Category Archives: Hursley

Hursley, site and location.

Baseball Sneek peek

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Hank Hoodoo from the electric sheep company sent me an IM that I got this morning in Second Life, saying the baseball stadium for tonights MLB.com HomeRun Derby 2006 was open for a look around. I had wrriten about this before but at the time I could only look it it from afar.
So I popped along and took a tour. All this is linked to the work on Wimbledon Tennis this year that I have been demonstrating to customers and fellow IBMers, on the potential of Second Life and general metaverse technology in several areas. One key are is the ability to represent a brand and an experience in a much more immersive and sociable way. Event are attended by othre people, interested people. The more events I attend the more I learn how they can be run and the benefits and risks that they bring. This is aside from the other trends around avatar based marketing, social computing and education.
The baseball stadium has been built by people who specialize in this sort of building. Designers and programmers working together. Some people focus on structure others on textures, others on code.
On approach this is very impressive. It has a very authentic feel as a ‘real’ place

The foyer is a shop for branded goods, some team medallions, free foam hands and some nice baseball caps, as you would expect

The approach is suitably stadium like

The internal of the stadium is a baseball diamond representation. I am assuming this will allow avat or object positioning to indicate which base a player is on.
The event will be video cast on the giant screen. There is also a scoreboard on the side of the screen. I am not sure if this will be scripted or manually changed. I am assuming there is some sort of data feed from the event.

The seating areas look a little sparse, but this is due to ensuring that there is a low lag environment. As Second Life scales up these seat numbers will increase.
One approach to event scaling is simply to clone the build on multiple servers, this could even be done automatically as sims filled up. It certainly the on demand approach we would take if we had control over our own servers for such events.

I am looking forward to attending the event. I am not a huge baseball fan, but I appreciate it enough, and want to see how it goes with my metahporical rather than virtual research hat on.
Good luck to the team doing it.

What sort of Geek are you?

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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.

Baseball and Wimbledon in SecondLife

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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.
baseball

baseball

baseball

Taking risks and Blogging

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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.

Everyware and nowhere baby thats where its at..

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Apologies for the title but I just needed some way to work in the name of the book i’m reading, “Everyware” by Adam Greenfield. Adam manages to get through an impressive list of technology areas in the book, neatly knitting together a story of ubiquitous computing that encompasses the more obvious topics of RFID, Motes, Mesh Networks and Mobile Devices with Web Mashups, IPV6 and a plethora of everyday gadgets.

Adams vision of Everyware is one of almost effortless and unknowinging interactions with our surroundings, surrounding that are actually networked devices receiving and broadcasting information, which is collated, distributed and presented to users (I prefer participants) in intuitive, helpful and appropriate ways. It’s a nice vision although occasionally a little scary. He doesn’t present it as any kind of Utopian future but more one that we are almost unknowingly creating often in isolation through small advances here and there in different fields of technology. The book also covers a lot of ground on the social, moral and privacy aspects of such a future.

The theme struck a chord with me simply for the fact that we use a lot of these technologies here in the Emerging Tech group in Hursley (well we are emerging tech after all) . Motes, Zigbee enabled devices, RFID and other funky Gizmos can usually be found spilling out from under Dave Conway-Jones office door. (shhh don’t tell the inspectors! )

Dave and other folks like Andy Stanford-Clark (No you don’t have to have a double barrelled name to work here) are experts in hooking up this kit up to messaging technologies like MQTT so that we can take real world sensor inputs and make them available to any other devices or computers that have expressed an interest in these events. The beauty of MQTT is that the client is so small you can run it on just about any device making it both a publisher and a subscriber of information.

Any of this starting to sound like Everyware yet ? In fact in his book Adam talks about the concept of an Event Heap which is used to communicate events to other interested devices. This is almost exactly the same principle as the Publish Subscribe (pubsub) mechanism MQTT uses which makes it such and effective tool for communicating realtime events around any local or remotely distributed system.

If you make it into Hursley at any point then maybe you’ll get time to come and visit Dave’s Pervasive lab where you can see all manner of Everyware enabling technology in use.

Innovation in Practice

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On Monday I went up to Leicester with some other folks from the Lab to run an event called ‘Innovation in Practice’ for some new hires into our services teams within IBM. This was an event run by members of the iSIG (Innovation Special Interest Group); on this occasion the iSIG members were all Hursley Lab employees preparing a session for IBMers working outside of the Lab. We designed the event with a hands-on approach with the aim of equipping attendees with the skills and confidence to make innovative contributions in their work and even other aspects of life.

Even in the sweltering heat on a lovely sunny day, the event seemed to be a huge success and everyone was extremely enthusiastic. On the day, attendees were required to elect which sessions to attend and we were a popular choice, having fun running round trying to find enough chairs! The techniques we taught were applied by the groups against a simple problem with some fantastic innovative results. After this we encouraged them try and apply it to problems of their own and the teams had formed such a great bond in a short period of time, they all chose to work together (without us asking!) on trying to solve each other’s problems.

All in all it was a great fun day, hopefully resulting in the attendees leaving with some useful skills.

Wimbledon, Shuttles and July 4th

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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.

spaceport alpha

More pictures are on snapzilla and the SLURL to spaceport alpha

The Warner Music man who ‘gets it’

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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

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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.

world cup