It is fair to call this an industry or a business now I think. Still a fledgling one but definitely shaping into an industry. One of the ways you I think you can tell is that stories are not just about what has been done with a technology, but start to get stories and general interest in the people doing things with them. Much of Web 2.0 is dotted with Rock ‘n’ Roll personalities. Virtual worlds have created another set of names to know and personalities to track around various companies.
With the various moves around Linden Lab, Philip Rosedale stepping aside and Mark Kingdon joining as the CEO it was interesting to see that this was news that appeared in all sorts of business journals and publications.
The most recent, and significant story this week has been Cory Ondrejka, former Linden Lab CTO is now Senior Vice President of digital strategy as EMI. There can be lots of discussion about the media industry and the benefits that EMI will have hiring a known name in the Virtual World and game industry. As Richard Bartle pointed out on Cory’s blog announcement this has made it to the UK Guardian business news
So we have articles not about whether virtual worlds make sense, whether working in or on them has value, but instead about how a media business is going to find new ways to reach audiences and customers. That’s business taking this all very seriously.
p.s. Good luck Cory from eightbar
Author Archives: epredator
Second Life live and active web pages on a prim – I never knew it did that
I have to admit to be rather excited about what we just discovered about the web page on a prim elements in Second Life now. For some reason I had assumed that the new drop downs on land management that let you replace a texture with a web page (as opposed to a video or jpg image from a URL) were simply going to render a flat image of a page. This is the pattern that had been used by third parties and also by some of out internal work in the early days of SL.
I had experimented a little with the new drop down when it went live some time ago, but today I happened to hit a page (in this case our French Open site whilst investigating some Wimbledon options.
The page rendered very well, lots of detail, readable etc, but I then noticed that the clock was flashing on the page. It was changing in real time.
Apologies to all the people who have been working on this, probably blogging to, but I had made an incorrect assumption. The web page is being rendered by the client and on top of that, whilst it cant run flash, it can cope with html and javascript based changes. For those of us on corporate networks it can also render things inside our firewalls as its client side once the URL is set by the land parcel.
Interaction is still a problem of course, but we have ways around that. The ability to get to web information in a shared fashion always seemed to be a killer app. There is so much content out there and people don’t always want to rebuild everything. So in the hunt for interoperability at the data level we also now have some tools to hand in Second Life for interoperability on glass.
To highlight the dynamic nature of this here is a video of twittervision doing its thing in SL.
Jump Around, Jump Around get up get up and get down – Interoperability
As has been blogged and reported and twittered there was a little experiment that had some success yesterday involving common login’s from Second Life and OpenSim. A form of avatar interoperability, albeit across very similar platforms.
One of the best places to read this is here at Zha Ewry’s blog as he’s running the IBM side of the experiments.
Lego Augmented Reality Kiosk from Total Immersion
Augmented reality, we love it here at eightbar. The blend of the real and the virtual. Roo recently wrote about the Radio 1 band in your hand now you need to see this excellent Lego AR kiosk. (Thanks to our collegue Alex Phillips (a.k.a DK) who pinged me a similar demo from a conference by the same people)
It is by Total Immersion
The Metaverse 3
Forces gathered in IBM Hursley House yesterday. Whilst we cant see which briefing we were doing there were three of us there from the industry. Roo and Ren (No relation) Reynolds and myself were swapping anecdotes, ideas and whats been going on from an industry point of view in virtual worlds to a very interesting group of people, who did not need convincing.
As this was officially and through our briefing centre we had name plaques. So being the interweb tech geeks and camera enabled we all took the same photo.
Click through to the notes on this Flickr photo to see what happens when the Metaverse 3 gather 🙂
We may not have as many metarati as the US West Coasters or as Brooklyn, but there is still a lot of shared knowledge over here in the UK and quite often centred around Hursley.
Second Life on your Mobile – Vollee
Vollee is now live in beta and allows you to access Second Life on a 3g or Wireless mobile. I managed to check this out on the train coming back from London. Though it was much easier at home as the London Southampton train has some of the worst phone coverage you can possibly imagine.
It did however work at Basingstoke. I twittered about how rock and roll this was.
The way Vollee appears to work is to be rendering things elsewhere for you and streaming video. Whilst laggy it is amazing to be able to do this and direct your avatar around the place. We have had things like this working on Activeworlds and did a very homebrew version last year at Wimbledon.
This service though, is that, a service. So it will no doubt get a lot of testing from the metarati in the next few weeks.
I cut a short video of Hursley and IQ islands with the Wimbledon build from last year ( something we are looking to update over the next 2 weeks) and then flying over to Andy’s SL rendition of his house that also appears on twitter now.
Anyway I can atleast navigate and see what is going on over 3g or wireless. I have not tried a chat, it will be a bit cumbersome. Of course the people that see me online may not know I am on a mobile. That may be a thing to work on next, a “I am in on a restricted client” message.
Still maybe at wimbledon this year I can work from the roof garden on 3g (the wireless is not great up there)
Eating the IT Elephant
I just got the review copy of Richard Hopkins and Kevin Jenkins book Eating the IT Elephant : moving from Greenfield Development to Brownfield.
I have known and worked with Richard for quite a few years so I was very interested when he started to talk about this book, then when this exploded into using Second Life for visualization of existing system architectures (starting on Hursley island) it got me even more interested.
Image from snapzilla
The book is not solely about using virtual worlds to visualize systems, but it is a part of the whole. For any IT architects out there and software engineers many of the themes around complexity with familiar. As will the not so good solutions of representing complex architectures in reduced down powerpoint slides or stickers on a wall.
There is a lot more to the book, and I need to read the rest properly. It has a foreword by Grady Booch and by the one of the UK based IBM fellows Chris Winter. They make interesting reading. Though I really like Richard’s family dedication. I wont spoil that for you 🙂
They have their own site an blog over at elephanteaters.org the book is on amazon the uk link is here
Tales from the firepit – The story of a virtual world community
A little while back many of us in eightbar and the wider IBM virtual universe community got to spend time talking to Rita J. King. Rita, or Eureka Dejavu as we all think of her was commissioned to write about how we got to where we are in virtual worlds. The story of a community forming.
The finished article is linked as a PDF from this blog post on Dispatches from the Information Age
It was great too when Rita and Josh came to visit us and we met up in Portsmouth as part of their Dancing Ink Productions world tour. As we always say these virtual worlds are not there to replace real life but add to it. When it means you get to hang out with great people like these it makes it all worth it.
Rita points out how she got to know Grady Booch through doing this piece, a massive figure in software engineering, it was Eureka who introduced me to him at a post virtual worlds conference dinner. To complete the chain a few hundred IBMers were at an award event called the “Corporate Technical Recognition Event” CTRE for short in Phoenix last week. Amongst the lucky award winners was our very own eightbar Daz and here is the picture I took, mainly to show the Peter Kaye lookalike service food in the chef’s hat, but I realized this slightly blurred picture actually also had Grady Booch in it, in the red shirt on the left.
You can read more about the event here and here. I should add that this amazing gathering we were lucky enough to be a part of also included Jeff Jonas who was being made a Distinguished Engineer which is a very big role in IBM. So present company excepted it was a massive gathering of some of the most influential technical people in our massive company. People I would never have got to meet if it had not been for virtual worlds either. Having an IBM Fellow of some note (The most important elected position in IBM for us techies), John Cohn come up to me at the bar and say hey it’s you did my ego the power of good I must say!
That’s enough name dropping and self congratulating, this post is about Eureka’s report
Being who we are online and offline – Generation V?
A common theme often emerges when showing people virtual worlds and metaverses. The theme is that of identity. Whilst sometimes this is the more usual business side of identity “how do we know someone is who they are claiming to be” that is actually a slightly different problem to the one that is actually expressed “people are hiding behind their avatar”.
Much of what I present to people is around my online persona as epredator. This is intended to help them understand that we all have projections and labels that we deliver in online interactions. The avatars in virtual worlds just make that slightly more obvious as we have a humanoid puppet with some elements of our name or reputation attached to it.
In SL I tend to be a masked science fiction predator avatar. In my explanations I go on to show that that is not something I hide behind, but is in fact a very expressive facet of my personality, with a link to my regular offline self in that I wear the same leather jacket in RL and SL. I am not choosing to hide who I am, but show more of who I am through the avatar puppet.
This approach is not an obvious one, as very often we take on avatars for games, such as Nico in GTA IV and take on a role to progress a story.
As having an online persona is a bit of a shock to some people, I try and explain they already have one, when they email, or sametime IM someone. Bloggers know they have a voice and a persona they develop for a particular style of post. What people are less likely to contemplate, but are led to do so by the principles of online personas, is that they exist with multiple facets to who they are all the time. People are slightly different at work to at home, with friends and with family.
In business someone might act tough and hard nosed as they are expected to blend with an ideal, yet at home they may be gentle and caring. Having to think who you are and understand how your persona(s) alter those around you is not something many people do. The people who do do this effectively are usually the leaders in organizations, they use their persona(s) in various ways to gather support and push things forward. (There are also people who lie, cheat and steal using multiple personas).
So, the premise here is that being online and having avatar representations or social media profiles is no more dishonest than anything else used in the wrong way. In fact I think there is a lot to be said for trying to make sure that all your personas are integrated, that it is really you, that you do not hide behind any of them, be it position at work, fame and fortune or just an unusual lifestyle.
I was very pleased to see that my anecdotal pop psychology on this matter was justified by this fantastic quote “We get so used to disguising ourselves to others that we end up becoming disguised to ourselves” by the French writer and philosopher The Duke de La Rochefoucauld. I came across this on the fantastic blog Slow Leadership in an article about leaders being genuine at work and not just playing the part. (Which was in turn inspired by an ft article by Stefan Stern.
The Slow Leadership article is specifically referring to bosses and reportees, but I think it has much wider relevance as we start to alter those traditional structures in business (or enterprise 2.0).
The bottom line though is that we can hide behind avatars, just as we can hide behind a desk, a suit, a name plaque, an email address, a front door or a process. Likewise we can actually get to be more integrated and honest individuals able to work, share and play with others with avatars just part of the mix. The disingenuous nature of some people in any field is not a reason ignore metaverses in business.
**Update: I recently read this brilliant description of a change in the generational divide. The term Generation V is used to alude to the change in attitudes across generations. We no longer need to consider Gen X, Gen Y etc, but instead those people that have merged across those generations and operate online with varying degrees of engagement and persona.
The article is well worth a look here from Gartner analyst Adam Sarner
Thanks to Malburns for twittering Giff Constables piece on it that led me to it
Rockets in action and I don’t mean salad leaves
On friday a contingent of the Hursley Emerging tech crew (a good few of who are founder members of eightbar) gathered in a Hampshire field to have a rocket launching competition. Fellow eightbar Rob Smart has produced this video of the entire event, its features all the key moments including Dave CJ’s rocket complete with wireless camera to record the flight, and landing (in a tree).
All the rockets were non-explosive, water powered, diet coke powered etc. It was a very good work day out and bonding experience, with a huge dose of geek chic on top of it. There was lots of participation too.
We did this last about 3 years ago, then I remember about 4 cameras. This time it was very well covered in digital form. We have a growing flickr pool if you are interested.