Rivers Run Red has launched a mobile messaging service for its Immersive Workspaces(TM) application, allowing team members to post notes and messages from mobile devices. Called Mobile Ripple, it continues the effort to seamlessly join Web applications, virtual world environments, and now mobile technology.
Immersive Workspaces, which was launched in partnership with Linden Lab, is an application built to help facilitate team collaboration, meetings, collaboration, and data visualization. It has been built on the same platform as Second Life, but stands alone from the “public” Grid.
In my recent interview with Justin Bovington, CEO of Rivers Run Red, he noted that much of the initial interest in Immersive Workspaces has been because it helps to improve business productivity and reduces costs.
Mobile Ripple lifts off the deeper potential, however, of virtual world applications: namely creating an integrated tool set that spans distribution platforms (desktop computers, mobile devices) and creates visual data streams. In this case, messages posted by team members “out of world” are visually archived in world. Messages are simultaneously posted to the Web site, synching the virtual space with the kind of tools we’re already used to for team collaboration.
A lot of attention is paid to the development of clients for mobile phones (although how you’d meaningfully navigate an immersive 3D space on a small screen eludes me). Justin commented to me that Mobile Ripple takes another view:
“It’s not about running a virtual world client on your mobile phone. It’s about using your mobile phone as part of the mix; playing to the strengths of each device and objects around us to their own core strengths.
Integrated voice notes and eventually video are in the works for Mobile Ripple, said Justin.
- Mobile phone to SL text messages
- Mobile phone to SL realtime chat
- Mobile phone to SL photo and video
- SL visitorstatistics and -tracking via SQL to Mobile Phone and back
- Power Point via flickr to SL Prim
- RSS feeds to SL public displays
- Room heating control/Coffee maker/… to SL and back
…
… all these (and also much more complex) applications have been already realized in 2006 and before… most of them are available as free code… its funny to see that some “innovators” use these low-level apps still for promotion…
Miki: Agreed. I think the interesting challenge for content developers and innovators is to look at new ways to aggregate and package those innovations for different audiences. Some are innovations that end up “stuck” in academic work, others are posted to SLExchange (or whatever it’s called now), others maybe end up as a youTube video.
I suppose some people are better at innovation and creating technology than packaging and selling it. Personally, I envy the people who make the cool stuff because I sure can’t! (Well, aside from an occasional rezzed prim). But what I don’t envy is the frustration in finding the best ways to package, promote, and sell those innovations to the right people at the right time.
I’m not saying that they should, necessarily. Good ideas have a way of finding their home. But what strikes me about where the Grid is at right now is that there are few “forums” in which specific applications can be combined, or put in a basket say, through distribution channels that can reach folks with the ability to invest in their use and continued development.
I’m really trying not to be overly broad. But I think we’ll see the emergence of more “aggregators” like Rivers Run Red who take innovations, build new ones, and package them all up for enterprise or brand or educational use.
I’m not claiming that Mobile Ripple is some breakthrough on its own…I don’t know enough about it frankly and as you point out I’ve seen other other mobile>>>SL apps as well. (Although the only thing I can remember where it posts simultaneously to a Web site and an in world artefact are the twitter fountains). But what strikes me about it is that it points to a new wave of opportunity that may be emerging - new channels through which content creators can see their innovations added to “packages” of tools and content sold to different audiences.
[…] Doug Thompson at Dusan Writer’s Metaverse discusses Rivers Run Red’s Immersive Workspaces application and their latest addition of a mobile connection. Of interest is that it combines the virtual world (on a private grid using Second Life’s technology), web applications and mobile technology for collaboration and data visualization. […]
Doug, you raise a good point about packaging technologies, whether for one world or cross-world commerce. Clearly there’s a huge opportunity for some kind of 3D mashup framework that would allow you to construct a complex scripted offering from components that you have purchased or built. Something like a 3D version of Microsoft Popfly or Yahoo Pipes that allows you to script information flows between objects, invoke their methods, etc.
In order for this tool to be really useful in a combined Second Life / Opensim / realXtend context, the scripting engine should be outside of the platforms and include features that address the issues of cross-world commerce & communication.