Interview Transcript - Mitra Ardron
Credits
- Daniel Mendez, Lead Researcher
- Alexander Price, Interviewer
- Angel Ramirez, Post Production
- Jaymian Buston, Editor
- Alyssa Castaneda, Web Editor
- Web Design: Sarai Mateo, Cristy Aguilar, Anna Huynh, Rosa Salangsang, Richer Fang, Vanessa Rivera, EJ Gandia, Cameron Chung
Abstract
This article, Interview Transcript - Mitra Ardron is just that.
Bio
Network Architect for Worlds Chat - the first 3D shared chat on the internet. Standards group (VAG) member, and lead author of many of the early drafts of the proposal eventually accepted for VRML2.0. Led the networking team at Paragraph until its acquisition by SGI.
Article Body
Alexander Price 0:00
Okay, thank you, Mr. Ardron, for coming. By the way, I really appreciate that.
Mitra Ardron 0:03
So I'm Mitra Ardron. And being involved in was involved in the internet in the early days around both the early days of the net, and VRML. These days, I mostly mentor people working with innovation and technology to solve big problems like the STGs and climate change.
Alexander Price 0:28
That's great. What is the earliest memory you have of developing technology?
Mitra Ardron 0:33
So my earliest memory would have been back in like 85, I started an internet provider. And so this has been before there was an ad in the email. And so I was jumping on creating a internet provider that was used mostly by the nonprofit sector. Where did that end up going after that? Well, the the ISP is still around, it's an England called Green net. And we created an international organization called the APC, which is now the, what we call in Australia, the peak body. So it's a body whose members are themselves organizations that works on digital human rights, mostly in the developing world.
Alexander Price 1:11
So what is your experience working with web 3D? Or what's commonly referred to as the metaverse these days? What is your total experience with that?
Mitra Ardron 1:19
Yeah, so I got involved in it back in who must be about like, 1985-ish, 84-ish, when I was brought on by Worlds Inc, to create the technology behind the first shared 3d environment on the net. So So before that time, there were things like Doom, which were multiplayer games, 2.5D. And it was very easy to do that, because you have very little data to transmit, everything was previously downloaded to people's computers. And the only content was, it was a one bit content, as we said, live or dead, you met people to shoot them. And the world wanted to create 3D environments where people could interact with each other. And so we created worlds chat, that was a 3D space station. And your avatars were like penguins or chess pieces, or teddy bears, things like that, you know, static avatars, highly bandwidth constrained. I mean, your your typical high end home system was running at 9600 baud on something which had less power than your than your Apple Watch. does these days, considerably less power than the Apple Watch? So we had to do be very, very clever about how much data we sent and how and all that kind of stuff.
Alexander Price 2:40
You have certainly come a long way since then, I'd say.
Mitra Ardron 2:44
Yeah, so all the environments, of course, were pre downloaded. But, you know, textures or the 3d models. But the content of where everybody else was itself, we had to be very careful about because at 9600 baud for a shared environment, you've got to be super economic about what you're doing
Alexander Price 3:02
Going back a little bit. Were there other VRML or web based projects that sort of influenced the way that you approached your contributions to World's Inc. and VRML 2.0?
Mitra Ardron 3:12
Well, because that was before VRML at that time.
Alexander Price 3:15
Right?
Mitra Ardron 3:16
Let's say VRML, I think existed at the time, but it was it was static, there was no, there was no movement, and it was like a way of describing 3D models. We didn't use it for Worlds Chat. It didn't, there wasn't really the rendering power that we needed in it at that time. We then went on while I was at Worlds, we started working on what was called Verbal 2, which was adding interaction, adding the ability to put a piece of JavaScript attached to a node so that you could describe what it did. And obviously, the part that we were interested in was then how can you then use network, the network to send instructions that could then be used to move objects in your in your world? And so that was Verbal 2 was that part Living Worlds was that was the interaction part. The first draft on Verbal one of the first drafts. Sony were too a competing one. And then we Sony and us joined forces merged. There were various other ones that were around at the time, there's other people with other ideas. But Sony and I merged our stuff, and we merged with San Diego supercomputers version. And then we evolved Silicon Graphics version. And that was what became available to in the famous the famous vote.
Alexander Price 4:35
What technological innovations do you think were the most significant in the development of Worlds Chat?
Mitra Ardron 4:39
The main thing I think, was figuring out there was the visual side, right, which was essentially taking what was in multiplayer games already. It was two and a half d, not 3d. Just because that simplifies a lot. The rendering on very low end machines. It was it was starting from the 70s trying to take a universe So the system and dump it down and make it run really slowly and really badly on a home system. We started from scratch and said, How do we design something for the the system that the median person out there has the graphics capability, the processing power and the bandwidth. And so we design from that point, in particular, for example, deciding who, whose updates you got, there's no point in telling you the precise position of an avatar, it's on the other side of the room. You, you need to know roughly, there's someone on the other side of the room, you don't actually need to know precisely where they're standing. But if you've only got a limited bandwidth, so there's a lot of innovation that went into both Worlds Chat and the development of that, about what do you send to who? When?
Alexander Price 5:48
Yeah, so would you say that accessibility was one of your top priorities during the development of this?
Mitra Ardron 5:52
Absolutely, yes, it was accessibility to the average computed home computer user, rather than that the average. And you know, that's a that's been a, that was a problem through the whole of the web development up to that point, and in many cases since was that the technology is developed by people running the latest computers so so when it's tested is not tested for somebody running a five year old phone, a computer they haven't updated in the last three years designing for a mass market, you've got to design those kinds of computers, not around, the one that can actually show off the coolest graphics, but nobody can play at home.
Alexander Price 6:28
Could you walk us through what a typical user or wheelchair user would experience? During that time.
Mitra Ardron 6:33
Typical workout user would start off with a CD that they that they bought, because you couldn't move that much data overnight. It takes you a week to download it, so people would buy CD much in the same way they bought CDs, the famous coasters that AOL used to send around to everybody? Right? So same idea, you couldn't download large amounts of applications. So they start off with a CD, they'd load the CD, it would drop them into a environment with that, a static image of a space station, where they would pick a name. And they would choose from a menu of avid avatars, static avatars, and we kept adding them, but like you're talking about your typical toy, or cartoon character, or you would then drop into the environment where you would see other people in a room that you were in not a continuous 3d world, but a room which had various doors and things and like an escalator that went up to different levels and rooms with different themes and different ideas. And you'd move around in a room chatting with the people. And then if you if you move through a door, you'd be moved into a different room where you would interact with other people with their avatars. And everyone, you know, each room was artistically themed differently.
Alexander Price 7:47
Is there a project or experience that ran on a platform you developed that stands out to you something that's a bit more memorable than the rest?
Mitra Ardron 7:55
Well, I think stop right because StartBlight was, was designed for kids in hospitals. StarBlight was a charity run by Spielberg, the director. And he, his his charity helps make the lives of kids in hospital better, not through medical stuff, but to. Stuff to make their lives more fun and less than they're only interacting with medical stuff. And so he designed this quite high environment. That could be like a kiosk that was rolled into a kid on a bed and the kids would then have avatars that that moved around in that world, and again, interacted with each other and chatted mostly kids talking to chat to each other. Although Spielberg had a tendency to drop in as an avatar and wander around the space as well. I think you're interviewing Tammy, because she can tell you a lot more about that she was the lead designer on it.
Alexander Price 8:47
Oh, wow. Yeah, it must feel very enriching to have such a positive impact in the world directly from something you worked on.
How did you picture web 3d In the year 2020. Back then, when you were developing things like VRML?
Mitra Ardron 9:01
Well, I think we pictured it in the year 2000. So-
Alexander Price 9:03
Mitra Ardron 9:05
It took a lot longer to get to where it is. A lot of us had read the book Snow Crash, which is really where the idea of the metaverse came from Neal Stephenson's book. And so we imagined a world where instead of using a 2D environment, we would put on goggles or, which of course, what didn't exist in those days, that low end level. And that that would be our chosen way of working with the Internet. I think at the time, we hadn't realized that. In many ways 2D is actually an easier environment to use, because it's more integrated with what you're doing. Like, while I'm having this conversation with you. I can make notes on a piece of paper. If I was wearing goggles, it'd be really hard. So we envisioned that people would interact with, you know, advertising and community environments and information environments all in 3D. Where you are. And of course, we also imagined it being, you know, things will get more realistic as we went to look more like high end CGI, rather than a bunch of chess pieces walking around.
Alexander Price 10:15
Now that we are in the year 2022, what do you think the next generation of web 3d is going to look like? Do you have a vision of what might replace the next gen web 3d In the future?
Unknown Speaker 10:25
Not my strong point, I've not worked on 3d for a long time. It's been interesting to see Meta jumping in there, and putting out their ideas of what the what the future will look like in a Facebook controlled environment. I hope it's not the Facebook controlled environment that we ended up in. I think the power of the Web 1.0 was, anyone could run a server, standards allowed people to move to use one piece of equipment, one piece of software to interact with any server out there. I think if we go down a Facebook world, we won't have that, which means we'll have a very limited set of technologies designed by one player, rather than a set of compatible worlds that you can move between and of course, take your avatar with you, you created your ideally, you create a digital persona. And then you move between different people's creations, where you interact in those creations. And those creations may have different rules or what a universe looks like. But they may not all be the same technology to take, for example, something from Worlds Chat, which is very different from how a lot of worlds do it. A lot of worlds have a 3D grid system, right? X, Y, and Z. And everything is consistent. If you have a house that occupies 100 square meters, a virtual space, you have to move past it 100 square meters to get to the next one. When we were designing Worlds Chat, we didn't work within those constraints and nor Paragraf, which is where I was later but I remember we could bend those rules. You could have small boxes that are a house and you could walk 10 virtual meters to walk to the next house but when you walk through the door of that house you a couple of hectares, right. Because there's there's no logical reason in a shared 3d environment where I you have to use the same rules that the physical universe that you do in the rest of the world. So this was close was known as the tightest effect after the doctor who said, space inside is more than the space outside. Yeah,
Alexander Price 12:42
I kind of going off of what you said earlier about Meta. Now that metaverse is becoming more of a household term. What kind of technological or cultural changes do you think have arisen? Since you know with this, like renewed interest in the metaverse? Like, how is that kind of changed?
Mitra Ardron 12:56
The biggest chunk about culturally I think the biggest change in many ways is that 3D like goggles, are now good enough that a good 3D environment can you can suspend disbelief. You are never going to suspend disbelief when you're in a 2D space station floating around like a chess piece. In a, the experiences I've seen, it's in particular, the photographic ones rather than than the animated ones. It's very easy to believe you're actually there. And then your brain kind of just like when you're watching a good movie, your brain suspends disbelief. And you actually act as if you are in a space, rather than as if you are watching a space. Do you know,I mean?
Alexander Price 13:41
Yeah, it's much more easy to kind of immerse yourself in this world now that the you know, as the technology catches up, it's easy to kind of lose yourself the same way you would in a book or movie.
Mitra Ardron 13:50
Exactly. Yeah. So for example, you know, the problem the early headsets have was if you moved your head, the world took a while to catch up, and people were getting nausy, but more than people getting nausea. So I mean, I never felt nausea syndrome. But you immediately know you're not in a real world because I turned my head up there and the world is slowly rotating. So you forget it. Whereas the first time I dropped into a panoramic world, it was the one that was a fundraiser for Clinton Global that they did an African film in an African village. It was the first time that walking around there, it felt like my memory of walking around an African village, you felt you were there. You heard some noise of some chickens, you turned around, you looked at the chickens, it felt natural. Similarly in, in a 3d world I was in. Not long ago, you had an elevator and you went to the top and there was a plank that you had to walk out to the end of which was like, virtually 20 storeys above the, above the ground. And I couldn't do it. I'm particularly susceptible to vertigo, but I couldn't do it because my brain told me I was there. And therefore I couldn't walk out on a plank 20 stories out Even though one part of my brain knows no, I'm actually on the terrace, the other part of my brain was like, No, you're 20 stories up, you're not supposed tofly.
Alexander Price 15:09
Yeah, that level of immersion is so impressive now.
Mitra Ardron 15:13
And that's why it might work now, when it didn't stand a chance. 20 years ago,
Alexander Price 15:16
What was one of the major obstacles you faced in the development of VRML 2?
Mitra Ardron 15:24
The biggest obstacle was getting people to... same thing with writing any standard was getting people to figure out how to meet their different needs within a common standard, because everyone's trying to everyone's imagining what they're creating having a different set of properties. And we're competitive. But we all benefit from having a common standard, because then we can all use the same browsers, we can all use the same bits of technology developed by third parties. So it was getting people to realize that actually, we were better off collaborating and building a standard than we were competing.
Alexander Price 16:00
Can you talk a little bit about your trajectory from going from web 3D to sustainable tech?
Mitra Ardron 16:06
Yes, so I was working on web 3D till about 96-sh, maybe 97. And that was when Paragraf, who was working for at the time, which was a Russian pioneer in the space, they got acquired by Silicon Graphics. And I was working as a consultant for them. And so I moved to Australia in that period was working remotely. And after some, some other technical forays, including peer to peer video sharing and an early social network, I wanted to work more on humanity and technology, which was directly affecting humanity. And so I started working in sustainability technology, and then more specifically, over the last 15 years on technology with a focus on ending poverty, and working in developing countries. So specifically, for example, I'm working at the moment on a water treatment, low cost water treatment in Bangladesh, about as different web 3D as you could imagine.
Alexander Price 17:07
Yeah, a little bit of a jump there. But I still see that, you know, similar to what you're saying about the charity before, it's, it seems you gather a lot of purpose from your work going towards some sort of good cause in the end.
Mitra Ardron 17:18
Right. And the things that seem to remember is, in the early days of the net, a lot of people were very socially motivated. And humanitarian, and that was a big driver, there wasn't much money being made on the net in those days. So it didn't attract people who were just there to make as much money as quickly as they could with no concern about the ethics.
Rhonda Holberton 17:36
Do you mind Alex? If I jump in here a little?
Alexander Price 17:39
Of course!
Rhonda Holberton 17:38
One of the things that strikes me, as you're talking about some of the kind of major challenges, right, or like the comment, like finding a common standard? Is that something that you are, I can imagine I'm projecting here a little bit? Is that something that you find you kind of encounter in the work with sustainability in tech like, what are some of the obstacles there? Is it like a cultural problem more than like a tech problem?
Mitra Ardron 18:09
I think it's a different problem. So in the in the sustainability space. Most are in the especially in the sustainability and poverty space. Most people have a common goal, which is how do you sustainably get people out of poverty, so helping other people in the space, even if that notionally they might be your competitors, is almost the norm. Because if my competitor succeeds in providing water in some other country, then great, that problem solved, I don't need to work there. In the Web 3D, two, and before that, in the Web 1.0 stuff, it was understanding that we were all better, having a slightly smaller share of a much larger space. So it was a sense of, if we collaborate, the people using the net will double in size, and maybe we lose a couple of percent of the competitor, maybe we gain 100% Doesn't really matter, because really, the whole thing is growing. Well, so it was getting people to think outside the box of "I own it." Something which of course, is completely lost in Canton Web 2.0, right? Where it's like you're in, you're in the Facebook universe and very different environment in the early days, where people develop servers, people developed applications that ran on those servers, people develop browsers, people developed extensions to those browsers. All those were different people. And essentially, any, anything developed in any one of them should have worked across the whole set.
Rhonda Holberton 19:39
And do you see, as maybe we're in the middle of but you know, Web 3, but maybe Web 4 is on the horizon. Do you see a shift back to towards a more collective or collaborative spirit and technology or do you see this kind of privatization, accelerating into kind of blockchain individuals?
Mitra Ardron 20:01
Well, let's distinguish. So I was I was a technical lead for decentralization for the Internet Archive for a couple of years, a few a few years back, the blockchain people, there's a lot of people in the blockchain, who were complete sharks, there were few good ones among them. But the bulk of it was, let's make money quickly and a lot of claims, way beyond what the blockchain could ever do. You. I've seen people say, Oh, it's decentralized, private and fast and cheap. And he pointed those points, exactly. As they said, each of those point people in the audience would say, it was a talk. And people in the audience said to the first one, no, it isn't. And then the second one, no, it isn't. And by the time they got to the fourth one, the guy was completely lost, he completely lost the plot around your script, because the four statements he made were completely inaccurate. But that was what was being put out there. Web 3 is a bit different, there is the potential for things to work together. And you see that a bit in the the move from Twitter to Macedon, where you've got people organized around a common standard called Activity Pub, rather than around a particular single piece of technology. So you can build different technology based on Activity Pub, and share social networks with other people, which is really how social networks should work. I also see unfortunately, a tendency in Web 3, for people to boil the whole ocean. So they'll design from the protocol level up to the application level, and they're trying to replace every layer, rather than say, okay, how can we do decentralized transport, but still access web pages, right. And then people might say, well, now we've got decentralized transport, we can do other things over that decentralized transport rather than web pages, or we'll do other things other than web pages, but we'll use HTTP to do it. So there's an unfortunate tendency for people to grab the hot, try and do the whole thing. And as a result, of course, they'll all fail, because because one will be trying one stack, and another one will be developing a completely different stack. So because they're competitive, people won't throw the investment in to work on it. Or as a lot of that developers do, they'll develop for all three, and take the minimum common subset of it, which is almost nothing. And then they'll be like "I can keep it as well," in case the whole thing fails.
Rhonda Holberton 22:24
So mind boggling, right? That both the kind of lowest common denominator, but also the kind of redundancies and the zero sum game.
Mitra Ardron 22:33
So which to the calling means that probably things like Facebook when, because they create a single large environment, which is worth playing in. But if if, if you go back to Web 1.0. 1.0, worked, because by competitors collaborating to create standards, we ended up very quickly bigger than the existing big players, the the America Online, and the phone companies and the other people that dominated the online world before what we know is Web 1.0. Right? Because each of those were competitors. Whereas when we collaborated, all the little guys were bigger than the than any one of the competitors.
Rhonda Holberton 23:17
Finding a system that sits between all of them a protocol or something rather than a system, maybe you mentioned, it's no pressure. And I think it's for a lot of the students and maybe readers of this, because the journal cuts across both tech but art communities. One of the things that has kind of stood out to me, as I've been talking to both developers, but also artists, developers around Web 3D, is the inter-compatibility of approaches to engineering, but also to art, that kind of speculative thinking. Right. And so Snow Crash became a map for a lot of developers. But, you know, I think it's really important to start thinking about the ways that humanities and the kind of sciences, co-reinforce, or have conversations to produce the realities that we're living in, you kind of talk about, you know, a return, you know, to technology that helps humanity more broadly, can you kind of speak to the relationship that you see between some of the more humanitarian or kind of humanities based practices and some of the engineering practices of your part of?
Mitra Ardron 24:34
Humanity having an engineering have had this strange relationship, right, where a lot of engineering is negative and I see in the Humanitarian Engineering space. So it's a lot of it's a lot of challenges there. But because you're trying to you're trying to develop stuff like typically for an environment where there's not much money, so it's a it's a challenging development, technology environment, but there's a lot of good will, a lot of students in particular who want to want to do something that has, you know, a benefit to the world. I'm not quite sure how that relates to Snow Crash, which I think was the other part of your question. But I think the Snow Crash is more of a common vision that got people excited with what was possible, therefore inspired people to do things, even if they were very different from Snow Crash, because nobody could build Snow Crash. When Snow Crash came out. It was such some we could we could probably build it now. But maybe some aspects of it. But then it was like it was we thought it was five years away. And this 25 years, and we're still not even there. But but it was a it was a vision of a common vision, which made people think, oh, okay, this is what this kind of thing could look like, you can do more with 3D than shoot him up.
Rhonda Holberton 25:49
Yeah, I think yeah, I think that kind of common vision. So like, in the creative arts, or, you know, teaching within an art department, some of the times, we're especially because we teach technology within an art department, that that relationship is kind of inverted. Right. So it's kind of concept first, how does this impact the world first, and then kind of technology, you know, follows. And I think what you're saying is that this for you, the literature, the kind of speculative literature became a map that allowed you the technology to kind of unfold underneath it, or around it. Because that's provided. Yeah.
Mitra Ardron 26:30
Yes, I think the speculative literature informed a lot of the technology in those days, much as in Web 1.0, some of the writings of philosophers, you know, people like people like Peter Russell, or and they were inspired by people like Teilhard De Chardin and like you go back down the philosophical chain, had this idea of humanity connected to each other. And in those days, of course, nobody knew what that meant. But when they were writing that stuff, but then that became, "oh, we can have people talk to each other, we can have shared for what we were, you know, we can have email lists, we can have all those things," which sound like blase now, but we'll revolutionary in the time that you could have a conversation with the 10 other people on the planet who shared your passion.
Rhonda Holberton 27:18
Or that we could do this, right? Like?
Mitra Ardron 27:23
Right! Right! It's hard for people who were born since that point, to think back to a world where you had to save up to make an international phone call, right? Because it probably cost you $1 a minute, when the first internet provider we put online, we charged people $10 an hour to access, and we were the cheapest one in the country.
Alexander Price 27:44
Of course!
Alexander Price 17:39
Just one more question I want to ask personally to you is, you've done so much over the past, like 30 or 40 years is like, what do you what are you the most proud of personally, what development you've made that you think you're the most proud of?
Mitra Ardron 27:58
Oh, it's always the most recent thing you've done. But I think Lumeta Which, where we built the technology that was inside a lot of solar systems provided to villages across Africa, and it's, you know, 80,000 houses or more with lights on because of the work we did.
Rhonda Holberton 28:17
Yeah, like, my last question is like, you know, always, what are we not asking you that we should be?
Mitra Ardron 28:24
I mean, I think there's a there's a story of what happened after I left the space that's missing? Why did 3D not achieve the potential, we weren't able to create compelling enough environments cheaply enough? That they beat 2D as a way of communicating to people? And that will be a valid question for Meta. Even now, with all the technology? Can you create a 3D environment, which communicates something better than a 2D enviornment? And gee, I hope it's not all advertising.
Rhonda Holberton 29:00
So maybe our visions of web three web form they can be actually do you know, I do see, like, from a user base and watching students, they're not on faith. They're not you know, Facebook users. They're not Instagram users are tick tock. But they're also very much as you say, kind of more discord users or kind of application or, like situation based users rather than platform based users. So I do think, you know, we're producing the next generation of critical thinker is in and technology developers. So hopefully, the reason to be in web 3d is connected to our physical environment and the kind of crisis that we see in our in our physical environment. Right. And so I do think that we can't we don't know what that story is yet, but yeah, but I see the future of my students and video later. I want to thank Alex, and thank everybody else who will be touching these little bits of media as they go through to publication thank you yeah so thank you so much
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Video Interview
Video Recording of the Interview with Mitra Ardron, Conducted November 28, 2022
Kewords
Historical, Accessibility, Metaverse, Wolds Chat, VRML