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.
Category Archives: Virtual worlds
Interesting movements related to the Virtual World industry
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
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
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
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.
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
I just got the review copy of Richard Hopkins and Kevin Jenkins book Eating the IT Elephant : moving from Greenfield Development to Brownfield.
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.
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
Metaverse Time Capsule
In case you missed this a couple of months ago, here’s Ren Reynolds (no relation) making sense of the metaverse.
Henrik Bennetsen is making a time capsule, capturing people’s responses to some short questions. Henrik got the ball rolling by uploading some short video interviews he conducted at Metaverse U in Stanford earlier this year, including responses from Sibley Verbeck, Raph Coster, Mark Wallace, Jerry Paffendorf, Corey Bridges, Wagner James Au, Robin Harper, Mitch Kapor, Eric Rice and many more. Cory Ondrejka shared his answers on his blog.
You can add your own responses via the Metaverse U group on YouTube. Although I’m late to the party (and I hate making predictions), I will try to do that myself soon. The questions are:
- What excites you about current metaverse technology?
- What concerns you about current metaverse technology?
- What will be most the surprising impact of metaverse technology on society within the next decade?
- What barriers will metaverse technology never overcome?
Tales from the firepit – The story of a virtual world community
A little while back many of us in eightbar and the wider IBM virtual universe community got to spend time talking to Rita J. King. Rita, or Eureka Dejavu as we all think of her was commissioned to write about how we got to where we are in virtual worlds. The story of a community forming.
The finished article is linked as a PDF from this blog post on Dispatches from the Information Age
It was great too when Rita and Josh came to visit us and we met up in Portsmouth as part of their Dancing Ink Productions world tour. As we always say these virtual worlds are not there to replace real life but add to it. When it means you get to hang out with great people like these it makes it all worth it.
Rita points out how she got to know Grady Booch through doing this piece, a massive figure in software engineering, it was Eureka who introduced me to him at a post virtual worlds conference dinner. To complete the chain a few hundred IBMers were at an award event called the “Corporate Technical Recognition Event” CTRE for short in Phoenix last week. Amongst the lucky award winners was our very own eightbar Daz and here is the picture I took, mainly to show the Peter Kaye lookalike service food in the chef’s hat, but I realized this slightly blurred picture actually also had Grady Booch in it, in the red shirt on the left.
You can read more about the event here and here. I should add that this amazing gathering we were lucky enough to be a part of also included Jeff Jonas who was being made a Distinguished Engineer which is a very big role in IBM. So present company excepted it was a massive gathering of some of the most influential technical people in our massive company. People I would never have got to meet if it had not been for virtual worlds either. Having an IBM Fellow of some note (The most important elected position in IBM for us techies), John Cohn come up to me at the bar and say hey it’s you did my ego the power of good I must say!
That’s enough name dropping and self congratulating, this post is about Eureka’s report
Being who we are online and offline – Generation V?
A common theme often emerges when showing people virtual worlds and metaverses. The theme is that of identity. Whilst sometimes this is the more usual business side of identity “how do we know someone is who they are claiming to be” that is actually a slightly different problem to the one that is actually expressed “people are hiding behind their avatar”.
Much of what I present to people is around my online persona as epredator. This is intended to help them understand that we all have projections and labels that we deliver in online interactions. The avatars in virtual worlds just make that slightly more obvious as we have a humanoid puppet with some elements of our name or reputation attached to it.
In SL I tend to be a masked science fiction predator avatar. In my explanations I go on to show that that is not something I hide behind, but is in fact a very expressive facet of my personality, with a link to my regular offline self in that I wear the same leather jacket in RL and SL. I am not choosing to hide who I am, but show more of who I am through the avatar puppet.
This approach is not an obvious one, as very often we take on avatars for games, such as Nico in GTA IV and take on a role to progress a story.
As having an online persona is a bit of a shock to some people, I try and explain they already have one, when they email, or sametime IM someone. Bloggers know they have a voice and a persona they develop for a particular style of post. What people are less likely to contemplate, but are led to do so by the principles of online personas, is that they exist with multiple facets to who they are all the time. People are slightly different at work to at home, with friends and with family.
In business someone might act tough and hard nosed as they are expected to blend with an ideal, yet at home they may be gentle and caring. Having to think who you are and understand how your persona(s) alter those around you is not something many people do. The people who do do this effectively are usually the leaders in organizations, they use their persona(s) in various ways to gather support and push things forward. (There are also people who lie, cheat and steal using multiple personas).
So, the premise here is that being online and having avatar representations or social media profiles is no more dishonest than anything else used in the wrong way. In fact I think there is a lot to be said for trying to make sure that all your personas are integrated, that it is really you, that you do not hide behind any of them, be it position at work, fame and fortune or just an unusual lifestyle.
I was very pleased to see that my anecdotal pop psychology on this matter was justified by this fantastic quote “We get so used to disguising ourselves to others that we end up becoming disguised to ourselves” by the French writer and philosopher The Duke de La Rochefoucauld. I came across this on the fantastic blog Slow Leadership in an article about leaders being genuine at work and not just playing the part. (Which was in turn inspired by an ft article by Stefan Stern.
The Slow Leadership article is specifically referring to bosses and reportees, but I think it has much wider relevance as we start to alter those traditional structures in business (or enterprise 2.0).
The bottom line though is that we can hide behind avatars, just as we can hide behind a desk, a suit, a name plaque, an email address, a front door or a process. Likewise we can actually get to be more integrated and honest individuals able to work, share and play with others with avatars just part of the mix. The disingenuous nature of some people in any field is not a reason ignore metaverses in business.
**Update: I recently read this brilliant description of a change in the generational divide. The term Generation V is used to alude to the change in attitudes across generations. We no longer need to consider Gen X, Gen Y etc, but instead those people that have merged across those generations and operate online with varying degrees of engagement and persona.
The article is well worth a look here from Gartner analyst Adam Sarner
Thanks to Malburns for twittering Giff Constables piece on it that led me to it
Business Interaction in Metaverses – “Reverse ICE” model to map against
I believe that many people are still looking at metaverses and not considering the wide spectrum of modes that the subject covers. Some of the potential reasons given for fear or suspicion are directed at the wrong end of the spectrum and hide the other deeper benefits that may be more comfortable for those people who are objecting.
I wanted to have some sort of spectrum that I could apply various business ideas, where already the business need exists but to be able to identify the key component that differs and hence some benefit can be seen or inferred or discovered.
The first element to this is a three layer model of where metaverses fit in and work
accidentally this is ECI, or ICE if reversed hence the title “Reverse ICE”
1. Expressiveness
This refers to the way that many early adopters and web2.0 people have come to metaverses. Just as Blogs, flickr, last.fm, twitter etc all allow a degree of personal expression the virtual worlds extend that expressiveness, how you dress, where you hang out, who you know, what you build, events you are seen to attend.
It is this expressiveness that causes the biggest shock to people who are not in the subset of people who do this. it is not wrong to not want to be expressive, but it can be viewed as the frivolous end of all this and the one that needs to be controlled in a business sense.
Expressiveness is the least measurable benefit, yet the one anecdotally we all benefit from the most. “I dont want to mess around creating an avatar” etc is a valid concern in the adoption or virtual worlds. It is also the one that is not seen quite so much in web1.0 where company information sites, shops etc are not about the users involvment in quite the same way.
2. Communication
This layer refers to the fact that metaverses are a communication medium, as are websites, blogs, powerpoint. User generated content whilst also blending with 1. above also are there as a commnuication vehicle. A picture says a thousand works so does a metaverse location in 3d say a million? We need to communicate in business with one another and around projects, with customers etc. This communication layer exists already in a variety of forms some more “efficient” than others
3. Instrumentation
This layer is the most comfortable for a company and in particular a large corporate. Instrumentation refers to the fact that there are things going on somewhere, in a business, in financial results, in a disaster situation etc that are all part of the information stack that drive business decisions. In many senses this is SOA(Service Orientated Architecture). The inbound and outbound services (whether technical implementations or not) are things about the business world, or social world that act as data, facts and decisions implemented.
With these three areas overlap I believe we can map certain types of business problem and see the parts that are newer, or brighter or more enhanced by virtual worlds or other solutions.
a. Retail
I would suggest that when retail is boiled down to having to shift product to customers the business flow would be as follows.
Instrumentation (How much have I got/What price to make profit) —-> Communication (advertizing, shops, salesforce) —-> Expressiveness (Engaging with a customer set, emotional involvement with a brand, customer loyalty and championing)
In pure web terms Instrumentation to Communication is clear, its putting products out there, simple clicks to buy. A small layer of expressiveness and brand engagement occurs, usually though other channels are used. Lifestyle, tv etc. Virtual Worlds offer a richer degree of expressiveness in that consumers may engage with the brand product, with each other and with members of the organization selling the product. The degree that this is needed depends on the product but the richness and depth comes from going past communication and engaging in the human need for expression. many brands already do this in several ways so as a channel do this more or better it would appear to fit.
b. Music/Art
I made this separate from retail in order to highlight that some industries and business do not flow in the same direction as the first examples.
Music, and examples of how MTV are operating at the moment in the web2.0/virtual world space follow a different pattern.
It starts with expressiveness (having an message, a feeling, a song) —-> this moves to be communicated in a variety of ways building a fan base. A loop occurs in that the fan base engages in expressiveness and commnuication too —> in business terms this then moves to instrumentation, selling records, songs, downloads, merchandise (the realm of the record company)
Virtual worlds are used to engages at the expressiveness stage, bands perform, fans attend bypassing some of the need for co-location. Successful bands become “mainstream” and appear on MTV an get record deals.
c. Business Meetings
This example is interesting as it starts in the middle to some extent.
Communication (There is a need to commnuicate/decide/inform/share in a formal sense) —> This leads to needing instrumentation from the business, data, results, powerpoints, evidence, business dashboard, KPI’s, threats from competitors. In regular business it might be considered that that is where the seriousness is, Just Communication and Data. However meetings of any sort have a degree of expressiveness. Business relationships exists, politics exist. awareness of others and understanding motivations and positions exists. Leadership is required. In most electronic media we use this is the thing we filter the most with phones, pure text etc. Some people only need this, only need th bare minimum (potentially because they already have a deeper insight) others need more immersion with other members of any meeting. Hence meeting face to face allows for this expressiveness (even it that is a poker face) to occur. Other electronic media turn down the detail. Virtual worlds allow for degrees of expression. The balance comes as a barrier to entry problem that some people can work a virtual room very well, other feel at a disadvantage. This is a threat to many people who have great social skills in real life but then feel they cannot translate them to any other platform or technology. I think this will dissappear over time but is a cultural problem.
Making the expresiveness that the more skilled communicators in real life need, easier to apply to the virtual world, and pulling in the instrumentation in an easier SOA fashion and delivering the answers out again are where we can make a big difference as a company I think.
d. System architecture/Data Centres/Buildings
This is a more pure mirror world/paraverse example.
This is about visualizing the data from instrumentation, where are my software elements deployed, which machine is not working, where are the power condiuts. Taking a location or state of a business or a chemical model and rendering it in 3d where appropriate does not really have to involve people or avatars. This is business/it dashboard territory. However in moving towards the layer of communication, to get the message across, drawing this in an immersive way to be experienced is what we try and do all the time. UML diagrams, design drawings, blueprints etc.
The interesting element again is that this is probably a very comfortable place for many technologists to consider things. It does not need a great layer of expression to be applied. However that expression can be there and can be used in a virtual worlds. Imagine two architects in a room discussing a design they will draw on boards, point, argue, agree, pull rank etc. This can and will also happen in a virtual world where such devices are available to express themselves. That expression does not have to be weird and cool clothing, or funky avatars, but pointing, moving, altering the environment, altering anothers point of view to show the effect of change.
e. Brand engagement is usually more about people dealing with levels of expression, in real life wearing the t-shirt, driving the car, mentioning the product in a blog post. I think it speaks less to instrumentation, though clearly if instrumentation is bottom line figures and business then it needs to. It just feel more decoupled. It may be the case in virtual worlds presence too. Enagage the passionate users, be part of the community first, not a hard and fast advertising of presence.
f. Education. This is traditional education, class, facts, teachers, pupils. Clearly this needs to deal with expressiveness, and it may be that the engagement that occurs with students wanting to be part of something is why we see such a growth in serious games.
As you can see I hope the normal expressive worries are often placed before the more solid business reasons of communication and instrumentation. We can engage people in those other layers without them having to worry about the expressive, but the expressive will come over time.
Many of us as early adopters flow around all these layers all the time, but a more directed approach for some may make it easier to accept. This may get over any mental barrier to adoption whilst we also need to sort out the technical barriers to adoption and make it easy to engage and for people to feel comfortable in that engagement.
Also this is by no means a hard and fast classification. It merely aims to place some elements of familiar business into some sort of context. A good business leader will more than likely be a strong personality and very expressive when rallying their people, whether that is for motivation or to deliver solid business messages to a wider audience. Those that seek to lock down this expressiveness and claim that business, politics etc are only a “serious” platform requiring only “serious” interactions may need to realize this is not a binary domain.
It seems that metaverse in particular, even more so than the text and pictures of the blog, challenge peoples notions of expressiveness. There may be a short term power base in business of people more akin to the traditional social networks and performance platforms, doing lunch, playing golf etc.
We had a good session recently discussing these points and it appears to work as a model for helping translate some of the business ideas. It is a high level model, with a lot of flexibility to explain many things. Being able to make a distinction between a type of business and the types of reasons for not doing certain enagegments is much mroe important now as people are gaining a degree of understanding as people as to why metaverses work, but now need to see where they fit in specific business areas.