John Roese recently blogged about his experience in a “global employee session within a virtual mixed-reality world.”
Roese explains how hundreds of people particpiated virtually and by watching the session in auditoriums and meeting rooms by watching the proceedings through an avatar on a large screens:
“The experience was fantastic,” Roese writes. “I was able to present, dialogue with employees, and answer questions within the virtual world but also in a way that all of the employees using other more traditional mediums – audio and voice conferencing and sitting in auditoriums – could also be a part of.
“Nortel is developing a prototype platform they intend to use going forward for these types of meetings, which is interesting, because it means leaving SL behind:
“What was different about this, versus doing a large company meeting in an environment like Second Life,” he writes, “is that a host of different technologies could be part of an integrated experience within Nortel’s own enterprise application architecture. Everything was linked to our telecom infrastructure, corporate security and identity management systems. In other virtual reality experiences, like Second Life or multi-player on-line gaming systems, you need to go into their footprint and are limited by their capabilities” (Like a per sim user limit maybe?)
Roese then goes on in his much-commented-on post about strategic direction in Nortel’s future:
“Although today’s broadband networks are giving us the ability to put communications wherever we want to, if we simply put legacy communications paradigms into these mobile and extended environments, we won’t really solve the problems. What we need to do is to create something that allows an experience that is at least equivalent to – if not superior to – a real world experience anywhere the broadband network exists. So, step 1 is to build a broadband network. Step 2 is to improve the experience by including all of those attributes that make the human-to-human experience exciting and effective.”
“That’s why much of our research and next-generation investment is focused on this area – identifying what makes the real-world experience special and effective and then replicating those capabilities through technology.”
A Game To End All Games
Simulation games have always appealed to me, but I dream of seeing them go so much further in the ultimate gaming mash up someday. Imagine a platform similar to Second Life, or The Sims. The foundation of it is controlling your avatar/character, inhabi…
I think it is interesting that Nortel took a look at SL. I think their angle is more how to create a pull for their own technology and services than to make use of virtual worlds for their corporate machinations, but I could be misreading.
I don’t think that the kind of event he describes – a virtual auditorium filled with people in a lecture mode for presentation – is a great strength of SL. The talks (that were probably similar to the Nortel event) I went to last weekend in SL were not a great experience, other than the ability to ask questions (via chat). Thus, there was interactivity and immediacy as a plus, but lag/slow-rez as a minus. (for instance, none of the slides were visible until half way through because of slow-rezzing).
I do teleconferences, video teleconferences, webcasts, ‘live meeting’, and so forth constantly. I also have to travel for meetings, and regret the time, cost, and carbonfoot print of jetting to meetings. We could really use better ways to meet that don’t require travel, but I can’t say that being an avatar at a meeting will help. I was hopeful to gain insight as to how this may have been attempted in this Nortel experiment, but am not seeing it yet. Still looking…
* Pais now begins to meditate using the mantra: “use the right tool for the task” *
Interesting here in New York Pais that a few of the big “sell points” of some of the technologies is the interface with other communication channels. Looked at one platform where you are in a virtual space and can make a phone call – a little cell phone pops open, you dial the number, and it connects you from within the world by phone. Similarly, you can TAKE a call from within the world.
The other issue is that until SL includes proper document sharing and porting in of external content, like PowerPoint pages etc. a proper collaborative space is tricky. Rivers Run Red has done a little app that uses a Web work-around and HTML on a prim I believe, which also gets us a little closer.
I talked to Glen at the SL booth about HTML on a prim and this very issue of bringing in content, and while he made some nice murmurs about it, I’m under the impression that its proven to be a tougher nut to crack than they may have initially thought (and hey, there’s been a project kicking around for years now, check the JIRA or is it the WIKI). Security holes and the challenge, as Glen said, of landing in a sim and having 200 prims floating around with Web pages is a danger. He made the interesting point however that what they’re looking at is having TEXTURES load the pages.
The combination of seamless voice properly integrated with phones, a light client, and the ability to pull documents, PPT, whatever into the space starts to make it feel like what companies want – a 3D version of a Web meeting.
I’m sort of fascinated, as you know, with the “stuff” beyond that, which is acclimatizing companies to start thinking about projects, collaboration, ideas and concepts in 3D itself rather than just thinking of 3D worlds as a stand-in and slightly clunkier version than a meat space session, whether we’re saving the planet or not (and even on this topic, there’s debate of course).
So, in the short term – some improved technologies, especially integrating with voice and phone, other platforms that may do virtual meetings a lot better than SL, with SL sort of limping along patching some stuff on top, but holding on, in my opinion, to its deeper potential as a creative, conceptual space that won’t just change how we have meetings, but how we think about what we usually talk about or learn at those meetings.
It all points to OpenCroquet. This is a open source virtual world api and engine, which can run incorporate external content, and operate point-to-point or client-server. I don’t understand why it is not catching on faster than it seems to be. http://opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page
Croquet rocks. There’s so much heart and effort going into it, the tutorials being put up are wonderful, it’s a really shining community of developers. And the architecture is genius. Unfortunately, and I think it’s recognized by the developers themselves, its coming across as by academics for academics, other than the work of Qwak which does the stuff you say but doesn’t have avatar expression. It DOES have integration of external elements…HTML, documents, PPT, video, worlds within worlds, etc. But somehow the resistance point by the developers to figure out whether/how/if it should be montetized at all might be hampering buy-in by the larger corporations (for now, anyways).
If Qwak was joined by another, sort of a Red Hat Linux kind of thing and if the development community could come up with a plan to attract more talent, I think Croquet has legs…it’s brilliant. Especially for things like 3D visualization, and more advanced applications, and now with Blender being patched in there’s some very cool stuff happening. (Can someone explain how Cobalt fits in though? And I mean that as a total newbie question).
Plus, Croquet is scaleable, and the P2P thing is genius.
Great platform. And advocacy towards academia, which is fine, because companies will catch on sooner or later. Rumour is that Cisco might buy out Qwak, maybe that will give it the boost it needs.