This is something that has been cooking since Linden Lab’s 2008 partnership with IBM : an appliance for an Enterprise version of Second Life. The price is a bit hefty, 55KUSD, but for corporation with many remote locations who recognize the value of Virtual World to organize live meetings without the need of actually having people fly to a same spot, this is going to be a good value for money. The only drawback is that it still requires a 3D video card in your laptop to render somehow nicely (read, LL, please do invest more in your viewer!).

I hope F-Secure will try this soon, since this would definitely help save on plane fares and phone bills !

If you’re a corporation and you’re wondering what Virtual World could bring to internal communication processes, I suggest you read Thinkbalm’s reports on the topic who are more than insightful (I’ve been myself a contributor to some).

Orange Island has been one of the livest place in Second Life for the past couple of years. With high-level conferences and events the highland was really showing how SL can be used by a company to create and distribute a corporate image in virtual worlds. I had the chance to be part of a few panels as a former SL resident (yeah Linden Labs killed my account and dropped ALL my inventory – suckers !!!).
I guess this just stresses the fact that SL has not been evolving for years now and that the enthusiasm around this platform is stating to fade, while real corporate use-cases start at last to emerge.

Total Imersion and Mattel just released the game cards for the new Avatar movie. This is probably the first full-scale implementation of Total Immersion’s augmented reality technology in a mass market consumer product. They had this amazing demos for years with Pokemon cards fighting one-another.
Congratulations, hope this will be the first of many successful consumer products for them!

Technologyreview has a nice cover of this week’s Siggraph 2009.
One innovative interface that really caught my attention is this work from INRIA merging camera analysis for precise motion detection and a HMD for full immersion. Results are stunning but as they say “A cluster of PCs is needed to perform the necessary image capture and 3D modeling”.
Indeed, camera processing is always a pain, as at VR-WEAR we developed a mod to the Second Life viewer using the webcam to analyse the user’s facial expression and paste it to his avatar, we witnessed some serious processing power trouble between our algorithms and the already ultra CPU-savvy Second Life browser. Anyway, can’t wait for these things to get mainstream and maybe game consoles such as Xbox 360’s Natal project will give enough power to let the mass market experience this level of interaction.

This is my networker of a wife’s dream, being able to tell in a public place who’s who by just firing your phone (and thus saving you the hassle of asking the waiter to investigate….
Pretty nice concept video (all fake) but illustrating brilliantly the idea.

Thinkbalm is probably the most interesting analyst group I’ve seen on the Immersive Internet field. They just released a Machinima where they present a lot of data on the status of Immersive Internet for Businesses in a very unique way. While the video might be a bit long for the web (9mins) it’s really inspiring!

I’ve been a pretty big fan of Second Life since its release. Have had a sim that we used at WaveStorm for demo purposes, vr-wear developed mods to the SL viewer with unique head facial analysis abilities and I am an active contributor to Erica Driver’s Thinkbalm focus group on the professional use of immersive Internet.
Although I’m obviously a virtual worlds enthusiast, I feel the change of management and objectives at Linden Labs destroyed the dynamism of the community surrounding the project.
Indeed, SL is definitely a work in progress, we all know that, and the full virtual world thing is only at its premises, as such the community has alway been very supportive on the efforts made by LL in delivering the vision and developing the use cases. Nevertheless, since LL changed management, the whole system has been stalling pretty badly, and when a system stops evolving its defects start being really annoying. For instance the clumsiness of the viewer, the lack of shaders, the poorness of the environment, the lack of goals and the little life in there just cream out loud “I’m a useless proof of concept”. And while I’ve been quite a lot in touch with active developers and builders, most of them are leaving the arena as time goes because the whole world is just not going forward anymore.

Linden Labs, it’s time to react fast and give a new pulse to this initiative or it will get buried and dead for the end users…

That research dated from January 2008 definitely shows the path to where we’re heading with VR-WEAR,“Contact lenses with circuits, lights a possible platform for superhuman vision”

A few excerpts from the article:

Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

The prototype device contains an electric circuit as well as red light-emitting diodes for a display, though it does not yet light up. The lenses were tested on rabbits for up to 20 minutes and the animals showed no adverse effects.

This is exactly the first step to “wearable computing” as described in Vernor Vinge’s “Rainbows end”