Good times for the research agencies. As more and more depends on predicting the outcomes of hypes and trends in the ever increasing phase of internet developments, companies become more and more insecure whether their investments are well spend. R&D departments need a more convincing pitch as they are competing amongst each other, - should it be social media, virtual worlds, instant messaging or that viral campaign over twitter…

In light of that, one of those research agencies Gartner seems to do a great job of milking the virtual worlds trend for all its worth. It was only recently they published a report on how 90% of a ll ventures into virtual worlds would fail (and why that is not a bad thing) and recently they have followed this up with a report containing the ‘elevator pitch for virtual worlds’. The report costing 195$ and consists of no less than 5 (five!) pages according to their website and should tell you how exactly to convince your boss virtual worlds all well worth of their/your attention.

”How to Justify Enterprise Investment in Virtual World” sees three big motivators in virtual platforms (as taken from the press release):

Stage 1: Virtual Worlds as Training Environments
Every organization has a training budget, and role-playing and scenario-based training exercises are well-established in many fields. Virtual worlds with strong development tools (such as Second Life) can be used to replicate specific environments (such as a retail location or a street scene) in which trainees can interact with each other, the environment and their trainers via their avatars. On a larger scale, substantial virtual environments are being used in training emergency services and military/law enforcement services to simulate real-world scenarios, — especially complex scenarios involving multiple agencies, such as biochemical emergencies or terrorist incidents in urban locations.

The ability to stream media into virtual worlds and embed documents into display objects enables trainees to proceed at their own pace to assimilate material, and then interact with each other and their trainers to explore their understanding and knowledge. The benefits of improved employee knowledge and training can be clearly enumerated, and the savings (or transference of funding) compared with established training methodologies can be reliably calculated to build a credible and substantiated business case.

Stage 2: Project-Based Avatar-Enhanced Collaboration
Having established a viable presence for virtual-world technology inside the enterprise, and begun to build basic virtual-world skills in the employee base, the second phase involves extending virtual-world deployment to support collaboration and employee interaction. Examples of successful projects of this type include worldwide product launches involving training, presentations and project planning that eliminate the need to bring employees from multiple locations to a single site, with substantial savings in travel and associated costs and time.

Apart from project-based success metrics, the ability to show cost savings — for example, reduced use of expensive videoconferencing or telepresence facilities, as well as reduced international travel and “downtime” — to support and offset the initial investment forms the basis for a credible and defensible business case.

Stage 3: Nonspecific Social Collaboration
Employee interaction and collaboration are well understood as key drivers in employee satisfaction, productivity and innovation. However, in the modern distributed business environment, with employees working from home offices, on the road or in multiple locations overseas, “casual social conversations” that once took place around the water cooler no longer occur. Employees increasingly work in isolation and broader-based interdepartmental discussions that are often the source or seed of new ideas and innovations no longer take place.

A virtual-world recreation of the social environment — seating areas, white boards, even a virtual water cooler — can serve a valuable function in recovering the disassembled social cohesion of the workforce.

The benefits can be significant, but will be hard to enumerate, because they will be predominantly in the “soft benefits” area of employee satisfaction, morale, retention and innovation. Nevertheless, with a proven record and established management acceptance of virtual-world projects, the business case for this final stage should be acceptable.

After reading the press release (and the assumption those 4 remaining pages are not going to provide that ‘eureka moment’ we’ve been waiting for) I’m just going to say I’m not convinced Gartner is really providing ‘essential insights for success’ here. Getting Real Work Done in Virtual Worlds by Gartners competitor Forrester is a little more beefy, and though both cover nothing new to the informed, it explains in a human language the potential of virtual worlds for the everyday work floor with examples, applications and a nice overview of its benefits versus 2D environments.

Posted on: June 23, 2008 | 2 Comments » |

Isn’t it ironic the industry which consistently struggles to monetize its digital content is the business with the highest potential to do so. Everyone producing content is starting to make money from it it seems, with the exception of the music industry who clamps desperately its retail model. They watch their income only drop on a daily basis and complain about theft through filesharing. The reality of today is:  The business model of just sending your music per unit vs money per unit is not such an interesting proposition anymore to many consumers.

A Social Beacon

So what to do? The obvious way to ’sweeten the deal’ and boost sales is to drop the retail model, and adopt and adjust the model the music industry uses for television. Because of the powerful social beacon music is, it could attract very specific ‘focus groups’ within complicated markets. The melting pot of various demographics on the internet can be sorted trough music. Music carries a strong image, and tells a lot about the person dedicating time to one specific artist or genre. So music can function as a filter for attracting specific audiences online. This has a lot of marketing potential and thus can be monetized. Focussed advertising and ‘brand affiliation’ (connecting brand or product X to the image of a band) could be an easy way to create value generated by advertisers.

This model isn’t the most innovative way however. And the music industry faces another threat besides dropping income from reduced sales. The threat is the labels are becoming obsolete themselves. There have already been a number of hits created by amateurs. Recording material for ‘industry’ standards is getting more and more available to the the everyday consumer. Also the need for the Music Industry labels as distribution is threatened. With websites as you tube and fast word-of-mouth in various networks they keep losing ground as gatekeepers to success in the industry.

Adoption by ‘The Industry’

Music is content, and on the internet content is king. There is a raw power in music, largely because it is a ’social beacon’. Meaning my personal interest in music could link me to someone I know nothing about except their interest in the same kind of music. We love to share music, experience it together. However, music downloads and CD’s facilitate the social experience very poorly - and concerts are expensive and rare events to most. This is where virtual worlds could come into play.

I think it would be interesting to see the music industry change their roles. Instead of selling music and being the gatekeepers to success, they should start facilitating and selling a social experience online, and benefit from the growing production on the consumer side. They could start to use the digital means to promote the growing number of prosumers on micro-scale, organizing live events in virtual environments for example. The social experience of music takes us one step back from mass distribution and can make it feel more intimate again.

Music is the most social, most powerful content you will find on the www. The traditional retail model for digital, copyable content isn’t going to get better, it’s going to get worse. New, social and thus commercial opportunities await in the Metaverse and it’s about time the Music Industry showed some innovation, instead of being two steps behind (again). Fortunately we can see some of this happening already. SellAband offers this platform on the 2D web, supporting upcoming artists by micro investments. vSide is a virtual world dedicated to promoting live performances in a virtual setting. From within Second Life we see initiatives like Cruxy and life performances innovating music monetization models.

P.S.: In case you missed it on the official blogs, Hibernia on the Skids has a great post on how to get your music streaming into Second Life without using voice or pay services through MediaMaster.

Posted on: June 19, 2008 | 2 Comments » |

A new promotional video of Home showcasing the promotional event spaces. It still promises amazing visuals and great designs. Though limited to the Playstation 3, I have a feeling this is going to be what Second Life should have been on a social and graphical level. The advantage of Sonys Home being they know who they are designing for, and better yet, they know the exact hardware specs of their users, preventing strange posts like these of Torley Linden on even higher graphical requirements of the ‘everything to everybody’ world of Second Life.

Posted on: June 15, 2008 | 4 Comments » |

A quick post on a ‘new’ application of the Papervision 3D technology. After we’ve seen Johnny Lee take the Wiimote to his interfaces for head tracking and touch screens, Seedylifestyle has found a way to put the Nintendo Wiimote to use in Flash (& browsers) through Papervision. The provided demo speaks for itself:

What excites me is this technology is highly accessible. The code is completely open source, and a Wiimote costs little over 45$ so pretty much available to anyone with an idea. I really can’t wait to see what developments on the organic interfacing with three (and two) dimensional spaces will be developed with this technology within the development community.

Posted on: June 12, 2008 | 1 Comment » |

When I talk about ‘the immersion in virtual worlds’ it’s not uncommon I get a questioning look. Most of the time I use a simplified example of the Matrix - The Matrix illustrates complete, 100% artificial ‘immersion’ into virtuality. At first I get a smile and something along the lines of: “yes, but we don’t have a matrix yet”. But when I tell them I didn’t mean the story of the movie, but the moment you watch the movie, it usually triggers a sign of recognition. When you get into a movie, you ‘understand’ it, you are at the location of the movie if you manage to focus enough.

This ’suspension of disbelief’ generates the most powerful form of communication: focus. A direct link between sender and receiver. The amount of generated focus through immersion still holds something magical, something like hypnosis. However, with hypnosis the hypnotists always say you need to be open to the hypnosis. The person being hypnotized has to allow the hypnosis to have any effect. At first sight, immersion seems to be just such a thing. You have to want to believe in the environment, place yourself in the story like a dream, a voluntary mental process. To many signals blocking this ’suspension of disbelief’ and the process of immersion fails.

How this might be a wrong perception became clear to me when I red an article on virtual reality in a newspaper (the printed thing). A hospital in Seattle has shown through extensive testing they could reduce the pain of their patients suffering from burns through a virtual world. When undergoing physiotherapy or changing bandages, the pain of the patient is effectively reduced by 35 to 50% through immersion. The displacement into the imaginary realm of virtuality thereby outperforms painkiller drugs. When the patient is faced with terrible plains of their burnt skin getting bandaged they actually don’t feel it as much when inside a virtual world. Mentally the moved to a virtual ream even though every part of their body is screaming the images are false.

The power of immersion is not just for those who want to ‘believe’, or some sort of fictional dramatization. Immersion has an actual, physical effect on us when we move into these virtual spaces. Even when we are well aware of the ‘fakeness’ of virtuality. The mental aspect can go trough the same process. A colleague has done extensive testing in virtual worlds with people with fear impairments. The virtual environments (a house in the test) is used to trigger these fears (irrational fear of sharp objects for instance). The subjects of this therapy is well aware of the ’simulated fake environment when they step into the program, starting the program when looking at the screen. But after the initial minutes their fear becomes real, even though the environment is ‘flat’ (using a screen, not even VR glasses). The user starts to respond, have attacks of fear and genuilly feel uncomfortable.

The immersion in movies or books, or any fictional environment (writers call it their ’secondary world’) has been known for decades. But the interactivity virtual worlds add to the existing media seems to bring a new level (dimension) to the phenomena. Wikipedia notes the writers Ernest Adams, Staffan Björk and Jussi Holopainen see the following types of immersion:

Tactical immersion
Tactical immersion is experienced when performing tactile operations that involve skill. Players feel “in the zone” while perfecting actions that result in success.

Strategic immersion
Strategic immersion is more cerebral, and is associated with mental challenge. Chess players experience strategic immersion when choosing a correct solution among a broad array of possibilities.

Narrative immersion
Narrative immersion occurs when players become invested in a story, and is similar to what is experienced while reading a book or watching a movie.

Spatial immersion
Spatial immersion occurs when a player feels the simulated world is perceptually convincing. The player feels that he or she is really “there” and that a simulated world looks and feels “real”.

Psychological immersion
Psychological immersion occurs when a player confuses the game with real life.

Sensory immersion
The experience of entering into the three-dimensional environment, and being intellectually stimulated by it. The player experiences a unity of time and space as the player fuses with the image medium, which affects impression and awareness.

Though these descriptions are very limited, and I don’t have the books available, none of these seem to touch on the actual mental and physical effects of immersion. A new level of experience interactive environments can inspire. It’s not very surprising as all these ‘definitions’ are written by game developers, who’d have a different approach to a virtual environment as the medical sector with a strong focus on real, lasting implications for instance. I think the words I am looking for is a genuine experience without the presumption of deliberate suspension of disbelief.

Perhaps I’m just making it needlessly complicated. But after reading that article of the pain reducing power of immersion, and the application in psychological therapy I feel the actual power of immersion and simulated experience is something we’ve only begun to explore.

Posted on: June 10, 2008 | 4 Comments » |

“Something a little scary, when shots of ruths jumping on empty sims makes eveeryone jump up and down with excitement” - Zwa Ewry

Funny because it’s true. IBM engineer Zwa Ewry describes the landing of Layla Linden on an OpenSim location. In itself not a noteworthy event if it wasn’t for the previous location the avatar of Layla - the beta grid of Second Life. The big news is OpenSim (an independent platform of hosting servers/virtual space) and the official (beta) grid of Linden Lab’s Second Life platform now seem to be interoperable

This comes a lot faster than expected and is really a step into the ‘right’ direction from a consumer point of view. What it means is people outside of linden lab, whether this is a hosting company or a private server, can now offer space to host your three-dimensional content. This first step towards decentralization could be a major step towards a more accessible 3D internet, without the high costs of Linden Labs own hosting. Perhaps more importantly it will also mean the owner of the content will have control over who can access his or her sim, and can overview the data going in and out of the sim. Obviously of big importance for corporate purposes.

Exciting news for anyone involved in the ‘metaverse’. There are some big issues still to be resolved such as property, item transfers between locations and probably a bunch of technical things. But eitehr way, this is a big breakthrough in connecting privately hosted grids and the ‘community grid’ of Second Life. Read a first hand testimonial on Zwa’s blog here.

Posted on: June 7, 2008 | No Comments » |

Recently Dusan Writer challenged the community to design a new user interface for Second Life. The emphasis in the contest seems to be a ‘light’ client, for new users to find their way in Second Life during the first hours/days. Dusan reserved 500,000L (roughly 1,830$) for the best design, 200,000L and 100,000L for the 2nd and 3rd place. Omissions will be accepted until 29th of June.

VIEWER INTERFACE CONTEST

Rules and Criteria
I am inviting the creative, brilliant, thoughtful, insightful community of SL to submit designs for a new Second Life client. We can call it a “newbie viewer” or a “junior client” - whatever terms you want to give, the criteria for the contest is as follows:

- Design an interface for the Second Life client that would improve the experience of a new or inexperienced user.

- There are no rules for what should or should not be included in the viewer. However, nothing should be added that is not possible with the current viewer. For example, while it might be nice to be able to groups your friends together, this isn’t currently possible, so it would not be an acceptable feature and your submission would be disqualified. The objective is to present the current features of the viewer in a new way. This doesn’t mean you can’t remove features. It just means the design should be based on existing and supported features.

- Designs are just that - designs, not prototypes. You don’t need to know code to participate. Please submit screen designs in TGAs, PNGs or another SL-compatible image format. The winners will be required to submit their original digital files (Photoshop, Illustrator, GIMP, or other graphic program) to receive their prizes. Submissions should be no less than 1024 x 1024 resolution. Submissions MAY include a notecard if the entrant feels that an explanation is useful in providing context to their submission.

- There is no limit to how many screens you can submit in order to visually demonstrate the concept.

- Up to 10 entrants will have the opportunity to present their entries to the judges and explain the rationale.

Resources:

1. Killing Sacred Cows: the SL interface
2. SL User Interface Roadmap Wiki
3. Second Life struggles with Interaction Design
4. Dazzle not helping User Interface Program

Posted on: June 6, 2008 | 1 Comment » |

Catching up on 560 unread items items in my Google reader I found the most interesting bit of information in a comment on Au’s piece in Businessweek on the ’supposed death of marketing in Second Life’. The article itself didn’t cover anything we haven’t heard a million times over (foster the community, be remarkable to attract users and using the existing brands in-world) and the comment might not seem to go any deeper at first sight either:

Second Life and virtual worlds are a lot of fun to check out when you have a few minutes of free time. Unfortunately, surfing the internet via web browser is 100x faster, easier, and efficient. While a virtual world is a great place to explore artistic creativity, it simply makes no sense to add a layer of complexity to possible customers’ access to your product or advertisements. Don’t forget, the residents of the virtual worlds are already using the internet, these are not separate populations. (source)

It seems to be the common perception of virtual worlds in the marketing industry, and the poster (Adam) doesn’t state anything most would disagree with. But what struck me as interesting is the three advantages of ‘the web’ the poster mentions. His statement made me question to whom these ‘qualities’ are actually advantages.

On television, the ‘magic of the 30 second commercial‘ is still pretty dominant, and when is the last time you spend watching 30 seconds staring at a web advertisement?As an advertiser, or someone in marketing, this ’speed’ of the internet is not really in my advantage. I usually have no more than the blink of an eye to communicate a message. Sure, maybe if this ‘1 second pitch’ strikes an interest you might give the banner (commercial etc) a second look. This makes most companies want to shout, something that will not escape your attention, but doesn’t exactly get the message across either. There is just no time to explain why you think your product would solve a presumed problem I have.

The easier to use part is true, but is that comparison really fair for his conclusion (it just makes no sense)? Years of trial and error went into 2D browsing versus probably 2 (or 3 at the most) years of 3D navigating in Second Life. Libraries have been written on the development of interfaces aimed at dealing with 2D information, and I have yet to run across the first book that explains engineers how to create an interface specifically used for 3D information indexing and navigation. This difficulty of navigating will blur in future development (and already is with the help of clientless virtual world experiences) giving the developer full control over their own, goal oriented interface design.

And lastly, he adds the efficiency of virtual worlds is lacking. I presume he means - if I wanted to buy a digital camera online, I’d be much faster visiting www.digitalcamera.com and click ‘buy’ versus visiting a three-dimensional store in Second Life and purchasing the camera there. I don’t really know of any studies that have accurately mapped efficiency in sales yet. What if 0.01% of my visitors bought the digital camera on my website, but 1% of the visitors in my 3D shop because of the experience virtual worlds offer.

So, Adam isn’t wrong of course in his observations at this time, but his conclusion is what bugged me. To me it does make sense to add these levels of ‘complexity’ to your business as long as you have a clear goal in mind. We could easily change ‘complexity’ into stickiness / retention as a counterweight to the fast phased web experience. The idea the consumer want everything yesterday is just one side of the story - they also want to be informed, entertained, experience, and be able to enjoy your product/service/message.

Posted on: June 5, 2008 | 6 Comments » |