Congratulations and kudos to the Nonprofit Commons project, fighting for the greater good in some inspired ways. I’m in awe of the scope here - the vision for this project was huge. I’ll have to make sure to meet the organizers someday, they must be a real force to be reckoned with.
About TechSoup’s Nonprofits In Second Life, Nonprofit Commons project. Learn more about how nonprofits are making a real-world difference through virtual world work.
Kudos to Draxtor Despres as well for his video work; genius as usual.
I was reading something about how a small cadre of vocal power users can skew the development of a virtual world platform, and it got me thinking about the kinds of things corporate clients I’ve worked with have asked for in the past. Oddly, these are things that don’t even seem to be on anyone’s radar - and they’re not very difficult to implement either.
Whiteboard - Being able to sit in a room with a bunch of other people and talk online is great, but being able to pop notes up about what people are saying and draw quick sketches (without having to learn to build please…) would be a game-changer for many people.
PA System - Just being able to designate certain people as temporarily “holding the mic” would make large meetings much more feasible. Having no session controls over voice has caused a number of calamities and driven more than one client to other applications.
Separate the 2nd Floor - This means establishing separate audio channels on top of one another; say, one for the 1st floor and one for the 2nd. People want a lobby downstairs and an office upstairs, and they want their conversations to be private in both places. The lack of functionality here means some strangely stretched out designs.
Real Names - Face it: the naming convention was a cute idea in the beginning, but it just seems idiotic to corporate users. Let us use our own names over our heads.
File Transfer Between Avatars - People have files. They want to share those files between each other. PDFs, PPTs, and VCFs are the most commonly requested that I hear about. Let us pass files to each other without breaking immersion and fiddling with email. It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate, just a simple drag/drop http transfer call would do. Integrate a little of the existing browser code with a spot on the option wheel for “Send File” and you’re good.
I just had to spend three minutes removing “this is huge”, “obviously”, “why isn’t this already done?”, and “please!” from the entries… cut the blog entry’s length in half.
And no, I’m not going to the Jira and there’s no possible way I’m asking my clients to go in there. The Jira is a nice bug tracker, but that is not how an enterprise-level piece of software gets designed.
This Monday at 2pm PST (GMT -7) the first episode of Virtual Worlds Keynote will be recorded in Second Life. If you’d like to be in the audience you can click here (SLurl) to teleport to the studio. Please note: we intend to keep the live audience small and exclusive, so get there early!
Our presenting guest will be Justin Bovington, CEO of Rivers Run Red. In his talk Supermarket Planograms In 3D Justin is going to give a specific example of how virtual worlds can be used in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) and Retail Sector.
I’ll have a full writeup, including the video, linked up shortly after airtime. For now though, to whet your appetite, I’ll let you know about some future talks we’ve lined up:
Real World Expos in Virtual Spaces
Why We Sold Our Real Building and Went Totally Virtual
Golfing With Clients Online
Turning Data Into Information With Google Maps In 3D
How Dell Took the Consumer Electronics Show Online
Getting involved is easy! Just email me at info [at] calebbooker.com.
Those who have been following the extremely promising Project Wonderland, a Sun Microsystems 100% Java open source toolkit for virtual environments, just got a bit of a shock:
I know everyone likes to get the bad news over with first, so I’ll start with that. We found out on Friday that development resources are no longer being applied to Project Wonderland.
Oh look, Sun just ditched its reputation as a leading edge technology provider… meh, who needs it, right?
Nicole Yankelovich continued to say that a core group of them are continuing the project and are working on making it self-sustaining. Currently they’re actively pursuing partnerships with various other companies. Hopefully a leader will step forward here.
While public perception has been that the project was stagnating, that’s purely a function of an inattentive press:
There is so much great momentum behind Wonderland. To our knowledge, there are currently three companies offering Wonderland-related products, and eight companies offering Wonderland world-building services. There are countless exciting university projects and a number of corporations that have seen the advantages of Wonderland over other platforms. We are seeing new people posting on the forums almost every day.
Of all the virtual environment products out there, Project Wonderland has the capacity to truly fill a void in servicing enterprise clients. Considering what it can do, I’m blown away at Sun’s decision here. Lets hope support continues to grow without the brand backing.
I find myself adopting the role of debunker and myth-breaker lately. Yet another “nobody takes virtual worlds seriously” message from a tech blogger. (IT guys… sheesh…) I’m not quite ready to make further announcements about Virtual Worlds Keynote, so how to address this?
Tell you what, its been a few days since I hit the news reader. Let’s see what kind of highlights I can pull out:
Design goes digital in Second Life Architecture & Design does a big writeup on the recent unveiling of the National Portrait Gallery’s virtual world rendering.
Phoenix NAP Launches Virtual Data Center Tour Pheonix NAP takes a cue from IBM and creates a sales tour / orientation space to help people understand their product better. See video:
Building a 3D workspace Hypergrid Business summarizes the history of technology and interface design, various studies, and shows how it all points to a virtual environment exceeding the efficiency of a real-world environment.
That’s just four random days, two of which were a Saturday and Sunday. Please please puh-lease can we stop loudly proclaiming “I haven’t been paying attention so it must not exist” in the press now?
