INNOV8 – a Serious Game hits 2.0 at IMPACT

This week I’ve been at IBM’s IMPACT 2009 conference in Las Vegas, along with a lot of my colleagues from IBM Hursley. As I wrote over on my personal blog, this is an event aimed at Smart SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and the Smarter Planet… but the synergies between them are bringing in all kinds of interesting themes and topics from the emerging technology space, including virtual worlds and gaming, social computing, and green / sustainable computing.

We’ve briefly mentioned INNOV8 on eightbar before. It’s a serious game for business and education aimed at teaching the principles of Business Process Management. The latest version was announced at IMPACT this week. INNOV8 2.0 is playable on the web, and has a set of new scenarios covering Smarter Supply Chain, Smarter Traffic, and Smarter Customer Service. The trailer is great – very movie-like 🙂

If you want a sneak peek at the gameplay, check this video too.

Virtual Forbidden City

I’ve been away for a couple of weeks so I’m very late in posting this!

On 28 and 29 April, IBM is going to be running an SOA tour being using the virtual Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time. Ian wrote about the Forbidden City launch last year.

According to the press release:

Attendees will be able to discuss SOA with IBM’s leading architects and strategists in an innovative setting, and learn first-hand how to shape the future of business communication. The virtual world tour provides a chance to:
  • See a real-life SOA case study in action
  • Hear how IBM solutions and products map to and enable specific SOA concepts and capabilities
  • Learn how to solve architectural challenges through SOA in a way that is non-disruptive to existing IT systems
  • Network with technical experts and peers

This is a good example of how we’re continuing to explore the use of virtual spaces for education and business. If you want to get involved, there’s really very little time to register (sorry! my bad!) – final day is tomorrow, April 17th.

Update – @ibmvfc reports via Twitter that registration is now open until Tuesday so if you’re interested, there are a few more days.

Eightbar featuring on Metanomics

I thought that those of you who read this blog might be interested to know I am appearing live on the Metanomics show this coming monday. Whilst I am appearing in my role as Director of Feeding Edge Ltd the conversation will be about how I see the industry going from IBM’s and corporate enterprise perspectives, how eightbar has been something that many of us have a deep affinity for, some talk of 3d printing and maybe a few surprises.
metanomics logo
There are plenty of ways to attend, and full transcripts and videos afterwards.
I was at rehearsals for it yesterday and the operation itself is certainly leading the way on Second Life shows.
See you monday.

Virtual worlds and enterprise case study

Dave Kamalsky of Linden Lab (formerly of IBM Almaden) pinged me to point out that they now have a new blog called Working Inworld. Now, I wouldn’t usually repost this kind of thing, but one particular post that caught my eye was the joint IBM / Linden Lab case study on the IBM Academy of Technology events that were held in Second Life. It’s a very nice paper, worth taking a look at for some of the figures and business aspects around how best to make use of these kinds of spaces.

Oh, and there’s an interesting concluding comment:

After holding the Virtual World Conference and the Annual General Meeting in Second Life, the AoT agrees that virtual worlds will have a big impact on business, on IBM, and IBM’s clients. And, the best way to learn about virtual worlds is to use them – which IBM is now committed to doing.

This made me smile… no kidding… some of us have been around in this space for quite a few years now… in fact, I was reminiscing about my avatar’s brief TV appearance in an in-world business meeting 2 years ago, only the other day 🙂

Sametime 3D unifies IM and virtual worlds

In the “nothing new to eightbar readers” column – we’ve talked about this before and it was showed at Lotusphere 2009 – it looks like the Sametime 3D platform is now available for test by selected IBM clients.

We don’t usually “do” press releases on eightbar, but this one is particularly interesting as it develops from trends we’ve talked about here for a long time, and has potential connections to both Second Life and OpenSim. More integration of the 3D Internet / virtual worlds into the enterprise.

Update – here’s some more from Slideshare:

A new era begins

Today is a day of mixed emotions. Today I resigned from IBM having been there for 18 years, 19 if you count my year out from university.
In all that time I have worked with some great people, and felt a tremendous sense of belonging.
Its been quite a journey, both in technical education and in personal growth. It is the extent of that growth and the speed that has not always been kept up to pace with by the system that I worked within.
I started back on green screens in 1990, very quickly moved to the PC’s and client server applications that followed shortly. Over the years the groups I worked with morphed from back office systems to customer facing ones, but in 1997 I made a break from what was traditional IT development. I threw myself into the web and the fantastic Interactive Media Centre. That itself morphed into the centre for e-business innovation but the group of people were known as Blueroom. An ecletic mix of can do people, graphic designers, producers and techies all bundled into one. That taught me that diversity of skills, coming up with ideas on the spot and good old fashioned teamwork for a common cause were what I thrived in.
For me that was the start of who I have become, the birth of epredator if you like.
When I decided that we should look in to the metaverse with Second Life back in 2006 I knew the industry was going to be big, but I was not expecting the evolutionary changes to happen to me. Getting this going turned me into a intrapreneur. The speed with which my fellow eightbars rallied and the spirit of innovation, just getting things done was simply amazing. It is something we should all be immensely proud of.
In leaving IBM I am not leaving eightbar, it is not something that can never really be left. The focus may change but I think we have made a decent enough mark in the history of virtual worlds.
Of course the question is what next? I left in order to be able to carry on and push this industry further. So in a few weeks you will see the birth of my own company, and I will seek to work and advise, speak and write just as I have done up to now. There are some significant projects that I already need to give some attention too.
There is, as I have told a few people, quite a story to tell on all this. The personal ups and and downs, the formation of our tribe and I suspect I will have to write that book after all. It will probably be called “Who says Elephants can’t Rez” or something similar.
So a huge thankyou and goodbye to all my friends, and thankyou for the support on twitter and see you all on Linkedin
I will also post this on http://www.epredator.com
See you all out there very soon.
***Update Feeding Edge is now live here, my new home

Lecturing MBA’s at Babson in Second Life

Last night I was invited to speak to a very diverse class of MBA students and entrepreneurs at Babson as a guest (Thankyou Linda for the invite). The conversation of course happened in Second Life, and also happened to be around midnight my time. That in itself is almost routine now, though for a change I was using voice and watching for text questions. However what was great was that the subject was not the metaverse itself, though I did throw in some futures like 3d printing and augmented reality. No the subject was the story of eightbar, the steps to get to the point we are at, how despite various things stacked against many of us we just carried on and did the right thing.
***UPDATE @abelniak who was at the meeting twittered that he had this post on his perspective as an member of the class. Once again the power of social media and willingness to share and build is in action.
Also some honest statements about the risk of being a pioneer, and the fear that self organized group can generate in traditional control structures.
I really enjoyed talking to the group, and there were some great questions from some clever minds.
We discussed leadership in particular, and what differs or is the same in virtual worlds. My general answer is a good leader will adapt, those true leaders already in traditional places of power have the emotional skills to lead and inspire anywhere. However the new connected world and removal of local as barrier unleashes the abilities in anyone who wants to lead.
Babson MBA lecture
Anyway, a huge thanks to everyone who came along, thankyou for listening, and following up. It became clear to me there is a huge value in sharing this story now, its constantly evolving for me, epredator, eightbar, metaverses, IBM. At any point in time it has things to learn from and things to share.

Augmented reality anywhere from MIT

Thankyou to AnnieOk for pointing me towards the video and articles here on the MIT Fluid interfaces that got such a good reception at TED 2009. This is brilliant work. You have to see this and go to wired to read the rest of the article.

Projection, mixed with gesture and finger tracking, whilst looking a little cumbersome this is showing some very clever things actually working.
What I like about projection (though I do find the personal ways to get an AR experience relevant too) is the potential to share with others. Just as it has become common, as I have mentioned before, to see people gathered around and iphone on the table.
Its been quite a weeks for seeing things often talked about actually working.

Anarkik eightbar

Ann Marie Shillito from Anarkik 3D visited the eightbar crowd in Hursley (thanks to epred for inviting a bunch of us hangers-on along!).

Anarkik are involved with haptic input devices and have developed some really nice software which enables users to interact with virtual worlds and 3D modelling tools using a consumer-priced haptic controller which can be connected to a PC via USB.

The demo blew us away. First we had a look at how the controller could be used to drive an avatar in a virtual world (in this case, OpenSim). It’s a considerably more natural way to navigate than the keyboard and mouse setup that is provided with most 3D worlds and should lead to a lot more accessibility into these environments. The part that really impressed us was the capability of driving a CAD-like tool called Cre8 – a free download from Anarkik, for people who have the controller – to easily create three-dimensional objects by physical manipulation… both inside and out. I remember hacking around with an old 3D package called Euclid on my RISC OS machine back in the early 90s and it was a nightmare – this was sheer joy. Watch the video to see various people playing around with the haptic controller 🙂

Just to explain what is going on in the video, as it may not be entirely clear! The demos use a Novint Falcon gaming controller. To quote Anarkik, it is “like a small grounded ‘robot’ and provides the ‘force feedback’ that gives the uncanny sense of touching a virtual object. This device replaces the mouse and also provides more natural and coherent movement in 3 dimensions.” At the start, several of us have a go with the controller to drive an avatar around an OpenSim island running on the local machine, using Anarkik’s software. Around the middle of the video, we switch to using the Cre8 tool to do some simple modelling. In particular, we change the surface hardness of a sphere (where it becomes more or less soft to the touch); and then go inside the sphere and extrude the shape by pulling the controller around. Finally, there’s a brief look at some fabricated items modelled using the same software.

Anarkik also have a community called Anarkik Angels where they are looking for supporters to help crowdsource and develop the project.

[the one minor disappointment for me personally was the current lack of Mac OS X support – Windows-only at the moment – and the websites aren’t terribly Mac-friendly either. Guess it’s time to buy a Windows box just for this stuff, it’s awesome!]

All of this haptic craziness hit a lot of our interest areas – 3d printing, new ways of interacting with technology, the application of these kinds of controls to education, manufacturing, science, craft, modelling… we had some very exciting and interesting discussions and I think several of us are looking forward to playing with this technology a lot more in the future. There are a bunch of additional videos on the Anarkik website.