The virtual forbidden city project, beyond space and time has now gone live.
This has been a fascinating journey to follow, that is as much part of the history of my involvement in virtual worlds as anything.
Way back in 2006 John Tolva and I bumped into one another again, having both worked together on Wimbledon and also having helped with another of the projects that came to Hursley for some extra development skills from Rob and Daz and many others.
John had hit the nebulus Second Life on the same day as I had, for no reason that we could fathom. We then noticed one anothers blog posts.
So the famous virtual world serendipty that I have learned to trust kicked in veyr early.
John was exploring options for the project that rolled on from his previous one of Eternal Egypt. John specializes in running large innovative projects that use the web for more philanthropic reasons as part of what is called corporate community relations.
So there we were in SL, I had my personal shiny new island Hursley and he and his team were looking at how they might represent the forbidden city in the growing world of the virtual, non game metaverse.
So I loaned the team the island, and a massively detailed chinese build started to form in the sky over the next few weeks whilst they procured their own official island.
That island then became the venue, after the 2006 innovation jam, for our CEO Sam Palmisano to announce virtual worlds as one of the top five findings from this virtual chinese palace, and getting this all on the cover of business week.
So Second Life proved a testing ground, but the development then moved platforms to a more controlled environment. The team chose Torque. (Yes the very same platform we used for the initial CIO metaverse work so you can see how this flow is going!). As this was a service that was focused on one subject in many ways, like a game, it does not need the full dynamic nature of SL. Also the scaling of this needs to work in a different way, running on and with underlying IBM infrastructure this becomes part reference account for being able to build and run things. Being torque the client download is large(ish) as it contains most of the reosurces you need as there is no need to stream the forbidden city all the time as its not constantly changing in structure, though new content can be delivered.
John’s post on the launch is the best reference I think (hence only a single picture here from me). You will also find it on IBM.com
One other feature that I always have to mention is the ability to not just follow NPC tours, but to be a tour leader yourself. This means teachers and educators can guide a tour around adding their own structure to the experience for a willing group of participants.
Enjoy Beyond Space and Time
Category Archives: Technology
Eightbar live at virtual worlds london 20th/21st October
This coming Monday and Tuesday eightbar will be live at Virtual Worlds London. Whilst there is no specific stand there will be Rob and I and few other collegues around and about to come and talk too.
Rob is on a panel on Tuesday morning in the enterprise stream Platform Integration Considerations for
Enterprise Virtual Worlds and then I follow that with a solo effort on “Business Process Management
How do you manage a virtual worlds presence for an organization.”
We also have Chris over from Ireland to talk about Security and Technical Issues.
I have just finished reshaping my pitch, as BPM is usually just one element. Though I believe I have enough interesting things to cover and a bit of future too. (I worked in an IBM emerging business unit on BPM about 5 years ago).
So see you there, feel free to grab any of us to talk and support Rob on his first VW conference panel.
Unconferencing in the Hospital for VWF
Rob and I travelled up to London today to take part in the last minute, but very worthwhile, unconference for the Virtual Worlds Forum. It was held at the Hospital club in London.
The venue was very busy and buzzing with people all willing to share, network and present.
Unconferences are probably very scary to many people. The agenda and direction forms dynamically, based on what the visitors want to cover. Generally any of these are attended by the interested and the dynamic, not the apathetic.
This one worked very well. We had a matrix on the wall, done with masking tape and added postit notes for the agenda.
I added top left session 1 a discussion of 3d printers and the future of manufacturing. Whilst a small attended session the important thing was the attendees really wanted to discuss this.
Ann Marie from Anarkik3d was at the session and Mark Simpkins. Hi to you guys. Mark had a clear interest and researched background (and knows Roo ). Ann Marie designs jewelry and works with haptics and virtual environments. Check out the videos on the Anarkik3d website its very exciting work.
Rob did a session on intraworld messaging with pub/sub (MQTT) opensim and unity and got a major power gathering including Linden Lab and of course Adam Frisby a driving force in Opensim from Deepthink(note correction apologies Adam 🙂 ) who was wearing a http://www.realxtend.org/ t-shirt.
Unity3d were major sponsors of the event and we had a great demo and chat with those guys as Rob is a Unity3d guru now.
The other conversations were varied and all interesting, including a rather unusual lunch with Christian Renaud, Dave Taylor, Bobby Clay, Jeff Barr and Dave Taylor in a Souk somewhere near covent garden.
So well done one and all and I personally really found ths useful and I know that I met some new people and re-enforced some other friendships and working relationships. That, after all, is the point.
Hangout.net a Unity3d web mashup virtual world
Thanks to @ids for getting me an invite to hangout.net. I have ended up in there with green spikey hair and a drum set, so its ticking a few boxes already 🙂
It is powered by unity3d as discovered for us at eightbar by Rob.
It seems to have good web integration, playing my youtube video from yesterday very easily, and wiring itself into facebook (not my favourite place but its a start).
As I mentioned the other day Unity are sponsoring next weeks virtual worlds forum europe in London
Thoughts on OpenSim, interview on UgoTrade
Tish Shute very kindly asked me to do an interview for her excellent blog over on Ugotrade. In the interview I discuss where OpenSim fits in with the rest of the Web and particularly how some of the recent work i’ve been doing makes it a more viable platform for consuming data and services from websites.
You can find the interview here.
Swarming code development visualizations and emotions
You may think sometimes that we are only bothered with avatars and islands. However things like this that changes the way you get insight into the flow of a project are equally fascinating.
This video is from mediamolecule showing the development of Little Big Planet (the game that may well save the PS3 in my house atleast). Using code_swarm it shows people joing the project and what they are editing. I am a fan of organic flocking algorythms and the complexity that forms from the simplest of rules should teach us all something. A flock you let go, and see what happens, control is not part of the agenda.
LittleBigBang : The Evolution Of LittleBigPlanet from Media Molecule on Vimeo.
This links nicely into the extreme blue project that had a very cool name but got renamed by someone to sound a lot less cool for release (but what do eightbars know about such things!). Group Persona Visualization is available on alphaworks. The aim was to gather the state of the emotion and feelings of a group based on their social media acitivity. It was a short, intern based project, with a lot of eightbar mentors :-). I think it turned out to be very cool.
Real to virtual, pushing into opensim – more interoperability
You may have seen the trigger in Secondlife using the MQTT publish/subscribe work that Rob has been doing. Now we have real life into Opensim using the same messaging infrastructure it also uses Rob’s JSON support. MQTT is the light version of Websphere MQ event broker. You create a message, and anyone interested can do something with it. In this case, image recognition via a webcam in the real world generating a message that Opensim has subscribed to. So yes, I hold a number up and a camera recognizes it and sends a message across the web, the internal opensim server picks it up and acts on it.
*update the really small message broker(RSMB) is available on IBM alphaworks (thanks @andysc)
Investment in Virtual Worlds for return in 4-7 years
As I come into contact with many more startup firms and people funding them in virtual worlds I gave become more aware of just how different the long term thinking is of investors. In a time when there is a certain amount of financial meltdown out there it would appear that the smart money is still investing in the talent and products of the future. Not to answer the question can I have my dividend this quarter, have we met this months sales figures (the usual corporate and business need), but can we grow this over time. Jussi Laakkonen blogs about the US$350M invested in VW’s, Social Media here. It is correctly pointed out that much of the list is US based. One of the reasons we started eightbar way back was to show that great emerging technology things happen this side of the pond. Eightbar is not quite a VC funded startup, but does have that mentality. Much of what we say and do is future, though we have a great grounding in what is actually possible now.
So in the current climate we should still look forward, the money markets will balance and adjust, even a chaotic system such as this has a balance point (or resolves to zero in which case we are back in the stone age anyway). Now would appear to be the time to invest in and also to deliver projects. People cannot afford to travel as much, financially and planetary costs are seeing to that, yet business still needs to function and that needs to be on a global basis.
So smart a move investing in virtual worlds of any sort it would seem?
Interesting microsoft virtual world developments?
Yes this is a blog written by IBMers, but it would be wrong to not comment on things happening in an industry that we helped energize simply because a perceived competitor is doing some unusual things.
Remember, these are my thoughts not IBMs.
The last few days have seen a plethora of virtual world pitches, reports, articles and blog posts around certain types of virtual world platform.
The first was over at @monkchips a.k.a James Governor analyst blog around a visit to microsoft to see about the ESP platform. This appears to be a high fidelity simulation platform and toolkit.
The second was widely reported but Wagner’s new world notes is the one most of the metarati will have read on the matter. This centres around some statments by Craig Mundie that avatar based interaction was of limited interest and really it was photosynth that was the way forward, modelling the real world from photos.
The third is the current blackout on Xbox Live for a system upgrade, widely expected to be the bassis for the new avatar based experience (a mix of Mii and PS3 Home).
The fourth is the OpenSim powered project manhattan, with some very clear Microsoft flavour to it.
So comments I have left around various places on all this are worth tying up.
Whilst there may appear to be conflicting messages, in particular the quote about limited interest in avatar based interactions yet it really may just come from a large corporation not having a central voice. Who is the microsoft metaverse evangelist. Maybe they need to appoint one?
That aside, the interesting thing here is that all the dicussion is not about why would anyone want a virtual world, but instead what sort is best. That seems to be progress?
Also many of the photosynth and ESP elements are geared around mirror worlds. A quadrant of the industry, but by no means the only reason for virtual worlds to exist. They form a great basis too for augmented reality. There is no need to rebuild the world as it is today, but we can enhance it by seeing the data around us. Human communication and in particular the non verbal communication of standing near someone may be far more engaging than a fully realistic model of somewhere that already exists. Though that is a different reason.
The realistic nature of interactions in a model may or may not be important. Yes in a flight sim or fire training it is important accuracy and fidelity counts, but a cartoon style interaction may be all that is needed to get a point across in a meeting. As we really should link more to the games industry, not all games are photo realistic. Not all films are purely based on real world locations. In a user generated environment if the backdrop is too real, you just can build any old thing as it would look out of place.
So it seems there is room for everything and platform arguments are just the usual IT problem that we face, which again sounds good to me, we are in normal territory.
I again point back to my reverse ICE model of interaction different modes of interaction have very different needs across the spectrum. Its not worth dissing any one of them, they are all relevant.
12 Seconds for the future of manufacturing and virtual worlds
I have been introduced to 12seconds.tv, micro video blogging. I just had to record the future of manufacturing in 12 seconds. Fabjectory and Shapeways leading the way. Making virtual things real.
3d printing the future of manufacturing on 12seconds.tv