Darb Dabney’s OpenSim Blog

Don’t fret about the silence here of the past two months–activity in the lab has been greater than ever before!
The 1 GHz Coppermine PIII / 1.5 GB memory has had 81 sims sqeezed onto it (with mere Basic Physics), and has been tested with three users, loaded with real-life terrain, and offshore areas filled with orthoimage-decked megaprims.

Really - please check out the new screenshots posted on OpenSimulator.org

More, there’s a new system on shakedown. It’s an ASUS P5KC, with Core2 Duo E6550 overclocked to 3.4 GHz with 4 GB DDR2800 overclocked to 485 / 970 MHz. Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy x86_64 is getting decked out with x64 VMware server, Samba 4 / AD Domain Controller, and soon will check out how far OpenSim can get scaled up from 1:4 closer to 1:1 with these better resources. Oh, and the alpha Second Life client has been working OK on Ubuntu x64 with an NVidia 8600 (x64 driver built and installed with Envy)

Some very fun images of the Berkeley 1:4 sims were prepared for the American Geophysical Union Fall 2007 Meeting in San Francisco, under abstract IN13A-0902 on 20071210. The sim hasn’t changed much since then.

With the new year, and a fresh focus on using OpenSim as the server-side vehicle together with Second Life client, I’ve felt that the most effective way to get my point across — of the value that I see in joining immersive 3D simulators to GIS data with the purpose of building 1:1 maps to work inside — could be done better than constant reference to Second Life. So the domain stack grows a bit, and will drop off a bit. Please consider hooking to the stacked domains http://blog.simgis.com or simgis.org as well as the original slgis.org and secondlifegis.com if you’ve got an interest in following these developments.

Nothing like a user conference to motivate poster production! Somehow the chance to share work with perhaps 20,000+ eyeballs at the San Diego Convention Center always adds a bit to the excitement. There are now eight 3-foot by 4-foot color posters that emphasize shots of the progress made on the land surface, buildings, street signs, street lighting, sidewalk lighting, and foliage.

Oh, and there’s one other panel that has SL snapshot images for decoration, but is really a little manifesto of the importance of metaverses (in 2007) to the future of spatial systems.

This is Darb’s manifesto posted for attendees in the Map Gallery of the ESRI International User Conference in the Sail Room of the San Diego Convention center, 18–22 June 2007
The attendees are geographic information systems professionals, managers, and supporting industry folk who largely work with maps, map servers, and related technology for a living.

—————————-<>—————————-
YOU WILL SOON WANT A METAVERSE FOR YOUR SPATIAL DATA

Metaverses are immersive 3D computer graphics platforms
- They are not too much like 2-1/2D raised terrain or globes.
- Their objects may not support the vertex model of GIS or CAD,
but use parametric points or U-V maps and raster textures instead
- Through a viewer or other tools, metaverses immerse the user into the 3D model.
- An immersed user is as likely to look up or under as a globe user is to look downward.

If the metaverse holds a model built honoring GIS data, then a metaverse might
- Place the user into the map
- Allow one to stroll through a geodatabase
- Publish spatial data in real-time 3D for very many simultaneous users

Metaverses can allow massively simultaneous at-will rendering in near-real time
- As an example, Second Life is built on grid computing with >5000 processor cores
- Second life spatial data are integrated parametric point objects and raster textures
(34 Terabytes as of 5 May 2007)
- Second life supports over 40,000 simultaneous users worldwide with streaming audio and video.
Integrated VOIP is in beta.

Open-source options exist for single regions, and are developing for grids
- Second Life’s producer, Linden Lab, has announced plans to open source their server code
- This would allow cost of hardware / server power / model development to become the
limiting factors for a civic-scale metaverse
- City of Berkeley could stand up a 1:1 scale immersive model on about 512 processor cores,
or 1k cores with a redundant grid

Metaverses typically include a physics engine
- this manages object collisions and optionally provides gravity and
- in Second Life, the physics engine in each processor core handles collisions among
up to 15,000 objects in the core’s region.
- the engine does so at 40 Hz (forty cycles per second) to allow rendering throughout
the region as real-time movies for each client.

Metaverses will change your data center expectations
- There will be a desire to build out grid computing
- Performance will be tied to processor cores, while most related resources such as
system memory and disk storage (per core) are not exceptional
- In metavserses, the simulated space expands linearly with the number of regions in your grid.
Second life has 64K square meters, about 16 acres, at 1:1 scale, for each processor core
- people interested in grid computing are very interested in having processors with more cores
- these people may be equally uninterested in having operating system costs, or even server application costs, scale with the number of cores

SL Darb Dabney, Berkeley, California 20070615

This is hoped to be the start of a new direction for spatial sloggers: the new world of 1:1 scale immersive mapping. In it, we hope to transcend the scale of mapping that has been a given for centuries, and through the proxy of a user’s avatar, go into and explore the map at full 1:1 scale.

Those who are professionals in the field of geographic information systems, managers of facilities CAD drawings, and government mapping agencies concerned with parcel-scale efforts are welcome to join us and help to pioneer the driving of data along the Trans-Metaversal railroad—getting high quality map data into a persistent 3-d world such as Linden Labs’ Second Life metaverse, so that detailed mapping of streets, sidewalks, curbs, trees, fire hydrants, parcels, buildings and more can be experienced immersively through an easy to use application such as the Second Life client.

Compared to the wondrous entertainment and commercial offerings that grew in Second Life (SL) between 2003 and late 2006, putting real cities into SL must at first seem mundane or perhaps even pedestrian. Yet in the early months of 2007 we will quickly be converging toward a world where the best municipal mapping has so many layers with such detail that the most natural way to experience, provide certain data quality assurance, and even develop a customer service interface will be to load all the physical features up into a single metaversal space such as SL, and then go into that space via avatar and just be in the map.

Much change in the real life (RL) GIS world will come of this, and much good in terms of publishing reference- grade civic models for general use. What it will require in terms of development are tools to translate our 3-d real surface models into SL terrain, translate our parcels into 4-meter grid representations, convert building footprints into low-primitive (prim) approximations for starters, and identify the bottlenecks in how we will be converting our point, line, and polygon features into 3-d shells of cubes, sphere, cylinder and related objects, sections, and twists in some automated ways.