Mr Web Roo got a ping from his brother who is a 3d designer amongst other things to say check out this augmented reality demo from artag.net
Well we did, as it is very impressive in that it just works and can use very low tech cameras to achieve the effect.
It struck me that it might be interesting to not just augment reality, but augment the virtual, but equally real metaverse experience. In this case Second Life.
So I did. I did not bother with lighting, tripods or very much else, and this did prove a little awkward.
However, Avatar met AR and has sparked a lot of thought now.
In particular around what a HUD actually is and the potential to Augment and mash virtual worlds together. Its a long thread of discussion, more later.

Yesterday Andy Piper pinged me and also sent me the landmark for IWOOT. I Want One of Those provides a whole host of mad gadgets and things you never knew you needed. Such as racing grannies (I got some for christmas).
Well now they have a Second Life presence. That shop allows you to tie your avatar to a shipping address, pick up a shopping cart and buy the products with Linden dollars then shipped to you in RL.
Its been a while coming, they may be more out there. The thing is this is the one I got to see first, for whatever reason. So this is the one I shopped at, and bought a couple of items.
The support emails appear to come from iwantoneofthose.com and I have shopped with them before so I feel quite happy.
Much of the build appears to be by Ceeq Laborde for his www.riellife.com so props to him for making this happen.

All pictures from snapzilla

I notice also in coming back that the pictures sent via postcards are now full size. So poor snapzilla is going to get get swamped with data. The old sizes were not production quality, but handy for blog posts. I am not complaining, as I can choose what I send but its an example of a knock on effect of a simple change in one system.
Nicer postcards -> more network traffic -> more storage required by service providers -> longer load times on blog posts if no editing done -> etc. Showing there is no such thing as a small change (maybe thats a post for terra nova 🙂 )

Roo and I have been invited to guest author over on Terra Nova for the month of August. So we have started already, we twittered about and then tossed a virtual coin (my real one is in the post) and I went first.
It is an odd experience to consider writing on someone else’s blog. As you know we all felt the need to split and write our own blogs a bit more (even though it appeared that this was my personal blog sometimes!). Now two of us are off writing similar but different things on the famous TN. When you combine this with the internal blogs we have inside IBM there are a lot of places to say things and reach people.
As I have found though the themes may be the same, and some cut and paste may occur you do have to put on a very different persona for each blog.
My personal blog outside on epredator.com I will say and do what ever, be as off topic as I want (within normal parameters as an employee of course!)
Eightbar used to be rougish fun, out blogging one another combining on posts, but now we have a responsibility to our eightbar brand and to each other.
Internal blogs…. well we are all freinds here so its about a bit more depth of thought aswell as quirky awareness.
Terra Nova? Well this could be about extending the credibility to a different audience. Eightbar gets a lot of Second Life traffic, though we try and show the broadness of its meta guild nature across other platforms, Sl is still where the extreme ideas are demonstrated at the moment. TN takes us to a whole load of gamers and thinkers, som of whom will not want corporate involvement in any of this. Some will be purists.
We will, just as with slashdot these days, get into raging academic arguments.
However, it is all good. Discussion is good. Contributing to discussions is not wrong.
Like most of the things I kick off doing I do not know the precise outcome, I just know the direction is right. Back in the early eightbar in SL days we sat and planned that we should try and get a trackback or reference from TN. That did not happen as such. Instead something much better, guest authors, came along. in measurement terms we have far far exceeded the plan and now hope to make use of the opportunity.

Do you remember seeing this image and post back in october 2006

Well now there is more as this has advanced a great deal and Turner and a team have been working to get more data, more understanding and to dynamically build metaverse versions of system architecture representations.
This time its video, and its a talky too with Turner’s northern tones. See what you think. It all started on Hursley sim 🙂

The wimbledon.org website that IBM runs with the AELTC is extremely popular. It is a 2 to 3 week event. In that period this year we have had Over 8.5 million unique users logged onto the Wimbledon Website , visiting the site over 40 million times! More statistics are here
Statistics are always ones to argue about but the rise has been dramatic again. I remember back to the early days in 1998 when used to count hits per minute. The world record at the time was 100,000 hits per min from nagano winter olympics. A few months later Wimbledon reached a peak of 144,000. We have stoppped counting those sorts of hits as caching and server management is around reducing hits, but making sure delivery of information is quicker to users. Hence being able to deliver points from court to web in less than 2 seconds.
I was often asked by people who popped along to the Second life Wimbledon why we did not advertize the second life location more.
My response was usually around the fact that if we did indeed put a link on the wimbledon.org homepage a sim that could holds 50-100 people, and a system such as second life which is just reaching 8 million accounts would probably count as a denial of service attack. Already the IBM sign ups people make through our proxies trigger Linden Labs detection for DoS in that it may appear to be multiple registrations from the same IP address. It would be unfair to have a knock on effect on everybodies experience. Having said that I saw a lot of people with sign ups during the torunament and we were teh first place thet had visited.
Things such as the times article reached many people as did the extensive blog coverage by everyone. This approach to reaching people is in itself a good lesson. Also reaching people who take the time to find you means they want to come along and want to talk.
We have in the past seen the Wimbledon website have an effect on the internet as a whole, aswell as having saved the internet, such as the year Judge helped the worlwide DNS root failure by soaking up the requests in the backup server farms to ease the congestion the word was seeing.
So it would have been irresponsible to have overly advertised Wimbledon SL this year. I am sure that the experience would have been reduced aswell for those people not able to meet us behind the scenes in SL, hence keeping it small and personal.
The finals were great in SL, and we had a bit of an aftershow dance up, and I will never forget the dancing strawberry.

picture from snapzilla
I am not sure if I will be there next year, its always a struggle and always an honour. I do know the desk will look exactly the same as the room gets mothballed for 12 months now. I also know what ever part fo the team is there they will do an awesome job and leave with a massive sense of pride.

Well the event is nearly over, a mammoth 2 weeks in one place in Second Life on IBM 7 for Wimbledon Slawn tennis (props to veejay for the slawn word :-))
It made sense to capture the build in video, though it will be foreever burned in my memory.
We have had approximately 200 visitors a day and I have talked to most of them. On so many varied subjects from “what is wimbledon?” “What does IBM do?” to “how does the script work?” and “do you do builds for other people?”

This has been a tremendous success, with the customers through on the tours liking what we have done and showing an innovative side. The fantastic feedback from people in SL. Even more answers to interesting questions that emerge for me when I am explaining what we do. Finally the fact that build that the team have done works as a tremendous vehicle for showing what IBM does at Wimbledon.

This time last year there was a lot of suspicion around “playing games” but that build last year acted as a springboard for IBM’s involvement in the metaverse. This years build we have taken some more risks and tried some new ideas, out in public. Which is the way things should be done IMHO.

So well done Laronzo Fitzgerald, Andy Remblai, Judge Hocho and Pipe Hesse for a fine build.
Special thanks to Elliejane Roberts for extending the work she does in RL at the venue into SL to explain IBM and the sports events team to visitors.

Thankyou to all the people who have visited, chatted and told other people about what we have been up to.

Wimbledon Second Life back in 2007 from epredator on Vimeo.

Welcome to Kolya Oh or Nicolai Rygh in Real Life. He has been very active with us here in the metaverse recently and has some very intersting customer projects. He has registered http://www.eightbar.no which is our first franchise.
Nicolai has written the following piece, as we experiment with extending the eightbar brand.

I read on a blog last week about a future scenario where Gucci launched their new DRM-free clothes.
“These threads can be worn an infinite number of times, anytime of the year. If you happen to have multiple closets, these DRM-free clothes can be moved to and from your different closets.”
This made me think about the Digital Rights Management in SL and other virtual worlds. My avatar owns a suit that I paid some linden dollars for. It is “my” virtual business wear, but I don’t own any other right then to have it on my avatar, keeping it in my inventory in SL or deleting it. The same is with my SL car – a brand new MD C-class that I spent some Linden dollars to get but I don’t own it as I can’t sell it.
When you buy a commodity in real life is it because you are planning to put the item in use or it is an investment. The difference between the two is that the first will be worth nothing to others as soon as you have started using it, but the other can be sold at a lower or higher price later. There is a second-hand market for a lot of stuff, so even if it isn’t a good investment, the possibility to cut your losses on the investment is possible.
As SL is growing in terms of economic factors, and some people even argue that it is an independent economy, the terms of business between avatars should over time equal real life terms. If I go to the car dealership and pick up a brand new car that I can drive around in, and use as mine but that I can’t sell or transfer it; then that isn’t a buy. This setup in real life term is leasing. You pay for the right to use, but you don’t get the ownership of the item. And as I can’t sell or transfer my SL stuff, then the real life term would be that I have a leasing agreement with the owner. The upside in the real world is that you pay for a service of using the commodity and not the risk of owning an asset of depreciating value. Normally you pay fixed amounts weekly or monthly when you lease, and not all upfront.
In the end if I build a successful avatar with the right to use a lot of stuff that I can’t transfer to other avatars, then the solution could be to sell my avatar to somebody else, and restart my adventure. That could even be the option if I would like to move my virtual business to another platform. The market to sell avatars is probably a bit thin at the moment, but on other scenarios the possibility to buy a player with high market value is normal. Establishing a market for trading avatars would affect the in world value of the items and commodities, and maybe also the impact of using this strict DRM settings on the items. The next question would be if I own the right to replicate my real life items in SL. If I do, then the DRM settings on the items in SL are only to secure the rights of the guy that did the development (and in this case replicated some real life objects). The right to use the objects is only have restrictions in SL, so if I find a way to copy the items out of SL into some 3D warehouse for reuse in other virtual worlds, then I am Copyrights and patents in real life don’t transfer automatically over to SL, but I guess we’ll see some law suits that will resolve this if anybody provoke some of the big brands. And the question then we’ll be where the border between virtual and real life digital rights will be.
Nicolai Rygh/Kolya Oh(SL)