About VOS

Our original motivation was to start building The Metaverse: a shared 3D virtual environment on the Internet, (inspired by things like Neal Stephenson's modern classic of science fiction, Snow Crash). Along the way we've created VOS, a new kind of networking system and protocol, with many unique features, including:

Hierarchical organization of network-distributed virtual objects
Network transparent access to objects (same API for local and remote objects)
Objects have typing and tagging information to make it easy for applications to determine how to handle different sorts of objects.
Simple XML-based object message protocol (which makes it easy to write scripts that use VOS)
Automatic data updates help create a more dynamic environment
Simple macro substitution language built into the protocol, along with the ability to refer to the replies of previous messages -- This means it is possible to specify compound transactions at the messaging level.
Implementations in C++ and Perl

Our goal is to use this infrastructure to build multiuser collaborative environments. Check out our 3D virtual environment project page for more information about the actual VR application. If you are interested learning more about VOS, why don't you check out our documentation and join the mailing list?

For a more extensive look at the VOS vision, and our thoughts about how we can create a new Internet reality, look at the opening chapter of the VOS Manual.

Personnel

Design, core VOS library, metaobjects, applications and documentation: Peter Amstutz

Design, applications, helper libs, metaobjects and documentation: Reed Hedges

Early design and vision, secret ninja kung-fu: Matt Barry

Also, thanks to testers and contributors of patches and feedback. A complete list of people who contributed code to VOS can be found in the AUTHORS file in the source code.

History

VOS has been in the works for several years now. Here is a brief history of our work.

Thanks

Thank you to everyone who has supported the VOS R&D, especially Andrew Fagg, Brian Levine and David Mix-Barrington at the Umass Department of Computer Science.

Sebastian Malcolm for hosting a VOS gallery and the VOS IRC bot (vosbot)

We have been inspired by many other thinkers and artists, including (but certainly not limited to) the following:

Neal Stephenson, the author of many fine cyberpunk novels, including Snow Crash which you'll probably hear us talking about way too much.

Ted Nelson, dreamer of Xanadu

The Future Sound of London shows us what the future sounds like

David Gelernter and his

And of course, who can forget Debian, GNU and Linux?