Whilst Roo is off at SXSW doing his thing on March 5th/6th I will be at the Web 2.0 and Beyond: Applying Social and Collaborative Tools for Business Problems(this is the upcoming.org link) conference here in the UK explaining all things metaverse and also the use of Web 2.0 to move a corporation into action as we have done with eightbar and our various other creative outlets.
So if you are wondering what this is all about, and there is way more than just hearing me talk about life as epredator, then sign up and come along to this one.
The full page of speaker details are here, we also have Ian McNairn from IBM Software Group talking on day 2.
Category Archives: Hursley
InstantAction in browser 3d multiplayer
As many of you know our IQ internal metaverse is based on the garage games Torque engine so we are always interested to see what is happening with it out there in the world. InstantAction.com teamed up with GarageGames to create this new multiplayer game experience in browser. The aim is to go way past the flash games approach and have a more detailed engine running that has grown up from game development.
So, being beta style Web2.0 people Roo, Rob and I dived in to see what it was like as the beta opened up some new games.
They have Marble Blast, Screwdriver and ThinkTanks all available as online or single player games.
Now the company is focused on all sorts of gaming experiences, a little past casual and puzzle games, aiming to exceed xbox live and playstation network.
It will be interesting to see how the dev kits help us in the future with corporate style intraverses. At the moment we still have a client install, though one that runs on mac, pc and linux for our metaverse. Also as instantaction is still in beta we have not explored what happens server side with interactions and persistence of worlds. I have no doubt someone is building something out there in garagegames land and I know we woudl love to see it.
For now lets enjoy the fact the games look pretty good and see where this develops.
Rare audio of both metaverse evangelists on Voices in Business
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
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
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.
An overview
Mushrooms and flower
Orchid style flower
A very pretty golden flower
The fish
Algernon and I also bumped into Tateru Nino and SpiderKitten Marabeau in a small valley on the sim too.
The trees grow in front of your eyes
Here is a large one
There are some nice touches like the mist over the lake too.
The entrance
The jetty
Surfing fish
Australian Open SL Fashion Winner
Congratulations to the Australian Couture on Court in Second Life winner Betty Doyle
The rest of the runners up can be found here, well done all
Augmented Reality head on a platter
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
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
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
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.