Tate, A., Potter, S., Wickler, G. and Hansberger, J.T. (2011), Virtual Collaboration Spaces and Web 2.0: Bringing Presence to Distributed Collaboration, in “Reshaping Research and Development Using Web 2.0-based Technologies” (Baker, M. (ed.)), Nova Science Publishers, 2011. [In Preparation]

Draft version of paper is at:
http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/ix/documents/2011/2011-web2-book-tate-virtual-spaces.pdf

See note on sync/async on page 10 (Experiments) and figure 2 CWA/Tool diagram on page 6.

Unity3d is Windows and Mac. One of the devs tweeted that they’re working on a linux version, but it’s not ready. I should say that while I am excited with the approach that Unity3d takes for creating and deploying scenes, I am concerned that it’s a proprietary piece of software, and therefore we’ll hit some pay walls eventually if we want to do advanced stuff. But, as I said, I hope graphics people take notice and that someone will eventually take the same approach with an open source scene editor.

+1 on the point about the statefulness of virtual environment/MMO servers being very different from the deliberate statelessness on the web. I think this is why attempts to integrate the two don’t get very far – virtual environments could fulfill a synchronous human-contact need that some social media yearns for but they won’t replace much that the web already does (no 3D web is somehow going to replace our current 2D web).

Also a very good point about the proprietary nature of a lot of MMO code out there. Just like the web, we need a vast array of open source projects that can be glued together to create the experiences that we need. For me, one of the overriding problems is how to encourage an ecosystem that can get us there.