Stanford's New Contribution To Virtual Worlds: Dryad

Ars Technica has an interesting hands on with a creation tool that the Stanford Virtual Worlds Group released last month. It's called Dryad, and is the first example of what the Stanford team hopes will be an easy way to create (realistic) user-generated content in virtual worlds:

It may not be completely obvious why research like this is so important, so we'll spell it out at the risk of over-simplifying matters. If virtual words are to proliferate, one major bottleneck to that proliferation will be visual design. Let's face it: few of us can draw something as simple as a tree well in two dimensions, let alone three. However, if a system could be devised that would allow everyday people to participate in the crowd-sourced construction of virtual worlds, then that particular bottleneck could be done away with.

While it's limited right now to trees, the team clearly hopes it won't be too long until even the least artistic among us can design buildings and objects for virtual worlds. It's an interesting read (including thoughts from Prof. Vladlen Koltun, who headed up the project) on how some academics are trying to do research that will applicable in the not-too-distant future.

Researchers hope to enable crowdsourcing of virtual worlds [Ars Technica via Worlds In Motion]

11:30 AM on Sat Jan 5 2008
By Maggie Greene
1,591 views
9 comments

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JoDi at 11:45 AM on 01/05/08
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Sweet!
I will still not touch SecondLife with a ten-foot pole... but sweet?
Mongoosekun at 12:11 PM on 01/05/08
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What another L-system content tool? There are some nice free ones, and for commercial use SpeedTree which is great for real time rendering. SpeedTree is used in Gamebryo (Oblivion), Unreal, and various other engines. Hell NWN2 used speedtree. :3
LordChris915 at 12:56 PM on 01/05/08
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far cry uses "Real Tree" which i assume is very similar, will this be open source?
cabjf at 01:25 PM on 01/05/08
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Something like this could be the future of massive multiplayer games. A developer could produce the tools, such as in Second Life, then give the players a barren wasteland to develop. Give "quests" to plant trees, build cities, etc. If done right (unlike Second Life) a developer could produce a living, changing virtual world. Then artists and designers could focus on producing more meaningful content in the game (like plotlines and events in the world) rather than the boring,repetitive stuff, like building forests and random towns.
Zadaz at 02:22 PM on 01/05/08
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Maybe they did themselves a big disservice by oversimplifying, because thier explanation doesn't make any sense.

Just like in the real world (where I don't know how to make 99.9% of the stuff I have) virtual worlds have people who do know how to make things and will sell them to me for a reasonable price.

2nd Life's modeling tools are awful, horrible to use and incredibly limited to how you can mangle a primitive object. And yet there is no shortage of original content in that world.

There is a benefit to better modeling tools, but it seems like what they're doing has been done years ago and much better by major 3D modeling applications.

Seems to me they're reinventing the wheel and tacking "community-sourced" and "Virtual Worlds" on to it to make it the new hotness.

(Disclaimer: I've done 3d modeling and animation for over ten years. I played 2nd Life for about 3 hours once.)
jtalton at 05:19 PM on 01/05/08
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I'm Jerry Talton, one of the lead developers of Dryad at Stanford. Thanks for checking out our software, and for your feedback! We really appreciate both.

If you use Dryad, I think you'll find that it's very much unlike the other tree creation packages that are presently available, for two reasons. First, the navigation interface: if you can use a map, you can use Dryad. You don't have to know anything about botany or L-systems or parametric design spaces or any of that stuff. Second, the collaborative aspect. Every time a user saves a tree, we store the tree on our servers and use it to inform future Dryad sessions. This means that, the more people who use the software, the better the results for everyone.

One of the motivating principles behind our work is this: the more accessible we can make content-creation tools, the more useful and interesting virtual worlds will become. I've been doing graphics research since 2003, and I *still* suck at Maya. There certainly is a lot of interesting content in worlds like Second Life, but imagine how much more there would be if it wasn't necessary to pay an artist to make it for you! In my book, free is always the most reasonable of prices. :-)
Eltigro at 07:38 PM on 01/05/08
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Connectedness Index: 66

I just like the fact that its being developed by people from Stanford University... and it is currently limited to trees... how coincidental...

(if you need explanation, do a google image search for Stanford University logo)
mcderek3000 at 07:00 PM on 01/06/08
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I understand that all this stuff is for amateur users, but imagine how much this could help professional game design.

Instead of putting in the hard yakka to design 150 possible character models in the RPG, you could simply use a system for procedurally generated human beings and then manually apply touch-ups to major characters as necessary. This could save a metric ton of time and money for companies, which in turn could be used to improve gameplay, story or sheer polish.

Alternatively, a program for a procedurally generated city (a la GTA) without the need for the company to design a (very likely) expensive and buggy engine to do it all from scratch.
mork1234 at 10:36 AM on 01/08/08
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i dont think previous commenters understand exactly what this software is -- it's not about making procedural trees. Trees are just the example object for this particular demo. It's about making *any* object in a shared 3d space easier to author by allowing people to make the models offline and then allowing other users to populate those models in the world. So you would be a tree-planter or a tree-builder, so to speak -- but you could also make fire hydrants, ligers or skyscrapers if you want.