LivePlace.com has posted a video displaying a very impressive render of a 3D virtual world called City Space. At this point very little is known about LivePlace, other than that the WHOIS lists the domain’s owner as Brad Greenspan, one of the co-founders of MySpace. Note: It appears that in the 20 minutes since I spoke to Greenspan about this post, someone was told to take LivePlace down (apparently nobody was supposed to find it).
Update: They’ve taken the video down. We’ve republished a copy, below.
The other nugget of information found in the video is that the game is running on OTOY, the 3D engine that renders graphics in the cloud. The technology allows relatively weak computers (or even mobile phones) to display incredibly detailed graphics comparable to those seen in Hollywood movies.
Note: We’ve put up a slightly modified version of the video at the request of OTOY. We’ve removed a 10 second sequence that was originally intended for an unaired Audi commercial. OTOY’s Jules Urbach says that the room will be in the future virtual world, but asked that we remove the scene for now.
The video shows a massive virtual city filled with towering skyscrapers, parks, user-customized apartments and houses, public meeting places, subways, and everything else you might expect in a metropolitan area, all beautifully rendered by the OTOY engine. The game also features impressive real time lighting, reflection, and weather effects that rival those seen in detailed 3D games (and even some movies).
At this point it appears that gameplay will be focused on human avatars, who can own their own living spaces and offices, buy and sell goods at a virtual mall, and interact with each other in public places.
While there are a number of online games that offer impressive graphics (though none of this caliber), the real potential behind LivePlace and the OTOY engine is the cloud-based rendering engine, which allows games on almost any computer to play without needing a powerful graphics card. OTOY has been developed to work in any browser without a plugin, which makes the barrier for entry into this virtual world much lower than Second Life. Of course, we have no idea when City Space will actually launch, so it’s far to early to hail it as the second coming of social online worlds.
Update 2: According to this comment, portions of the video are taken from an artist’s portfolio that may not be related to LivePlace (the video he linked to is identical to the first 10 seconds of the clip above). It’s possible that the artist works for LivePlace, but it certainly doesn’t sound like it was rendered in real time…
Update 3: Here’s what OTOY’s Jules Urbach has to say:
The 14 mins of real time rendering in this material is streaming live to a Treo 700 at 240 kpbs. This was captured on March 2007, the server was running an ATI RX 1900 GPU. The tech has improved massively since then (as has the HW we now run on). There was never intention to show any part of this to the public until we could include voxel rendering and Lightstage based characters. I think anyone who liked what they saw, will find the final project much more impressive.
The whole aim of our work last month on the Ruby demo for AMD was to show that the quality of offline and real time work is identical starting with this generation of GPUs. The following presentations this month are just introducing Lightstage and how it makes characters (or any CG object) look 100% real in those real time environments.
The virtual worlds these technologies are going to be applied to was not meant to be discussed until later this year, after one further announcement regarding the server side platform being developed for OTOY.
We had nothing to do with editing or leaking this video and can’t comment on anything other than the OTOY technology, since this project is still under NDA.
Jules Urbach
Another money making opportunity in virtual worlds. excellent…
Yup ! Recently Google’s Lively launched and other biggies are also likely to jump over to have a virtual world pie
well i honestly don’t think this is going to hapen…unless it happens in (internet 2) which is millions times faster than the internet of today…
(thats what the guy says in the fox news video about internet 2)..
Personally i think they are going to show this virtual world to everyone through myspace,youtube,google etc..but in order to have, be in,or be part of this virtual world youll have to vote for internet 2…4 the record, this new internet is totally controlled by the gov’t and only sites they approve off will be avaiable for your viewing…..and again i might be wrong im just a hardthinkingpothead
Well pretty soon I think they’ll have the ability to send fliers door to door and advertise real things. You could even hold conferences in offices and whatnot.
Wow. Just…wow. If they can actually create a virtual world that looks that good to any user with a browser and a decent connection, and scale it to millions of users, I think we’ll see an incredible adoption rate of virtual worlds. Now if they can just figure out a way to hook my brain into it directly…
Neil Stevenson’s Idea of the Meta-verse Here We Come!
my first thoughts as well… *grabs samurai sword*
I was grabbing my sword on just reading the first para… didn’t need to see the vid OMG wow
Very impressive demo. now go outside and play with real people…
OTOY looks sweet. That’s nuts if Javascript can render video. I’m looking forward to seeing this stuff unleashed on the web.
I wonder how much it costs them to do the rendering serverside. If they can get it to be cheap, it’s going to be a revolution in video games. Imagine playing Crysis in your browser on a crappy computer. Amazing stuff.
You’ll be able to see crisis, but being able to play is an entirely different matter – due to lag.
If you look closely at the vid, they seem to be able to look around their current viewpoint with no lag, but the camera movements are very laggy (with lots of smoothing to hide it).
The way the camera moves reminds me a lot of Gibson’s original view of cyberspace.
@Greg Mills – thats not javascript. They have servers doing the rendering, then streaming the video to the user via a browser plugin.
I occasionally comment on the virtual worlds space here at Techcrunch. All I can say is… Wow.
They say you don’t need a plugin. I’m still skeptical.
skeptical … big time … if this were the real deal (& practical) Microsoft (photosynth) or Google (Earth) would be all over it.
I found the following from OTOY whitepaper (available on OTOY site)
—————————————————————————
How does the OTOY technology get installed on the end user’s machines?
If a user views OTOY content on a system without the OTOY runtime (i.e.
it is a virgin machine), OTOY will then install itself almost instantly through a stub
mechanism (usually between 30-100k ) that is downloaded just once (with no
more than one click required by the user to install).
Users on thin machines (i.e. old cell phones), that cannot support the
native client, would instead be routed to a virtual session of the application,
hosted by an available node on the P2P network that scales the content for the
thin device in real time.
On a system where the native OTOY client is installed, the runtime
renders the content seamlessly within the host application (as an overlay, palette,
embedded frame, etc.). The user never has to quit an application, restart the
machine, leave a web page, or do anything other than click ‘OK’. All further
updates to the engine are handled transparently.
ite)
—————————————————————————
I don’t see a reason to be skeptical, if it is just uploading user input -> returning a rendered frame … it doesn’t really need a plugin … flash can do that.
However I can’t think of any backend that can do that in a scalable fashion — it just doesn’t make sense from a financial perspective to invest in the hardware necessary. Think about how expensive (interms of both hardware and energy usage) a single graphics card is. Well it takes one graphics card per user to do that kind of rendering.
Yes and no Salik. On one hand, the rendering crunch to generate the world ALL at once is brutal, but by that some token, if you only have to render the entire world once, instead of thousands of times….ehh, it seems like it has the potential to be more efficient. It’s just hard to say.
I think it’s more a question of overcoming our conventional approach and figuring out how to make it work, vs. it being actually impossible.
I’m not sure I fully understand your point, but I don’t think they will be able to “render the entire world once, instead of thousands of times” … thats the nature of interactivity … every user is seeing a different perspective thus they require a completely different rendering calculation (which is *extremely* intensive). I guess maybe there is some room for combining processes i.e texture filtering or LOD computations… the problem with distribution then is mainly bandwidth though … you just can’t do it on a network … there are several gigabytes of information that need to be passed around at extremely high speeds.
is there something I’m missing?
To be honest the way i’m mentally visualizing it is still a bit nebulous. The way I see it potentially working is from a snow globe/google earth esque perspective. You have the world rendered as a whole. What changes, is how users interact within the world and the surface elements.
If the world as a whole is being rendered once (with thousands of updating elements) and all you’re doing is moving an individual chess piece relative to the board…it just strikes me as something where you could figure out a way to streamline the process. So instead of a server tracking everything and sending out millions of render commands to thousands of computers each rending the visualization, relating to it, and then responding with updates. You could render it all once, subject to the basic, core, navigational information.
As is right now the bandwidth would be a beast and the computational power is suspect on a large scale. However, also consider it relative to streaming video services like hulu. The catch is, that it has to be real time.
Just don’t know. It’s definitely fascinating. I think the biggest obstacle is getting ourselves far enough outside the box we can see potential new options in a way that lets us know they even exist.
Alex Berger:
You have no idea what you’re talking about. You can’t render the whole world “once”. Each user has its own coordinates, angles,
I can’t imagine most people have a connection quick enough to handle the streaming, not right now anyway.
Excuse me while I clean up the pieces of brain on the floor.
From what I’ve heard, LiveUniverse isn’t doing too hot financially (e.g. employees aren’t getting paid), so they probably won’t survive to see the launch of this thing.
Bob S – where did you hear that from? Any more details – quite curious…
fun for entertainment, serious business apps? i doubt it. LiveLocator.com
mind blowing. imagine the possibilities, especially behind the mall and business offices. after all, i might well actually live up to the matrix revolution.
Plugin or not, I could give a damn. This looks AMAZING
ZING! Forget Cuil launch, this could be the web app launch of the year. A-mazing.
Pretty, but does it scale? It is an old-ish idea, but the bandwidth, codecs, and silicon are finally at a point where it becomes plausible.
Wow – that’s very impressive. Now I can know EXACTLY what the inside of restaurants, bars, hotels, etc look like before I go to them… Plus I can watch videos, edit Word docs, and more all inside these rooms.
This looks truly amazing, I’d like to really see it work though…
Reminds me of the virtual world in Snow Crash
Hi techies,
I am looking for a good hosting company. I haven’t been satisfied with any I’ve had so far, and would like to finally be able to get one that is good, robust, forward looking, cutting edge, and not too expensive.
I have only one domain to take care of, a couple blogs, and that’s it. I don’t need much, but my quality work wants to be parked at a cozy nice location, that is a pleasure to work with.
Any advise? Thanks upfront.
If you need your “hand held” and have real traffic, you are screwed. None of that ~$10/month for unlimited is real.
Get a developer you trust and use Amazon Web Services. Been there, done that. We’ve got minimal traffic and it was still worth the $1500 we paid a local long time java guy that is brilliant with ruby/ python and php.
Good luck
P.S. This is not a forum and you will be ignored 99.999% of the time here with this shite.
There’s a good reason for ignoring people who post this kind of stuff: if people start answering their off-topic questions, more of them will show up, driving the overall relevancy of the conversations down. Please don’t encourage them.
Thanks for your response.
I’ll ignore all posts by Ryan though.
I am a real person searching for real advise. I am human, not a computer, nor a troll, not “them”, Ryan.
Btw, this is my first visit to this blog. Thanks for a warm welcome.
NOT.
Dear green minute,
I’m headed off to college in the fall, and my girlfriend says we should “take a break” so we can start seeing other people. My friends all say that’s the coolest thing she could have done for me, but I think she just doesn’t want to miss getting laid while I’m gone. What should I do?
Sincerely,
Way Off Topic
The site is back up. I also wrote about this.
I wont trust a company that steals someone else work to demo his tech.
Some shots of the video are from a CG video done by a friend like 4 years ago. nothing about real time rendering, and more lime a week of video edit and composing.
http://3dblasph...sonal/CITY.html
The website allowed the video for download which makes it pretty much a public domain. I wouldnt mind having a video of mine be used as a test data to this awesome technology. But alas, I am not as talented.
What i mean is some of the shots in the video:
a) are not theirs
b) where not generated using his ¨awesome technology¨
Is like you use a video from a real car crash to demo your new cash simulator .
lolec – thanks for presenting that link.
SweetNSourOrc – The article says that all the visuals were rendered with their engine. They seem to say they have a realtime rendering engine but that is a prerendered video. And it’s doesn’t seem to be prerendered by their engine since it looks the same as the video presented by the original author.
That quality of rendering even if it was done by a cloud, the cost of processing to user would be expensive. You’re not processing for a single intensive process but rather it’s continuous for the user. The moment you log on you’re taking up hefty processing power. It doesn’t seem to scale well.
Regardless though. I will say that video looks incredible. I would love for this to be real but i doubt it.
SweetNSourOrc:
The website allowed the video for download which makes it pretty much a public domain
Oh is that how it works? Everything available on the internet is now Public Domain?
Sigh…
Copyright laws don’t seem to agree with you.
This whole OTOY rendering thing a massive load of crazy BS. Just look at this psychotic white paper from a 2006 GDC.
http://www.otoy...white_paper.pdf
So OTOY is a cross platform 800k scalable API content creation UGC P2P buzz word cluster fuck.
Seriously who is getting hood winked by this crap? Adobe M$ and Sun have nothing to fear. Just foolish venture capitalists. It promises magic without offering any kind of real technical detail on how this could even be possible.
Something that’s available on the Internet is in the public domain?
How old are you? 12?
The tractor trailer rig in this video is also the same one from the OTOY demo article shown here on TC. It’s Optimus Prime!
Lot’s of other tidbits look eerily similar.
Interesting…
Wow… those guys basically stole someone else’s video and they are saying it’s being done in “real time”. HAHAHHA… SCAMMERS!!! If they got VC money based on this, sucks to be the VCs.
Hey fool, this was illegally leaked, it wasn’t a demo from a company.
PJ has a point. We don’t know what this video was made for.If it’s a concept demo for internal use, a way of showing “this is what we want to do”, then I don’t see much of a problem with using pre-rendered material, assuming they got permission to use the work from the original author. If it was “leaked” on purpose to create hype, then yes, I see problems.
You mentioned that you could potentially run this on a mobile phone.
Given Google showed us street view on their android system that you could physically look around with the phone – if you could apply that tech with this phone, I think they might have a winner.
April fools !
Notice the slight delays, leaps… Rendering even if done on the cloud would take a small fraction of time (divide and conquer parallel) then piecing it back together, delivering that high quality image, at a reasonable framerate is still not possible. Lots of cycles and lots of bandwidth. The leaping is becaust it has lots of guesstimating and interpolation/extrapolation projections that it needs to lerp to. So this will work for tech demos, architecture, maybe virtual worlds but not many high frequency games. At least at the current internet qos and processing costs.
No offense, but I just realized that, when it comes to technology, the TechCrunch audience has no clue whatsoever.
lolec exempted.
ShishKebabCrunch? WTF
Wow, this joint be lookin sick nasty.
I dont get it – he keeps refering to “City Space” or it may be “City Place”
Both are registered ?
http://www.cityspace.com
http://www.cityplace.com
WTF is it called ?
It’s impressive.
Too impressive.
I’m calling bullshit.
Today’s high-end video cards can’t do raytracing for downtown Manhattan, but this company has figured out a way to effectively do this with a cloud of computers and not only that, but can beam it back to me in real-time?
I don’t think so.
Did anyone make a copy of the video while it was still up…. ?
Anyone?
yeah, we did. copy will be up shortly.
Copy is now up. Not sure what their logic was – the video had already been viewable for 3 hours before they took it down.
oh you guys are the best, this is why I love TechCrunch… very nice job guys… you guys rock.
cant make it to play. it keeps loading. by the way, is it a new money making online?
F*&K OFF WITH “CLOUD”.
cloud == servers. little less glamorous now isn’t it???
Actually Cloud refers to any machine in the internet. Not just servers. Maybe running the rendering P2P is part of what they are aiming for (having heavier machines render for lighter ones) Maybe they do mean just servers when referring to ‘in the cloud’
As long as streaming video has a buffering moment to get to your machine, nothing will be different for streaming video that needs to be rendered before coming your way, just more possibility of something slowing down even more somewhere.
Possibly you can get something like this to work halfway workable in a lab environment with lightning network connections between the machines doing the rendering and the machine providing the user interface, but on the rickety web…
I smell a rat. Is it possible they’ve taken a video and digitized it to make it *look* like a virtual world? Surely, that level of detail over such large areas would take an impossible number of person-hours to design.
And what’s with the shaky hand-held camera view? Why would I want that for my avatar camera controls? On the other hand, if I wanted to make a digitized video look more realistic I’d use a hand-held camera. :-/
If I’m wrong, and I’m happy to be, this would be truly amazing.
@Sean Fitzgerald: “I smell a rat.”
That would be Brad Greenspan. No one who has done business with him would do so again. This announcement using other people’s work has his kind of BS written all over it. Check into his ouster from eUniverse.
I don’t know anything about OTOY. It might be great or also complete BS. But this thing from Greenspan (who had _nothing_ to do with MySpace except taking credit for it) will never see the light of day. But it might suck down some naive investor dollars along the way.
Lol!! WOW!!! I love 3D. FInally the 3D dream seem to be coming true.
This is a great video. Even if it does not exist and completely virtual, I care a damn. Whoever made it has done such a terrific job and and it is so believable and they projected a great vision!!! Great job guys!!
The idea of using cloud exits for quite some time but what was not avaialble was the cloud as a commodity. Thanks to AMAZON, GOOGLE etc. , the cloud is now available to every one. ANother thing lacking was a proper 3D Engine and OTOY seem to have done a good job. I am surprised that heir WEB site is not up to date. I wish these guys stay around. Wake up VCs, you should fund this type of companies and they can make a difference to the internet.
If the livespace is going to be a reality, I die for it. It is simply a fantastic vision.
Thanks to Tech crunch guys for bringing it up from ashes and show us.
Impressive. However, there is a huge problem implied by this tech demo. The level of realism in the environments must now be matched with an equal measure of realism in the characters/avatars/humans and their interactions or the whole thing will ring hollow.
Even if the entire promise layed out here were to be true – server-side rendering of extremely complex 3D environments, streaming to browsers, no plug ins, user generated content, in-game commerce, etc. – there is still a huge missing piece. Will this be a compelling place to spend time? Just making it photo-realistic does not guarantee that. In fact, in my opinion, it makes it a much harder thing to achieve.
The excerpt they took from http://3dblasph...sonal/CITY.html is described as a “render and composite” test. “Composite” as in combination of animation and video. Still smelling ratty to me.
I agree ! I have my doubt this could even be done in the cloud at this stage.
A “Composite” doesn´t necessarily mean a combination of animation and Real-live footage. It means primarily it is a composition of several differed layers witch could be all computer generated to handle efficiently the rendering and post-production time.
However City movie 100% CGI created with 3DS Max in 2004 and resealed 2005.
This could take ten years to become real and it would still be impressive. It’s like Google Earth’s 3D buildings rendered inside & out down to 1 cm resolution. Of course in ten years the iPhone will have enough GPU to render Crysis, so it won’t need to be rendered on servers anymore.
Meanwhile the rendering wouldn’t take anything like a whole GPU per concurrent logged-in user. A top-end GPU can render Crysis at what, 1920 x 1200 60fps? Chop the resolution down by a factor of 6, the frame rate by a factor of 10, get rid of the fancy fog & shadows etc. Not good enough for a first-person shooter but plenty for a virtual shopping mall. Maybe you could get to a hundred users per GPU? If you could get $20/month for a service fee or sell that much in ads you could cover the hardware cost.
And if the business failed you could rent out your server farm as a supercomputer for protein folding…
Umm…. This looks unrelated to Otoy….
Their stuff is low poly..
This stuff is from JJ Palomo – WTF?
G
BTW – These renders are from 2005.
What you probably grabbed from Livespaces was what they WANT it to look like one day…
G
I love how cool it looks but if someday I wake up the and internet works like sim city I will turn it off and never look back. These games are great but it this is just too Matrixy for me. I hope the web remains a content delivery and communication platform for a while.
LOL .. the internet will always have differnet “windows” into it – text, images, video – 3D is just a higher “fidelity” version of the content. Silly Rabbit
I’d love to believe it – I really would.
I’ve spent years rendering 3D scenes and currently use Papervision3D to create online realtime 3D online. I’ve never seen anything come close to this level of detail and lighting quality – not even from some professional architectural viz firms. Surely it’s a video of what CitySpace are aiming for in the future, not what exists now. However, this begs the question, why go to so much trouble of such a long demo, if it isn’t true?
“why go to so much trouble of such a long demo, if it isn’t true?”
Answer: This video was only meant for potential investors. It only had to be ‘good enough’ to fool the investors, not the entire TC readership.
Seems pretty ballsy.
Well surely it’s to generate interest and speculation, and to get us geeky 3D tech heads excited about the future of our medum! I agree though, but what’s the point in these amazing graphics and animations when you could go out and film all of Manhattan with a DV cam? – For half the price and hassle.
In my eyes, Animation (3D & 2D) is supposed to be used as a medium for creating other worlds and characters which we as humans are limited by and can’t create etc. Look at Star Wars or any science fiction film..
I agree – but Augmented reality will be a huge piece of the 3D web puzzle eventually.
Also, to John’s first post – advertising and such in 3D worlds is already happening. Virtual reality isn’t fiction anymore. Look at the new range of games by EA and Microsoft – where they are saturating the game worlds with advertising and marketing ploys from would be companies.
I don’t buy it.
When it looks to good to be true…
2 found with the IP 8.3.233.56
1) liveplace.com (view site)
2) liveuniverse.com (view site)
2 found with the IP 8.3.233.56
1) liveplace .com (view site)
2) liveuniverse .com (view site)
2 found with the IP 8.3.233.56
1) liveplace. c o m
2) liveuniverse. c o m
both on same ip
Hey I have an idea. Why don’t you just go outside into the REAL world.
The graphics do look amazing but now that we know it’s from a video, no need to panic. So far, virtual worlds have had a hard time of actually monetizing their efforts – IMO, it shouldn’t be subscription based. Advertising and promotion should make it possible, as it allows an experience even richer than in RL, since users are probably “playing” and are more open to interaction.
We already have Second Life, why do we need yet another* virtual world.
Second Life is working to make the metaverse an open experience with private grids available to anyone who wants it, this seems like the right direction vs all these new SL-clones which don’t want to be open and instead want yet another closed network.
Second Life seems like the right choice, not lively, or even this vaporworld.
You forgot Opensim – SL is embracing the Opensim opensource virtual world project with BOTH arms
Dave the catch is, while massive the SecondLife offering is, relatively, out of date. Look at the average lifespan of a MMOG. Compare that to the current lifespan of SL.
Then, compare the regularity of patches and updates between the two. Compare the time frame between major graphics engine and skin overhauls.
SecondLife is an amazing resource as a transition piece. It woke the greater tech community up to the possibility of a non-fantasy application for online gaming technology and virtual worlds, but it’s far and away no where near the full potential of virtual worlds with today’s existing technology.
Lively and some of the similar start-ups still don’t get it. SecondLife’s move to start to open things up is a wonderful one, and another wonderful contribution, but it’s also a smart competitive choice designed to compete and maintain their dominance over the virtual world environment. They want to be the Microsoft – the operating system for the future virtual world web. A smart move, but not one – i think – that will embrace the full potential and creativity catapulting Virtual Worlds forward.
Alex, listening to the folks at Linden Lab talk, it sounds less like they want to be the Microsoft of virtual worlds than the Verisign / Paypal of VWs.
I’ve heard of OpenSim implementations with alternate physics engines, alternate avatar meshes, vastly higher primitive object counts; there is room for the technology to improve within this framework.
An interesting though, and definitely see how that could be the case.
I guess in that instance though, my question is why? Why filter my currency into game credits/currency to make a purchase when I could otherwise pay with $ directly without service fees, and added steps?
The one justification I can think of off hand, is to overcome national currencies. eg: You can buy linden dollars with Yen or Dollars, it doesn’t matter, but in game everything is priced in linden dollars.
I guess the real question is, which will enable more powerful solutions the fastest? Fresh starts eg: WoW replacing Everquest I, or modernizations monopolizing on existing market share?
Good food for thought, thanks!
Wow LivePlace looks Sweet…
Cant’ wait to try it out!
Marci
Looks to good to be true so… I saw amazing rendering possibilities like this last year, in a lab, and about 5 years off for the “public at large”… Some day we’ll have virtual worlds like this but this is still far off… But then again, I am not a VR specialist. Virtual World News hasn’t heard back from these people… You would think they would at least reply “no comment”.
Unrealistic bullshit…they gotz nuthin’ Nothing new except for the ability to have the game render quickly online which at the moment can not be done due to lack of sufficient broadband speeds. That new technology they are talking about is all theory and nothing accomplished yet. The videos were pre-rendered and not displaying in real time.
At the end of the radio, there are some Chinese characters shown on a banner in a store of the mall. The meaning of these characters is basically “Congratulations to the opening of Shanghai International Traveling Festival!” It’s about Shanghai, China. So I felt fishy about this video. It looks like a mash-up of several videos which might be grabbed from the web and then posted as the result of their rendering engine.