It is fair to call this an industry or a business now I think. Still a fledgling one but definitely shaping into an industry. One of the ways you I think you can tell is that stories are not just about what has been done with a technology, but start to get stories and general interest in the people doing things with them. Much of Web 2.0 is dotted with Rock ‘n’ Roll personalities. Virtual worlds have created another set of names to know and personalities to track around various companies.
With the various moves around Linden Lab, Philip Rosedale stepping aside and Mark Kingdon joining as the CEO it was interesting to see that this was news that appeared in all sorts of business journals and publications.
The most recent, and significant story this week has been Cory Ondrejka, former Linden Lab CTO is now Senior Vice President of digital strategy as EMI. There can be lots of discussion about the media industry and the benefits that EMI will have hiring a known name in the Virtual World and game industry. As Richard Bartle pointed out on Cory’s blog announcement this has made it to the UK Guardian business news
So we have articles not about whether virtual worlds make sense, whether working in or on them has value, but instead about how a media business is going to find new ways to reach audiences and customers. That’s business taking this all very seriously.
p.s. Good luck Cory from eightbar
I have to admit to be rather excited about what we just discovered about the web page on a prim elements in Second Life now. For some reason I had assumed that the new drop downs on land management that let you replace a texture with a web page (as opposed to a video or jpg image from a URL) were simply going to render a flat image of a page. This is the pattern that had been used by third parties and also by some of out internal work in the early days of SL.
I had experimented a little with the new drop down when it went live some time ago, but today I happened to hit a page (in this case our French Open site whilst investigating some Wimbledon options.
The page rendered very well, lots of detail, readable etc, but I then noticed that the clock was flashing on the page. It was changing in real time.
Apologies to all the people who have been working on this, probably blogging to, but I had made an incorrect assumption. The web page is being rendered by the client and on top of that, whilst it cant run flash, it can cope with html and javascript based changes. For those of us on corporate networks it can also render things inside our firewalls as its client side once the URL is set by the land parcel.
Interaction is still a problem of course, but we have ways around that. The ability to get to web information in a shared fashion always seemed to be a killer app. There is so much content out there and people don’t always want to rebuild everything. So in the hunt for interoperability at the data level we also now have some tools to hand in Second Life for interoperability on glass.
To highlight the dynamic nature of this here is a video of twittervision doing its thing in SL.
As has been blogged and reported and twittered there was a little experiment that had some success yesterday involving common login’s from Second Life and OpenSim. A form of avatar interoperability, albeit across very similar platforms.
One of the best places to read this is here at Zha Ewry’s blog as he’s running the IBM side of the experiments.
Augmented reality, we love it here at eightbar. The blend of the real and the virtual. Roo recently wrote about the Radio 1 band in your hand now you need to see this excellent Lego AR kiosk. (Thanks to our collegue Alex Phillips (a.k.a DK) who pinged me a similar demo from a conference by the same people)
It is by Total Immersion
Forces gathered in IBM Hursley House yesterday. Whilst we cant see which briefing we were doing there were three of us there from the industry. Roo and Ren (No relation) Reynolds and myself were swapping anecdotes, ideas and whats been going on from an industry point of view in virtual worlds to a very interesting group of people, who did not need convincing.
As this was officially and through our briefing centre we had name plaques. So being the interweb tech geeks and camera enabled we all took the same photo.
Click through to the notes on this Flickr photo to see what happens when the Metaverse 3 gather :-)
We may not have as many metarati as the US West Coasters or as Brooklyn, but there is still a lot of shared knowledge over here in the UK and quite often centred around Hursley.
Vollee is now live in beta and allows you to access Second Life on a 3g or Wireless mobile. I managed to check this out on the train coming back from London. Though it was much easier at home as the London Southampton train has some of the worst phone coverage you can possibly imagine.
It did however work at Basingstoke. I twittered about how rock and roll this was.
The way Vollee appears to work is to be rendering things elsewhere for you and streaming video. Whilst laggy it is amazing to be able to do this and direct your avatar around the place. We have had things like this working on Activeworlds and did a very homebrew version last year at Wimbledon.
This service though, is that, a service. So it will no doubt get a lot of testing from the metarati in the next few weeks.
I cut a short video of Hursley and IQ islands with the Wimbledon build from last year ( something we are looking to update over the next 2 weeks) and then flying over to Andy’s SL rendition of his house that also appears on twitter now.
Anyway I can atleast navigate and see what is going on over 3g or wireless. I have not tried a chat, it will be a bit cumbersome. Of course the people that see me online may not know I am on a mobile. That may be a thing to work on next, a “I am in on a restricted client” message.
Still maybe at wimbledon this year I can work from the roof garden on 3g (the wireless is not great up there)
I just got the review copy of Richard Hopkins and Kevin Jenkins book Eating the IT Elephant : moving from Greenfield Development to Brownfield.
I have known and worked with Richard for quite a few years so I was very interested when he started to talk about this book, then when this exploded into using Second Life for visualization of existing system architectures (starting on Hursley island) it got me even more interested.
Image from snapzilla
The book is not solely about using virtual worlds to visualize systems, but it is a part of the whole. For any IT architects out there and software engineers many of the themes around complexity with familiar. As will the not so good solutions of representing complex architectures in reduced down powerpoint slides or stickers on a wall.
There is a lot more to the book, and I need to read the rest properly. It has a foreword by Grady Booch and by the one of the UK based IBM fellows Chris Winter. They make interesting reading. Though I really like Richard’s family dedication. I wont spoil that for you :-)
They have their own site an blog over at elephanteaters.org the book is on amazon the uk link is here
Anna is an animated avatar developed by the University of East Anglia’s eSign project to synthesize sign language, she was used as part of an Extreme Blue project to convert Speech to Sign last summer. Anna is animated using Signing Gesture Mark up Language (SiGML) which is based on the internationally established notation for sign, HamNoSys. Currently, to create signs for Anna, eSign have provided an editor which is very good, but requires a reasonable amount of time to be able to use efficiently. For a few days per week I have been working on a way for people who are not familiar with the eSign editor to create signs for Anna, with the hope that creating signs can be the sort of thing you just dip into, when you have a spare minute and a sign you would like to create. With this in mind I decided, as a test, to create the EightBar gang sign using my interface.
After 15 minutes of playing about, I had a gang sign! It took a few attempts to get there mind…
But finally Anna was throwing the gang sign like a pro…
A little while back many of us in eightbar and the wider IBM virtual universe community got to spend time talking to Rita J. King. Rita, or Eureka Dejavu as we all think of her was commissioned to write about how we got to where we are in virtual worlds. The story of a community forming.
The finished article is linked as a PDF from this blog post on Dispatches from the Information Age
It was great too when Rita and Josh came to visit us and we met up in Portsmouth as part of their Dancing Ink Productions world tour. As we always say these virtual worlds are not there to replace real life but add to it. When it means you get to hang out with great people like these it makes it all worth it.
Rita points out how she got to know Grady Booch through doing this piece, a massive figure in software engineering, it was Eureka who introduced me to him at a post virtual worlds conference dinner. To complete the chain a few hundred IBMers were at an award event called the “Corporate Technical Recognition Event” CTRE for short in Phoenix last week. Amongst the lucky award winners was our very own eightbar Daz and here is the picture I took, mainly to show the Peter Kaye lookalike service food in the chef’s hat, but I realized this slightly blurred picture actually also had Grady Booch in it, in the red shirt on the left.
You can read more about the event here and here. I should add that this amazing gathering we were lucky enough to be a part of also included Jeff Jonas who was being made a Distinguished Engineer which is a very big role in IBM. So present company excepted it was a massive gathering of some of the most influential technical people in our massive company. People I would never have got to meet if it had not been for virtual worlds either. Having an IBM Fellow of some note (The most important elected position in IBM for us techies), John Cohn come up to me at the bar and say hey it’s you did my ego the power of good I must say!
That’s enough name dropping and self congratulating, this post is about Eureka’s report
