A recent piece in the New York Times Technology ('Circuits') section (free subscription required) describes some nifty activity being undertaken by Jules Urbach of Groove Alliance. The work, aside from providing a fast 3D-rendering engine for web-based media, promises to bring massively multiplayer gaming to the 'lightweight presence' world of Instant Messaging.

Mr. Urbach['s ...] invention, which he calls Otoy, is a game engine that piggybacks on instant messaging, and thus it is something of a Holy Grail in the software world. For years, developers have been trying to figure out ways to turn instant messaging into a multipronged medium that goes beyond mere chat to integrate games, e-mail and Web browsing; in the gloaming of a guest bedroom, Mr. Urbach believes he may well have come up with the skeleton key that will open IM to an era of hyper-functionality.

If it pans out as promised, this is going to be a very interesting development in the world of Synchronous Social Software. True, you can already bring fellow IM-ers into various games, but typically small games. True, you can already engage in IM-like activities in the big blockuster MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games.. sometimes better known as MMORPGs if you include the RP=Role Playing), epitomized by Everquest and Asheron's Call: these games involve hundreds of thousands of participants, but necessarily there are a much smaller number on your personal radar screen at any moment.

The cool thing about Otoy, at least from my perspective, is that it would allow simple 'massive crowd' games (think of a Mexican wave in a big stadium), which is the direction Yanna Vogiazou and I have been heading in, with early entrants like her BumperCars and CitiTag games. We'll be talking about how these games fit together with the BuddySpace instant messaging / geolocation framework at the forthcoming ACM Symposium on Applied Computing in a 'Ubiquitous Computing' track in March 2005, and as that progresses I'll be posting related developments here on Get Real. Readers interested in big-crowd presence and gaming, whether real, virtual or mixed-reality, may also be motivated to check out this List of Urban Mobile Games (from Howard Rheingold via several intermediate sources).

In the meantime we look forward to seeing how Otoy evolves.