displays are small but good in quality
In the future we can expect to see virtual displays that allow people to project the display to a big screen on a wall or plug in to wearable head mounted displays. It should be also easy to make the mobile’s own display to show in real stereo, as it is small and watched from hand – which makes it perfect application for passive stereo image technologies.
With the external display present, the user input may be easy to arrange so that the device’s 3D accelerometers are used as the steering device.
How should a virtual world client on a mobile platform work?
To conserve energy – and maximize battery life, virtual world client should minimize network traffic and cpu intensive work. As the memory is cheap and well available, many things can be precalculated and cached into memory. Calculations should be moved to the server as much as possible. The networking solution should be client-server and not peer-to-peer. Peer to peer tends to cause more network load even it has many other benefits. See earlier Maxping article how this is contradictory to how things should be arranged with desktops.
Fistest.org is a community project to think and research through all the architectural and hardware needs of networked virtual worlds. This post is written as a part of that work. Follow me on Twitter to stay updated on virtual world technologies.