Virtual Society Info Booth
(A screen dump from a DIVE based shared 3D space showing two users (represented by the green
and red 'blockies') in a shared conference space with live supporting video.)
Overview
The Virtual Society Project is an umbrella for a set of
research projects within Sony CSL. The overall goal of the
Virtual Society project is to investigate how the future online
community will evolve.
NOTE: This page is the CSL home page for the research aspects of the VS project.
Sony BIS (Business information systems) now host a Virtual Society home page
devoted exclusively to the CyberPassage software which is a commercialisation
of some of the CSL work. If you want access to one of the slickest VRML browsers around
which incorporates support for behaviours and a stylish authoring tool
then go there.
It is our belief that future online systems will be characterised
by a high degree of interaction, support for multi-media and most
importantly the ability to support shared 3D spaces. In our vision, users
will not simply access textual based chat forums, but will enter into
3D worlds where they will be able to interact with the world and with other
users in that world.
Members at CSL
Members at the Corporate Research lab
- Michel Feret
- Masayuki Ishikawa
- Tatsuo Itabashi
- Teruhisa Kamachi
- Satoru Matsuda
- Ken Miyashita
Members at SME
Current work areas
We currently have ongoing work in several areas:
- Infrastructure: We are looking at several issues
including the basic networking structure, distributed consistency,
continuous media support and support for many hundreds of users.
- DIVE related work: Our original work was based on the
DIVE
system from SICS. We are
currently collaborating with SICS to investigate how to support a DIVE
like system in a wide area internet based environment.
- ATM work: We are experimenting with Apertos running on ATM networks to
investigate resource related issues. We will eventually port our
shared 3D platform to machines running
Apertos.
- Virtual society and the WWW: We believe that the growth of the
WWW and its open architecture is a perfect opportunity to further our
study of a large scale shared 3D space. To achieve this we are
investigating how we can merge our shared 3D infrastructure and the
WWW. We have an initial draft proposal
that discusses an open
architecure combining the WWW and the VS sysyem.
- Interface devices: Currently we interface to our shared 3D world using traditional
2D screens.
NaviCam
is an investigation into hand held access devive that will free users
from traditional desktop terminals.
- CyberLab: Ubiquitous and augmented 3D spaces: CyberLab is a longer term project that
aims to pull together some of the other projects to investigate the use of shared 3D spaces
as support for CSCW. The main aim of CyberLab is to build a shared 3D space that seamlessly
integrates a virtual world and the real world.
- Agents in cyberspace: There is considerable interest at CSL in agent based computing.
We are currently investigation how we can apply A-Life techniques to create and evolve
intelligent agents who inhabit the shared 3D worlds.
VRML related Documents
Extension to VRML 1.0 (v 1.2) (updated 05/10/1995)This was our
original behaviour proposal for VRML1.0
Moving worlds VRML2.0 proposal This is the result of our original behaviour proposal (above) combined in with SGI's and Mitra's proposals.
An O-O perspective on VRML
'Technical issues in the design of a scaleble shared virtual world.
CyberPassage related documents
CyberPassage is the internal name for our first PC based VRML browser, documents in this
section are related to Sony specific features of that browser. They are not intended
as proposals for standardisation.
sample behavior api (TCL version) (updated 14/11/1995)
Related sites
A comprehensive list of other sites that contain information on
related work.