Author Archives: epredator

About epredator

Director of metaverse and emerging tech consultancy http://www.feedingedge.co.uk Former IBM Consulting IT Specialist with 18 years at the company Games player epredator xbox live tag. epredator potato in second life

Rare audio of both metaverse evangelists on Voices in Business

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Roo and I did a podcast the other day. It is a rare thing for us both to be recorded at the same time.
You can listen to it here on Mike O’Hara’s Voicesinbusiness blog.
Just in case you cant tell the difference Roo is the posh sounding one and I am the slightly less posh (or scruffy) sounding one.
We covered a lot in a single take and it was both where all this has come from where it is going and where it is now. So good stuff.
I am not going argue over the billing with Roo first as Mike actually came to see Roo but I had gap appear in the diary so joined in too.

(From mikes blog here is the run down of the timings)
00:12 – Mike O’Hara introduction
00:40 – Start of interview
01:01 – What is a “metaverse evangelist”? (Roo)
02:16 – What is IBM actually doing in virtual worlds? (Ian)
04:35 – Events for IBM’s partners and customers
05:32 – Customer builds and retail opportunities
06:48 – Why should firms take this seriously?
09:21 – The scale issue
11:15 – Human interaction in the 3D environment
13:10 – Mistakes to avoid
15:24 – Demographics
16:01 – Ian’s predictions for the future
20:10 – Roo’s predictions for the future
22:59 – Web 2.0 style of adoption
24:36 – End of interview
24:42 – The Eightbar blog
25:19 – Wrap-up

Grady Booch on Ugotrade

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Over on Ugotrade there is a really detailed and interesting post and interview with the great Grady Booch. He is an IBM fellow and one of the most influential people in software engineering. Virtual worlds have become very important to him. The post covers things like Bluegrass, a software development environment using the torque engine and integrated with the Rational tooling.
I was lucky enough to end up at dinner with Grady at the VW San Jose as Eureka DejaVu was having a real life gathering.
Grady’s humble yet worldy wise demeanour reminded me of a post that Scoble made a couple of days ago in Davos where Bono turned up and said “I am a rock star… sort of”.
In the UK there is also an interview with Grady in the British Computer Society magazine entitled the Mighty Booch, which is reference to the comedy show the Mighty Boosh 🙂
We have not covered Bluegrass much yet on Eightbar though we are very close to the team given our shared interest in Torque. So expect more on here soon.

Artificial Life – Timeless style

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I bumped into Timeless Prototype the other day in SL. It had been a while. I asked what have you been up to and he answered. Come over and have a look. So I TPed into Primula Risa on Delphic
Timeless (of Multigadget, multichair and the london eye fame) had started an artificial life sim in motion. Svarga is of coure the famous one but Timeless is doing some other interesting things.
The area is full of trees, mushrooms, ornate plants and flowers that all grow before your eyes, much of the flowere work is that of Spiderkitten Mirabeau and Timeless has worked with SK and brought them to life. The positioning and seeding is all in the hands of the weather and of the random flow of seeds that you see fluttering around the place.
The things that initially attracted my attention were the fish that Timeless has created. Not only are they fantasticaly articulated and organic in their swimming motion but whilst we were talking the fish took an interest in us and congregated around the jetty we were on. Timeless days he has seen all sorts of unprogrammed but interesting behaviour as the fish take an interest in their surroundings and each other. He got me to hover in the water and a fish decided to lift me up and ‘rescue me’ clearly not scared of the predator AV 🙂
Having spent a little time watching things grow and happen it is intriguing how much more involved you can feel as the environment changes around you. The fascination of both the simple patterns of nature with the uniqueness of each part of the landscape as things grow and then die to respawn elsewhere is really good.
I know that under the covers there are some intersting pieces of code, but like all good alife it seems simple, the rules are simple, yet it causes (just like simple flocking) a very complex looking and attractive feel.
I have been looking at putting a-life approaches into some of the things we have in our internal metaverse and we have all talked about the growth of plants and other elements. So it is good to be inspired by such a cool build by Timeless.
I am sure he will add some comments with more details and depth, but you can appreciate it this on so many levels, so go and enjoy it 🙂
I took a whole lot of photos and the odd bit of video, I will need to edit the video up and youtube it. In the mean time heres some pictures from Snapzilla.
primula risa
An overview
mushroom
Mushrooms and flower
flower1
Orchid style flower
bell flower
A very pretty golden flower
Those smart fish
The fish
tateru and SK
Algernon and I also bumped into Tateru Nino and SpiderKitten Marabeau in a small valley on the sim too.
tree
The trees grow in front of your eyes
tree2
Here is a large one
mist
There are some nice touches like the mist over the lake too.
entrance
The entrance
jetty
The jetty
more fish
Surfing fish

Augmented Reality head on a platter

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Artag has come up again recently in a few posts. I was just getting an older webcam working my laptop so I used Artag to see if it was working ok and did this little render test. In this case with a head model of me generated by cyberextruder from a 2d photo. It looses registration a bit but as I said it was an old camera.

I was also intrigued to see whilst looking for a newer webcam that Logitech have some avatar webcam software. i.e. it responds to your talking movements but overlays or replaces you with a rendered object. I must try this. It would let me use seesmic more as I have not got the hang of small clips to camera yet.

Metaverse Evangelist in a top ten of jobs to have

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I was trying not to post too much today and let the discussion run on Roo’s points about the TV ad. However this was both cool and funny as well as shameless self publicity.
http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2008/01/ten-jobs.html
The metaverse evangelist role listed with 9 others 🙂 Flavourist, Brewmaster, Sensory Brander, Carbon Coach, Sleep Instructor, Interaction Designer, Roller Coaster Engineer, Animator and Travel Writer
It was interesting that Metaverse ended up in “enhancing life and the bottom line” especially given the recent dicussion on money and that TV ad.

VR Cave, Second Life and Retail at the NRF

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All things virtual featured in the latest NRF retail show. I spent some time talking to my collegue in Second Life a fellow member of eightbar Siobhan Cioc about the Dallas based GSC demo centre.
There is a background story to this that is also of interest to the Web2.0 community trying to establish the value of both blogging and virtual worlds.
I had seen a press release about IBM at NRF. Now that the metaverse acceptence has spread there are too many things and spin off for even us tuned in metaverse evangelists to keep up with. So here is what happened….
I saw the press release and the mention of a CAVE demo. I blogged internally about it to see if anyone had anything. Of course many of the people involved were at the show so that was always going to be a slow burn approach. However the question was out there, what are we doing? Then an article about NRF appeared on our intranet with a link to … yes an NRF blog. I tracked back on the blog entry asking the question again about the SL/Cave piece to try and connect the threads. Sobhan Cioc’s real life presence both replied on my blog and also sametime instant messaged me. We then both dived into our public SL islands where she explained what the project was all about. I listened and also took a small snap of film which I just put on youtube.
Now we have connected, discussed who we know in common, worked out some ways to help one another becuase we both used all the available technology and approaches to connect with one another. Why blog inside a company firewall….. Well there is your answer. We get people connected and questions answered. Some instantly.
I digress (I think I may have turned into Ronnie Corbett)
So the cave project. You may be able to see this here though I am not sure how well the link will work to the fox news item I will post a better one when I find it, this is hot of the press after all.
So just in case here is the explanation with some SL footage.
The team have created a configurable room in SL. The room is HUD controlled. The HUD allows elements in the room, in this case TV’s, Speakers and even the starlit sky above it to be adjusted. This approach has been shown before in various ways, the Circuit City couch and the Sears kitchens over on IBM 10. The difference here though was that the demo was built to specifically integrate with a head mounted display and the booth was build for this sort of interaction to occur.
Yes we have seen 3d rooms in VR before, but the difference here is this is on a public multi user platform. Much of what we saw with VR before was single user or just very expensive. This example was at a general retail conference, mainstream.
Being able to configure an room or a product experience and be able to share it with others, whether they are friends, other people with a vested interest and/or experts from the store or business is a very significant point.
Having a booth with a single SL or metaverse experience is good, but in some ways having multiple headset stations to help people see that someone else is going to join them may have made this more obvious to people that others need to be involved in the process.

I think we will see lots more concrete examples this year both of additional interfaces into virtual worlds, but more importantly interaction with existing enterprise systems such as product fulfilment.
Another thing to consider is scale here. People often worry about how many people can you get in one space, Roo has a good post on the way very soon. Here we have an example that if you are having a personal shopper experience you do not want a huge crowd of thousands around you?

Facing up to sculpties – More Archipelis

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I have done some more experiments with Second Life sculpties from the archipelis exporter. This time I used me as a subject rather than poor old Roo 🙂 This is all part of some tests about moving various types of things from place to place including into our internal metaverse.

Now I am no artist(I guess you noticed), but I felt quite intrigued by my results and the use of sculpties to do it. Bear in mind this was a very very quick experiment. In fact it too longer to process the video than it did to create and import the ‘head’.
As the object is made of multiple sculpties it opens up the options. I was going to script it to move around, thats the next little experiment.

Australian Open Tennis and Fashion Cash Prize in Second Life

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Our collegues and friends Gizzy Electricteeth, Pipe Hesse and their cat Linden down in Australia are running a public build of the Australian Open Tennis right now. Whilst British hopes are dashed alread with Andy Murray getting knocked out in the first round they are are still very high with respect to the Aus Open in SL. Regular readers will know the links between what we do and tennis. IBM sponsors and provides the sites for the major grand slam tennis events around the world.
Wimbledon 2 years ago was where we cut our teeth in seeing how we could represent the tennis data in a metaverse. This was done privately. Pipe and Gizzy then built a massive stadium for the Aus Open which very much expanded the ealry wimbledon proof of concept. Last year it was private though. Then this yeat in June we swapped places again. Taking and adding to Pipe and Gizzy’s work to create the public Wimbledon 07 event. This was an experiement in how people would repsond and we kept it small an intimate but staffed during the live event. So now we are back again with the Australian Open and they awesome stadium build on Slam1 is open.
tennis
In order to keep things fresh they are having an official fashion contest for all you couture experts out there in Second Life.

couture

We dont often do things that are press releases, but in this case I am pasting this in here to help you all out there.
This year, in conjunction with its sponsorship of the Australian Open
tennis, IBM is holding a ‘Couture on the Court’ competition to find out
who can create the best avatar tennis outfit in Second Life.

The winner will be voted by the SL residents and the first prize is
$250,000 Linden Dollars.

The top 10 eligible entrants will be awarded prizes – which will be
amounts in Linden Dollars.

Entry is open to any avatar created before Jan 8 2008 however
eligibility to recieve the Linden Dollar prizes is restricted to those
who fill in the full details of the entry form.

Entry, voting, and the full terms and conditions of the competition are
on IBM’s Australian Open island in SL – which is public this year (for
the first time). SL URL is
http://slurl.com/secondlife/slam1/201/239/24/.

Entries close 12am Jan 21, 2008 AEDT. Voting is open between 12am Jan
22, 2008 and 12am Jan 24, 2008. The winner will be announced on Friday
Jan 25 2008 .

Molecules and supercomputers in Second Life

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It is strange as we talk about this project all the time, yet as Ugotrade was looking for a link to it on eightbar it turns out we had not covered it well enought. So here we go.
We have said before about taking things from one place and regerenating them in another to find interesting ways to visualize data and system architectures and workflows in a business.
This project by our collegues in Watson took the result of some complex protein folding on a blue gene supercomputer and then injected the result of those calculations on the structure of a rhodopsin molecule into a scripted object in Second Life which then built a huge representation of that molecule.
The guys have an interview here over on SLNN.com Rez Tone and Zha Ewry are the main contacts.
The interesting thing is that as well as being a scientific visualization it has a place as an art installation and a though provoking place to gather. Inventiably when people gather there they tend to ask so what is this then? This leads to much deeper conversations about life sciences and supercomputing at IBM.
I tend to use this little clip of me sitting in the molecule to deomstrate the scale of this. Remember its all generated, not a manual build.