Mobitrends

Erica Driver, which used to work at Forrester and wrote an amazing report called “Web3D the Next Major Internet Wave” moved as an independent analyst a few months ago and created Thinkbalm, an industry analyst firm / think-tank obsessed with helping businesses get advantage of Virtual Worlds.
Today, Thinkbalm published its first report “The Immersive Internet: Make Tactical Moves Today For Strategic Advantage Tomorrow” and which can be downloaded for free on Thinkbalm’s blog.
There are great ideas and visions in there which totally match what we are aiming at through VR-WEAR, this is definitely a must read !

Update: rotfl, my avatar can be seen in the picture p5, yellow one on the back – funny !

This video has been out on the web for a couple of days and while I got no clue who is at its origins, it’s a great illustration of where we are heading to with Virtual Worlds. With the improved graphics available now in any low cost PC around, along with FTTH technologies, we could reach this degree of realism within years. Add to this a bunch of cool immersion devices, and Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” gets real !

This virtual world was created by IBM and is a total digitized version of the Forbidden city. Just make yourself an avatar (not highly customizable I must say), and walk around the marvelous gardens. If you want a more straight approach, just grab one of the guides (NPCs) that will give you a tour around the place.
That kind of use cases around virtual worlds is really amazing, while it sure isn’t photorealistic (I guess having the appropriate high-res textures would be the only reason to justify FTTH projects) it is still stunning to go wander freely in an open 3D environment, just like if you were there in real life.
Last time I went in Beijing I missed it (it is closing way too early) so it’s funny to get there from home!

Just had a great demo by SL’s Dusan Writer of an extremly interesting inworld mind mapping tool (on remedy‘s island).

While Gartner estimated in 2007 that by 2011 over 50 Million people will have a “Second Life” in one of the various online worlds (which if you think about it is about the size of the French populations), it’s pretty interesting to see how use cases develop and new usages expand making it possible to actually reach those figures. While Linden Lab’s SL got a lot of exposure and hype as a marketing tool, it’s only now that we see real use cases around collaborative working and real “get together” habits being developed in a useful way.
Only in a 3D environment such as SL could you have such an awesome tool representing in 3D the participant’s ideas and bringing in inspiration sources from the web (i.e. here a demo about “cheese”), and to have just participated at a demo of this tool I can only tell how inspiring it is to be in that environment to open up your mind and be creative. If only the PC would disappear to leave the space for full immersion in the stars…

Dunno what is really worse in WoW … getting beaten up by tough dragons or witnessing inworld flirting … somehow both can be really scary !

I totally forgot that in 2005, Metal Gear Acid 2 was expected to sell with an accessory for the PSP enabling 3D vision of some scenes of the game. Seeing the form factor of the accessory in 2008 just had me burst out into one of the heavier laughter of the month…

Last intervention today during a panel about “Hands Free Navigation & Avatar Expression”. Thanks again extralab for organizing all this – very interesting discussions out there. I’m still a bit confused about being on a text-chat panel with 100 ppl interupting on the same chat channel – that felt weird and a bit hard to follow, but really funny. I prefer voice a lot!

btw the big avatar on the bottom of the screen is Silverlight Linden – you know what they say, the bigger the avatar…

I’ll be demoing the new VR-WEAR SL viewer tonight during Orange innovation week on Orange Island tonight at 1:30 PM SLT and will be on a panel on thursday at 12PM SLT about “Hands Free Navigation & Avatar Expression”. You’re most welcome to drop by anytime (at least to visit our cool booth ) !
When teleporting there you’ll be greeted by the cute MASA bots, I want one on my island!

Tried this setup : Vuzix HMD + Xbox 360 + PGR4… looks cool but aftera few mins I had to give it up – those Head Mounted Devices really aren’t up to the expectation… low resolution, small and bad viewing angle and the ergonomics is a joke…