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 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.
I have a lot of work to do today, but to hell with all of it for a minute. This needs addressing.
Last week I put some notes down about what I wanted in a virtual world largely as a thought exercise to help me collect ideas as I worked on a project for Clever Zebra. Interesting pingback links and comments came in, but one stood out (thanks Claus):
I agree with everything except the need for 1,000 or 10,000 concurrent users, in one shared space. The benefit of a virtual environment is the interaction with other people. You can interact with 30,40 people, even 100 will stretch it. 1,000 or 10,000 is a broadcasting event. Unless you break it down again into 30-40 smaller groups.
This is a common objection to the concept of allowing more than 50 avatars to share a space. Many bright people from both academic and technology circles argue that the need for many concurrent users to share a single 3D space is unnecessary and irrelevant.
At the moment virtual worlds just aren’t built that way: get too many people in the same room and the whole thing chokes. Many of the world’s brightest people consider this issue to be very low-priority.
They’re dead wrong.
I have all sorts of arguments, but let’s put my nerdyness on hold for a second and ask a simple question: which of these two clubs would you rather hang out in?
vs.
Go with your gut here, because that’s what using a 3D space is all about: your gut reaction.
If the issue is settled for you then get to work filing bug reports with your favorite 3D platform that they aren’t supporting nearly enough people in a given place, and that until they do everything else they accomplish is irrelevant. If you’re an Auditory-Digital thinker and the issue is still far too vague for you, read on.
The facetious, in-your-face argument:
If the whole point of using a 3D virtual space is its similarity to being in a physical space, ask yourself this question: in the real world, are conference centers important to business? Are large rooms important? What about auditoriums and theaters? How about trade show floors?
A lack of concurrency forces us to slice all of these things up into small classroom-sized rooms. This is unacceptable. Period.
Take every one of your arguments in favor of small “multiple-venue solutions” or the fact that you can’t chat with more than a few people at a time and apply them to eliminating REAL-WORLD large venues. Do they still hold water? No, of course not. They don’t apply in the virtual world either.
The perception of value argument:
Which of these two speakers at the UN is saying things the world considers important to think about?
vs.
Note: you could tell without even knowing who was on stage, couldn’t you? Shared presence matters on an instinctive level.
Seeing lots of avatars manned by real people adds a huge perception of value, but it isn’t just a visual phenomenon. Audio comes into play here as well.
One of the most important features of a recent trade show we ran (using four separate servers at once to support a mere 200 people at a time) was the chatter in between the booths. That background hum was something that you can’t fake with a looping crowd sound-effect. The real thing makes a difference.
That sense that something big is happening right here, right now, is huge. It beats the hell out of even a live video broadcast.
The rebooting server argument:
Which server is less likely to crash: one that can support 1000 users, or one that can only handle 50 at a time? I mean, all things being equal, a high-capacity machine can handle one or two extra avatars joining a meeting or sneaking into a lecture much more safely, can’t it?
The “on paper” vs. “in practice” argument:
Bottom line: nobody should be rationalizing what should be important. They should just look around and figure out what seems to be important, based on observation of how things are done in the real world.
This is a chronic problem in both academia and technology circles. People discover a new way to sound clever and stop paying attention to what people are actually inclined to do. This results in user-punishing interfaces, the necessity for hour-long orientations, and the Zune. Check yourself guys.
The “stop saying that’s impossible” argument:
Ok, last one, and then I’d better get back to work… won’t really be proof-reading this either… again…
One thing a lot of people assume is that high concurrency is impossible. The fact is, it isn’t even hard.
Take Activeworlds: you can cram a ridiculous number of people into a single room. Chat his handled gracefully, and on the client side if your computer can’t handle displaying that many avatars at once it just displays them as 2D cutouts in the distance.
A number of other platforms simply reduce the detail level on avatars that are far away. As a result the client doesn’t nag at the server for a ton of data it won’t use, and everything scales. Again, a client-side fix, easy to roll out.
Even voice can scale! Vivox is just one of many companies finding new ways of mixing audio based on proximity, allowing you to see someone in a conversation across a crowded room and walk over to them with your business partner without all sorts of technical hacks and craziness.
Ok, I’m out of time…
which is why this is so long. Usually I ramble, grab a bunch of pictures from Google Image Search to break it up, and then start cutting the text way down… but you’ll have to suffer the length this time, sorry. So, how do I wrap this up? Concluding thoughts?
Concurrency is a make-or-break for business. For games, who cares. That argument I’ll buy for a myriad of reasons. But when it comes to making these things into practical, meaningful tools, worrying about an extra team of 20 observers from the branch office not being able to fit into the venue is just stupid.
We’ve just barely been able to scrape this technology together into something that isn’t a toy in the last few years, but the true explosion of virtual worlds is held back by the inability to do anything large-scale. Delivery of virtual crowds will be the true dawn of the virtual world.
For the first time since last August, I missed a week on the news roundup. I didn’t even realize it until mid-week. Please accept my apologies!
Clever Zebra has been busier than ever (our work on OpenVCE being only one part) and until I’m 100% satisfied that everything is running better than anyone could possibly wish for and far ahead of schedule I’ll be just a blur in everyone’s peripheral vision.
Having said that, I did make a commitment to myself to keep this going lest I lose touch with what’s going on out there. Thus, a two-week edition!
Wait, did I really just use the word “lest” in a sentence?
Anyhow, I continue to operate under time constriction and now there’s two weeks of material to cover, so I probably missed something worth reading. If I did, please contact me or leave a comment!
Important links:
Archive page of past weeks of Business in Virtual Worlds News
Disclaimer: As with everything on my blog, the opinions expressed here are mine and do not reflect on Clever Zebra, the vBusiness Expo, my friends, my family, my blip channel, any of the other “Jack of All Strange” stuff that I do, etc etc etc… k here we go:
ThinkBalm Leads Visualization Tours
Proof-of-concept tours regarding the enterprise case for entering virtual spaces. Hey Erica, funny we should end up touching base this week. This looks good! (A more in-depth look appears on the Linden Lab blog.)
Want to Hold a Virtual Event of Your Own?
Clever Zebra offers event support and white-label services for anyone interested in a branded gathering in a virtual space. Everything from venue setup and hosting to VIP orientation to speaker coordination.
Teachers Enroll in Second Life Webcasts
Pretty interesting stuff: “Called A Virtual World for Professional Learning, the session is the final in a series of webcasts and learning resources made available to teachers across Canada, by the Ontario Research and Innovation Optical Network (ORION) and the award-winning Advanced Broadband Enabled Learning (ABEL) program, from Toronto’s York University.”
‘Virtual Life’: EU’s three year, 3.3 million euro 3D virtual world project
That’s a pretty big project, and one that has some extremely unique notions of how a virtual world should work. It seems to be flying under most people’s radars from the look of things. (WARNING: some NSFW and possibly offensive images.) Discover more about the project on the official site: FP7 VirtualLife.
Adult Content Changes in Summary
A final summary of the changes in Second Life’s handling of adult content that we’re soooooo interested in. Now, we could have just said: “if you don’t like sex, avoid entering brothels” and be done with it ages ago… but that would have involved people taking responsibility for themselves and nobody wants that…
The Dares + Free Realms = New Guinness World Record
For whatever reason the Guinness people seem to think this is the first concert given simultaneously in the real world and the virtual one. Whaaaaaat??? (Clearly the Guinness people just needed some press here…)
I *almost* linked one of those philosophical “trends in virtual worlds” articles this week telling is “what it all means”, but then my senses returned to me just in time. Close call!
Important links:
Archive page of past weeks of Business in Virtual Worlds News
Disclaimer: As with everything on my blog, the opinions expressed here are mine and do not reflect on Clever Zebra, the vBusiness Expo, my friends, my family, my blip channel, any of the other “Jack of All Strange” stuff that I do, etc etc etc… k here we go:
WB.com Goes 3D With ExitReality
Good score by ExitReality. They’re very promising, and just need to do something to make the experience a little bit smoother to take it to the next level.
Eco Gamers: Manage Energy in a Virtual World with Shaspa
While I believe I’ve linked to this energy-management software before, I just wanted to link another article to point out that the past two weeks have shown quite a bit more press about it. There’s good buzz!
Calling All Evangelists
In every company there’s one person willing to bring the big ideas forward. This is the visionary, the thought-leader that wants to bring the latest technology and business practices to their stakeholders. We call these people Corporate Evangelists. Ever think this could be you?
Events
Want to Hold a Virtual Event of Your Own?
Clever Zebra offers event support and white-label services for anyone interested in a branded gathering in a virtual space. Everything from venue setup and hosting to VIP orientation to speaker coordination.
Could Sadville break the internet with nakedness?
Alright look. All anybody can write about for the past solid month is LL’s new policy on adult content. I’ve had enough of it, all right? It’s not that important! Alright? Alright… let’s call this the end of it then.
Did I miss an important story? Got feedback? Leave a comment below, or email me at info [at] calebbooker.com
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