Reviews on Hypecycle Keynote

It's always nice to get quoted, or get good critics. Yesterday I stubled upon two articles on a presentation I did back in February this year. It was at the Virtual Worlds convention at the Hogeschool van Utrecht, where I held a presentation on how virtual worlds are subject to Gartners Hypecycle and how to navigate the hype.

First article is from a well established blog, TweePuntNul (2 dot 0) and reads:

Door middel van een analyse met de zogenaamde “hype cycle” werd Second Life als case besproken. Het blijkt dat Second Life nu in de Enlightment-fase zit, na een periode van teleurstelling. Een zeer uitgebreide analyse die in een korte tijd werd gegeven.

Aan deze twee keynotes zullen we aparte posts besteden, aangezien ze zeer de moeite waard zijn. Simpelweg omdat de rest van de keynotes voor ons oude koeien waren, en we denken dat deze ook voor de gemiddelde TPN-lezer zullen zijn.

In English it comes down to this:

VeeJay gave a very extensive analysis of virtual worlds in a very short
time. This keynote will get a dedicated blogpost instead of a summary as this
one was very interesting

The second one is from Rico DB blog on Marketing and Communications thought the presentation I gave was a very clarifying view of the future of VW's as it wrote :

Johan Vermij van Sogeti presenteerde een verhelderende visie op het voortbestaan van de Virtual Worlds.

The article (in Dutch) has a pretty good summary of the keynote I did.

Life 2.0 in Wonderland

One of the prime Technology events is Dr. Dobbs Life 2.0 Conference. Today saw a series of talks in Second Life as well. Unfortunately I didn't have time to drop in. The good thing was that I was kept up to date through the Metanomics group IM on today's keynote;

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9:00 AM PDT - 10:00 AM PDTKEYNOTE:
Project Wonderland - 3D Toolkit for Building Virtual Worlds. Nicole Yankelovich, Principal Investigator, Collaborative Environments Project, Sun Microsystems Laboratories

Project Wonderland is an open source toolkit for building 3D virtual worlds for business and education collaboration. Within a Wonderland virtual! world, p s, interact with team members, and have chance encounters with colleagues, all using natural voice interaction. Most importantly, real work can be accomplished with Wonderland's support of X and Java applications as well as innovative telephone integration. With application sharing as the default, people can create, edit, and share documents within the virtual world.

Wonderland is built on top of the Project Darkstar game server platform, which provides enterprise-grade scalability, reliability, and flexible integration with other enterprise systems.

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Surprisingly enough, synchronisity strikes again. Thursday I have to give a presentation on collaboration and project management in Virtual Worlds, and one of the options I will discuss is the Wonderland project as it is one of the most advanced platforms when it comes to collaboration at this point in time, I think.

Perhaps we have to clarify a bit on the names used, as it sometimes causes some confusion.

• Darkstar: (also referred to as project ~) The game server platform which is the foundation of the technology
• Wonderland: (or project ~) The open source virtual world produced by Sun, which is built on top of the Darkstar platform.
• MPK20: The wonderland version Sun uses as its own private development VW.

Some bits and pieces on Darkstar / Wonderland from the speech:

Darkstar permits users to participate in one space without sharding. In addition to Darkstar they use jVoiceBridge for audio. It also permits interacting with telephone systems. They are also trying to get their artwork to be open source or CCL. Part of Wonderland includes collaboration capability that can be extended to enterprise software.It can interact with business data. Darkstar also scales down...an instance with 2-3 users can run on a laptop

There are external worlds live today: and some coming up fairly soon. They have tested some already. Small wonder; Wonderland is not planned to interact with SL... However, except maybe in the interoperability space (transportable avatars, etc.) and they will cooperate as much as possible.

For a complete schedule of the Dr. Dobbs Life 2.0 conference in Second Life click here.
More info on the Wonderland click here.

Virtual World Symposium 2008 - Utrecht

It's been quiet at the Mindblizzard blog lately, this due to some very time consuming projects and presentations. Today I went to the Virtual World Symposium in Utrecht, organised by the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences.

Only yesterday I received a call from the organisation that one of the speakers wouldn't make it because of the flu and if I could fill his spot, so late last night I had to prepare a speech on the Gartner Hypecycle and how it applies to Virtual Worlds.

• Learning in and through virtual worlds, Frank Husmann Up the Vortex



• Case study Randstad, Barend Raaff DNB Media



• Use of virtual agents / avatars in digital environments, Christian Kromme Artificial Industry



• Virtual Worlds and Domotica in eldery care Lector Ben Kröse Digital Life Almere



• Selling Clothes in Second Life Zina Karremans & Wim van der Plas HU



• Reintegration of long term unemployed, a project by the city of Deventer and TNO,
  Roel Cremer TNO Nederland



• Navigating Virtual Environments, Johan Vermij (yours truly), Sogeti Nederland B.V.



• Use and non-use of virtual worlds in a cross media landscape, Lector Harry van Vliet HU FCJ



• Operating Second Life with a WII Console, Kai-Ho Jim & Wim van der Plas HU



• Medical Libraries and sharing medical knowledge, Guus van den Brekel Centrale Medische Bibliotheek UMC Groningen

It was an action packed afternoon with some fun speeches. My conclusion for today is that especially in the field of science, virtual worlds are offering very serious possibilities. What I also liked very much was how one of the HU students expanded on the Wii software and used the wireless remote to operate Second Life.

There's a catch though, Kai Ho isn't the first to make this work, as Wired published an article on how MIT did this in July 2007.

Philip Rosedale at the Davos conference

One of the hottest tech events these days is the World Economic Forum in Davos. Through twitter I've received a lot of updates, especially through Robert Scobleizer's stream. Seems like things get pretty seesmic over there.

One of the interesting points from a Second Life point of view was Adam Pasick of Reuters' interview with Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Labs. The interview touched some interesting topics and even though Philip tried his best to stay as political as possible, some to the point questions resulted in some interesting answers (as summarized by Digado)

…HTML in Second Life

“Maybe, quite possibly in the next couple of months. Not on the main grid but in a close to ‘finished’ state so…. May 2008. Definitely.”

…People leaving second Life soon after Signing Up

On the question whether Philip regrets seeing so many people leave Second Life close after they signed up he told Adam he did. He tells us he would have loved to step in a time machine, go back, and change things before they left. But he also says the problem was or is twofold. One is obviously the software, Linden Labs ‘part of the deal’ - and then there is the community, responsible for the content of Second Life. The content of Second Life wasn’t appealing enough to these people either to keep them from leaving, but he is confident this will change in the future as he talks about media the media coverage of 2006.

…the media hype

Philip goes on to say the media has created a ‘too pretty picture’ - thats why many people came into Second Life to early, and left when they were faced with disappointment. Second Life has not been able to live up to the High expectations but Philip was confident these people will return once they find Second Life offers more applications, and is able to meet at least some of these users in their expectations. He continues to say we will see more Hype Cycles because of this every 12 to 18 months for the next 5 years.

…Signfarms

Sounds like Prokofy has been calling in, and Philip says: I don’t care. Well spoken Philip.

…Copyright issues

Technical rights management is not too difficult, he claims it is within the range of Linden Labs capabilities at the moment. What will take time is to implement these rules and get them right. He wants to make certain he doesn’t underestimate the issue of ‘Content Right Control’ and is well aware Linden Labs is on an experimental level here.

The complete interview can be found on Reuters and is well worth a listen.