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September 27, 2007
Virtual Worlds 2007 Conference- San Jose
For those of you who will be on the left coast, we strongly encourage you to attend the Virtual Worlds 2007 Conference and Expo on October 10-11 at the San Jose convention center. We have the honor of presenting alongside some very smart people in industry like Jeff @ Amazon, Cory at Multiverse, Ron @ Proton Media, Edward Castronova, Ian Hughes @ IBM, Christian and Reuben from Millions of Us, Tony O'Driscoll, Jerry Paffendorf, Paul and Matthew @ Intel and the unstoppable Ren Reynolds. The last VW Conference in New York in March was an excellent event that was standing-room-only.
We'll be kicking off the second day of the conference with a keynote presentation on getting serious with virtual worlds as a collaboration technology for businesses. We also will be hosting the attendee lounge, so please stop by and say hello, lounge, and enjoy the free drinks!
Posted by Christian Renaud at 11:31 AM Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
September 25, 2007
It’s about the user experience!
I will start with a quick introduction of myself, as I’ve not yet posted to the blog until now. I am Randy Sisk, another one of those Technolgy Center folks working in networked virtual environments. Most of my efforts are centered on Cisco’s use of Second Life as a platform and environment for engaging with our customers, partners and other interested parties. As a result of this, a good deal of my time is spent in Second Life and facilitating Cisco groups and employees in accessing and utilizing SL. Having looked at and used several virtual worlds, I’ve noticed that acceptance and adoption are in part a function of how easy it is to get the tool running and then to be able to utilize basic features.
Now, by training I am very technical, however I am also somewhat “right brained”, so rich graphical interfaces are very appealing to me. In the case of virtual worlds, the wider the flexibility (good 3D graphics, physics simulation, external interfaces), the more challenging the learning curve is for new users, and the more complicated the user interface is. Human nature is to select tools that provide a good deal of utility while minimizing the “investment cost” of learning to use the tool. This is especially so in an enterprise environment where there is a high opportunity cost for an employee’s time. Where I’m going with this is that users will tend to adopt a tool with an easy to learn and use interface, but those tools that do so and provide a rich interface (graphical and integration with other applications and media types) will be differentiated in the marketplace. One of the technologies (is UI design a technology?) that will help move this market forward will be the design and integration of technologies and tools that make virtual worlds easy to use. I will be digging a bit deeper on this topic in future posts, so stay tuned!
Posted by Randy Sisk at 06:39 AM Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
September 24, 2007
Getting through customs without removing my shoes?
After adding some new stamps to my passport last week, I was reminded of a blog entry I wrote several months back about the frustration of not being able to move between worlds without the equivalent of a strip search, or a complete disrobing. We give up our names, our possessions, our reputation....you name it.
But today I was pleasantly surprised to see this article on the rumors of Google's Social Graph API . Now I'm sure people will say that this has the possibilities of Google knowing more about your life than it already does, but I see it as having other possibilities.
The opportunity is that access to the social graph will become freely available, so companies could focus more on "user experience" and uniqueness of the application. It's a little bit like start-ups using Amazon's Web Services to run the back end of their company while staying focused almost entirely on the business-model, application and experience.
If nothing else, it will make alot of currently silo'd "communities" (MySpace, Second Life, etc.) think about how interconnected we've become and the business opportunities or threats associated with it. These companies will have to do some serious thinking about how they will evolve or survive
I'm not sure virtual worlds have reached those interoperability and interconnected tipping points yet, but they would be well served to begin thinking about these types of possibilities.
Posted by Brian Gracely at 12:52 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Walking the Talk
When industry and press pontificate about the future of work, they seem to have a similar utopian vision with some common attributes:
1) A 'Virtual' workforce scattered all over the world, with job responsibilities and skills that are not based on geographic location
2) Rich collaboration tools to facilitate sharing of information and joint work
3) 'Hollywood' style of work, based on 'free-agents' coming together for a project and then moving on to the next project.
As the science fiction author William Gibson once said "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed."
Take a look at the picture above, which I grabbed this morning during one of the weekly team meetings we regularly have using Second Life. Each person on the team has a different functional role, and each one is coming from a different geographic location (I would have liked to have said 'different time zone', but two are in Central European Time, and two are in Central US Time.)
Since we are all in the incubator group at Cisco, we are accustomed to coming together for a project, working together, then moving on to the next technology scouting opportunity. Not exactly Hollywood, but we all have the same agent. ;-)
To tie this back to the three attributes of the future of work above (with all apologies to, and no reference to, Tom Malone's great book of the same name), we score about 2.5 out of 3, allowing for the fact that you do not have a rich WebEx-type of collaboration opportunity using Second Life, but you benefit from the magic of physical proximity and the serendipitous aspects of virtual worlds.
Personally, I'd like to find an intuitive way to combine the benefits of rich collaboration (app share, screen share, etc.) with the approximation of physical presence that you gain from immersive environments, without burdening the collaboration with a bunch of moving your avatar around to gain the proper perspective on the screen.
Any good ideas? Has anyone seen a good implementation of shared collaborative workspaces + 3D avatar presence that wasn't a nightmare to use?
Posted by Christian Renaud at 10:29 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
September 14, 2007
Serious Virtual Worlds
Yesterday, I had the honor to keynote the Serious Virtual Worlds conference in Coventry. The conference is entirely focused on serious business applications for virtual worlds and there were an excellent number of presentations throughout with some very innovative applications and platforms.
Here is a link to the slides I presented, and I'll post the links to the video of the session when they post it in the next few days.
Posted by Christian Renaud at 07:13 AM Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)
Virtual Environments and their effect on the Network
On September 6th, we held our first Networkers TechTalk in Second Life, Virtual Environments and their effect on the Network. It was well attended and there were some very good questions from the participants.
Some of the attendees reported problems with their audio streams during the event, so here is the mp3 archive of the event, as well as this pdf of the slides. As you will hear during the preamble to the presentation, this is all a 'work in progress', and we have plans to drill deeper into the virtual worlds listed as well as explore the network impact of other implementations. If you happen to run into Dannette CiscoSystems avatar in Second Life, you may want to thank her for painstakingly editing out all the 'ums' and 'ahs' from this MP3.
The executive summary of the entire talk is that the traffic of virtual environments is sporadic based on the architecture of the world (cache-intensive vs. minimal updates to a static world), and bandwidth is generally limited to around 500kbps with a few exceptions. The key learning is that the 'network hygiene' of most of these worlds, when it comes to security, is still 'sub-optimal' (borderline miserable). Cisco suggests that customers keep virtual world traffic on a separate guest wireless network until more secure and consistent implementations emerge.
We'll be elaborating on this recommendation in future blogposts, as well as developing a best-practices design guide as soon as our travel schedules subside a bit.
Posted by Christian Renaud at 04:12 AM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
Announcing the Cisco Industry Solutions Partner Network
For those of you who did not see the announcement, Cisco has announced a new tool for our channel partners and application service providers to interact, the Industry Solutions Partner Network (ISPN). This is a 3D immersive environment for our channel partners to discover the wide array of solutions available from our ASP partners.
To quickly dispel any confusion, this is not a user-created-content, avatar-customized, free-roaming experience as experienced on the Cisco Virtual Campus in Second Life, but a 24/7 3D tradeshow with easy navigation targeted specifically at our Channel partners. As you know (if you are reading this blog), there are a number of different species of virtual worlds, ranging from pre-scripted web-based flash worlds, walled and open 'free-roaming' worlds, and hybrids. Each species has it's own best uses, as there is no 'one-sized-fits-all' solution.
We'll be releasing more details in the near future, however here is a sample screenshot of the environment because a picture is worth a thousand blog-words. ;-)
Posted by Christian Renaud at 02:07 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)
September 11, 2007
What defines virtual?
A question that we often hear is 'why would anyone want to interact in a virtual world versus the real one?' I used to go through a lengthy explanation about virtual worlds being one of many collaboration tools and suited for some use cases better than other tools. Then one day I just ran out of gas.
Now I just ask them 'how do you define virtual?' Is having an avatar-to-avatar conversation virtual, but an IM session is not? How about videoconferencing? Do you watch television?
This may be one of the reasons why 'virtual worlds', as an industry term, can be a misnomer. It implies a 'where', when what they actually achieve is more of a 'how'.
Before everyone jumps me and says 'Such and such a virtual community is a unique world', I completely agree....but it's the setting for human-to-human interactions that makes it valuable, not a replica of the Eiffel tower or ancient Rome (although, admittedly, those things are pretty cool). It is a HOW we are going to meet (avatar to avatar, serendipitously or pre-arranged, with or without voice and video), and not so much of a where. You don't generally say 'Meet me at the H.323 MCU' or 'Meet me at the WebEx', because those are not destinations in and of themselves. One of the reasons prior virtual world attempts failed was because there were not enough people there......it's the people that create the value.
The ability for common, shared, synchronous spaces that are independent of physical geography is certainly not new, but it is more accessible as a 3D room or club than it was as a discussion forum or chatroom. The shared experience of networked virtual environments, where you can have a technical discussion in an amphitheater with thirty of your closest friends (as we did last week), is unparalleled.
Having said that, when you begin to go down the rabbit-hole using the term 'virtual worlds', it takes you to some oubliettes like virtual economies, which (in my opinion) are an unnecessary affectation. Hey, Skype allows me to video-conference my children tonight from Amsterdam, however they don't use their own 'Skype-bucks'. They just denominate in your currency of choice.
This is also true because geographies come with a fair bit of baggage, like laws and governance, that collaboration services don't have to worry about. When you have baggage like governmental oversight of the virtual economy or trials over virtual property rights, you start to scare off the big game, which is widespread adoption by consumers and businesses alike. We're not even scratching the surface of reasonable adoption yet, and the prior attempts at virtual worlds have failed for lesser reasons than these.
On September 13th, Coventry University will be launching it's Serious Games Institute, and we're going to be discussing Serious Applications of Virtual Worlds. It is a pretty easy conversation actually, as you look around at how much business communication is already electronically mediated, or heading that way, to realize that the virtual and real have been one and the same for a while now.
Speaking of 'heading that way', one interesting link to drill down on is the work being done by the AMI consortium (of which Cisco is a Community of Interest member). They are composed of a number of research organizations around the world who are focused on augmenting multiparty interactions (thus the acronym) like live meetings. If you can capture live meetings and mine them for metadata and content, didn't you just essentially 'rip' the meeting? There are researchers looking at dominant talkers, attention focus, real-time transcription (and possibly even translation), automatic video editing of the proceedings, and then serving all that up via a web-services interface (mix). All you need to do then is replay the meetings that are appropriate to your task-at-hand (burn).
This is just another piece of the great digitization era that we live in.
Posted by Christian Renaud at 01:33 PM Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
September 05, 2007
Sustainable Futures and Virtual Consumption
At the World Future Society meeting in Toronto in 2006, Peter Hesseldahl, the excellent technology writer, made an offhand remark to me that I am reminded of almost daily. He quipped that, for most people, 'the amount of resources you consume is an indicator of your social status'. Exempli gratia..a private jet trip to Paris for dinner equals a high status (and buckets of emissions).
At the same time, individuals and corporations are increasingly focused on more sustainable futures for the planet. Clever programs like the University of Hawaii's Futures Project seek to engage students to compete for which dormitory can be most energy efficient, hybrid-auto owners are fine-tuning their driving style to squeeze extra fuel efficiency and mileage, and collaboration technology is constantly providing us with new options that can help reduce our individual or corporate carbon-footprint by approximating the 'magic of physical proximity'.
Networked Virtual Environments provide an excellent example of a collaboration technology that has the potential to drastically reduce the need for travel and the resultant emissions.
(begin shameless plug)
As an example, starting tomorrow at 1200 Pacific time, Cisco is extending our Networkers at Cisco Live TechTalk series into Second Life. At the first Networkers TechTalk in Second Life, I'll be (somewhat self-referentially) discussing virtual worlds and their effect on the network. (Here is the location) The participants will likely be the standard Networkers attendees, which is to say Chief Network Officers, network managers, network architects, collaboration experts, and security specialists.
(end shameless plug)
The best part of the experience is that we'll have a virtual amphitheater full of like-minded colleagues discussing network architecture and security, and none of the attendees will need to travel to a physical amphitheater to participate. We'll all be attending as avatars from our respective locations, and the only emissions generated will be created by our energy-efficient laptops.
This leads me to the second part of this post, which is how we can begin to substitute 'virtual consumption' for physical consumption. As we begin to spend more time in virtual environments for collaboration, we also begin to accumulate clothing and bling for our avatars (and possibly even lodgings for our virtual selves). Perhaps we can begin to guide those who would normally be conspicuous consumers (and emitters) and make it trendy to be virtual consumers instead.
We already intermediate our avatars with our physical selves. Byron Reeves, who participated in our 'Collective Intelligence in Synthetic Environments' mixed-reality workshop last February with the Santa Fe Institute, Stanford, and MIT, spoke about this at the recent Virtual Goods Summit. He said that 'the same neurons fire when an avatar smiles at you as when a real person does'. So if we are biologically hard-wired to believe that avatars are people really smiling at you, can we also trick ourselves into believing that we are profligately consuming resources (and thus satisfy the consumption = status urge) when actually we are just expending just a few electrons?
Or, have I completely slid off my rocker? Comments or suggested medication welcome. :-)
Posted by Christian Renaud at 07:34 PM Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (1)
