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riastarthe · 2 years ago

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if you're seeing the same thumbnail i am for this video... well, i can't imagine not being thrilled by whatever it promises.

AVATARA (2003)

a documentary about Digitalspace Onlive! Traveler by Donato Mancini, Jeremy Turner and Flick Harrison of 536 Studio, this documentary is a machinima-style "docudrama" made entirely inside the virtual voice-chat world of Onlive! Traveler.

i've wanted to share this somewhere for a while, and... what i already knew was that this documentary was made by some Canadian libertarians, but what i only just found out is that this independent 2003 documentary was shown at many events and galleries, including the "summit of micronations" in Helsinki. it's exactly that-- a convention for representatives of self-supposed micronations such as Sealand and other sovereign weirdos. so now i have a whole other thing to research, because that isn't the point of this post.

let me quote an interviewee from the documentary.

"If we were actually in here, and all the criteria we have here, there's no death, there's no injury, there's no physical pain, there's no hunger, my avatar never gets hungry, he never needs to breathe air. If all of these things were the reality, and the physical world that we live in was the so-called "Fantasy" part, we would have to completely abandon all of our ideas and come up with a whole new set of coping mechanisms. This right here to me feels like the conceptualization of what Heaven would be like. It causes you to exist in two worlds at the same time."

this post is about Onlive!

but it'll have to serve as an introduction only. part of the reason i revived this blog was to have a place where i could store scraps related to Onlive! for my own easy retrieval, so i'm sure there will be more.

■

Origins: VRML

Onlive! is a precursor to more expansive virtual realities like Second Life.

rather than being rendered in Blender or Maya, or Second Life's built-in OpenGL 3D modelling tool or with its Linden Scripting Language (which tells objects and avatars how to behave,) the Onlive! Traveler 3D chat program was crafted using the early "Virtual Reality Modeling Language" or VRML (pronounced vermal) to create 3D vector graphics.

this was intended to create 3D spaces explicitly for the burgeoning concept of virtual reality; browsing the internet as a virtual "space" as an alternative HTML. therefor, in VRML you were primarily responsible not just for describing attributes like colour or light, but for designating where objects are in this space, their distance from each other, as though physical. adopters could create rooms/spaces that were representative of links otherwise accessed in "2D" on the world wide web.

Software engineers Mark Pesce and Anthony Parisi created the first VRML-based browser in 1994, Labyrinth, written for Windows 3.1

if you'd like to know more, here's a 1995 interview with Parisi.

a short description better than my own, quoted from the Laura Lemay's Web Workshop,

VRML's designers wanted to create a platform-independent way to send 3D worlds across the Internet. For this to work, the file format had to describe where objects were placed in 3D space and what their attributes were, such as color. VRML browsers would be running on everything from powerful UNIX workstations to humble desktop pcs. Silicon Graphics offered the Open Inventor file format for use, which was greatly accepted. A number of changes were made to make it compatible with the Internet and World Wide Web. This was released in May 1995. Following a number of different interpretations, a clarified version called 1.0c was then issued in January 1996.

- justin couch, as copied down on this italian programmer's website

Web Workshop was written by Laura Lemay, Kelly Murdock, and Justin Couch, published 1996

Another program that used VRML2.0 was Sony's SAPARi さぱり, or "Community Places," which after its 1997 public launch, came pre-installed on Sony VAIO laptops until its closure in 2003.

virtual chatroom system that consisted of a client (known as the Community Place Browser), server software (the Community Place Bureau), and an authoring tool (the Community Place Conductor).

quoted from a fan website about SAPARi. the software still works from win95 to win11 and there are fan discord servers to help get you going!

■

Starting up

Traveler began development in 1993, by the long lost Onlive! Technologies Inc. in Cupertino, CA. The company was formerly known as EnterTV and focused on interactive television games before switching to develop and market virtual reality software.

Their investors included SOFTBANK Holdings with $23 million dollars, Intel Corporation, Creative Labs, MCA, AT&T, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Merrill Pickard Anderson & Eyre, Mohr Davidow and New Enterprise Associates. Bill Gates also featured Onlive! during his keynote speech at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference.

Onlive!'s product was exceptional for its use of voice chat right out of the gate. at the start, it had no text-based messaging system. it went on to market itself not solely as an exclusive virtual reality, but essentially new conference call technology for businesses. they developed an audio conferencing server that relied on standard protocals and acted only as a messenger system, rather than a signal processor, able to send 2 audio channels to each listener, thereby allowing natural interruptions.

■ July 10, 1996: MTV AND ONLIVE! TECHNOLOGIES TAKE THE INTERNET TO EXOTIC NEW DESTINATIONS

MTV To Host the First TV Launch of an Internet Technology

MTV: Music Television, a unit of Viacom Inc., and OnLive! Technologies announced today that MTV fans now have access to online technology that, for the first time, enables groups of people to talk in 3D virtual environments over the Internet. MTV is unveiling this technology both on-air and online July 11. OnLive! has developed the breakthrough technology that turns MTV Online or any World Wide Web site into a community by enabling groups of people to use their voices, not text, to talk online. MTV TikkiLand is the OnLive! enabled 3D site accessed via MTV's web site at www.mtv.com. Modeled after the Tikki God theme featured on the MTV Beach House, a variety of MTV TikkiLand 3D settings let users bask in the warm glow of a virtual sunset by the beach and explore an exotic Tikki God cyber temple.

via bloomberg ... jesus christ with the tikki stuff!

■ 08.02.96: MTV's Tikkiland is ready for online chatting

New Internet application allows you to talk instead of type

[...] The software, OnLive! Traveler, is available free at [mtv dot com] but you’ll need a souped-up Pentium PC running Windows 95. Still in a test version, it has a few glitches, including the occasional sound dropout, which turns this killer app into a mere screensaver. But when it works, it’s a blast, and you don’t even need sunscreen.

via EW

youtube

Here's an MTV special featuring Onlive!, hosted by Bill Bellamy.

■ 11.26.96: Short Take: Onlive ships voice server

OnLive Technologies began shipping its multiuser voice server, OnLive Community server 1.0.

The software comes in two packages: Talker and Traveler. Talker enables users to converse on a web site. Traveler lets users talk in a 3D world as avatars. A free trial of a five-voice version is available for download before January 31. A 15-voice, 60-day trial version is also available. Prices range from $2,295 for a 15-voice server to $8,995 for 75-voice capacity. OnLive is available for Windows 95, with a Macintosh version expected in late 1997.

via cnet

■

Reflections

From Onlive!'s former artistic developer Steve di Paola's old portfolio site,

The Design Approach For OnLive! Traveler, Avatars and Worlds

(Excerpted from my SIGGRAPH talks on Designing Virtual Worlds)

OnLive’s Internet-based Virtual World software and communities allow groups of people to socialize with each other by navigating through 3D spaces, meeting others and talking with their own voices through emotive, lip-syncing 3D head avatars. Currently, there are over 30,000 worldwide users on several sites including commercial sites for ABC Sports, MTV, MCA/Universal and community sites for Univ. of Texas at Austin and a user created site called OLGate. Considered one of the leading 3D virtual software environments and general internet software innovations for the PC, OnLive Traveler has been written up in or broadcast on:

Wired Magazine USA Today Discovery Channel MSNBC’s The Site The New York Times Wall Street Journal ABC and MTV c|net Central (TV)

Steve di Paola hasn't only been in the role of artist when it comes to Onlive!, he's also one of its primary scholars, doing talks at various conferences, presenting lectures, teaching courses on digital arts and 3D animation, and researching

Artificial intelligence, computer graphics and interaction

Computational systems for expression, movement, gesture and creativity

Gaming, narrative and interaction systems

Avatar, character and computer facial animation and AI

Cognitive science approaches to computer modeling

and helping preserve it as part of Preserving Virtual Worlds project. He explains the thinking behind Onlive!'s development and audio,

We examine OnLive Traveler as a case study. Traveler is a client-server application allowing real-time synchronous communication between individuals over the Internet. The Traveler client interface presents the user with a shared virtual 3D world, in which participants are represented by avatars. The primary mode of communication is through multi-point, full duplex voice, managed by the server.

Our design goal was to develop a virtual community system that emulates natural social paradigms, allowing the participants to sense a tele-presence, the subjective sensation that remote users are actually co-located within a virtual space. Once this level of immersive "sense of presence" and engagement is achieved, we believe an enhanced level of socialization, learning, and communication are achievable. We examine a number of very specific design and implementation decisions that were made to achieve this goal within platform constraints. We also will detail some observed results gleaned from the virtual community user-base, which has been online for several years

- Steve diPaola and David Collins, A 3D Virtual Environment for Social Telepresence

Figure 3. With Spacialized (3D) multi-point audio, avatar C

hears others with distance attenuation, and stereo positioning,

hearing avatar A louder and more to the right than avatar B

In Being There Together: Social Interaction in Shared Virtual Environments, author Ralph Schroeder observes,

MUVE - multi- user virtual environments

To highlight how communication in MUVEs or VWs can differ, we can briefly consider two other examples, OnLive Traveler (OT) and Second Life (SL). OT is unusual in having been a VW with voice from the start. 01 X an environment that uses "talking heads" or avatars without bodies, even though they have some of the capabilities of avatars as in other worlds, such as navigation—and, in OT, unlike in most online worlds, their lips move when they speak. The first point to notice that unlike in other online worlds where people have avatar bodies (and where there are usually more avatars in the space), in OT, where they do not have bodies, people tend to do hole else except stay in one place and talk, except to move to face each other.

In other words, they don't move around much, explore the environment, or interact with or move around to position themselves in relation to others (although of course they also need to use the keyboard to "push-to-talk" and navigate, and so may be too preoccupied to move around very much). This makes OT close to videoconferencing (although in OT, the faces are very cartoon-like). OT thus highlights, in a backhanded way, that different kinds of virtual worlds (VWs) produce different kinds of activities.

In an excerpt from an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, 2007:

Millet, who works for an Internet marketing firm, is a sign technician for Ocean County, New Jersey, and runs a nonprofit called New Jersey Alliance for Informed Choice in Vaccination, cannot choose an avatar that literally looks like her.The world she visits - Traveler - is visually old-school, said computer and avatar historian Bruce Damer, chief executive officer of DigitalSpace Commons and author of the book Avatars! Exploring and Building Virtual Worlds on the Internet. Traveler, created in 1996, was made popular after MTV did a feature on it. These days, it is maintained only by its users - including Millet - who do so just for love.

oh i love that they went and printed this in the newspaper. our Millet must be a member of NJAICV, an extant group that focuses on pressuring NJ state government to relax vaccination mandates and uphold religious exemption. they do their damnedest to provide up to date resources on how to ensure NJ children become dangerously ill. their Twitter account was dormant from 2015 to 2021, right in time to start making claims about the covid vaccines.

■ 06.12.97: OnLive trims a third of workforce

The network software maker will lay off 23 of 70 employees as part of a corporate restructuring.

via cnet

From Brand Avatar: Translating Virtual World Branding into Real World Success By Alycia de Mesa,

Originally called "Onlive! Traveler," the Traveler technology has been adopted for the greater good by The Digital Space Commons and carefully maintained by a network of Traveler devotees. The ideal world for those who would rather speak than type, Traveler offers a virtual world with built-in real-time voice chat. Not only does this reduce strain on arms and hands, for some it also provides a more emotionally con-nected experience to the virtual world. Much like The Palace, there is no central Traveler world but rather a network of user-generated Traveler rooms and worlds with a wide variety of themes. A visitor's avatar in Traveler is a large, expressive head whose mouth moves to mimic the voices of its host. Unfortunately there is no text balloon or chat window alternative for those who prefer not to use the voice feature but communication can take place with other visitors through individual text messaging.

■ 12.29.97: The Power of Money

KPCB's star is John Doerr, who joined the firm in 1980 after a short career at Intel Corp. But Buchsbaum says KPCB's strength goes beyond its most visible partner. "KPCB's got a whole slew of brilliant general partners," he says. "It's in a category all by itself." Brilliant, but not perfect. One of KPCB's recent Internet investments, OnLive Technologies, Inc., reportedly faces serious financial and management problems.

via Network World

For all the excitement about its own promise, Onlive! asked a lot from the people. the audio conferencing software alone cost $3-9k 1996 US dollars.

From what i understand, this is what transpired: Onlive!, like many other VR projects, had seemingly "failed" to create or satisfy demand for an immersive VR experience and new method of web browsing. it required money for, access to, and time for understanding the hardware and programming language. it asked that companies work in concert with them to provide a VR-friendly web presence. it asked that they enjoy the peculiar design direction, or to consider it of less import. it required a user base that was knowledgeable about and comfortable with the technology and most especially with voice chat, and moreover, who were comfortable divulging their personal lives and opinions in an intimate setting, among strangers (refer back to the ominous "free speech wars" discussed in the documentary.) and this was all while graphics capabilities quickly advanced.

the patents are abandoned, some of which can't be reclaimed, and the company no longer exists. Electric Communities acquired The Palace (another visual chat program) and OnLive! Technologies, and changed its name to Communities.com. This group consisted of multiple properties, each under the Mozilla Open Source license, with Digitalspace Commons heading all modern development. Digitalspace is a project of "tech guru," motivational business speaker, and damn freak, Bruce Damer. This is a guy who references his own work, whose websites substantiate one another with few external links, claims to be the origin of various concepts and words in computers and gaming, and will innovate great change for your workforce.

whatever the demographics of their userbase might be now, whether or not those people from the 2003 documentary are still around and online, i can only imagine that becoming an open source software would've had the ability to diversify the space and drum up new interest. there's spooky videos on youtube to attest to that, i think-- it's all the strangeness of games like OFF or Yume Nikki or creepypasta like Ben Drowned built right into it. whoever they are, Onlive! does have, or had, enduring fans, creating worlds and striking up seemingly very intimate friendships through what became a very lonely chat client.

From a fan page ranking their favourite VRML clients,

in a 2008 interview with The Scope, musician and Second Life user/crafter Liz Solo opined on Onlive!'s unique functionality,

But what was so novel about Traveller was it had a real-time voice interface, and so it became very community-focused because people would go in and talk in real-time. Face to face. And that changed the whole thing. There was more intimacy. There was less opportunity for deception, and things seemed even more human.

This appeared when the dot-com boom was happening, and when the bubble burst, the company died, but the community of users that populated that world gathered their money together and bought the software so they could continue having that community. What was neat about it was they resisted any commodification… a telephone company wanted to come in and set up phone booths so people could call. Others wanted to set up stores and sell stuff. But they resisted that, because they were focused on the community. But these days, it’s empty. You’re a lonely head wandering around on this plane…

one of the things i found immediately when i went looking is this surviving fansite by the user Smiling Cat, part of an Onlive! webring. I forget if she's featured in the documentary, but she learned and creates VRML art spaces because of Onlive!

■ ■ ■

FURTHER BROWSING

■ June 1997 Talking the Talk across the Net - WIRED

■ The Virtual Reality Medical Centre in San Diego, CA

■ Steve di Paola shares the OnLive! 3D Authoring Kit, 2.0 on his website.

■ SIGGRAPH 1987 Art show, July 27th - 31st, 1987 ft. Steve di Paola

What’s the point? What is the art in a computer art exhibit? Why have this exhibit at SIGGRAPH at all? Why is it that computer art is still being “discovered”? It seems to go without saying that all these and other questions are asked each year.

■ Avatars98, a virtual conference/convention built in Active Worlds by Bruce Damer's team:

■ June 1997 Talking the Talk across the Net - WIRED

■ Using 3D Virtual Environments to Treat Social Phobia: Presented at the Banff Centre for New Media, September 9th, 2001 by Stasia McGehee, 3D artist at OnLive! Technologies (1994-1997) Authoring Engineer at Communities.com, (2000)

■ The Virtual Reality Medical Centre in San Diego, CA

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