Next week, September 3rd/4th is the next major Virtual worlds expo and conference. I will be over there along with lots of my IBM collegues to meet, greet, share, explain and talk all about various aspects of the gorwing virtual worlds business.
So come find me at the IBM booth or just grab anyone with a striped leather jacket 🙂
We have Colin Parris our VP of digital convergence doing a keynote, I am on the technology visionaries panel in the futures stream and Boas Betzler will be on the enterpise track on the panel The Future of Virtual Collaboration in the Enterprise.
Michael Rowe of dogearnation fame will be wandering the floors doing interviews for a podcast with all sorts of key people in the industry.
Looking at the speaker list, and the sponsor list this is really going to be a huge show. They get incrementally bigger, so its great to see the growth happening.
If you check the other keynotes, John Landau is opening the show, Steve Parkis an SVP from Disney online and Tim Kring creator of Heroes are all speaking too.
The entire speaker list is something I get a kick out of reading. CEO’s and Senior VP’s and a few of us with other titles peppering the list.
I know I am going to be torn by my speaking schedule, booth schedule, catching up with the metarati schedule and the fact I really want to see some of the high end Hollywood sessions. Whilst we have driven this into the enterprise based on human interaction and meeting style communication, the blend back into the entertainment and game space is clearly going to have a major impact.
Anyway, if you are there see you there, safe journey’s everyone.
Category Archives: Virtual worlds
Come hear my dulcet tones on Dogear Nation
On Friday I had the pleasure of being invited to the Michael and Michael Dogearnation show to talk all things metaverse. As Michael Rowe pointed out the last time I was on the show it was not a public gig as it is today. So if you have a few minutes to hear us jam on various metaverse subjects and the odd anecdote then the podcast is here.
Michael R. was streaming to Kyte.tv from his end of the podcast, though Michael M. and I were on Skype seperately to be recorded, so the live video at the moment has a comedy one sided conversation only ehearing Michael’s voice. We did use the backchannel of text too though.
Another great experience, I particularly like the fact that it is really a live show. Whilst there is editorial considerations and timing for some editing the flow and feel was very live and again different to other media style interviews that I have done. The content for the show is both driven by the guests and the hosts interests and by the articles that have been tagged dogear-nation on delicious
CBR special on 50 years of Hursley Cool
Andy-SC just twittered the link to this great article from Computer Business Review on Hursley’s 50th celebrations. It is particularly good as it documents the complete set of things that Hursley have done and are still doing including virtual worlds. Fellow eightbar author Rob (is there anything he cant do) Smart was interviewed by CBR and is quoted throughout. Its well worth a quick read for anyone who has not quite grokked Hursley yet.
As we started eightbar to try and explain some of the ethos here, it is good to see it professionally written up.
Webflock by the ESC
I was tempted to do lots of Flocking jokes in the title of this, but I will leave that as an excercise for the reader. I had a chat today with Giff and Swords from Electric Sheep Company anout their virtual world product/service that they have created called Webflock. There is a much richer description on this page.
Image from http://www.electricsheepcompany.com/
I think the natural thing with all the Googleness around with Lively is to make a comparison, but I think that is a rather misguided one as there really is not that much similarity once you drill down.
Webflock is Flash based, so yes runs in a browser. I agree this may be regarded as “not a plugin” as its so pervasive, though technically it is and still needs patching when adobe updates it, but it is a very standard plugin so thats a good thing. It uses papervision3d as part of the rendering engine. Its intended use is for branded experiences with a very low barrier to entry. In many ways this is the same challenge that we face in the CIO in IBM. There is a balance to be had between just letting people get in quickly, to experience something avatar based, with video and a small degree of interaction and a fully immersive, user generated content 3d world.
Being flash based Webflock is able to be driven from javascript in other pages, hence allowing for on glass integration with other web applications, rather than inserting the application in the environment. Though video is able to be played (and presumably any elements that flash wants to deal with too)
Its a very interesting model and direction to take. For those of use already immersed and bought in it may seem a step backwards, but I have certainly experienced the need for some of the steps to need to be slightly smaller for the vast majority of people, so this may just be the right way to go.
It can of course evolve, having a seperate backend system “Aspen” as the model and sometimes controller in this Model View Controller (MVC) application is an architecture that many of us techies are used to.
Some other interesting features we talked about was the emdebbing of game related content. Being able to initiate a quiz where you have to alk to the answer. This is very easy to do, may be slower than a quick click of a question but gets people considering the 2.5d space and moving around in it. The real interesting parts are when that is not simply a HUD for one person but a view shared by all. This is possible with the underlying model.
The system is designed as part of the more normal tool chain you might expect for web development. It is not currently aimed at excessive user customization, though no doubt that will creep in as its not long into grokking this that people want to do that as we have found inside IBM too.
So it does have the potential for a private view of the world, and a public shared view of the world.
Expect more in the next few months as some projects come on line. I look forward to seeing how these targetted customer spaces work and fill a gap to get even more people understanding the richness of human communication possible over the web. (its not all facebook you know)
PS3 Home vs Xbox 360 new look dashboard vs Nintendo Mii
The explosion of avatar based interaction outside of the context of an actual game is well and truly on a roll at the moment. It is akin to when evrything and everyone started to allow profile pictures. These pictures are of course a low grade avatar expression of a persons intent towards you and a system. Inside IBM we have a corporate bluepages, everyone has a space for a picture. It is intended to be a recognizable passport style. However use of it it broken into 1/3 regular pictures, 1/3 expressive, different and innovative pictures and 1/3 no picture at all. I have many conversations around this. (The numbers are not actual numbers btw, just classifications of people). It seems there is a percentage of any population that just does not want to let you know anything about them, they either dont have time, inclination or ability to share. The other 2/3 though are more interesting and whilst may seem to be opposing camps they are willing to share something of who they are online in a particular domain. It would be great to be able to have more than one picture, a straight laced on and an expressive one to further explore who people are and get a sense of them before meeting or talking.
Of course this is where the avatars burst into life. The gaming community is used to some of this expression from within the games. This is now very much bleeding out into the lobby, and going cross game experience.
The Mii’s started to let people created a persistent character when playing in a game. They allow a degree of portability, carrying the Mii around in a WiiMote to a friends house, or travelling around via the slightly over regulated(IMHO) friend system. The problem is the connection to others is not really there online, though is certainly there when all crowded around a TV.
The PS3 Home system promises to enable every PS3 owner to have an immersive virtual world experience, share content, provide game lobby brokering, win new avatar and room related things in games etc. At the moment the PS3 experience online is not great in terms of conncetion to others. The friends list is a bit light, just an icon and a sense you might connect with people in a game somewhere. Recent patches start to change this, but it is a long way behind in terms of feeling of being connected.
The 360 has Live, and this really does seem to have been an integrated community success. You feel always signed on and connected, in game, out of game, watching a DVD. The comms and invites to places, tracking friends achievements and a whole host of other things feel really good. The player pictures from games or from cameras work as an expressive low grade avatar. Of course now after E3 we know that the flat almost web2.0 experience of Xbox live is going to have the brightness turned up on it with avatars. It is a combination of the Mii and Home but will just be there in the autumn no fuss no bother. There is a (not very good) press release page here the videos dont seem to work. So lets hope for a smoother release on XBL.
As per usual all the companies are influenced by one another, trends sweep through, but I think the underlying need we seem to have (atleast 2/3 of us) for digital representations to be more rich is the interesting point.
Even more crossover virtual and real
As I say so many times in Second Life I wear a mask but I dont hide behind it. I managed to teleport myself into Second Life from Real Life with a little help from Roo holding the teleportation device for me.
Here I am/(we are) on the court at Wimbledon
In the Sl version of the RL office at Wimbledon
In the SL version of the RL roof garden at Wimbledon
So who would you rather interact with, the predator with the jacket and the mask, and a certain presence or a video version of me? Personally they are the same thing to me, but different situations suit different AV’s
Lively.com Googles Virtual World ?
After months and months of rumour about Google creating a virtual world Lively.com has sprung up seemingly from nowhere, I caught wind of it via Al Kronos’ twitterings and went off to investigate.
It’s a cutesy looking ‘create your own room, invite your friends’ and embed on your website type world with a default set of content that can be expanded by splashing out more cash in the shop.
Of course step one is to create somewhere to congregate and it would be wrong not to stick the Eightbar flag straight in to claim a spot. So here’s the Eightbar desert island, see if you can get in.
I have to say its not quite what I was expecting from Google as the social room on a web page is quite a common concept already.
Teleporting across virtual worlds
You may have heard talk of this on his blog, our very own Zha Ewry appears in this video on the Linden Blog. (thanks John Sisk for tweeting this to me as I had quite a post Wimbledon backlog to wade through and twitter gets first look most of the time).
The video and article is about teleporting from Second Life to Open Sim. This is a sort of openid/unified login approach. It is a form of interoperation between similar yet different platforms.
Take a look at Linden Labs perspective on all of this (you hear enough from IBM on interoperability) 🙂
What did I/We learn this year at Wimbledon 08 in Second Life
Wimbledon is like a very very long plane journey. We all tune into the event and our various roles and focus completely on them. Having added the extra extreme sport of standing in Second Life at the same place for 15 hours a day for 14 days (except middle sunday), and having spent many of those hours talking to people in world and in real life about what we do I thought I would share a perspective on it.
- I can explain why I have been saying “People stopped asking why? and started asking if?”” Our real life clients and visitors were fascinated this year more than the previous two year. In 2006 it was “ha thats funny”, in 2007 it was “why are you doing this?” in 2008 it has been “Oh! I didnt realize there was so much to it, so can I do x?”
- We had less visitors in Second Life this year, but the ones that came stayed longer and asked more detailed questions about the various modes of working. We also still had more visitors than the physical hospitality tours. Business opportunities arose too in virtual discussions. The depth of conversation and the quality of interaction proved to be way more important that the volume. This is a change that many marketeers would not yet understand, but clearly need too. I realized that in many ways I had turned into a Social Media Strategy Consultant. We segued from the official RL wimbledon tour showing the website and how it was reaching out to social media sites allowing people to take feeds and widgets wherever they happened to be. Metaverses are on that continuum. The 3d wiki, mixed with social network, mixed with being a fan, mixed with behind the scenes blogging all merge in a virtual world event.
- Identity versus expression through avatars came up alot. Many people see my predator AV and assume I am hiding. “I wear a mask but I dont hide behind it”. It was very useful to have Judge Hocho there too in SL and in RL. Judge’s choice is a more real world expression of his physical form. Though interestingly he refuses to have photos of himself in RL. Those two ends of the spectrum allowed for me to explain that visual representation is not the same as knowing who someone actually is. Persona’s are difficult and many people are not confronted by that balance. Proving who someone is from a trust and security perspective is not based on what their username is or their avatar appearence.
- Shared web browsing worked really well. The embedded web browser, albeit read only worked very well. It is a pity it did not do flash as much of the widget content was flash based as it the realtime scoring feed for the pub-sub elements. However, showing people the wimbledon.org site either in world or on a RL tour worked very well. Demonstrating in the RL room the SL version of the website at the build allowed me to show how I would say the same things to people in world as Andy and Elizabeth would have just said to the visiting customers on our tech tour. The power of the familiar worked. Also in world we drove a few extra people to the site, more traffic. The official numbers will be published soon.
- The complexity of shared web browsing becomes more apparent when actually trying to do it. I spent a good few conversations in RL and SL showing people why shared web browsing is complicated. It is not obvious to many people until they see this or do it. The web is a single user experience. There may be 8.5 million people hitting the same site, but your view is your view. Content gets personalized, you login etc. The LL implementation has an embedded client render a URL provided to it. After that it is your client creating the session. If the pages are not personalized in any way then thing will remain in synch. We will all see the same page. If you were able to just click and navigate following links etc, soon the web would start to personalize to you. Each view may start to diverge, cookie trails of browsing, preferences etc. Also being able to see any page on the web would mean peoples browser may be taken places they dont want to be. NSFW sites etc. Judge built the monitor for browsing so that it had a menu of defined Wimbledon pages. So people got to know they had shared control. We then had the odd occasion when two people asked for different pages at the same time. They would then feel the shared problem of losing the page they wanted to see. The facebook page also highlights this. Its asking the user to logon. If the SL user used the break out object judge provided they would be able to view the URL in their personal embedded browser not on a prim. They could then logon to facebook. The prim object would then show them they were logged on and show their page. This woudl cause concern as they would ask if everyone could see thier details. The answer in this case is no. Each user’s embedded browser forms its own session with the website, just like any browser. So very quickly content gets out of synch. The alternative though, a server based proxy to show the same content to all would mean that people details once logged on would then be shared. All these problems are solvable, but we need some new metaphors in web browsing to make it obvious what is happening. The same as when https started to be shown as a padlock on the browser. We will need standard iconography for shared pages, individual pages but similar view, divergent pages etc.
- Why have we not modelled all the players? Another common question. There are several answers. The whole Wimbledon SL build is still done effectively for free. A lot of volunteer effort. Building hundreds of player AV’s is complex and time consuming. Down the line when the virtual worlds can represent things even more accurately we would be able to completely reconstruct the match in intricate detail. We know where the ball is, where the player is, what stroke has been played. All this information is mashed together with video in a DVD we (IBM – the atlanta sports events team) provide to the players and coaches after a match. So we know we can take crowd noise to indicate an exciting rally and index video based on that. To take a virtual event to the next level it needs this detail. However we then run into player image rights. Even the top video games do not feature all the player models in tennis. Wimbledon does not feature as a brand in any of the tennis gams either. The blur of copyright, players image rights, broadcast rights and sheer politeness (do you like you AV) gets complicated. Who knows where we could be for things like the 2012 olympics with a virtual presentation of the event live? For now though we keep it simple. Though if we do it again I still want to have more data and more atmosphere.
- Any event or build needs people. The single biggest draw had to be being able to talk to people at the RL event, behind the scenes. Everyone was always amazed and interested. Are you really there? Wow that must be great! It is of course great, but never for the reasons people assume. For me it is the amazing sense of doing something so well known and immediate. Having the whole of IBM behind us helping and people interested in our work. Pride does not pay the mortgage, being away from home and family for so long is awful, but its worth it. I could have done SL Wimbledon from anywhere, but the truth of being there came through the build and the avatar. Nothing beats Real Life, and reporting on that in a virtual world at a human level is the important thing to remember
Maybe see you all next year. Thankyou for all the support and conversations. Hi to Sean Krams our most regular visitor, always good to see you there Sean. It meant a great deal to Judge and I.
Vote for Eightbar on the computer weekly blog awards?
Not only has Roo been nominated in his own right in the same category we have eightbar for the computer weekly awards. Web2.0 and Business. So if you would like to vote its a few click away by july 31st.
