NeoHabitat, as the name suggests, is a reboot of the classic virtual world from the mid-80s, when it was owned by LucasArts, and it's virtual history reborn: Arguably the very first graphical MMO/virtual world (at least on a commercial level), Habitat was and is incredibly influential, and has a lot to teach developers of the next generation of virtual worlds. It's officially launching tomorrow night at The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment in Oakland aka The MADE, (Facebook announcement and invite here), where lead creators Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer will appear in person to do the ribbon cutting.
For the last six months, Farmer has led the open source development of NeoHabitat, getting help from top gaming executives who were inspired by the original MMO. Part of the inspiration for doing this, Randy tells me, is “to show how far we’ve come. Before there was virtual reality, before there was MMOs, there was Habitat." Doing this, he says, is "Restoring a legacy and making it available for everyone to see."
That also means hopefully showing it to VR and MMO developers now making the same mistakes Habitat did decades ago:
LucasArt's original Habitat trailer
For instance, what he calls the "Tyranny of the metaphor" -- in other words, developers who announce “Let’s make a duplicate reality because reality is so great.” Habitat's virtual homes came with telephones for users to "call" each other, until AOL founder Steve Case suggested it would be better if Habitat users just, you know, messaged each other instead.
This isn't to say Randy's all negative on the new generation of VR -- for instance, he's a fan of In Jeri Ellsworth’s CastAR system, and believes it'll attract some cool use cases. “It’s ‘help me Obi Wan!’ right there!”
In any case, there may be more active use cases to NeoHabit. While Alex Handy of The MADE acquired the rights to Habitat from Fujitsu, which bought them off Lucas, NeoHabit itself runs on Morningstar and Farmer's open source Elko platform. Randy believes it's powerful enough to improve existing virtual world-type games: "The thing that’s actually missing from Pokemon Go is playing Pokemon with your friends," he tells me. "You could build that on Elko in a weekend.”
As for NeoHabitat, Randy and team are creating a version with a much simpler log-in process, and with luck, a mobile version, which may be its ideal platform. Until then, here's everything you need to know for joining him in NeoHabitat.
Cool beans! I'm in!
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Posted by: Pathfinder | Friday, June 02, 2017 at 12:31 PM