More Tennis in Second Life - Roland Garros
We have gone live with our mini build of for the French Open tennis on the “IBM 7″ sim. We have previously had the builds for last years Wimbledon (video here) , and the previous Australian Open, but they were all private. This is out in the the public areas.
The team, Laronzo Fitzgerald, Andy Remblai and I have taken Pipe Hesse and Gizzy ElectricTeeth’s australian open and adjusted it for the Roland Garros event.
We have all discovered on the way lots of interesting gotchas on collaborative building, with sharing of permissions and how to make things portable.
The area itself is branded and in the style of the actual event with a central clay court.
We get data from the same feeds as we use for the website with current matches and complete matches represented on a main board.
The court itself is central, it houses the match replay gadget. The replay shows the play of the ball from a rally and updates the main scoreboard.
People can pose at each end of the court for a players view.
We are going to keep adjusting the experience as we have realized a few usability quirks that may not be obvious to people.
1. The rally is played after the real rally has finished, that is when the data is sent in Real/Web life. So the main scoreboard and court will always be behind the live one (at the moment)
2. When players change ends, or there is a break in play it looks like the court is not doing anything, so that may be confusing as a spectator
3. Rain delays, its started with one yesterday and we have not represented one as the Autralian Open has a roof.
Anyway we welcome your comments on it, as we try and bring the experience of the tennis event to the metaverse. The main website extends the experience with news and photos aswell as scores. In Second Life we can obvioulsy extend that experience to one that can be shared.
Here is a mini youtube with a famous metaverse personality playing tennis at the end with a golf club
So come on over and take a look
May 29th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
[...] Ian now has a great post describing all the features of Tennis in Second Life - Roland Garros. [...]
May 30th, 2007 at 5:35 am
[...] ePredator at Eightbar blogs about IBM’s latest cross-reality tennis experience for the French Open, and also coins an expression I can relate to in terms of the phases of reactions you see as people become accustomed to virtual worlds: “Joke, threat, obvious” … we have a little while before we’re at obvious, but it is coming. [...]
May 30th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
[...] Meer informatie omtrent dit experiment kan je hier vinden. [...]
June 6th, 2007 at 9:23 am
[...] An older, but neat example of how a simple game like Pong can interact with a real environment. Reminds me of IBM bringing the Roland Garros tennis ball to Second Life. [...]
June 6th, 2007 at 10:36 pm
nice court for tennis. i like it.
January 15th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
[...] Previous projects include Virtual Wimbledon, the French Open and last years Australian Open. What IBM demonstrates with these initiatives is the visualisation of effectively raw data - turning captured real life information (ball speeds, trajectories) via their court-side equipment and using Second Life to take that information and in near real-time republish it graphically on a virtual court. [...]