metaverse

The prize for innovation in avatar interopability goes to ….

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Codemasters Colin McRae Dirt 2 on the Xbox 360
I was taking a look at the latest incarnation of off road console gaming. Codemasters Colin McRae Dirt 2 on the Xbox 360. The previous Dirt game was brilliant and it looks like this is going the right way too. The demo is even packaged with voice overs from Ken Block and Travis Pastrana indicating it is a demo (i.e. not just a disabled functions as with most demos).
Having had a blast around an excellent simulation of a Baja track and then an even more impressive and stunning rally stage set in Morroco I was thinking about how this mirror world, and the purity of the experience as a simulation blended with fun and some interesting game related features (such as rewind when you total the car) would not be one to have any quirky avatar or non car related expressions of personality in it. I often use Forza 2 (soon Forza 3)(as here in 2007) as an example of how expression and customization of things like cars are done in context and that interoperability is a social and branding activity more so than a technical challenge to move data from one environment to another. “We don’t want our avatar from X, wandering around in Y as it will break the atmosphere”, “yes but we can”.
I happened to pop into the demo customization options and selected something that said avatar as a cockpit customization. I was amazed, amused and impressed when on the replay of the hectic drive I saw this.
Dirt 2 - Embedded Avatar
My personalized xbox avatar dangling from the mirror, swinging around with ragdoll physics in car. It s such a subtle little idea, yet I was surprised. There in this real yet fun off road driving simulation, where mentally I was the driver of the car in overalls and helmet, hurtling and sliding through the desert, I was able to reference back to a little bit of my more global system wide visual persona. My predalike dreadlocked avatar with his new virtual t-shirt.
It did not break the spell, it fitted. The avatar was embedded in world yet not interfering with it. Well done to the Codies !

Whilst this feature was on the 360 I am sure there are equally interesting features on all the other versions it is out mid September (which whilst i am on the subject all the games that get release pre-xmas are always in mid September which make it mighty annoying when the predlets want to by me a birthday present for the end of August!
Colin McRae: Dirt 2 (Xbox 360)
Colin McRae: Dirt 2 (PS3)
Colin McRae: Dirt 2 (PC DVD)
Colin McRae: Dirt 2 (Wii)
Colin McRae: Dirt 2 (PSP)

What have I done to me now? Gizmoz

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I was investigating some other avatar creation tech and dropped into Gizmoz.
Increasingly there seems to be simple yet accurate ways to capture and model faces. In this case a single photo was enough to generate this image.

Of course whether we choose to represent our real faces, versions of us adjusted, or some much more abstract rendition in various places online is both personal preference and context.
Gizmoz seems like a lite version of Crazy Talk which incidently got a good few mentions on this weeks dogearnation podcast.

web.alive it’s looking good to me.

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epredalive2In exploring various virtual worlds it is always good when you are able to try some of your own content and interact with a space. My friends at Nortel let me use some space in web.alive to experience what the basic building blocks can be within the space.

Many of you will have visited the eLounge the Lenovo Thinkpad customer facing environment, which is very effective indeed. Remember Web.Alive is a web browser plugin powered by unreal.

I should add this little image was from me also experimenting with vmware and running NT on my MBP.

The key for me was that whilst logged in to this web plugin I was simply able to right click upload my Washing Away Cave Paintings pitch and there it was. Of course this sort of interaction is something that is key to many enterprise virtual worlds. They key here though is the web plugin nature of the client.

There are many other types of objects and surface behaviours but everyone always wants to see ppt working 🙂

Some other interestingly useful features are things like sound/voice proof offices. A particular feature I like as it was the glass cube offices that you could see a meeting occur but not hear it that I thought were important in the very old icelandic SmartVR system that I got to evaluate back around 2000. The dynamics of location, seeing who was gathering but not being party to it is a an important part of many offices. It is a degree of organizational and political transparency, but still keeping the conversations as “secret” as they need to be.

When you also see some of the things the guys have in the pipeline I think many of you will be very impressed as I was. That is there’s to unveil though.

Also if you want to visit a public web.alive instance that is not elounge Mellanium have a build of a furnace. It is a demonstration of an engineering visualization. http://furnace.projectchainsaw.com A handy hint if you want to see you avatar (3rd person) hit v or scroll wheel out. I quite like seeing my avatar in these environments yet prefer first person in games and driving sims for some reason.

I hope there will be more to come on the who, what, where and why I was noodling around in web.alive, so watch this space. That sounds like my Second Life post from 2006 that kicked this all off 😉

XBox360 update – Bought the t-shirt

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This week saw an update (a very quick to load one I should add) to the Xbox Live experience on the 360. As reported in virtual world news virtual goods are on the rise.
One of the key elements is that the avatars now have more than the free set of clothes to pick from, but instead have a range of items from 80 mspoints to 320 mspoints to adorn your representative online. For those of you who have not seen the 360 dashboard your friedns and contacts are always visible in avatar form as an integral part of the experience. When you play certain new games like 1 vs 100 the avatar is your representative in that environment. It is very much a blend of mii and ps3 home, but it is intriguing.
I thought I should try and buy a virtual item, though I kept it simple with this very cheap t-shirt. 50p or so I think it worked out as. As I have commented before these virtual items are the same principle as buying a mobile phone ringtone, except in this case you cant easily make them yourself.
Apparently some games will now be dishing out avatar kit. The problem comes from whether you feel you need a constant churn of looks or if you are happy to be recognised in some way shape or form. As some of the things are props rather than clothes this helps that problem go away, buying a light saber, a football or a chicken with a pulley (yes there is one) all augment your current look without altering it too much. Maybe one day there will be a proper predator look with the games in the pipeline. Sign me up for one of those please!
Avatar Xbox360 Virtual Items

So a few million people spending a few pounds each. That seems a reasonable business model?

G.I. Joe and the fat princess in PS3 Home, different views of the same thing

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There is some cool content for G.I. Joe the movie appearing on PS3 home. A set of clothing parts in the threads store. This is great as I can now cover my face, in protest at not being able to have green hair for some still inexplicable reason.
It was great to see the G.I. Joe clothes spread through home in various combinations. Here I am a mix of white ninja, black ninja and wearing Star Trek original series trousers. An interesting combination.
GI Joe based avatar
Whilst I was on I noticed a new promo space for a game called Fat Princess. It was a cartoon themed environment with lots of statues matching the game. Interestingly it had a little mini treasure hunt Xi style. In the environment (whilst still populated with other users) you are able to hunt cake hidden in little bird cages and answer eight questions on the game. This is not state of the art gaming, but I did feel the need to answer. It is also interesting as your view of the space is actually different to that of others. i.e. you wont see the cake unless you are personally on the quest, on completing the quest the princess changes into the larger version of the princess. This is a reward, but for the individual player. Everyone else will be seeing you as an avatar in world, but the princess will be the regular princess.
Fat Princess
This concept can be tricky for people lost in the concept of a unified world. There is no reason to not see a completely different representation of a world to every other user of that world. Of course there is then the question of what it is you are all there at the same time for in the first place.
One other twist was that completing the quest, bothering to engage with the advert in effect, gives you a virtual object. In this case the royal throne to place in your own apartment.
GI Joe Ninja meets Fat Princess on Ps3 Home
So here I am, in my lightly decorated apartment (without the ability to upload my own pictures and videos as I live in Europe and SCEE cant seem to get round UGC legal issues), wearing my G.I. Joe cool costume (that doubles as a protest for no green hair) sitting in my Fat Princess virtual throne that I won by walking around an immersive advert with lots of other people (mostly all wearing G.I. Joe clothes).

Its a bizzare mash of brands, advertising concepts and customer engagement. Oh, its fun too 🙂
A big shout out to Annie Ok for the showing the way with the G.I. Joe kit, previously doing Star Trek, Watchmen amongst others and also the Transformers Augmented Reality ( A film I only just got to see last week, but I loved it)

James Cameron – Avatar Augmented Reality

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It has been intriguing to see and hear various bits and pieces about James Cameron’s Avatar project over the past few years. It has been kept pretty much under wraps. At the virtual worlds conference way back in September 2008 we heard the keynote conversation from John Landau with Corey Bridges of Multiverse which alluded to the role of multiverse in the project. Cameron and Landau being on the advisory board of Multiverse, though we know little more than that.
However these videos are appearing on youtube of an Augmented Reality component to the merchandising.
It also looks like markers on the card are used as buttons to cause actions when they are covered from view by a finger pressing them. Its very impressive I think you will agree.

This is of course just the beginning of a massive hype machine, but as it is Cameron I think we can all be pretty confident this will be an awesome cross platform experience.

Business is about people, people play games

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Hence business is about games? This does not mean that business is about any highly structured rules based board game like monopoly, nor does it mean that it is about a counterstrike mission to capture a flag, though all of these do apply in some context to business. Instead it could be said that business is about the politics of people knowing one another a little better, for some that is to get the best form one another, for others it is to get the drop on someone and exploit a weakness.
In my move from intrapreneur to entrepreneur I am of course trying to understand which game it is that we are all playing. My observation is that it really is not any different either in or outside a large organization from the types of games that you play in order to get things done.
Interestingly a recent piece from Gamasutra at casual connect brought out some themes from a piece by Playdom VP of Game Design Steve Meretzky and Executive Producer David Rohrl, along with Hit Detection founder N’Gai Croal. This was of course to try and help people understand where social games fit into the landscape of the games industry. I fully agree with the trends identified in the piece, but I though I would apply these not to social games in AAA games industry, but to business as a game.

Trend 1: Virtual Worlds
Any organization of people, a.k.a. a corporate, is a really a virtual world. It has boundaries, access controls, terms of service. Metaverses help highlight this as people gather and form other corporate structures such as guilds.

Trend 2: Customization and Personalization
Individuals in a business all strive to either blend in or differentiate themselves, all businesses try to do the same in their market place.

Trend 3: Collections & Wish Lists
Aspirations of collecting rank, awards, accolades, prizes, end of year ratings all sit in regular business.

Trend 4: System Simulators
In games this applies to feeling some mastery over something other than blind luck. Being part of an system and seeing the impact of small adjustments is really the payoff.

Trend 5: Narrative
Established businesses trade on their brand, their reputation and what is means to engage with them. Companies place one another in a pecking order and treat competitors as the bad guys. This is all part of the story of business.

Trend 6: Making Missions More Interesting
Motivation for a team is important. Boredom and a feeling of worthless activity does not help a business grow. Making work interesting and challenging will always get the best from people.

Trend 7: Gift Invites
Come join our organization, as an employee or as a customer. We see this with all sorts of incentives to attract people to business. Vouchers, special deals, sales etc. all fit into gift invites.

Trend 8: Donations as Revenue
In many businesses it is regarded as “professional” when a salaried employee to invest more time and effort than is contracted to help the business. Asking customers for feedback, even with a potential prize for an answer, is another donation to a company.

Trend 9: New Horizons in Virtual Goods
I do not see any difference between a real and virtual good or product. A business has to provide something people value. If that is software, consulting, digital media or a car all business looks for new horizons for products.

Trend 10. Using Friends’ Gameplay Data
This would appear to fit with the old adage it’s not what you know but who you know. In all business relationships you will hear people refer to what others have done and where they fit in that social structure.

Trend 11. The iPhone and Social Games
How many businesses do not have a need for remote and mobile communications? In many ways it was the business user that caused the massive rise in mobile phone usage and the need to be permanently attached to the business.

Trend 12. Capitalizing on Player Resources
When someone chooses to work on a project, or with a business, or when a deal is made all parties involved are capitlizing on the existing resources of the parties involved.

So whether you are the largest corporation on the planet or the smallest would be startup you are in fact a casual game injected a global platform. The reach we all have now to organize and share is the same reach that is making social games so successful.
Just as the AAA games industry may have missed or turned its nose up initially to social games, AAA corporate business needs to make sure it does not turn its nose up to small interconnected business, or they may find themselves out flanks and their flags captured.

Sensing your presence, Handsfree 3d in Second life

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A great video by Mitch Kapor is doing the rounds. Part of the wave of things washing away the cave paintings we have of user input and computer output. It is interesting to see it hooked up to Second Life, which as chair of Linden Lab you would expect to see. However this shows that the technology and software is out there, and is coming to fruition to track our movements and get gesture based, controller free computing up and running. Like Project Natal on the 360 this starts to make things more accessible rather than us chimping on controllers and keyboards all the time.
Of course there is the issue of feedback, of muscle memory and patterns formed from understanding the resistance physics gives us, but that does not mean these are not going to be useful technologies. In fact having watched people (and also doing it myself) even when using a regular controller moving the body to somehow impart that extra turn, leaning back to slow down more means that there may well be a place for the hybrid solution. Controllers for precise feedback, knowing the limit of a steering lock in a car etc, but enhanced by body movement.

See more as it appears at http://www.handsfree3d.com/