OnexOS: a 3D virtual world operating system!

In this article, we show how you may use OnexOS and live your online life in the Object Network.

Daily usage of OnexOS and examples

OnexOS is an operating system that will let us create a single, shared 3D universe. OnexOS gives you and your family and friends a shared space for creativity, sharing and communicating.

Its primary unique feature is its use of links - between everything we create and between each of our creations within a single shared universe.

In its early releases, the primary building material we use will be flat panels, that can be used both for making rooms and for writing messages on.

So the first thing you may do in OnexOS is to build a family room to share stuff. Just quickly snap or link together some panels into a room, then put a panel on the wall as a pinboard space to pin or link to messages and photos. Everyone can visit this room and will see each other and can say "Hi!", and add to the pinboard.

Building worlds together, with links between objects

Having everything in the world, from photos to cities and from leaves to forests, linked together allows us all to quickly create a potentially huge, single, shared universe.

With links you can build a city:

build a house from panels linked into rooms and rooms linked together
add more rooms to build your virtual family home, perhaps one room for each of you
then build a street made of links to all the houses of your family and friends
add some extra houses by creating one house and dropping its link up the street
then build a city with links to the streets of other families

You can build shared experiences like a gallery:

place a large city gallery with walls linking to everyone's favourite photos in their albums or photo frames
rebuild the gallery to create many rooms organised by theme
a picture matching two themes in the gallery can appear twice with a link from each room
if you like the gallery's "landscape" room, simply grab its link and paste it onto your own virtual house
now you can wander in easily at any time (but you'll be in the gallery now, so need to hit the back button to return home!)

Or a warehouse:

create a warehouse store full of links to 3D objects to share with each other
fill it with plants, tables, trees, rocks, houses, castles
if you want to use something, you don't walk out with it, you just grab a link to it and drop it where you want
you can even grab a bit of that castle: if you like its tallest tower, simply take its link

You can build entire worlds:

create a pretty tree on a little hill
replicate a link from your tree to your sister's leaf, repeated all over it
then multiply that tree up to a forest on a mountain by dropping hill and tree links all over
if your sister changes the leaf to red in autumn, all trees that use the leaf go red together
attach that mountain to the back of your city with just a link, and another link to get back again
but have a signpost in the forest that also contains the city's link so you can save the walk and teleport there!
if you visit a fantasy village made by a different group of folk, and like it, share its link with the other families in the chat room
then if everyone in each town agrees, you can all co-create a highway through the hills to link the two towns up in each direction

How does the 2D stuff work in 3D?

Panels can be used to create notes and photos. These can be shared, pinned to the walls or even left lying around on the floor.

if you want to share a poster from your virtual bedroom, simply grab its link and pin it to the kitchen pinboard
now if you change anything on the poster, everyone in the kitchen can see that change too
drop in a link from your scrapbook of notes and photos to one of your mum's notes on the desk in her virtual study
pin a link in the middle of your virtual kitchen wall to one of your scrapbook photos
keep a shopping list in the virtual kitchen that everyone can see when going out

There are panels representing documents, that know about layout. You can drop panels with text onto or into them and they will then line up with one another and you can scroll them. You can then re-order this sequence of paragraph panels easily.

Similarly, there's a chat panel, where the stack of message panels it contains can't be re-ordered as they are timestamped, so can only be added to at the end.

These document and chat panels are really just sequences of links to paragraph panels. So this means that you can easily build a new document or poster by simply collecting and dropping some links into it. These could be links to paragraph or message panels that you find elsewhere, links to select chat messages or links to photos you like on someone's wall. You can of course, link to bigger things in your document, like other documents, or to complete 3D objects, or to an entire virtual city.

With document, poster and chat panels:

before going out, anyone can quickly make a personal shopping list by grabbing just the links to the items of the shared one that they plan to fetch themselves
create a 2D chat panel on the kitchen wall, which everyone can grab a link to to put in their own rooms
create a chat for several families
create a billboard with links to text paragraphs and images, describing an upcoming meeting or event
remind everyone by putting the billboard up around the city, by simply dropping its link down
if the event time changes, when you edit the billboard, all instances around update
create signs pointing the way to landmarks, containing a link to allow direct teleporting

Or build a city library:

next to the city gallery on the high street, put down a library full of links collecting the best documents you have created or discovered
maybe the holiday plans, favourite recipes or music reviews you each have in your rooms
or documents "published" by other families
collect an array of some links to snippets of text and images that you find useful for a short story you're writing
obviously, a stack, array or list of links is also an object in the world, so has its own link
if you like a paragraph in someone's document, then of course it also has a link that you can grab for your snippet collection
sit in the library and surround yourself with (links to) those snippets while you compose it

Read on

To read on, go here, here or here for an expanded view of this approach with examples, or here to read about the smartwatch version.

There's also a list here of many more, broader and deeper, articles and presentations about the Object Network.

OnexOS is still under development. If you want to get involved as an early adopter and tester, get in touch!

Duncan Cragg, 2023. Contact me