Reality Augmented, Virtually

Wagner James Au has a brilliant post on New World Notes about a project at Georgia Tech called AR Second Life, which integrates Augmented Reality features into the open source Second Life client.

Last summer, Ian blogged here on Eightbar about an experiment with running the ARTag system alongside Second Life, and augmenting SL with additional 3D content, like this…

The Georgia Tech project goes the other way, augmenting the real world with live content from SL. Like this…

It hints at a future in which the lines between virtual worlds and real world will be crossed by more than just the use of a keyboard, mouse and monitor combination. The ability to see and interact with other people in virtual worlds is one of the things that has allowed interest in 3D environments to expand far beyond what we ever saw back in the days of (largely single-user) ‘virtual reality’. Being able to go beyond clunky user interfaces and blend those interactions naturally and intuitively with the real world is something I expect we’ll see a lot more of this year.

"Oh, it has losers…"

The US version of The Office (which does an excellent job of being almost as funny as the BBC version) is no stranger to life online. It’s fun to spot Kevin, Meredith, Creed, Roy, Pam all on MySpace, and Dwight has a blog. This week they dipped into Second Life. The very same week as CSI:NY; It’s all getting very mainstream.

Of course, the Office’s treatment of SL was as tongue-in-cheek as you’d expect…

Dwight: “Second Life is not a game. It is a Multi User Virtual Environment. It doesn’t have points or scores  or winners or losers.”

Jim: “Oh, it has losers.”

Steve Nelson at Clear Ink, the team behind bringing the office into SL for the episode, has written about the project and carefully lists the locations and clothing used.

Update: Aleister Kronos has been blogging and engaging in very interesting discussion about the nicely viral SL stuff the Office (through Clear Ink) have been doing in Second Life. Here are some links: part 1, part 2, part 3.

VWF pre-conference workshop

Both Ian and I are (for once) in the same place for much of this week at the Virtual Worlds Forum conference. I’m actually speaking at the ‘harnessing enterprise virtual worlds‘ pre-event workshop today, as part of the following lineup:

  • Steve Prentice (Gartner) – What are enterprise virtual worlds?
  • Ron Edwards (Ambient Performance) – Harnessing the advantages of enterprise virtual worlds
  • Dele Atanda (Diageo) – Case study (their work in Second Life with Rivers Run Red and IBM)
  • Roo Reynolds (IBM) – Building a community within a (big) company
  • Chris ‘Satchmo Prototype’ Carella (Electric Sheep Company) – Understanding the human factor
  • Sara De Freitas (Serious Games Institute) – The impact on education

Here are my slides. I’ll try to add the audio track later today. You might want to open the presentation itself and click the “comments on slide x” tab to see the speaker notes.

A nice warmup for the conference and it was really good to meet Chris/Satchmo face-to-face for the first time.

IBM, Virtual Worlds and Standards – a roundup

Although I’m missing the conference in San Jose this week, I am watching the breaking news from the event with rabid interest. First, we have the news itself. There was the official IBM release of course, and it hit the official Linden Lab blog too.

“Linden Lab and IBM will collaborate on integrating virtual worlds and the current Web, improving the stability of the platform, increasing interoperability, securing transactions, and bringing us closer to the creation of universal avatars.”

Next, there are the people reporting the news. The organisers of the current conference in San Jose covered the story on their blog, pointing out the highlights, which are:

  • Universal Avatars
  • Security-rich Transactions
  • Platform stability
  • Integration with existing Web and business processes
  • Open standards for interoperability with the current Web

The Reuters story (carried by a huge number of news sources) also had summary and quotes from Colin Parris (the VP in charge of this stuff at IBM)…

An open system would let people create one avatar that would keep the same basic appearance and customer data no matter where it was in cyberspace.

“It is going to happen anyway,” said Colin Parris, IBM vice president of digital convergence. “If you think you are walled and secure, somebody will create something that’s open and then people will drain themselves away as fast as possible.”

Now, we have the analysis, which gets really interesting. Read/Write Web asks “Is the move towards interoperability a meaningful announcement and what kind of future could it lead to?, inviting Wagner James Au, Barb Dybwad and Eric Rice to share their thoughts.

On the more tongue-in-cheek side, Nicholas Carr asks “Can I bring my flame thrower into Second Life?” predicting that “About five minutes after the gates come down, all the residents of Second Life will have been made the slaves of powerful Warcraft clans.” which is hilarious, but perhaps intentionally misses the point slightly.

Aleister Kronos says

“Don’t lose sleep over this in your excitement, boys and girls. It will take a little while to arrive. The point is that this is now out in the open, following months of speculation – and the parties involved go beyond just IBM and Linden Lab. I understand that at least 20 companies were represented at last night’s meeting”

Which is a really good point. This is far bigger than just an IBM + Linden Lab announcement; the discussions and announcements happening at the conference are rather larger and more exciting even than that. And just as well too, because Bobbie Johnson at the Guardian Unlimited rather hits the nail on the head:

“I don’t really want my avatar to move between a series of closed virtual environments: I want a single, linked virtual environment that I can move around freely.”

And that’s exactly where we need to take this goal of interoperability and standards in virtual worlds. A nod towards standards is not enough. To allow virtual worlds to inter-operate will require the whole industry (including initiatives like the Metaverse Roadmap and the Architecture Standards Working Group to name a couple) to help in building partnerships, agreements and standards.

The Unofficial Tourists’ Guide to Second Life – factcheck

My friend Nick was kind enough to lend me his copy of The Unofficial Tourists’ Guide to Second Life by Paul Carr and Graham Pond, and couldn’t help point out a few interesting inaccuracies as he did so.  Here is my open letter to the authors, in order to correct some minor problems…

Page 115 – 116 (under ‘Shopping and commerce’), the history of IBM in Second Life is told. IBM’s CEO is named as Edward Palmisano (that would be Sam, actually).

“At the time of writing, the IBM island Hursley, is being kept strictly under wraps, so we’ll have to wait and see what IBM has in mind for its vast virtual market.”

I can only assume the wording must have been written a while ago, since we’ve been quite open about what goes on at Hursley island since September 2006 and the IBM cluster of sims since December 2006.

Even worse…

“Incidentally, the vast majority of groups in Second Life are free to join. Because it’s not about money – it’s about community. IBM Employees Worldwide, however, costs a Linden tenner. Make of that what you will.”

What I make of it is that ‘IBM Employees Worldwide’ is by no means the official IBM group, or the only group for IBMers. Searching Second Life for ‘IBM’ groups gives an amazing array of groups but not all of them have been created by IBM or even IBM employees. In fact, anyone can create a group, and while the goal of bringing people together is a good one it’s unfortunate that there’s a joining fee. Personally, I would never join a group in SL that charged for the privilege.

 

Page 219 (under ‘Useful Second Life websites’) eightbar.co.uk gets listed. Yay. Embarrassingly, it’s introduced as

“The home of Roo Reynolds, the man tasked by IBM to spend much of his first life in Second Life…”.

Eek. Eightbar is very much a group effort, but I can’t let that introduction pass without pointing to Ian ‘epredator’ Hughes, by far the most prolific writer here on Eightbar. Introducing this blog as “the home of Roo Reynolds” is true, but gives a very incomplete picture. Anyone who knows the story of Eightbar will know that it was Ian who got me excited about virtual worlds and since the earliest days he’s been a hugely influential part of Eightbar and IBM’s work in Second Life. He’s also the guy behind Wimbledon in Second Life, something for which I somehow also get credit in the same paragraph.

Other than that, it looks like a relatively interesting book. I shall pick through it properly soon. It’s always going to be a challenge to create a rough guide to such a diverse place as Second Life, but Paul and Graham do a decent job of covering some of the interesting areas. It manages to introduce the subject of Furries, Svarga, Dublin, Darfur, Jessie, Luskwood, Gor, Tringo, Aloft, Midnight City, Pontiac/Motorati, Copybot, Teledildonics, and lots more besides.

For future reference, I’m always happy to proof-read any copy that authors are thinking of writing about IBM in virtual worlds. 🙂

More art in virtual worlds. AM Radio rocks.

Back in July I shared Robbie Dingo’s beautiful ‘Watch the World(s)’ machinima. Today I was equally blown away by some of AM Radio’s amazing creations, captured as a video by Aeron Copeland.  Both are Eightbar members and long-time explorers and builders in Second Life.

 

There’s not much I can add to that, other than “wow”. I’m delighted, since I’ve been looking for some examples of art in virtual worlds for a talk I’m giving next month for the IT For Arts community at the Wigmore Hall in London. If you have more examples I should know about (doesn’t have to in Second Life, and could be any sort of art, including theatre, sculpture, …) do feel free to share them.

Serious Virtual Worlds 2007, Coventry

Back from a couple of days at the Serious Virtual Worlds conference in Coventry. The speakers and their topics were:

Thursday 13th September

(Detailed notes from day 1)

Friday 14th September

  • Tim Foresman – Digitial Earth and Virtual Worlds
  • Lizbeth Goodman, SMARTlab  – Virtual worlds community applications
  • LeRoy Heinrichs – Serious worlds for biology and medicine
  • Richard Smithies, TruSim – Creating a medical training game
  • Claus Nehmzow, PA Consulting – doing business in virtual worlds
  • Roo Reynolds (um, that’s me)- virtual worlds for corporate collaboration
  • Dave Taylor, NPL – VWs for informal education and knowledge transfer
  • Majid Al-Kader – Logicity: a real-time climate change game
  • Jim Piggot, CEO TPLD – Applying serious games to curriculum for excellence

(Detailed notes from day 2)

It was great to catch up with Christian, Dave, Ren and Tish in person, as well as a chance to meet lots of other interesting people.

The presentations and video archive is being made available on Wednesday from http://seriousgames.org.uk/. For now there were a bunch of of at the conference taking photos and Andy Powell grabbed some great screenshots of the Second Life portion of the event. My presentation “virtual worlds for corporate collaboration“, complete with audio, is already online too.

Visit the slideshow itself to see a brief text overview of each slide, or see more background on my own blog.

Other events on the radar for Ian and me later this year:

IBM Virtual World Guidelines

The world is positively abuzz this morning with news of guidelines being released by IBM as a code of conduct for IBMers in virtual worlds.

Lots of news sources (including TIME, USATODAY, the Examiner, the San Jose Mercury News and more) are carrying an Associated Press story talking about the guidelines. Since nobody seems to be linking to the guidelines themselves, I’ll provide a link to the guidelines in full

What’s in them? Let’s see. The introduction begins

IBM believes that virtual worlds and other 3D Internet environments offer significant opportunity to our company, our clients and the world at large, as they evolve, grow in use and popularity, and become more integrated into many aspects of business and society. As an innovation-based company, IBM encourages employees to explore responsibly and to further the development of such new spaces of relationship-building, learning and collaboration.

There is a summary section of guidelines, which I’ll reproduce here

  1. Engage. IBM encourages its employees to explore responsibly – indeed, to further the development of – new spaces of relationship-building, learning and collaboration.
  2. Use your good judgment. As in physical communities, good and bad will be found in virtual worlds. You will need to exercise good judgment as to how to react in these situations – including whether to opt out or proceed. 
  3. Protect your – and IBM’s – good name. At this point in time, assume that activities in virtual worlds and/or the 3D Internet are public – much as is participation in public chat rooms or blogs. Be mindful that your actions may be visible for a long time. If you conduct business for IBM in a virtual world or if you are or may appear to be speaking for or on behalf of IBM, make sure you are explicitly authorized to do so by your management. 
  4.  Protect others’ privacy. It is inappropriate to disclose or use IBM’s or our clients’ confidential or proprietary information – or any personal information of any other person or company (including their real name) – within a virtual world. 
  5. Make the right impression. Your avatar’s appearance should be reasonable and fitting for the activities in which you engage (especially if conducting IBM business). If you are engaged in a virtual world primarily for IBM business purposes, we strongly encourage you to identify your avatar as affiliated with IBM. If you are engaged primarily for personal uses, consider using a different avatar. 
  6. Protect IBM’s and others’ intellectual property. IBM has a long-established policy of respecting the intellectual property of others, and of protecting its own intellectual property. Just as we take care in our physical-world activities to avoid infringement of intellectual property rights and to provide proper attribution of such rights, so we must in our activities in virtual worlds – in particular with regard to the creation of rich content.
  7.  IBM business should be conducted in virtual environments only with authorization. You should not make commitments or engage in activities on behalf of IBM unless you are explicitly authorized to do so and have management approval and delegations. If you are authorized, you may be asked by IBM management to conduct IBM business through a separate avatar or persona reserved for business use. You should certainly decide to use a separate avatar or persona if you think your use of an existing one might compromise your ability to represent IBM appropriately. 
  8.  Be truthful and consistent. Building a reputation of trust within a virtual world represents a commitment to be truthful and accountable with fellow digital citizens. You may be violating such trust by dramatically altering your digital persona’s behavior or abandoning your digital persona to another operator who changes its behavior. If you are the original creator or launcher of a digital persona, you have a higher level of responsibility for its behavior. 
  9. Dealing with inappropriate behavior. IBM strives to create a workplace that is free from discrimination or harassment, and the company takes steps to remedy any problems. However, IBM cannot control and is not responsible for the activity inside virtual worlds. If you are in a virtual environment in conjunction with your work at IBM and you encounter behavior that would not be acceptable inside IBM, you should “walk away” or even sign out of the virtual world. You should report abuse to the service provider. And as always, if you encounter an inappropriate situation in a virtual world which you believe to be work-related, you should bring this to the attention of IBM, either through your manager or through an IBM internal appeal channel.
  10. Be a good 3D Netizen. IBMers should be thoughtful, collaborative and innovative in their participation in virtual world communities – including in deliberations over behavioral/social norms and rules of thumb.
  11. Live our values and follow IBM’s Business Conduct Guidelines. As a general rule, your private life is your own. You must, however, be sensitive to avoid activities in a virtual world that reflect negatively on IBM. Therefore, you must follow and be guided by IBM’s values and Business Conduct Guidelines in virtual worlds just as in the physical world, including by complying with the Agreement Regarding Confidentiality and Intellectual Property that you signed when you became an IBM employee. It is obviously most important to do so whenever you identify yourself as an IBMer and engage in any discussions or activities that relate to IBM or its business, or use any of IBM’s communications systems or other assets to participate in a virtual world.

It goes on to discuss the following topics in more detail

  • Launching Digital Personas and Disclosing Their Identities
  • Appearance
  • Digital Persona Ownership & Responsibility
  • Identities that Span Multiple Environments
  • Protecting IBM Intellectual Property Assets
  • Respecting Intellectual Property of Others
  • Doing Business in a Virtual World
  • Export
  • Encountering Inappropriate Behavior
  • On Your Own Time

All of which make a lot of sense to me, but you can read them for yourself to see if you agree. The document concludes with a common sense summary:

IBMers are encouraged to engage, to learn and to share their learning and thinking with their colleagues. That is what it means to be part of an innovation company. As we do so, our best guideline is to approach virtual worlds in the same way we do the physical world – by using sound judgment and following and being guided by IBM’s values and the Business Conduct Guidelines. Remember that IBM’s integrity and reputation, as well as your own, are in your hands. If you are unsure of the correct action or behavior at any stage, speak to your manager, your HR partner or an IBM attorney.

If you’ve ever heard of IBM’s blogging guidelines here you’ll recognise the pattern here. (Incidentally, I always loved the introduction: “In 1997, IBM recommended that its employees get out onto the Net — at a time when many companies were seeking to restrict their employees’ Internet access. We continue to advocate IBMers’ responsible involvement today in this new, rapidly growing space of relationship, learning and collaboration.”). Things are not so different now.

The baseline is that every IBMer agrees to to a code of business conduct, the Business Conduct Guidelines, which define and expand on IBM’s values as well as giving concrete examples of what it means to act ethically. Building on that, the blogging guidelines explicates the conduct guidelines in the context of blogging, outlining how we interact in blogs. It’s exactly the same story for the virtual worlds guidelines; they simply expound on the same code of practice and ethics we all agree to, putting them in the context of virtual worlds. As with the blogging guidelines, they were not written by a drone in Armonk but were written (collaboratively, on a wiki of course) by the virtual universe community inside IBM which was already exploring virtual worlds. That has to be A Good Thing.

When IBM published its blogging guidelines, many companies quite openly borrowed and adapted them for their own use. I wonder if we’ll see something similar with the virtual worlds guidelines.

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

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.