At the VW Forum Europe in October Holly Stewart was thrown in front of the camera for a BBC click interview. Holly/Ada Alfa has been in with this since very early on and is very much core to eightbar. Not only that but she is currently the jointly elected guildmaster for our Virtual Universe Community.
It has taken a while but the BBC just ran it on BBC click as part of a virtual worlds piece. The page is here and UK people can watch the video.
A few small things, Its Holly Stewart not Stewarts, and the other IBMer is Paul Ledak not Paul Ladek, but you cant have everything can you.
**Update as Holly just pointed out on twitter the IBM SL machinima used in the piece was Rob Smart’s work too so credit where credit is due too 🙂
The key angle is also about interoperability, as you will notice this has been a bit of subject lately.
Anyway well to done our Holly for a great piece to camera. At last I cant take Click off series link on Sky+
Also greta perfomances from Valerie from ESC, the ubiquitous Justin from RRR and a great advert for Corey’s Multiverse in the middle of it.
Just for the record I think we (eightbar) have appeared on virtual worlds on click 3 times now in some way or another. Now where is the royalty cheque?
Category Archives: Virtual worlds
Exploring communication options in that metaverse middleground
As part of a bit of forward thinking I have been doing more experimenting with some levels of visualization. Working on the assumption that all video or all avatar is not the only way forward.
One way and another I ended up using Daz’s very amusing photo from flickr to illustrate the point here.
This is a mix of a static photo (an insane one) blended into an emotive 3d-ish representation, but with a synthesized voice from txt.
Daz crazy talked up from his 2d http://www.flickr.com/photos/shawdm/2… photo they will not read my mind
and speech synth lyrics by kanye west
I did a one of these the other day on my epredator.com blog which was a little more just to see if the technology worked, but also let me see if that would help in expressiveness and enhance a pure video conversation (which I think it does).
Here comes another wave of ideas for metaverses?
Metaverse technology and approaches to how people can interact in a MMO type way are appearing thick and fast. It always opens debates around one world versus many, it starts technical arguments around platforms. However that diversity is both a rich source of ideas and approaches and a restrictivce and confusing situation in social media circles.
Eric “Spin Martin” Rice comments on some of the problems of this in a recent post Just where and why are people choosing to gather in 3d spaces.
Recently Roo and I have been discussing the evolution of all these fragmented spaces. I dont think it is enough that we just tell people what is out there at the moment. It is by no means solved or possible may not be solvable, but it is worth considering some things here. Often interoperability reduces to a pure technical discussion when in fact its a social and organizational problem too. As virtual world companies and communities attempt to own their customers/members in a traditional sense they clearly want you to come to them to experience their wares and their way of doing things. This is a wider web2.0 conversation around who owns me and my stuff.
We are starting to see some words appear in up and coming virtual environments that start to hint at maybe some different metaphors. “Widgetized” is a forced word but if you read the press around RocketOn (props to Xantherus for twittering this company the other day) you start to see that we do not have to stick with the real world analogies that we have today. I am second guessing what Rocketon is doing but having a thing you take around with you from world to world appears to be their approach.
So I made a little picture, not so much a roadmap as a suggestion of where we are today and the ? as to where we need to evolve to in our understanding tomorrow. It is fairly self explanatory I hope.
We have gone from not knowing about anything going on around us, to our friends being online and sharing their thoughts/pictures/videos asynchronously to a set of single worlds where our avatar presence is part of the experience for us and those around us with a nominal amount of the previous steps awareness pulled into that environment too.
The trick is to think about the evolution from that, not to just replace real world metaphors but to extend them.
We already see this adoption as people start thinking about metaverses. They start with the replicas of themselves and of their offices and of their existing assets. They very quickly start to evolve their thinking and challenge why we need to stay on the floor in an office, do powerpoint, market with billboards etc. The non-real world representations start to flow as ideas.
My suggestion here is that the very container of those ideas, the world itself may also need to have this sort of evolutionary thought applied to it.
Single worlds and single avatars and a single live presence may be too restrictive, though is a comfortable metaphor to help people adopt metaverses and to feel some benefit from the.
This idea I think flows across each of the quadrants we see from the metaverse roadmap with the distinction being made with the types of virtual worlds and metaverses. Mirror Worlds, Virtual Worlds, Augmented Reality and Lifelogging.
Any thoughts?
IBM at the NRF
Does your avatar know how to make actual money? Bernadette Duponchel’s does. She was recently at the National Retail Federation conference with the rest of her team, presenting IBM’s take on virtual worlds for the fashion design industry.
This is the second consecutive year IBM has demonstrated the use of virtual worlds at the NRF. The brief demo highlights the benefits of real-time collaborative design, short feedback loops when tweaking materials and costs, and even pre-selling the item before it is physically manufactured.
Building cities by generation – Introversion
A recent conversation reminded me that I had read something in edge magazine about city generation for games. The premise being that whilst real places or soon to be real places may need to be hand crafted, sprawling believable cities that are backdrops or scenery, like forests or mountains, just be able to be generated. Of course ‘just’ hides the complexity of what needs to be done. The guys at introversion seem to be on the case though.
This video shows some of the toolkit in action as it decides how and where to layout a sprawling city.
There is more from the developers on their forum
I had seen this in a number of places on the web too like kotaku and digital urban it is certainly of interest in gaming community but procedural generation has its place in all sorts of content and simulation arenas.
Geek Rockets 2.0
We have just had a note to the emerging tech group here in Hursley inviting us to the 2nd rocket day. (I nearly said annual but it was back in September 2005 that we had the last one).
It reminded me that it was so long ago I had not youtubed the video I cut of the event. Unlike most video I do now which is small mobile snippets I had used a DV camera and then spent hours editing it up and cutting a soundtrack into it. Daz did a great one too with stills and a Kanye West track.
Making video like this is a very rewarding experience. So here is the 5 minutes of madness in a field in Hampshire.
Who knows, if I get to go to this maybe this will be a live webcast on epredator.tv into multiple virtual worlds (batteries and people willing)
March 5th Conference – Metaverse Evangelizing in a Web 2.0 world
Whilst Roo is off at SXSW doing his thing on March 5th/6th I will be at the Web 2.0 and Beyond: Applying Social and Collaborative Tools for Business Problems(this is the upcoming.org link) conference here in the UK explaining all things metaverse and also the use of Web 2.0 to move a corporation into action as we have done with eightbar and our various other creative outlets.
So if you are wondering what this is all about, and there is way more than just hearing me talk about life as epredator, then sign up and come along to this one.
The full page of speaker details are here, we also have Ian McNairn from IBM Software Group talking on day 2.
InstantAction in browser 3d multiplayer
As many of you know our IQ internal metaverse is based on the garage games Torque engine so we are always interested to see what is happening with it out there in the world. InstantAction.com teamed up with GarageGames to create this new multiplayer game experience in browser. The aim is to go way past the flash games approach and have a more detailed engine running that has grown up from game development.
So, being beta style Web2.0 people Roo, Rob and I dived in to see what it was like as the beta opened up some new games.
They have Marble Blast, Screwdriver and ThinkTanks all available as online or single player games.
Now the company is focused on all sorts of gaming experiences, a little past casual and puzzle games, aiming to exceed xbox live and playstation network.
It will be interesting to see how the dev kits help us in the future with corporate style intraverses. At the moment we still have a client install, though one that runs on mac, pc and linux for our metaverse. Also as instantaction is still in beta we have not explored what happens server side with interactions and persistence of worlds. I have no doubt someone is building something out there in garagegames land and I know we woudl love to see it.
For now lets enjoy the fact the games look pretty good and see where this develops.
Rare audio of both metaverse evangelists on Voices in Business
Roo and I did a podcast the other day. It is a rare thing for us both to be recorded at the same time.
You can listen to it here on Mike O’Hara’s Voicesinbusiness blog.
Just in case you cant tell the difference Roo is the posh sounding one and I am the slightly less posh (or scruffy) sounding one.
We covered a lot in a single take and it was both where all this has come from where it is going and where it is now. So good stuff.
I am not going argue over the billing with Roo first as Mike actually came to see Roo but I had gap appear in the diary so joined in too.
(From mikes blog here is the run down of the timings)
00:12 – Mike O’Hara introduction
00:40 – Start of interview
01:01 – What is a “metaverse evangelist”? (Roo)
02:16 – What is IBM actually doing in virtual worlds? (Ian)
04:35 – Events for IBM’s partners and customers
05:32 – Customer builds and retail opportunities
06:48 – Why should firms take this seriously?
09:21 – The scale issue
11:15 – Human interaction in the 3D environment
13:10 – Mistakes to avoid
15:24 – Demographics
16:01 – Ian’s predictions for the future
20:10 – Roo’s predictions for the future
22:59 – Web 2.0 style of adoption
24:36 – End of interview
24:42 – The Eightbar blog
25:19 – Wrap-up
Grady Booch on Ugotrade
Over on Ugotrade there is a really detailed and interesting post and interview with the great Grady Booch. He is an IBM fellow and one of the most influential people in software engineering. Virtual worlds have become very important to him. The post covers things like Bluegrass, a software development environment using the torque engine and integrated with the Rational tooling.
I was lucky enough to end up at dinner with Grady at the VW San Jose as Eureka DejaVu was having a real life gathering.
Grady’s humble yet worldy wise demeanour reminded me of a post that Scoble made a couple of days ago in Davos where Bono turned up and said “I am a rock star… sort of”.
In the UK there is also an interview with Grady in the British Computer Society magazine entitled the Mighty Booch, which is reference to the comedy show the Mighty Boosh 🙂
We have not covered Bluegrass much yet on Eightbar though we are very close to the team given our shared interest in Torque. So expect more on here soon.