Google Wave Extentions

I came across this very interesting presentation by Tish Shute titled “AR Wave: A Proof of Concept”. AR, incidentally, stands for Augmented Reality. I then found this video that shows AR Wave in action, check it out:

Trish adds the following in her presentation:

The main advantages of using a OT system like Wave for games is twofold;

1. For making simple games it takes far less investment as all that is required is basicbot-coding. You dont even have to run your own server if you dont want, provided theres a Bot-supporting server or something like Google App Engine you can use for your game code.

Wave takes care of accounts, transfer of information and the propagation of changes over the restof the infrastructure.

2. If you want to make a more advanced game (something like WoW or Secondlife), theres still some big advantages to using Wave. You can build your own custom-server to handle complex game events and actions, but by conforming tothe WFP standard for serverserver interaction, you allow anyone to both view or join your game with little to noeffort required. When users can just view or try your game with a single click, you stand a lot more chance of getting them hooked on it. Having to signup, login, and potentially download a client is often far too much effort for people that just want to try something quickly.

With OT you can even create multiple servers worldwide with a persistent and constantly synching world between them…all with no extra effort on your part. This means a faster experience for the end user, while still having a consistent game world for the user. (No need for separate worlds for the user to login too due to server load restrictions)You could even make your game support user generated content, or overlap with other game worlds…if you wish.

This is just a handful of advantages really (more that Markus suggested)

OT is what makes multiuser (or multiplayer) interaction possible. In Networked games you have a scene graph that is kept in sync between the clients by sending changes of its nodes states between the clients (or between the clients a a centralized server).

In Wave OT does this for the nodes of an XML document (aka a wave).The catch is that requirements for document editing and requirements for game scene graphs are somewhat different.For example regarding real time requirements vs. correctness.e.g, the way Googles OT implementation works, a client cannot send out a new change before the last change has been acknowledged. This is because OT has to guarantee consistency which isnt that important in a gaming scenario.

Also of course the scene graph example is rather simplified. Modern network games are a lot more sophisticated than that But the scope of Wave is much broader that game design, so a specialized AR Game Engine will most likely be able to offer more in terms of performance and possible gaming scenarios.

You can visit the ARWave.org site to find out more or to contact Trish with any questions you may have.

As always, please leave your comments and thoughts regarding the efforts of ARWave below. We love to hear what you think.

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