KnowSense

Why virtual worlds shouldn't chase the shiny

neilC — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 18:33:24 +0100

One of the things that environments that use the Second Life family of virtual world viewers are often criticised for is poor graphics, compared to the latest games (or even games from 5 or 6 years ago). Usually this is defended in several ways - that the content is user generated, so isn't optimsed the way that game art is, that just dropping into a random space in a grid like Second Life or Reaction Grid isn't a fair test since again it's user generated, and there are beautiful and breath-taking places if you know where to look, that the graphics artefacts have to be streamed and aren't supplied preloaded on a DVD and so on. All of this is true. It is also true that the graphical environments rendered by games are typically richer and more detailed than even the best Second Life and OpenSim environments, if you have the necessary hardware in the form of a modern console or graphics card. So it might seem natural to respond by striving to improve the graphical quality, to compete. The futility of this approach was recently highlighted starkly during an 'office hours' discussion from a staffer at Linden Labs, the makers of Second Life. They posed the question "what percentage of residents (users) would you all guess have 'class 0' (basic Intel motherboard) graphics hardware?". Various guesses were proffered before the answer gathered from Lindens own connection data was revealed - a massive 60%. This is across the board as a percentage of all users. If you are in a more constrained environment, such as a corporate office environment, my experience is the figure would be substantially higher.

So aiming for graphical richness will have the effect of creating wonderful eye-candy that an ever decreasing set of people can access. The Blue Mars virtual world is a case in point - based on the Crysis graphics engine, it requires high performance hardware to participate. This approach also sets a precedent for constantly trying to keep up with the latest graphics developments which in turn keeps the potential audience low. In an ideal world the graphics would degrade gracefully across all platforms, giving a cutting edge look for the best hardware but still run on the low end. The challenge here is in the content generation, since to do that would require users producing content at a variety of levels of detail (this will be required to some extent in the forthcoming 'mesh imports').

Now I am aware that I'm ignoring one important sector of virtual world users - and it's one of the few strong growth areas of Second Life - it's use as a platform for machinima. I think the approach here should be the one that is already being taken - most people serious about creating machinima in SL use a customised viewer with improved lighting and shadows that needs some serious computing horsepower to run effectively. In any case, if the ambition is to increase the number of users of virtual worlds significantly and make such environments a realistic, desirable choice for collaborating and social interaction, we shouldn't be catering specifically for a narrow minority (leaving aside the undeniably positive effect that great looking machinima clearly have). But all things considered, that 60% is timely reminder that to produce social or collaborative environments we should be targeting the mainstream and not the elite if we want to succeed. Graphics alone do not make an environment engaging or immersive, something Nintendo understood very well with the Wii and DS. Content and ease of interaction are the key.

(This article is based on one I wrote originally for Flying Island)

SL Viewer 2.0 Guide to Shared Media on a Prim

neilC — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:12:55 +0000

Essentials: You can now display fully interactive, shared web content on any surface in Second Life including flash, javascript, and embedded movies. On any surface of any object. A different browser on all six sides of a cube if you want. When you change the displayed URL by clicking on a link, everyone else sees that change. Scrolling isn't shared.
Details: The new Second Life viewer is now officially in open beta and available to the world. Amongst the huge raft of UI changes, about which vast tomes will undoubtably be written, there is also the totally new media functionality. It is now possible to create multiple panels in the 3D environment each of which is a fully fledged web browser allowing scrolling, clicking on links, text entry, full javascript support and flash. Anything you can do in a browser you can do on a suitably configured panel. The old constraints of parcel media having one URL per parcel are gone. Any surface of any prim can be configured as a browser, and the closest 8 to your camera will be displayed at any one time. The media are shared in the sense that when the displayed URL changes, either through you typing in a new link or clicking a link then that URL is distributed to everyone else who will see the change within a few seconds. Sadly, scrolling is not similarly distributed, at least not in the build of the viewer that I tried. This slightly dampens my enthusiasm as it means I can't use a pointer to point at the browser and know everyone else sees the same thing. (If shared scrolling is something you need, contact me as my company Flying Island are enhancing the browser with shared scrolling for selected content).

I'll provide a separate tutorial on configuring a surface as a media player, and also how to script the media. Scripting is already there with new functions to read the currently displayed URL and set w new one, as well as changing other settings. Importantly you have good control over who can interact with the media, and this too is scriptable. You can also create and manipulate a whitelist of acceptable URLs - you don't want vistors leaving nasty suprises on the browser. The other thing you can do of course is script the panel to reset and return to it's homepage if there's no one near it.
The new UI supports several features to help interact with the new media features. When your mouse hovers over a media surface, a small icon bar pops up allowing you to enter a new web address, or go forward/back/home. At this point, the media surface does not have focus. However, if you left click on the surface, a faint green outline appears. It now has focus, and your keystrokes now go to the browser. In addition on the popup navigation bar there is a magnifying 'zoom' button - pressing this zooms and centers the surface for easier viewing.

If the surface is configured to display Quicktime-playable content, a different navigation bar appears, with volume control and elapsed time display

This new shared media functionality is provided by the new SLPlugin architecture in the viewer. SL Viewer 2.0 comes with 2 plugins, one for displaying web pages and one for Quicktime. The plugins launch as separate processes, on a windows machine you will see up to 8 SLPlugin.exe processes running. There are already other plugins being worked on, including one that supports VNC desktop-sharing protocol and since the API is public, the expectation is that people will develop more. Mind you, with the full browser support now available, a huge raft of possibilities open up even without new plugins - shared whiteboarding and collaborative reviewing and editing being the most obvious to me.

This really is going to make a huge difference to what can be done in SL, certainly for enterprise and education uses. Along with all the other changes in Viewer 2.0 this has me all fired up about SL again. Great work!

As if by Magic, a Conference Call appeared...

neilC — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:40:24 +0000

When we first formed Flying Island we would hold regular skype conference calls. It was useful (and free) but frustratingly clunky to use. If one party dropped out, as they regularly did, more often than not we'd have to restart the entire call. Sometimes I'd try to reconnect, only to end up in a one to one conversation. If some colleagues were already in a group call, I couldn't just join in. If we'd been in the same physical space it would have been so much simpler - just walk up to the group of people you need to talk with, and start talking... shouldn't a conference call be as easy?

The voice chat integration in SL gets slated but my experience has been overwhelmingy positive. The niggles that are there should hopefully be removed with the auto-level adjustment and echo cancellation that are due to be part of the Viewer 2.0 release in March. The huge 'aha' moment for me happened after a Show and Tell gathering at the Beta Business Park in SL - around 10 of us had been voice chatting, swapping our best discoveries of the previous week. When the meeting broke up, I noticed that some of the Flying Island founders were online in the office on the park. I walked my AV across the park and into the office, as I entered I could hear them talking, and I simply sat down and joined the meeting. Effectively I'd gone from one 'conference chat' with 10 people to another with 3 other people in exactly the same way I would have done in a physical space - by walking from one group to the other. No menus, commands, connections to negotiate, it just worked. The voice integration has other nice features too. Working out who is talking is quite natural, helped by many mechanisms built into the environment - spatial cues with the sound appearing to come from the correct place relative to your field of view, glowing 'vu-meter' above the speaking avatar and various animations during speech. Also, if you need privacy then lock the parcel of land you are on to prevent unauthorised access, and restrict voice to the parcel.

I should say that the VoIP in SL is provided by Vivox and it will be interesting to see what innovations the recent announcement of another $6.8m of funding for Vivox might bring. The transparent metaphor of forming chat groups by proximity of avatars within the virtual environment isn't confined to SL, it is true of many platforms and games based on Vivox or similar spatial voice servers. But it is a perfect reminder of how the use of 3D immersive spaces populated by avatars can make collaboration much more natural.

Oracle stops development of Project Wonderland

neilC — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:37:40 +0000

Ironic. A day after discovering this glowing oracle-branded summary of the amazing immersive collaboration platform that Sun had put together in Project Wonderland, the Wonderland developers tell us that Oracle have pulled the plug. They are putting a brave face on it - it didn't exactly come as a total surprise to the team or indeed anyone else - like most Virtual World developers, my heart sank the day Oracle bought Sun. Some of the existing team hope to create both commercial and not-for-profit enterprises out of the ashes, citing a few existing Wonderland commercial developers as proof that there is something to it. Well, there's certainly something to it technically at least. Unlike Second Life and OpenSim-based enterprise collaboration systems, Wonderland was designed from the ground up as a serious work environment, specifically to solve the problem of allowing employees who were out of the office to continue to interact with their colleagues just as if they hadn't left. The telephony features alone are really tremendous, and by leveraging the existing X-windows protocol, there is proper built-in application sharing with OpenOffice documents, whiteboards and web-browsing. This means real server-based shared web-browsing where I see what you see, not the Linden Labs style embedded browser client coming in SL Viewer 2.0 that is different for each viewer. What about dragging and dropping documents and resources from the desktop straight into a meeting? Yes, that's there too. The graphics have been criticised quite rightly in the past, but the 0.5 release leaps into far less cartoony territory, and looks ready to start creating a convicing sense of immersion. Both server and client are built on java, so there is a massive base of developers round the world who could get involved and development tools and environments for java are fantastic. If there's anything missing technically it's probably rich gesture animations and voice gestures/lip sync, and a browser based client. But technically, it looks great.
The problem is that like OpenSim all the intiaitives and developments around Wonderland have been technical. It is geek heaven. But if a potential enterprise user read the glowing summary and thought "Wow this sounds useful. Where do I start?" they would have a mountain to climb. What seems missing is the business perspective,the return on investment arguments,the convincing real world enterprise success stories. Also needed is a way to jump into a Wonderland world and start experimenting with it straight away, preferably in a private space you could invite a colleague to with a clean simple interface and good help resources in the form of newbie training videos and orientation, or even people available in the space to help you. The Amphisocial folk have to be given credit here for creating something that integrates Wonderland into a web platform for launching meetings and collaborating, and at Flying Island, the company I work with, we are also looking closely at Wonderland as part of our collaboration solution.
So I really hope that the team can put something together and I hope that it has a serious business focus. I'm really looking forward to the 0.5 release and a roadmap for the future, and that the promise of Wonderland is fulfilled.

Nobel Prize Winner fits Universe into Second Life

neilC — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:57:05 +0000

Working hard, both in the office and at home. Out of nowhere, an invite to a presentation by Nobel laureate John Mather, cosmologist and man responsible for one of the most important scientific findings of the 20th century. The lecture had just started. Fortunately for me, it was just a mouse-click away. Within seconds I had my seat amongst the audience of some 60 or so people who had come to listen to one of the discoverers of Cosmic Background Radiation present quite literally the history of everything that has ever been and possibly will ever be, live. Hearing his phenomenally clear and enthusiastic voice I watched him present slides and video, answer questions from the audience I was sat amongst and all the time we were all exchanging snippets of conversation - insights, jokes, links to related science. I was able in no time to invite other friends to join me and watched as they arrived and found seats too. We could chat privately about the presentation as it unfolded as well as engaging in the banter of the audience. The final section of the talk detailed the James Webb Space Telescope, an Infra-Red instrument which is the successor to Hubble which is going to be placed 1 milion miles beyond earth, away from the sun and will give us unprecendented vision of our universe. At the end, we all were able to applaud the speaker and he fielded a wide range of great questions.

For veterans of virtual worlds like Second Life this kind of experience might be taken for granted but for me despite the years I've been involved, these are the times when the power of shared social immersive environments still takes my breath away. The sense of involvement, engagement, interactivity and togetherness is unsurpassed. It seems lately that I'm having more and more such experiences, and my long-held belief in the power of shared 3D immersive spaces seems to be growing ever stronger.

A huge thank you to Prospero Frobozz and Curious George of MICA, the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics for running the event in Second Life and for their great amphitheare on the StellaNova sim. I am very grateful to have been there.

Second Life Affiliate Program - free advertising for Linden Lab?

neilC — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 13:05:54 +0000

I read about the new SL affiliate program, got briefly excited and signed up. The idea is that you run adds on your blog, and any click throughs that result in registration and conversion to a premium account within 30 days land you $5. Now $5 sounds a lot in the world of micro-payments and miniscule ad rates. So let's see if this is a good deal. Currently around 10000 people a day sign up to Second Life. Total registered users somewhere near 18 million. These sound like big numbers - so far so good. But according to a recent post on SL stats only 0.1% to 10% of users who sign up actually get through orientation and spend any time using their new account, the others find the experience too difficult, confusing, or lacking in goals. So now only 10 - 1000 people a day are becoming new users. Now the real sting - payment is only if the user signs up for the 'premium' paid account in SL, not the free account that most people use to dip their virtual toe. In theory those 'premium' accounts should be attractive as they are the only way to really own land. However, users on free accounts can rent houses or land, and the rental market is now so large and established there is little incentive for premium. So exactly how many people have premium accounts, and what percentage of new users take them? These stats are hard to come by, the only reliable figure is that the last time figures were released at the end of 2008 there were some 90000 premium accounts. Total, and dropping. Add in the fact that getting confident enough in SL to want to make the jump to premium can take a while and the user must convert to premium within 30 days - now that $5 is starting to look quite elusive.
Clearly Linden Labs want to try to revive the Premium membership - the current beta program for Linden Homes for premium members and this Affiliate program seem to indicate that. But I can't see how this affiliate program is going to work or help, and it appears to my naive eye as just free ads on blogs for SL. Anyone want to straighten me out?

Backchat Gets a Slap - noise, poise or joys from Back Channels?

neilC — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 20:00:37 +0000

Is there anyone in the world that doesn't get irritated by people talking in the cinema? You are mentally 'somewhere else', then you get dragged back into the darkened room with the sticky carpet and popcorn on the floor. You lose your immersion and sometimes the plot. Being asked about the plot, well that's another perfect way to make sure you miss something. This is all so obvious and so cliched that I shouldn't need to mention it. So why when we are engaged in a collaborative coming-together to watch a presentation or video livecast or some other info-share in the metaverse do we suddenly think that back-channels are the greatest thing since sliced time? The chat channel will be buzzing,IMs will be flying, people will be diverting each other off to tweets and plurks and various other trendy emmissions. And all of this is suddenly good, and I'm immediately a dinosaur for saying otherwise. Well there has been a big debate raging recently over this on the ThinkBalm Linked-In group. One post summed up my feelings perfectly, and with the permission of the author, Christopher Simpson, Professor of English at George Brown College I've copied it here:

The Power To Point - Why immersion can bring teams together

neilC — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:59:59 +0000

So Second Life Enterprise is launched, in beta at least (great moderation by Dusan Writer during the presentation too). More about that soon, but here's what I think an audience unfamiliar with this stuff should have been told. See, I've discovered that immersive environments are, erm, immersive. Maybe I should back up a bit. During the recent crazy round of activity which has kept me away from the blog, I spent some time giving presentations using WebEx. At the same time I got to give a presentation on Collaboration at the Beta Business Park conference in Second Life last week. I reflected on why it was that the WebEx presentations hadn't made me feel in anyway connected to the people I was presenting to, and how different that was to my experiences of presenting and collaborating in immersive environments.

Here's my thesis - WebEx feels less immersive, less like you are sharing a space with others than even a telephone call or IM chat. In a phone call you create a kind of mental shared audio space (teleconferences often fail to achieve this, for me at least), and pure IM can do the same, some kind of shared mental dialogue space. However, when you use something like WebEx to 'share' a desktop or give a presentation, you force yourself to be in your office interacting with the flat screen of the computer. When I present using WebEx I have to fight the urge on every slide I present to say 'OK, I've changed the slide, can everyone see that?', and it's a natural urge because I get no confirmation that the magic broadcasting is actually taking place. When I point at something on the slide, I don't feel like I'm pointing it out to the audience - I know logically that I am but I don't feel it. Even if the presentation has a quality audio channel, this interaction with flat stuff on my flat screen in my office at my desk drags me out of my shared experience. I'm going to suggest that if your aim is to make people feel closer, WebEx actually hinders rather than helps! Presenting in a virtual environment like SL is totally the opposite. The illusion of a shared space, of being together is so convincing, so powerful that I never used to check if everyone was seeing the slides or the movie or the web page - because "obviously" they are. It's utterly clear to me that when I use a pointer or even my avatars arm to point out something, I'm pointing it out to everyone. Why? Because to my foolish ape brain, we're all looking at the same screen in the same space! Except of course we aren't, it is just an illusion and I should be checking at least at the start that everyone is having the same experience. Indeed, the illusion is so strong that you don't have to be presenting anything, you can just 'be' together. This "Togethering" is the essential quality that distinguishes the immersive environment - so if you want to do more than just transmit information, you want to actually keep a team bonded and whole, look beyond the WebEx and explore the power to point.

Beta Business Park - Business Community Plus

neilC — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 21:57:41 +0100

I had the great pleasure last night of attending the launch night of the Beta Business Park in Second Life. Given that there are already a number of businesses established there, the 'launch' was more like an official public acknowledgement. The event itself was well organised with a constant stream of live music in the Black Sun club in the Park and demonstration tutorials in the lecture theare. Gwyneth Llewelyn and Gayle Cabaret were extremely helpful in talking me through the concept and it's an interesting model. Fundamentally they are setting out to provide businesses that want a presence in SL with everything they need in a community of other businesses. What sets this apart from other business-oriented communities is the services that the team can provide as part of the package. The most significant of these is the orientation services for new users, ranging from self-guided 'read and click' exercises to video tutorials to live classes. The team claim to be on hand more or less 24hrs a day, and can be summoned in a variety of ways. It'll be a while before I hit a huge gong again 'just to see what happens'...

More on this soon.

Media Plugins For SL (updated)

neilC — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:36:48 +0100

Mark Kingdon has announced a new Media Plugin API for the SL viewer. I know it's controlled for just this reaction, but I do like the sense of progress that this gives - only yesterday I was reading about the promised land of support for viewing documents, proper web browsing and new media formats in the presentations from SLCC, and thinking it'd be late next year, then the very next day this. Predictably the comments section of the post is a mass of 'Yay, awesome' and 'Boo this sucks'.

I think the plugin idea will advance media support much more rapidly - I can see plugins for remote desktop viewing using VNC, and displaying PDFs both coming quickly. For education and enterprise uses, this makes a lot of sense. For a social, open to all platform it makes less sense - now you can't be sure that everyone can see your content - what will they see if they don't have the plugin? But we'll get over that - we did on the web, Flash and Java being the obvious examples. The mechanism for downloading the plugins and keeping them up to date must be transparent and flawless. How this will work for large estates with tight policies on software rollout, like university campuses and corporations is another matter.

But where it gets interesting is to look at the details on the wiki. The announcement seems to be focusing on 'viewing' various sorts of media, as identified by it's MIME type. But looking closely at the messages that can be sent between viewer and plugin you'll find mouse, keyboard and scroll events as well as cursor and focus - so clearly the infrastructure is being put in place for properly interactive media surfaces. This is hugely exciting, and raises tons of questions - the concept of a surface having focus simply doesn't exist in the viewer right now to my knowledge, how will this be indicated and managed? How will I swap to chatting from entering text in my Google Doc? I suspect it will be quite a while before those things are implemented in the main SL viewer. Until then there is the Roobaab clickable, scrollable browser, of course :-)

Update 24th August...
Well it didn't take long - Aimee Trescothick has created a media plugin for SL based on the new llMedia API for viewing the VNC desktop sharing protocol.

Now we just need a release of the viewer that supports it, and we can view shared desktops in SL. Of course it is already possible with high quality video streaming, but you need a huge bandwidth and an expensive hosting account to do a desktop at reasonable resolution. So this is a big step forward for SL, and will bring it in line with realXtend that I believe already supports VNC, along with Wonderland and Qwaq Forums. Nice one Aimee.

Roobaab Season is upon us

neilC — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 11:21:13 +0100

Roobaab is a new collaboration tool to bring a team together without bringing the team together. Work collaboratively with a powerful, easy to use community collaboration and publishing tool, then when you need to meet your collaborators, launch a fully integrated 3D immersive meeting space, in either Second Life or a private OpenSim instance. The content to be discussed is immediately visible to all attendees on a clickable, scrollable browser. Participants can converse using built in VoIP and text chat is logged as meeting minutes back to the community site. Other tools include 3D pointers and an interactive notecard board. Read on for high quality video and detailed description

The Lab gets serious about work

neilC — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:26:45 +0100

Linden Labs have revamped their 'serious' virtual world marketing with the release of a new subdomain http://work.secondlife.com/ - and it is miles better than the old 'Second Life Grid' material. There are reams of examples, case studies and quotes, and much more professional looking graphics. One interesting ploy is mixing photos of real people over scenes from the virtual spaces, perfectly emphasising the immersiveness. I recommend anyone thinking of getting involved with virtual worlds for real work to check it out. It makes a compelling case. I guess this is all leading up to the release of the 'Nebraska' behind-the-firewall SL solution coming in the autumn. Rumoured to be priced between $50k and $80k, it will need a polished marketing campaign and a solid value proposition. One thing that for me is missing though is photos and videos of real environments in use. It's hard for those evangelists amongst us to realise, but a text description of this stuff almost never gets the point across to folk who haven't already experienced it.

IBM Lotus SameTime 3D - 4 Regions of OpenSim for $50k

neilC — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:29:53 +0100

An interview on Hypergrid Business reveals the pricing of the new IBM virtual meeting solution based on OpenSim. It's worth a read, and I'm fairly convinced of the usefulness of the product. I haven't yet seen anything describing content integration though - how are the presentations, videos, task lists integrated with Notes (or heaven forbid another 2D knowledge and organisation tool)? We think this is crucial, and we're working hard with Roobaab to bring about good integration with the 2D web.

One minor point - IBM say they chose OpenSim in order to allow writing on a prim - we've done that in SecondLife to create a notecard board, one prim per notecard. Video coming soon :-)

Two new data visualisation videos

neilC — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 12:40:07 +0100

I've recently been involved in a data warehousing project, and of course I immediately thought how useful it would be to be able to represent vast volumes of data in an immersive 3D environment, to be able to walk through or fly over the data, to 'experience' it. Two videos released this week demonstrate the ongoing efforts to do exactly that using environments such as Second Life. The work from Green Phosphor below shows data from a spreadsheet be in displayed immediately in Second Life as a grid of 3D bars, dynamically updatable.

This is great, but only a first step. I imagine the data being represented in a much bigger way that can be flown over or through. But it's a great start.

The other is a video of the new ThinkBalm 'data garden'.

This is an attempt to represent the results of their report on the business value of immersive environments in an immersive way again in Second Life. I should say that I haven't had time to explore the data garden in Second Life itself yet, but I think the video highlights one problem with using video clips to demo these environments. It's impossible to see the value of the immersive technology from the video. Frankly I found myself heaving a huge sigh of relief each time the video zoomed in on the 2D graph - at least that made sense! Many of the things in the garden seem to be using 3D for the sake of it without considering the value added. So I love the idea, but the video just doesn't convince even me, a real 3D evangelist. I'll post more observations after I've visited the garden 'for real'.

IBM Releases Sametime 3D Virtual Meetings

neilC — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 14:31:28 +0100

IBM have launched their OpenSim-based 3D meeting solution integrated with Lotus Sametime. It is much more impressive than I had expected judging from the details and video posted here, and could be quite compelling for organisations that already have an investment in SameTime. Of course, for anyone who doesn't, well I'd recommend Roobaab - we will be providing many of the same meeting features, and others, all tightly integrated to a unique really useful content management system.

Clever Zebra join the OpenVCE Collaboration Project

neilC — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 09:13:38 +0100

The Clever Zebra guys have joined the OpenVCE project which aims to proved an open source set of tools and artifacts for collaboration, meetings and training in 3D spaces well integrated with traditional 2D tools like blogs and wikis. See Nick Wilson's post for more details.

This interests me greatly as there will be significant overlap with some work that we're doing to provide an integrated system for taking content from a collaborative 2D content management system and allowing the collaborators to launch a meeting in a 3D space (currently SL, soon to be OpenSim too) taking the content with them to display on a scrollable, clickable browser, and having tight integration and archiving of the meeting chat with the original CMS. All part of a big push to make 3D environments easier to access and really useful. I'll be fascinated to see what come out of the OpenVCE project.

Report shows Business Value of Immersive Environments

neilC — Fri, 29 May 2009 09:07:09 +0100

Analyst outfit ThinkBalm have published a detailed report 'Immersive Internet Business Value Study 2009' outlining the results of a survey of 66 organisations and 15 in-depth interviews covering 2008 and Q1 2009 focussing on the value to businesses of adopting immersive internet technologies, by which they mean virtual world environments. The report makes highly encouraging reading, giving weight to the anecdotal evidence reported in previous studies that these environments are of significant value and utility. I would urge reading the entire report, but here are some headlines:

95% of those surveyed reported some level of success ("Is or feels like a success")
More than 40% saw positive total economic benefit, ranging from $10k to more than $1Million and 42% said they 'didn't know' (which probably suggests that they didn't have mechanisms to measure it, not that there wasn't any)
74% said they would or might expand their investment this year or next
Learning/Training and meetings most prevalent use cases
Reasons for preferring over alternatives - low cost, increased engagement
Biggest benefit - enabling people in disparate locations to spend time together, followed by opportunity to show innovation and cost saving

There is a wealth of interesting information in the stats and charts, and the usual range of technical hurdles were raised by the interviewed participants. One of the most fascinating conclusions was that the level of engagement means that "Immersive meetings are more like real meetings than they are like web conferences"

Given the stature of some of the participants - Microsoft, IBM, BP, BAE - a report like this should be taken seriously by anyone wanting to improve the nature of collaboration in their organisation. And if you've read it and want to know more, see a demo or launch a pilot - contact us :-)

Problems and Prospects for Virtual World use in Businesses

neilC — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:53:23 +0100

IBM's Social Computing group have published an interesting paper entitled "Acquiring a Professional 'Second Life': Problems and Prospects for the Use of Virtual Worlds in Business". It details the trials that the group have done with a variety of business users and outlines both the issues met and the benefits to be had. Rather like the Forterra 'Recipe For Success' paper that I wrote about, the most useful aspect are the user anecdotes and quotes. For example "Comparing other technologies, big step up. Can probably adequately replace F2F for some tasks.", or "I really do think there's potential in using Second Life to collaborate in teams". It's worth a read.

Wither Wonderland?

neilC — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:19:29 +0100

So just as my interest in Sun's Wonderland virtual world platform starts to really kick in, Oracle goes and buys Sun. Now what? Is it worth investing time building tools and solutions on Wonderland? I don't expect Oracle to allow resources to continue to be devoted to the platform given the rather speculative nature of the technology and the lack of any kind of prospect for income from it in the near or even middle term. But the virtual world community is one of the most enthusiastic and committed of any I've seen, so I'd venture that Wonderland might end up as a truly independent Open Source project, like OpenSim and, from an enterprise viewpoint, a better bet for collaboration.
My growing interest in Wonderland has been triggered by the incredibly hackish ideas I've had to come up with to do useful collaborative things on the SecondLife/OpenSim platform. For example, I've got prototype ideas for a scrollable in-world browser/document displayer for SL, but there's a lot of work required to achieve something that Wonderland just gives you via the X11 shared applications support. Similarly, collaborating on say a spreadsheet or a text document in SL involves either rendering it as a bitmap and uploading it (automating the upload via a bot is also a hack but one I've already implemented), working in an online equivalent like google docs or a decent collaborative online CMS, or using a desktop streaming client viewed using the QuickTime capabilities in SL. Again Wonderland supports shared apps, so no issue (especially if you already use OpenOffice).
I've got a lot invested in tool development in SL, and for the moment it is still the most expressive and immersive platform, so I plan to continue working with SL but any spare time I get I'll be pushing Wonderland too.

Getting Your Point Across

neilC — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 19:29:11 +0000

"So as you can see, the colour of this panel is OK but that one needs to be brighter".... "then you have to touch this button."...."At this point the graph shows how changing to super-bright saved us quillions of pounds..." Come on it must have happened to you - despite all their amazing immersive features, even the best virtual worlds don't convey direction of gaze as well as we might like - SL makes a really good attempt, but nine times out of ten you still end up thinking 'What panel, which button, where on the graph?'. So I set out to look at ways to make this better when giving presentations in SL at least. The video clip shows my first experiments, first just enabling the in-built selection beams, then supplementing them with my own unmissable pointer :-)

I found out a few interesting things along the way, partly courtesy of the wonderfully helpful folk on the SL Forums. Firstly, the colour of the in built 'selection' magic beam of dots can be changed in the viewer preferences - managed to miss that all these years! And that you can't turn them off, at least not as seen by others (which is the point, literally!) You can turn them off using Advanced menu Debug settings, but this has no effect on what anyone else sees. So for the moment I have a chat switchable pointer that swaps between 'normal' particle chain and 'unmissable' modes. Should make demoing the other tools I'm working on like whiteboard and noticeboards a lot easier. And those impromtu whiteboard games of pictionary - "That bit is never a moustache..." :-)

New Video of Aula environment for SL and OpenSim

neilC — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 19:36:23 +0000

vComm solutions have released a video showing some of the features and architecture of their Aula enterprise training and meeting environment for OpenSim and SL.

For a higher resolution look - go here
I was lucky enough to get involved in helping make the video, and it suddenly occurred to me that just in getting together to do that, we were demonstrating the power of immersive environments for virtual team working - there were three of us in different parts of the world, and yet we were able to complete the filming and work well together as a team. This stuff works, and for anyone wanting a ready-to-run way to get started, Aula looks like it might be a good contender.

Update: I should make it clear that this video was shot in Second Life. The architecture and facilities offered in OpenSim will apparently be very close if not identical although speech gestures are not yet implemented. When I get to see the OpenSim solution I'll provide more details.

Complete Enterprise Solution for OpenSim announced

neilC — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 19:43:08 +0000

vComm Solutions of Zurich, Switzerland have announced their Enterprise solution-in-a-box for OpenSim at the LearnTec 2009 trade show in Germany. Called Aula the ready-to-run virtual environment is targeted at enterprise training needs, and provides meeting spaces, an auditorium and breakout areas alongside tools including Voice-over-IP, easy PowerPoint presentations and desktop sharing. The solution is based on OpenSim and can be hosted or installed locally behind a firewall.

The announcement on the companies website is currently only available in German, but it says roughly:

vComm aula is a complete virtual world, which is designed for training in the enterprise. Geographically dispersed users can work together in the highly realistic 3D environment. This saves travel and infrastructure costs. vComm aula is based on the platform OpenSim and can be installed on an Intranet.

If you read German, more details of Aula are available at the LearnTec 2009 show website
I was lucky enough to get a tour of the virtual spaces a while ago, since they also exist in Second Life, and I believe that the facilities in SL can also be rented, or set up as a private sim. I can tell you that Volker Gaessler and his team have done a great job. The quality of the architecture and furnishings is first rate and the feeling of being in a real meeting is quite strong. The presentation screen and the associated web uploader make displaying presentation slides a quick and simple affair. I haven't seen the desktop sharing as this is currently only available in OpenSim, but I hope to soon. This is a very promising project for any enterprise that wants to get started in using virtual environments with the minimum of effort. The current polar conditions in the UK mean a lot of people stuck at home - wouldn't this just be perfect for allowing them to keep working together?

Acklam Grange School built first in Second Life

neilC — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 12:43:35 +0000

In what is being billed as a 'world first', new school buildings funded by the UKs 'Building Schools For The Future' initiative have been created first in the virtual world of Second Life in order that staff, students and other stakeholders ca explore and give feedback. The work has been carried out by theMiddlesborough City Learning Center which in itself looks like an amazing IT resource for Middlesborough schools. New buildings for the Acklam Grange School, which hosts the MCLC facility, have been built in Second Life and transferred to the Teen Grid so that pupils can explore them.

From a great video on the Project A page of their wiki, it seems that the MCLC have created some kind of technology for converting the building plans into a set primitive objects inside a controlling object (rezzer) which then instructs them all to move themselves into their correct positions. I've contacted the creators in the hope that they'll tell me more about how the data is fed into SL.

Sadly, despite having such a wonderful ICT resources and futuristic ideas, the old problems don't go away. The most recent news on the Acklam Grange school website is from 2007.

Forterra "Recipe For Success" could be yours too

neilC — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 09:55:23 +0000

Well finally, my summary and thoughts on Forterra's 'Recipe For Success...' paper. The paper, a recommended read for anyone interested in enterprise uses of VW, was produced by Forterra after their work with the MASIE Center, a New York think-tank for corporate learning. The focus of the work was to have a second look at virtual worlds for enterprise learning, after spending some time in Second Life during the hype cycle of 2006.

Why SL may not be the ideal platform for real enterprise use

neilC — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 13:13:18 +0000

There has been a rash of articles and publications recently emphasising the real benefits for enterprises in use of Virtual Worlds, including Forterra's paper 'Recipe For Success' and Jani Pirkola's discussion of developing realXtend using agile methods based partly in the VW itself. (I still plan to write in more detail about both of these soon!) Now CyberTech News has a post that includes a very succint set of reasons why Second Life misses the mark as a platform for enterprise use, the main ones being:

No way to connect other grids or platforms and teleport between them

No easy way to extend the API or influence other technical aspects

No choice/control over service level

No local install for behind-the-firewall use or as a private walled-garden

Voice solution won't work with most company firewall policies

I think this is spot on, and I would add to it that getting the SL client itself installed and working within most corporate IT networks is a huge challenge, requiring many steps that run counter to corporate IT policy, starting from downloading the client from a location that is often blacklisted as a games site to then being actually able to do the install to configuring the necessary proxies to opening countless firewall ports (even if VOIP isn't required). Add to that ensuring that the graphics capabilities on a corporate PC are up to the task and you have a huge uphill battle.

Despite this there are still people trying, because SL is I believe the most comprehensive, stable consistent, immersive platform with an unbeatable range of content and social activities. But for how much longer? OpenSim and Wonderland are both catching up, and in the case of OpenSim in some respects overtaking. I still spend time in SL to socialise, to explore and to feel part of a living, evolving big world, but for business meetings and enterprise use? It's starting to look as if OpenSim will be the platform of choice for the next couple of years and maybe Wonderland will be in beta by then. Exciting times.

Sony HOME - First Impressions

neilC — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 13:30:47 +0000

I've had a few minutes to try the new public beta of Sony HOME, the virtual world for the PS3 that is free to all broadband-connected PS3 owners. Actually it had to be more than a few minutes since with repeated connection errors it took at least 10 minutes to get in. That was after downloading two huge updates to the PS3. Once in, there is a simple tutorial which leads you through the fairly intuitive avatar customisation, then you are dropped into your sparsely furnished apartment. The views are fabulous but purely for show - you can't get over the balcony to actually explore any of it. You are encouraged to head for the hub area, which can be reached either from the lift in the apartment or from the 'world map' which isn't a map at all, but a stack of tiles that spread out with locations on. This reveals that underneath HOME is not so much a world as a a set of separate virtual rooms that you can travel between. Heading for the hub you are faced with a 47Mb download, and similar large downloads will occur when you head to any new area. The advantage of course is that once that's done, the graphics are on the hard drive for good, and since there's no user generated content, you get a more or less lagless experience after the download. What does take a while to appear though are the other characters. HOME has it's own version of the much missed SecondLife 'Ruth' - a translucent glassy AV that you see before the actual shape and clothes download. Once all the other characters had appeared, I was struck by how little variation there were between them. This is partly down to the limited clothes and hair styles available at the start, but even within this it was disturbingly uniform and male - I don't remember seeing a single woman at the time I explored.
The graphic environment is almost garishly bright and sharp with super-saturated colours and lighting effects, but overall it looks pretty good. The hub had several media screens, none of which were showing anything initially - it seems that these don't show streaming video, but instead have to download the full clip and then show that clip over and over. I presume therefore that there is no way of knowing if you are seeing the same thing as your colleagues at the same time. There were also one or two poster boards - everything was of course an advert of some kind. The presence of a locked gate through which an escalator can be seen was interesting - maybe it will be a transport system?
I walked round the hub to the bowling alley and tried to walk in. Unfortunately it is a separate virtual environment, so there was the obligatory tens of Mb download first, then I was able to wander round with around 50 other AVs and play pool, bowling or one of the arcade games machines.
There were numerous huddles of people chatting and when I got close enough I could overhear the odd conversation that was clearly happening using voice - the way the sound falls off with distance seems to work well to keep groups isolated from one another. I don't know if there is a way to have private conversations, I presume so.
On trying to leave the bowling alley I was disappointed to find that despite now having both the hub and the bowling alley on my hard drive there was still a substantial pause going between the two. And there my exploration ended.
So my immediate impression is that it looks pretty good, the current population all look the same and they are nearly all male, and there's not a lot to do. As a way to introduce casual users to the ideas of avatar customisation and moving around in a virtual world it could be valuable. But more importantly I wonder where it's going to go. Who is going to really use it? It is fundamentally a social platform. There are some 18m PS3s in the world. How many of those have keyboards attached, or users willing to pay for and use a bluetooth headset? Without one or other of these there's no social aspect - the onscreen keyboard is basically pointless. So I'll be interested to see what developments Sony roll out, but I don't see this being the next big thing in virtual worlds.

Virtual Worlds useful to educators says BBC

neilC — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 13:32:02 +0000

Well finally - a mainstream media outlet, none other than the BBC, publishing a story that shows Second Life and other virtual worlds in a relatively positive light. Tech journalist Bill Thompson has written a fairly skimpy article about his time at the ReLIVE08 education in VW conference. Whilst repeating as everyone seems to need to that SL is used for 'cartoon-like sexual encounters' he also notes the education and research use of virtual environments and has a subtle dig at The Register for always dismissing SL as 'Sadville'. His most interesting points are his summary of the work of Sarah Robbins-Bell in characterising virtual worlds against various metrics, and his suggestion that by labelling themselves grandiosely as 'Worlds' these Persistent Immersive Environments set themselves up to be too readily dismissed by the media. He may have a point there, and many people, myself included, try to avoid the term Virtual World as much as possible.

Why everyone should play LittleBIGPlanet

neilC — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:38:08 +0000

My copy of LittleBIGPlanet for the PS3 arrived this week. What a beautiful, amazing, addictive thing it is. At heart it's basically a 2D platformer, of a type that has existed since the dawn of home computers, but now with photo-realistic 3D graphics, a wonderfully animated and configurable character ('Sackboy', so called as he is made of rough knitted cloth!) and a deep physics model that means problems can be solved in many many ways. It is presented in rich 3D graphics, although movement is constrained to a stack of three 2D planes - you can move freely up, down, left, right, and then hop into the screen by one or two hops. What can we call this - 2.3D?
So what is the relevance to Virtual Worlds? Read on to find out!

First Life meetings - don't believe the hype

neilC — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:43:48 +0000

Thanks to Vint Falken for spotting this great vision of the future of business meetings posted by Jon Brouchard. Personally I can't see it working. I mean in a First Life meeting everyone would complain that I'm not making enough eye contact. In Second Life, that's just what you expect. I think we should hold business meetings in the PS3s amazing LittleBigPlanet, more about that soon (yes, I know it's basically a 2D platforms and levels game, but it's oh so much more too).

Discussion of Immersive Workspaces and Interview with Rivers Run Red

neilC — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 12:01:21 +0000

Dusan Writer has published a lengthy and informative piece on the emergence of business collaboration as VW application showing real ...