News in the blogosphere this morning (from Sean Kane's Virtual Law blog, via Virtual Worlds News) that Worlds.com, a company that was an early pioneer of virtual worlds development, but which has long been relegated to the shadows of online history, is flexing potential litigious muscle in asserting certain patents it has been awarded on key aspects affecting virtual worlds and MMOGs -- essentially, just about anything with a virtual space and an avatar.
Quoting Kane's blog,
According to statements by Alexander Poltorak, General Patent Corporation’s Chairman and CEO, “[t]he Worlds patents represent exceptionally valuable intellectual property,” and “[w]e welcome licensing inquiries from the on-line game industry. Non-exclusive licenses are available on favorable and non-discriminatory terms.”
Worlds.com holds U.S. Patent Nos. 6,219,045 entitled “Scalable Virtual World Chat Client-Server System” and 7,181,690 titled “System and Method for Enabling Users to Interact in a Virtual Space”. Thom Kidrin, the CEO of Worlds.com, stated that “[w]e are pleased to have the expertise and IP experience of General Patent and Lerner David to enforce Worlds’ patent portfolio,” and that “[a]s the number of virtual worlds and MMORG’s continues to grow, Worlds has seen the space we pioneered in 1995 validated in techniques and methodologies we believe are defined in our patents.”
The central question, of course, is whether these patents are any good, and what effect this is likely to have on virtual worlds -- MMOGs and social worlds alike.
For example, the abstract for first patent cited above says that
The present invention provides a highly scalable architecture for a three-dimensional graphical, multi-user, interactive virtual world system. A plurality of users can interact in the three-dimensional, computer-generated graphical space where each user executes a client process to view a virtual world from the perspective of that user. The virtual world shows avatars representing the other users who are neighbors of the user viewing the virtual world. In order that the view can be updated to reflect the motion of the remote user's avatars, motion information is transmitted to a central server which provides position updates to client processes for neighbors of the user at that client process. The client process also uses an environment database to determine which background objects to render as well as to limit the movement of the user's avatar.
This is limited to 3D, not 2D, so Habitat might or might not qualify as prior art (I'm not a lawyer by any stretch, but we have some terrific ones here, and I'm guessing MMOG and social world companies around the world have a few too). On the other hand Habitat (and even many early MUDs) operated with graphical clients as described in these patents. As for navigating with avatars in a 3D space, what about games like Air Warrior? Are there other examples of 3D client-server games? How about the early PLATO games and early 3D military systems?
The second patent appears similar to the first:
The present invention provides a highly scalable architecture for a three-dimensional graphical, multi-user, interactive virtual world system. In a preferred embodiment a plurality of users interact in the three-dimensional, computer-generated graphical space where each user executes a client process to view a virtual world from the perspective of that user. The virtual world shows avatars representing the other users who are neighbors of the user viewing the virtual word. In order that the view can be updated to reflect the motion of the remote user's avatars, motion, information is transmitted to a central server process which provides positions updates to client processes for neighbors of the user at that client process. The client process also uses an environment database to determine which background objects to render as well as to limit the movement of the user's avatar.
I will be interested to see what happens as the result of this effort by Worlds.com to cash in on what has become a multibillion dollar global industry. Personally, I hope that Blizzard, NCSoft, Linden Labs, Electronic Arts, Microsoft and others bury this, just as Compton's attempt to enforce a poorly thought-out and overly broad patent on "any system that combined sound, images, and text" was eventually denied (nod to commenter Chris on Virtual Worlds News for that link). Either way, there are a lot of dollars involved, so it's hardly surprising that we'd see a turn of events like this.
If you have pointers to substantive prior instances of client-server systems involving 3D navigation and avatars, etc., feel free to post them.
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