Greetings. I hope that I'm not spamming the list with this monster forwarded FAQ. But since the author(s) are proposing, as one of the stated goals of Virtual City(tm): The Virtual City(tm) Network will also be a proving ground for privacy technologies such as public key cryptography, PGP, and Digital Cash(tm). I thought that folks here might be interested. Has anyone heard of this outfit? Is it for real or a huge slice of lemon meringue in the sky? ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1993 02:36:43 PDT From: Strata Rose <strata@apple.com> To: strata@virtual.net Subject: Virtual City (tm) Network FAQ 1.0 VIRTUAL CITY (TM) NETWORK FAQ, REV 1.0 SO WHAT EXACTLY IS THE VIRTUAL CITY (tm) NETWORK? The Virtual City(tm) Network is an ambitious Networked Virtual Reality Infrastructure which will link current Internet information technology with the emerging capabilities of on-line virtual reality environments. Using existing software which implements shared, interactive virtual spaces we will extend the paradigm of the FreeNet community into virtual reality by creating online cities and communities in which people may share text, graphics, and multimedia in a cooperative real-time environment. These online communities will be able to make use of cutting edge tools such as network conferencing, collaboration & visualization tools, multimedia electronic mail, online access to government data, networked library catalogs & facilities, electronic books online and Internet-accessible public data repositories. The Virtual City(tm) Network will also be a proving ground for privacy technologies such as public key cryptography, PGP, and Digital Cash(tm). DIDN'T YOU RUN AN AD IN _WIRED_ RECENTLY? NO. And again, No. The Virtual City (tm) Network is the brainchild of one M. Strata Rose, longtime net.lurker and sometime visionary, who has been developing the concept since roughly June 1992. I started serious feasibility exploration in December of '92 and have been on track on a timeline which formally started in May '93. The folks who put an ad in _WIRED_ are Objective Communications of Illinois. Virtual City (tm) is a trademark of M. Strata Rose and VirtualNet (currently undergoing formal incorporation). We are registered with the NIC as VIRTUAL.NET and VIRTUAL-CITY.COM. OH, COME ON-- TRADEMARKING THE PHRASE "VIRTUAL CITY"? The concept of creating virtual communities in a Mush/MUD/MOO environment has been kicking around for many years, and quite a bit of work has been done by a great many people. However, there is a particular on-line public access service concept which I call the Virtual City (tm) Network. As it says in the terrifying amount of paperwork required to file a trademark, "this application in no way attempts to restrict the usage of the terms 'virtual' or 'city', merely their usage in conjunction where applicable to services in this class". Or something highly similar but in stricter legalese, as per professional advice. WELL, HOW IS YOUR "VIRTUAL CITY (tm) NETWORK" DIFFERENT FROM THEIR "VIRTUAL CITY"? Obviously there is a limit to the extent to which I can comment, as both of our offerings seem to be in a pre-release state. However, a brief telephone conversation with an individual at Objective Communications indicated some important differences: 1) The Virtual City (tm) Network will be free for individuals to access; charges will only be levied on entities attempting to conduct profitable business activities. My understanding is that Objective plans to charge fees at all levels of participation in their service. 2) The Virtual City (tm) Network has been designed for multimedia and information service access from the ground up. My understanding is that Objective's service is text-only and the gentleman on the phone indicated that they had no current plans to expand it to multimedia. 3) VirtualNet incorporates both a for-profit corporation and a not-for-profit research arm. One of our primary goals for the Virtual City(tm) Network is to take the Cleveland FreeNet model into virtual space. The Virtual City (tm) Metropolitan Transit Authority, VCMTA, is being designed concurrently as an object transport model between instantiations of various Virtual City (tm) Sites. We will be offering templates for instantiations of our city model to be used by communities and organizations, with a true distributed model allowing users and information to flow freely throughout the Virtual City (tm) Network. We are attempting to build an expandable, scalable piece of Internet infrastructure that will support a rich model of growth and self-determination as well as support research on virtual communities and cyberspaces in general. Look for abstracts, research papers, RFC's and API's from us in the coming year. NO KIDDING. TELL ME MORE. One of my design goals in building the Virtual City(tm) Network is to challenge people's assumptions about "the real world" versus "the virtual world"; many if not most of people's interactions today take place in a virtual world which has been largely co-opted by the real world. Newspapers, television, and radio are all prime examples-- most of these rely on mental constructions based on primarily verbal input or on finely crafted presentations which have little to do with "reality", yet few people consider to what degree these omnipresent factors constitute much of their information flow. A wonderful example is the Android Sisters' "Money" (radioplay "Ruby", ZBS Productions). The Sisters hold up two items, described as two pieces of paper, to a "viewer" and ask for her description. Her reply, "well, one is a piece of paper, but the other is money" elicits the ruefully exasperated reply "two pieces of paper!". The well-made point is that people's cognitive mappings have become so rigidly codified that they view their world through highly constrained filters to the point of shutting out other options. In the Virtual City(tm) Network, the line between the real and the virtual has the inherent ability to be deliberately blurred. Information from "the real world" can be presented as often as possible in a matter of fact way. I hope to feature several space station designs from the cutting edge of the aerospace industry, and the reported weather in the outdoor sections of the city will come from weather data live from local feeds, updated to the San Mateo Bridge area, the putative location of the site. Our virtual coffeehouses will tie into Internet game servers of various sorts and we are investigating links to real-world coffeehouses via terminals in the field. Imagine chatting on a virtual terminal via the Internet to folks on real terminals in coffeehouses. Now who's real and who's virtual? OKAY, WHAT'S YOUR TECHNOLOGY BASE? We are currently using LambdaMOO, an object-oriented virtual environment designed at Xerox PARC. Instantiations of LambdaMOO are already being used to provide virtual spaces in which researchers, educators, and interested folks can meet and interact online, such as MIT Media Lab's "MediaMOO", "JaysHouseMOO". the original "LambdaMOO" and a growing plethora of others. Various university and individual projects are adding the capability to access certain Internet information resources such as the "archie" FTP search engine and University of Minnesota's Internet Gopher browser [JaysHouse MOO]. Xerox PARC is working on a project called "AstroVR" in which extensions to the text-based MOO software allow astrophysicists to share graphical images and data. The PARC team is also working on MBONE extensions to LambdaMOO; these extensions will allow LambdaMOO users to use the Multicast Backbone to do real-time audio and video conferencing using tools which are being developed concurrently by the greater networking community. We are working on extensions which will combine the functionality of NCSA's Mosaic information browser with the virtual environment capabilities of LambdaMOO. Mosaic is a hypertext browser through which individuals may access various Internet services such as World Wide Web, Gopher, WAIS, and archie. The World Wide Web in particular uses a format called HTML (HyperText Markup Language) to create documents which can access other documents with a single mouse click from the browser. We are adding the ability for SGML or HTML documents to be valid MOO objects; this single extension opens up a significant range of possibilities which represent needed interconnectivity between the MOO environment and the wider world of Internet information. Virtual spaces in the MOO can then lead directly to an information cache, and information browsers on the Internet can interact with MOO spaces as well. This is just the beginning. In particular, the Virtual City (tm) Network is being designed to allow encapsulation of other information formats and explicit handoff to both public and proprietary information servers. Our model is very similar to the one which NCSA developed with Mosaic. You interact with our virtual spaces using custom clients or browsers which can invoke various service handlers or interaction programs on your host machine. Just as Mosaic will bring up a GIF viewer when you reference a GIF file, the Virtual City (tm) browser could invoke Virtus Walkthrough (tm Virtus) or the BRL-CAD environment on a virtual space. You might enter a virtual space with encapsulated or referenced data available in several formats that your client or browser could handle. WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT? Ah, this is one of the really great parts-- if we can hand you off to some other viewer or program or even another server, then the Virtual City (tm) Network is truly expandable and extensible. We will be able to offer services that no one has even thought of yet as long as they run over the Internet infrastructure (ie, TCP/IP or something that can encapsulate itself in it). The Virtual City (tm) Network will grow along with virtual reality and internet information technology, since new services can be accessed in a plug-and-play fashion. What we're trying to do here is essentially spawn a meta-infrastructure context in which to tie together highly varied services. This is also where VCMTA comes in. WHAT'S VCMTA? VCMTA, the Virtual City(tm) Metropolitan Transit Authority, will be developed concurrently. This facility will provide authentication services for moving database objects between servers on different hosts, as well as implementing state-of-the-art privacy enhancements for secure communication & transactions. VCMTA will allow us to network instances of the Virtual City (tm) Template together and allow people to "move" between them in one ever-growing virtual space. We realize that there are hard problems to solve in building any sort of object transport facility; however, our philosophy is that we can't work miracles but can make something that works, is customizable and configurable, and will make most people happy. Obviously you can't "move" objects, however you can build objects which rely on a core object library, are "registered" with VCMTA, and follow certain rules as to their behavior on other servers and in other conditions. The nature of our distributed architecture already means that resources you access are not necessarily on the VC server, this is the logical next step. WELL THIS IS ALL VERY NICE, BUT I DON'T PROGRAM AT ALL SO I PROBABLY WON'T BE ABLE TO USE IT MUCH. Current implementations of MOOs and MUDS require that users be able to program at a fairly sophisticated level in order to enjoy the full power of MOO/MUD environments, especially in constructing new objects. We feel that this encourages "second-class citizen" status for those virtual citizens who cannot or will not learn to program proficiently. Accordingly, the Virtual City(tm) Network is being designed with virtual storehouses of objects which can be drawn from and user friendly front-ends with which to customize those objects to create personalized and useful virtual spaces. The full power of the MOO internal programming language will still be available to those who care to use it, but those who have neither the time nor desire to do so will be able to interact as fully as the programming hoi-polloi. As part of this effort, we are designing interactive front-ends to interface with the storehouses of objects and handle simple customization. Certain "city services" such as phones, chat lines, radios, gopher slates, etc will be available as well as common objects (and unusual ones!) from various individuals. By the way, if you register an object for public use and it passes the Virtual City (tm) Architectural Board (no Trojan horses or duds, please!), it no longer counts against your quota. Keen, eh? THIS IS STARTING TO SOUND PRETTY COOL. ARE YOU SURE IT'S FREE? There will be no charge for private individuals to access the Network and to engage in building and programming activities (up to a generous initial quota, as in most other MOOs or MUDs). Non- profit and government organizations will be allocated space at no charge in the Virtual City(tm) Marketplace, Business District, and other public areas. Cultural attractions such as art galleries, museums, and music halls are placed throughout the Virtual City(tm) Network; space in these attractions will be donated to artists and community projects to publicize their work. The several museums will feature examples of the growing number of online exhibits such as the Library of Congress' current Vatican Project. Corporations and other for-profit entities may be charged membership fees on a monthly basis, as well as rent for virtual spaces in which to transact business. Our basic paradigm is that if you're in the Virtual City (tm) Network to generate professional profitable activity then you should pay a fee to do so. Ie., the customary net.forsale or net.jobs type of stuff is just fine, whereas setting up a virtual office in which to run a real-time on-line consulting business would require paying rent. Arrangements can be made on a rental or percentage basis, or both. We are very interested in supporting subscription-based services where subscribers are allowed access to custom objects or facilities. This can be a very economical way to do rich text or multimedia electronic publishing in a small-press model, or provide specialized databases or services at a modest cost to subscribers. WHAT SORT OF FACILITIES ARE YOU PLANNING? In addition to those mentioned above, we will have all the standard amenities-- Alexandria, the Virtual Library, a business district, arcade and game areas, residential streets, a campus area where several interesting projects are being designed, transit facilities, and so on. We're choosing to leave MBONE facilities out on this pass due to bandwidth considerations; however, we plan on supporting such diverse applications and protocols as Netjam MIDI, CUSeeMe network video conferencing, various whiteboard tools, IRC with local client enhancements, connections to other MOOs/MUDS, NCSA & BRL-CAD visualization environments, group collaboration tools, interactive game servers, Internet Talk Radio, etc. We're exploring support for proprietary and vendor environments as well, such as Autodesk, Virtus, SGI, and other virtual reality software interfaces. We also have several original-design projects up our virtual sleeves such as the Virtual Coffeehouses, the Twilight Lands where storytellers roam the campfires, the UpAbove and DownBelow space and marine research station simulators, a Virtual Physics Lab, and so on. Not to mention the Virtual City (tm) Marketplace, Information Center, and On-Line Technical Support Center where you can sell your products or services with minimal overhead and rely on our expertise to deliver your information to the Internet community. WOW, I'M CONVINCED. HOW DO I LOG ON? We're terribly sorry, but you can't log in quite yet. We will be opening the database to key implementors once we finish the C modifications to the LambdaMOO server and to the LambdaCore. We had planned a general announcement in mid to late November, but circumstances required otherwise. We are taking lists of pre- registrants, though. Send email to "vcreg@virtual.net" with pertinent info: your name, your requested character name, and a short blurb which will become your initial description. Oh yes, and your Public Key. Don't have one? Tsk, tsk, they're a good thing to have in general; go out and connect to a public key server and get yourself a key-- we'll send out your initial password encrypted to you, and you can decipher it with our public key. Fun, eh? If you're a sufficiently enthusiastic cyberspace denizen to pre-reg, you probably already have a public key... We are planning a Virtual New Year's Party at the very least, even if all net services are not on-line yet. The HTML/SGML capability is really the critical factor-- we will open as soon as that is reliably running and add other services as our range of interfaces expands. Even if our (free) custom browser is not finished by then you will still be able to use standard MUD/MOO clients in conjunction with Mosaic or similar HTML browsers to enjoy the multimedia capabilities. WELL, DO YOU NEED ANY HELP? HOW DO I GET INVOLVED? I'm glad you asked that question. :-) Since a critical aspect of our project is free public access, we need volunteers! Our schedule has been accelerated fairly rapidly at this point and we could use a hand fairly soon. Send email to "vcbuild@virtual.net" with some brief notes about what you're interested in implementing and your level of familiarity with MOO coding. If you have experience with server and core-level mods, there may be funding in it as well, though we are primarily looking for volunteers at this time. ISN'T THIS GETTING PRETTY LONG FOR A "FAQ" FOR SOMETHING NEW THAT NOT MANY FOLKS OUTSIDE OF THE BAY AREA HAVE EVEN HEARD OF? Totally correct. Send questions, suggestions, pointers, flames, and so on to "vc@virtual.net". If you'd like to be on a mailing list for discussion of virtual communities, network services, and other Virtual City (tm) Network related themes, send mail to "virtual-citizens@virtual.net". There's plenty more where this came from, look for technology updates, facility updates, and GIF & Postscript (tm Adobe) maps. See you in cyberspace! Virtual City (tm) Network FAQ 1.0 copyright 1993 M. Strata Rose & VirtualNet; permission to distribute in its entirety, including this notice, freely granted.