Caleb Booker

Interoperability Arrives

A few years ago I remember quite a bit of fretting over closed-door meetings about virtual world interoperability. None of the participants in those meetings are responsible for the current innovations in this area.

What does that tell you about “closed” vs “open”.

/soapbox

BOSTON, MA – November 09, 2010 – The Immersive Education Initiative (http://ImmersiveEducation.org) today unveiled iED 3D/VR™, the open and royalty-free cross-platform 3D/VR mesh file format that enables 3D and virtual reality (3D/VR) content to be created once and and experienced across a range of virtual worlds, games, simulators and mixed/augmented reality applications. The culmination of over 2 years of work conducted through the Open File Formats Technology Working Group (OFF.TWG), iED 3D/VR is aligned with the COLLADA standard and currently supported by official iED virtual world platforms realXtend, Open Wonderland, Open Simulator (“OpenSim”) and Open Cobalt in addition to the candidate iED platform Sirikata.

A range of hands-on workshops will be given at iED 2011 (http://MediaGrid.org/summit) to teach educators how to create cross-platform 3D/VR content using a variety of authoring tools, including Google Sketchup and Blender, and starting immediately virtual training sessions will be provided to Initiative members online and free of charge.

iED 3D/VR is designed specifically to enable 3D and virtual reality content to be exchanged between all official Immersive Education Initiative platforms. To this end, iED 3D/VR a functional subset of COLLADA that is tested across conformant iED platforms to ensure consistent content representation from platform to platform. The current baseline profile for iED 3D/VR features static 3D mesh models and textures. New features and capabilities, such as animation and skinning, are now being added as well.

Thousands of Members Worldwide at http://ImmersiveEducation.org

The Immersive Education Initiative is a non-profit international collaboration of universities, colleges, research institutes, consortia and companies that are working together to define and develop open standards, best practices, platforms, and communities of support for virtual reality and game-based learning and training systems. Thousands of faculty, teachers, researchers, staff, administrators and students are members of the Immersive Education Initiative.

To learn more about the Media Grid, Immersive Education or the Education Grid visit:
http://MediaGrid.org, http://ImmersiveEducation.org and http://TheEducationGrid.org

Web.alive and Kicking

Four separate platforms got the nod of approval from the USDA recently:

• web.alive (recent AVAYA acquisition)
• Vastpark (wow, they’ve come a long way!)
• OLIVE (nice one guys, way to survive!)
• Teleplace (workspace, used to be named QWAQ)

This is just great to see. Not only are these four solid platforms completely worthy of the business, but it’s also a great response to the doom and gloom prophesy that so many were indulging in a few months ago. Welcome to the new workspace guys, it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Further reading:

Thanks for the links Joe.

Quick Update on the State of the Metaverse

Here’s a quick breakdown from the last month or two:

• Google Maps goes 3D – In-browser 3D is the holy grail of virtual spaces, always has been.
• Second Life users are angry at Linden Lab – In other news, spring came this year and summer could be next…
• OpenSim is becoming a serious contender – We always hoped it would, but did we expect it?
• ASSEMB’LIVE releases devkit – It’s getting even more awesome every day, worth a look. video
• web.alive releases a content development kit – looks like AVAYA is going ahead with development.
• Wonderland is alive and kicking – Project Wonderland became Open Wonderland, and they’re some shocking good.
• IMVU is a monster – $40 million coming in for 2010, and they’re hiring.
• Worlds.com and NCSoft lawsuit settled – … and I hope they got next to nothing the lousy thieves…
• Blue Mars hasn’t closed yet – I already own a copy of Final Fantasy XIII so I’m good, thanks.
• Apple is planning a virtual world store – After the idiotic iPad, I’ve zero sense of anticipation here…
• Second Life bigger than ever – Any speculation on my part as to why will result in a boring, boring debate… consumer PCs are generally fast enough now, that’s why.
• ProtonMedia, On24, and InXpo are all still doing big business
• Dozens of new government and private sector projects launched over the last few months for procedural training, prototyping, therapy, education, conferencing, etc…

Now you know.

2pm PST Today: Military Amputee Peer Support

Doug Thompson, CEO of Remedy Communications

I’ve long been a fan of the work Virtual Ability Inc. (VAI) has done creating one of Second Life’s most flawless and in-depth orientation experiences. They’ve firmly established themselves as innovators in the field and so, when I find out about projects they’ve been a part of, I pay attention.

This is why I took notice when Doug Thompson mentioned in conversation that Remedy Communications had worked with them on a project funded by the Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC) of the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC). (There was a full press release about the project, linked here.)

For virtual environment geeks, this is a nice look at a use of the “behind-the-firewall” solution Linden Lab provides. For everyone else, however, this is a good look at why virtual environments are meaningful in the first place and how they can make all the difference to those using them.

Join us today at 2pm PST (10pm GMT) in Second Life for this latest session of Virtual Worlds Keynote. Question and answer period will immediately follow this quick 10-15 minute presentation.

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To join us in Second Life, you’ll need to do the following:

1. Go to SecondLife.com, create an account, and install the software.
2. Log in through the Second Life software using your user name.
3. Click here to be teleported to our studio before 2pm Pacific.

There.com Follows Forterra Into The Light

An official announcement was posted on the There.com website that they will be closing their doors on March 9, 2010. We knew this would happen to a few more worlds, although I admit to being surprised at There.com’s departure. It looks like 2010 will be the year the wheat is separated from the chaff. The document reads like a bit of a eulogy, filled with memories of the golden years and happy thoughts of their achievements. This, I can accept – they’re going down and aren’t funded by anyone, so there are no stock holders to give solid explanations to. What I’m not so sure about is the blame they cast upon the “economic downturn”. This was a world whose primary source of revenue was virtual goods, an industry that saw $1.38 Billion in investment last year. What happened? As business began to slide, they started tinkering with the toy:

Throughout the last year and this quarter, we have fought the good fight by churning out new features and revisions as fast as we possibly could. [...] introduced a whole new suite of casual games, a completely new foundation for our user interface, improved internal efficiencies for the product, real estate, a whole new level of Community Involvement, etc, etc. On top of that, we’ve revised our first user experience several times [...]

This is a little disconcerting. While the move to get the “first user experience” right was a positive one, it should have been perfected back when they opened the world in 2003. The rest of these tweaks are just that – tweaks. Ask Blizzard what effect applying patches to World of Warcraft has on customer loyalty and new user generation.

What it comes down to is this: you can’t be a computer geek or Web 2.0 guru after the initial build of a .com. Instead, you have to be a business geek and entrepreneurial guru. Specialists built the enterprise, and now new specialists are needed to run it.

To put it another way: architects and engineers who build skyscrapers don’t busy themselves making sure the offices are leased out and a maintenance crew is taking care of the place. The reverse is also true: most landlords can’t manage a construction project.

Sure, every once in awhile these two specialties are combined in one person, but this is why there’s only one Steve Jobs and one Bill Gates. Its a very rare individual that can handle both roles.

There needs to be an understanding, now that we’ve seen the dot-com boom and bust and we’ve seen so many of these worlds rise and fall, that there’s a difference between building a company and running it. This needs to be a common understanding, out there in the open, not as a criticism of anyone’s skill but as a way of placing value on specialization.