Solipsis

» see solipsis.netofpeers.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Solipsis was a virtual world with no servers in it. Not fewer servers than the commercial worlds, none at all: the space existed only on the machines of the people standing in it, and a node found its neighbors by asking other nodes over UDP. Joaquin Keller and Gwendal Simon designed it inside France Télécom's research and development division, published the architecture as a paper in 2002, and released the code under the LGPL so anyone could write their own client against it.

The split between the two halves was the interesting engineering. A Solipsis node was a small program that knew where it sat in a coordinate space and which other nodes were near it. A navigator was the part you actually looked at, talking to its node over XML-RPC. You could throw away the navigator and write a new one without touching the network at all, which meant the protocol could outlive whatever interface happened to be fashionable that year. The reference navigator drew the world in two dimensions and gave you text chat, and not much beyond that.

For about two years it got the press a research project dreams about. Wired covered it in December 2004 under the headline Gamers Eye Open Virtual Worlds. New Scientist went further and said gamers were about to rule worlds of their own. The pitch wrote itself in the years when Second Life was the future and everybody could see who owned the ground under it.

A world that starts empty and fills only when people arrive does need people to arrive. Solipsis ran on every desktop operating system that mattered and cost nothing, and its own homepage described the experience as acting as pioneers in a pre-Cambrian world. It stayed pre-Cambrian. By the time anyone outside the research community went looking, there was nothing running to join.

~ the record ~

~ what it was actually building ~

The claim underneath Solipsis was not really about games. It was that a shared space should have the addressing properties of the internet rather than the tenancy properties of a rented room. No operator could close it, because there was no operator. No company could change the terms, because the terms were a UDP protocol on a public mailing list. Every node was functionally identical to every other node, which is a sentence that sounds like ideology until you notice it is also a spec.

France Télécom was an unlikely place for that argument to come from, and the project never hid it. The mailing list lived on BerliOS, the German open-source hosting service, and in November 2005 the team ran a public Solipsis event tied to a conference in Miami Beach. A corporate research lab was funding the thing most likely to make corporate virtual worlds unnecessary, which happens more often in telecom research than people expect.

~ the fall ~

Peer-to-peer worlds have a bootstrapping problem that servers solve by existing. To join Solipsis you needed to already know a node, and to see anything you needed people nearby in a coordinate space that was mostly vacuum. The commercial worlds of the same years were selling the opposite thing: a place that was already built, already populated, already running when you logged in.

The interface did not help. A 2D representation in 2005 looked like a research artifact next to Second Life, and it was one. The node-navigator split that made the design good in the long run also meant nobody on the team was responsible for making the client feel like somewhere you wanted to be.

~ the next chapter ~

Version 1.09 shipped on 18 February 2009 and nothing came after it. The project site quietly became solipsisarchive.netofpeers.net, first captured in that same month, which is the least dramatic way a research project can say it is finished. The pages are still there in the Wayback Machine, still inviting you to download a navigator and go be a pioneer.

Both domains have moved on. netofpeers.net is now a search-optimized blog about peer-to-peer file sharing written by nobody in particular, and solipsis.org sells an encrypted workspace with no connection to any of this. The argument survived better than the name did: serverless shared spaces came back through WebRTC, and every browser-based metaverse attempt since has rediscovered the problem Solipsis had a working answer to in 2005.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »