Category Archives: Second Life

Cisco CEO John Chambers on future of virtual worlds

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Tish over at Ugotrade has just posted some transcripts from the an event in Second Life yesterday. The Cisco CEO John Chambers appeared and answered some questions. Now I know I am biased, but it is good to hear many of the same themes and reasoning I/We use when evangelizing coming from someone else, and in particular a CEO of major company like Cisco.
Read the full article on ugotrade

“John Chambers: …..very often if there is one thing that I have learned in my thirty years in high tech is sometimes concepts are a little bit too early but when they do take off they take off with tremendous speed and efficiency.
This where I think it is important especially for the business communities and the entertainment industries to understand what is possible because when the market does move it usually moves at speeds faster then anyone anticipated. ”

“I think what is exciting to here is that where last year we were talking about that in theory and this year we are beginning to see people grab this is going to happen. We may disagree on the time frame but it is not longer a question any more of if, it is now a question of when. ”

Real Life Wimbledon still Rezzing

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Wimbledon is building a new court number 2. I got to go and have a look. The whole place is currently plain concrete and also has some terracotta warrior style statues of the players. All in all it looks like a Second Life render of a place that has not had any textures applied yet. (It was Ricky that pointed this out first yesterday to me and so I had to go and see, and he is right I think)
Court 2
The avatars of the players ar in the video below, along with a nice particle effect (they were watering the real grass with real water and getting a real rainbow)
Replacement video as the other one was incorrectly identified as copyright infringement. Still doing the paperwork to clear my good name

Wimbledon goes Live

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The gates are open at the venue, the website is starting to provide all the fantastic extras. There is a more official twitter feed this year, with an author ready to share some things, likewise a facebook group for those of you who like that too. We also have the soft launch of the IBM 7 Wimbledon build in Second Life. One of the coolest things this year is Judge Hocho’s build of the roof garden. This area is a press/media/IBM only area on top of the broadcast centre. Judge has built a retreat in Second Life representing this. Everyone here who has seen it on screen have appreciated it. Nice one Judge.
epredator on the roof

Wimbledon 08 in Second Life, the build progresses

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With Wimbledon looming large and already qualifying starting this week you may think we are leaving it a little late to complete the build and presence in Second Life. In many ways you would be right. However, we are all giving it some time, knowing full well that we will also build during the event. It has been interesting to see what has happened to some of our scripts, in particular the tennis ball rendering with all the various updates. The base scripts done by Pipe Hesse are still htere, were still active, but seemed to have been damaged a little by the many upgrades that have occured. We are still unsure about representing the ball flow again this year, for various reasons as I alluded to in the previous post around web page on a prim. For me the complications and social interactions that can happen around collaborative web browsing this year are the key part.
In jointly building this with Andy Remblai, Judge Hocho and Laronzo Fitzgerald we have given ourselves a platform to try some things. I am accutely aware that it will be my stage for 2 weeks too and that being live in world for the event will be as big a challenge as last year, if not more so. Of course if nobody comes to visit next week that too will be a challenge, but I hope that will not be the case. Avatar fingers are crossed as we are 5 days from live (though live is a time for continuous development not a traditional hard stop, this is a virtual world and this a dynamic build environment after all.
Wimbledon 2008

Interesting movements related to the Virtual World industry

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It is fair to call this an industry or a business now I think. Still a fledgling one but definitely shaping into an industry. One of the ways you I think you can tell is that stories are not just about what has been done with a technology, but start to get stories and general interest in the people doing things with them. Much of Web 2.0 is dotted with Rock ‘n’ Roll personalities. Virtual worlds have created another set of names to know and personalities to track around various companies.
With the various moves around Linden Lab, Philip Rosedale stepping aside and Mark Kingdon joining as the CEO it was interesting to see that this was news that appeared in all sorts of business journals and publications.
The most recent, and significant story this week has been Cory Ondrejka, former Linden Lab CTO is now Senior Vice President of digital strategy as EMI. There can be lots of discussion about the media industry and the benefits that EMI will have hiring a known name in the Virtual World and game industry. As Richard Bartle pointed out on Cory’s blog announcement this has made it to the UK Guardian business news
So we have articles not about whether virtual worlds make sense, whether working in or on them has value, but instead about how a media business is going to find new ways to reach audiences and customers. That’s business taking this all very seriously.
p.s. Good luck Cory from eightbar

Jump Around, Jump Around get up get up and get down – Interoperability

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As has been blogged and reported and twittered there was a little experiment that had some success yesterday involving common login’s from Second Life and OpenSim. A form of avatar interoperability, albeit across very similar platforms.
One of the best places to read this is here at Zha Ewry’s blog as he’s running the IBM side of the experiments.

Lego Augmented Reality Kiosk from Total Immersion

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Augmented reality, we love it here at eightbar. The blend of the real and the virtual. Roo recently wrote about the Radio 1 band in your hand now you need to see this excellent Lego AR kiosk. (Thanks to our collegue Alex Phillips (a.k.a DK) who pinged me a similar demo from a conference by the same people)
It is by Total Immersion

The Metaverse 3

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Forces gathered in IBM Hursley House yesterday. Whilst we cant see which briefing we were doing there were three of us there from the industry. Roo and Ren (No relation) Reynolds and myself were swapping anecdotes, ideas and whats been going on from an industry point of view in virtual worlds to a very interesting group of people, who did not need convincing.
As this was officially and through our briefing centre we had name plaques. So being the interweb tech geeks and camera enabled we all took the same photo.
The metaverse 3
Click through to the notes on this Flickr photo to see what happens when the Metaverse 3 gather 🙂
We may not have as many metarati as the US West Coasters or as Brooklyn, but there is still a lot of shared knowledge over here in the UK and quite often centred around Hursley.

Eating the IT Elephant

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I just got the review copy of Richard Hopkins and Kevin Jenkins book Eating the IT Elephant : moving from Greenfield Development to Brownfield.
Eating the IT Elephant
I have known and worked with Richard for quite a few years so I was very interested when he started to talk about this book, then when this exploded into using Second Life for visualization of existing system architectures (starting on Hursley island) it got me even more interested.
turner boehms original build
Image from snapzilla
The book is not solely about using virtual worlds to visualize systems, but it is a part of the whole. For any IT architects out there and software engineers many of the themes around complexity with familiar. As will the not so good solutions of representing complex architectures in reduced down powerpoint slides or stickers on a wall.
There is a lot more to the book, and I need to read the rest properly. It has a foreword by Grady Booch and by the one of the UK based IBM fellows Chris Winter. They make interesting reading. Though I really like Richard’s family dedication. I wont spoil that for you 🙂
They have their own site an blog over at elephanteaters.org the book is on amazon the uk link is here

The Eightbar brand – part 3

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Following on from Ian’s posts about the Eightbar gang sign and large hands and sign language in Second Life I have created the Eightbar gang sign using my good friend Anna.

Anna is an animated avatar developed by the University of East Anglia’s eSign project to synthesize sign language, she was used as part of an Extreme Blue project to convert Speech to Sign last summer. Anna is animated using Signing Gesture Mark up Language (SiGML) which is based on the internationally established notation for sign, HamNoSys. Currently, to create signs for Anna, eSign have provided an editor which is very good, but requires a reasonable amount of time to be able to use efficiently. For a few days per week I have been working on a way for people who are not familiar with the eSign editor to create signs for Anna, with the hope that creating signs can be the sort of thing you just dip into, when you have a spare minute and a sign you would like to create. With this in mind I decided, as a test, to create the EightBar gang sign using my interface.

After 15 minutes of playing about, I had a gang sign! It took a few attempts to get there mind…

But finally Anna was throwing the gang sign like a pro…

Eightbar gang sign