Admist all the business and fun within Second Life, once in a while real life hits you.
Our thoughts are with the family and friends of Dorien Van Den Elshout, who passed away at the age of 28. As Jordan Witherspoon she worked as part of the Alliance Navy. Whilst there may be much bickering over the role of the AN, we have colleagues and friends of eightbar who have lost a good friend.
There is a much more fitting obituary over at Sltimes where it would be good to gather and remember Dorien/Jordan.

As many of you will have been following the IBMers in eightbar have been exploring and building in Second Life for some time. Now we have grown in numbers as people start to see the possibilties in all sorts of fields, social, entertainment,education and business.
So IBM has focused its attention on a 12 island complex. Not to be the biggest, nor the brashest. Why 12? Well we had three people investing, and each bought a large island. Having three large islands initially gave us an I, B and M. Mostly to help us look at the concepts of different areas being for different things. We make no secret that we are all still exploring the potential, and the past few weeks the build by the team has evolved. A mixture of buying, building and partnering with friends out there in SL land.
We have ended up with a magnificent space. It is becoming more public. I say becoming as we have been doing guided tours to help explain to collegues and some customers and also press about the various ideas being explored. As we move on we will open up areas for more public access, and equally have invite only areas as we build new projects.
I hope we continue to grow with the same integrity and sensitivity to the virtual eco system as we have tried to do up to now.
Part of our launch party though was held at the zerog skyflyersshow, in conjuction with the NMC.
This was an amazing way to end this opening chapter. Algernon missed it as he was speaking at the Business Communicators meeting.So before some pictures of IBM land here are some snaps from the excellent snapzilla of the flyers in action. With a commisioned piece of music and many perfomers this was the most amazing thing I have experienced so far in Second Life.
The stills do not do it justice of course. It was a vibrant and organic swirl of lights with haunting music. And the perfomers nimbly moving and flying around us.

There is a video by DanCoyote Antonelli on you tube that is worth seeing

So the IBM 12 Islands have had quite a few visitors. Torley Linden popped in as a Melonzilla and Algernon gave a tour. Of course a Linden draws a crowd.

We have 3 auditoriums on the sim boundaries (to experiment with 4 lots of sims being able to hold many more people at events)

A large welcome area with a tour train to take people to the key spots.

This overview (Just find IBM on the main map) shows the 12 island layout

We have a home for greaterIBM the alumni association. An example of a social networking space and crossing enterprise boundaries to keep people in touch with their collegues in IBM.

We have the wonderful SOA hub. This lets the Service Orientated Architecture messages be explored in a virtual world. It allows customers and IBMers get to meet and talk to experts, and allows IBM to learn how to present its business messages in order to help other present theirs.

There are also some lovely pieces of artwork by IBMers in here too, such as lidia’s here. SL has brough t to the fore many creative talents across the company.

And links to other more ‘traditional?’ content

Our IBM virtual universe community had a building competition that was then voted on for a focal point for us, a clubhouse if you like. Turner Boehm won with this build.

Turner of course has also found a home for his visualization project (as started on Hursley). Here he takes in from the outside world the structure of an application. It then renders istelf as a 3d model to help understand the structure, and share with others. There is a lot too this and we will explain more soon.

We then also have a customer in Circuit City
This is an exploration of retail. A shop, with links to real products that can also be staffed. It pulls in lots of things from the web, store locators etc.

It also shows the potential in a virtual world of adjusting the world to meet your real world needs, and helping pick the product that best suits those needs. Thos sofa moves back and forth to show the size of TV that is recommended. For many people this became an ‘oh I get it now’ demo. When added in with the presence of others to help in the desicion. Its just one sofa and one TV, but you can see where this can go with a larger room and dealing with acoustics, visuals, wiring etc.

We also have an educational style campus, built mostly by Yossarian. This again helps both with running events, but also in showing people the potential.

Aimee Webber also is partnering with us on a House of Horizons project (that needs its own post here very soon). The area is under construction, but still on the tour.

Each area in Second Life adds to our understanding, and helps us show more people things that are relevant to them and their ideas.

We set up tours with tour guides and the islands got quite busy as the dot followers amongst you will see.

Gathering in Circuit city

In the mall of the future

All in all the event (which has been 2 days solid) has been very rewarding. A year ago, whilst I believed in virtual worlds and thier potential I could not have dreamed we would be doing what we are now. We being everyone, not just the IBMers.

But really well done to everyone that has put so much effort and talent into making this all happen. Its not a big bang entrance, but an evolution of what we have been. I am not going to name everyone as this page will be way too long, but I hope I have been making good use of the rating system.
However, Jessica Qin has been the guiding light on the build with overall say and design authority. This has been great to see as when Algernon Spackler and I entered SL as N00bs back at the start of the year we very soon found Jessica. Her mentoring and her talent for building, and her understanding of the community became the foundation of eightbar in Second Life. Jessica is now a very good friend and it is the fact that we get to meet people and form these bonds that is still the most important part of being in Second Life.

So roll on the new industry. This year has been a turning and tipping point, I am looking forward to whats next and well done all.

Linden Labs have now hit the magically 2 million with Second Life. To think it was only about 9o,000 at the start of the year.
As we move towards our opening up of the more official IBM complex(more soon form us on that though you will seem some press such as greeterdans’ piece here) we have got nearly 1,000 IBMers in Second Life.
As I am very keen to point out many of those are out there in various groups working with the community as residents.
This is a very exciting time for this industry and and amazing social experience.
We really do seem to be putting the people back in the technology.

Roo and I, at a recent press event, recorded some podcast interviews with Peder Bjerge from Danish Computerworld.
So in order for us to get over the shock of our real voices (I am glad Second Life is text based) you can listen to Roo here and if really ready for a shock me here.

Over on the new Primdig Electric Sheep Blog is a good description of how to edit the terrain file for a private island. With lots more people getting these its handy for people to know the quick way to terraform.
My original attempt on Hursley island , way back in April, led to a massive earthquake and lots of objects getting returned.
The reason, well I got my Raw file, edited it, then when I went to save it Photoshop asked – “Interleaved order or non-interleaved order”, I thought I was being clever and changed from the default of interleaved. This meant all the mapping of the Raw channels was basically corrupted. As it applied the raw file I got some very very high mountains and very very low valleys. The high ones pushed objects up, out of range and returned them to the users.
Luckily we had only just got started, but I still shudder when I attempt a terrain file change on a live island. I am sure we still have some buried treasure on Hursley becuase of this too.

This evening Yossarian, Jessica and I had a bit of a relax shooting the breeze and solving the worlds problems. We decided to hang out back on the plot in Austin that I rent from Jessica.
Whilst we were just gathering Timeless Prototype sent me a camp fire version of his multi gadget chairs. This fitted very nicely with the organic look I have going on Austin and added to the ambience.

Picture from Snapzilla – that I notice now is also able to push to Flickr too which is great.
Whilst we were chatting I had the TV on, and BBC 1’s imagine (arts programme) with Alan Yentob started to go down the web 2.0 root. Blogs, wikis, myspace, youtube etc.
It then finished on, the obvious one for us all now, Second Life. It looked like the Alan Yentob AV was flying around millionsofus. Its certainly getting more mainstream when it features in an arts show like this. It was odd to be in Second Life, shooting the breeze and also explaining the program as it happened to Jessica.
The whole session, and interlinking of so many threads should have been confusing, but somehow it all made perfect sense.

Our friends over in the Alliance Navy have had a great idea of doing flyovers of public areas delivering presents to people. It is written up very well over here at the Second Life times.
I really love the idea that you can fly a large ship over areas and give something back.
Some members of eightbar are also members of the AN.
This is not a one off event, so keep an eye out for the anti-griefers delivering goodies in your local sandbox.
This is a mini photo cube of the drop ship and some happy residents from snapzilla

The alliance navy were there for our 3d Jam way back in September as this picture from Judge Hocho on snapzilla shows

I managed to turn up late to Adam Reuters interview with Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime today. There was a good crowd when I got there and a few of us who sat not having pressed play on the audio feed. I feel such a Noob!
So I was not surprised I did not get my question in, which equally for Nintendo of America may not have been relevant. I managed to miss the 7 minute window on Amazon in the UK that took the preorders for a Nintendo Wii. This was a bit dissapointing, but I was on the page from 9am but had to do some work and managed to miss the 7 minutes that the console was available.
The Wii is yet another console powered by an IBM processor, like the 360 and the PS3, so I should have viewed getting one as work, but Second Life got on the way.
I also wanted to ask if Nintendo will mind seeing Avatars that look like the Wii Mii that people will be able to create on the Wii. Large bobble headed manga style AV’s


All pictures from Snapzilla
At the event I bumped into Moo Money who asked me if I had received her IM. It is slightly unfortunate that my two islands tend to notify my of things not being able to be dynamically created because they are so full with my fellow eightbar members builds. This in turn caps my IM message delivery and so I tend to loose a lot of IM’s. Now my home email gets them, but as I have been busy inviting the now 600th eightbar member my mail tends to fill with “has accepted inventory offer” combined with “object x has exceeded parcel limit”. So in the middle of all that and the other spam I tend to miss some requests from people. I apologize and will get on top of that!

A while back I bought some Scions from Toyota. I had not blogged about them much, but as Algernon was doing a demo I thought I would perform in front of his audience. Its flippant, but only took a few mins, what I need now is some buses.



All pictures from snapzilla