future

Luxurious Faberge pushing the boundaries of web selling, here comes the turtles.

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I was chatting today to Andy Burns a longstanding friend and former colleague (wimbledon and interactive media centre etc.) about his recent project. He has been doing a huge amount of work with Faberge and their new rebranded website.
H082059 Sadko Sea Horse Brooch
I found what had been done intriguing and also very related to the evolution of the web and to some extent to the values and drivers of virtual worlds.
So Faberge is an extreme luxury brand, most of us will never really be shopping with them will we? However the website is not a simple catalogue to show you nice pictures. It is geared around a shared web browsing experience between the client and a live consultant/sales person. Access to the site is only for those people who Faberge deem viable customers. Customers who do get access are directed and talked through the various pieces that suit them, the salesperson delivers pages to them, with ultra high bandwidth imagery of the products.
So Faberge are creating a true store online, one with staff, people connecting with people. Its very high end, but very much where the web, social media, virtual worlds etc fit. CNN reported on the press launch of some of this (see below). If you are rich enough to get on the site, well you wont be reading this blog will you?

The other interesting things is that this shared browsing, joining other on webpages is one of the key points in the recently of stealth Operation Turtle. This may mean that in the future we will be able to shop and research together just as we do in 3d virtual worlds, with both friends and representatives of companies (when needed) without needing a highly expensive build to do it. Its people in the equation that makes a difference. It is why education works online when you have teachers and students in the same place, on the same page, looking at the same thing (not just filling in forms). Obviously we don’t need this for all products and services, but the ones that we do need it for working with people will make all the difference.

Andy happened to pop over to near where I live in his boat (hence the conversation), Ricky came along too. All very Rock and Roll I think you will agree? No Faberge samples changed hands either!
Andy's Boat

Evolving epredator

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I have been experimenting with many avatar creation sites recently for some projects. I have two experiments I usually try, one is the predator themed version. This usually tests the creative flexibility of a system, with a mask or mandibles messing up most systems.
The other is some green (preferably spikey) haired version thats a caricature in some way of me.
Most recently I looked at Evolver.com a great looking avatar creation service that is designed as a web based wizard for rich 3d content which is then exportable in a variety of formats, from animations to yes, 3d prints of the avatar.
It is also interesting that there is a much more complex and richer export to 3d applications with rigged bones etc for Maya and alike. This seems a good addition though I suspect that many of the users of the high end packages are already skilled in design or have suitable models to work with. I have to try and see if it fits into my “not quite a graphic designer but with aspirations” tool chain and it would be great to grab the custom me and pop it into Unity3d.
evolver epredator
evolver epredator face
This is a sample video the site makes for you with animation of the character too.

Augmented Reality API – Build your own future, pixels or atoms

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Thanks to @abc3d for tweeting this link on ReadWriteWeb for the Wikitude Android Augmented Reality open API

One thing to not forget in all this is that whilst we can augmented physical locations with information we can also augment virtual locations in the same way. So not only are the virtual worlds visual databases and user created content wikis that can be used to provide information out to the real world, they are also clients that can receive augmented data from multiple locations. The mobile phone magic window application clearly has some future, but there is so much more we can do too 🙂 Don’t forget we can also augment our reality by creating physical instances of things with rapid fabrication and 3d printers too.
Wash away those cave paintings people.

Immersive banner ads, new worlds and exposing platform choice

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In the ever evolving and growing virtual world business we are seeing yet more interesting changes since my previous post.
Blue Mars is entering the fray as a virtual world experience. It is one powered by a high end game engine Crysis CryEngine 2. I suspect this will get quite a bit of interest from people who regard some of the other places as to old or to weird. It looks like its content development is a gated process rather than the freeform nature of some of the other platforms.
I have not been in the beta yet, I guess my invitation got lost in the post? When I do get in I will give a better description. As far as I am concerned more platforms is good, and it validates the direction we have all been going.
Also the last few days 3Di made another anouncement. Hot on the heels of the “opensim in a browser” they have extended that to use the same principle for more immersive banner advertising.
3d banner
Whilst the press release does claim a first, which as always is debatable, it does look like some product wrapping has gone on to enable this deployment.
Of course it is already possible with other plugin approaches such as as web.alive to have an embedded virtual world on a webpage, or richer experiences with unity3d embedded in a page. The interesting part here is of course the use of opensim, which indicates that the construction of the content viewed by the plugin is able to be very simple.
I started to wonder if we were realistically going to start to see user generated content in banner ad virtual worlds?

Closing Thought Springer Style
Lots of ways of interacting may seem confusing and worrying to people, and indeed investing time in places either as a company or an individual does have its challenges when there are lots of places to choose from. However this is the nature of the internet. There is not one website, one application platform, one way of doing things. Virtual worlds are on that continuum.
In development there is of course a difference, running a website on Websphere, Coldfusion etc has technically challenges, coosing a backend database or language also is important, but generally your customers don’t know or don’t care. Having an HTML layout or some Flash plugins start to make a different to your users experience. The exposed face of the system (including its speed and performance) gets the focus of any user. With any virtual world you end up with a user experience and feel straight away regardless of the things you build or provide in the environment. The choice of platform and access to it has both technical direction and creative direction all wrapped into one. You enhance that experience with your extra creative and technical endeavours. So the technical implementation of the virtual world and its base experience and branding is very important, it has exposed what used to be behind the scenes technical platform choices and given them a face. A location both in a choice of which virtual world or worlds and within a particular one, has become important. In many ways the degree of user perception and experience that impacts the platform choices is an anti-pattern to cloud computing. In cloud we (as users) don’t really care where something runs, how much storage, how many processors, what the plumbing is, we just want it to be there when we need it. With the extremely visual and socially engaging nature of virtual worlds we absolutely do care about where something is, where we are, who we are associated with.
The question, for both us as users, as customers and as businesses is which platform to go for. The answer is not straightforward, but I would suggest that with the increasingly low cost of entry to these just pick one you like the vibe of. Holding back to wait for the best of breed pick would be the same as not having a customer database installed because you weren’t sure if DB/2 was better than Oracle or MySQL, so you just did not bother. However I would also suggest that you engage people to help you describe that vibe, people in your organization (or outside it 😉 ) that mix the technical direction with the creative direction.
You need to find people who are a blend of techie, have an eye for design, a feel for social interaction online and a passion for pushing things forward. There are lots of people like that out there, usually buried in your organizations. Please find them and grow them.

Browsers, plugins and virtual world steps in the right direction

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We have great conversations in the virtual world industry about mass adoption of virtual worlds and how that might happen. Usually all the barriers to adoption are human not technical. Social resistance of world x or practice y or risk z within a particular business or social community. Some of this is based on fear or on thinking there will be a lack of control. However in all this is the great saviour of mass adoption. “Oh thats OK it works in a browser, no special hardware/software/IT Policy/training/implementation… etc is going to be needed so lets just adopt it.”.
That of course is a fallacy, but none the less I will take adoption trigger wherever I can and the more avenues to enagage with a virtual world the better. Of course Facebook, blogs, Twitter, Youtube etc all run in a browser and require little effort to access them, but still those scared of a revolution in communication will want to block them just in case people waste time on them.
That said there have been some very interesting developments the past few weeks with browser integration and virtual worlds.
Second Life announced and let out its Media Plugin framework into the wild (and a much improved website for us residents too). For those who don’t get involved in the details at the moment Second Life is able to do various things with content from outside of the virtual world. 1. Play a quicktime movie on a surface using the quicktime installed on your computer (or stream audio) 2. Place a read only version of a webpage on a surface, 3. Make requests for data out into the ether that is the internet and respond to that data (That was how Wimbledon worked).
The new plugin architecture lets that principle of using quicktime become open to people that want to write new plugins that we can then all take advantage of and use accordingly. Hence we have seen demos of remote terminal with VNC already crop up.
It is interesting that this stops the Second Life client being an extra client on the desktop and starts to make it actually a Browser that does streaming 3D as well. Web browsers really are just collection of plugins that do various things, the most used plugin for graphics tends to be Flash, but as you will have noticed this is not a download free plugin anymore as constant updates are required.
As we all become more literate with updating plugins ( or plugin providers become more more lazy with permanent updates), and as plugins get validated or certified by more IT departments and virus checkers then the always on nature of the web means a plugin is not the issue it once was.
This video from AimeeTrescothick uses the test client for a plugin (rather than a deployed one) but it shows using VNC to remote access into other machines. An example that anything can be wrapped in a plugin and delivered onto a surface in Second Life.

All the example we are seeing tend to be flat, but with a little bit of work and thought we can texture any surface with any data and this may act as a way to bring content rendered on another platform in world at least for viewing and with some interaction without actually copying assets from one place to another and causing copyright issues. I demonstrated this with a live rendered video avatar placed onto a sphere back in March 2008. The aim being to show that even with simple video replace you can get deliver content across worlds live.
The other interesting report was that of the the 3Di opensim viewer in a browser. This time a plugin to a web browser to enable access to the virtual environment side by side with web content. This was covered on New World Notes, and is well worth an investigative look.
A whole host of plugins already exist (and more on the way) for browser ultra rich content, Unity3d, Torque3d, Flash.
Of course Web.alive, Metaplace, ProtonMedia, Forterra, Qwaq, Vastpark, and vanilla Opensim all provide various degrees of this too, some have plugins, some are plugins but the key is nothing is isolated. These are not supposed to be locked away structured game experiences, they provide live integration between people, experiences and data when they physically cant be together in a real space.
So we have an increasing number of technical implementations to show information, some of it 3d, in web browsers, in custom clients even on handhelds. We have network connectivity to allow live interactions between people in those environments. Clearly the more ways to access and interact the more likely people are to just do that.
So just as we have seen the open letter to your boss, and an open letter to your metaverse evangelist we need a very simple open letter to everyone.
Don’t be scared, it will be alright, you can benefit from this revolution.

SXSW 2010- Second Life Where are they now? go vote please :)

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John Swords asked if I would be up for making the journey from the UK to Texas for the SXSW event next year to be part of his panel Second Life Where are they now. I said yes straight away. Panels are democratically decided, so get voting please.
Its an ideal panel for those of us who have made major changes in our lives, in my case starting an enterprise surge then moving from intrapreneur to entrepreneur because of it.
Swords post about it is here and the voting form is here
I think the subject is right up our collective virtual streets, and specifically the fact this was no dead end but the start of something much bigger for everyone.
So you are you going to vote yes and give me a reason to dig into the Feeding Edge travel budget and head for Texas in 2010
Voting closes September 4th

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 😉

3D Printing hits mainstream BBC TV

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A big thanks to Andy Piper for tweeting this. He was watching Bang Goes the Theory last night on BBC1, which is a prime time science investigation show. On it the one of the presenters, Dallas, went and had a full body scan and then showed a laser sintering 3d printer build the model of him from that scan.
3dprintbbc
The show was not actually about 3d printing, it was a prop they built to investigate bio degrading plastic, by then destroying his mini me.
The 12 inch figurine was rendered in a large machine, but of course there are many smaller printers and you dont always have to wear a white coat and glasses. The 3d body scan was part of the process, but as 3d Printers can build anything you don’t always have to go from such a complex to gather model.
It will be interesting to see the viewing figures for this show, as now that means a whole host of people who had never heard of or seen 3d printing will have seen it was real, not science fiction. A bit of a shock 15 minutes after Eastenders I am sure. I also wonder in this sparked any future Fabricaneurs to realize the impact of this technology on the planet?