There's a new study from Strategy Analytics predicting massive growth in online virtual world participation over the net 10 years.  The basis of the study seems to be an assumption that a little over 20% of broadband users worldwide will register for a virtual world, but only about 6% will be "active users".

The 1 Billion figure seems high, as other sources have estimated TOTAL broadband penetration worldwide to be 1 billion people by 2011, which would make it a stretch for 5 billion by 2018 (even if Wi-Max and 3G are fully deployed by then).   But even if the total penetration rate were being overestimated, the active user number might not be: if the 3-D Internet is going to be a reality, then wouldn't it be a reality for work as well as for play?  Meaning as collaboration moves away from single-sense (e-mail vs. teleconference vs. webcast vs. IM vs. twitter…) to multi-sense immersive collaborative experiences, the actual market for virtual world services will be larger than $8B/year by 2018?

Continuing the trend of expanding MMOs and online social environments to broader audiences, comes two stories from The Hollywood Reporter.

The first, from April 10, writes about how Nickelodeon is developing two casual MMOs. The first a virtual world based on SpongeBob SquarePants, and the second called Monkey World.

The second, from April 17, writes about Cartoon Network prepping it's own casual MMO for this fall, after being delayed twice. This on the heel's of Disney's original property Toontown and their purchase of Club Penguin in 2007.

Is this a trend?

"When we started building 'FusionFall,' 'Toontown' was the only kids MMO," notes [Chris Waldron, the game's executive producer]. "Since then, we've seen a proliferation of MMOs targeting the same young demographic as ours, including 'Pirates of the Caribbean,' 'RuneScape,' and even social games like 'Club Penguin' and 'Habbo Hotel.' So, yeah, it's getting crowded out there and there are many more in the works so it's getting even more crowded."

After an over-1-year-hiatus, Bruce Woodcock (http://www.linkedin.com/in/brucewoodcock - sorry, my editor is still on the fritz with hotlinks…) is back with an updated MMOGCHART (http://www.mmogchart.com/).  And for those who thought the exponential growth in MMOG subscriptions was not sustainable, well, the data shows that at least in the short term is still very much is.  Over 2007, total worldwide active subscriptions grew from around 14,000,000 to 16,000,000 (up 14%).  

World of Warcraft, to no great surprise, continues to dominate, but others are starting to appear, notably Tabula Rasa (http://www.rgtr.com/index.html), Lord of the Rings Online (http://www.lotro.com/), and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes (http://vgplayers.station.sony.com/).  Which means the Fantasy RPG is still the dominant theme.  I wonder how that will all change when the long, long, loooooong-awaited Spore (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_(video_game)) finally arrives later this summer.

After seeing Johnny Chung Lee’s wildly popular Wii head tracking video we were highly motivated to add this technology to our iRT ray tracer so colleague Joaquin Madruga quickly coded this function and we hit the road for GDC 2008.

Left to Right, Joaquin Madruga (IBM), Johnny Chung Lee (CM), Barry Minor (IBM) 

At the show we demonstrated two infrared (IR) LED tracked displays. The first was a target scene, similar to Johnny’s, that we created in 3dsMax and the second was a 7 million triangle China town scene created in Maya by our partners at Threshold Studios (Thanks Threshold!!). The target scene was easily ray traced on a single Linux Playstation3 but the China town scene required some real horsepower so we deployed six QS21 Cell blades and rendered it remotely using a GigE connected blade center.

Head tracking produces a very unique virtual window effect where the monitor appears to be a portal into a virtual world. The user wears a pair of IR LED equipped safety glasses which are tracked using an IR camera attached to the Playstation3. As the user moves, the view relative to the screen is computed and ray traced in real-time producing a strong motion parallax 3D effect. The next step for this technology will be passive head tracking using face tracking technology like that demonstrated by Richard Marks in the Sony booth at GDC 2008. What we need now is a passively head tracked 150” plasma with ray traced visuals at 120 frames/sec!!

iRT Head Tracking Video (YouTube)

iRT Head Tracking Video (Quicktime 28MB) 

Still trying to figure out why none of the HTML functions are working for me, so apologies for the text-only posting. 

Today was supposed to start with a Macrovision session on digital distribution, but the speaker never showed, so it was quality time with my coffee and Starbuck's Yogurt Parfait instead.

I next managed to get a seat at the jam-packed Ray Kurtzweil keynote address.  Last time I was in that room was for the Direct Marketing Association's 2007 show which had Richard Branson (of Virgin fame) as the speaker.  He's a very low-key, almost deadpan, public speaker but the audience was still very much entranced with this clearly brilliant mind.  He has a  gift for the understated joking aside, starting with his opening about how "games" in an unfortunate name for the industry given it's real value (a telephone conversation is "virtual", but does that make a verbal agreement over the phone any less real than one in person?  Of course not…so why do we treat games and virtual world interactions differently?")

To set up the topic, what was Games: The Next 20 years, he took a look back.  He observed that 95% of innovative projects fail because their timing is off.  One reason for that off timing is that growth is exponential, not linear, and our thinking processes are based on linear evolution ("there's something in the corner of my coming towards a certain spot…it'll get there in 20 seconds and I better not be in that spot…this is good for cavemen, not for us").  When we look at innovation and pace of change as an exponential function, the overall paradigm shifts become relatively easy to predict.  He then showed plenty of examples: over the past 40 years there's been a billion-fold increase in computing price/performance.  And that pace is accellerating: there will be another billion-fold improvement over the next 25 years.

The result is a democratizing of communications, tools of creation, and tools of production.  Example: his own Kurtzweil Reading Maching for the blind, in 1979 was the size of a washing machine.  You now have a much more powerful version on a smart phone.

So what's the implication for Games?  Well, if it takes >6months to design a game, you need to design it for where the technology/market WILL BE, not where it is now, otherwise it'll be obsolete by the time it gets launched.  Things like computing devices disappear by 2020, replaced by embedded computing in eyeglasses, clothing, mobile devices, etc.  

Definitely lots of food for thought, and not even sure what that means yet.   One of those thinking exercises perfect for quality time with a coffee and yogurt parfait.

From the Jan 29 Hollywood Reporter (yeah, I know I'm 2 weeks behind on my reading): "Par plants promo flag in teen virtual world Habbo".  Money quote:

"…Under the terms of the agreement - one of the first between a major studio and a virtual world - Habbo will have merchandising rights throughout North America for "Beowulf", "Mean Girls" and the upcoming "The Spiderwick Chronicles"…" 

While this is more often than not a technology blog, it's also about the business of games too.  This announcement to me shows Paramount is thinking strategically about natural extensions of selected franchises to where their audiences are going (or already are).  Unlike "hey, this is cool, let's do a virtual world!", it shows someone has been thinking hard about how to leverage virtual asset sales and audience migration away from traditional media like cinema.

Time will tell, of course, whether there will be real value from the partnership.  But for all it's vaunted progressiveness, Hollywood is often a very conservative business, so this stands out in my mind.  Just look how long it took them to jump onto the digital distribution bandwagon.  MTV is ahead of the pack in this regards, of course, especially with their games studio expansion.

The open side of the PS3 is a good way to get access to Cell technology as a programmer. Just head down to Toys-R-Us and toss 200 gigaflops into your cart. Programs like Stanford’s PS3 version of Folding@home are showing that today’s game consoles can form very potent compute clusters. In the video below (sorry about serpent like sound track) we show our IBM developed iRT ray-tracer running on a small PS3 cluster. This car model is 75x more complex than those used in today's games and ray-tracing is a class of rendering algorithm only deployed by the film industry, yet PS3s when clustered together handle this problem with ease. Our code was written using the Cell SDK so the same binary that was developed for the QS20 blade runs fine on the PS3, no changes. We just grabbed our Yellow Dog DVD, installed Linux on the PS3s, copied over the iRT binaries, and in minutes we had a very low cost 600 gigaflop cluster. While it's no match for LANL's massive Roadrunner system the same code can be run on both clusters.

Today, IBM and Vivendi Universal’s High Moon Studios are hosting a first of its kind “jam session” around the IBM-Sony-Toshiba developed Cell processor — allowing for video game developers to explore developing games directly from the Cell processor.

Over the course of two days, IBM engineers and top Vivendi game developers will come together to explore the Cell processor, and conduct “jam sessions” to develop game code which could eventually lead to the first video game developed off the Cell technology itself.

The opportunities and applications for Cell technology continue to grow. Once developed just for the Sony Playstation 3 system, IBM has been looking at opportunities outside of the gaming system itself - to where Cell could be applicable. Mercury Computing is using Cell technology for solutions they have developed in the medical and aerospace industries; IBM itself developed a BladeCenter based on Cell technology, and IBM just recently announced a worldwide contest for University students to develop ideas and applications for future Cell technology use.

This week, in the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) booth at SC06, IBM will demonstrate newly developed interactive ray-tracing technology. The iRT will be running on a hybrid system consisting of four IBM QS20 Cell blades and an AMD Opteron based client. By dynamically balancing work across the four Cell blade’s 1.6 Tflops, the iRT renders high definition images at interactive frame rates using advanced techniques such as BRDF shaders, and ambient occlusion. This mini-Roadrunner is approximately 1/2000^th of LANL’s monster 1.6 petaflop system. I hope they invite me back to run the iRT on their finished system.

Quicktime Movie of real-time iRT output
(Resolution reduced and H.264 encoded but still 27MB so be patient)

Jupiter Research’s David Card must’ve woken up on the wrong side of the bed yesterday. How else to explain his grumpy smackdown of Steven Johnson’s profile of Spore in yesterday’s New York Times?

OK, so maybe some of the more utopian fantasies of Will Wright and Brian Eno are fair game for parody - I’m certainly sure that I’d never want my kids to be part of an educational system where videogames are part of the core curriculum. If you watch how kids interact with games, you’ll see them primarily relying on instinct. This may set Malcom Gladwell’s heart a-fluttering, but I think that also erodes deep critical thinking skills at the exact time they should be evolving.

But Card goes on to say “Studying videogames in a larger context is useful for UI/man-machine interaction, for immersive entertainment, and for non-linear storytelling. Not much else.” Really? What’s undeniable is that Spore represents some major advancements in how games are engineered, creating what might be termed a “biology engine” that has the same type of law-based properties as the long-sought “physics engines.” And if we’re able to fully replicate the properties of the real world, Card can’t see anything game-changing (sorry for the pun) about that? The impact on science, medicine and computing would be profound.

Card finishes by saying “Why doesn’t Johnson look at some real 21st century youth communication patterns, like IM, texting, or MySpace? I’d read that.” Right. Because MySpace and social networking haven’t been written about at all.

And besides, Spore looks like it could be kick-ass fun.

My First Austin Game Conference

This was my first time at AGC and I have to say that it was a bit smaller than I expected. The conference only needed a small corner of the (rather large) convention center for the expo area and the meeting rooms. As a matter of fact, it was literally a longer walk from the nearest entrance of the convention center to the action than it was from my hotel to the entrance!

However, contrary to what one might expect from such a small conference, it was surprisingly professional. The expo area was well organized and the meeting rooms were kept neat and all the equiptment seemed to work. So all in all it was a pretty smooth experience.

I had not originally planned to attend, however. Noel Llopis, another Sr. Architect at High Moon Studios had planned what would surely have been a great presentation on Agile Game Development but Noel was called away on more pressing business (But if you are interested in more information, you might want to check out agilegamedevelopment.com). So, I was asked to substitute at the last minute. Although I am a proponent of many Agile methods and Scrum in particular, I wouldn’t be able to do the topic justice on such short notice. So after some discussion we decided that I would present something which I can speak on endlessly with very little notice - my current passion: Programming the Cell processor.

At Vivendi’s High Moon Booth

Along with the local Austin professional developers, it turns out that there are quite a few students and recent graduates that attend the conference. And since we are actively recruiting top talent at all levels, it was a great opportunity to talk to people and promote our studio - we were able to spend some quality time with quite a few applicants and really get into the details of why the culture at High Moon is unique.

Quite a few of those students were prepared with resumes and demo reels and it was really great to feel the enthusiasm for the industry and our studio in particular. I did spend some time helping the students with their resumes, actually. Apparently there is a common format that 90% of them are using which made it difficult to tell them apart. I suggested each person forget about using off-the-shelf formats and write something that is a little more unique - or at least slightly different. Here are a few other problems I saw on resumes and my suggestions for fixing them:

• Being too wordy. Especially at a convention where there’s a very limited time to read a resume. Say things simply. Don’t use 100 words when you can use 10.
• Make it clear what you do. Are you a programmer? An artist? It seems obvious, but put that at the top. If you haven’t narrowed down what you can offer to a studio at least to a basic skill, your probably not going to get anywhere.
• Microsoft Word is not a skill. I suppose that there are jobs for which it is not assumed that applicants can use basic office applications, but this is not one of them. This is especially true for programmers - it just makes your resume look silly. Photoshop and Maya are probably relavant though.
• Put the links to your stuff on the web. A few programmers mentioned that they had demos or sample code on the web but there were no links to that information in their resumes. If you have something special, make sure it’s easy to find when your resume is evaluated again later.
• Don’t overstate your strengths. I don’t expect kids fresh out of school to know everything, honestly - it’s not a problem. But if you are going to say that 3D math is your main strength at least be able to answer a couple of basic math questions. Or if you’ve listed x86 assembly as a strength be prepared to talk shop - I love programming in assembly and if you can’t then even carry a basic conversation about it, it’s a little disappointing. If you’ve just dabbled in something or have only worked with higher level APIs - that’s OK, just be honest about it.

Tapping the Cell

As it turns out, the right people were not informed that I was substituting for Noel. When I arrived, I was not on the list and didn’t have a badge. The staff did a great job of handling the situation quickly though and within minutes I was on my way with a custom hand-written name tag. But none of the schedules or door signs were changed. Rob Vawter from SCEA was gracious enough to mention my presentation during his, and our guys at High Moon really went above and beyond and helped me out by printing a session description and handing them out at the booth - that was really nice.

Overall, I think the presentation went well. I tried to respond to quite a few of the comments I received from my interview with PSINext. Specifically how high-level strategies for Cell programming are applicable to cross-platform titles and the impact of my suggestions on engine design. If you’re interested in the details of what I presented you can get: Tapping the Cell (Slides)

There were a couple of interesting questions that I can manage to remember:

“The basic philosophies between Agile development and the type of data-first design [I’m] espousing seem to share some similarities - is that a coincidence?”

I think the answer to that is both yes and no. Yes it is a coincidence in that any similarities are not there by design. But no, I think the similarities are there because both methodologies are based on the basic premise of knowing what the most important elements are and being prepared to adapt and change them to get practical benefits. I think knowing what’s both real and practical is more important than policy and procedure in programming and the Agile methods are similar in regard to development in general.

“How would you teach these approaches to an established programming team?”

This is a tough question that I still don’t have a great answer to. At the moment, I think the most realistic method is to work with one programmer at a time and demonstrate the real benefits that can be gained from changing their approach and perspective on programming. In general, programmers find it harder to argue with immediate results but can argue about “design philosophies” until they run out of breath.

And the obligatory…

No game development conference would be complete without:

Was it worth it?

Yes. At the very least, as was pointed out to me, it is an opportunity to know better those who we may work with but never get the chance to spend time to really get to know eachother. And the Austin Game Conference has been one of the best experiences I’ve had with regard to being able to spend time connecting not just with old friends and colleagues from other studios, but from my own too. It really was the environment and the people that made this a worthwhile trip.

I just got back from a book signing and presentation by Dean Takahashi, author of The XBox 360 Uncloaked. This is one of the things I like about living in the Bay Area, getting to go to cool things like this.

Dean had some interesting stories to tell about his journey writing this book and I began to see why Twichguru.com said, “You could argue that no one outside of Microsoft knows more about its Xbox game business than Dean Takahashi.”
Dean promises that there is “less profanity in this book” than in his last, Opening the XBox. (Kinda makes you want to read his first book, doesn’t it?) What the book does include is “blow by blow” coverage of heated internal debates as senior executives worked to bring the product to market. In particular, check out the chapter called Ed Fries Last Stand. The book also has plenty of interesting anecdotes about the launch events and all of the craziness and brilliance that went into developing the XBox 360.

Get the book on Amazon here and don’t forget to write a review when you’re finished.

Tags: Xbox 360 , Microsoft , Xbox , Gaming

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The above image is a frame from a Quake like game called kkrieger that has a disk foot print of 97KB. No, not 97MB, the creators of this game squeezed everything into a meager 97,280 bytes. In an age when state of the art PC games consume more than 1GB of disk space this is quite shocking. Where this game differs is that all of the art assets are generated procedurally at run time instead of created by teams of artists and stored on your hard drive. Many of the techniques used in this area can be attributed to Ken Perlin’s noise functions and Loren Carpenter’s work with fractals. Kkrieger generates the art assets at run time as part of the loading process turning the stored mathematical descriptions into megabytes of memory resident textures and 3D geometries. The next step in this area is to generate all these art assets on the fly as they are need in a resolution independent way thereby dramatically reducing the memory foot print if the game, off chip memory bandwidth requirements, and finally removing those annoying fuzzy low resolutions textures that are visible when you walk up close to an object. Next generation processors like Cell were designed to excel at these techniques. SPEs are great noise generators that can churn out gigabytes of dynamic textures and procedurally generated geometry on demand. Moving such techniques from load time to run time will dramatically improve the visual quality of games and produce dynamic ever changing worlds that can be different every time you experience them.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger has a great post in his blog this week about “life and business in the virtual world”.

“Finally, with IT all around us, it is very important that we leverage all that powerful and inexpensive computing power so that future applications will be much more human-like, realistic and “immersive.”  We see this future emerging most clearly with computer and video games, especially with the new generation of game consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation 3, as well as with massively multiplayer online environments like Second Life and World of Warcraft.   “

Tags: Second Life , WoW , mmog

The new Forbes cover story explores the power of the Cell processor. Here’s how it begins:

IBM’s radical Cell processor, to debut in Sony’s PlayStation 3, could reshape entertainment and spark the next high-tech boom.

Later this year millions of homes will get a new supercomputer for the living room. Or maybe the playroom. Sony’s long-awaited PlayStation 3 game console, a slender yet muscular machine the size of a DVD player, performs a mind-boggling 2 trillion calculations per second. This kind of power, once reserved for seismic exploration and nuclear-weapons design, will let programmers create videogames that look as realistic as film.

Some techies say PlayStation 3, which may debut by midyear and could end up in 100 million homes in five years, will usher in the next microchip revolution. The Sony system owes its prowess to a microprocessor called Cell, which was cooked up by chip wizards at IBM (with help from Sony and Toshiba) at a cost of $400 million over five years. The Cell chip, based on a design inspired by supercomputers, runs at least ten times as fast as Intel’s most powerful Pentium. More important, Cell boasts a staggering fiftyfold advantage in handling graphics-intensive applications that will define the next generation of visual entertainment–blindingly fast and seductively immersive games, virtual-reality romps, wireless downloads, real-time video chat, interactive TV shows with multiple endings and a panoply of new services yet to be dreamed up.

The whole article is a must-read.

With IBM currently leading the video game industry in processor development, it makes sense that they also have professional gamers in their ranks. IBMer Carlos “Johnny” Lopez II talks with Game Tomorrow about his move to professional gaming (and recent win in the Electronic Arts $250k Battlefield: Modern Combat tournament!), and his career with IBM.

Read the whole interview here.

For future reference, interviews can be found on the front page of this blog by clicking on links under Pages on the right sidebar.

Tags: IBM, Electronic Arts, Battlefield 2, GameTomorrow

Well, the MMOG Live Interactive Web Seminar 2, hosted by IBM this page Nov 16, went off very well. We had over 575 registrants from 35 countries, a big jump from the MMOG 1 event back in June. All the speakers were very well received. We tried a slightly different format this time, more of a talk-show style web broadcast from our 6 cities (Austin, Canberra, Los Angeles, Paris, Reykjavik, and San Diego) and it seemed to bring a lot more life to the proceedings.

All our speakers were fantastic (especially given some of the glitches as I’ll describe later). Our intrepid hosts, Julien Merceron from Ubisoft, and Marcel Baron and Sheena Stewart from IBM, opened the proceedings up before passing it right along to our first speaker (well, second speaker, but I’ll get back to that in a minute), Richard Garriott from NCSoft (my personal favorite). He talked about generating real intellectual property for online games. He brings a new meaning to cross-discipline information mining! And I thought I was a renaissance man! Next up was Adam Joffe from SONY Online Entertainment, relaying some of his experiences on setting up and running services oriented architectures for online games. Robert Spencer from BigWorld joined us from Canberra talking about some scalability tests they’re running to hosting hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. Steve Canepa’s and Patty Fry’s final round table on where the games industry is going was a facsinating discussion about both technology and business trends such as changing demographics, media convergence, how vendors like IBM are increasingly important as games companies shift from programming towards the art and design of games.

For those of you who missed MMOG 2, you can go to the replay until February 15 here: www.westcast-systems.com/ibm/event/vod.html. For those of you who still want to listen in on MMOG1 from June 1, that replay is also available here: http://www.westcast-systems.com/ibm/event/mmog1.html

And we’re also converting the files into downloadable audio and video files for your own replay. Watch the IBM site for more details coming soon.

Of course, we weren’t without our interesting glitches, which I can laugh at now though I wasn’t exactly laughing while they were happening. Makes you remember to always have a Plan B (and Plan C and Plan D…) in place when Things Go Wrong: Due to a scheduling conflict, one of our originally scheduled speakers had to drop out, so we had to scramble to get a replacment. Our rock star gamers at CCP Games were more than happy to oblige; unfortunately Iceland decided it was a good time to do some tinkering with their Internet Backbone the same morning, resulting in dead air just as we were going live from Reykjavik. Now what kind of icecream sundae would it be without a banana: there were terrible fumes in IBM’s Glendale (Los Angeles) offices where our VP for Media and Entertainment, Steve Canepa was presenting. The troopers made it through their talk with more aplomb than Anderson Cooper! Continuing our sundae metaphor, for the chocolate sauce, Verizon decided it was a good day to disconnect my neighborhood phone lines. Oh, the cherry on the top was the last-minute discovery that our IBMers’ cell phones didn’t get reception at the NCSoft office location in Austin where Richard was broadcasting from. Our intrepid IBMers had had to scramble to get a landline strung into the room. And what dessert would be complete without a dessert wine: the RER regional commuter train in Paris had an emergency shutdown, which almost delayed the arrival of Julien to our moderator panel.

Well, no one ever said it was easy to run a simultaneous web broadcast from 6 cities in multiple timezones. But in the end I’m pretty confident the audience didn’t see the background glitches. Much like Geoffrey Rush’s character in Shakespear in Love: “Allow me to explain the theatre [webcast?] business: the natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. [So what do we do?] Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well. [Why?] I don’t know. It’s a mystery.” And of course I’m also confident our audience really got a lot of great value out of the proceedings, and we’re hoping to continue this series in the Summer of 2006. So keep your eyes peeled!

Do we see a virtual housing boom?

BBC NEWS | Technology | Virtual property market booming

Just to follow up on Catherine’s posting. Here are some pictures from the event.

As many of you undoubtedly know, today was the first day of Blizzard’s Blizzcon convention in Anaheim, California. At this conference, gamers from around the globe are taking part in developer panels, battles, and other entertainment. The company is also using this venue as a launching pad for new games.

The big announcement of the day was upcoming World of Warcraft expansion set, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. According to Blizzcon, “Users can join the Horde as one of the power-driven Blood Elves, or aid the Alliance as a yet-unrevealed new race! Explore the scarred Orcish homeland of Draenor! Delve into mysterious new dungeons, engage your enemies on new battlegrounds, and acquire wondrous new items! Take up dangerous and rewarding new quests for your faction! Train in an all-new profession! Increase your might as an adventurer up to the new level cap of 70, with new spells, abilities, and talents, and meet head on the plethora of new challenges awaiting you!”

Also today, Blizzard, allowed conference attendees to be the first players anywhere to play the newly released Starcraft Ghost. The product premier was kicked off with a competition. Achieving first place and winning the competition was my son, Michael Hoffman!

The conference runs through tomorrow. I will be posting some pictures tonight.

Anyone else attending this event? Post your reactions here.

Tags: Blizzcon