EcoSim is label (named for historical reasons) that I have grouped my personal research into large scale virtual worlds.

Motivations

Richard Bartle (co-author of the original MUD, currently a lecturer at Essex University CSEE) often outlines in public lectures areas in which the AAA virtual world titles have consistently ignored, to the detriment of the genre.

I agree with him and am interested in exploring some of these areas in a way that commercial pressure does not shape world design. In particular, to what extent can deep simulation replace graphics in perceived immersion in virtual worlds. In addition, I think deep simulation has a much greater potential for the sort of emergent behavior required to reduce the cost of art and balancing in present virtual world systems.

The technology to experiment with this cheaply (ubiquitous broadband, Websockets, commodity 64 bit multi-core machines) has gotten much better lately. I have begun transferring some of my theoretical designs into concrete programs. In particular programs that explore the WebSocket protocol for creating lightweight browser-based virtual world clients and a solar system scale gravity/physics simulation engine.