Even more crossover virtual and real

As I say so many times in Second Life I wear a mask but I dont hide behind it. I managed to teleport myself into Second Life from Real Life with a little help from Roo holding the teleportation device for me.
Here I am/(we are) on the court at Wimbledon
epredator and me (same thing)
In the Sl version of the RL office at Wimbledon
epredator and me (same thing) 2
In the SL version of the RL roof garden at Wimbledon
epredator and me (same thing)
So who would you rather interact with, the predator with the jacket and the mask, and a certain presence or a video version of me? Personally they are the same thing to me, but different situations suit different AV’s

Lively.com Googles Virtual World ?

After months and months of rumour about Google creating a virtual world Lively.com has sprung up seemingly from nowhere, I caught wind of it via Al Kronos’ twitterings and went off to investigate.

It’s a cutesy looking ‘create your own room, invite your friends’ and embed on your website type world with a default set of content that can be expanded by splashing out more cash in the shop.

Of course step one is to create somewhere to congregate and it would be wrong not to stick the Eightbar flag straight in to claim a spot. So here’s the Eightbar desert island, see if you can get in.

I have to say its not quite what I was expecting from Google as the social room on a web page is quite a common concept already.

Teleporting across virtual worlds

You may have heard talk of this on his blog, our very own Zha Ewry appears in this video on the Linden Blog. (thanks John Sisk for tweeting this to me as I had quite a post Wimbledon backlog to wade through and twitter gets first look most of the time).
The video and article is about teleporting from Second Life to Open Sim. This is a sort of openid/unified login approach. It is a form of interoperation between similar yet different platforms.
Take a look at Linden Labs perspective on all of this (you hear enough from IBM on interoperability) 🙂

What did I/We learn this year at Wimbledon 08 in Second Life

Wimbledon is like a very very long plane journey. We all tune into the event and our various roles and focus completely on them. Having added the extra extreme sport of standing in Second Life at the same place for 15 hours a day for 14 days (except middle sunday), and having spent many of those hours talking to people in world and in real life about what we do I thought I would share a perspective on it.

  1. I can explain why I have been saying “People stopped asking why? and started asking if?”” Our real life clients and visitors were fascinated this year more than the previous two year. In 2006 it was “ha thats funny”, in 2007 it was “why are you doing this?” in 2008 it has been “Oh! I didnt realize there was so much to it, so can I do x?”
  2. We had less visitors in Second Life this year, but the ones that came stayed longer and asked more detailed questions about the various modes of working. We also still had more visitors than the physical hospitality tours. Business opportunities arose too in virtual discussions. The depth of conversation and the quality of interaction proved to be way more important that the volume. This is a change that many marketeers would not yet understand, but clearly need too. I realized that in many ways I had turned into a Social Media Strategy Consultant. We segued from the official RL wimbledon tour showing the website and how it was reaching out to social media sites allowing people to take feeds and widgets wherever they happened to be. Metaverses are on that continuum. The 3d wiki, mixed with social network, mixed with being a fan, mixed with behind the scenes blogging all merge in a virtual world event.
  3. Identity versus expression through avatars came up alot. Many people see my predator AV and assume I am hiding. “I wear a mask but I dont hide behind it”. It was very useful to have Judge Hocho there too in SL and in RL. Judge’s choice is a more real world expression of his physical form. Though interestingly he refuses to have photos of himself in RL. Those two ends of the spectrum allowed for me to explain that visual representation is not the same as knowing who someone actually is. Persona’s are difficult and many people are not confronted by that balance. Proving who someone is from a trust and security perspective is not based on what their username is or their avatar appearence.
  4. Shared web browsing worked really well. The embedded web browser, albeit read only worked very well. It is a pity it did not do flash as much of the widget content was flash based as it the realtime scoring feed for the pub-sub elements. However, showing people the wimbledon.org site either in world or on a RL tour worked very well. Demonstrating in the RL room the SL version of the website at the build allowed me to show how I would say the same things to people in world as Andy and Elizabeth would have just said to the visiting customers on our tech tour. The power of the familiar worked. Also in world we drove a few extra people to the site, more traffic. The official numbers will be published soon.
  5. The complexity of shared web browsing becomes more apparent when actually trying to do it. I spent a good few conversations in RL and SL showing people why shared web browsing is complicated. It is not obvious to many people until they see this or do it. The web is a single user experience. There may be 8.5 million people hitting the same site, but your view is your view. Content gets personalized, you login etc. The LL implementation has an embedded client render a URL provided to it. After that it is your client creating the session. If the pages are not personalized in any way then thing will remain in synch. We will all see the same page. If you were able to just click and navigate following links etc, soon the web would start to personalize to you. Each view may start to diverge, cookie trails of browsing, preferences etc. Also being able to see any page on the web would mean peoples browser may be taken places they dont want to be. NSFW sites etc. Judge built the monitor for browsing so that it had a menu of defined Wimbledon pages. So people got to know they had shared control. We then had the odd occasion when two people asked for different pages at the same time. They would then feel the shared problem of losing the page they wanted to see. The facebook page also highlights this. Its asking the user to logon. If the SL user used the break out object judge provided they would be able to view the URL in their personal embedded browser not on a prim. They could then logon to facebook. The prim object would then show them they were logged on and show their page. This woudl cause concern as they would ask if everyone could see thier details. The answer in this case is no. Each user’s embedded browser forms its own session with the website, just like any browser. So very quickly content gets out of synch. The alternative though, a server based proxy to show the same content to all would mean that people details once logged on would then be shared. All these problems are solvable, but we need some new metaphors in web browsing to make it obvious what is happening. The same as when https started to be shown as a padlock on the browser. We will need standard iconography for shared pages, individual pages but similar view, divergent pages etc.
  6. Why have we not modelled all the players? Another common question. There are several answers. The whole Wimbledon SL build is still done effectively for free. A lot of volunteer effort. Building hundreds of player AV’s is complex and time consuming. Down the line when the virtual worlds can represent things even more accurately we would be able to completely reconstruct the match in intricate detail. We know where the ball is, where the player is, what stroke has been played. All this information is mashed together with video in a DVD we (IBM – the atlanta sports events team) provide to the players and coaches after a match. So we know we can take crowd noise to indicate an exciting rally and index video based on that. To take a virtual event to the next level it needs this detail. However we then run into player image rights. Even the top video games do not feature all the player models in tennis. Wimbledon does not feature as a brand in any of the tennis gams either. The blur of copyright, players image rights, broadcast rights and sheer politeness (do you like you AV) gets complicated. Who knows where we could be for things like the 2012 olympics with a virtual presentation of the event live? For now though we keep it simple. Though if we do it again I still want to have more data and more atmosphere.
  7. Any event or build needs people. The single biggest draw had to be being able to talk to people at the RL event, behind the scenes. Everyone was always amazed and interested. Are you really there? Wow that must be great! It is of course great, but never for the reasons people assume. For me it is the amazing sense of doing something so well known and immediate. Having the whole of IBM behind us helping and people interested in our work. Pride does not pay the mortgage, being away from home and family for so long is awful, but its worth it. I could have done SL Wimbledon from anywhere, but the truth of being there came through the build and the avatar. Nothing beats Real Life, and reporting on that in a virtual world at a human level is the important thing to remember

Maybe see you all next year. Thankyou for all the support and conversations. Hi to Sean Krams our most regular visitor, always good to see you there Sean. It meant a great deal to Judge and I.

Explaining why some old approaches wont work

I decided to look at some other webpages in the shared browser we have at Wimbledon. Of particular interest is the F1 british grand prix. Now having had some issues (still not resolved with over zealous copyright take downs of a youtube of the grounds that I posted thanks to IMG for trying to police the wrong thing and youtube not putting things back up as quickly as they take them down.***update resolved as of 8th July 2008 retraction accepted and video re-instated) elements of copyright and how brands choose to try and stomp over the customers that actually own the brand interest me greatly.
So, I have the f1 web page up on a shared browser in a virtual world where all can see the same content. Its not a screen scrape so its legitimate web browser. However, it is set in a world that we can view it from any angle, changing the intended design. Here it is on screen on an IBM and eightbar build, at a Wimbledon build. All that and am in a predator avatar as per usual.
This view I snapped and sent to flickr. It represents me, my interests and what I doing at the time. However, if you right click on any of the pictures on f1.com in a regular browser you get a horredous copyright notice. Which is fair enough, but. Aside form the screen shot, does the browser in SL count as a reproduction? An interesting question and one that shows the web routes around arcane ideas and is truly disruptive.
web mashup

Fred Perry, Second Life, Wimbledon video fun

I had an idea for a video presentation with something a bit different this year for the Second Life Wimbledon build in IBM 7. This is more of a rush of it, but features crazy talk and voices from Cepstral. Edited up with my newly purchased Premiere elements. I like to get the ideas out there.
Its a bit of an example of life immitating art cross over augmentation. You will see what I mean. Also I have been typing the same things all day to explain what we do, text to voice seemed to make sense.
The Wimbledon website has gone very well this year too, cant say the numbers they are embargoed until post event, but we like them 🙂

Had our face(book) smashed in

You may have noticed that Wimbledon this year was doing lots of interesting social media related things. Letting people join in with the Wimbledon experience wherever they are. One of the things that was going rather well was the facebook page. I mentioned it way back a week or so ago in this post. Well a few days ago the Facebook page dissapeared. We initially thought it was an admin error from one of the writers, but now it turns out that Facebook decided to remove the page as it breached some elements of the terms of service. This was a pity as in the few weeks of the championship it had grown to over 9,000 fans. Maybe it was that volume of interest that attracted some attention.
Anyway with my social media strategist hat on, i have to say I am more than a little annoyed at this. All the groups and pages that exists on Facebook in a grey area of companies and political parties and pressure groups. A globally loved tennis event with lots of interest was kicked off Facebook for the smallest bit of administrivia around whose ID created.
I am not going to get into details as thisis really between Facebook and the AELTC, but as our I and my collegues are very passionate about Wimbledon we feel part owners, as I am sure do those 9,000+ people who know have to be told that Facebook doesnt want them to use the platform for gathering together around and event like this.
Web 2.0 is as much as anythng about letting go of brands, putting things in the hands of the people that consume them. Attempting to “own” customers and make strange laws will lead to the end of a platform. People will cotton on and drift away. Just sayin’

A slight change from Wimbledon SW19 – Learning Grid

Last night as Andy Murray made his triumphant comeback in a massive 5 setter I was driving away from Wimbledon and on to Corby. I am presenting at the Learning Grid for the next 2 days and Helen from Hursley is coming up to do the other half of the gig here.
We are presenting to visiting schools from around the area at the Rockingham Motor Speedway as an event called the learning grid.
As part of an hour long presentation in the auditorium here we get about 7 minutes to help show why what we do is so interesting and fun aswell as important. The aim of the event is to inspire kids into engineering. So far what I have seen this has got some fantastic exhibits.
My office for the day (when not presenting is a tad different from the Wimbledon basement)
Rockingham
The cars in the car park are a bit different too.
Rockingham
Still the message is the same. we have 2 minutes of video of our VP of the Virtual Worlds/Digital Convergence business talking, then the rest is Helen or I, Hursley. Wimbledon, Second Life, Say it Sign It, Battlefield2 and all the chips in the games consoles to finish.
There are 2 MC’s here, about to go and meet them Michael Rod (from tomorrows world and screen test) and Michaela Hyde from kids tv.
The videos all seem to work, running in a decent resolution.
Wish me luck and go Murray !