A Californian, a Brit and a sheep walk into a bar.
Not just any bar - but the hottest bar in town. The kind of bar with limos lined up out front and models handing out free samples of Red Bull to the people waiting in line.
All three walk out some time later.
The Californian says: “That bar was cool. It’s just too bad it was so small. If the bar was bigger, and the people were more glamorous and global, it would make a mint.”
The Brit says: “Sure the bar was cool. But you don’t make money with cool people. You need the executives with expense accounts and corporate jets if you’re going to turn it into a real success.”
The sheep says: “That bar was dreadful. I hated waiting in line to get in. And once I DID get inside, I could barely move around. The lights were too dim and the space was so complicated I couldn’t even find the can.”
All three wander off, each with a different dream of how to apply the lessons they learned from visiting the bar. But the bar itself kept chugging along, night after night, each night with a crowd that was slightly more global, or slightly more crowded, or with decor that was slightly improved from the night before.
One night, someone asked Philip, the bar’s owner, why he thought the Californian, the Brit, and the sheep had reacted like they did, and gone off to hang out in new places.
“What did you expect,” he said, “There’s nothing in this place but mirrors. So you make of it what you are.”
The “Big Three” Give Themselves a Bailout
See….there’s still a sort of regret about what happened in virtual worlds a year or two ago. It’s that hype cycle thing. And three agencies were, perhaps, most closely associated with it: the Electric Sheep Company, Rivers Run Red, and Millions of Us.
Second Life was on the cover of Business Week - the famous Anshe cover. Coke had arrived. Scion was giving away cars or whatever it was doing. Reebok was selling customizable shoes. And of course CSI was gearing up for the great cross-media promotion with TV characters making the leap to Second Life, followed it was assumed by the consuming hordes who wanted nothing more than to get off the couch and actually solve puzzles or whatever it was they were supposed to do.
Now, Anshe ended up being attacked by flying, um, prims. And CSI ended up at a bunch of giant Cisco signs with red arrows. And the hype cycle took a nose dive while the “big three” metaverse agencies shuffled around and regrouped and looked for new things to build while preserving the integrity of their message that, yeah, virtual worlds are great, and we learned a lot, and we can do it better this time.
It’s not to say that everything fell of a cliff - these are smart people, after all. But where are you going to go after you’ve exhausted the low hanging fruit….you know, that ad agency money that people were swimming in back when there was ad money to be found, and every brand was looking to find the next hot thing, and no one wanted to be the guy who missed out on the next Facebook or youTube.
So they each took stock, and they each played to their own strengths, or to what they thought were the strengths of the virtual world industry, and what’s telling perhaps is that each has forked off in a slightly different direction, which either means that one is right, or just as possibly that they’re ALL right, in which case we’re really just at the cusp of where this is all going.
Enterprise Ready?
So the Brits over at Rivers Run Red decided that Second Life wasn’t so bad after all, it just needed to be nurtured a little over on some private sims, out of the prying eyes of the media, and the hype, and it could be all about enterprise and saving money.
Justin Bovington addresses the value proposition nicely in response to a recent article at Independent Minds (why does it seem that so many British publications have the word ‘independent’ in them anyways?). He argues that virtual worlds are “ready for business” because, amongst other reasons:
1) Companies are looking for new ways to connect their employees to a larger network. Virtual worlds can help facilitate this.
2) We’re in a new era of travel bans.
3) Virtual meetings are only part of the mix: they supplement other forms of communication to help address limits on travel.
“The advantage of Virtual Worlds,” he says, “Is the ability for Virtual Worlds to break the linear model of time. The persistent nature of the space, enables an always ‘on’ option for quick meetings, to larger set meetings connecting up to 20-30 people at anyone time (ROI is huge!)”
4) Virtual worlds help companies play catch-up to their networked employees. They are tools that get them ahead of the curve.
5) Virtual Worlds enable us to view and literally step into content. Data visualisation within these spaces will enable employees to perceive data as metaphors.
His comments, echoed on his recent appearance at Metanomics, are as clear a statement of the value proposition for the enterprise use of virtual worlds as I’ve read.
It’s the Client, Stupid
The sheep, of course, is Sibley. And the Sheep decided that usability was the key barrier to adoption of virtual worlds, and that the way to solve that was to shift gears and move into browser-based worlds. This is an idea echoed by Raph Koster, who believes that the end goal is wide-spread adoption, and that worlds don’t need to be separate, but rather embedded in the Web.
Now, I won’t get into Metaplace. I’ve been there, I’m not supposed to say anything about it, and I don’t understand much about technology, although I am under the impression that how Metaplace is built and the philosophy of the code is pretty stunning. And it’s not really browser-based at all - although browser-based environments will be the thing most people see.
The Sheep went the browser-based route but without the game mechanics. (Hey, Raph is a game God, you didn’t expect him not to think about game mechanics did you?)
As Sibley said about the Sheep’s Webflock service:
“Sure. It’s not specifically for games in the way Metaplace is, but it is a tool set on which you can create games, for sure. So it doesn’t, at this point, have game engines in it so you would have to do a few more of those, really, game mechanics and the software behind game mechanics yourself. But, in that way, it’s very flexible. So it’s a little bit at a lower level when it comes to a gaming tool set than Metaplace might be considered to be, but, at the same time, it does have perhaps even more of the features that would be in other types of Virtual Worlds built in. So it’s just a little bit different feature set out of the box, but I think on Metaplace versus what we’re doing, you could do similar things if you wanted to go far enough with those tools.”
And the goal? Millions of us. Um. Millions of users:
“So the goal of Electric Sheep Company has always been to try to build applications that many millions of people would use if they use Virtual Worlds. We felt like, as we were learning about Virtual Worlds, certainly doing things in Second Life and doing things in other Virtual Worlds, which we’ve always done, we felt like in addition to the great platforms that are already out here for different audiences, for different purposes, one of the things missing in getting mainstream users into Virtual Worlds was a really easy first step. One of the things we’ve always been challenged by is getting large numbers of whatever mainstream users mean, but somehow a large number of users into a great community like Second Life.
So we felt like, well, a first step might be doing a little more that’s like a Virtual World on an existing website. And that’s never going to be a rich with user generated content or with all the interactive experiences you can get in Second Life, for example, but it can really take people to getting used to being in a multi user environment with avatars, perhaps creating content and so forth.
So we decided to create Webflock, and it is entirely Flash based. If people have seen the 2D Flash Worlds like Club Penguin out there where they have the isometric viewpoint or something that might be considered 2 1/2D, maybe like Habbo Hotel or something, we’re trying to go a little bit further with what Flash can do and make things feel a little more 3D. And from a personal point of view, I’m hoping that’s a gateway towards getting larger numbers of people into really rich Virtual Worlds.”
Now, I have no idea how Webflock is doing. Maybe it’s a stunning success. What I do know is that it looks a lot like the dozens of other Web-based worlds out there. And that I can’t help wondering, as I do with a lot of these “mini spaces”: OK, so you can get people IN all right - but can you make them STAY.
Social Media and the Big Brands
Which leaves us with the Californian. But on this one, you’re just going to have to tune in yourself to find out where Millions of Us has headed since we met them last.
What I will say is that I’ve heard Reuben Steiger speak, and I follow his tweets, and I read his articles in Ad Age and the guy says some pretty smart things.
None of which will really answer the question: which of them is right, if any, or what if it turns out they ALL are?
Which remind me of a joke: an accounting professor, a Canadian and a bunch of Australians walk into a bar…..
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Reuben Steiger, CEO of Millions of Us, is actively defining the role of Social-Media Agencies for marketing and branding. From celebrity wrestling in Gaia to the highly successful Upper East Side for “Gossip Girl” in Second Life®, Millions of Us is acquainting traditional media audiences with virtual worlds. Its affiliate, Virtual Greats is responsible for a growing portfolio of copyrighted intellectual property for use in virtual worlds. Join host Robert Bloomfield, as Metanomics queries Reuben Steiger about the emerging principles around social-media campaigns.
Excellent analogy, and quite telling as to why people’s reactions to Second Life are so mixed.
It’s quite true that if any company — not just Linden Lab — expects to reach the mega-user audience that the 2D Web enjoys, they will have to make the virtual world experience considerably more intuitive than SL presently is.
However, I do think that Second Life is approaching the right balance of user-ability and content creator-friendliness that it needs to continue to succeed — IF Linden Lab can resolve its continued annoying issues with stability.
P2
Read it loved it
Immersive Workspaces will still not be a huge success. The reason being people do not have TIME to faff about with the pain that is Second Life. For an hour meeting, we use a conference line. Simple. If we do have to get more involved and see presentations, we use WebEx. Again Simple, quick and lost cost.
I fail to see the value of Immersive Workspaces it’s a gimmick at best and perhaps will gain some customer based. But the smart educators are already hooked into Sun Microsystem’s Wonderland project, the corporates into CISCO and the rest simply use 2D or verbal tools.
I think RRR has pushed their limits on this one, if they are still in business by 2010 I would be surprised.
I don’t think SL is dead by any means, but it offers limited opportunities at this point. SL may yet come into its own, but it is not anywhere near to fulfilling its early promise as a 3D Web.
Markets come and go, that is a fact of life, and businesses have to adapt or die. This one came and went pretty fast.
As I see it, SL-based opportunity can only support smaller consulting businesses and freelancers right now. I think the most exciting stuff in SL is the experimentation being done by folks in education, and it makes sense that SL is a great place for them to be.
There still is a lot of work in the consumer virtual worlds space, however. Certain businesses still see virtual worlds/MMOs as an important moneymaker or offering to their customers, especially in the kids demographic, but they typically want to create their own offering rather than build inside of someone else’s world.
ESC built WebFlock so that it could build custom worlds for those clients. It’s a flexible platform, right now with a Flash front-end but it can support any rendering engine (such as Unity). Yes, you can build lots of games and activities on top of it. One large kids virtual world built on top of WebFlock, Ridemakerz, should be emerging from closed beta later this spring.
So in terms of your question, “will people stay?” in WebFlock worlds — that totally depends on how one designs the particular world and the activities/games therein. WebFlock is just a flexible toolkit and server platform for ESC or third parties to build virtual worlds.
Jonathan,
Not too sure who you are, or what you do?
You’re missing the point though, virtual worlds have become part of the mix. WebEX, audio conferences and video all have their place and time, as do Virtual Worlds.
Immersive Workspaces is designed to address a lot of the issues arising from Virtual Worlds usability and adoption. We call this, breaking the snowball. We’ve developed a web based system, seamlessly integrating with 3d space. One of the biggest headaches was presenting media, an area traditionally taking around 45mins to set up a 15 min meeting, this now takes minutes. We’ve addressed all this and a lot more. Also, our solution is a fraction of the cost of competing VW technology. The ROI is incredible, one of our clients has told us they’ve already saved over a 1MillionUSD.
The smart educators are using Wonderland, are you sure? 80% of the UK Universities and Colleges have a presence in Second Life. Not to mention, the dizzy amount in Europe and the USA. We’re seeing almost daily Educators opening or expanding their presences in Second Life. As for the corporate world, we’re seeing multiple adoptions: Forterra, Wonderland, Second Life, Open Sim etc.
Also, it might be worthwhile thinking about virtual worlds for their persistent advantage, non- linear interaction. We’re seeing great gains with clients achieving real advantages in distant learning, knowledge transfer and collaboration. As we’ve seen VW’s add that something extra to collaboration.
Also, have a look at the recent Gartner predictions, they’ve cited VW as a major consideration. They even mention our product as one of the main products to look at.
If you get a chance Jonathan, why don’t you come and see a demo. I would love to show it to you personally?
As for our ‘business’ we’ve been here since 2003, I can assure you we will be around a lot longer to come.
Justin Bovington
CEO
RRR
Great article, Dusan. One question - why does every paragraph uttered by ESC in the above start with “so”? Anytime someone starts off a thought with “So,” I know it means they don’t have a clear thought to communicate. They’re thinking it up as they go.
Interesting analysis. I think with a lot of new technologies you get a lot of firms testing the waters there and deciding that it wasn’t market-ready and moving on. VWs and SL are no different.
The key issues of scaleability and “first hour” user interface issues are ones that Linden Lab has frontloaded as priorities for action in the near term. They’ve got a lot of smart people there, so I wouldn’t count them out by any means.
But there is definitely room for new entrants that can seize the space by combining the most attractive attributes of VWs, social media, social networking, and online games.
From what I understand about MetaPlace, they are positioning themselves well. Other solutions like Qwak Forums seem to be contenders in the work collabotion 3d suites. And webinar solutions are still way too expensive for most middle to small firms to use on a regular basis. So there are definitely still opportunities there for a nimble tech company to enter and thrive.
@ Gif - I think you made my point for me. My feeling isn’t that browser-based virtual worlds don’t work, it’s that the value proposition needs to be delivered to each audience. It’s interesting that you use the kid’s worlds as an example, I suppose: sure, some have worked, but far more have failed. It takes the right mix of entertainment, social chat, games, etc. possibly mixed in with a recognizable brand if you’re going to ‘cut through’. But I suppose the bigger argument FOR Webflock, and Metaplace, and Vivaty and everyone is that you can ‘take it with you’ - the ability to embed virtual worlds across the Web is a compelling way to argue that you can attract users from where they already are - L-Word being an example, maybe.
Add Quest 3D and Unity 3D to the mix (now cross-platform woot!) and you have a decent range of scripting abilities, games, and mash-ups.
You’re right about Second Life - I suppose it’s why I said “chugging along” - it’s not ready for the millions that ESC is after. However, if it can continue to allow users to create their OWN value then the attraction of SL isn’t that it’s a mass media platform, it’s that it has a “work force” that’s in the 10s of thousands, with 100s of schools (as Justin points out), independent content creators, technologists and others.
Jonathan really is missing the point. But then, someone who posts anonymously usually is. (Gif, I’ll exempt you, there’s only one Gif after all). But what was telling about his comment was the phrase ‘2D and verbal tools’. This belies either an ignorance of where 3D tools can take you, or a lack of recognition of the different communication and learning styles. Besides which, anyone who’d propose that one form of interaction is a replacement for all others probably believes that books are dead or, conversely, that the Web will never achieve the power of the printed word. Two complementary media, each part of the mix, each with its strengths.
I suppose it’s no secret whether I’m an optimist or a pessimist about virtual worlds. My bet is they all win: Web-based worlds, virtual worlds, enterprise uses and branded entertainments. I also bet that the breakthroughs to come are in mixed/augmented reality and mirror worlds, in particular cross-media controllers and appliances and sensors that talk to virtual platforms; and geo-specific virtual worlds that allow location-specific tagging and data visualization.
Sure, no one thing will last forever. Eventually ‘creative destruction’ lets us all start all over again, picking up from past successes and failures and forging on anew. But that’s OK. I lost interest in the limits of my Commodore 64 a few years ago.
@Rik - Excellent points. We see progress in SL. And OpenSim for that matter, or variants of it. But Qwak? I have a license to Qwak. The support is terrible. The ‘richness’ of the spaces is lacking. But what it DOES have is the ability to share and co-edit documents and desktop items.
The real break throughs this year for SL will I believe be HTML on a prim and HTTP-In (and maybe mesh imports - but if they mishandle that they could just as easily sink themselves). With those in hand, you could see all kinds of cross-platform applications and mash-ups, and you could hack together what Qwak does, only with far better looking avatars.
You’ve hit this problem (or some aspect of it) right on the head. It’s what I always call a ‘Rashoman’ experience. Even when we view the same “reality” we are strongly influenced by our assumptions, pre-conceptions, and expectations. That applies to every new experience, not just virtual worlds.
One of the things I find most compelling about SL is, in fact, the opportunity to meet avatars from all over the world who brin all those different viewpoints and worldviews to the table.
From an education POV, what I see is rapidly increasing interest and awareness. The majority of educators missed the 2006 hype period entirely and are just now hearing about SL and the really interesting applications.
Time will tell. I for one am still really excited about the possibilities of such a rich environment for higher ed applications in particular.
Which is correct?
What if they all were just like Protozoa, Construct, and Curve?
SGI once ran a bar too.
I’m glad to hear that Justin and RRR are doing well. I think that there are some excellent use cases for enterprise virtual worlds. The one I am *personally* most bullish on is ops management, with the virtual presentation of telemetry data.
Dusan, I thought you stated this quite well “However, if it can continue to allow users to create their OWN value then the attraction of SL isn’t that it’s a mass media platform, it’s that it has a “work force” that’s in the 10s of thousands”
I agree with you. It’s funny how many people I run into out there that think SL is dead, but I try to tell them otherwise.
An interesting trend we see is kids brands wanting to shift their websites to a 3D or 3D-like interface. They are not necessarily creating a full MMO. Time will tell to see how this really plays out. While you said that most virtual worlds fail, these are websites which already have high traffic built around a real world brand, and where kids are already spending a fair amount of time playing flash games. I do not think that these websites will take over the world and become monsters of market share, but I believe that it is much easier to monetize a virtual world-like website than a normal one via virtual goods.
OK, all I have time to dash off, but interesting conversation.
So the big story is the “metaverse” goes from “Snowcrash” to “Flash sites using Swift3D”.
Which is from what the older websites have said, was the end of the first web3d hype in the early 2000s.
It just goes to show that “tools” sold to developers to use any way they want commercially ALWAYS trumps “single company owned service media platforms” for any real commercial industries growth.
I dont remember any of these “big 3″ running there businesses/or client projects this way.
Bailouts from the government were meant to help “industries” not “companies”.
Best to let these 3 join the ranks of being just another freelance flash/web house.
Join the rest of us flash artists and action script dudes since 1999.
cdz
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It’s interesting that we are all dissecting the history of what has happened in Second Life, but generally neglecting to discuss activity before the 2006 / 07 .
To me, Second Life is simply a virtual place, which has been steadily growing for 5 or 6 years. The various ways people have tried to make it work for them ( residents and companies ) are all good, some are more successful than others, some promise more and are higher profile. I’m not sure I think about it being the 3d internet at all, and to be honest I don’t think that has ever really been its intent. I think its something else, which we don’t understand yet, but is evolving at its own pace, slowly and steadily, and of course its really just an very good extension of numerous other virtual world projects going back to the 70s.
At the moment I have to say that it seems far more logical, that the mainstream adoption of a concept like the metaverse or a globally pervasive location based web overlay, is far more likely to come though augmented reality / mobile applications. I say this because that approach requires no process of avatarisation - you don’t immerse to go to the data or the people, the data or the people come to you. I think successful and lasting avatarisation requires a certain type of self analytical ability or expression, which may be limited to an early adopter, or early adopter+ demographic.
However as Justin says, a mixture of fully immersive places, 2 dimensional web and location based augmented reality applications seems to be a perfectly logical way forward on all fronts.
I think its a shame to think of the 06/07 period as a regret. That was a period of people trying to do something very hard - make a virtual place pay for itself in real world terms. Those projects deserve respect for trying this and indeed finding out many things that dont work, as well as many that do.
Applying the Gartner hype cycle to just the adoption of Second Life is an incorrect reflection on the larger development of virtual worlds. When considered along that 30 year time-frame, the peak of inflated expectations and trough of disillusionment are just a little blip, similar to many before.
The future of the internet / enterprise / education etc etc may well go its own way, and VWs will probably play a part in all that. Frankly though, I’m more interested in the unique and new things which these new media afford, not trying to shoehorn them into extending or slightly augmenting old models.
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