Yesterday the enterprise 2.0 conference saw the official release and announcements relating to Second Life Enterprise and of course featuring some preferred content in the form of Rivers Run Red’s Immersive Workspace and more to come via the Work Marketplace. It is interesting to see this happen both at something like an enterprise 2.0 conference and focussed as a packaged product in the way it is.
Back in April 2006 thru to Dec 2006 (which seems a very long while ago now) we said to one another as we (those early eightbars) realised that there was a huge scope for internal corporate communication…. wouldn’t this be great behind our firewall?
By September 2006 (after the first Wimbledon in Second Life) the US based CIO office had realised the potential and a few of us from places not just in the US ended up on that growing project to understand SL and all the other platforms and their implications to an internal corporate audience. This also started to lead to the more commercial based business unit forming, which interestingly is now part of the CIO office according the communications out of IBM.
This journey and the things that happened on the way (good and bad) all form part of the story I share with people in various ways including the in progress book on the subject.
Linden Lab focussing on enterprise and producing a product, however it is priced and packaged is an important further catalyst to this industry, one that those of us in IBM, Cisco, Sun etc. started to generate corporate and public interest in through our patronage. However this is now happening (unlike in 2006) in an era that has very many more potential direct competitors. many have been there for a while but will now be dropping into even more invitation to tender conversations, Proton Media, Forterra Olive, Teleplace, web.alive…. Equally there will be an increasing drive in take up of the hosted and self hosting services based on Opensim (SecondPlaces, ReactionGrid, Rezzable and SimHost ). Other platforms and standards such as Vastpark, or Wonderland for those who want to still explore and drive forward and develop things for themselves and get a step up on the packages. Services such as Venuegen, specialized in providing a particular quick access service also start to take a share of the market.
It is of course a huge market, business/enterprise communication relates to every employee in every company that has any form of electronic or remote communication. Like email, web and increasingly instant messaging and voip and social media in general it is essential business addresses the communication gaps we have generated. All these options may be confusing, but just pick one and get on with it!
I also still expect an actual games company to realize that their middleware and massive scaling and runtime abilities can be applied to a spin off market. So rather that enterprise business trying to figure out how to use games, games will figure out how to use enterprise business. With some of the developments this week too such as Unity3d becoming free to develop with and also Unreal 3 doing the same to some extent the future looks very rosy and very interesting.
However….. remember that the problems and challenges are not wholly technical. We are dealing here with social and cultural change. Something else I have experienced both the good and bad of and happy to share if you need to talk about the implications to your business, industry or life.
Avatar throwing – Bonfire night
I am not sure how I feel about this, but as I have been investigating how to turn my Evolver avatar into a Unity3d string puppet and then drop that on the iphone as part of an education in pipeline and development I have ended up with quick demo that works on the web.
In this demo you are able to click the spheres that that are above the avatar, each toggles between 3 modes on each click. Initially the state of each is off. When clicked once or twice the spheres then respond to the arrow keys or wasz game keys. The two active states merely change which direction in/out up/down the spheres will move which let you swing the avatar around. The middle sphere is connected to the spine, the rest to arms and legs.
I am experimenting with types of connection and the various weightings on the joints but I thought I would leave this lying around on the web.
So feel free to throw me around 🙂 Its a bit bonfire night themed, reminded me of penny for the guy as a kid.
Blink and you miss the future of sports broadcasting.
On the last Formula 1 race of the season (well done Jenson Button for becoming world champ the race before) not only was the coverage by the BBC brilliant, if nothing else for the fact that we had no adverts destroying the action and we had the return of “the Chain” as a them tune, but there was a little hint at the future of sports broadcasting.
This example may have come from the F1 company feed, or been part of the upgrade in racing brought by the Abu Dhabi circuit but it was the sort of thing we need to see more of.
The live video (replay) was blended into a rendered 3d model so that camera angles and analysis could be made after the event.
This is of course a little after the event and probably done manually in the tv suite, but as we did with Wimbledon and Second Life way back it is possible to rebuild live elements from data and allow viewers their own perspective on the action.
I hope the Olympics 2012 people were watching!
Happy Halloween from Feeding Edge
I could not resist this, we did not carve it in the end went for a more traditional look. Happy Halloween everyone.
More iphone Radgoll experiments
I carried on with a few ideas of what to do with the ragdoll version of my Evolver avatar and I ended up with this interesting behaviour. Which is sort of where I was heading. It is a form of emergent behaviour caused but the avatar being suspended by the two top spheres using a form of hinge. This combined with gravity and the bones and joints in the avatar lead it to create this dancing toy effect that is different each time it is run. Next is to wire the strings up to touch controls and then I have a full dancing avatar to play with on the iphone.
Iphone dancing on the ceiling
In my continued look at the quick things that can be done with a Mac, and Iphone, unity3d and some content (in this case my Evolver avatar) I thought I would see if the bones and animation worked ok and performed ok on the Iphone.
I was not being overly precise about defining the mappings of the ragdoll, but I did click on a few Kinematic check boxes to see what would happen.
This was the result. It does indeed animate itself, there is nothing I have put in other than asking for joints and physics it just dances away to itself.
It is amazing, the lengths we used to have to go to to make even the most basic animation happen, morphing 2d shapes on commodore 64’s and alike.
It feels to me that we have the potential for a huge bedroom coding movement now again. This was so quick to build and deploy that its hard to see why we all are not doing it.
Art, U2inSL and experiences in Second Life
My feeds today led me to look at a brilliant YouTube video that is over on New World Notes called Impressions by Willow Caldera. This video is wonderfully shot and shows a the very creative and expressive side of Second Life. It acts as a reminder (probably to those of us who preach about “business use” or who are starting to finally grok it all that there is much much more to all this than a bit of powerpoint and some business dressed avatars. I would recommend popping over to NWN and taking a look.
In following the links I saw this video too on the same channel about the U2inSL Warchild benefit gig.
U2 are back in the news again for using Youtube themselves (as opposed to this U2inSL who are a tribute act). However I still always manage to get U2inSL into any explanation of what this is all about.
There are several reasons for this.
1. Most people know who U2 are they are both part of the establishment and known innovators.
2. People listen to music all the time on the Radio, Ipods etc.
3. Bono is particularly known for charity work too.
Each of those have a way to reach people who don’t yet understand why we are all harping on about virtual worlds. Love or hate U2 it acts as personal conversation rather than a business one.
What happens at the concerts (as you can see from the video) is effectively a tribute act puppet show/impersonation. Yet it also has a crowd of people willing to watch listen and feel part of it. They are all passionate U2 fans, and they have gathered together to raise some real money for charity by collectively listening to their favourite tunes together.
Underlying all that we of course end up with copyright and image rights conversations, but in the case of U2inSL this really is a passionate fan base enjoying feel connected rather than someone making fake gucci bags for a quick buck.
As many of us keep pointing out, engaging and supporting these passionate fans whether you are a band, an author, a manufacturer of widgets is the key to the world today. Where those people happen to be and the way they are choosing to interact with one another is where you need to be joining in. Not a huge capital investment, not masses of PR and spin but just good old fashioned human to human conversation. Twitter, SL, Facebook…. whatever comes next, you just have to be there.
Predator design on Feeding Edge car
Further to my previous post with some Feeding Edge logos splattered over a Subaru, I just used what little graphic design talent I have to create this multi layered rendition of a predator mask. So I now have both a version of the corporate presence and my own merged together on a GT500.
I think it looks pretty good, but then beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Update: Using the subaru scoop as part of the predator mask 🙂
More product placement – Feeding Edge Forza3
Ok so it will not win any prizes for design (yet) but here is my custom Scooby in superb Forza 3.
This user created content means that people I race with online with this car get a Feeding Edge advert for free.
How are you promoting your brand across social networks like Xbox Live?
Thankyou to the audience at Smarter Technology
On tuesday night I was invited to pop along in Second Life to a Smarter Technology (sponsored by IBM ironically). Jon and Rissa kindly asked me to show and tell on the various elements of presenting in Second Life that I stumbled upon when preparing for the conference in Derry earlier in the year.
I basically had a pop at all the single screen powerpoints that we end up doing in world, just replicating what we do in offices. The space and dynamic nature of virtual worlds means we can do so much more. Part of what I do is wear the presentation elements, this is of course a hack around not being able to rez, but it works and has some nice side effects.
I used most of the flavours of the pitch that I wrote about here and yes we did get onto 3d printing. So whilst the presentation was about presentation styles I also tried to inject elements of the content in aswell so it was not overly meta.
I got Jon to set up my first page on the big screen, then also to break the build with a long wide collection of slide similar to the ones that can be seen on IQ which is a presentation trick people use to show the entire pitch and move along it (which is well on the way to breaking the PPT metaphor)
I had also built some examples of the quest for 2d whiteboarding (which we still need) but how that can be done in a different way in these environments, we have dynamic creation, we have 3d immersion why stick to 2d?
(These shots were from when I popped along to check the space out so I did not grief people too much)
Still the favourite was the giant hands though I think.
Photo by Ishkahbibel
So a huge thankyou to all who tuned in or attended. The discussions and questions we great. It was mixed mode in that text flew past and I answered mostly by voice, something that still takes some getting used to. However the sheer amount of text activity meant I knew everyone was there 🙂
I know right at the end we descended into Mac/Iphone/Xbox/Windows 7 discussions but its kind of like the parrot sketch for Monty Python its part of a gathering to discuss such things.
If anybody missed an answer to a question they asked, or I missed the question altogether in the live flow then please feel free to ping me inworld, or comment here or twitter or….. I am not hard to find 🙂
IQ and Hursley are still there in world, there are a few plots left to rent on Hursley and the half a sim on IQ is also available though it has a furrie colony borrowing it at the moment let me know if you need some SL space.