Legacy - rSimulate Overview
From 2015 -
https://web.archive.org/web/20150312223830/http://www.rsimulate.com/
10 years ago I launched a company. First called ‘rSimulate Studios’ and then rebranded to ‘Universe Builders.’ We had a concept called the ‘Meta-Sim’ framework long before the ‘Metaverse’ became a buzzword - with the vision of breaking simulations into distributed areas of compute… We were too early. Here’s the blurb from our homepage.
The Mission
Our five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no where no web development company has gone before!
Every other company/project/agency is out trying to change the world, we think the best way to do that through direct holistic modeling of the entire planet. Along the way, we also to create new worlds too!
We definitely aren’t the first or the only group to ever consider massive interconnected simulations for multi-purpose uses, however, we live in an era where computing is powerful enough and the internet is still unrestricted enough to pursue grid based simulation amalgamation projects.
We are also fortunate enough to be in a time where browser standards make it easy to offer cross-platform and multi-device responsive solutions. Our projects also fit succinctly into the timeline estimated for virtual reality device adoption and the explosion of the internet of things. Peripherals offer massive capture of data, which means new methods of interpretation will be required. Relational tables and Bayesian statics will only answer certain groups of questions, for anything pushing the envelope of NP, the best answers will come from approximations derived from simulations which go deeper than being purely numerical.
Looking to the long-term, both Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near” and Charles Stross’ fictional “Accelerando” describe transhumanist civilizations with a majority of citizens living “in virturo.” Which means that these computationally optimistic views of the future share a similar premise: humanity will live inside of computers. Perhaps it may be absolutely impossible to extract and upload consciousness into a machine (we don’t think s0). However, as long as Moore’s law continues (even partially) for the next two decades, we will be very capable of replicating brain functions or some generalized intelligence.
If progressively intelligent algorithms proliferate across all aspects of society (beyond HFT and search engines) then we need to look at how to migrate our physical world into the digital substrate. In December 2007, Tom Riecken was tasked with imagining an art project 50 years in the future.
After researching cybernetics and accelerating technology trends, he envisioned creating massive realistic simulations as a way to test historical causality and steer society towards a healthier future.
Seven years later, rSimulate is beginning to formulate technical strategies towards creating the virtual parallel universe. Here is the timeline as predicted in 2007, we all hope that we can make this a reality!
The Team
It’s the 21st Century, for better or for worse, the boundaries are collapsing between work, home, play and purpose. Wearing many hats is part of what defines the individual identity, and the best hats are the ones you pick out for yourself. Everyone who has helped build the tools and games at rSimulate have labored towards the pursuit of their ideals. Primarily, as we have grown, we have all volunteered our hours in hopes of creating awesome simulations, operating more like a guerrilla movement than a de facto company. We hope to keep up this revolutionary commitment, but eventually turing project development into full time roles.
So here’s a bit about who we are as people, what we do, why we work, and where we want things to go!
Services
The focus of rSimulate is primarily on the development of products, but our core monetization strategies include deploying our open source software as a solution. This might resemble the Oracle model but with a much different set of applications.
MetaSim Platform Deployment
Custom Game Server Hosting
WebGL Scene Consultation
Predictive Services & Simulation Analysis