A Review of Portals in Virtual Worlds

BACKGROUND

A year ago, we started to look at how we might travel from one virtual world (anything from a simple program launcher to a more complex program like JanusVR) into a completely unrelated virtual environment.

As I searched for some consensus on how portal should look and operate, I wasn’t able to find any good guides which cover the topic. (The extensive use of the word portal by web-based companies has made it a particularly difficult topic to search.) This article is a (non-exhaustive) review of portals as a popular method used in virtual worlds today to transport the user to entirely different regions.

What are portals? Portals are typically objects or areas in the environment which advertise the ability for a user to approach and engage them in order to be teleported to a new location. Traditionally, they are placed vertically along a wall (and walked into), but they can be placed horizontally along the floor (and stepped onto). An additional action may be required, before or after moving an avatar into the aperture, to actually engage the portal.

Portals won’t be the exclusive means of long-distance travel within and between virtual worlds. What portals have going for them is that they’re already commonplace in virtual worlds, they can be visually integrated into many themes, and they’re easily understood by players.

In JanusVR, portals take center stage as the method used to connect otherwise unrelated virtual worlds.

The Wolves of Virtual Reality’s Eternal September

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This is the second article (in a series) on issues that face the virtual reality community as it enters a period of rapid and sustained growth. If you need additional context, please begin with the first article in the series, “Before the Eternal September of Virtual Reality“.

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Image Source: Wolf Quest (3D wildlife simulation)

The Wolves

Along with a massive influx of new users, how much thought have we given to malicious actors entering the fold?

Griefers aren’t anything new to virtual worlds. In last year’s article, Griefing and the Metaverse, we explored some of the problems that persistent virtual worlds have faced. In recent history, our new virtual reality applications have had precious little exposure to malicious actors. We can expect our isolation to end as more people begin to own VR hardware.

Developers, are you validating inputs on the client side and the server side? Are you hardening your multiuser code against those who would intercept and change their own network packets in-flight, or modify variables inside of application memory? Are you even creating an audit trail of anomalous events? Probably not. Very quickly, we’re going to attract the sort of crowd which will exploit such opportunities.

Travelling Between Unrelated Virtual Worlds

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If this is your first time visiting Metaversing, please read:

This blog is about going beyond the science fiction descriptions of the Metaverse and actually fleshing out some of the concepts, designs, and details that are useful in bringing it to life. The ideas described here are not to be interpreted as the exclusive way for the Metaverse to be designed. We’re here to put a stake in the ground. We hope to start the conversation (where it doesn’t already exist) and to move the conversation forward.

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How do you navigate between unrelated virtual worlds?

Back in August 2013 when I first envisioned how I wanted a different model of the Metaverse to work, one of the fundamental questions I had was in how to glue everything together. Instead of building one large Metaverse and splitting it into pieces, as has been done before, I looked at a different solution. How do we start with a bunch of unrelated pieces of software and combine them together to form a larger Metaverse?

Image Sources: VRChat, JanusVR, Anarchy Arcade, Minecraft (house by PoPlioP)

Our universe starts with completely different and unconnected virtual environments, games, and virtual worlds. There are different authors, languages, graphics libraries, and more. If you wanted to create a way for players (avatars) to actually move between them, how could it be done? How would you move from JanusVR to Minecraft? How do you walk from Minecraft into VRChat?

The Future of Vehicular Safety Communications Systems

This article is going to stray a little off-topic. Before the end, I’m going to bring it back to the topic of augmented reality and virtual reality. I hope you find it interesting.

As mentioned in my previous article, I’m taking some graduate level computer security courses as part of my continuing education. Right now, I’m taking a quick break from my project which investigates security vulnerabilities in next generation vehicular safety systems. These systems, under development today, have been given the green light by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

If things go as plan, your vehicle will send and receive reports on position, speed, heading (and more) to surrounding vehicles. The road may transmit information to you such as posted warning signs (curve ahead), weather conditions, or upcoming road hazards.

A small break

You may have seen my interest security issues in articles like The Metaverse and the Virtual Home,  Representing unknown avatars in high traffic public spaces, and especially Griefing and the Metaverse. This isn’t by chance.

In addition to my day-to-day job, I am taking some graduate level computer security courses as part of my continuing education. I’ve been able to explore how these general computer security concepts apply to the Metaverse in interesting ways.

The academic year is finally coming to an end, and I need to buckle down and get some assignments turned in. I’ll be taking a week or two off to wrap those things up, and then I’ll be back to writing more articles.

I’m trying to decide if I want to talk more about the Virtual Home, or a proposal for the structure of a modern Metaverse. If I talk about a modern Metaverse, I’d probably want to lay some more groundwork first. Thoughts?

On another note, I received an old book in the mail today. $7.22 shipped. As always, I embed no referral code, and I claim no relationship to the book, author, publisher, or seller (other than having purchased the book).

Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality

I’ve only had time to skim over it today. It has fourteen different articles written by academics in the 1990s. So far, it looks pretty good. It has some good sections (communications theory, applications, immersiveness), and a few dated topics (location-based VR entertainment, cyberpunk culture).

My copy is lightly annotated by its previous owner and, actually, that’s something that I appreciate because they’ve picked out some of the good bits for me. If you can pick this one up cheap, it is probably worth adding to your library.

That’s all for today. See you again shortly.

The Metaverse and the Virtual Home

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If this is your first time visiting Metaversing, please read:

This blog is about going beyond the science fiction descriptions of the Metaverse and actually fleshing out some of the concepts, designs, and details that are useful in bringing it to life. The ideas described here are not to be interpreted as the exclusive way for the Metaverse to be designed. We’re here to put a stake in the ground. We hope to start the conversation (where it doesn’t already exist) and to move the conversation forward.

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“The Basement” from Ready Player One, recreated in Second Life. Image Source: New World Notes Blog

I’m convinced that the Virtual Home is at the center of the user experience in the Metaverse. There is so much ground to cover, more than will fit in a single post. How do I convey a universe?

My design sensibility tells me that we’re going to have to iterate this over time in order to figure out what exactly this space needs to be. My gut tells me that we’re going to need quite a bit of competition to make those iterations happen.

The Virtual Home is born out of four concepts: the Launch Pad, the Personal Space, the Utility Space, and the Trusted Space. We’ll talk about each of these, and then we’ll talk about three different ways that this set of concepts play out.

Representing unknown avatars in high traffic public spaces

Maciej Kuciara: Cyberpunk 2077 trailer concept art

“The Street.” That’s what Snow Crash calls it. The Street is a shared virtual environment that grew to be used by over a hundred million users. The author eases us into how avatars might interact in the Metaverse by describing a simple problem: how to reach the front door of a famous establishment.

If these avatars were real people in a real street, Hiro wouldn’t be able to reach the entrance. It’s way too crowded. But the computer system that operates the Street has better things to do than to monitor every single one of the millions of people there, trying to prevent them from running into each other. It doesn’t bother trying to solve this incredibly difficult problem. On the Street, avatars just walk right through each other.

You might remember that in a previous article, Griefing and the Metaverse, we touched on some of the issues involved when avatars collide. In an even earlier article, The sci-fi Metaverse is bad, we realized that the science fiction Metaverse is actually an unrealistic blueprint for what an actual Metaverse should be like.

When Snow Crash describes a high traffic public place, I think that they got it more right than wrong. When practical considerations need to come first, the Metaverse does not need to be a faithful simulation of reality. We could stop here and implement a public space with Snow Crash’s description of the Street, but there are additional practical considerations to deal with.

Griefing and the Metaverse

Know Your Meme: Pool’s Closed

If you’ve been following some of the posts here on Metaversing, you may have noticed a slant towards planning and design issues. This isn’t by accident. Many issues seem innocent or almost trivial, but need to be carefully considered before jumping into an implementation. A well thought-out design can save countless hours of trouble down the road in the systems development life cycle.

Today, I have an easy prediction: the Metaverse is going to be the stuff of legends for hackers, griefers, trolls, vigilantes, security researchers, and spy agencies. If you’re already familiar with the scene at the top of this article, then you know what we’re looking at: an in-world denial of service attack. Do you see it? Is it the guy in the pool with the antlers on his head? No? To explain, let’s go back to design.