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
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.
I think I’ll have to start doing these general “Stuff You May Have Missed” news roundups on a regular basis again. There’s just too much good stuff out there!
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:
UPCOMING: Monday, March 1st at 2pm Pacific – Anders Grondstedt, President of The Gronstedt Group, as he tells us how Schneider Electric and IBM have found a strategic planning solution in Second Life. Attend the live event here.
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:
