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)

We have now finished (as much as a constant build in Second Life ever is) the behind the scenes tour to go with the live court of on IBM 7.
The build is at the top of this picture and is set up in the air for views over the rest of IBM land.

On ascending the escaltor you will find that the data flows from right to left.
We show the court and how the point and ball data is both automatically collected via cameras and also manually captured, such as the stroke data at the data entry laptop


Much of the information flows to opens in room 60 where it is turned into tv graphics for the BBC to mix in to live programmes

The studio also, as with courtside, gets access to the wimbledon information system for detailed stats from the data captured.
The information is also sent around the site to kiosks and to club offices as part of the intranet.

Last, but by no means list the data if put together in a local publisher and sent to the main server farms to be sent to the world (and back into Second Life) on wimbledon.org

The whole thing end to end takes less than 2 seconds.
Its been very nicely built by laronzo fitzgerald and andy remblai and is the same tour that you get in real life here when you visit on hospitality, but with out the lovely views as we are in a basement. As represented by the photos just above the backstage tour.

As play wound down tonight and after hundreds more conversations with hundreds more visitors on IBM 7 wimbledon build Algernon Spackler and I popped over to see the Second Fest.
Rivers Run Red with the Guardian and Intel are running a festival. Great music, and a great build.
I turned up and started dancing, but put my Wimbledon brolly up in case it it became a bit glasto like.

Lyr Lobo was there with an awesome scripted dance partner

We invited some of our friend list over too so asanyfule wollongong popped in.
It was Vimto Spackler (no relation to Algernon) who pointed us in the right direction and it was most relaxing and enjoyable, given we were still in the bunker at Wimbledon.

RenZephyr Zircon popped by too but was having some crashes so twittered he was off to watch big brother.
Fizik Baskerville and co has even laid on tents to have a rest

A nice touch
This looked like the turnstiles they will use as this ramps up as if it anything like the radio 1 gig last year it will get very full.

I almost turned into Mary Poppins with all the dancing

The whole vista is well worth looking at too if it does not get too locked out. Some very nice spread out zones over a whole lot of sims.
I hope I get some time to go back and party

Today Wimbledon and our customers visiting us in Second Life and Real Life had the benefit of both of eightbar/IBM’s metaverse evangelists onsite. Today we continued work along with the other guys on creating the extra behind the scenes experience now we have the event up and running.
After the mixed mode press conference it was a natural thing to try and bring things into SL and out again using some extra pieces of ambient instrumentation.
So using veodia and a webcam to pipe back into Second Life our real life presence.

Whilst giving a customer tour Adam Reuters popped by. So he got to see the people on the tech tour, and also became part of the tour himself as he was on my big screen. The impact of an avatar waving due to the mixed mode of video ambient presence and a two way interaction across the worlds had a massive wow factor.

Whilst Ian and Roo are busy on site, keeping the virtual Wimbledon wheels turning and evangelising as they do best, I’ve found myself spending more and more time hanging around the build on “IBM 7”.

So much so, I felt I needed to show some good old-fashioned biased support for the Brits. My suggestion of making the virtual Henman twice the size of the other players didn’t get very far. These views are my own and not necessarily those of IBM. 🙂

Update: seems my support wasn’t quite enough.

I have sent this link to many of the people visiting us in Second Life on “IBM 7”. However it is worth sharing the mini video of the glamour we all work in at Wimbledon

So when we meet in SL, this is where we are, no champagne, and only a few strawberries.

I saw this posted on our internal blogs. As many of you may know every IBMer has access to blogcentral powered by lotus connections and much of what is in these slides is what many of us try and do already.
The patterns of working and simple reasons expressed here are really powerful. It was these sort of approaches that got us to where we are in Virtual Worlds, and why eigthbar exists at all.

The principle of starting small and just letting things grow from passionate user contributions is a hard one for many people to grasp. It is not the only way, but it seems to be a good way.

Well despite lots of rain we have seen some play at Wimbledon and had our first day of visitors. Andy and I have been busy talking to people and taking feedback.
Several interesting points have come up.
We don’t have scripts running on the public IBM islands to reduce griefing. This has a knock on effect for people wanting to bloghud and twitter from in world. This is a pity, but its better to be safe.
Secondly, we have some things we would like to automate but have never had to with the regular scoring feeds at Wimbledon. Things like player change overs and rest breaks take time. The regular score feed has been about getting the point data out to the web. Point data is that, not data about the rest of the things happening around it. So whilst we might imply from the tennis data what is happening we don’t have the direct instrumentation to saying player A has stopped to change his raquet. Interesting set of things that need to now be gathered.

Picture from snapzilla
Also whilst we have created seats, many people choose to stand where the other people are standing. This is actually good as it is because are interacting, which is the whole reason I am in the Wimbledon build to help.
The other comment was that it was hard to find. We have not advertised as such. This is a deliberate ‘soft’ launch. Though people who read this blog will know about it, or follow me on twitter. That combined with 4,000 IBMers is more than enough to be going on with!
With the rain I have also had lots of conversations about Cliff Richard and needing an AV of him. I bet there is not one already!

Annotated by Roo on flickr

A few people who populate the virtual world