UgoTrade

Yesterday I visited IBM 7 in Second Life to see what Ian Hughes, IBM (Epredator Potato in Second Life) has been doing with his Wimbledon project this year. In the picture above, Tara5 Oh, my avatar in Second Life, is in the IBM Wimbledon team control room reconstructed in SL from panoramic photos. Click on the image below to see the whole panorama in Flash.

My timing was good because I not only met up with Epredator and got to play his new “Rock, Paper, Scissors tennis game (see picture below). But, I also got to talk to Judge Hocho, the IBMer who Epredator noted did much of the work on the build this year. Also there was Laronzo Fitzgerald who worked on the build last year. Even the legendary Jessica Qin (one of IBMs most talented architects in SL) flew in briefly to tweak a telehub. But she was “slammed” with work, unfortunately, so she couldn’t stop to play tennis and drink Pimms.

Enjoying Prims Pimms

As Epredator has illustrated with a video on eightbar some very funny cross purpose conversation that occurred during my tour of Wimbledon in Second Life! Pimms, a specialty English drink that is a tradition at Wimbledon, kept cropping up in the conversation. But prims, as we know, are the basic building blocks of Second Life. For a while I was struggling to work out why Judge and Epredator wanted me to visit the virtual Wimbledon roof garden to share some Pimms “prims.”

Well I had prims on the brain not Pimms. I had been admiring the good use Epredator has put Linden Lab’s “html on a prim” to. But as you can see below I did finally get to enjoy a Pimms on the roof garden that again makes nice use of panoramic photos to capture the beauty of this spot.

Judge does not blow his own horn and it took me a while and a few roof top Pimms to find out Judge is also Lead Architect for the division of IBM that handles the infrastructure on the Wimbledon project.

The infrastructure for the IBM Wimbledon web site is cool in and of itself. Judge explained some of the more gearheady details:

Judge Hocho: We use multiple sites in a failure avoidance capacity, rather than the standard failure recovery. It’s something we developed here, wherein we only need 150% capacity, instead of the typical 200% for recovery which is why we have had IBM.com running at 100% since June of 2001.

Tara5: What kinds of load does it handle?

Judge Hocho: we can handle a metric ton of load

Tara5 Oh: What does that mean?

Judge Hocho: heh, millions of requests per min!

Epredator Potato: Last year, we had 266,311,332 page views for the event.

HTML on Pimms a Prim

Epredator Potato showed me how the present capabilites of HTML on a Prim in SL, that include live updating, do provide nice presentation tools.

Epredator: if you press play like you would for a movie. You will see the website on the large monitor in the corner. You can click the monitor to get slected pages. The Linden browser on a prim is not fully active. But it runs things

You see the webpage?

Well I have been using this to demonstrate how to interact with existing content. While the links dont work we can change the url, just like videos and hence let you have control. You will see the clock is ticking and working. And, we have a wimbledon twitter channel now too, so when I do demos, I can direct this web to anything.

The HTML on a prim is read only but, if you have a fixed structure on a page you can make the surface buttons clickable until we have full browser [more about LL's plans for this below].

Full browsing is complicated, so there isn’t a full browser capability yet. But its not just graphics. Like if we run twitter vision because you can change the URL. Well this [the Twitter vision page above] is an active webpage running live. They dont do flash but they do do ajax style. It is a webpage. it is a browser just with clicking turned off. So it is running javascript on your machine. It is very nice as a presentation tool.

“WebKit Meta: A new standard for in-game web content”

I pinged Qarl Linden who has been working on Linden Lab’s web rendering project while I was admiring the IBM Wimbledon web presentation board. And Qarl Linden concurred that even though the current html on a prim is not fully dynamic yet, you can for instance, if you use an ajax based white-boarding software, see the whiteboard update live on the prim.

But Qarl also mentioned there are some very interesting plans afoot for using webkit as our web renderer because “we’re having trouble getting mozilla to properly handle plugins (flash, java, etc).”  You can read more about that progress here:

After admiring the Web presentation tools I tried my hand at Judge’s server game. Judge (seated below) seemed rather underwhelmed at my serving skills! But I highly recommend an outing to Wimbledon in Second Life. And, for updates on what is going check in on the eightbar blog.

John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, after his Cisco Live keynote, held a question and answer session in Second Life yesterday. It was a packed house and Chambers’ responses to the questions were amongst the most powerful endorsements for the role of virtual worlds in positive global development and our futures that I have heard in a while!

The Cisco virtual worlds blog had been indicating this would be a strong statement from their CEO in support of virtual worlds (see Virtual Worlds: Are they really dead? ). But listen for yourself to see how deep and far reaching this vision for collaboration in general, and the role of virtual worlds in particular, goes with Cisco.

The whole Q and A will be posted here and covered many interesting topics from reducing emissions to the power of collaboration to change our lives in ways we can barely imagine now. But here are a couple of extracts.

First the answer to Matt2 Ultsch’s question. Matt2 is the Second Life avatar of Matt Hamblen, Computerworld in “real” life. Then, not surprisingly, I have transcribed the answer to my own question - asked by my Second Life avatar Tara5 Oh. And, finally, a clarification of a main theme of the “The Power of Collaboration,” in a description from John Chambers of “communities of interest” prompted by a question from Dannette CiscoSystems.

Matt2 Ultsch: My question for Mr. Chambers: A thoughtful blog by Bruce Damer recently questioned whether virtual world platforms could be facing a downturn in use and popularity…Do you have any reaction, now that Cisco is showing a strong interest in Second Life interactions?

John Chambers: …..very often if there is one thing that I have learned in my thirty years in high tech is sometimes concepts are a little bit too early but when they do take off they take off with tremendous speed and efficiency.

This where I think it is important especially for the business communities and the entertainment industries to understand what is possible because when the market does move it usually moves at speeds faster then anyone anticipated.

I would compare it to the first stages of the internet. If you look back to the predictions made by Cisco and others in the early nineties and mid-nineties almost all of them not only came true but ended up being even lower then we expected in terms of under estimating the market opportunity.

So I think when you think about interfacing to your customers, interfacing to your family, interfacing to your piers and the communities of interest we will have both in our business world and our personal life, I think we are at the very, very beginning stages of what is possible.

Might there be some bumps along the way, yes. But I would disagree with the overall commentary. I think you are going to see a world that explodes into many types? of utilization.

But to refer back to one of your other colleague’s earlier comment. You are going to have more ubiquitious band width, processing power, and more people that see the value of bringing this.. whether it is the value of bringing to education, health care, productivity or entertainment.

I think that what you are seeing is the very front end of a very large wave of opportunities.

Tara5 Oh: What is Cisco doing in terms of research and development in terms the use of virtual worlds for creating new ways for people to interact with data, i.e., 3D data visualization and even 3D virtual operation centers?

John Chambers: Well, if you watch what we are beginning to do is we often get our best ideas from our customers and through our partners. And, clearly, while we have just been a member of Second Life since 2006, at our last partners conference earlier this year we had a 3D virtual partner capability which we continue to expand.

And if you watch what we are doing, we are instead of talking about video capabilities in companies we are really bringing that virtual capability into our customer environment as the primary way we will support them in the future and the primary way that we will interface in our company.

So we are not just using the technology we are changing the organizational model to be much more collaborative and rewarding people based on that and restructuring. In fact, if you watch what we are doing as a company while we are organized in traditional ways in terms of sales, engineering, legal, and supply chain, our organization structure of the future will be all around communities of interest - will be based upon market opportunities in the enterprise, or the consumer, opportunities in terms of video, or opportunities in terms of software, etc.

So we are restructuring are whole company around these concepts and we think it will have a huge future. And we clearly intend to not only lead in this area in terms of using it ourself. We intend to lead in terms of bringing it to our customer set.

I need to in the interest of self disclosure remind everyone that this requires a lot of bandwidth and lot of ….. devices and that we will be into it in a big way in terms of the capability that this type of technology brings to our ….(last few words inaudible).

John Chambers elaborated on the role of “communities of interest” in a response to a question from Danette CiscoSystems who was fielding the questions from the audience.

Danette CiscoSystems: What is exciting you at Cisco Live? What is getting you revved up?

John Chambers: What is getting me revved up at Cisco Live is seeing a concept come true. We started down a collaborative path at Cisco literally 7 years ago with most people in the company not believing this was the right way to go and all of us having been successful in command and control, but that is not the future at all.

The future is going to be built of communities of interest and how you can access any data from any device and share that not with a machine or another person in a one to one transaction but share it among a community of interest where you think together. I think this will forever change business models. I think it will forever change entertainment and it will change every aspect of our lives in a way we are just starting to imagine.

I think what is exciting to here is that where last year we were talking about that in theory and this year we are beginning to see people grab this is going to happen. We may disagree on the time frame but it is not longer a question any more of if, it is now a question of when.

Some of other interesting questions to John Chambers from the Second Life audience and Cisco Live were:

(name inaudible): As collaborative technologies have grown so has the demand for increased bandwidth however rural education systems still struggle to meet those … connective needs. As urban school systems continue to grow more connected to global collaborative environments rural systems are being left behind the curve how do you see these technologies being implemented by rural schools and governments?

John Chambers noted in his detailed answer to this question that one of the reasons Cisco bought a WiMax company was to respond to this need.

Movies1963 Beck: Gartner reports the total number of pcs in use has broken one billion mark and grows? by 12% a year. What are your thoughts on that?

Tao Takashi: What are the obstacles we are seeing right now regarding virtual worlds. What are we experiencing? What needs to be solved before they get adopted more?

Beyers Sellers: What real life policies do you think, if any, are going to be crucial to the success of virtual worlds - these might include net neutrality, government investment in infrastructure etc.

Beyers also asked: What is Cisco’s investment strategy for virtual worlds?

For the answers to these questions see the recording that I hope will be posted on the web soon. I will put in a link as soon as I have one.

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves” Carl Jung

Philips Design’s Ideation Quest in Second Life (SLURL) explores how to effectively combine the emerging technology of virtual worlds with a customer-centric perspective of open innovation. Co-creation and open innovation are important concepts for Philips Design and part of their vision for design as a catalyst for a better future (see also my earlier post on Philanthropy By Design in Second Life and Designing Lifestyles for 2020 ).

Philips Design Co-creation Island and the Ideation Quest has a soft launch in Second Life on Monday June 16th, 12pm SLT. The aim is to start some communication and to attract people from the Second Life community and Philips Design friends group, and to introduce the island to people “as a place to cooperate and explore the future by design.” There is a schedule on the island showing when members of the Ideation Quest team will be available for questions and tours twice a week.

Josephine Green points out in her paper “Democratizing the future”:

At Philips Design, we believe that we have to challenge and re-think our approach to creating business and values for the future…….It seems that making sense and making sense in the future lies in understanding how people are evolving, engaging with them on a journey of discovery and exploration and co-creating and envisaging the future together.

Philips Design’s vision for co-creation probes deep into core human desires for happiness and love. Fast Company back in 2006 noted how under the leadership of Stefano Marzano Philips Design was taking on the great themes of human existence through design:

“How can we provide more happiness, a more relaxed life,” [Marzano] asks, “without actually entering the utopian idea that the world should change overnight?”

[Marzano] calls design nothing less than a “catalyst for a paradigm change,” the mechanism behind the improvement of the human condition.

I was fortunate enough to witness Josephine Green and Stefano Marzano discuss the theme of Love and Business during a panel at the 2007 Philips Simplicity Event at London’s Earls Court exhibition center. This was also one of the great “aha” moments for me re the potential of virtual worlds. And, while I rarely write about the engagement/enhancement of qualities of love as one of the most powerful aspects of the immersive 3D space, this is exemplified clearly in the most successful virtual world to date, Second Life.

While love has many forms, at it’s heart it is about a powerful two way connection. And virtual worlds because they create new possibilities for connection also create new possibilities for love, happiness, and our ability to improve the human condition.

It is clear how people’s love for their fellow humans and this planet is finding new ways to express itself in virtual worlds in all the amazing non profit work done by such groups as Virtual Africa, Global Kids and Non-Profit Commons in Second Life. But, the notion that business (for profit) can work through virtual worlds for a better future where love and happiness is center stage is a more radical notion in contemporary culture. Although, as Business Balls points out in this article, love and business were not always so far apart:

High finance and loving principles rarely appear in the same sentence now, but many regional banks, long since swallowed by the multi-nationals, were once Quaker businesses, run on caring principles.

So how does Ideation Quest engage these themes of play, happiness and love through linking business and customers in co-creation and innovation in Second Life?

I interviewed Dolf Wittkamper, Philips Design Senior Director (Second Life avatar Dolf Rhino) and Thomas Kohler, a Ph.D. candidate in Marketing and Innovation from the University of Innsbruck (Second Life avatar Rein Spire) last week. They have been developing the concept of playful co-creation that uses immersive 3D environment of Second Life to create collaborative relationships in a “playground of ideas.”

The Ideation Quest on the Philips Design Co-creation Island was conceptualized by Dolf and Thomas with Avaty and design support by Apple Antwerp (SL avatar name) and scripting by Dirty Mclean (SL avatar name). Also Slava Kozlov, Philips Design senior people researcher (Second Life avatar Centrasian Wise) supported the whole concept. He is the co-author of an interesting paper called, To Play or not to Play, very relevant in this context. And, Dr. Daniel Stieger and Dr. Johann Füller from HYVE played a substantial role in shaping the concept of the Ideation Quest.

The Ideation Quest explores people’s love of games, ideation and collaboration, for example, through the collection of points which are given by other avatars. An avatar on the Ideation Quest has a so-called ideation meter above their head which is the mechanism to keep score and “participants can collect points along the three dimensions that are considered relevant for innovation: creativity, collaboration, and expertise.”

But, both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards of play are vital to Ideation Quest.

Elements of The Ideation Quest

After an arrival experience where basic questions “Where am I? Why am I here, and what do I want to do?” are answered, the Ideation Quest moves into an inspirational scenario drawn from one of Philips Design’s award winning probes into a sustainable future through off the grid living. This is the heart of the quest that encourages individuals to explore and ideate on the topic together.

Philips Design presented, “Off the Grid: Sustainable Habitat 2020″ in Japan in the AXIS building. “Off the Grid” is part of the Philips Design Probe program and is a continuation of the Skin probe which was listed as “best innovation of 2007″ by Time Magazine and was recognized with a Red Dot “best of the best” award.

Dolf explained:

We call it a Design PROBE. It is in sense a provocation to think fundamentally differently about a topic. A probe is to start a discussion, to shift boundaries and it can ultimately be used to brief technologist to develop in certain directions too. The skin of the building is smart and on the inside there are 4 zones where treatment of water, air, waste and light is explained. We have more SKIN related probes on the site.

In Second Life there are a number of distinctive features to the Probes so users are given a chance to “directly” experience a creative concept, not by just reading about it, but through audio-visually interacting with it in virtual space.

Then the Ideation Quester moves on to the challenges in the third phase. These tasks aim to stimulate creativity by involving avatars in a number of activities.

The first challenging task a user faces is a so-called free word association. Participants are invited to react to a stimuli word and picture and according to how many associations users typed in they get the points. To overcome the second challenge users need to answer a set of knowledge questions and engage in a sentence completion task. Every object holds a multiple-choice question and is related to the question. The questions encourage the acquisition of domain-specific knowledge.

The third one is a brainstorming session. After 4 participants are seated, a brainstorming session is initiated.

The fourth is ideation. Avatars are invited to visualize and express their ideas. In the sandbox area participants can collaborate to innovate and interact in real time. The final task of this stage is for avatars to submit there ideas in the form of a 3D model, in writing or in any graphical representation through a web interface.

In the final stage of the quest participants are able to review comment and judge other submissions.

How does Ideation Quest reward all the participants in co-creation?

Tara5 Oh: What are the rewards for individual participants in being involved in a co-creation project like this?

Dolf Rhino: Good point. We believe we have to give before we can expect anything back. What we are giving here is sharing scenarios and ideas about a sustainanble living in 2020 and how a building could be disconnected from the grid. Water, light, waste and air are considered and collected through the skin of the building.

Rein Spire: Research has demonstrated that participants of co-creation are partly motivated by the process itself - meaning that they enjoy the creative process. The IQ aims toward facilitating such compelling experiences.

Dolf Rhino: But we think it is also important to celebrate the winner with some relevant present.

Tara5 Oh: And how do issues of IP work? I know Wikitecture has many meetings about thinking about ways to credit and recognize peoples roles in the design process?

Dolf Rhino: Our ongoing exploration and research on this topic has the purpose to clarify this. We think there are good solutions.

Rein Spire: One option would be to reward the ideas that will be commercialized. But as you say if more people are involved there needs to be a fair mechanism in place. In the case of the Ideation Quest the most active participants will be rewarded with material prizes but again the approach is directed to not only depend on extrinsic rewards but to intrinsically motivate customers.

Tara5 Oh: But the designs are not owned in common, i.e. participants will have to sign a contract that gives rights to Philips?

Rein Spire: Everybody can review the ideas - so its open - but Philips retains right to use, publish and eventually commercialize.

Tara5 Oh: Wouldn’t you think that with a more radical approach to IP you might get a higher lever of collaboration?

Dolf Rhino: In the exploration we want to try various ways. The beauty is that the only way it will work is when we have a model which is valuable for everyone.

Tara5 Oh: Is Ideation Quest aimed not so much in professional designers but at customers?

Rein Spire: I think all kinds of users can take on various roles and bring in different contributions. If, for instance, they are not designers they can still review and comment other ideas or designs.

Dolf Rhino: The focus now is a broad audience

Tara5 Oh: But the challenges of working out IP would be more complex in a community of professional designers wouldn’t it?

Rein Spire: I agree and a more flexible approach to IP would presumable facilitate participation.

Dolf Rhino: Yes, if that is the focus then we need to present and work differently.

Tara5 Oh: I suppose my question is have you though about taking this model of ideation into the level of high end design?

Dolf Rhino: We take one step at a time and the 2 elements: co creation and VWs are complex enough to master at this moment.

Tara5 Oh: Yes I agree! And would you say as Philips already does quite a lot of customer collaboration in RL and this is why you decided to start in this way?

Dolf Rhino: That’s right.

Rein Spire: I think the degree of a company’s involvement is a different for open source and for this kind of co-creation. To me this approach is about providing a platform to empower customers, to allow them to enter an active dialogue with products or companies they care about. On the one side companies are opening up their doors to involve participants and on the customer side, people want to be involved during all phases of value creation.

Picture of Philips Design Co-creation Island in Second Life

Next Steps

We can expect more in the future on the Philips Design Co-creation Island. It has amongst others 2 areas in progress Poeme Electronique and Next Simplicity.

There is also another Ideation Quest in Second Life - on the topic of the future motorbike experience together with KTM.

Recently, I met Kyle Gomboy, a former aerospace test engineer turned entrepreneur (pictured above working in Project Manhattan OpenSim), at a realXtend open house in Second Life. I quickly realized that this little bot (his avatar in Second Life is a cute energy efficient robot called G2 Proto) was one of the power houses behind a big vision.

Kyle, with partner Robin Gomboy (the G of G2), is now working with Microsoft, OpenSim, realXtend and the community of over 800 TechNet and MSDN/.NET that has already come together in Second Life to establish:

a technology grid for companies to come together with community members to form a high tech silicon valley virtually

The Microsoft connection, of course, really intrigued me! IBMers have been a movers and shakers in OpenSim since the early days. But Microsoft had not to my knowledge shown any interest in joining the immersive 3D party.

But within hours of meeting Kyle I had an interview set up with Zain Naboulsi (C# Writer in Second Life), a Microsoft Developer Evangelist who is the engine on the Microsoft side for this “community effort.”  Zain pointed out to me that despite his title, he is known as “the guy for Virtual World Evangelism” at Microsoft. I asked Zain how many virtual world evangelists there are at Microsoft?

Ha good question! There is probably about four or five of us right now.

Zain described his role in Microsoft and how this relates to this community effort in OpenSim?

I am relatively young in Microsoft I just celebrated my first year anniversary so I can’t talk about what happened several years ago, all I know is what happened over the year that I have been there.

My job description when I started this absolutely didn’t include anything about 3d worlds or anything of the kind. I became interested in 3d worlds and I think it speaks volumes for Microsoft that they said alright fine lets make it your job. And, that’s exactly what they did and likewise with other folks it is on their commitment now. Our strategy is straight forward, if you you can prove that your efforts in the community work then you are given carte blanche. If you can’t prove it then why be given the resources to waste.

My friend Ben Lindquist, of Green Phosphor, who is the only developer I know that develops in all the major open source virtual worlds, sent me a link pointing out that Microsoft has been interested in virtual worlds for some time.  But I asked Zain about this notion I have that Microsoft has been hiding its light under a bushel re the free form 3D immersive space. Zain responded:

I think we want to be careful. I mean just because we didn’t show up to the party doesn’t necessarily mean we didn’t like the party. Like most very large companies we wanted to make sure it was a viable type of thing. I think what you are seeing now is the beginning of the emergence of that experimentation and that is validation of the fact that we are definitely interested in this space.

As both Kyle and Zain were very clear that this is an open source community project, with no expectations of paid Microsoft developers being involved, at least in the short term, I was very interested as to how Kyle and Zain saw the big question of how such community driven Open Source development will reward people for their efforts (also see Second Thoughts for an alternate position to my own Open Source advocacy).

The full transcript of my interview with Kyle and Zain follows here. But, I will highlight one of Kyle’s responses. He is an experienced open source developer and entrepreneur and this is the answer he gave to this billion dollar question.

That’s a great question and since I got involved with communities and Open Source it has been a tough one to figure out. But I came to grips with when I found out that you could create this cool java script and that anyone could open new source and take what you did and that annoyed me. And I remember thinking many many years ago, how am I going to get anywhere if everything unique I make people can just take?

But then I began to thinking I can do that to. I can look at their code and then we can move up the whole technology the whole effort together, we’ll move forward faster and that will benefit us all because we will be able to send twice the product to market that we could have if we all stayed in our own little cubicles.

As far as the Manhattan project goes anything we develop there goes back to open source immediately and once it is embedded and tested it goes right back in cos OpenSim is open source and that is the ideology it was started with and we are not going to interrupt that at all.

Of course turning back code to an open source community is not always a straightforward process as a recent debate about the integration of realXtend code in OpenSim sparked off by Justin Clark-Casey and Dusan Writer indicates. But another good friend - an astute virtual world developer/evangelist, Peter Quirk, made an important point re the idea that realXtend “may not be giving back what it takes.” He noted too this must also be viewed from the perspective of “how hard it is to merge source trees that are changing rapidly without any stable releases.”

As I have heard on the grapevine great efforts are being made by both OpenSim and realXtend to work out an approach to integration. I cannot say much specifically at this point. But as Dusan Writer notes, I am an “OS promoter” and as such I think the fact that OpenSim, at such an early stage in its development, is being faced with the challenge of integrating such large contributions as realXtend’s is not just about “cracks in the open.”  This is just as much a question of how to deal with an abundance of riches in an unstructured and rapidly expanding community. The arrival of another important new community of developers from the Microsoft .NET and TECHNET will of course bring more riches and challenges too.

Interview with Zain Naboulsi (MIcrosoft) and Kyle Gomboy (G2)

Tish: Are you going to get involved with the OpenSim community?

Kyle: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been trying to catch Adam [Frisby]. He’s been chatting with me through Facebook. The first thing we want to do is start working with him and Microsoft’s Zain has offered to get support going for some of the packet handling issues that Adam was talking about that might be limiting how many people could be in OpenSim. So Adam was looking to run some code by Microsoft, and Zain was saying that he definitely had some volunteers to help out. We definitely plan to get involved.

Tish: I was interested to know how deep you were going to get in terms of OpenSim development?

Zain: Kyle you want to start and then I’ll take it?

Kyle: I had thrown out to Tish that I had already started discussion with Adam, and first thing he mentioned was some issues with performance that he was hoping if Microsoft got involved they could contribute. Zain had already asked to start working with codeplex and getting some of the files up on there so we could swarm in the .net community and possibly some Microsoft help as we get them more educated on the OpenSim movement.

Zain: Absolutely. You asked how far we’re going to go with this? We’re going to go as far as it lets us go. We honestly believe we’re forging the future here so it needs to go as far as people want to take it.

Tish: Have you thought about where you want to be interoperable with other Microsoft projects, XBox even eventually, Virtual Earth? Have you gone that far or are you just going a step at a time at the minute?

Zain: That’s a great question. Honestly we haven’t thought beyond seeing if people are really interested in this concept and from what Kyle tells me a lot of uptake. And, I know we’ve started some basic experiments, nothing really major, to see. But certainly it’s not inconceivable. I think what it is though, you mentioned the Windows aspect of it, that’s great. But we’ve already proven, if you just look around here, it doesn’t really matter to us that much what the platform is. I think the main reason we’re going to OpenSim is not so much because it all runs on Microsoft stuff which is just a nice bonus, but because I really feel like (and I just love the Lindens by the way so let me get that out!), but I really feel like we’re kind of restricted here [in Second Life]. I think that we can have a lot more flexibility by going the OpenSim route, and working with folks like Adam who I haven’t met personally but Kyle tells me he’s just phenomenal. And everybody Kyle’s met has been cool and talking about all these great things we can do with OpenSim that I don’t think Second Life’s going to give us the ability to do this anytime soon.

Tish: I know some groups are involved in the OpenSim core, are you aiming to be that involved or are you just not sure yet?

Zain: Honestly, this is the very early stages now. [Project] Manhattan is the first real test to see if first of all people respond, secondly if it’s something we want to stay involved in. All indicators are right now that it’s phenomenal. Third, I think the big thing is will this resonate with the community? The main reason we’re in this game right now is about the community. That’s why we built everything you see around you, and that’s why we want to do what we want to do with OpenSim. Then if it benefits the commmunity and the community responds to it, then we’ll stay with it. If the community doesn’t like it, doesn’t think it’s a good idea, then obviously we’ll get out. But from what Kyle has been telling me the community has just had phenominal response to the Manhattan project.

Kyle; Yes, I am pretty much lost to OpenSim at the moment because of all the options and the flexibility and the code familiarity. And everyone I’ve talked to who has gotten their own sim set up, every single person who is getting their ports configured to hook up to our grid agrees, and it doesn’t seem to be a contest even with the quirks here and there, and the lack of some features. There is so much ability - the scripting the c#sharping is everything that we had been talking about needing in SL and the desk top sharing that realXtend is doing. It is exactly the work we want to get involved in. I don’t see myself developing in Second Life, I see myself attaching the work I do in Second Life to OpenSim and everyone else is joining in so far too.

Zain: Let me clarify though too. While OpenSim will be the R&D and experimentation side of what we do, by no stretch of the imagination are we even considering abandoning our Second Life presence. So this sim [Microsoft sim in second Life] isn’t going anywhere. Community is what drives us so now we will have the community folks come here for some things and go there [OpenSim] for other things.

Tish: Just to be absolutely clear, when you say community, you mean your .net and C# developers community right?

Zain: Yes, and the technet folks, all of them, any of the community that wants to come here. But obviously the Microsoft focus people in general, so yes .Net and TechNet.

Kyle: yes we have almost 800 total in Second Life. And Zain is right noone’s leaving Second Life. But this is a community based thing and the biggest number is our c# developers. And what c# developers want to do is get into something and tinker and the top community leaders dove right into OpenSim and have seen past the quirks. So I think it will turn into a socializing place here on the islands [project Manhattan] but I think in the next year you will see a lot of .net innovation coming out of the group that was just meeting here in Second Life.

Zain: Yes I really agree with that. This is a playground now for them but I think it will evolve into something more than that.

Tish: Your focus is really on your developer community isn’t it?

Zain: Yes and I think that we may be the only project from a large company that is hundred percent community driven. I don’t go to outside folks and ask them to build this stuff. The community does it, the community decides on it, the community drives it. That’s the biggest deal. I am here to help the community in any way I can.

Tish: When you say that, it’s not just about people who are interested in Immersive 3D development, it’s people who are working many Microsoft areas right?

Zain: Absolutely. My job as Evangalist is fairly broad in nature. Today I just got done doing a webcast on new features in AJAX. I cover a very broad spectrum of things, but without a doubt an enormous amount of my time is spent with virtual world evangelism. As you aptly pointed out people are getting more and more interested in this stuff so I find more and more of my time is spent there.

Tish: I suppose future directions depend on what the developers pick up on in OpenSim doesn’t it to some degree? Do you have people who have started doing any projects in OpenSim yet?

Zain: I don’t focus internally, yes, Microsoft folks are doing stuff in OpenSim a variety of projects. But my main goal is to get out and encourage the community to get involved in OpenSim. If we can’t get the community engaged and involved in this then ultimately we’re doomed to fail because the community has to want this. The community has to pick this up as early adopters or we’ll never get to the point of mainstream acceptance.

Tish: I know Kyle is interested in something I’m really interested in which is seeing OpenSim as something much more than a 3d virtual world. Some people see OpenSim as something potentially more like a next generation operating system with really far reaching potential for dynamic, interactive data visualization and virtual operations centers and applications like that. I know Kyle you’re interested so perhaps I can ask you about that?

Kyle: I’m one hundred per cent interested in that. You might be able to send an engineer a drawing and then pop in a little active-X control and they can read about the drawing and then just click and have a view of OpenSim and move the camera around and inspect it in 3d. I see more as another output device like an excel graph or something like that.

Zain: I’ve got to agree with Kyle. I think in the short term the only way you’re going to initially get adoption is, to use a metaphor, if we think of the client as the next generation of the web browser. I think by going that path you’re going to get a lot more folks to want to try it. But ultimately certainly it’s entirely possible it becomes the shell or something like it becomes a shell. It might become, not the entire desktop which is probably unlikely, but a major component of the desktop integrated with it just like you get pieces like IM and things like that today. I don’t know if you’ve seen TouchWall yet. One of the technologies we’ve come out with. It’s like surface except it’s a big wall you can use with your interface. And, I can see TouchWall combined with the client we have today, and doing some pretty cool things especially if we can do what Kyle’s talking about - bring in some Exel spreadsheets - basically bringing in the ability to do office type activities into these clients.

Kyle: I don’t mean to say that I rule that out as a possibility, I do think that’s a possibility. I just look at what can I do in the next one or two years with this because whatever I start now that’s about as far as I can really look because the whole game will be changed in three years.

Zain: I totally agree with Kyle on that.

Tish: As far as I can see Intel might have a key part to play now, because I think that the graphics cards are a limiting factor here, particularly for the applications you are talking about Kyle?

Kyle: Yes. The video requirement is pretty steep and not only that I need probably 4 times the resolution that OpenSim has now maybe a thousand by a thousand grid before I can do any real high resolution data visualization. There needs to definitely be some expansion but if you pick the right project and the right application, it’s perfect for a lot of things right now. The other thing that Adam [Frisby] mentioned was some of the threading issues. That would help with concurrency where we can have more than 30 people or so. Even though I’ve read some hidden blogs here and there that someone’s working on a mod that lets you do over a hundred people in a sim. That would help a lot. But you’re right Intel getting involved could mean some help with some of the threading issues.

Tish: I’m really interested when you even start to mention taking this technology into other user interfaces. There’s just something wrong with being stuck in a little 2d window when you have all this 3d power. Anything that gets you away from pushing around a little mouse in a tiny window, that’s where it begins to rock.

Zain: I was in this game place where they had video arcade games and there was this one where they had these motion detectors and you play this karate style game. and you kick and the avatar does what you do. And in the end that’s where all this technology’s headed. You won’t have bulky crap attached to your hands and body like we see now, but you’ll have motion detectors that are finely tuned so that you can move and manipulate things in the virtual world.

I think Phase 1, if we’re really going to get wide adoption of OpenSim, is to treat OpenSim like the conference call center of the future. For the big events that’s where you start getting the budget and interest from internal Microsoft. I think that naturally leads to whole lot of Microsoft folks becoming much more heavily involved.

Tish: I’m assuming at the moment, your OpenSim community just has separate islands. You haven’t gridded them, they’re not related in any way right?

Kyle: That’s right. I’ve only really had the sim up a little over a week now. The initial Manhattan sim. I’m just setting up some different group meeting places within that sim. For example, we’re working on Live-ID integration so you can login with your LiveID and a few other live services integration projects. So I have a designated area, and at that area we have a colored ball that’s a certain color that you know is a wiki for that area or API for that area. You click it and open up the services for that API. Also the inworld scripting area has a link to the approved LSL commands for OpenSim. So the first sim is resources for anything and everything to do with developing in Second Life and OpenSim because we will really be developing for both. I’ve got five or six sims from community members up and running and they are just waiting on me to fire up my grid server. We’ll even try and organize our grid according to different disciplines. There’ll be a .NET developers area with a bunch of islands having to do with .NET work. And then you’ll be able to fly to the TechNet area where there’ll be a windows server and SQL server. So there’s going to be a community grid but it’s going to be organized around the developer community.

Tish: Are you hosting sims for the community for free?

Kyle: Yeah, I’m going to have a few sims up for community experiments and things like that. In addition, since most of the community has at least a broadband connection at home, and a spare computer. Everybody’s been reformatting that old 3 gigahertz single processor computer in the closet and opening up ports, so I’m going to have a grid half made up of hightech companies that want to do their own experiments and the other section of the grid will be community members that just pop in with their own simulator.

Tish: Very nice. So you’re basically showing people how to do a very quick community grid aren’t you?

Kyle: Absolutely. And then any company that has some sort of experiment going on can connect to the grid too. I’m hoping that if Intel develops a grid that they’ll at least teleport link to us or something like that so that we can start out as a community and expand out to Silicon Valley or something like that where we have gateways to all kinds of different experiments. So I’ll let Second Life be the social networking thing and then I’ll have all the Star Trek type of projects going on in OpenSim.

Tish: I love your approach - building a grid based on developer communities - people do need to be very geeky to handle OpenSim development at this level at the minute.

Kyle: Exactly. And you happen to be talking to two developers. Our job is to try and match the technology with the problem. Right now the people most likely to embrace virtual worlds and use it is the technical crowd. That’s just the way the internet came to be and all that. So put it in their hands first, get all the really hyper geeky stuff going, and let it evolve from there down to the regular person. One of the things that is in Manhattan sim now is a meeting place for a standards committee. I want to start right away setting up common standards for how navigation and walkways are done, even making accessibility possible for blind people one day where we use sound to guide you along. And we make sure like on web sites we have the proper alt. text in so audio readers can translate what’s going on. The first step is testing it, putting some standards in so anybody can go into any type of sim and can know how to get around. The we’ll really be able to bring this to the common person who can just pop in there like they can a web page now.

Tish: A question for Zain. I have this notion that Microsoft has a reputation for not liking the free form 3D immersive model?

Zain: I think we want to be careful. I mean just because we didn’t show up to the party doesn’t necessarily mean we didn’t like the party. Like most very large companies we wanted to make sure it was a viable type of thing. I think what you are seeing now is the beginning of the emergence of that experimentation and that is validation of the fact that we are definitely interested in this space.

Tish: A big question for many people looking at OpenSource development is how will people be rewarded for their efforts. You see this as a community development project - how will the members of the community be rewarded. This is a question for Kyle I think!

Kyle: That’s a great question and since I got involved with communities and Open Source it has been a tough one to figure out. But I came to grips with when I found out that you could create this cool java script and that anyone could open new source and take what you did and that annoyed me. And I remember thinking many many years ago, how am I going to get anywhere if everything unique I make people can just take? But then I began to thinking I can do that to. I can look at their code and then we can move up the whole technology the whole effort together, we’ll move forward faster and that will benefit us all because we will be able to send twice the product to market that we could have if we all stayed in our own little cubicles. As far as the Manhattan project goes anything we develop there goes back to open source immediately and once it is embedded and tested it goes right back in cos OpenSim is open source and that is the ideology it was started with and we are not going to interrupt that at all.

Tish: Are you going to become involved with the interoperability efforts like the one launched by Linden Lab - The Architecture Working Group that is making efforts re: the interoperability of OpenSim and Second Life, in particular?

Kyle: It is projects like the LIveID integration that we are working on and many people are interested in OpenID. There may be a lot of third party type of log ins that handle authentication. So you may see that even Linden Lab uses multiple methods for people to authenticate into their grid. And I think that this new group that they have started [AWG] is just proof that they know that they must open up and embrace these other grids and get ahead of the game so that they can work with these other grids right away.

Zain: And as far as standards go i think we have a ways to go before we start getting down to the hard core standards path. First we have to establish that this medium is going to be viable to the market in general. And then start bringing it together much like we did with the web. The web took off and there was a governing body that evolved into the world wide web consortium and I think that eventually you will see that with this who knows maybe even W3C will take over aspects of standards for this medium.

Tish: A question for Zain - how do you describe the community development in OpenSim and how does this differ or follow on from other Microsoft involvement in OpenSource communities? Oh and how do you describe your roles what you do for Microsoft and how this relates to this community effort in OpenSim?

Zain: From my personal experience, I am relatively young in Microsoft I just celebrated my first year anniversary so I can’t talk about what happened several years ago, all I know is what happened over the year that I have been there. But without a doubt I think our approach is simple straight forward and elegant. And as a developer evangelist I am hired to interact with the community. My job description when i started this absolutely didn’t include anything about 3d worlds or anything of the kind. I became interested in 3d worlds and I think it speaks volumes for Microsoft that they said alright fine lets make it your job. And, that’s exactly what did they did and likewise with other folks it is on their commitment now. Our strategy is straight forward if you you can prove that your efforts in the community work then you are given carte blanche. If you can’t prove it then why be given the resources to waste.

Tish: So you actually have the title Metaverse Evangelist?

Zain: No I am still a Developer Evangelist but I am the guy for Virtual World Evangelism which is what we call it internally at Microsoft and I guess externally as well. It is known as Virtual World Evangelism.

Tish: So how many Virtual World Evangelists are there at Microsoft?

Zain: Ha good question! There is probably about four or five of us right now.

Tish: So have I missed asking you any important questions!

Zain: No I think you have hit the big points! If nothing else the one key point I would walk away with from this is the emphasis in my virtual worlds evangelism on the community. That’s really what we are about and that is why we are embracing folks like Adam [Frisby] and the realXtend guys because we want to come in and get more community involvement and get people excited about this. We are not interested in anything but really fostering a good environment for making this stuff happen.