About

realXtend speeds up the development of the global standardized 3D internet of virtual worlds by making the best technology available to everyone, and entirely free of charge. The true value of the interconnected 3D worlds is in the applications, not the platform.

Do not pay for the technology, invest in content. realXtend can reach the highest possible number of users and developers because it is open source.

You can create own networked multiuser 3d applications using realXtend as a base. Royalty-free, no strings attached, suitable for business. Pre-existing open source components and Internet standards are used when suitable, and new are created as needed.

realXtend is an organization that helps companies and people to collaborate on open source development and standardization. It is formed as two legal entities:

1. the realXtend association, where the actual work is coordinated (largely on-line) and in which anyone is free to join as a member
2. the realXtend foundation, which ensures the existence (owns and protects the name) and can be used for funding (the foundation can receive donations, and allocate them to realXtend development based on association’s recommendations).

The actual development work is mostly done in projects in the different companies and other organizations. realXtend is the collaboration to continuously develop the common platform on which applications are built.

Technologies

An introduction to the general architecture is presented in an article, An Entity-Component Model for Extensible Virtual Worlds (2011) (Alatalo, T. IEEE Internet Computing, 2011:30-37.)

Currently realXtend provides the following technologies:

The Tundra SDK

The realXtend Tundra SDK is a complete 3d multiuser application development kit. It is a modular application that can be used both to run standalone applications (for example a single player game or a CAVE installation) and networked worlds. The same codebase is used both for server and client which are just different configurations. Tundra is the new name for Naali, which first started as a from the scratch client for the Opensimulator+ModRex server suite (aka. Taiga). With the addition of standalone functionality and a server module it was renamed to Tundra. Tundra uses Ogre3d for rendering and Qt for UI and several other things.

Tundra is divided into the Tundra core and additional plugins and application level features. This division is illustrated in https://github.com/realXtend/doc/raw/master/tundra.png and the parts are documented in http://www.realxtend.org/doxygen/

Blender to Ogre/realXtend export & integration

Any 3d modelling application can be used with realXtend (e.g. Maya or 3ds Max). Blender works too, so a complete open source toolkit exists for creating realXtend worlds or applications. There is a special blender2ogre exporter with extra Tundra support: http://code.google.com/p/blender2ogre/

WebNaali efforts – alternative browser based realXtend clients

With the advent of widespread preinstalled technologies for realtime networking and 3d graphics, we have created alternative clients that can be used to deploy realXtend applications to people on the web without the need to install a special client application.

These clients are very simple and codebases are small, but they are already suitable for commercial or other production use thanks to the maturity of the underlying technologies (WebGL, Flash’s Stage3D) and the open source 3d engines used (GLGE, Away3d).

For more information see http://realxtend.wordpress.com/2011/08/30/webnaali-demo-on-line/ and http://www.realxtend.org/webnaali/research/ . New generic demos are coming on-line soon.

Friends

We are small, but we are not alone.

Everything in realXtend builds on continously developing open source components used also elsewhere.

There are also several related other projects with a similar goal, but with some differences in the approach. For example Overte Foundation with the Opensimulator project, Sirikata and Open Wonderland are among the friendly neighborhood communities with which we talk to share ideas and experiences, and technologies when suitable.

realXtend and Virtual Worlds

realXtend technologies are not limited to virtual worlds but can be used for many kinds of applications. Here the term ‘virtual world’ refers to the bag of functionality that people expect from a complete virtual world system such as Second Life ™.

realXtend does not currently provide a complete virtual world solution (a Second Life clone), with authentication, avatar editing, simple world creating tools, inventories, virtual currency, social groups etc.

We emphasize ease of integration to existing systems: both to Internet services and internal e.g. corporate backends. Instead of coming up with realXtend-specific authentication, typically it is better to use e.g. OpenID (Google, Facebook etc. accounts) or whatever your organization is already using (e.g. LDAP). Or just provide anonymous service which is typical for websites.

Instead of using a realXtend-specific group chat system, it can be better to use the Internet standard XMPP (used also by Google and Facebook chats) etc.

Assets (i.e. data files such as meshes and textures) can be put to normal web servers, special Second Life style inventory systems are often not needed.

However, the original inspiration for the initiative is from Second Life (http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/04/03/realxtends-vision-for-open-virtual-worlds-interview-with-juha-hulkko/). Several realXtend applications and business ideas share a lot with virtual worlds and some realXtend people advocate the so-called 3D Internet etc.

It is possible that a distributed Internet wide new open source & standard Second Life like thing emerges from these efforts. The Hypergrid system with Opensimulator is approaching it from a different angle. We discuss constantly with Opensimulator people about possible cross-compatibility and interoperability.

Currently the Tundra repository hosts simple example / reference Avatar, Chat and Voice applications (written in Javascript on top of the base C++ level functionality). The scope of virtual world functionality efforts under the realXtend umbrella is open for discussion.

Welcome to the realXtend community!