IEEE Spectrum January, 2008 - 36

instead of bullets, to one called Full
Spectrum Warrior, in which players lead
troops in realistic skirmishes.
OLIVE has its roots in There.com, a
virtual-world site created by a Stanford
eng ineer named Will Har vey and
launched in 1998. In 2005, There.com
spun off Forterra not to sell the virtual
worlds themselves but to sell the tools
with which to make them. "Rather than
be a walled garden, like AOL," says
Forterra president Robert Gehorsam,
"we said, 'Let's create a platform that
works with open standards that can be
used in all kinds of areas.' "
The idea was novel, but what really
mattered was the timing. By this point,
Moore's Law and other forces had
brought to the commercial world the
necessary hardware capabilities, in the
form of broadband, inexpensive graphics cards, and easy-to-use tools to create content. With that infrastructure in
hand, OLIVE is all you need to make the
magic happen.

ne main difference between
an OLIVE world and other virtual worlds is the OLIVE world's
"purpose-driven" intent, says Gehorsam.
Rather than make the kind of free-form
environment found in EverQuest (the
massively multiplayer online game from
Sony Online Entertainment, Gehorsam's
former employer), OLIVE's customers want worlds that impart particular
skills-like dealing with irate customers
or safely disposing of bombs.
OLIVE consists of a suite of applications and tools that enable customers to
build worlds accessed through PCs-up
to thousands of them-that are connected
through a high-speed network to five
servers. The brains, called the OLIVE
Core, reside on those five machines:
a simulation server, which handles
object simulation and interaction in real
time; a communications server, which
routes the simulations and communication content, such as voice over Internet
Protocol (VoIP); an application server,
which maintains such information as
the user's account information; a database server; and a cluster management
server, to facilitate software updates.
The tools are designed for a layman.
For example, you can quickly fill your
world with prefabricated objects that
can be customized simply by changing
the associated parameters-an operating table can be elongated, a closet full
of uniforms can be changed to women's
www.spectrum.ieee.org

dresses. Changes appear on the monitor
instantly. If you want to exert still more
control over your world's look and feel-
say, how fast a virtual cougar runs in a
safari simulation or how much smoke
billows up from a forest fire-you can do
it by making changes within the source
code of the application program interface,
using C++ programming language.
T he de sig ner s worke d ha rd to
give OLIVE's avatars-the computergenerated characters-gestures and
inf lections that are natural enough
to fully involve users in the world. A
customer who wants to enhance these
details can employ third-party plug-ins
and software, such as FaceGen, which
transforms an ordinary digital photograph into a three-dimensional character. When the users communicate with
one another through microphones and
headsets, they can use VoIP. The audio
is spatially accurate, adjusting in volume and location in proportion to the
user's distance from the speaker.
The ultimate goal is to create a persistent avatar-that is, one that can
move seamlessly through a sea of interconnected virtual worlds. A flight attendant in a virtual airline training exercise,
in other words, should be able to simply
and swiftly teleport to a NASA press conference on a simulated Mars. Forterra's
chief technology officer, Jon Watte, proposes a solution: connecting existing services at the back end. "There are a lot of
technical hurdles to make first the avatars, and then their inventories, move
between worlds," Watte says.
One challenge is to copy information
about avatars and hook that into the
process of authenticating them. Another
is to enable the system of one world to
encode the geometry and textures of a
scene into a format that makes sense
to a system controlling another world.
Watte says that one way to solve the
problem is with Collaborative Design
Activity, or COLLADA, an open standard for transferring digital assets in
3-D environments.
To transfer an avatar's identity from
one world to another, system designers
might modify OpenID, open-source software that provides identity authentication using a single sign-in solution for a
number of sites. It's already being used
by AOL and Firefox, and Watte says that
with a little modification it could suit an
avatar's needs too. Rolston expects to provide the ability to surf between worlds
within three to five years. Meanwhile,

IBM has recently announced that it, too,
is working on the problem. Its partner
in the effort is none other than Linden
Labs, the creator of the single most popular virtual world, Second Life.

t looks as though Forterra can handle
the physics, but far more important,
the company seems to have figured
out the customer. Michael Gartenberg,
an analyst for JupiterResearch, a technology research firm based in New York
City, puts the challenge in the form of two
questions: "What can I do in a simulation
that I can't do in real life, and what are the
implications of that?"

what the exPerts say

"generations of kids
immersed for years in
virtual worlds of gaming
will segue naturally into
professional training in
Forterra's physics-based
virtual-world simulations."
-Nick Tredennick

The answer is simple: in a simulation you can learn to drive a car without crashing, trade securities without
breaking your company's bank, manage
complaining customers without alienating them, treat patients without killing
them. More and more organizations are
working with simulations, and whoever
figures out how to provide these parties
with the right tools stands to do very
well indeed.
Back in the demo room in New York
City, for example, the OLIVE simulation is coming to a close, and the virtual
patients are now on the operating table at
the simulation of the Stanford University
Medical Center onscreen. "I'm going to
remove the shrapnel now," says the real
nurse in Palo Alto over her headset, as
her avatar slices into the pixels of the
victim's knee. If the incision goes awry,
the simulated patient may lose his leg
or even his life, and that wouldn't look
good, not even on the nurse's real-world
résumé. But today she makes the right
moves, and the patient survives. "Great
work, team," the trainer says over the
headphones.
"You can only imagine this 40 years
from now," says Forterra's Macedonia,
with a grin. "We're all going to be living
parts of our lives 'in-world.' " ❑
JANuAry 2008 * iEEE SpEctrum * NA

http://www.There.com http://www.There.com http://www.spectrum.ieee.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum January, 2008