Environment Category Archives
April 20, 2008
Mixing Reality via Virtual Syndication
The Cisco virtual environment team gets asked to mix reality with virtual all the time. We also get asked to make it easier to participate and view the events we hold in virtual environments. So (drum roll please ;-) this month we are trying an experiment using the Second Life Cable Network to syndicate our TechChat on sensor networks taking place at 1200 PDT on Tuesday, April 22nd.
What does this mean? It means for all of you who can't join us in Second Life at the Cisco Bandwidth Stage you will be able to come to this blog entry and watch the virtual event streaming live via an embedded web page feed. For those of you who missed this live you can view the archive of the event below now.
Please let us know what you think of this new format by submitting a comment to this blog entry. This new format is a direct result of your feedback to make accessing the events held in virtual environments easier for all interested parties. So you see we really do value your feedback and would appreciate more of it!
Posted by Dannette Veale at 10:38 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
January 31, 2008
No More Meeting Travel
One of the habits that Cisco promotes is substituting virtual meetings for physical ones. There are numerous statistics as far as the productivity benefits and cost savings that result from the immediacy and geographic-independence of a IP telephone call, video-conference, WebEx session, or Telepresence. One area that doesn't get mentioned as often is the environmental benefit of avoiding air and automobile travel by the use of these technologies.
Late last year, I pledged to avoid physical travel and instead substitute virtual meeting technologies like videoconferencing, WebEx and virtual world technologies. I was asked by The Nature Conservancy to write up a summary of my experiences which they recently published here, and was 'Digged' here. This has, in turn, resulted in a number of emails and phone calls asking for more best-practices for substituting virtual meetings for physical ones.
One thing I know for sure is that 10 or 100 brains are better than one. What I'd like to propose is that the readership also share their best practices, and we aggregate this into a user-editable wiki of what seasoned virtual attendees/presenters have found to be key elements to making their work a travel-free experience. Lets start out by using the comment field of this blog entry, and I'll furiously set up a Wiki page for us all to use once we have a critical mass of inputs. Sound like a deal?
Posted by Christian Renaud at 05:59 AM Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)
December 26, 2007
Happy Virtual 2008
"As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Happy New Year! 2008 is going to be jam packed with virtual activities for Cisco. With so many exciting virtual events coming I can't even name them all but here are few upcoming dates. Make sure you mark your calendar.
CES Round Table, January 8th at 1pm PDT
Come talk about CES and celebrate the Cisco Second Life virtual campus one year anniversary.
Data Center Mixed Reality BannerCasts, January 23rd and January 31st at 8:30am PDT
Two exciting mixed reality events featuring Jayshree Ullal, SVP, Data Center, via live video.
Second Life TechChat: Transforming Business Models with Cisco TelePresence, February 7th at 12:00pm PDT
During this TechChat Randy Harrell, Director of Product Marketing, will discuss Cisco TelePresence, concentrating on business case studies and the enabling technology.
As stated in numerous posts Cisco is participating in virtual environments because we want to engage with you in enabling the future. That being said, 2007 is all most over...it turned out to be a productive and exciting year for those of us pioneering in the virtual age ;-)
I for one learned a lot in 2007 from my colleagues, our customers and fellow virtual frontier folk. Here are my top three virtual learning's:
Don't duplicate real life
Leverage virtual environments to do something you can't do in real life. Our Connected Life Contest event was a great example of using a virtual world to enable a conceptual demonstration for event attendees to interact with.
I know it has been said 100 times before but it is true and something I still have to review every time I talk to someone about virtual worlds.
Don't believe the hype
There has been a flurry of folks buzzing about how virtual worlds are either the bane of existence or the savior of mankind over the course of 2007. I know that for every one person who attends one of our virtual events looking to refute the ROI there is another looking to evangelize the value add.
You say tomato, I say tomato but how about we don't call the whole thing off?
Patience is a virtue
It seems like every time I run an event there is always at least one person:
--with some kind of technical difficulty to hammer through...sometimes it is me.
--who wants to derail the discussion with their own agenda.
--that misses the content all together because they were so caught up in the user interface.
In the long run a system is only as good as its operator.
This is the time of year that one makes resolutions. I have one that I feel confident I can achieve which is to keep learning, every day, and enjoy every minute of it. I all ready mentioned some of our 2008 activities but that is truly just the tip of the iceberg. So check back often and be part of creating the future with Cisco.
"The best way to predict the future is to create it." – Peter Drucker
Posted by Dannette Veale at 11:15 AM Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
October 15, 2007
E-Meetings and the Environment
I had written previously about the opportunities to reduce air travel by substituting virtual meetings for physical meetings, however reading through the excellent work already being done for Blog Action day has really got me motivated to make a change today.
I'd like to make a bargain with you......http://blogs.webex.com/webex_interactions/2007/10/cost-benefits-o.html
For the remainder of the year, don't fly. Neither will I. Instead, we will use the amazing array of tools at our disposal, from Telepresence to WebEx to avatar-mediated communications, to approximate the magic of physical proximity.
What's the bargain? I promise to pay $1000 out of my own pocket per airline trip that I take between now and the end of the year. Where does that $1000 go?
The Nature Conservancy. So the result is a win-win, either I fund the Nature Conservancy to look into solutions for combating rising emissions, or I reduce my share of airline-related emissions. I don't drive to work or else I'd suggest the same for cars. If you are game, then publicly promise to do the same.
There are a number of us in the virtual world space that travel from virtual world event to virtual world event to speak and do business, and the question always arises 'why cant we do this virtually?'. Well, if 30 or more speakers were looking at $1000 fines each for flying, I bet you'd see a really big virtual world event conducted in the virtual world.
Feel free to track me on Dopplr to confirm I am keeping my side of the bargain. How do I reach you again?
Postscript: Excellent post by Michael in our WebEx team here.
Posted by Christian Renaud at 12:24 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | 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)
