Category Archives: Virtual worlds

Blogs and Social Media Forum

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I spoke at the Blogs and Social Media Forum yesterday.

The agenda had me slated to join Ben Edwards (publisher of Economist.com), Jem Stone (Executive Producer, BBC New Media and Technology), Adriana Lukas (Big Blog Company) and Myles Runham (General Manager, Europe, Ask.com) for the keynote panel.

Euan Semple, who chaired the event, kicked off the day by getting a feel for the audience by asking how many of the participants a.) read blogs, b.) write blogs, c.) use wikipedia and d.) have edited wikipedia. A surprising number of people said yes in all categories. Indeed, it seemed to me that the percentage of the attendees blogging was slightly higher than the percentage of the keynote panelists blogging publicly; Although Ben Edwards said he wants to start, the fact he doesn’t already have one surprises me enormously given his previous role as director of New Media Communications in IBM’s HQ at Armonk. Equally surprising is the fact that Myles Runham (who previously worked “…in BBC Corporate Strategy (focusing on new media)” also doesn’t seem to have a public blog either.

Blogs and Social Media Forum - participants Blogs and Social Media Forum - Euan Semple Blogs and Social Media Forum - Keynote panel Blogs and Social Media Forum - Myles Runham Blogs and Social Media Forum - Ben Edwards

I think I was subconsciously quoting either Suw Charman or Euan himself when I said that a corporation is made not of employees, but of people.

After some case studies from the Economist and BUPA and a quick speed networking event, we were treated to an open space session facilitated by Lloyd Davis. Lloyd invited anyone who was interested in hosting a conversation to stand up, introduce themselves and share what they wanted to talk about. A dozen subjects were covered, including mobile applications of social media, moderation, spam and (of course) virtual worlds. Yes, the Ian and Roo show was there in full force, attracting a couple of tablefuls of people which opened up into a detailed Q&A and discussion about the virtual worlds.

Tuesday 12:05 pm 6/5/07

[CC-licensed photo from Robin Hamman]

Great fun, and an unexpected chance to share in more detail with some very untested (and of course interesting) people.

Sadly we had to dash off during lunch to a meeting across town, so we missed the afternoon sessions. I hate leaving conferences early, and it was only because I was invited to join the conference (replacing another speaker who had dropped out) at the last minute that my afternoon was already full up. It meant we missed Lee Bryant (Headshift) and Simon Phipps (Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer) present, plus a couple of really interesting looking panels too. I am hoping we get the recordings of the afternoon sessions soon, so I can catch up with the end of a great conference.

Update: due to the frankly stunning level of spam it generates, I’ve disabled comments on this individual post. Email me if you have something you want to add.

Live (Destroy) Television

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Yossarian and I just gave Destroy Television a bit of a tour both of our public areas in Second Life and the private islands of Hursley and IQ and the giant molecule on Thornebridge town. All this was being broadcast live on destroytv, and also streamed to flickr.
It is an amazing project of 10 days of live filming that Destroy embarked upon. Including a wedding to Walker.
This is both art, journalism and thought leadership all rolled into one and I am proud to have been part of it as content.
flickr destroy
See the flickr feed here

BBC money programme on Virtual Worlds Real Money

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I just watched the BBC MoneyProgramme edition about virtual worlds and real money. It featured a few people we all know quite well. It being the BBC and the money programme it covered everything really well. There was still a playfulness about the piece, but it showed the seriousness of the entire industry. Philip Rosedale/Linden made some good points about the future, and how we dont quite know where its going but its going to be exciting.
Max Flint also did not solely cover Second Life but instead looked at the business of virtual goods versus subscription models.
It was good to see Justin Bovington on TV from Rivers Run Red too. So that’s two weekends running as he was on the sky news feed last weekend too.
I know know we can expect even more people at work to have been woken up to the potential and to understand why were have all invested so much of ourselves in this.

Our Virtual Universe Community Guildmaster – Voting closes today

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As well as the Eightbar group, our unofficial mini brand presence created around this blog and our lives in various metaverses, we do have inside the company the Virtual Universe Community. The VUC is a community organization that all the interested parties inside IBM that want to gather and understand this business and social and technology change can join.
The VUC is currently having elections for its next guildmaster. We collectively decided that we would have an elected representative running the community, and attempt to operate more like a guild.
This is a more formal, yet different arrangement to how Eightbar operates. Eightbar being a more free ranging brand.
We are all members of, and active in the VUC and I am looking forward to the results of the voting this time around and then will will have an interview with the winner of the election right here, and maybe some public appearences in SL and other metaverses.
So good luck to the candidates. Any VUC/eightbar IBMers reading this, go and vote now.
Apologies to the rest of the world but this is an intranet link, but kept here for the ease of our fellow VUCers and eightbar members.
Good luck Ada Alfa, Boris Frampton and Zha Ewry

Tweakfest architecture of the metaverse, and the IBM Zurich Lab

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After my metaverse pitch at Tweakfest on Friday I was followed on stage directly by Jeffrey Huang whose pitch was a fascinating one on how the digital world is effecting how we treat real physcial spaces and architecture.
Leading in with elements such as banks closing and turning into other spaces in cities, mass warehouses for fulfilment and data centres occupying space around the world.
This was to introduce the concepts that he is known for, of bring real and virtual space and concepts together. He researches and builds things that use existing physical space but joins it to the virtual in some way.
This resonated very well with what got me started in all this, when we tried to use lots of types of art and technology to link up our Hursley and Southbank locations when we were the very unusual IBM group called blueroom (or Interactive media centre). Having graphic designers and web tech people, but within IBM, we were more like a startup but were split across 2 main locations in our centres for e-business innovation back at the turn of the century. We had lots of projects to try and gather real life data and presence, then re render them virtually as large collaborative art forms. Including using virtual worlds to meld the two offices.
Jeff showed several pieces of work that were thought provoking and of various degrees of seriousness. A video of a web cam mirror in student dorms that pumped directly to hot or not and projected your rating out of 10 back onto the mirror, then a fascinating wall projection that took words from snippets of real life conversations (using speech to text) to get a flavour and buzz for what was going on in a room. Also an interesting concept that the location of certain facilities now are based on the provision of high bandwidth network access, where as once it was major road, rail or river connections. So the digitial world and its needs is having a direct impact on our physical space.
Finally there was the swiss house. The aim here to connect swizz ex-pats with their home country and fellow swiss in other countries. This ‘house’ is in cambridge, MA between Harvard and MIT. The aim is to create a physical space but have the presence and linkages to other spaces, not by one video conf screen but lots of types of walls, projections, virtual/real world tools.
There are some pictures here of the sort of space created.
The blend of these concepts, with the patterns we use in virtual worlds and the continuing blurring of the lines with augmented reality in real life, augmented reality in virtual life and 3d printing and replication really gets my head spinning with so many ideas. So when the dust settles on the virtual world boom, I think that this sort of space will be where we are going to be.
The guys in our Zurich lab already have some fascinating projects and demos blurring these lines such as bluespace. Once again it was before its time, but now people have multiple digital presences and need to combine things in a physical space in order to interact
There is a massively impressive list here of the demos in Zurich, some of those we have in Hursley too by the way.

Eightbar @ Tweakfest

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Tomorrow I am hopping on a plane and heading to Zurich for Tweakfest Its a multimedia extravaganza. I have no idea what to expect, but it looks very exciting. I do know that I am on stage doing a key note on this whole virtual worlds business, where it fits, why we got so interested, go evangelize.
I also get to SlMeet (as we it got called at virtual worlds 2007 when you physically meet someone oyu know well from Second Life) our very own Sifu Moraga, who was a very early joiner to the eightbar group.
So whats the plan, I am probably going to bounce around and do my usual pitch. Usual to me, but not to the people listening. With either some live internal metaverse running around, or Second Life, or videos depending on the vibe in the room.
Steve Wozniak is opening the event on Thursday, which sounds very cool, so I may get to say Hi. He also has a wikipedia page, I can but aspire to that, along with eightbar itself.
Hopefully I will be able to photo blog and twitter a bit, but I know I have a load of interviews to do, and I am not there for the whole weekend but have to fly back friday night.
As an arts festival, themed on metaverse the varieties of knowledge of what this is all about will make it truly confusing, anywhere from the entire SL twitter crew to the most cynical its just a game brigade. However, I love a challenge, and as people who have met me I know I do like to talk. 14 months of daily discoveries and anecdotes make for great material, as does the entire self organizing nature of eightbar and the impact we have all had on our business.
If I get any time, with me Second Life though I am sure I will be exploring what we can do with sculpties, good luck with the update everyone.

Virtual worlds in education – Eduserv Symposium 2007

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I presented at the Eduserv Foundation Symposium yesterday. I wrote up my brief notes from the event, and there has already been an impressive amount of blogging about the conference.

If you missed the live stream on the day, I believe all the videos will be made available by Eduserv soon.

For now, here is my presentation.

It’s a brief introduction to the breadth and variety of virtual worlds (I cheekily included EVE Online in this list, even though it is of course an MMORPG rather than strictly a virtual world). I also cover what IBM and IBMers have been doing already, as well as a brief overview of what’s interesting in the world of education, both within IBM and in the wider world. Right at the end I included a teaser for what’s going on behind the firewall. The reasons for an internal metaverse are pretty obvious; while there will continue to be virtual world activities we’ll want to run in public, there are some situations in which IBMers would benefit from having a virtual world running on our own servers.

I learned a new word during the conference (always a sign of a good day). When discussing people being more ready to communicate online, often in the form of ranting and flaming in blogs and forums, I was introduced to the term ‘cyber-disinhibition‘. Daniel Goleman’s term describes how,

In order for this regulatory mechanism [of impulse inhibition] to operate well, we depend on real-time, ongoing feedback from the other person. The Internet has no means to allow such realtime feedback (other than rarely used two-way audio/video streams). That puts our inhibitory circuitry at a loss — there is no signal to monitor from the other person. This results in disinhibition: impulse unleashed.

It makes me wonder whether 3D virtual worlds, by bringing a palpable sense of presence, provide some of the real-world cues required to allow people to express themselves while helping prevent the negative effects of cyber-disinhibition. Certainly some of the research into interpersonal distance of avatars (see this study of nonverbal social norms in online virtual environments for a review) have been pretty interesting, and may suggest that the spatial cues in virtual worlds are already good enough to bring out our real-world social norms.

Update: video of my presentation is available from Eduserv’s site