Networked Virtual Environments Category Archives

May 11, 2008

Working Virtually

There was an excellent article out this week in BusinessWeek on "The [Virtual] Global Office" that touched on many subjects discussed by the various writers on this blog. The article reinforces how a virtual workspace creates an environment for workers to engage with their global peer network using personalization, immersion and collaboration. This is powerful and something business is keen to explore.

For example, the Cisco Sales Associate Program (CSAP) at Cisco is using Second Life as a meeting place for their globally dispersed team. The CSAP folks get together in this virtual environment regularly to ensure synergy with their program and to talk about the latest in technology such as WAAS and virtualization. The team is also leveraging the virtual environment for team building activities like global team photo days. This leads to a sense of belonging to something greater than ones self, to a sense of being part of something.

Isolation is a killer for the remote worker. It is common for the remote worker to feel out of sync with the office worker. The sense of being left out of desicions because one is not part of the 'water cooler' conversations at the office is palpable for the remote worker. Virtual environments allow for the potentially disenfranchised worker to reengage and realize their contribution potential. There are many folks exploring this subject and I would like to quote directly from Peter Quirk’s excellent post about how virtual worlds address this:

1) by making meetings more engaging than is possible through 2-D web conferencing solutions
2) by creating a sense of a workplace separate from the employee’s home environment, helping to focus the employee on the tasks at hand
3) by creating places for real-time collaboration with other employees
4) by creating a workplace that can be seen from afar, reducing the likelihood that the remote employees will be “out of sight, out of mind”
5) by creating places for remote workers and their office-bound colleagues to hang out with each other over lunch, after work, or after long meetings

I would like to add one to that list:
6) by allowing workers to personalize their appearance in the virtual environment to create a brand for oneself and allow for creative expression

I feel that personal expression and brand is something we all do on a day to day basis, without really thinking about it. Our clothing, hair styles, office accoutrements, etc. say much about who we are, and about our life styles and interests. (Walk past my cube and you can see that I am in to Star Wars, technology and the Muppets. Hmmm, once I apply that idea to my self it makes me wonder whether folks think I am just a big kid?) Participation in a virtual environment can allow remote workers to do much the same thing with their avatar. This enables the remote worker to have a sense of ownership and self when engaging with their peers in a virtual work space.

The consensus is in and the conclusion is that virtual and real world will meld in the work place over the next 5-10 years so intrinsically that we will not think of them as separate. The lines of separation will be blurred to the point of making the separation between virtual and real world not relevant.

I'll toast to that!

Posted by Dannette Veale at 10:25 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

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)

March 26, 2008

Gaming, Alternate Reality, the Metaverse and Emoting Avatars

For those of you who missed Harvard Business Review's 'Breakthrough Ideas for 2008' in February, they managed to aggregate four very salient articles around the 'gamer disposition', Alternate Reality games (ARGs)in the workplace, the emerging 'metaverse', and the future of emoting avatars. Here is the link.

Combined, they present an excellent leading-indicator of the future of the virtual workspace. Be sure to check it out.

Posted by Christian Renaud at 08:08 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 04, 2008

Intimacy with Virtual Environments

I got the question "Why would I want to be in Second Life with Cisco" again today...I understand the puzzled query and did my best to address accordingly :-)

Here is a rough recap of the conversation....
Puzzled Person: Why Second Life...?
Dannette: Because it is a fluid environment for having very intimate (but not proprietary) conversations and developing deeper relationships.
Puzzled Person: Deep avatar relationships...you must be kidding.
Dannette: Hmmm, no not so much.
Puzzled Person: Seriously!
Dannette: I know sorry, my bad, couldn't resist. Seriously though, think of it this way...in say a Netpro discussion forum you can take part in Cisco to you, you to Cisco and peer to peer interactions but not in real time. In say a Cisco TechTalk webcast you can take part in Cisco to you and you to Cisco interactions real time but no peer to peer interactions are possible. In a virtual environment you can take part in Cisco to you, you to Cisco, and peer to peer interactions and all in real time. So figure out what you are looking to glean and how quickly, then choose your accordingly. Cisco utilizes many communication vehicles, such as the three mentioned here, and will continue doing so as we recognize that people learn and communicate in very different ways. We aren't making anyone drink one flavor of kool aid, you can take your pick ;-)

All kidding aside this is really a question that is best answered by the end users goal...meaning if you want a quick, touch-free communication then Second Life (and virtual environments as a whole more than likely) are not for you. However, if you aren't satisfied with the level of interaction and immersion you get from more traditional communication vehicles then networked virtual environments may be right up your alley.

I guess my thinking is what have you got to loose? A bit of your time yes and some hard drive space for the application. Of course, if you don't like the experience you can always 'uninstall'...

So if you haven't to date, I encourage you to come out next week and test the water. We will hold our monthly TechChat on Learning 2.0 at the Cisco High Bandwidth stage, http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cisco%20Systems%204/65/35/22/.

Hope to see you out for either a first visit or as a repeat attendee.

Posted by Dannette Veale at 05:13 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

February 29, 2008

Industrial Age Metaphors

One thing that people rarely consider in envisioning the future of collaboration is the opportunity to finally unshackle ourselves from outdated user interface devices such as keyboards and mice. There have been a number of companies that have successfully implemented ambient sensors and displays that are much more intuitive and immediate than the mouse+monitor combination, and there is now an extensive body of research and second-generation 3D user-interface devices that challenge the incumbency of the 2D mouse and Qwerty keyboard.

An area that is ripe for development is the combination of surface computing and 3D spaces. There has been excellent work done in education on surface interaction and training using collaborative whiteboarding, and there have been a number of videos posted around the net of the next generation of intelligent work surfaces and displays.

Roger Farnsworth, who runs our Executive Thought Leadership team at Cisco, is busy attending the always-entertaining TED conference in Monterey California. He blogged last night about the newest work being done on combining surfaces and displays, and even speculated about their use in 3D spaces.

Being a user of 2nd-generation VGA goggles, a projector, and a Wiimote to navigate around Second Life, I can personally attest that the current user interaction model is still clunky and unintuitive. There has been some recent work done on gestural interfaces that was discussed at the MetaverseU conference that may go a long way towards helping facilitate the true immersive effects of these environments. This would allow you to take your visual-metaphor of an office (and your networked colleagues) with you anywhere......be it at 35000 feet on a networked aircraft, or just in the Red Carpet Lounge between flights.

Posted by Christian Renaud at 06:32 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

February 17, 2008

Metaverse Roadmap and MetaverseU

From February 15th through February 17th, people from industry and academia gathered at Stanford University to participate in two events.

The first was a continuation of the excellent Metaverse Roadmap work that had started two years ago, which is an attempt to capture and forecast the coming changes in the user interaction model with the Internet. If you haven't read the original MVR, you can find it here.

The second event was (or rather 'is', as it is still underway) the MetaverseU, which is a combination of presentations and open discussion covering various facets of the virtual worlds, augmented reality, and lifelogging, with a particular focus on the human factors and societal impact of an idealized Metaverse.

The event is being streamed live (and freely) into Second Life here, and Henrik Bennetsen has taken a further step of creating a time capsule of where we are in this technology cycle by interviewing all of the participants and attendees with four questions regarding the best and worst things of current technology, and the opportunities and unforseen downsides of the future adoption of same. His interviews will be published on YouTube under the group 'MetaverseU', as well as tags on Flickr and elsewhere tagged 'MetaverseU'

Henrik has also blogged about what he is doing on the MetaverseU blog here. It think this is a good example of forward thinking in being able to tag content distributed around the Internet as a distributed transcript and record of the event. Consider it 'Distributed Lifelogging'. Now, if we could incorporate Twitter and Second Life chat transcripts.....in one portal.........

Posted by Christian Renaud at 09:18 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

February 05, 2008

Degrees of Immersion- Cisco Telepresence

There are many different tools today for connecting on a personal level with others. They range from networked virtual environments where people can connect through digital representations of themselves, such as avatars in Instant Messaging, or Virtual Worlds and MMOG's. These different tools provide different levels of experience and different levels of interaction and immersion between the participants. Cisco Telepresence provides a unique experience for the participants- one that connects them on a personal level in a way that many other tools cannot. Come hear Randy Harrell, Director of Product Marketing for the Cisco TelePresence System Business Unit at Thursday's Second Life Tech Chat, discuss the Cisco Telepresence System and how it is changing the way businesses communicate internally as well as with other businesses and customers. Join Randy Harrell and the Cisco Second Life team, as he discusses these business transformations made possible through immersive visual communications on Cisco's TelePresence systems. He will also discuss why Cisco TelePresence is different than videoconferencing. We look forward to an engaging and interactive discussion after Randy's presentation. See you there, virtually!
When: Thursday, February 7th. 12-1 Pacific Time.
Where: Cisco’s Virtual Second Life Campus, Bandwidth Stage.
http://slurl.com/secondlife/cisco%20systems%204/53/1/22/

Posted by Randy Sisk at 12:15 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 31, 2008

MetaverseU

For those already in the Northern California area, or who are able to attend via Second Life, the great folks at Stanford University will be holding 'MetaverseU' on the 16th and 17th of February at Stanford in Palo Alto. Henrik Bennetsen at Stanford has assembled a diverse field of people from around academia and industry with the goal to catalyze some critical thinking around the current state of networked virtual environments and where they could, can, and will go.

Be sure to check out the agenda page of speakers to see some of the topics and visionaries that he has put together for the event, and please try to attend if you are in the area for any of the other many virtual world-ish events taking place that week in San Francisco.

Posted by Christian Renaud at 06:17 AM Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

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)

December 21, 2007

Virtual Workplace - a 2011-2012 Vision

For those of us that have been through the scars of previous technology and paradigm shifts, it's always interesting to watch a new cycle evolve. It usually starts with a great bit of fanfare, vision, bold predictions and concerns of "that's crazy...it'll never work...why would anyone care about that...??" etc, etc. And then after a little while (usually 12 months), the hype slows down and there are lulls while people get down to the business of creating the actual technology and associated companies. During these lulls, doubt often creeps in and we find out who has actual vision and who is riding the coattails of hype.

During the initial lull in any technology cycle, I like to ask the following questions to help me determine if the lull is temporary or potentially permanent.

1. Can I explain the benefit of the technology (or vision) in 1-2 sentences, or do I need to ramble through some story?

2. If I can explain it in 1-2 sentences, do semi-technical people understand it, or at least ask good questions to clarify?

3. If this technology was open-sourced, as opposed to being controlled by a single company (or a small number of companies), are there enough interesting aspects to get communities of developers to engage with it?

4. If it's not happening already, what is going to be the "ah ha" moment when people will actually start valuing it enough to pay for it, or at least associating valid business models with it?

5. If it went away tomorrow, would anyone really miss it within 3-6 months?

So how does all of this relate to the Virtual Workplace? In the simplest terms, the intersection of Virtual Worlds, Business Worlds and Globalized Worlds is creating an inflection point in the marketplace around how people communicate and collaborate. We know the pace at which the Business World is changing. We're understanding the impact that the Globalized World is having on our day-to-day lives, but what we don't exactly know is how the virtual aspect of Virtualized Worlds will truly impact the way we interact. This is where the answers to those previous 5 questions will shape markets.

I threw out the dates 2011-2012 in the title of the blog post, so let me throw out some predictions of what this Virtualized World might look like around that time frame. ([NOTE: These are personal predictions and should not be considered guidance or forecasting by Cisco).

1. Pundits and companies will no longer talk about Virtualized Environments in terms "alternative environments" or "you can do anything you want", but rather focus their message on the things that are unique to the medium, or an order of magnitude better than previous mediums. For example, I expect someone will come up a next-generation "meeting" environment that combines the trust of Cisco Telepresence, the simplicity of Cisco WebEx, the robust visualization of IBMs Many Eyes, the recommendation engine of Amazon, the social-grid of LInkedIn and the serendipity we see in aspects of Cisco's Second Life campus.

2. People will stop talking about Virtualized Environments in terms of "avatars", as the medium becomes much more of a blend between virtual-presence and humanized interaction. Maybe it'll be simple things like dynamic system movement based on your people or content interactions (so we can stop bumping into walls). Maybe it's a live webcam feed of your face as you speak to convey actual emotion or trust. But hopefully it evolves to a point where you don't think about it as a tool to interact with, but rather it seamlessly blends into our daily workflows that are already highly connected.

3. Users won't have to think about full-blown Virtual Environments like we do today with Second Life or Club Penguin, but rather they will think about grabbing the aspect that is interesting or valuable to them and add it to their world via widget-like applications. For example, the "fly-on-the-wall" widget will let a colleague capture a live virtual engagement and flip it to you as easy as sending an email and you'll be able to view it on your mobile phone without any new client software.

4. Like the telephone system, where interaction with anyone is necessary, Virtual Environments will become the "ah ha" driver to build blended "Inside-the-firewall" and "cloud-computing" environments. As we saw in the examples from Wikinomics, the ability to create environments that allow diverse groups of people to interact will be key for all companies, big and small. The technologies exist to create those environments, and the winning companies will be the ones that unlock the doors that are creating barriers between those paradigms today.

So with those predictions, I wish the blogosphere a happy and healthy Holiday Season, and all the best in 2008!!

Posted by Brian Gracely at 07:50 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

December 20, 2007

Value

"What has never been doubted, has never been proven."- Diderot

I think of this quotation often these days when reading the frequent broadsides against virtual worlds, the departures of major corporations from Second Life, and stories questioning the value derived by corporations such as Cisco and IBM in the virtual world.

Although I cannot speak for other companies, it is easy enough to quantify the value that Cisco derives from our interactions with our customers and partners on our Virtual Campus in Second Life. (If any of our customers or partners wish to comment about the value, or lack of, they receive, I'll be happy to contact them and create a follow-up post as a complement to this one.)

To further quote the late quality guru Dr. W. Edwards Deming, and probably the antithesis of Denis Diderot, "In God we trust....all others bring data." Here's the data:

1) Customer Contact

In the last year, we've had tens of thousands of customers visit our virtual campus to participate in roundtables, Tech Talks, training, executive briefings, focus groups, press conferences, product launches, and the list goes on. 'Frequent Customer Contact' is our corporate mantra at Cisco, and any mechanism that increases our ability to work closer and more frequently with our customers is extremely valuable.

2) Innovation Input

We've created prototypes of potential products and elicited input from the customer community in Second Life, which we have been directly able to incorporate into our advanced development efforts. Think of it like a focus group providing new product input, 24x7x365, worldwide. There is an artifact of one of these 'elicitation events' on the second floor of the Technology Center building on our virtual campus today, the Health Presence Pod, which is a proof of concept to stimulate discussion about what can be done to improve the current state of tele-medicine.

3) Shared spaces

As I said in a prior post, there is a value of a common virtual space for the community to meet and interact. If it is an internal team meeting that crosses geographies, a business meeting, or a workshop with 50 customers, having a virtual 'clubhouse' to socialize in is a powerful substitute for the 'beer and pizzas' user-group meetings of days past.

To Staff or not to Staff........

One question we frequently receive is why our virtual campus in Second Life is not staffed for walk-through traffic. Our answer is simple, we view our virtual campus as a place for our customers and partner community to socialize, with a healthy quantity of events held there to stimulate conversation and network-building (no pun intended). We are not a retail sales operation, selling routers and switches to customers who walk in, and we do not consider our virtual campus a retail outlet. The customers we meet for the first time in Second Life at our events generally ask to exchange additional information with us, email addresses or phone numbers, for follow on conversations and our help in locating local Cisco channel partners from which to purchase from. And when Linden Labs incorporates the ability to 'call out' via voice or instant messaging to customer service agents, we will provide those mechanisms for casual visitors.

Ultimately, any tool or technology that allows Cisco to have high-quality, direct, and global customer feedback on a regular basis has direct value to us, as it is the Customer who drives our company.

Posted by Christian Renaud at 06:48 AM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

December 13, 2007

The value of ‘Place’

In 1999, James Scott penned a book entitled ‘Seeing Like a State’, where he illustrated excellent examples of how organizations and governments have designed buildings and cities without considering the local habits and styles of the population. In the book, the employees or citizens recognized that there were very few areas for them to socialize informally in these optimized workplaces or cities, which is how many cultures exchange important social ideas and other information.

The difficulty in civic planning is you don’t know where the citizenry wants to congregate, much as companies cannot anticipate where the social loci will be for it’s employees. If you add to this the growing trend towards organizational decentralization, it makes it critical for organizations to provide a substitute for the break-room or water cooler conversation, to allow that free-flow of ideas between employees. This also extends beyond employee/employer relationships to customers and partners.

When we utilize virtual workspaces, be it our Cisco Virtual Campus in Second Life, our Industry Solutions Partner Network, or other intraverses within the company, we are providing a Place for people to congregate, socialize, and brainstorm. This virtual workspace transcends traditional physical boundaries and allows for free-flow of information and ideas continuously worldwide. It becomes the corporate breakroom, the park in Brasilia, the clubhouse, the ‘beer and pizzas night’, where like-minded people can congregate.

This is evident in the design of our Cisco Virtual Campus in Second Life, which recently won the Society for New Communications Research 2007 Award of Excellence in the Online Communities/Virtual Worlds category. When we initially designed it, we thought it would be used for people to interact with content we had provided into the environment, but we quickly discovered that what people wanted a common place to socialize and network. We ultimately ended up ‘virtually bulldozing’ the virtual campus and rebuilding it around informal and formal meeting spaces.

As we begin our second year in public virtual worlds, we will continue to focus our efforts on building communities and dialog between our customers, partners and employees. We look forward to seeing you around campus!

Posted by Christian Renaud at 06:50 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

November 11, 2007

Living the Virtual Future

At a recent Cisco virtual event there was a comment put forth about how we are all living the future and I heard others refer to being pioneers in a virtual world. Cisco wants to venture forth with you into this new frontier which is why the later part of 2007 has been and will be jam packed with virtual events and activities. If you haven't been paying attention, have been too busy, or have been under a rock for a while (JK ;-); let me bring you up to speed.

Upcoming Virtual Event:
1) This coming week on November 15th at 12pm PDT we have our monthly TechChat. I anticipate a lively discussion as our topic is 'Why Unified Communications and Collaboration Are the Next Trend for the Internet'. Our speakers are Alan Cohen, Vice President Enterprise and Midmarket Solutions, and Joe Burton, CTO, Unified Communications. Hope to see you out at the Cisco Bandwidth Stage.

Recent Virtual Events:
2) In October the winners of the Cisco Connected Life Contest where announced in Second Life with the grand prize winner and several of the finalist joining virtually to attend the gala festivities. The additional value-add for the attendees was the demo of the grand prize winners 'Personal Digital Butler' concept. There where some truly serendipitous moments during this event for me. Such as on of our finalists who attended in world commenting, "Not to sound corny but we are living the future as we speak.....only a few decades ago who would have thought virtual communities in cyberspace." Our main speaker, Thomas Barnett, Senior Manager in Service Provider Marketing, summarized the value of using a virtual environment in this sound clip. The grand prize winner also provided a sound clip on why he found this event to be, 'the wave of the future."

3) A Virtual Partner Career Fair was held recently. It was a really successful experiment with recruiting in a virtual space with more than 60 attendees; view some pictures of the event. There was a lot of interaction between our partners and the possible recruits. One of the effective (and fun) things we were able to do in a virtual space was once a booth was staffed we could send up a poof (think smoke signals in real life) so the attendees could easily see which booth was now online with representatives able to talk to them. I don't think the majority of career fair venues would let one even light a fire. This is a great example of what you can do easily virtually in comparison to real life. Here's a link to Nobody Fugazi’s post, where he says, “The combination of technology oriented individuals, a virtual world setting and a chance to shop for employers and employees at the same time seems to have been a fitting use of Second Life. Perhaps some other businesses will learn from this example."

4) CSI, CBS and Cisco teamed up to bring TelePresence, Second Life and TeleVision together in a CSI Episode. In addition you can continue the story by becoming a virtual CSI in Second Life using a Cisco TelePresence HUD to communicate with HQ.

To quote John F. Kennedy, "Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future." We hope to see you out living the future with us in the virtual world. When you arrive give me a shout out, my avatar is Dannette CiscoSystems.

Posted by Dannette Veale at 07:50 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

November 08, 2007

You are [Here]

If you want to know where a given space is on the path to being mainstream, there are few measures better than looking at the distribution of venture capital flowing into that space over the prior twelve months. In the case of the Virtual World market, the last twelve months have had somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 deals totaling $1.26B, ranging from investments in world developers, 'producers', and the supporting ecosystem of in-world economy and advertising companies. Including the Disney/Club Penguin and Intel/Havok deals, which skew the numbers heavily and account for 2/3 of all activity, you get a distribution roughly like this:

What does this tell us?

Out of $451M of non-acquisition money flowing into startups, the majority of it is round two. This generally means that there were many many startups with ideas for 'metaverse' platforms that were bootstrapped with the help of friends, family and angel investors (or deep corporate pockets, but we'll touch on that in a separate blogpost). Out of the 'many many', some suffered what we call 'execution failure', which is to say that they were unable to make their vision a reality, even in prototype form to demonstrate to venture capitalists for more funding. This left a subset of startups that had/have prototypes in-hand and were out looking to take their invention mainstream with the help of a capital infusion from the venture community. They had received their smaller A/first/Seed/Angel round(s) already, and were looking to expand.

Also interesting is the number of companies that have effectively retreaded their business models away from fully recreational or training simulations and are attempting to steer into consumer virtual world businesses. A number of startups have gone through their first two or three rounds of funding, at which point they were shipping product, only to take on one or two more rounds of funding and go back into product development mode to re-ship a retreaded product for a larger more consumer-focused mainstream user base.

One final thing to note are the investments in surrounding and secondary technologies, such as platforms (Intel/Havok), producers (CBS/Electric Sheep and Omnicom/Millions of Us), economies (Bessemer/Sparter) and advertising companies for virtual worlds (Microsoft/Massive, Intel/IGA, Time Warner/Double Fusion). This usually follows consolidation and more mainstream adoption of the primary technology (in this case, virtual worlds), but is showing up early this time around.

Effectively, if you see the majority of venture deals leaning towards rounds two and three, that means that you are on the verge of seeing a number of new products and platforms announced. Considerable potential energy. This should be a fun time to watch the industry and see the second generation of virtual world platforms emerge that integrate the key learnings and address the shortcomings of first generation worlds, and the consolidation of the market around key areas such as training, business collaboration, and social networking.

Posted by Christian Renaud at 06:58 AM Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

October 19, 2007

Ode to Interoperability

For those of you who were not at the Virtual Worlds 2007 Conference and Expo last week, there were a number of announcements by ourselves and others that were not product specific in nature, but rather more focused on overall industry development.

First among those was the launch of the Metaverse Market Index (MMI), which is an effort spearheaded by Nick Wilson at Metaversed and Prof. Robert Bloomfield at Cornell University. The MMI is an organization that was recently developed by and for the industry to track adoption, economies and use activity of virtual worlds. This is an important step in the maturation of the industry, as we move beyond early vendor-specific approaches to measuring the market to a more industry-common measure. This will clear up any ambiguity for people outside of the industry when trying to separate fact from hype, as well as allow people within the industry with a common yardstick (meter-stick for those not in the coalition of the metrically challenged) by which to monitor the growth of the industry.

Next, and possibly more contentious, is the notion of the Virtual World Interoperability Forum. This requires a bit more elaboration......

There have been discussions going on within the game-driven virtual world community for many many years to determine what level of interoperability, if any, these platforms need to share. Obviously, there is considerably less motivation for me to take my Halo soldier into WarHawk, or my World of Warcraft character into an Entropia Universe-based game, as it disrupts the narrative. Two of the critical elements of these games is suspension of disbelief and immersion, which is interrupted by the injection of non-narrative-consistent elements into the gameflow. This is a valid rationale to keep these environments as walled-gardens, and the business models around these worlds are about customer retention and subscriptions.

This is less true when you contrast non-game-driven platforms such as Second Life, Forterra, Proton Media and Kaneva, which are more general purpose and are being increasingly adopted as a shared workspace for social, B2C and B2B collaboration. In this case, you do not have a Tolkienesque world populated by Orcs and Elves disrupted by a Powerpoint presentation on next month's forecasts, but the ability for enterprises and individuals to choose their best-suited home domain and then seamlessly move from administrative-domain to administrative-domain based on the task at hand. I can't help but take a network -centric perspective and compare this to Intranets, Extranets and the Internet. Some times I transact business within my own administrative domain (M&A discussions come to mind), some times I need to include a trusted development partner, and sometimes the use case is a public forum.

It is unrealistic to assume that the entire industry will fit cleanly into one business model (Web based vs. Thick-client) or that one world platform has both the physics necessary for medical or meteorological simulations and is also the optimal business virtual shared workspace platform simultaneously. There will be, as there is for the Web ecosystem as well as social networking sites specifically, different tools for different jobs.

What I am most interested in is interoperability between these different tools, knowing that we will have them. If I have an optimized public environment where we have an active conversation with our customers and partners, it would be best to have that interface cleanly and transparently with my enterprise collaboration platform that I use for engineering collaborative development so I can seamlessly shift between the two as I do today with my web browser.

To anticipate the next point, which is 'why dont you use the former exclusively for your internal collaboration?', the answer is that in some cases you legally cannot. If you have logging of IM and possibly voice as well, as is the case with Second Life, then I am violating Non-Disclosure agreements if I discuss a partner development effort with another Cisco employee within Second Life, as I just disclosed it to the Linden Labs chat logs. If they access those is irrelevant, I have disclosed the information to a third party. If they didn't log that information, then we have secondary questions about datacenter security to discuss. This is where WebEx has an advantage, as they are able to securely compartmentalize customer interactions within each company's administrative domain.

To bring this back to the WIIFY ("What's in it for you?"), the benefit to business of interoperability is that you have freedom of choice to pick a provider of the environment that best suits your use case (simulation, training, collaboration, etc.) without it being segregated from the benefits of the network-effect of the Internet and the many tens of thousands of active users of other virtual worlds. It doesn't have to be an 'either-or' decision, with all of the risk of sunk development costs shouldered by the customer, but rather 'and also' as the platform you choose can interact with other virtual world platforms.

This is probably a good a time as any to point out the elephant in the room, which is outside data. When we talk about these virtual worlds, we discuss them as some other place distinct and separate from The Great Conversation (to appropriate a great Clifton Fadiman phrase) we call the Internet. This is an error of reasoning in my opinion, as it assumes that the platform is what is central to the conversation versus the content. Where is the value derived, in the platform itself and how it handles the physics of wind and tree leaves, or in the content you are receiving in the form of collaboration with other individuals and the contextually relevant data you are discussing? Obviously, the latter.

So why today is it so highly lauded when a virtual world succeeds in importing existing data from outside their world? Why wasn't this permeability between virtual worlds and useful data planned from day one? I think this is an artifact from the gaming side of the VW family tree, as you were disincented to disrupt the Middle Earth narrative and business model by interfacing with Amazon or Netflix or Credit Suisse. This is the opposite when you talk about a general purpose virtual shared workspace, as you can only talk with another human for so long before you want to point or reference something pertinent to the conversation.

This is a key component of interoperability, which is interoperability with the rest of the world. Virtual Worlds should not be some 'otherplace' which requires immigration of outside datastores one shipload at a time, but rather an overlay collaboration environment that leverages the vast corpus of the Internet.

The rest of the minutiae of interoperability, be it in avatars or polygons, is important but not the big WIIFY. I am only partially concerned that the appearance of my avatar be the same in the public and private domains, but I am concerned that whichever representation of me that is best suited for the environment inherits the entitlements and policy/privileges that my identity allows me. That can even include, as is explicit in the OpenID model, anonymity with entitlements.

One other carry-over from the entertainment domain is the concept of virtual currencies. If we have just painstakingly killed a dragon, we are not going to want to denominate the booty in Euros or Swiss Francs, but in the gold pieces consistent with the game narrative. Conversely, If we are consummating a multi-year consulting agreement, we wont want to denominate the contract in Lindens or There-bucks. By continuing to perpetuate virtual currencies in general-purpose worlds used for business, we are adding a layer of complexity (and distraction) that is unnecessary.

The WIIFY of virtual currencies is whatever is easiest for your transaction. If that means you have to pay VAT on negligible in-world transactions because sovereigns have not yet determined the proper taxation regime for virtual worlds, it is going to discourage serious commerce and marginalize virtual worlds as a serious platform for widespread adoption. Lets leverage the elaborate and proven interoperability of world currency markets and avoid the potential for confusion, added complexity and extra risk inherent in walled-virtual currencies.

There is much more to be said on the topic of interoperability, however I will save it for future blogposts.

In the interim, the 'call to arms' for this space is that I would encourage anyone interested in the long-term benefits and viability of virtual shared (work)spaces to focus on breaking down the early barriers to interoperability and encourage widespread standards and adoption so we can reap the benefit of the network effect of user adoption.

Posted by Christian Renaud at 07:38 AM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

October 15, 2007

E-Meetings and the Environment

It's Blog Action Day!

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)

October 08, 2007

The Virtual Trust Spectrum

Last Friday, I had the privilege of speaking to several groups of college seniors on the Cisco campus. They came to get a better understanding of Cisco and some of our technologies, and we get the chance to speak with them about their role in potentially changing the world. As the "speaker", I approached it as a wonderful opportunity to be a student of this captive audience of soon-to-be colleagues or future customers.

My talk centered around the work that Cisco is doing on Networked Virtual Environments (NVEs) and how it has the potential to change how we interact with people and content, especially in a business context. The hyped and dreaded collaboration word. As would be expected of this age-group, at least 50-60% of each sessions claimed to be "gamers", and most of them said they didn't think twice about associating the avatars on the screen with the actual people driving them. This was in stark contrast to the professors that accompanied them to campus.

After about an hour of discussing all sorts of interesting possibilities, I had one student sheepishly raise his hand and ask a simple but important question, "If we do all this communication in virtual worlds, do you think we'll eventually struggle to communicate with people face-to-face?".

My gut reaction was to say, "No, because Virtual Worlds or NVEs are just one aspect of communications in the overall spectrum of building trust with others.". I've even drawn pictures of this spectrum and struggled with where to put Virtual Worlds.

.

But over the weekend, I thought about this a little more, using a couple of interesting examples I heard recently.

The first example was talking to my neighbor, who has a 12yr old daughter that is eager to get a cell-phone and use IM with her friends. One of her friends has already decided that she won't accept voice calls, but rather will only communicate "virtually" via IM. I'm not sure if she's sponsored by a social network yet, but this is definitely one end of the spectrum.

The second example came from a Cisco banking customer that told us they doubted whether they'd ever be able to have a remote meeting with a high net-worth client within a virtual world. While they hadn't tried it yet, their bankers intuition was telling them that people liked to look other people in the eye when exchanging checks with lots of zeros. Maybe Philip Rosedale or others might be able to test this intuition sometime soon, but it captures the other end of the spectrum.

So I'm left to wonder, where do you see virtual world communication fitting into the communications Trust Spectrum? I don't know the answer, but I suspect it will vary depending on the situation and the users. But the question still remains.....will virtual communication change our inherent need for face-to-face communication?

Posted by Brian Gracely at 06:28 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

October 01, 2007

Mass Extinctions and the New Math

465,003,915

That is how many aggregate subscribers are claimed by 44 of the top self-proclaimed virtual worlds.

443,230,979

That is the entire population of Mexico, the United States and Canada.

We are all accustomed to the early stages of any technology when individual companies attempt to set the rules and language that will be used for the ensuing battles. There have been expensive fights over simple things like rather to call the aggregation of ISDN B-channels 'MLPP' or 'Bonding', IP telephony vs IP-PBXs, and so on. There are very tangible benefits to defining the market you are going to compete in. This is Law 5, the Law of Focus, in the classic marketing work The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout, "The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect's mind."

This is still going on in the virtual world sector, as every platform with an avatar calls themselves a 'virtual world', and attempts to define the rest of the market around their paradigm. What typically follows this Cambrian explosion of platforms and competing technologies (and semantics) is that there is a 'great rationalization' (a 'KT Period', to mix my periods/eras/eons/epochs). This space is rapidly becoming ripe for it's own.

When I was adding up the numbers of virtual world subscribers, one thing that was immediately evident was that there is no common denominator for how platforms reported their users, or traffic, or economies. Since this is still an early market without a common language, each company is reporting whatever statistics make their platform look more attractive to potential end-users and content companies. As the old saw goes....'Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics'.

The next step in the maturation of this market, if it wants to grow beyond it's current size, is for the industry to agree on two things:

1) There needs to be an agreed common taxonomy of virtual worlds. You can slice and dice the market by 2D vs. 3D, web-based vs. client software, apples vs. oranges, but we need to find a common set of language by which to differentiate the QQ and Cyworlds from the ActiveWorlds and Kanevas from the Metaplaces and Toontowns. Until then, you have emoticon-on-steroids avatar chat in IM and Social Networking sites being compared apples to apples with narrative driven virtual worlds like World of Warcraft or Runescape. It's not apples and apples at that point, it's apples and orangutans.

2) There needs to be a common market index. There are some very good starts at databases to track the virtual world platforms, but where they are currently deficient is in capturing and analyzing the key metrics for this industry, as Gartner Group and others do for the networking industry. Until we get to a common set of metrics by which we measure these platforms, we can't accurately compare them or determine their real measures of success. This is a critical piece as we see more traditional advertisers step into the virtual arena, as you can rest assured that they will want rigorous statistics as to the degree of impact of their advertising message. Go ask the advergaming companies if you don't believe me.

Once we get to the common semantic understanding and a common denominator for metricizing these platforms, then we can get down to the real business of rationalizing them against one another with the goal being heterosis, resulting in fewer platforms of the best possible offspring with the best attributes of each.

When we have fewer platforms with better attributes, then non-early-adopter individuals and companies can evaluate which platform(s) is best for the application, without the present concern of investing large amounts of time and money on one of the many virtual world species that doesn't make the evolutionary cut.

Posted by Christian Renaud at 08:21 AM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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 24, 2007

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

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 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)

August 31, 2007

Game Play in the Enterprise

This is my first post to the Virtual Worlds blog so let me start by introducing myself. My name is Greg Pelton, I've been at Cisco for 10 years and I lead the Technology Center. Now that we have that out of the way, let's talk about collaboration. Collaboration is critical for successful businesses and the premise of this blog is that Virtual Worlds have a role to play in enabling enterprise collaboration. Let's explore that idea by looking at two examples of Virtual Worlds - Second Life and World of Warcraft - and how they support collaboration.

Meeting vs Collaborating in Virtual Worlds

Second Life (SL) is an extremely powerful environment, with great flexibility and unlimited options. After a team meeting in SL today I had a chance to wander around a shopping area looking for new clothes for my avatar. There were a wealth of things I could buy in SL and in many ways it was a better shopping experience than in real life. Along the way I ran into other avatars and had an opportunity to meet new people, but I didn't really feel compelled to interact. I've also attended scheduled events within SL, for instance a Cisco new product launch. Here I met other people who shared similar interests to me and we had nice discussions about Cisco products or even avatar clothing. However meeting isn't collaborating. I don't find Second Life a very satisfying environment for collaborating and this comes down to what is missing in SL. One thing that is missing is Game Play.

I consider myself a casual gamer, not in the sense of exclusively playing Casual Games, rather that I enjoy playing games casually or occasionally. Real life intrudes often enough that I can't devote the time or energy to become a Hardcore Gamer. I often play World of Warcraft or WoW and I find it a much better environment for collaboration than is Second Life. In fact if you just sit back and watch avatars in WoW, you'll immediately see examples of collaborative behavior.

So what does this creature have to do with collaboration? First you need to strip away the fact that the character looks like a Frankencow and think of it as just an avatar. In WoW (we can use WoW as a proxy for any of the good MMORPGs) your avatar is given a set of tasks to complete. You can solicit help from others who share that same task by sending a message to your organization, or you can travel to the location where that task takes place and meet others who have the same assignment. You are allowed to form ad hoc groups to work on the task and once you complete the task together, you will all share in the reward. This is where meeting becomes collaboration - the combination of co-location and common goals and shared rewards. It is the Game Play of WoW that determines these three factors and, ultimately, which promotes collaboration. Game Play has many other elements including navigation and conflict, but for now let's focus on just these three.

I use the term "tasks" rather than "quests" or "missions" deliberately because I think there is an analogue in the enterprise. In business we are assigned tasks constantly and accomplishing these tasks is one of the key reasons we continue to draw a paycheck. The challenge before us then is how to define the Game Play in a virtual world so that it represents tasks that are relevant to the enterprise and generates rewards that are relevant to our MBOs and careers.

Like most other companies, Cisco has a lot of rules that govern what we do and how we do it. The more frequently used rules are captured in what is formally called Business Processes and these business processes are either deeply embedded in the default behavior of the organization or captured and facilitated by various systems and tools developed by the IT department. In order to have productive collaboration in an enterprise Virtual World, we need to incorporate Game Play rules that reflect the business processes of the enterprise. How are we going to achieve this without hiring armies of consultants and if we are successful, how are we going to link this back into the operations of the enterprise? I think this is an important issue and I haven't seen a lot of study on topic so far.

What do you think?

Posted by Greg Pelton at 06:04 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

August 23, 2007

Making 'Over the Network' better than 'Over the desk'

In 1998, when we were building the original Cisco IP Phones, we spent a lot of time talking about 'better than' features that would improve the voice communication experience over the standard PSTN/PBX voice model. At the time, we ran into an established hardware chain that didn't support wideband handsets, DSPs without G.722 support, and so on.

We are at the same point in Networked Virtual Environments today, with a few caveats.

When you communicate or collaborate over the desk with someone, you benefit from four of your five senses. You can see them, hear them, smell them, and shake their hand. Generally, I try not to use my sense of taste in meetings, unless it's sampling the local coffee.

When you have an 'over the wire' or 'over the network' interaction, you use fewer senses. Lets summarize the pros and cons for now, and some possible technology opportunities to address the shortcomings:

Sight- You can still see the other party (albeit as they want to be perceived, not as they physically may appear), but not their body language. This is a big disadvantage, as we have all read the studies that say how much non-verbal behavior contributes to person-to-person interactions. This is a drawback. This is a feature that Telepresence offers (high quality video, visibility of the other party's body language) that is better than NVEs.

What can we do to address this? Well, we can intrusively interject biometrics/affective sensors to determine mood or disposition and have that trigger animation overrides, wire up algorithms to your webcam to mirror facial queues, and develop pleasing animations triggered on your force of impact on the keyboard and the amplitude and pacing of your voice (as is done today in call centers to detect angry customers). That'd be a good start, but obviously nowhere near as 'signal rich' as an over the desk interaction.

There is still some opportunity to leverage 3D displays when those technologies mature.

Touch- Keyboard and Mice. Until we get better sensors and force-feedback gloves, we have the industrial-age keyboard and same old mouse. I have a drawer full of nifty I/O devices that I hope will one-day supplant the keyboard/mouse duo, but the applications and user interfaces are a direct byproduct of the I/O devices in use.

It will be fun when we can reach across the virtual table and shake each others hand, and feel it.

Smell- Nothing we can do here, but I do recall a 'smell over IP' company at either Interop or Macworld in the early 1990s. Perhaps someone smart acquired those patents. ;-)

Hearing- Same as or better than. I can have spatial, wideband audio in a Second Life meeting today. Why is this better? I can get the same audio experience of an in-person meeting but across a broad geography. This makes a ton of difference in the overall experience, as any early-adopter of SL voice can attest.

So where is the better than given these disadvantages? It's in achieving your overall goal quicker, with the right people, information, and context.

Because this is an electronically mediated interaction, we could augment the interaction with another person in ways that are infeasible to do in-person. You could record entire meetings like you can with TiVo and television, and mine that data for later decisions or content. You could have documents, websites, media, past meetings, in orbit around your virtual table to support the decision or conversation at hand.

You could also easily create and interact with 3D models of data, which is very useful in those instances we have all run into when your 2D spreadsheet or presentation has a lossy impact on the topic at hand.

You could mine the metadata of the conversation and recommend people that need to be present at the conversation that aren't there (the local subject matter expert, perhaps?).

These are the areas that need the most attention, in my opinion. We have the tools now, recommendation engines, inference engines, and need to apply those to our collaboration modalities. There is some great work being done in academia right now including the MIT Media Lab, Eurecom, and Coventry University's Serious Games Institute along these lines, which will help accelerate the 'better than' of these environments.

Posted by Christian Renaud at 10:36 AM Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)