Mobitrends

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”

This statement :

Virtual Reality is so 2008 – 2009 hype is Augmented Reality

sounds awfully wrong and yet it’s something I’m witnessing a lot lately, and I’m feeling uncomfortable about this.
I feel that this kind of hype is only dictated by communication agencies to have their clients make their way to the headlines. It has never had any real bound to the business side of the technology being used as hype vector.
For instance in 2006 there was a huge hype around Second Life and web3D but it’s only now that we start understanding how we can use this as a productivity tool and actually make money out of it in both business and personal use cases. Yet the hype created by the agencies has had a negative effect on the technology that has been soon perceived as outdated and useless.

The same thing is going on about Augmented Reality, it’s being pushed to create funky user interactions for brands and yet no real use case gets out of those trials. Even worse the whole creation chain of augmented reality content (i.e. stamping somehow real “things”, and associating them with 3D content) is far from being ready.

Somehow I feel like there are already so many mature use cases that could be used to value existing technologies (such as advergames web, mobile or console-based) and that haven’t yet been explored to their full potential that I feel like going to the next hype is somehow pointless… and from an end-user prospective it’s just trash-communication where you enjoy being part of a “premiere” but 5 mins later you get bored and trash the application away without creating any bound with the brand.

While I was shaving this morning, I just realized something really fun, I have the exact same social patterns in World of Warcraft as I have in the real life.
Let me explain:
in WoW I’m not really part of any guild, mostly because those are really time consuming if you want to take fully advantage of what a guild can bring to your game experience. Thus I’m mostly a lonely player, yet I still go for high goals and heavy instances by gathering people from my contact list the moment I need help. And I never hesitate to help someone in need for my tauren DK/warrior two handed mace and spells.

So somehow this make me a independent guy with a network of partners / subcontractors that I can book for a few hours of their time to help me reach my goals and with whom I share my know-how and rewards as they come… sounds a lot like the way I’m behaving in real life business actually!

Tell me how you play and I’ll tell you who you are.

3D web is an amazing playground for me. While we are really early stage in terms of usage and adoption, we already have a lot of pretty amazing implementations of 3DWeb environments and while the initial hype we witnessed in 2006/2007 is now over real use cases are starting to happen.
Also it’s getting harder and harder to make a difference between an online 3D game (MMORPG) such as World of Warcraft and a 3DWeb environment such as Second Life. Indeed while the latter misses NPCs and objectives and allows user generated contents, both are place where users/players seek each other to spend a time “together” around a common objective shared within that world, wether it’s talking about how to convince the curmudgeon on a role playing session or take down Malygos in WoW.

First Prediction : Most first-tier businesses will be carrying out experiments about the use of 3Dweb within their organization as a powerful brainstorming / meeting tool and will be seeking for ROI not press coverage – those experiments will mostly remain under the hood and private.

Second Prediction : Bots and NPCs will become common thing within 3Dweb environments and IA will be able to start showing its full potential. Those bots will enable a persistent presence within virtual worlds and will try to fight the “alone” effect you get when entering Second Life at random times.

Third Prediction : Accessories especially designed to engage in 3D web will roll out and the one already on the market will strongly develop. We can think here about Logitech’s 3DConnexion or VR-WEAR‘s devices and SL-viewer (a webcam *is* a device after all).

Fourth Prediction : 3Dweb will get mobile and to the games consoles. 2009 will see reference implementations of major 3Dwebs on non-PC communicating platforms. While console makers are working on their own 3Dweb software (Playstation Home, and Xbox’s avatars and soon to be virtual world) market leaders will have to move to this market.

Fifth Prediction : 3Dweb will interconnect seamlessly with 2Dweb communication tools. First experiments were witnessed through tools such as SL-Messenger enabling msn/gtalk/aim/yahoochat/twitter/visualbookmarking from Second Life which will evolve as interconnection platforms for 3Dweb communities and common web communities.

One of my preferred presentation at LeWeb08, gives a lot of perspective to what is tangible and what isn’t… and how to monetize emotions.

Thinkbalm‘s Erica Driver just organized a pretty funny event called “Convince the curmudgeon”: a role playing session aiming at convincing Christopher that there is business value in the Immersive Internet.
Lots of amazing ideas and comments during a wild session and overall a really interesting experience including multi-channel communication process and use-case about the immersive Internet (along with a pretty nice list of do’s and don’ts by Sam Driver such as “Don’t talk about virtual world, it’s negative, use immersive internet instead” and such…).
Can’t wait to read Erica’s article on the session
One of my main conclusions is that we definitely need body language and the ability to see a user through its avatar (such as what we did at VR-WEAR ) to give those Immersive Internet a real meaning – and immersive devices would also be more meaningful than the kind of setup required today to access this experience (see the pict below, it’s a bit hectic…)

VintFalken has noticed a pretty amuzing use of Amazon’s EC2 elastic cloud computing : the “Sim-OnDemand” application. Basically the idea is pretty simple, if you need to host an event with a lot of people in your sim then today you need to buy a couple of server at Linden Labs, and try to get no more then 100 avatars per server if you want to deliver a decent experience to your users.
The sim-OnDemand uses EC2 specificities to let you start the sim before the event, scale to allow virtually as many users as you want get in, stop it when the event is done and be billed only for that time!

Sim-OnDemand Personal Virtual World Server – is a ready to use packaging of OpenSim 3D virtual world server (opensource) software. Sim-OnDemand’s GUI based launcher employs a simple music-player metaphor: Play-Pause-Play. Thus with the launcher, you can simply click to activate(Play) or deactivate(Pause) or reactivate(resume play) your OpenSim (EC2)server.

Amazon Web Service’s Elastic Computing Cloud(EC2) infrastructure is leveraged by Sim-OnDemand to make the OpenSim operation resource abundant. Sim-OnDemand’s charging model is based on Amazon’s pay-as-per-usage utility pricing model.

Although I really find Augmented Reality to be amazingly impressive as a technology, I’m still not convinced by the use cases around this technology. Of course having a “terminator”-like view of your environment can be usefull in finding Sarah Connor when she’s hiding in a crowd – but let’s face it augmented reality remains useless imho if you cannot interact seamlessly with the system to let it know precisely what data you’re interested in.
Here’s another example of “Arisu” (Japanese’s Alice) your augmented reality maid… nice and kawai but useless…