Nowadays one can hear in many places that hyper realism in virtual environments is not that important. What does it matter that your 3D-environment has very rich graphics when even in the rich part of this world almost nobody can access it because most people lack the needed hardware and connectivity?
The question, of course, is rhetorical. In fact, it cannot be answered, because the very first thing one has to ask the institution, the company or the individual interested in virtual environments, is “what is your purpose? What is it you want to achieve or at least do?”
If it is just socializing or watching YouTube videos, so be it. Other applications would be organizing meetings for small teams in a business setting, or organizing mass events. Or playing games, or simulating disasters and armed conflict.
“Educational purposes” might be too broad a category. Next Monday we will hear about learning foreign languages in Second Life. This could make sense because of the audio capabilities of that virtual world and the possibilities for creating virtual contexts.
But what if the educational purpose is to learn about archeology or engineering, and if you really would need to show all the details of the objects, buildings and constructions you are discussing? Maybe in that case, hyper realism is needed.
It is in that context that I met this week the Canadian Joe Rigby from MellaniuM, a company specializing in “3D Virtual Real World™ that is realistic of the past, present, future, or imaginary world.” We Skyped each other and he showed me some examples of their realistic 3D renderings.
“We have successfully imported King’s College London (KCL’s) “Theatre of Pompey” into the UNREAL 2 platform”, so an enthusiastic Joe tried to explain me. “The technology I would like to present to you comprises a unique method of importing 3D Studio Max and AUTOCAD models into the UNREAL TOURNAMENT 2004 multi-participant platform”, so he went on.
Now the technological ideas behind all this seem to be very different from those behind Second Life or similar virtual enviroments:
…the concept hinges on the ability to import high polygon models (static meshes) with high resolution textures into an MMO platform such as UNREAL. The environments and client are locally administered off your PC. Any web based browser client where the assets are stored remotely and must be downloaded as you travel through the virtual space can only result in lag and “less than immersive” latency effects. We have produced a movie to compare the graphical fidelity for archaeological visualizations of the MellaniuM application and Second Life.
The movie compares the Theatre of Pompey and the Titanic rendered in Second Life and in UNREAL using the MellaniuM application:
Of course, one needs pretty decent hardware, because you need to put the client and the environment on your own computer. When you are wandering around in these realistic environments, you need the internet for the avatar movements and positioning, not for “rezzing” the buildings and objects.
Of course, as Joe says, every year that passes our computers become more powerful, and the applications we look at here will be used in a rather professional context.
Anyway, the stuff Joe showed me was stunning, for instance a tour of a virtual galery where, when zooming in on the pictures, the images did not pixellate…
The whole proposition of MellaniuM is, as Caleb Booker explains, “not about this vs. that, it’s about using the right tools for the right application.” Dusan Writer puts this whole project in the context of the visualization industry and Second Life. He claims the building tools offered by Second Life get a lot of competition, but Second Life did manage to build a vibrant and creative community, a world, around those tools. Writer rightly warns Second Life to pay attention that it gets not behind on all those other, community-related, aspects.
Back to MellaniuM. I cannot judge whether their technology is the best out there for rendering hyper realistic environments. What fascinates me is not only the quality of the product, but the fact that the underlying technological ideas are completely different from those of Second Life and similar worlds, and that this may be justified, depending on the goals of those who consider using these products.
Roland Legrand