Ian has already blogged this over at eightbar… this week’s series on technology on the BBC Newsnight programme features some coverage of one of our internal discussion groups, plus footage of IBM Hursley and a short interview with Ian himse…

The problems of scripts and load are a complicated one. How and where to distribute the load and architectural considerations as well as social ones come into focus here. e.g. If you presence creates a greater load at a large event is it ok to be asked to de-prim and run less scripts for the benefit of others?
This is highlighted somewhat in Snowcrash (the definitive novel on the subject of the metaverse) Avatars of people with cheaper equipment are less well represented. Which sort of hints at more distributed processing. The second life terrain is reffered to as a grid, however I am sure as we progress the more distributed nature of grid computing can be brought to the metaverse.
You can certainly make requests to and from the ‘real’ web world to get at applications. There are some considerations such as the fact the Linden Server is making the request so the http server responding has to be visible to that.
Avatars are a richer version of the current awareness we have in an online world. Obviously in real life if we are there people see us. Online we are starting to see ‘n users online’ or friends lists with pictures on instant messages. In some respects, travel, cost etc virtual conference will start to be better than RL. However…. we are still human and still crave real interaction. It will be a while before the virtual is indistinguishable from the real.
Security is certainly a concern too, but like any online collaborative environment that is a consideration. The way around that is totally private areas, firewalls, counter measures. Just as in real life.
I think finally that already this is more than just entertainment, my draw to this was, as a gsmer, it did not fulfil my gaming needs. So therefore that meant, to me, there was something else happening. What that something else was and what applications might arise is why is was so interesting.

I followed your two links. In relation to the first, yes I agree with the comments about telecons, I too find them cold, stilted and difficult to deal with. I much prefer vtc, but its too expensive in equipment and network load…and has a number of limitations such as being “tied” to the camera position. I also agree with the observations about informal interactions at the end of meetings. The data representation looks interesting, but is obviously only one of many potential ones (currently being limited to nodes and links).

I was travelling back home from London on the train today and opened my December IET magazine, and guess what was in it?…an article called “Another World” written by Chris Edwards on Second Life!!! The article raises a number of issues and certainly stimulated some futher questions.

First he describes a sound of “tappity tap” of someone typing at a keyboard and a message appearing. I have used 3D virtual worlds before, Microsoft used to have one available for example. However, having still not tried second life ‘for real’ yet (maybe this weekend) – I am making some assumptions. Presumably we are still limited to text input? If this is the case, has anyone thought of being able to speak into your avatar, such that a sound ‘field’ is modelled and generated around your avatar, such that those within a certain distance in the virtual world can hear what you are saying. In fact all of those within that distance can hear, allowing multi-party converations, even when you may not be facing the right direction. Server and comms loading problems again?

The articles talks about the problem of too many people brining their own scripts with them and slowing down the servers as a result, and that requests have been made for people not the bring those. Is there not an architectural solution to this problem, again based on the notion of distribution to share more of the computational load?

The article also raised the same question that I did, i.e. can you import “applications” or application outputs, into the virtual world?..at sufficient quality that they are legible to others in the virtual world?

There is a query about the value of avatars, and that syncrhonous collaboration spaces based on text may be sufficient, but then goes on to say that virtual conferences can be better than physical ones.

There is a suggestion that, as virtual worlds take hold in business there will be concerns about scalability and security. e.g. is someone sneaking in on your meetings to steal your ideas/IPR (I guess this also raises an issue about the potential for ‘virtual identity’ theft).

The article finishes on a positive note, describing multiverses, suggesting that though increasing use, people may find the ‘killer apps’ and that we will find many more uses for them than just entertainment.

I am interested to know if such environments might be valuable alternatives for virtual meetings, rather than sitting on the end of a telephone conference call or typing into a text window. Do such environments make virtual meetings richer and more realistic? Taking some of the themes in the programme, perhaps they might even allow us to do additional things that are not possible in the real world, like taking someone by the hand and flying them over a 3D representation of some data?

Can you use these environments to effectively point/refer to sub-picture elements – contained in pictures, diagrams, presentations, video etc. for meetings and teaching etc.?

Finally, are there decent alternatives to secondlife, that allow you to construct your own worlds in a way that is not beholden to the secondlife server system? One of the options might be to allow worlds to be constructed in a distributed fashion, so the environment is constructed out of a patchwork quilt of servers, each holding a part. I have searched for open source alternatives myself, but the impression I have formed is that progress is either slow or has come to a halt.

It seems that such environments might have some interesting implications for future social interaction, but personally I would rather see such environments in community hands rather than being owned and controlled by a few commercial suppliers.

IBM Second Life evangelist on BBC Newsnight

[…] I thought I�d post a couple of screenshots from the meeting, since there wasn�t a huge amount of in-world footage. Click through for larger images. […]