The IBM global innovation jam 2008 is on now for the next few days. Lots of interesting topics to come and tlak about (loads of virtual world related ones too).
You can register here and come share with the world. (*Update. In my haste I appear to have not noticed that whilst this is a large innovation jam is has been restricted to certain large organizations – sorry for misleading in anyway, my bad)
I just posted about changing the supply chain model with 3d printing from virtual world distribution. Come and tell me why I am wrong 🙂
Category Archives: Virtual worlds
More Virtual Worlds Forum news
This post may be a bit late, but…. Kevin/Boris Frampton one of former guildmasters in the IBM virtual universe community set up an SL overflow event for the VWF from 1:30-4pm. I was travelling and could not use the mobile in the car, but heading there now.
It also looks like an unconference will be happening tomorrow at the Hospital in London, so Rob and I look like we may well be there after all to join in the sessions. So if you are looking for an eightbar, we will be there.
It may be self selection in the virtual world and web 2.0 brigade but everyone is very resourceful no matter what occurs
Virtual Worlds Forum Postponed
We have all just been receiving notification of the postponing of the Virtual Worlds Forum tomorrow in London. It is completely outside anyones control due to an apparent fatal shooting outside the venue in the early hours of the morning.
Whilst clearly this is an inconvenience to many people who have flown in from all over the world, everyone’s thought will be for the victim and their family and friends.
The networking events will still be on as planned as they are at other venues.
It does mean though that the Hursley Eightbar’s (Rob and I) will probably not be able to travel up to London after all. So we wont be able to join everyone for that networking.
See you at the rescheduled event I hope.
The official statement is here on the VWF blog
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.
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
We are on TV… again. This time Sky
The recent hursley 50th has yielded this great bit of footage.
The whole package is great, but 4 mins in, yours truly rocking the virtual world
Yes I do quote(with attribution) the famous Warcraft is the new golf phrase. 🙂
I also seem to have become the lead story on the event. Fancy that.