Clear a half-hour of your schedule at 4pm SLT and join us in Second Life (SLurl) as our guest Jonena Relth, President of TBD Consulting, gives a 15 minute presentation entitled: “Why We Sold Our Real Building and Went Totally Virtual”. We’ll be recording and broadcasting live through Treet.tv.
If tough economic times have driven your business to look for new cost-cutting measures, or if you’re at risk of losing highly skilled employees due to a long commute, do not miss this! Extending well beyond virtual environments, Jonena will cover how her company has combined a variety of Web 2.0 technologies and old-fashioned spreadsheets to get the job done right.
After the presentation we’ll be holding a Q&A that will not be recorded, so be sure to arrive on time to secure your seat!
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To join us in Second Life, you’ll need to do the following:
Go to SecondLife.com, create an account, and install the software.
Log in through the Second Life software using your user name.
Click here to be teleported to our studio before 4pm Pacific.
I’m seeing signs of the new rush into virtual worlds beginning. Let me give you a few references:
Myst Online is back! Why does this mean anything? Well, it failed twice. The game just isn’t financially viable. The creators, however, just switched the lights on and aren’t even worried about making any money out of it. That’s how cheap it has become to run these things!
Layoffs Won’t Stop Project Wonderland – The latest from a GigaOM affiliate blog about the Wonderland team’s determination, stating that the project has enough momentum to carry it forward without any need for Oracle’s help and a number of companies are taking a serious look. Isn’t this exactly the kind of thing we started seeing just prior to the first dot-com bubble?
These are three specific examples, but in general I can tell you that there’s more virtual worlds news trying to cram itself through my news reader than ever before. I’m also hearing a lot of behind-the-scenes chatter of some huge announcements coming this summer. Brace yourself folks, 2010 is going to be a big year for virtual worlds.
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Want some hard facts, but don’t want to go through hundreds of articles to find it? I can’t blame you. Here, chew on these PDF links:
As of right now you can’t even buy the development kit for Web.Alive. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t start getting ready to build there!
Firstly, why should you bother?
I took a tour of Mellanium‘s environment again today, and what really struck me was the level of detail visible. I was looking at this highly detailed model of the Titanic with textures so good I could zoom in on the knots in the wood. That’s impressive, but what was even better was that I could glance across the room and see a fully rendered locomotive and old fighter plane.
The interface was obvious. Fixing up my avatar was easy. The voice just worked. Full-screen mode just worked. We could easily hand files to each other, view PowerPoint and fully rendered web pages with Flash support, and snap privacy settings in the room on and off with a click. All of this right in the web browser.
So its a beautiful thing, tested with up to 90 concurrent users and it runs on your mom’s laptop. While things with Avaya’s buyout of Nortel make things a little shaky, this isn’t a platform to be underestimated.
At the beginning I promised information on how to get an early start. Its simple: buy a cheap copy of Unreal Tournament 2004. It comes bundled with UnrealEd, which is all you need to begin building environments right now. Import your static meshes from Maya or 3D Studio Max, and you’re just a step away from publication.
Now we just have to wait for Avaya to release the dev kit. I’ve been lead to believe that good news is on the way, but beyond that we’ll just have to wait and see.
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.
