Category Archives: IBM Projects

IBM projects we are working on

Australian Open Tennis and Fashion Cash Prize in Second Life

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Our collegues and friends Gizzy Electricteeth, Pipe Hesse and their cat Linden down in Australia are running a public build of the Australian Open Tennis right now. Whilst British hopes are dashed alread with Andy Murray getting knocked out in the first round they are are still very high with respect to the Aus Open in SL. Regular readers will know the links between what we do and tennis. IBM sponsors and provides the sites for the major grand slam tennis events around the world.
Wimbledon 2 years ago was where we cut our teeth in seeing how we could represent the tennis data in a metaverse. This was done privately. Pipe and Gizzy then built a massive stadium for the Aus Open which very much expanded the ealry wimbledon proof of concept. Last year it was private though. Then this yeat in June we swapped places again. Taking and adding to Pipe and Gizzy’s work to create the public Wimbledon 07 event. This was an experiement in how people would repsond and we kept it small an intimate but staffed during the live event. So now we are back again with the Australian Open and they awesome stadium build on Slam1 is open.
tennis
In order to keep things fresh they are having an official fashion contest for all you couture experts out there in Second Life.

couture

We dont often do things that are press releases, but in this case I am pasting this in here to help you all out there.
This year, in conjunction with its sponsorship of the Australian Open
tennis, IBM is holding a ‘Couture on the Court’ competition to find out
who can create the best avatar tennis outfit in Second Life.

The winner will be voted by the SL residents and the first prize is
$250,000 Linden Dollars.

The top 10 eligible entrants will be awarded prizes – which will be
amounts in Linden Dollars.

Entry is open to any avatar created before Jan 8 2008 however
eligibility to recieve the Linden Dollar prizes is restricted to those
who fill in the full details of the entry form.

Entry, voting, and the full terms and conditions of the competition are
on IBM’s Australian Open island in SL – which is public this year (for
the first time). SL URL is
http://slurl.com/secondlife/slam1/201/239/24/.

Entries close 12am Jan 21, 2008 AEDT. Voting is open between 12am Jan
22, 2008 and 12am Jan 24, 2008. The winner will be announced on Friday
Jan 25 2008 .

Virtual art is real too. Watch the World(s)

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I’ve been wanting to post something about art in virtual worlds for a while. Yesterday, my friend Kybernetikos posted some thoughtful observations about the limitations of virtual worlds, which included these two sentences about art:

Art is always looking for new mediums to express itself in, and with a virtual world, it has an old one (reality) with a new twist. What could be better for giving people a new way of looking at the (real) things around them?

It also got me thinking about how the creativity of overcoming limitations, and made me want to keep my eyes open for great examples of art in virtual worlds. I didn’t expect such a jaw-dropping one to fall in my lap so quickly. Jessica Qin just sent me this link:

Robbie Dingo (the creative genius behind Suzanne Vega’s guitar) has just taken my breath away with this piece, Watch the World(s), a Second Life machinima. If you’re sceptical about virtual worlds, I’d encourage you to spend 4’17” seeing how, in the rights hands, the process of recreating a famous artwork in 3D (which sounds so mechanical) is to create something new and spine-tingling.

There’s a great post at New World Notes on the creation process, with links to higher resolution videos.

If you would like to share your favourite virtual world art with me in the comments, I’d like that a lot.

Practice makes better – IBM press conference at Wimbledon today

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Ian Hughes, Mark Alexander and I are joining Andy Burns and the rest of the IBM team at Wimbledon today, helping out at two mini press conferences. Excitingly, they’re taking place in…

  • Wimbledon itself (in the physical realm of London’s SW19),
  • a conference call,
  • Streaming video (on ustream),
  • Second Life (at the IBM 7 sim),
  • Flickr (mine and Ian’s),
  • … and probably more.

The first one happened this morning, but you can join the SL portion if you come along at 8:20am PDT (4:20pm BST) for the second event today.

In attendance in the real world this morning were Dr Ann Quinn (Head of Sports Science at the Lawn Tennis Association) and Ian Ritchie (Chief Executive Officer of the All England Lawn Tennis Club). Joining on this morning’s conference call was tennis star Ivan Ljubicic, though he’s playing a match this afternoon so I don’t think he’ll be able to make this afternoon’s event as well. In fact, I’m delighted he made the time the morning of a match to join us today.

Of course, all of the web-speed work can mean instant results; the first press coverage from this morning has already been blogged by the New Scientist.

These mixed reality press events are always a little improvisational, but are something we’ve been practicing for a while now. As early as November 2006 a bunch of us ran something similar with Irving Wladawsky-Berger, which was attended in the real world by several journalists – including Tim Guest, whose recent book actually covers that event in some detail. In the months since then, many more journalists seem to have already become users of Second Life (and some, of course, of several other virtual worlds too). Certainly, the general level of knowledge of virtual worlds is much higher now. So much so in fact, that today’s event was largely not even about virtual worlds, but simply used Second Life as a medium to extend the public reach of the event, just like the conference call, the web stream, and everything else.

Update: Ian has posted his own thoughts on the event too.

Update: coverage from New Scientist, silicon.com, vnunet, Le Monde, Times Online, Sporting Life, …

House of Horizons grand opening, Danish band Carpark North rocks the crowd

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Hosted on IBM 2, the House of Horizons project is a partnership between IBM, Computerworld Denmark and a Danish firm called Innovation Lab. Each of the companies involved has a sphere in a floating bubbleplex, with other shared meeting areas too. The architecture was designed by real-world architectural firm Arkitema and built by Aimee Weber and her team. Partnering with other companies in this way is fun, and organizing a shared space which we can all invite our clients into, as well as hosting events like today, has been a fun experience. It’s a bit like setting up a convention center or a a shared office complex but one in which silly things like gravity and fire regulations are not an issue. All of this is getting plenty of coverage from Computerworld Denmark too, particularly in their Danish-language Second Life blog.

The space was launched this morning with a concert from Danish band Carpark North, who recently announced the gig on a Danish music news site. Sorry to our cousins in the US, but having a big event which is convenient for those of us in European timezones, and makes Americans wake up early (or, more likely, stay up late) for one was a pleasant change. 🙂

Not so long ago a few of us were planning where in IBMland the House of Horizons should be based…

Then, before long, it was a building site. Under construction. (Get it? How mid-90s web is that?)…

 

But recently, floating above the cloud level, some bubbles appeared…

The sim was very full this morning. 70 people in IBM 2, with another 34 in surrounding sims, many of them waiting to get in…

The gig went really well. Lots of cheering, whistling, clapping and and people calling for more…

I confess I’d not heard of Carpark North before, but I really enjoyed their music. I also really liked the ambient stuff that was playing before the gig got started. (Anyone know what that was?).

Aimee’s construction of the floating soap-bubble idea is really well executed, and looks beautiful. Well done to IBM’s lead SL architect Jessica, who made sure everything ran smoothly, even changing the sim time to night as the concert started, which really made the lit stage stand out.

Come by and see it. There are teleports at ground level to get you up to the bubbleplex (I don’t know if that’s the preferred term by the way, but it’s a word I like). Once up there there’s plenty to explore. There are a couple of contests running at the moment, one to submit a Second Life news story or anecdote for inclusion in Computerworld, and another for the best gadget or artifact. Two L$10,000 prizes to be won on 15th March.

Drop into IBM 2 and visit the floating House of Horizons some time.

More tennis in Second Life – Australian Open

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If you’ve been reading eightbar for a while, you may know that last year, some of the group put together a nice demo for Wimbledon (video available). The build was a proof-of-concept for taking a live feed of the balls from the Hawkeye system, and replaying the action in-world.

Well, the news is out on the Sydney Morning Herald site today, and Chris Yeoh mentions it too… a group from IBM has put together a really stunning build for the Australian Open. From the SMH article:

Over the duration of the two week tournament, data will be fed from games in the real Rod Laver Arena into the unreal one, nano seconds after happens.

The feed will come from game-tracking technologies such as the line-calling system HawkEye, PointTracker which plots shots and ball trajectories and Speed Serve which clocks the players’ serves.

I took a sneaky early tour of the site. There are some fantastic touches – for example, you can see rallies played out on the court, there are plenty of shops, open areas to chat, and video screens. Well done to the team involved (Pipe Hesse, Gizzy Electricteeth, and all the others) – this is really one of the best builds I’ve seen.

Click through for slightly larger screenshots, and be sure to visit once the site is open to all 🙂



IBM Virtual Worlds event in London and SL

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As Andy pointed out, some of us spent much of today in both London and Second Life hosting a Virtual Worlds event for European press, which included a rather exciting global ThinkTank session.

ThinkTank#1

We tried to make the day as interactive as possible, and after introductions and a real life discussion in the morning we spent a chunk of the afternoon immersed together in Second Life. It was a good opportunity to run a ThinkTank, in which we invited a wide array of bloggers and thinkers (including Ren Reynolds, Jerry Paffendorf, Adam Pasick and many more) to discuss Virtual Worlds, open standards, and the 3D Internet. Not everyone could make it of course (sadly some suffered from some recent issues with SL) but I think we ended up with 33 attendees altogether, covering a wide array of subjects. I’ve uploaded put the transcripts of the two discussion groups, both Ian’s group and my own.

I am already looking forward to running another one of these before too long. Thanks to everyone who battled with troubled teleportation to make today happen.

In other, but related, news: IBM.com carries a big flashy link to a big flashy piece on Game Tomorrow, starring Jai from the GameTomorrow blog (who, I see, even has his own MySpace page). Pretty timely stuff.

Innovation Jam results

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This years Innovation Jam was the third of IBMs jams. It was mainly web based, with over 150,000 people (IBMers as well as their families, business partners, universities, clients, …) apparently generating over 46,000 ideas.

Of course, as you’d expect, some of the fun happend inside Second Life too. This was a joint effort between IBM’s Virtual Universe Community and the NMC, with the Alliance Navy providing security and joining in the discussion too.

All the ideas generated went into a multi stage selection process, in which they were filtered and refined down, with $100 million in funding to make the top 10 ideas happen.

As was already reported by Reuters (as well as Business Week and, well, pretty much everywhere) this week…

Chairman and Chief Executive Sam Palmisano (right, with his Second Life avatar) is set to visit Second Life on Tuesday, Nov. 14 following a “town hall” meeting with some 7,000 employees in China

The 14th is finally upon us so I thought you’d be interested to hear what happened.

The event itself was a ‘townhall’ IBM meeting, held in an IBM location in China, in front of more than 6,000 employees. Sam Palmisano presented in person, but when he started talking about Virtual Worlds and the 3D Internet, he first handed over to Irving (who recently blogged about signing up to Second Life) whose avatar was surrounded by a decent sized bunch of IBMers from across the world.

Later, Sam’s avatar (samatar?) entered as well, and, nimbly assisted by our own Rob Smart, delivered his message both to the IBM China employees gathered there in person as well as those of us in the Second Life portion of the event. Rob was also joined in Beijing by Holly Stewart and Ian Smith, whose tireless work recently resulted in their being invited to attend (read: be camerapersons and generally make it all work) in person. Huge respect to John Tolva for his tireless efforts in making this event happen too. John has written an excellent post on his blog about the logistical challenges of pulling something like this off.

I didn’t get any great screenshots of the Sam avatar (I hope to add some more later), but here’s a quick grab of Sam and Irving presenting together.

So what are the ‘winning’ Innovation Jam ideas Sam announced? They are…

  • Smart Healthcare Payment Systems
  • Simplified Business Engines
  • Real-time Translation Services
  • Intelligent Utility Networks
  • 3D Internet (building a seamless, standards-based 3D Internet)
  • “Digital Me” (personal content service)
  • Branchless Banking for the Masses
  • Integrated Mass Transit Information System
  • Electronic Health Record System
  • “Big Green” Innovations (new business unit)

You can read the list in full, complete with an explanation of each one, in a recent IBM press release.

As with so much of the recent Virtual Worlds related work, this was a lot of fun to be part of. It doesn’t look like much, but it is a bit of a milestone, and will no doubt increase the internal interest in Virtual Worlds still further.

Because of the timezone, the US employees attending virtually were up late (1:30 AM EST) and those of us in the UK were up early (6:30 AM GMT). While the rent-a-crowd were excitedly waiting in Second Life we were listening in to the event over a phone call and getting gossip from those embedded locally over IM. The atmosphere was tense, but also slightly hysterical due to the late night/early morning/what on earth are we doing nature of the event. Total madness of course, but what else would make us all want to get up at crazy times and dress up in suits?

Component Templates

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From January to May this year I was working as part of an incubator group to develop a technology called, Component Templates.

Component Templates are a way for a subject matter expert to develop a template that will let a less-knowledgeable user customise and configure an asset. The neat thing is that no changes to your existing software are required. So, for example, if I was an Apache web server expert, I could develop templates (via an Eclipse wizard) for an Apache server. These templates then give a non-expert user a gui interface to customising their Apache configuration, but in a limited way, to ensure they couldn’t break it.

Component Templates has just become available for download on alphaworks.

IBM Virtual Block Party

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Thanks to Peter Finn for pointing out this recent press release about the Greater IBM block party – an alumni event running tomorrow.

On Thursday, October 12, 2006, IBM is holding a first-of-its-kind Alumni block party in the virtual world of Second Life … The virtual block party is part of a larger IBM program called the Greater IBM, designed to maintain connections with IBM’s network of alumni around the world.

…

Hundreds of IBMers — across its services, global business consulting and IBM research labs — have been working together in Second Life for more than a year. Their focus is on applying synthetic world and game-like universe techniques to real business and social applications.

Exciting stuff. Keep an eye on the Greater IBM blog for more details too.

Eightbar On Top Of The Rock

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Some of us from Hursley are in New York at the moment for an ITA workshop. It’s a chance to catch up with the work thats going on in other projects and the research that the rest of the teams are carrying out. Tha main areas that us Emerging Tech people are involved with are social networks, planning, collaboration and sensor networks.

NYC Rockerfeller