http://www.forbes.com/sciencesandmedicine/2008/11/06/virtual-world-sensors-tech-science-cx_ag_1107virtual.html

While I share your concerns about the ‘firewalled/invisible’ initiatives, I also see it as a source of parallel innovation and a sign that the platform has matured enough that it has moved beyond prototypes and is now entering the investment mix of business. Sure, these are early adopters, but they’re early adopters within the operational domain rather than the brand and mass user adoption segment, which, in any case, is rotating off into games, Web 2.0, and the various “mashes” of the same – call it anything but a virtual world even if that’s what many of those things are, they just LOOK a bit different.

I was incredibly impressed with the IBM OpenSim/Lotus Sametime work. When I saw it at VW LA (or was it NYC? Can’t remember) my jaw dropped to the floor. It was the kind of integration with current systems that I was waiting to see – because virtual worlds will NOT survive if it can’t be demonstrated that they’re not some “separate and distinct” part of the communication, productivity and collaboration infrastructure.

So, let’s say the following: when a technology matures, companies and service providers will come along, take the most stable pieces, and start to package that for business use with solid return on investment models, with many of the glitches and kinks worked out.

As this happens, actual use cases in these environments will, I would hope, continue to develop. I think it’s too early, frankly, to say that VWs are ready for “fitting into existing work patterns”. This implies a day-to-day integration that I don’t think yet exists, and I’m not sure I’ve seen a compelling argument for why it SHOULD exist, except in the domains of product prototyping.

What’s missing in order to make this part of existing work patterns is the innovation that you’ve been paying attention to: integration with Web 2.0, maybe, or the “living spaces” idea that Justin talks about.

Now, just as IBM is testing Sametime implementation and will eventually take some of that, and the lessons learned, behind their own “firewall” in order to maintain some proprietary knowledge and insight, so Justin is doing with IW. What I fear is that all of the branches of these trees extend, that people forget to come back and feed the roots, so to speak: to share best practices, publish their findings, share metrics, etc….otherwise we might be faced with a thousand islands, each of them like the Lindens hoarding data and not contributing useful insight back to the community. (That might be unfair to the Lindens, it’s just how I feel right now).

So I’d like to say that we’re on several paths of parallel innovation. One of them is behind a firewall, because that’s where one client segment WANTS to be: they don’t want high profile exposure or promotion because they don’t want to face the same risks that the brands experienced when they arrived in and then left SL. What might have been experiments were instead perceived as failures, and who wants that to happen again? Instead, give them a place to toy around, get them behind a firewall, but for goodness sake if the stuff works PLEASE share back with the wider VW community (and I’ll trust that Justin is sufficiently motivated to do so – would be great press after all!)

As for the avatar discussion – I think that one deserves a post of its own, and I chatted with Raph Koster about that tangentially over on the beautiful Metaplace (hope I can say that without breaking another NDA!)

What I heard again and again from many key business leaders and serial entrepreneurs at Web2Summit is that the key issue is not the technology in terms of business adoption but how you put it to use in a context and a usage pattern.

I think that we are at last seeing Virtual Worlds fit for business technology wise. But the challenge now will be all about integrating VWs into a work context and usage. It may be necessary to find a good evangelist in other departments to “trump” notoriously conservative IT departments to get a foot in the door. But getting a foot in the door is only a first step, something I know you, Justin and many people who work with VWs in a business context are well aware of.

Lets not make the same mistake, as we evangelize behind the firewall VW solutions, that was made when brands were brought into Second Life. Again I know you and Justin as veterans of SL are savvy to all the nuances of this history.

But the general perception was that brands that hoped to engage with Second Life came in and got disappointed partly because they found themselves in an environment they didn’t understand and weren’t ready or equipped to work with. This resulted in a lot of disillusionment and bad publicity for virtual worlds. We are still suffering from the backlash.

The IBM approach to integrating OpenSim into Lotus Sametime is an important step in the direction of fitting VWs into existing work patterns. But I would like to see a great article from someone exploring what other pathways are proving fruitful in the business environment. To be truly seen as a useful technology, virtual worlds must be fully integrated into people’s work patterns. It is not enough to just say look how good this technology has gotten now! We must focus on how people are actually using it effectively.

On avatars! I had a wonderful interview with a key Wikipedia administrator and editor in San Francisco. We talked at length about the similarities between Second Life and Wikipedia – in particular the challenges of collaboration in communities based on user generated content. We talked a lot about the role avatars play in Wikipedia. Presence in Wikipedia is not of course developed in quite the same way as Second Life but is very important there too. Interview coming up soon!!! I have so much writing to do.

There’s an intriguing meme that seems to be doing the rounds these days (and maybe you started it!).

It’s the one that says that business types find avatars too ‘goofy’ for real world applications. This has hit me in back channels, was discussed at Metanomics yesterday, much of it related to my recent interview with Justin Bovington on the Rivers Run Red Immersive Workspaces application: an application that, in my opinion, is about as “business ready” as you can get:

- It’s a clean, clutter free ‘build’. Business will get comfort I think in the construction of the virtual environment – it looks good, and it doesn’t have any of the associated ‘dwarves and swords’ imagery that people seem to fear of virtual worlds
- It is ‘private’ in both being white labeled (built on the SL platform but without the branding), behind a firewall, and can be deployed with different levels of “firewall” (it SEEMS like it can be completely detached from the Second Life grid but Linden Lab is a bit foggy on the whole thing as you can see in the comments)
- It has a return on investment model.

What’s interesting is that Justin says that uptake of the application is seldom through IT. We’ve found this ourselves: we can get champions amongst clients, but their IT departments start to kick and scream. But if you have a champion at the right ‘level’, they can trump the IT guys.

I think that the issue of avatars is a red herring. It’s not to say that 3D spaces won’t evolve without avatars, but that’s not because avatars are counter-intuitive, just that there are some things where avatars won’t be necessary.

Justin talks about data visualization and “living spaces” – virtual environments that are organic, real-time data representations. But even data environments can be accessed by more than one person.

But I’m sorry: the use of avatars are short-hand for presence, in some ways. There seems to be this confusion over avatars as identity, and avatars as presence. If we have a 3D data visualization and we want to collaborate on that visualization, we need a short hand, or visual marker, for the presence of others in that information space. Avatars represent one way to achieve that presence.

When we first used Qwak, the avatars were little flat cutout figures on which you could put a picture of yourself. Later, they released mesh-based avatars, and I’m assuming they did this because they discovered that the sense of presence was jarring when your representation in the information space was a stick figure: it’s not that it was wrong, but it was jarring.

What frustrates me is this view, by technologists in particular, that somehow the business world is over-run with people who are embarassed by the idea of having an avatar – that it’s somehow too fun, or frilly, or jarring for them. Since when did we return to the 1950s here? I thought that the technologists were aware that the world has changed, we’re all crowd sourcing and Twittering and joining office Nings or Facebook groups. Why are all of these things LESS frilly and pointless than having an avatar?

The issues with virtual worlds aren’t related to what visual metaphor you use for presence – your avatar, but rather adoption curves: do you have the technology install to even run them? What’s the training and adoption plan? What specific ROI model are you hoping to achieve? Do you see it as a productivity or an innovation space? How deeply integrated should the application be with legacy and other systems? Should you be able to Twitter from within a virtual space? How geographically dispersed is your user base?

Tim may love Twitter – but I can tell you, last time I used the word with a client all I got was a blank stare and a giggle. I mean “Twitter”? Does that SOUND like a serious application?

But give the business folks credit, and give Justin some credit too – the learning curves are shrinking, there are serious applications out there, and while I’m not proclaiming that virtual worlds are a killer app and that corporations will shut down their conference rooms and convert them to storage lockers, virtual spaces are clearly a useful addition to the productivity suite, will become a useful addition for innovation development and employee morale, and as data visualization becomes richer we’ll see a mix of 3D immersive applications that both include and exclude avatars.

Forests and trees: don’t miss out on the fact that this stuff is ready for business just because you’re one of those wired-in information junkies who toggles between Twitter and Plurk and Facebook or whatever, (and I say that with all the self-recognition I can muster). A lot of people out there don’t find the concept of avatars as jarring as you think: it’s what the interface (avatar) is there to DO that’s important.

By the way, having said all that, I still think that Photosynth is one of the more profound views of the future, but frankly I wish I could fly through it with some others from the office.

The Justin interview is here:

http://dusanwriter.com/index.php/2008/11/08/are-virtual-worlds-ready-for-business-justin-bovington-immersive-workspaces/

Concretly Noisetube.net (www.noisetube.net) is a research project aimed at monitor the noise pollution from the daily sound exposure of citizens using their mobile phones. It’s an open platform to collect decibels data(db(A)) + semantic layer (tag) using an application for mobile phone.

Free iphone and java enabled applications for mobile phones will be distributed for people who subscribe in the website.

At the collective and personal level you will be able visualize the sonic pollution on a map and access to the data by an API. but also, if you accept, this information will be accessible to any scientists and city planner to better understand the noise pollution issue.

The web site and API will be opened in few weeks. In subscribing to the experimentation you will receive a free mobile application to measure your own exposure to the noise pollution , visualize it on a map and participate to a scientific programm with data accessible to the scientific community.

http://www.noisetube.net

Nicolas Maisonneuve
Associate Researcher
SONY Computer Science Lab

great post. You asked me for comments on avatar vs non-avatar, and unfortunately, I must say it’s in my mind by and large a moot issue; even with OpenSim-based worlds, we have from the start explored anonymous avatars and avatar-less scenarios; one of the first things I did with OpenSim, was to make the viewer into not displaying an avatar at all – because the application I was doing (a simple board game) didn’t need a contextual agent marker.

Because that’s what I would say the avatar is; a contextual agent marker, aggregating application-specific properties. Some applications will use this, others not.

It’s like the ‘cursor’ and ‘mouse pointer’ concepts of 2D, you need to know your current context, and you need to have feedback from interactions with the environment. But some 2D applications use neither.

So, as Tim claims Web 2.0 is misunderstood I think the 3D Web is misunderstood – in exactly the same way; you bring up the specific solution, make it the generic case and dismiss it.