<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_extra">I was going to sit this one out but seeing as Tom name-checked us....</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">I think what Toni, Doug and Maria have been saying is pretty spot on. It all comes down to the fact that SL (and to an extent OpenSim) is a complete virtual world environment, whereas Unity is a game engine. Out the box Unity does nothing, you have to build up what functionality you need - SL/OS gives you a huge head start by already doing avatars, chat, voice, multi-user, editing etc. You could, if you really wanted, build most, but certainly not all, of the SL/OpenSim functionality in Unity, but in reality you just build what you need for a given project. </div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">Collaborative manipulation and placement (as on your Rezmela video) is definitely possible, and when we redo our OOPAL system for Unity that is pretty much what it will do. What would be a lot harder is collaborative prim based building - still probably do'able though perhaps not with the flexibility of SL/OS. The link-set example you mention would be do'able, Unity has a similar concept, but in reality you might not do it in the exact same way. </div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">Collaborative white boards are certainly do'able (we're just doing one), but document editing isn't really viable as Unity does not have a MOAP equivalent - we've tried a few third party solutions but they all fall well short of the SL functionality - and of course that also means that there is no collaborative web browsing - a real issue for some uses cases. There are I believe a few bespoke solutions where people have used Unity as the basis of larger commercial virtual office offerings and built the collaborative document bit in.</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">You don't see many voice demos as that is something that does have to be brought in through a third party service, Vivox/Teamspeak etc, so tends to just be rolled out as needed - although a lot of Unity use cases don't need it (or just use Skype/Google+). But is certainly an extra hurdle to jump if you need it and you're going from SL/OS to Unity.</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">Can't comment on Physics as we rarely use it. We are also looking at WebGL, initially for non-avatar activities, but the DoD Virtual Worlds Framework that Maria mentions are some of the best avatar driven demos I've seen for WebGL and there are emerging WebGL game engines like GooEngine.</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">Unity is though just such a different experience from SL/OS. With Unity you are building an app from the outside, with SL/OS you're building one from inside. Having spent a lot of time in both just in the last couple of weeks there are annoyances and strengths in both. Approaches like PIVOTE where we try and take the logic out of the environment certainly help, but we still don't have the ideal solution anywhere.</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">You say that "So I guess it will be a race between how fast opensim can get a browser</div><div class="gmail_extra">based viewer solution, or less ideally, tablet viewers that actually work</div>
<div class="gmail_extra">by providing a PC level experience, and how fast the Unity team can develop</div><div class="gmail_extra">their server solution." but that is not the case - Photon and SmartFox are proper established MMO servers for people using Unity and other systems, any Unity corporate offering will only add to that. So with a Unity system already having multi-user, and web, and tablet, and having complete control of the user experience (cf Kay's comment - I think - about a simpler OpenSim browser, something we've also always called for) it has already won that race, and is why we end up using it on most projects. SL/OS really is just left for those cases where you either need a big populated shared world (eg for social science or AI research), or you need that highly collaborative build approach.</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">We did a comparison paper a while ago at which might be of use - <a href="http://www.daden.co.uk/resources/download-white-papers/" target="_blank">http://www.daden.co.uk/resources/download-white-papers/</a> - and our single user Unity demo space (although untypical of how we normally use Unity - see the videos for that) has just gone up at <a href="http://www.daden-cs1.co.uk/demos/dadencampus/DadenCampus.html">http://www.daden-cs1.co.uk/demos/dadencampus/DadenCampus.html</a> (beware 88MB - not yet really optimised for web delivery) . We hope to add multi-user shortly, but it shows some of the things mentioned such as in-world video, in world white board, simple object manipulation etc - and the content of the space is certainly relevant to everyone on this group :-)</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">David</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br></div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div>
<div dir="ltr">David Burden<div>Managing Director<br>Daden Limited<br><br>t: <a href="tel:%2B44%20%280%29121%20250%205678" value="+441212505678" target="_blank">+44 (0)121 250 5678</a><br>m: 07811 266 199<br>e: <a href="mailto:david.burden@daden.co.uk" target="_blank">david.burden@daden.co.uk</a><br>
w: <a href="http://www.daden.co.uk" target="_blank">www.daden.co.uk</a><br>
skype: daden5<br>twitter: <a href="http://www.twitter.com/davidburden" target="_blank">www.twitter.com/davidburden</a><br><br>Daden specialise in creating immersive learning & visualisation systems. <br><br></div></div>
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