Uni-Verse & the 3D Content Creation Market
Background
"The ability to not just connect the browser to any site, but for software to connect to any other software [...] at the protocol level. That leads to a style of programming and flexibility that is pretty important." - Bill Gates, on the revolutions that will define this decade, www.eweek.com
"Fast search methods, combined with the elimination of unnecessary mechanisms such as file names and URLs, hierarchical file structures, and applications, to allow us to take speedy shortcuts." - Jef Raskin, the creator of the Apple Macintosh in his book Humane Interface
In many ways, the current computer desktop and working environment didn’t change the past two decades. It is evident that especially the concepts of “file system” with individual “applications” operating on it, is going to be replaced with a search/database oriented system with an atomic protocol-based application framework.
In his influential and futuristic book “Humane Interface”, Jef Raskin describes how the redundancy and complexity of today’s applications – like Photoshop – could be replaced by a modular set of atomic tools operating together as a single meta-application.
Ongoing development on the internet, with online business finally maturing, will enable software development companies not to sell and maintain bulgy and enormous application suites, but to sell the actual functionality as required by artists at the moment they need it, with the ease of purchasing and downloading a mp3 file.
Tools
Within the Uni-Verse consortium several end-user tools are being developed which will be distributed under a free license (BSD, GPL). All tools will support the Verse prototcol, and thus allow to be connected together to operate on the same data. Verse-enabled tools will offer an increase in efficiency and productivity, both in the individual artist’s creation process, as in collaboration in teams and quality control.
3D Creation suites
- Maya plug-in
- 3D Studio Max plug-in
- Blender-Verse integrated system
Verse tools:
- Loq Airou, modeler
- UV editor
- Connector (data management UI)
- Purple; developer API, framework for plug-in based tools
Use Cases
We can distinguish three areas of which artists will benefit from applications utilizing the Verse protocol;
1. Connecting Applications
Within any creation studio, the main content creation bottleneck typically is the overhead of managing files and transferring/translating files between the applications. This forces many (smaller) studios to bypass this bottleneck by choosing tools from a single vendor and restricting to a single operating system.
Using Verse-enabled tools will not only solve file-sharing problems, but will give instant access to the full range of tools in any application to operate in real-time on the same 3D graphics content.
2. Connecting People.
Multiple artists can use Verse-enabled applications simultaneously to connect via IP to a central database, or to collaborate online on content creation projects.
3. Connecting Development
With the transition from using ‘3D file formats’ to integrating with a ‘3D protocol’, tools and application developers will get immediate results from their work on tools, independent of which application it will be actually used for.
