Avatar Technology
Sunday, January 18, 2009 at 01:27PM I recently saw some video clips from “Modeling and Simulations Capitol Hill Expo 2008” where all of the usual suspects on the government/military side of the fence were showing their “serious games” wares for training, simulations, and so forth.
Two things struck me…first, several of the people mentioned “avatar technology” as a big selling point or key aspect of their technology, and second, the “state-of-the-art” being touted at this event (and similar ones) is woefully NOT state-of-the-art.
First, let’s deal with this goofy concept of “avatar technology”. Listening to these people, you get the sense that they really have no earthly idea of what the hell they are talking about, or perhaps they have some inkling but figure that if they talk real fast over the buzzwords, you will be impressed. Being impressed leads to sales!
Imagine a lot of people selling something they don’t quite understand to people that don’t really understand what they need, but feel like they should be buying something to keep up appearances.
But really, what is this “avatar technology” they talk about? It is basically using avatars, or more accurately, 3D characters, as a method or tool for teaching, training, and doing simulations. While this seems pretty obvious to half of the country that has experience with any kind of video game or educational animation, the other half of the country still thinks this is some kind of strange new magical technology.
The idea of using technology from the game industry for non-entertainment applications is generally referred to as “Serious Games”. What a lot of people don’t realize, is that the game industry has been in the lead (for a long time) in innovation, and has been pushing the envelop in multiple areas…3D rendering, 3D lighting, motion capture, artificial intelligence, massively multiuser networking, dynamic load balancing, world creation, behavioral modeling, simulations, physics, and generally anything interactive and immersive. Anyone leveraging any of these technologies in other industries should have a huge edge on the competition, and be able to do some amazing things.
So why is it that nearly every “serious game” application I have come across looks like crap, is clunky, feels like it came from 1996, and is marketed by people that really don’t understand the technology?
My take on this is that the people running the companies that focus on “serious games” (inclusive of anything with the words virtual, interactive, immersive, avatar, simulations, etc.) are generally from backgrounds in government or academia, that acquired some cheap tech and then leveraged their existing connections/expertise to secure grants and government funding. I have yet to see one of these companies run by game developers (current or ex).
The curious thing here, is that this results in a lot of money flowing to these companies, as the military, government, and even corporations are under the impression that they are getting “state-of-the-art” because this is all that they are seeing and being sold. Sure, there are exceptions (and I’ll tip my hat at America’s Army, which used the Unreal engine to roaring success), but not usually.
Probably the most dramatic example of this is the Institute for Simulation and Training at the University of Central Florida. I was fortunate enough to have a guided red-carpet tour of the facility recently as part of a team evaluating the facilities (not directly related to my own ventures, I was acting as a subject matter expert).
The Institute at UCF has quite a lot to brag about, and they do so. Repeatedly. I won’t go into details about the 140+ companies that have some presence at the Institute, or the $18M+ in grant money every year, or the sheer breadth of R&D topics being investigated there, or even the multiple buildings (all quite nice) and the new development. That was all quite impressive, and rightly so.
I do take issue with the presentation of everything as the world capital of simulations, or that this was the end-all, be-all of innovation and state-of-the-art. I’ve never been quite this underwhelmed by anything technology related, except perhaps by the E.T. game or the movie “Battlefield Earth” after all the movie hype. I think the most “cutting edge” stuff I saw could be done by a high school student over a weekend in a garage, or might have been considered pretty awesome in 1993.
One of the big highlights of the day long tour was the simulations/training platform for Forterra Systems. They ran a demo for us that was horribly cheesy (worst voice actors ever), with a pretty solid script that definitely showed off what they could do. I was reasonably impressed with that. However, their tech is severely dated (based on the same engine as there.com) and limited to something like 30 or 40 people concurrently logged in to the same virtual environment.
That last bit stunned me a bit so I commented about using commercial off the shelf (Cots) game technology to implement a more robust “back end” (refering to the server side networking) to get a few thousand concurrent users, or even a more realistic 3D graphics (you know, maybe only a decade out of date). I was immediately slapped down by Dr. Randall Shumaker, the Director of the Institute (who never bothered to ask anyone in the group (outside of the leader, for which the tour was to benefit) who we were, what our backgrounds were, or what we were looking for from the Institute).
Anyway, he pretty much dismissed me, and the game industry as a whole by saying that game tech is too flashy, unrealistic, over hyped, incapable of doing physics (beyond simple things), and essentially useless. Yeah, I was shocked. Someone has been drinking too much of their own kool-aid.
At the end of the day, the lesson here is that the “state-of-the-art” is certainly not so, and that the government is spending a lot of money to transition towards simulations to SAVE money, but there are a lot of jokers taking advantage of the gravy train. Why should they really innovate and push the envelop? Isn’t it easier to just snag all of the grants (SBIR, STTR, etc. and whatever else) and just coast?
Just for grins, if you want to see what I was talking about, simply go to the Forterra site and check out their demos (be prepared to cringe at some of the voice acting, particularly for the “kids”).
I was initially surprised that Forterra has been doing a lot with IBM, but then again, IBM thinks that Second Life and Open Sim are great and next-gen. Right idea guys, wrong implementation. The whole “virtual world thing” is not going anywhere as long as the money keeps going to the wrong companies, tools, and technology.
Avatar Technology is a red herring. The avatars are the least important aspect of virtual worlds and what their true potential is. Avatars are nothing more than self-representations of our individual selves. Getting excited about more dancing emotes or greater variety and realism in clothes misses the whole point. The real value is in the world itself, and the tools necessary to build them, and make them useful.
Reader Comments (3)
As I said on twitter I do agree on alot of this. We have not got to the position yet of having the absolute best that we can have in any of this technology. Equally though we have not yet managed to persuade everyone its a good idea. Hence there are a certain number of steps that both the tech and the culture have to take. I wish it was moving faster too I should add.
I was reminded of what Prof Richard Bartle said on serious games, if you take fun games and boring education you dont get fun education you get boring games. Alot of that is therefore down not just to the tech but to peoples understanding of how to implement and engage with humans using it.
I also agree that avatars are not the end point, but I do think they are an important first step for people, in particular non gamers to understand their presence in a virtual space. It is easier for them to simply puppet the avatar, use elements of non verbal communication such as merely standing near someone they know in order to start to open up the ideas and experiences and for us to find a deeper way to communicate.
This is seperate from the need for richer graphics, or more people in one place, as this is conceptually how do we manage to engage with people over and above what we can do already.
I have a sift spot for Second Life as that allowed me to persuade a huge number of people of the benefits of interacting in ways other than just email. It was free to access, public, had no need for game skills etc. It allows people to create things, relatively simply, to sketch and prototype. There would have been no way 3 years ago to get the resource and money to build something based on high end game engines to produce something to the quality of the current generation of games and also allow people not experienced in high end 3d design to make their own stuff. So to that end it is state of the art. Opensim extends that creativity to the coders, the programmers that can apply their talents to solve certain problems, hooking to certain business applications and services, something that most games platforms have no real need to do.
I hope that we get a convergence, the high end physics, visual, AI and network engineering in games with the high end enterprise scale architectures and middleware that business relies on. That will happen over time, because now there is a demand, now it is not just those of us who our eye on the future who have felt and benefited from these ways of interacting, but its everyone else too.
I think part of my greater point is that we have been messing around with virtual worlds for the better part of the last decade and a half and people are still touchy feely about avatars and exploring the idea of virtual worlds. Definitely an important first step, but one that we should have moved on from a long time ago. Everything that is "new" in the virtual worlds sector is a rehash of stuff more than ten years old. I just want the industry to get off their butts and create something really new, innovative, and useful.
I share your frustration. It has been amusing to see people who have never bothered to take not of gaming technology, get into places like Second Life, enjoy the rapture of interaction and immersion, then suddenly look at high end games and be blown away.
The time periods to mess around are getting shorter, but I had not expected us to get this far in this wave in the past 2-3 years.
The change in gaming habits may generate the impetus we need when combined with the exploration by non gamers.
As is also often said gamers are raising gamers, so this is not going to stop.