Intel and Qwaq team up to crack the Virtual Workspace

Ever since the plans were on the drawing table 3-D based collaboration software developer Qwaq has kept its eye on the price: The virtual workspace for the enterprise. It resulted in an environment where focus didn't go out to slick avatars, but towards integration of office applications.

Earlier this week Qwaq made a joint announcement with Intel according to which Miramar, a 3-D information space technology originally developed by Intel Corporation's research labs, will be brought to market by Qwaq, which reminds me somewhat of the joint collaboration of IBM and Linden Lab. It shows that the major players on the technology market understand the potential of 3D environments, have been working on it themselves for years, but failed to crunch the 3D-ness and need to team up with new emerging specialist companies, which in their turn could use a big partner to crack open closely sealed corporate IT doors.

First Intel is/will be using the Qwaq technology internally to improve their teamwork, an act which they apparently didn't get together in Second Life, where they also have a strong presence. It will enable information, which is now only available to individual departments or divisions, to be easily accessed and shared across the enterprise, in dynamic unified views.

Secondly, Qwaq and Intel plan to work together to integrate Miramar technology into a new cross-platform edition of Qwaq Forums, which is expected be available next year. As for Miramar’s backgrounder, the software with immersive 3D and 2D components was originally developed by Intel Architecture Labs aimed at increasing the productivity of distributed enterprises by enabling new information visualization capabilities across distributed teams.

A very thorough article on the collaboration was posted online yesterday at the TechRadar magazine and originally featured in PC Plus issue 274. Here's the introduction

Working in a virtual world

Leave your car - and yourself - at home. Here's a virtual office
you can actually work in.

The use of virtual worlds and genuine 3D interfaces for anything other than fun and frolics has been a long time coming.

Granted, virtual worlds such as Second Life get an awful lot of media coverage, but until recently they remained a niche activity, even among the gaming community.

However, thanks to years of research by Intel and a collaborative effort with a specialist company known as Qwaq, 3D visual metaphors in general and virtual worlds in particular are becoming the latest business productivity tools, used for all kinds of collaborative work, from conferences and training sessions to work groups and project management.

The story of Intel's involvement in 3D interface and collaboration technology is actually rather convoluted. To make sense of it all, PC Plus met up with Intel's Cindy Pickering at the recent IDF conference in San Francisco. According to Pickering, it all started in the late 1990s with a project known as Miramar in which Intel Architecture Labs was investigating the use of 3D metaphors as alternatives to conventional, fl at 2D workspaces.

3D Multitasking

The research began by observing how client PC users coped with complex multitasking and then studying the effects of adding a third dimension to the user interface. "Going back and forth between lots of windows introduces a lot of task overhead. Having that third dimension allows you to put things aside in a different way that means they're still visually available, but without dominating the virtual workspace," Pickering explains.

Read the full article here.

Enterprise mode? Why Bother?

After I heard 3Di is releasing an Enterprise version of Opensim, I read up on a couple of blogposts about getting the virtual workspace ready for business to prep my blogpost on 3Di (previous post). Most of these blogposts (including my own ramblings about making things fit for business) are very serious about this with all sorts of tea-circles and self-help-group-like things like the Interoperability Forum and groups like Professional Second Lifers, Virtual World Roadmap and Association of Virtual Worlds on LinkedIn and so on.

Don't get me wrong here. Virtual Worlds need serious pondering to make them fit for business. Companies do need privacy in certain areas. Think of what would happen if you could walk in, or eavesdrop on a session between a bank and a wealthy customer on how to invest his money, but every once in a while it would be good to take a step back, look at what you're doing and have a good laugh. Raph Koster did a very nice blogpost in which he wonders why we would have Enterprise VW's. Here's some quotes:

Enterprise VW's - do they suck ?

Second Life technology continues its slow move towards being an enterprise solution with the announcement that the SL-derived OpenSim project is getting commercialized by 3Di. Enterprise was a big buzzword this year at the Virtual Worlds conf in Hollywood. (Of course, in the midst of it, someone had to ask “what is enterprise anyway?” It means “selling VWs to businesses”). The penny has also dropped for some users that SL itself seems to be trending in this direction — as Tateru Nino writes on Massively,

When you look at the hiring of Tom Hale, the ongoing hiring of enterprise sales and marketing staff, and the licensing of the Immersive Workspaces product from Rivers Run Red, this all seems to signal a clear direction for where Linden Lab is taking Second Life. Clearer than anything else we’ve seen in a year, certainly.

Of course, we have also seen Forterra and their OLIVE platform (derived originally from the There.com codebase) continue to focus on this area over several years, with particular success in work for the military.

and

"So, no, the dream isn’t dead. Consumer virtual worlds are still coming on strong, despite the focus on enterprise lately. It may be that part of the reason why these slightly older worlds and platforms are having to shift is that they are simply the wrong design for the consumer space, and the future belongs to stuff that looks more like Lively, Whirled, SmallWorlds, Vivaty, and yes, Metaplace. I sure hope so, because the very different architecture choices made there can grow back to the big immersive experiences, but I am unsure that the big architectures can shrink down to the smaller needs of the ordinary person."

read the full article

BT Group presence in Second Life

Earlier this week I blogged about the AvaTalk project which British Telecom ran in Second Life. I wasn't really positive about this project, which is about making phonecalls from Second Life to the Real World. I kept looking for positive things, and yes, there's more to BT in SL than first meets the eye.

First, let me introduce the players in the arena, which off course starts off with British Telecom.

"BT Group plc (formerly British Telecommunications plc) which trades as BT(previously known as British Telecom and still occasionally referred to by that name) is the privatised UK state telecommunications operator. It is the dominant fixed line telecommunications and broadband Internet provider in the United Kingdom. BT operates in more than 170 countries and almost a third of its revenue now comes from its Global Services division.

BT Group is the largest communications service provider in the United Kingdom. It is also one of the largest communication companies in the world." [Wikipedia]

British Telecom worked with Clarity International to create their Second Life experiences (note the plural).

Clarity International is a global design and communication management consultancy firm, headquartered near Milan in Italy, with offices in the United Kingdom and USA. specializing in helping clients simplify complex propositions and problems through focused expert consulting and visualisation of strategies, key concepts, products and services. (Clarity website)

Viewing Clarity's portfolio they have done quite a number of projects with BT, not only virtual, but in the real world as well. One of these projects is BT Contact - Your Personal Communication Hub! in which Clarity has been selected to work on the UI designs of BT Contact, a new way to manage all your IM, Email, VOIP and SMS communications on the web. If you link that to the AvaTalk project it starts to make a little sense.

BT Tradespace

Aside from the AvaTalk concept they have created a number of projects in Second Life. First of which is the BT Tradespace project.

BT Tradespace is an online community incorporating a business directory and marketplace. On its site you can buy and sell products and services, find a business and network with other like-minded individuals. Unlike a conventional business directory, BT Tradespace members can use social media tools such as blogs, photos, videos and podcasts to promote their products and services. For prospective customers, it provides the opportunity to get to know a business before buying from them and Clarity has brought this existing Tradespace into Second Life.

Read more on the BT Tradespace Trial on the SL Tradespace website.

BT 21 CN Innovation

Another Second Life project BT has done with Clarity takes place on an island named BT 21CN Innovation, which I think stands for 21st Century Innovation. In thisproject the virtual environment of Second Life is usedto explain the reuse concept. Avatars interact with a virtual shopping basket of capabilities to understand them, and view how these capabilities are "mashed-up" to create new products/services.

BT 21CN Innovation - Second Life - The funniest videos are a click away

A lot of my earlier scepsis has been taken away after digging into the other projects BT has done. They weren't the first of the telecom providers to dive into Second Life, they were probably the last one. Not everything they are doing is a smashing success, but at least they are trying to work out what they can do with their core business in virtual worlds, rather than use it as a marketing toy.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/BT%2021CN%20Innovation/128/128/0

Cranial Tap opens virtual business showcase

I'm not sure if I or Aleister Kronos noticed the presence of Cranial Tap last year, but they've been around a while. The first time I ran into them was with the Things To Do group (Good old days) when we visited the Cyberextruder in June 2007. Another one of their projects has been 1-800 Flowers, blogged at KZero. These were pretty cool projects and when I received a press statement today, I didn't have to take long before putting it up. Here's the introduction.

Cranial Tap, Inc. today launched a business solutions showcase geared specifically towards 3D online virtual worlds. Located on Cortex Island in Second Life®, businesses and organizations can now connect remote teams, conduct
research, offer training, recruit candidates and conduct meetings. These solutions are aimed at increasing productivity while reducing operating expenses.

The four showcase areas provide working technologies that demonstrate the benefits of Teleworking, Virtual Meetings, Training and Presentations. Visitors are encouraged to participate in the featured solutions. Upon arrival, visitors are greeted by Tia, a computer driven character (bot) that provides information related to Cranial Tap and their services. She serves as an example of an automated character that can be used in place of human hosts.

Read the full press release here.

Folks over at Cranial Tap are doing pretty slick things at the moment. Go check out their website and visit their showcase in Second Life:

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cortex/27/231/5

Virtual Manufacturing, Real Jobs at Boeing

Last year I've blogged a little about Brussels Airlines in Second Life and just recently have been talking with someone at KLM airlines on what airliners could do in virtual worlds. Their core business is of course transporting passengers from a to be, or metaphorically from their Real Lifes to their dream destinations (in case of holiday flights). Other focuspoints might be in crew training, but today I caught up on an interesting article in the Newark Advocate, published about two weeks ago which deals with Boeing's ventures into the realm of virtual worlds.

The Boeing Company is a major aerospace and defense corporation, originally founded by William E. Boeing in Seattle, Washington. Boeing has expanded over the years, merging with McDonnell Douglas in 1997. Its international headquarters has been in Chicago, Illinois, US since 2001. Boeing is the largest global aircraft manufacturer by revenue, orders and deliveries, and the second-largest aerospace and defense contractor in the world. Boeing is the largest exporter in the United States. Its stock is a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. [Wikipedia]

Building an airplane isn't something you do in a few days. It's a major production process in which tens of millions of parts need to be fitted together meticulously, which is pricey stuff to do, even if you do it 'first time right'. It takes a lot of training, space and equipment. Virtual Worlds may aid in this process.

Boeing's new Virtual Manufacturing Center not only provides a detailed three-dimensional model of yet-to-be created products, but it also shows how to build them. Employees at the company's Guidance Repair Center on the Central Ohio Aerospace and Technology Center campus will watch through 3-D glasses on a huge video screen how to assemble a product only in the design phase.

The precise computerized images use physics to demonstrate the assembly process, down to details such as which screw or bolt to attach first. The information in Heath will be used at Boeing sites across the country.

The defense contractor showed off the center's capability to government and business leaders Wednesday, beginning with a virtual ribbon-cutting, virtual fly-in from above the site and virtual walk-through of the facility, with precise re-creations of every detail in the building.

The $1.2 million center will bring 30 to 60 new jobs to the Heath facility within 12 to 18 months. It will speed up design and production, and cut costs and training time. "Implementing virtual manufacturing seems to be, on the surface, an overwhelming task, but we've taken the first baby steps," said Mike Emmelhainz, director for the Guidance Repair Center. "We're actually going to see a product we'll start building the first quarter of next year.

Read full article here.

An Avatar, By Any Other Name...

... might be a lot happier with Second Life.

Most of us who came into Second Life out of curiosity, and have stayed ever since, are probably happy with our avatars. We instinctively associate our avatar name with ourselves - regardless of where we sit in the 'Spectrum of Involvement' that goes from the fully-immersed digital beings at one end, to the augmented reality users at the other. Incidentally, if these terms mean nothing to you, then I'm afraid you will have to Google them if you want to know more. The subsequent romp across the blogosphere makes for a long and interesting diversion!

For the more prosaic purposes of this post, I want to consider names. It hadn't really occurred to me just how out-of-step Second Life is, compared with other virtual worlds. Everywhere else - as far as I know - you are pretty much free to select your own avatar name. OK, it may need to be unique in the World, which can be a challenge. But in principle, you have carte blanche. For example, I am used to a semi-digital existence thru' my avatar, Aleister Kronos. Therefore, in all the virtual worlds I am signed up to - and there are many - I am happy to use this name, or variants that may be forced by a local naming constraint (like no spaces in the name). Importantly though, I could instead have opted to use the name I was given in the atomic world, Tim Kelly (again, subject to some basic constraints). I'm hardly blowing away any great atomic/digital divide here, since anyone who was remotely interested could have garnered this information in about... ooh... one Google hit.

So where am I going with this? Oh yeah...

Second Life marches to a different tune. It forces you down a path of pseudo-anonymity by compelling you to select a surname from a predefined list, rather than allowing you to elect for anonymity or openness. And what a bunch of surnames you get! If your aim in Second Life is to have a laugh, muck about and generally use it as a purely social environment then the disproportionately high ratio of "wacky, zany" surnames may be just the ticket. It means you don't have to employ too much brainpower of your own in order to appear interesting, when you can get instant charisma, off-the-peg, just by choosing a suitable surname. Maybe most Second Life regulars are happy with this arrangement. Personally, as a resident, I'm perfectly happy with my avatar name.

But it is as a corporate resident that issues arise. I have recently been hosting or assisting with a number of internal presentations for various company folk. The aim of such presentations is to show that you don't need to waste time and money travelling to meetings when they can be done, at least adequately, in a virtual environment. And virtual meetings are far better than the other alternatives: video and teleconferences. Most of the attendees are not out-and-out Second Lifers, but rather casual visitors, looking at the potential for using the environment as a work tool.

Now then - in proper Blah 2.0 fashion I have been eliciting feedback, to understand their experiences and see how I can help to improve them. Oddly, the recurring concern was not the awkwardness of the user interface, or the lag, or indeed any of the technical issues that I had anticipated. Instead, it was the avatar naming constraints. The general view was that the absence of real names lead to confusion and lack of clarity, while the names that were used could not really be characterised as 'professional'. When you have large numbers of colleagues using virtual worlds on an occasional basis, for specific activities or events, they are not likely to know each other's avatar names - leading to confusion and lack of effective communication. While this will change over time, the process is unnecessarily slow, when all you ever wanted was to use your own name in the first place.

There are cumbersome ways around this, usually involving a dumb-ass surname but putting your full name (without spaces!) as your avatar's first name. Don't get me started on the ludicrous costs associated with having a user-defined (in this case, corporate) surname. The point is, it should not be necessary to go to these lengths.

Second Life is coming across as somewhat antediluvian, a primitive throwback to a time when early adopters were happy to look funny and have hilarious names. While I accept that many, more recent residents also share these aims - it is time for Second Life to grow up, grow out and make better provision for those who don't share these aims. I am sure that it is not just business users who have this frustration.

So a note for Linden Lab: if you are still trying to be taken seriously by the business world then changing the naming system would be a small, but non-trivial step in the right direction.

(And God knows... it seems that right now Second Life could do with all the help it can get)

this post first appeared at Ambling in Second Life.

Wipro Innovation = Redundancy?

Today's last expedition led me to te Wipro Innovation Isle (I guess it they'd love to abbreviate it to Wii - but that one's already taken in SL). For people working in the IT Services a well known name as it is one of India's giants when it comes to IT services.

"Wipro Tech is an information technology service company established in India in 1980. It is the global IT services arm of Wipro Limited (in operation since 1945, incorporated 1946). It is headquartered in Bangalore and is the third largest IT services company in India. It has more than 79,832 employees as of December 2007, including its business process outsourcing (BPO) arm which it acquired in 2002. Wipro Technologies has over 300 customers across U.S., Europe and Japan including 50 of the Fortune 500 companies." (Wikipedia)

Near the end of 2007 there were speculations of Wipro Technologies considering to take over Capgemini and thus Sogeti as well, but in the end it was a no show. The corporate website puts focus on 'applied innovation';

"At Wipro we have fine-tuned the science of viewing innovation through the lens of practicality to design unique solutions for end customers. Applied Innovation is the ability to infuse newer ideas and newer ways of doing things into all parts of the organization, and improve business outcomes, often without major disruptive change. It is a 360-degree business approach covering process, delivery, business and technology Innovations that help Wipro to work
collaboratively with clients for cost take-outs, speed to market and new business opportunities."

It is this theme that is the starting point for the Wipro presence in Second Life, which looks to be in the first stage of the experiment. It is a 3 sim cluster, of which only one is fully build, one only holding an expo stand and an empty sim.

Applied Innovation is the ability to infuse newer ideas and newer ways of doing things into all parts of the organization, and I can well imagine this applies to their Second Life expedition as well. I do believe we have to bring Virtual Worlds (newer ways) beyond the average marketing department (i.e. into all parts of the organization). The question remains how to do this.

Let's see if Wipro can bring the answer. The sim is filled with an assorted array of buildings, with two larger builds standing out. The first of these is the 'Learning Center' and is shaped a little like the Sydney Opera (not really, buyt you can see which building I'm referring to).

Please reread the lines on the triple sim: "One build, one half build, one empty." This is pretty much the case with the Learning Center as well. It holds two auditoria, and right outside there's an amphitheater. Also, at the second level it has several empty officerooms.

Further onto the campus we see various buildings, like a 'Client Engagement' building, a library and a datacenter each filled with several workstations / cubicles.

Finally I arrived at the second large building, a four storey square concrete office block which looked a little cramped when I walked into the hall and up the staircase. It made me wonder how much of the build is actually shaped like their real life offices... This building is labelled 'Offshore Development Center' and that is what interests me, what would bring innovation to the virtual workspace.

I was a little disappointed though when there were more rooms with workstations, and more and more. But no show. One of the great benefits I see for Virtual Worlds is what they potentially can do for the offshoring industry, as offshoring projects often require a lot of attention; extra management, extra communication, extra code checking etcetera and in the virtual workspace where you can collaborate while both in offshore and rightshore location would greatly aid this process.

Yet I'm fully aware of the limitations Second Life has in this regard. There's no real integration with development suites or management tools. Then there's always the issue of security. I can't really blame Wipro for not finding the solution for Second Life, but I had hoped for more info, more ideas.

The last redundancy in the sim was when I moved from the cantine inside the ODC to 'the Glacier', a cafe on the campus.

As for the build itself, I find it of average quality. It is a melee of textures (a lot of default SL texturing) and styles. As I said, I'm under the impression that part of it is based upon real life buildings, so maybe they had to work with what they had. Otherwise, I'd say the triple auditorium, the cramped staircases etcetera don't really utilise the 3D-ness of a virtual environment.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Wipro%20Innovation%20Isle/109/225/23

vBusiness Expo - April 2008

It's been a couple of months since I heard the first plans from Clever Zebra to organise yet another vw conference and expo. Here's the first announcement:

The vBusiness Central project in Second Life will launch in April with a 4 day Expo, to be held bi-yearly in April and October (which coincides with the Virtual World Conference).

The conference aims to cover 4 key areas:

• Virtual Workplace
• Virtual Education
• Virtual Marketing
• Virtual Commerce

We'll be announcing dates and details very shortly. If you want to keep up with developments, including other Clever Zebra events and product updates then join our email list to be first with the news.

Virtual Healthcare 2: Palomar Pomerado Health

This week I suddenly was confronted with more hospital visits than I'd hoped for (though not personal), and kept delaying writing this post for days.

Early april 2007 I wrote a short blogpost on the Cleveland Heart Clinic in Second Life which was probably the first hospital to enter Second Life. The question I ended that particular blogpost with was: "I wonder though, are they about to perform virtual surgery? I'm hoping they can explain what SL can add to hospital care."

The times, they are changing though. Nearly a year later I see how virtual worlds can perform a massive role in education and training. A world like second life offers a lot of opportunities for modelling the complex human anatomy (see for instance the Testis Tour) and virtually practising surgery would overcome a shortage of breathing guinneepigs.

Research company Forrester also sees virtual Healthcare as one of the promising areas when it it comes to the virtual workspace. In the "Getting real work done in Virtual Worlds" they describe one healthcare project in particular:

Developing effective healthcare team coordination. Duke University and Virtual Heroes are collaborating on a high-fidelity 3-D virtual environment for healthcare, funded by the US Army. The initial project, targeting healthcare team coordination skills, is called 3DiTeams and combines gaming concepts with the healthcare team coordination training curriculum developed by the US Department of Defense and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

In the past year we've seen several smaller 'medical experiments' in Second Life, but late February saw two major projects enter Second Life; the IBM Healthcare island and Palomar West, both opening in the wake of the HIMMS'08 healthcare conference.

The Palomar West simulation is a joint effort by Cisco and Palomar Pomerado Health, though in developing the Second Life sim, Cisco has had major help from Millions of Us. The february 25 press release reads:

Cisco® and Palomar Pomerado Health (PPH) today cut the ribbon on a new hospital in the online virtual world "Second Life." The virtual hospital, a simulation of a real-world hospital campus due to open in 2011, gives visitors the opportunity to tour the hospital years before its doors actually open.

The virtual hospital showcases the rich assortment of design and technology innovations planned for the real-world Palomar West Medical Campus in San Diego, Calif., and to gather feedback that will be used to enhance the way that care is delivered. The immersive quality of "Second Life" allows visitors to experience the progressive nature-embracing design of the hospital firsthand. Visitors will also be able to experience Connected Hospital technologies that will be delivered in the real hospital by Cisco. (Full press release here.)

In short, The Second Life island is a representation of a new Healthcare campus to be opened in 2011. It actually is a very good build. For n00bs there's a short introduction to navigating Second Life near the entrance of the hospital.

I received my Hospital tag which guided me through the hospital, making sure I went to the right rooms to have my gall bladder repaired. Throughout the tour a lot of information was pushed through excellent movies, but they essentially are a promo talk on the Cisco solutions for Unified Communications, telepresence monitoring, rfID, etcetera. I can see this part of the simulator become real in the near future.

Fully automated, or robot-driven surgery probably won't be integrated in the RL campus opening in 2011.

After surgery I returned to my hospital room for a few second to recuperate, but soon was sent outside as 'clean air' helps a lot for speedy recovery. The downside is that I entered into an 'Al-Gorish' speech about minimizing the footprint, low emission products and more green bla bla.

For information about Cisco Connected Health technologies, visit www.cisco.com/go/healthcare

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/PalomarWest%20Hospital/30/120/35

Association of Virtual Worlds Advisory Board Goes Global

I just checked the PRWEB and didn't see the press release there yet, but I just picked up one that's about to air on the Association of Virtual Worlds.

Jacksonville, Fla. (PRWEB) March 10, 2008

The Association of Virtual Worlds welcomes four new members to its Advisory Board: Dr. Sara de Freitas, Director of Research at the Serious Games Institute at the University of Coventry in the UK; Darius Lahoutifard, CEO, Altadyn, with offices in Paris, France and California; Rahul Dutta, CEO, Trimensions-Metaverse Development, of Gurgaon, India; and Bruno Cerboni, Founder and CEO of Virtual Italian Parks, of Rome, Italy.

“I am thrilled that these four leaders in their fields have agreed to join the Advisory Board of the Association of Virtual Worlds. The Association is truly a global organization and the addition of these four international members to the Advisory Board underscore the global aspect of this new group.” says Dave Elchoness, Executive Director.

The Association of Virtual Worlds is experiencing rapid growth both in the US and around the world. “It is extremely exciting to see such an enormous global interest in this organization,” says Edita Kaye, Founder.

The Association of Virtual Words is a global industry association for the rapidly growing virtual worlds industry. It serves as a resource for those wishing to experiment and explore virtual worlds for work or play. The Association’s mission is to educate, network, recruit, and further the membership’s collective goals.

For more information please contact: dave@associationofvirtualworlds.com or edita@associationofvirtualworlds.com

Dave Elchoness,
Executive Director
Visit
Association of Virtual Worlds at: http://www.associationofvirtualworlds.com/

New HOAP for Second Life

I had lost a little faith in Second Life, but there's new hope coming about when it comes to Second Life being a serious tool for business: Html-On-A-Prim.

Gwynneth Llewelyn wrote an excellent article on this new feature and its implications, here's a short extract:

"A few months ago - not many in terms of “real life”
hours, but an eternity in Second Life® - a brief discussion with Linden Lab exposed the rumour that they were planning to integrate an HTML browser inside the Second Life application client. This is not a revolutionary breakthrough - things like ActiveWorlds or OpenCroquet have done it ages ago, and the world did not shatter and end at that time.

Some eager residents of SL were happy about the idea. At the very least, you would be able to exchange notecards with “rich text”. Perhaps even have a way to browse a bit while in-world - no more need to open up your browser to check the Help pages, do some forum posting, or even insert events directly from in-world.

On a second stage (according to Linden Lab®), HTML may be directly drawn on top of a prim face. This would mean, for starters, a way to get outside information on top of a 3D world. Older platforms already allow for this usage of HTML. Things like proper text management on top of a prim are finally possible - books, slide-show presenters, coreboards, even clothes vendors, will be able to get away with textures for writing text, and use HTML-rendered text instead.

The third stage is full integration. Prims with HTML pages (and LL is still thinking on how this will happen) will be point-and-click browseable. Neither we nor Linden Lab have yet figured out how exactly this will be implemented..."

HTML on a Prim boosts options for virtual workspace

Although the features at this time are pretty basic, it has brought Second Life back into focus for me as a possible platform for serious collaboration. My frustration with SL was mainly caused by lack of real collaboration possibilities.

What it all boils down to is that you rez a prim and put a webpage on it. Now you can look at a webpage with others. Nothing spectacular, but it gets more serious when you can look at secure webpages. I've done some tests with a colleague displaying secure content. Through the built-in media browser you can access and log into secure sites, then use the option to 'send current URL to parcel' and it will display set itself at the parcel media URL and display at the screen. Your fellow observer won't see the webpage unless he's logged in as well. Today we started working through some of our project tools (like JIRA) in which we can monitor our projects.

It works. We could both look at 'classified content' and discuss the status of a project, manage service calls and have a look at the time budgets for the project at hand. At the end there was one question nagging me: Security? Anyone?

The thing is, Second Life doesn't have the reputation of being a safe and sound business environment (remember ABN is partly moving to Active Worlds because they need a secure environment). What happens with my username and password when I enter this info in the built in browser?

A Quick HOWTO:

Maybe it's me, but it took me some time to fiddle out how it worked. And because there's a little bug (it can crash your sim) I thought I'd do you the favour of a quick 'howto'.

The feature only works with the new Release Candidate 1.19.1 client (March 6th) and there are a few new features that are obvious - such as the extra media tab next to the talk settings - and some little settings to tweak in the 'Preferences' bit.

The basic element for displaying web content is in the estate management settings, the 'About Land' configuration where you have the option to set the media url for the parcel. The downside is that you can only set one URL per parcel. Remember to select the texture that will be used on the prims to display the content as well. If you're working behind a firewall or proxy, you now have the option to set proxy stuff as well in the preferences bit (pic right)

Then build the prim, select the desired texture (in this case the new *default media texture) corresponding with the texture set at the media options in the previous step. Then go to the general tab and select prim properties. Where you used to have buy, open and sit options, there are now two extra's: Open Media Content and Play Media Content.

ABN metaverse update

Today I visited the Virtual World Seminar at the University of Delft and finally had time to sit down and talk with Popke Rein Munniksma, the team leader of ABN's 3D Experience and with Emmanuel Gruijs, CEO for Active Worlds Europe. In the past week we have had some contact on the blog ING and ABN flee Second Life which caused a little stir in the blogosphere.

First, of all, one of the remarks on the initial entry read:

"Maybe it has something to do with the company being taken over by Fortis."

Although the future isn't certain this has been denied completely. The takeover is not affecting ABN's presence in any way at this point in time. ABN is sticking in Second Life, but is indeed shifting focus to be able to do real business.

Popke Rein said: "As a bank we have the need to have 1 on 1 contact with our customers behind closed doors." By being a bank ABN is bound to very strict privacy and compliancy rules which make it impossible for them to conduct business in Second Life, hence their move towards Active Worlds.

Overview of ABN in Second Life

In December 2006 ABN Amro was the first European bank to enter Second Life and rode the wave of mass media attention perfectly. They primarily entered with a "just do it" mentality. Their initial 4 islands and offices have grown towards a 27 island presence at it's peak, but is being downsized now. A team of 4 full time employees on average has build and rebuild every experience over and over again, mainly based on user feedback (so I'm estimating a budget of close to 1 million euro).

Every build was an experiment to see to which part of the Bank's business they could find a virtual extention as they are convinced that Virtual Worlds are here to stay.

"Remember who said "The internet, we are not interested
in it," in 1993! That won't happen to ABN when it comes to virtual worlds. Every step the team made had to be checked with risk management and compliancy and other regulatory organs within the bank. We cannot afford to do that, go through that whole process, once virtual worlds become mainstream. Then it's too late."

That process of going through regulatory motions has become quite clear in their TechnoDesk and Tradeglobe sims in Second Life. In Real Life ABN has 5 TechnoDesk offices close to the 5 Technical Universities in the Netherlands. In these offices the bank offers information for High Tech startups and when looking at the population of Second Life, this was their logical 6th office.

The TradeGlobe is ABN's private banking vehicle with which they come into contact with their shamingly rich clients. In Second Life they've held investment meetings and so on.

Over the past year, the ABN greeter, the lovely Mrs. Jung, has had over 1.100 real business conversations with interested customers, which is more than the average local bankemployee has. In this regard, Second Life has been a success for the bank.

However, due to privacy rulings they found they would never be able to achieve one on one advice and were limited to general information only. Because of it's conservative nature and regulations the bank needs a secure environment to conduct one on one business. Active Worlds can offer this, said Emmanuel Gruijs on the growing affection between their world and the Dutch banker.

Trivia:
Popke Rein said: "Remember who said "The internet, we are not interested in it," in 1993!

Do you remember who said this?

A mobile world: SL on the move?

Today I came across this youTube video and article on TechDigest:

No, your eyes aren't kidding you. That really is the processor-shredding Second Life virtual world running on an iPhone. But how? And why is it so slow? Well, the answer is that it's a concept demo produced by mobile technology firm
Comverse.

In a layman's nutshell, all the processing is being done NOT on the iPhone, on a central server. All that's being streamed to the iPhone is the visuals - essentially, a video feed of the Second Life environment. Then, when you tap the
on-screen buttons to move, or type in a message, that's sent back up to the server for processing.

So, it's not a Second Life client on the iPhone - it's just streaming Safari-friendly video of your SL session, with you able to send your commands back in the other direction. That's why it's this sluggish at the moment, because you're one step removed.

Second Life is too resource-consuming to go mobile right now. Especially its streaming technology requires quite a lot of bandwidth to render the simulation you're in. For the time being this is a nice gimmick to show your friends, but not of any real use.

But the virtual worlds will get on the move sooner or later. For the virtual workspace to have an impact on our busy lives they will have to go mobile. It will require lighter interfaces and more bandwidth on mobile phones, but we'll get there. Why?

Well, I'm on my way to a meeting, and I'm stuck in a traffic jam. I'll be missing this important meeting. Time to pull over and log into our virtual world and do this meeting there...

vBusiness Expo

I got pointed towards a video on YouTube about the vBusiness Expo. This will be an event about the Virtual Workspace, working in a virtual environment. The video states that there are over 200 companies working in Second Life right now. At 1.09 minutes you'll see Sogeti logo fly by...

I*t doesn't really say who uploaded the vid, except "posted by vBusiness" but I think I recognise Nick Wilson's (Clever Zebra, ex Metaversed) voice there.