Eric Rice has some good anecdotal evidence on how people seem to approach things like Second Life.I have noticed that there are varying sets of people, even in a technical environment such as I we work in that sometimes find Second Life building hard. There are also people that a retiscent to leave things lying around. There does seem to be a general trend that non techies have no preconceptions about how things should work, objects are objects. They see the build tools, build a box, wear it on their head accidentally and then move on to do some shopping. The problem for an established techie is that in order to learn building you tend to have to do that in public. The same as how you have to learn to blog with an audience. Scripting is a different matter, nearly, that’s more traditional. You can write code hidden away in objects, though the outputs of the code tend to be shouting status messages to all an sundry. People will come up and ask, “what ya doin?”. Not something that normally happens when deep in code.
So I think it may be the introvert versus the extrovert factors that change the initial learning experience, though we have new extroverts in the blogging world that may only be digital extroverts.
As more and more non techies, non geek people seem to be populating the metaverse we are getting a some new digital personas, and presumably new ways to work out who is who. An interesting social trend.
Author Archives: epredator
Baseball and Wimbledon in SecondLife
Over at Electric sheep they are announcing major league baseball as an event This of particular interest given my current Wimbledon tennis proof of concept that we have been demoing the past two weeks here at Wimbledon along side the official championships site
This has been getting some very good reactions from my collegues and my customers, and it feels like we are riding the start of a very large wave.
Taking risks and Blogging
Robert Scoble talks about the risks and intent of blogging
It links to a very good video of the man himself, and one that all bloggers and people doing things that are considered “risky” outside of their normal role should watch.
As a blogger, and having created a bit of a Second Life movement, as you can see in the rest of this blog, I can really relate to what Scoble is saying. The knowledge that there are risks in talking publicly, whether in blogs, at conferences, in presentations and that you have to be mindful that social networks work both for the positive and the negative is very true and something I have pointed out to people. The fact that many people do not want to talk to groups of people and share their ideas is an interesting and correct observation, whether as a blogger or as a face to face presenter. People do get to practice they public speaking persona in a less risky environment of a blog, gain a voice and a position on a subject, then present and talk to people.
The motivations for blogging, of having something to say, and having some sort of reason to take a risk in putting that agenda forward certainly resonates with me too.
The rise of user created content, the blog,wiki and metaverse effect applied to any form of media which now allows anyone to get their ideas out to the world at the click of a button is a key theme that we should all ponder how that might change what we do, just as e-business has.
Wimbledon, Shuttles and July 4th
I am currently onsite at the Wimbledon Championships. This involves sitting in the basement of the media centre with my collegues from Hursley, Atlanta and Raleigh. Being couped up delivering wimbledon.org always brings an interesting group dynamic. We have a strange 14 hour day, with a mixture of customer visits (a.k.a. tech tours), checkpoints, testing out new things and the day job.
With my Wimbledon second life demo as part of the tech tour it was natural that a few of the guys in the room would get into it too. Yesterday was a prime example and trigger. It was July 4th. There was a shuttle launch. We have lots of bandwidth. So streaming media of the launch both for the Uk and the US guys in the room was a must.
The difference this year was that some of us had Second Life running, and were at the excellent spaceport alpha. It turned out that of the 70 or so people at the event in the prime location 5 of us were IBMers from eightbar in Second Life, including a husband and wife team. The event was the first one I have seen that had overflow areas as more areas of land were turned over to streaming the video.
The nature of the event and the buzz we had in RL and SL in an enclosed space made it all very exciting and enabled a few more people to ‘get’ why metaverse technologies really do work.
More pictures are on snapzilla and the SLURL to spaceport alpha
Trends in brands and the metaverse
This article is a must read at trendwatching.comThe across the board examination of how brands have to take opportunities in the virtual space is fascinating. I already get some of this, but to see it written by these analysts is great.
The Warner Music man who ‘gets it’
Having written a , for me, quite deep expression of my experience with the Regina Specktor album pre-release by Warner it has been great to see all the coverage and postive bloggage about Ethan Kaplan ‘blackrim glasses’ at gnomedex. He is a person who ‘gets it’. The people writing about him ‘get it’ such as Eric Rice and the people I meet in Second Life and related places all seem to have the same approach and same ideas. Not identical, but birds of a feather. It is important, as Eric writes, that we still work with the rest of the world. No technology or social change just happens overnight. I think that they guys and I here in Hursley have both a creative and future looking point of view, but mix that with practical uses. So it feels like the Metaverse is the place to express this and make a serious and innovative contribution.
A good indication that IBM understands Second Life
Over at 3D point, is a great article about IBM’s Linda Sanford at the Supernova conference. The principle being that there is an acknowledgement that leaders grow their skills and emerge from the ‘gaming’ platforms. Second Life of course not being a game, but it is a gaming engine.
It has been interesting for me to meet many other IBMers in virtual space. Who have the same outlook and views as I do, but all with different angles. We often communicate across the corporation, so lots of us know one another. However, using the internal blogs some wikis and Second Life with some of our social networking tools real communities form around good ideas.
I am proud that much of this is coming from Hursley, as well as IBM. Though I know it is an uphill struggle to convince everyone as it all looks like way too much fun to be real work.
Meanwhile today I am onsite at Wimbledon.org but Rob (who was at home) joined in with our excitement and then crushing defeat in the World Cup.
The nicest place in Second Life
I toured around last night, whilst trying to remove the constant images in my head of tennis courts. I arrived at spaceport alpha. I have to say it is one of the best builds I have seen. It is a representation and history of space travel. I have visited kenneddy space centre in RL. This place has way more tings to look at :-). Accurate to scale builds of many types of rockets, shuttles etc. It also has some great museum articles and they also have a website. The whole place looked planned and thought about, had a key theme and a great ambience.
I had a good chat with Kat Lemiuex one of the museum staff/group that build and runs the place.
It was nice ot have that interaction too. Thanks Kat.
Well worth a visit by anyone interested in the educational aspects of SL and/or in anyway interested in space.
My snapzilla set of pictures from my visit are here that includes the SLURL
Now back to the tennis and Wimbledon.org
Wimbledon in Second Life
IBM, amongst other things, runs the official Wimbledon website during the event. This has lots of exciting well designed tennis information, real time scores and we deal with a large volume of traffic. Most years I am onsite for a period of time, helping explain how we bring innovation to our customer as part of a large cross IBM team. In the lead up to the event, and with what I know about the data we have, I decided to take on a mini proof of concept to bring Wimbledon to Second Life.
The first point is that this is a proof of concept. The build is designed to show the various ideas rather than be a 1:1 representation of the actual place. That’s very possible, but would take more days to build.
Secondly, lots of people could attend, the shots show only one avatar.
The example security gate is there to show you can detect things about peoples avatars in this case it shows the name and if they are wearng anything that contains code.
The first item on the tour is the RSS weather feed globe. It updates now every hour from a weather service, but has a manual overide for some other cities to prove its not all smoke and virtual mirrors
Next is the highlight. The real world tracking data for actual tennis matches. We get a feed for the normal web scoreboard and the point tracker. Here we plot the ball in 3d space and can rotate around it for various angles. The net is actually in control, if it gets told another url to use it plays another rally. This can be done manually, by talking to it, or by another control box that cycles through the various games.
We could put players on this, with the extra data we have on which shot has been played and knowing when the ball changes direction, but I was working to a timeframe.
As you can see you can control the camera even when your avatar is sitting enjoying the game
This shows several concepts. The main one is the 2 spheres, these are ambient devices that change size depending on who is winning the match, it shows the ambient device concept.
The picture on the right is of the IBM special keyboard used to record the matches, with keys for forehand smash, volley etc.
This shows one of the special products at work. The flying wimbledon towel. When anyone clicks the towel it act like a normal banner ad and directs them to the real wimbledon shop for the real towel. This banner add though can be flown as a vehicle. So I can fly around, advertising in places without leaving the ad lying around on private property. Avatar based marketing.
These images show a mixture of photo panels of things at Wimbledon and 3d objects such as the park benches. Just to add a bit of character. The go away rain sign is a legacy of many championships.
This is the most recent addition. advert watching posts. Stand in front of each of the screens and a streaming video of the IBM adverts with people from the AELTC and the BBC talking about Wimbledon, IBM and innovation
Whilst the trigger for the video is standing in front of a particular one (and hitting the movie play button in SL) the video will play on all the screens at once. It does not have to do this, I just liked the effect.
This is sort of Henman hill. Again to show a hint and nod to the real place. The video wall in this case is showing one of last years flash scoreboards, to show the analogy with the full size court and the previous web incarnations for tracking the ball.
Again this is a flavour of mixing 2d pictures with 3d objects the line of benches coming out of the space, giving depth.
More example pictures, with fencing and plants to show the potential
These pictures show an object raining multiple tennis balls down. No real reason its just fun, It actually the same code as the full court but the balls are physical, and hence fall rather than the one on the court demo that hang around, to help show the path of the ball.
The Fred Perry statue can be touched, and it will get the RSS feed from wimbledon.org
The chat history window shows us what Fred said, and formats its nicely.
Further up in the air, to use the small real estate, is a hovering Wimbledon shop.
The products in the shop include a Tshirt, using the actual tshirt as source to build a SL Tshirt that can be worn (see last photo). This shows the flow of money and product placement.
We also have some pose balls. These allow us to put an avatar in a pose when they are attached to it. In this case two backdrops with different poses. People then are able to take snapshots of them ‘in action’ like in new citizens plaza, but tennis branded.
The avatar I am wearing is available for sale from a poster of the avatar. Again shows the flow of money and the potential to look like real people.
We have a pagoda in the sky, its also a video wall showing one of the IBM vignette adverts.
So you can fly in and be immersed in the video.
And there we have it. Back to a normal(ish) look, but wearing my Wimbledon 06 tshirt.
If I leave the private Hursley island everyone will be able to see this shirt
We could do a whole lot more with the browser as a texture gecko engine, but for now the httprequest has made much of this much easier
For more on what IBM does at Wimbledon it really is a fantastic effort and a great partnership.
That is just the start of IBMers in the Metaverse.
U2 in SL, as it happens
The late night concert at the moment is “U2 in SL” They have real avatars with the real looks and the band are perfoming to a real U2 set of tracks. By enforcing a no prims(attachments) policy the perfomance of this island is manageing to hold 101 people. Which is very impressive.
The PA with the rapper Chamillionaire was good this evening, it was the real artist, talking and answering questions. However, a gig would have been better, except for his die hard fans.
U2 are a different league, albeit a tribute band. Seeing The Edge and Bono wander around the extended stage, posing and dancing in context with the music, surrounded by a mass of fans is great. It will only get better as the island servers and software get faster.
Of course a great benefit of it being virtual is that you dont have to be stuck at the back. Your avatar may well be behind someone tall, but you can move the camera yourself to get a great view.
Well done to Nyna Slate and all the crew.
Costume changes are also quicker than in real life
