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 (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.

Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.

One of the biggest challenges I have always faced in my efforts to broaden the appeal of virtual environments is the perception that they’re just toys. The public’s thinking is often that gaming is not a business application, and so by extension virtual worlds are just a game that isn’t all that much fun.

The effort has been to help people see that a virtual environment has nothing at all to do with gaming, and is often a very practical solution to real world problems. Slowly this understanding is growing.

I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t acknowledge that the fun factor of virtual environments does play a part. I got involved with Second Life because I’m a gamer, despite it not actually being a game. The intuitive connection exists.

While my primary outreach strategy is currently the Virtual Worlds Keynote series, I’m beginning to realize that I need to start using gaming as a framework in my future planning. Gaming strategies lead to much better ROI than traditional project management. If I can find a way to leverage existing human instincts, rather than my current policy of educating people to overcome what their instincts are telling them, I’ll get further, faster.

The seeds of some new ideas are starting to germinate… but I’d love to hear your ideas, if you’re willing to offer them. I’ll give a +1 Vorpal Sword to the best one.

What really strikes me about this is that she was able to find many big open featureless areas. Large deserts with a small oasis in the middle should be the exception, not the rule. Having said that just look how smoothly this platform runs. This is an entrepreneur’s dream project, if someone out there can find the funding to pick it up. With proper marketing there’s no reason this world couldn’t own the teen and tween demographic, even in the face of vSide and IMVU.

Here are a couple of other fan-made videos from the world to illustrate the point: a Prom in There.com Prom and an exploration of just one of the dozens of fun things to discover, in this case an ancient tomb.

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.

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:

Top Stories

Interview with Mark Kingdon, CEO, Second Life
Talking about Second Life as a business tool:

ProtonMedia Upgrades ProtoSphere
Includes 250 person auditoriums, single-port firewall traversal, and a healthy bundle of gadgets.

The Bottom Line on Second Life 2.0
My attempt at being both succinct and in-depth at the same time about the new viewer upgrade.

Events

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.

Virtual Fashion Offers Opportunities for Designers
Using virtual environments to launch fashion products.

Why We Sold Our Real Building and Went Totally Virtual
Presentation on the transition into using virtual environments as training and collaboration tools.

Real World Expos in Virtual Spaces
How sales were impacted by having a virtual component to a real world expo.

Training and Education

Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference – March 12-13
The “big show” in education. Don’t miss it!

Problem-based learning in Second Life: new resource
University of Derby and Aston University releases “Best Practices in Virtual Worlds Teaching: A guide to using problem-based learning in Second Life”, download it here.

Government and Military

Second Life at Work
The Department of Agriculture seeks to use Second Life as a meetings and collaboration tool.

Gaming

Child’s Play Goes Virtual: CBSNews.com Visits Engage Expo Floor
See video below on CNN’s coverage of the Engage! toy fair:

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Advertisers are disappointed with Sony’s virtual world as an ad platform
… because it sucks. Sorry Sony.

Health

Imagine Solutions: Transforming health care through a patient-focused delivery system
The Mayo Clinic looks at SL.

Virtual Poster Session = Green Travel
Pharma covers a global pharmaceutical firm conducting a virtual poster session in ProtoSphere.

Second Lives Clinic: demonstrating autologous stem cell transplant in Crohn’s disease
Take THAT Crohn’s disease!

Nerds

Scientific Research in Virtual Worlds
Detailing efforts in Sociology, Psychology, and Engineering. Lots of cool stuff here.

Newbs

Is ‘Virtual World’ replacing reality?
Everybody panic!!!

Misc.

Virtual worlds pose compliance risks
A fantastic breakdown of the issues surrounding communication, behavior and archiving risks in virtual worlds.

Why sales of virtual goods are soaring.
Forbes takes a look at virtual goods.

Linden Lab boss: sex isn’t the key to Second Life
PC Pro is embarrassed into thinking before typing. Kudos to Linden Lab for responding to this kind of thing; a good change in policy.

1. Interface Cleanup: The old interface was a disaster. There’s no other way to say it. For new users it was like being threatened with the edge of a broken bottle, daring them to try to figure that nonsense out. This is much better. Well, not perfect, but better than a broken bottle in the face.
2. Current Location Easily Accessible: Just like in your web browser, your location in Second Life is now at the top of your screen. Copy/paste it into a document, send it to a friend, or paste locations up there that you want to visit. Now if they could find a way to make them shorter and more memorable…
3. Places To Explore: The worst part about entering Second Life for the first time, apart from the interface, has been the complete lack of direction for finding something interesting to do. While some will inevitably whine about the “preferential treatment” these destinations are getting, this was a critical change.
4. Improved Avatar Customization: Its still way to complex for new users, but they’ve made it much easier than it was before.
5. You can buy a house!: In the real world you can just buy a house and furnish it, and now you can in Second Life too. Thank goodness. Before you had to buy some land, make sure it was big enough for what you needed (which, as a new user, you have no real clue about), then find somewhere that sells houses, and figure out the build tools to deploy it correctly. Forget all that now: just go buy a house. *whew*
6. Webpages On Walls: A game-changing feature. Watch YouTube or run other Flash-based applications on your wall, no problem. Even bigger: users can just click the surface to automatically zoom in on it properly. Genius!

I’m usually loathe to give the Linden Lab crew too much credit for development of new features as it all seemingly comes at a glacier’s pace, but this was a huge leap forward for them. New users might actually get through an entire orientation without smashing their keyboards in frustration! Well done guys.

Now don’t stop here; keep it up!

Video Resources

A general overview of the Second Life 2.0 interface.

Web content on walls parts 1 and 2
(called “Shared Media” because they just can’t help but make up new terminology for you to learn… aren’t you grateful… )

You can buy a house. (“Linden Homes”)

The full set of in-depth tutorials covering every little thing in the new interface.

Virtual Worlds Keynote
Real World Expos in Virtual Spaces

To embed this video on your own blog, right-click on the video for the embed code or click here for social networking options.

What I really enjoyed about this presentation was the specifics on how this experience impacted sales. In addition to information on how salespeople became better prepared before the expo, we saw some actual conversion numbers on people visiting the virtual exhibits and following up with the company in question.

Please join us next week (Monday, March 1 at 2pm Pacific) when our guest will be 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.

If you think you might have questions do make sure you’re there for the live session; the Q&A portion is not recorded! This is to keep each episode short and to the point for maximum usefulness in business environments. As usual, if you have questions for a speaker you might have missed, you can also email me at info [at] calebbooker [dot] com.

Recap from last time:
Last week we held the very first session of Virtual Worlds Keynote with guest speaker Jonena Relth, President of TBD Consulting. Her topic was “Why We Sold Our Real Building and Went Totally Virtual” and proved to be a valuable resource for anyone who has ever considered taking a team online. I loved how grounded in real-world concerns her approach was, and the story that she tells about the discovery of this new tool is meaningful for a wide variety of professionals. You can view it in its entirety here:

Why We Sold Our Real Building and Went Totally Virtual

This video now begins its life as a tool that you can use when proposing a solution for cutting travel budgets, team building exercises, or cost effective training. You can get the code for embedding this on your blog by right-clicking on the video itself, or click here for various social networking options.

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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.

• 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!
• Apple gets a patent for a 3D shopping destination! Apple fans are fanatical. We have now officially bought ourselves a few million supporters of 3D environments.
• 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:

• BP Improves Online Collaboration, Reduces Costs With Protosphere – A straight-forward case study.
• Engage! Exhibit Hall Cheat Sheet – A list of companies who are selling virtual goods and reaching out to people at a physical conference.
• The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide – Great if you need a quick overview of what’s out there.