Really

As someone who has had many discussions with Xerox people about the corporate use of Second Life and virtual worlds, I was interested to see the recent Linden Lab recently blog-post: Open Letter to Your Boss. The letter neatly addresses some of the immediate concerns that arise when initially exploring environments like Second Life. However, after getting some exposure to virtual worlds, different issues become apparent. It’s great to see Linden Lab working with the community to help identify and overcome these types of concerns, so in an attempt to move the discussion forward to the next level, I’ve crafted a response to the initial letter, from the point-of-view of a manager who is interested in virtual worlds, and already has had some experience with Second Life:

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Hello <insert name of your employee>

Thanks for continuing to explore how we can use Second Life as a tool to provide benefit for ourselves and our customers – it’s important that we continue to innovate and adapt. I look forward to seeing a specific proposal for a pilot project that will demonstrate the value of virtual worlds in our environment. In the proposal, I’d like to see you address the following issues:

Barriers to Entry

For those who do not already have experience with virtual worlds, some training will be required before they can feel comfortable navigating and communicating. While not an insurmountable problem, the time investment for participants (and trainers) needs to be factored in when considering the project.
In addition, many of the PCs people use around here are a couple of years old, and while they may be able to run Second Life (though some won’t be able to), the experience will be less than satisfactory. While you are seeing WindLight clouds and your avatar reflected in the water around your island (I know, because I saw what graphics card was included in the machine you just purchased when I approved the PO), others are getting 4-5 FPS and nothing but grey textures.
I should also mention that the IT folks are still not happy over having to open all the non-standard ports in the firewall needed to enable Second Life access, so a solution that allows us to use the regular proxy mechanism would be preferred.

Security and IP

As you know, it would be very difficult for us to conduct any sort of business in Second Life that involves private and confidential data. Our security policy states that any communication of private data outside the firewall must go over an encrypted channel, but even if we disregard that, we have no guarantees that our data is secure once it reaches Linden Lab’s servers. Linden Lab’s own terms of service state (section 3.2) that by putting content in Second Life, we grant them permission to distribute that content for marketing purposes (and only gives you the chance to prevent the distribution after the fact). Also, having to grant Linden Lab rights to any patents related to content in Second Life makes it difficult to use it a space to collaboratively develop new technology (or even bring in new technology developed elsewhere). Yes, we could use the media streaming feature to show slides and video on a screen, but avatars sitting around silently watching PowerPoint slides on a screen hardly seems like a valuable use of the technology.

Inappropriate content

Clearly, one of the benefits of using Second Life has to be interacting with the external community and the content created by them. It doesn’t make much sense for us to say to people that they can go into Second Life, but only to our private island. Though “adult” content may have been isolated, there is of course much that is appropriate in Second Life’s causal atmosphere, that would still be considered improper in a work environment. It’s difficult to send people to look for business suits, for example, knowing they will displayed next to lingerie and swim wear, featuring models in provocative (but still “PG”) poses.

I really look forward to seeing your proposal, and encourage you to consider some of the other platforms as well (OpenSim, Project Wonderland, Qwaq, VastPark, Sirikata…). While perhaps not as fully featured as Second Life, many of them seem to be moving forward rapidly, and might serve better as a base for initial exploration.

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Those of us promoting virtual worlds are now trying to reach beyond the early adopters, and we need more compelling evidence than anecdotes and shiny graphics. It’s encouraging to see Linden Lab collecting case studies, and I look forward to them continuing to add more concrete studies showing what features of virtual worlds make them a better communication medium than competing technologies.

Last week I attended the State of Play 09 conference, organized by the NY Law School. There were several excellent speakers and panels, and I met lots of great people, and had many interesting discussions about virtual worlds and their applications. In the next couple of posts I’ll try to summarize some of the ideas and discussions that arose during the conference. For more details, and better reporting on what was actually said, see the list of blog post collected by keynote speaker Raph Koster, or go back and look at the discussion that took place via twitter during the event.

Raph Koster opened with a keynote addressing the conference theme of “Have virtual worlds reached a plateau?” Comparing Second Life to services like Twitter which are being used by demonstrators in Iran and their supporters, Koster stated that virtual world have failed to achieve main-stream relevance. He pointed out that the MMOs and virtual worlds of today are direct descendants of text-based MUDs, and enable the same type of interactions that were available to users in the 1970’s. In order to make virtual worlds more relevant, or at least reach a wider audience, virtual world and MMO designer need to start thinking about different user experiences and ways of interaction. As an example, Koster suggested a more web-browser-like experience, using open standards, and allowing users to have multiple tabs open in different virtual worlds.

I definitely agree that by looking at how users are currently working with and consuming information on the web can give us important insights on how to evolve virtual world design. I like the idea of using tabs to allow users to be present in, and easily switch between multiple virtual locations and think it would enable new techniques for managing communication and collaboration. Looking at other ways we work with information and translating (not merely importing) them into virtual worlds is definitely a rich area to explore.

However, Koster seemed to be advocating for ways to get more people to play games in virtual worlds. “The killer app for virtual worlds is ‘having fun’,” he said (according to my notes – maybe not an exact quote). The fact that the activities in text-based MUDs survive in modern 3D MMOs was presented as stagnation, and a barrier to wide-spread adoption. My view is that rather than stagnation, this persistance of a certain set of activities simply means that there is a large group of people who enjoy playing those types of games (quests, role-playing, world-building, socializing, etc.) and they have used the evolving technology to make those games more enjoyable. What is needed now is to look at other types of activities that other people enjoy and see how to apply virtual world technologies to them. We’re already seeing virtual worlds being applied to domains like concerts, training, and collaboration. Perhaps there is similar benefits to using virtual worlds, or certain features of virtual worlds, to other domains as well (accounting, basket weaving, exercise…).

I recently got to take a small group of my colleagues through their first Second Life experience.   We don’t have an orientation area as such (Printalution island kindly lets us place our new-born Xerox avatars on their starting area), but we’ve created a small area with some games and other activities.  Teaching new users to arm-wrestle, sit in a chair, get and drink a virtual cup of coffee, gets them through the basics they will need to interact with the environment and other avatars.

Basic Training on Xerox Innovation Island

The session went pretty smoothly, but after having watched many different people trying to get started in platforms ranging from Second Life, to Wonderland, to World of Warcraft and Lord of The Rings Online, two issues seem to cause the most problems for new users:

Unresponsive Controls

I used to think that the reason why people need to spend a fair amount of time learning to walk in virtual worlds is that a keyboards and mice are not good control devices for navigation in a 3D space.   I’m starting to wonder if the problem is caused more by the fact that the controls are not responsive or smooth enough.  In Second Life in particular, because of network lag and other factors, there is often a noticeable delay between pressing the up-arrow key and seeing any avatar motion.  This type of delayed feedback, can make learning the controls difficult – apparently studies response times longer than 100ms-200ms cause problems for hand-eye coordination.  Games like World of Warcraft seem to be better able to provide responsive controls (and you don’t hear many people saying, “WoW was fun, once I learned how to walk!”), probably because the environment is fairly static and pre-loaded on your machine.  Maybe an approach for dynamic virtual world platforms is to have the starting area be static and pre-built in the client, so as to remove any delays due to slow networks.

Too much information

Most beginner areas in Second Life, MMOs, and other games, try to gradually present different aspects of the environment, usually as a series of tasks, each of which needs to be finished before the next one starts.   However, the mere fact that you’re immersed in a rich 3D environment, means that you’re constantly overwhelmed by visual information: colorful, shiny, beautiful buildings, trees and other features, that make it hard to notice the little poster that is telling you how to use the arrow keys.  On top of that is the client UI itself, with all its menus, buttons, and popup windows.  when I look over the shoulder of a new Second Life user, I often see 4-5  popup dialogs on their screen (usually trying to give helpful information about the UI), that they either don’t notice, or can’t be bothered to remove.

Where is the relevant information?

Less visual information makes it easy to highlight what you want the user to see.

Games have the same issue; one common remark I got after introducing some colleagues to Lord of The Rings Online (for research purposes!), was, “There is so much you have to pay attention to!”  Better UI design might help, but even just radically simplifying the beginner environment might help direct the user’s attention to the relevant area.

Apart from the client UI and environment design, the best way to help new users is to have a knowledgeable user sit with them and guide them through the process.  The need for expert help will not be a constraint on the technology, however.  Though we assume that anybody can use a web-browser, at some point most of us were told, “…and then you click on the blue underlined text…”, though we may not remember when that happened.  For many, web-browser training is now happening in early elementary school or earlier, and I wouldn’t be surprised to soon see basic virtual world navigation skills being taught as well.

I’ll finish off, by pointing to a video showing Felicia Day (gamer, geek, actress, writer of The Guild, and co-star of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog) helping out Jimmy Fallon (some guy from TV?) to get started with World of Warcraft.

In addition to showing how even in a game that tries to make it easy for players to get started, newbies can get completely lost, there is also a nice discussion of the importance of your choice of avatar, which ties in neatly with my first It isn’t easy being green post.  Having thus completed the loop, I promise never to use this title for a blog post again.

When considering using virtual worlds as a technology for meetings and remote collaboration, the environmental impact of the platform is a question that often comes up.  In December 2006, Nick Carr estimated that the energy use of Second Life avatar was about the same as the average resident of Brazil.  One can argue about the details of the estimate, but clearly any service that depends on large numbers of servers can have a significant impact.  However, what we really need are solid comparison between different alternatives.   What is the impact of meeting in a virtual world as opposed to participants traveling to a meeting location.  Is using the corporate Windows Live Meeting servers more energy efficient than using Skype and OpenSim?  The calculations become difficult once you try to account for every detail (what is the environmental impact of manufacturing telephones vs. head-sets plugged into a PC?)  Are there accepted standards one can use to make these types of comparisons?

I’m also curious to hear that Byron Reeves has proposed a virtual world application to help you monitor and reduce your energy consumption.   Will there be a point where the game tells you to not use the application in order to save energy?

What does seem clear, is that moving applications to dedicated server-farms operated by third-parties is going to be more efficient than trying to run the servers yourself.   Though Google was criticized recently for the power needed by their servers, their own analysis indicate that you can offset one year of Googling by doing one less load of laundry (I declare next week, “stink for the environment” week – another reason to have all meetings virtually…)  Significantly, Google has made a public commitment to sustainability (as has Xerox).

I have not yet seen similar commitments from virtual world platforms.   As many of us are considering running OpenSim or other platforms inside the firewall, in what are likely non-enviromentally friendly internal data centers, there may be opportunity for some of the new virtual world providers to differentiate themselves by specializing in running a green grid.

Update: My fellow Xerox blogger, Francois Ragnet, just posted about Green Tech Trends in 2008, linking to an Infoworld Article, that describes, among other things, modular datacenters.  This technique allows a gradual increase (or decrease) of server capacity,  using only the power and cooling capacity that is needed.

This is what I look like in Second Life:

I spent a fair amount of time to make it look like me, but for some reason the skin and hair didn’t come out quite right.    At this point however, the green skin and pointy hair is what I identify with, and what I try to look like in other virtual worlds.

Unfortunately, most platforms out there are pretty constrained in avatar skin colors:

Even in the “cartoony” environment of Lively, this was the closest I could get to what I wanted:

Of course, other environments have even more constraints.  In Disney’s Pixie Hollow, I’m forced to look like this:

(see how I matched my top with my hair and eye color?  For some reason I don’t spend a lot of time in Pixie Hollow.  It is not quite yet enterprise ready.)

Actually, most business oriented virtual worlds seem to make a point of limiting avatar looks.  I remember one vendor proudly  showing me how they only allowed “business appropriate” avatars – which meant you had a choice of 4 looks, all wearing identical suits.  Arn Hyndman, talking about Nortel’s Web.Alive seems to have a similar point of view: “We’re trying to take this in a much more serious direction so our avatars look like people and are somewhat constrained to look like people as opposed to the Second Life model.”

Of course, there are looks that would be inappropriate in a business setting (and looks that are always inappropriate), but I think there are problems with limiting avatar looks too much.   Drastic skin colors and weird shapes makes an avatar recognizable from a distance.  If you are limited to “look like people”, then the differences tend to be more subtle, and less visible  unless you zoom in.

It’s always fun  to see someone confirm and reinforce your beliefs in effective and eloquent ways.    Thus, last October, when game designer David Perry’s TED talk, “Are Games Better than Life”, was made available, the link was passed around the virtual worlds community, usually without any additional comments beyond “watch this,” or “this guy gets it.”   It really is an inspiring talk, given in 2006, before the boom and bust of the Second Life/Virtual Worlds hype cycle (back when there were only 5 million World of Warcraft players…) – reminding me of  what it is that motivates my interest in this technology.

There are three points of the presentation that stick out for me.   Around six minute into the talk, Perry shows a video timeline of the evolution of video games from extremely crude to hyper-realistic graphics.   It is clear that if the technology continues to improve, within 5-10 years, complex, highly interactive environments and characters will be as easy to generate as web pages are today.  The second point is at the end of the talk, where Perry points out that kids are now growing up in a world where realistic graphics and artificially generated worlds are common-place.   Unfettered by the mental constraints placed on us by using older technologies, and not distracted by the “shiny”, they will be the ones creating innovative games and utilities that we can’t even imagine today.  Our attempts to recreate reality in virtual spaces, and the desperate drive to bring application sharing to virtual worlds so we can watch PowerPoint slides in them, will be at best regarded as quaint, and more likely (given the way kids are today, with their hair and their clothes), scorned.

Finally, where I found the most resonance with the way I feel, is the middle section of the talk, which is a video called “As Real as Your Life,” by Michael Highland.  I actually had to watch it twice before it sunk in that the video is sort of a negative view of video games – you might pick up on it after the first few seconds, when he says “I am a video game addict”, oh yeah, that’s a bad thing.  But the video is really about the power of video games to have emotional and psychological impact, “I’ve had life-altering experiences in games”, he says at one point.  And while this impact can certainly have negative consequences, the power to educate, communicate, and inspire through virtual worlds is what makes the technology so interesting.  It’s not that one can recreate a real location in a virtual world, it’s that one can create completely new and impossible environments and experiences in a way that is indistinguishable from the physical world.   So, while I don’t want to put down or discount reality (don’t get me wrong, I love reality, some of my best friends are real…), I agree completely when Highland says: “…it is the power to break down reality that is so fascinating and addicting to me.  I know that I am losing my grip – part of me is just waiting to let go.”

Aaron Hunt, SMB Marketing Manager, did a “behind the scenes tour” of Xerox Innovation Island for SLCN’s Real Biz in SL show. The interview was streamed live last Monday, and is now available for viewing in the SLCN archives.

The tour gives a good sense of some of the ideas we have been playing with (though Aaron did a good job of steering the reporters away from the secret areas ) so take a look if you’re curious.

Showing the Wall o’ Cool Places

I also want to highlight that while we’ve built stuff ourselves on the island (or commissioned others to build things for us), much of what is shown are freebies (including the large building shown towards the end of the tour) or things that we simply bought in-world. Being able to access the output of the SL creative community, really enables us to setup things like the orientation/game area very quickly.

The arm wrestling game is useful for socializing, teaching how to interact with objects in-world, and to resolve disputes.

Xerox Innovation Island is likely to remain accessible to Xerox employees only, so many thanks to Cybergrrl Oh and SLCN.tv for giving us this opportunity to show off our space!

New virtual world platforms have been popping up almost daily for the last couple of weeks: Vivaty, Lively, JustLeapIn, ExitReality, WebFlock, and I’m sure I forgot a couple. This is a new generation of virtual worlds, eager to show that they’ve learned from the mistakes of Second Life: Browser based! Embeddable in your web page! More fun graphics! Integrated with FaceBook!

Right now (and I realize it is still early), they just seem like more 3D chat rooms, similar to what Meez and IMVU have been offering for a while. To me, this type of platform is not that interesting. I want to be able to create things with other people, and explore environments and tools that others have built. So, I tend to dismiss those environments that seem to focus on just chat – they obviously don’t get it! Of course, IMVU reports that they have more than twenty million users, so maybe I’m the one who doesn’t get it (or, perhaps, people are different and like different things. Looking at Richard Bartle’s classification of player types – Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and Killers, might help us understand what type of person prefers what type of virtual world).

Some of the new-comers are showing glimmers of moving beyond the simple chat rooms: Lively will allow Google Gadgets to be integrated in the 3D space, ExitReality automatically converts a web page into a 3D environment, and JustLeapIn “premium” room templates are much larger than the rooms of of other platforms, allowing plenty of opportunity for exploration.

However, I want to point out a story that’s told about Second Life’s beginnings. Philip Rosedale, describes how at a meeting where an early version of Second Life had been demonstrated, the agenda moved from the demo to a discussion about finances. However, the screen stayed on as “background entertainment” (cutting and pasting Rosedale’s story below from 3PointD):

What happened was, we were watching the background, and we realized this city was emerging, very, very fast, it was this incredible thing. We all started getting drawn more and more back to the screen. We started talking about it, and a snowman showed up, Andrew built a snowman, and I don’t know if it was broken at the beginning, but then somebody else built a sort of burning man, with a bunch of small snowmen bowing down to the greater snowman, and so you could see this jazz thing happening in real time. There had never been a canvas in which two people could paint that way at the same time, much less three or four or five.

That was this moment of change in that board meeting where we said, you know, it’s not necessarily about the wind working really well. It’s actually about people making things together. What’s going to come out of this is cities and intention and collaboration and community, because the capability this thing provides is mysterious in the degree to which is allows people to do things together.

What enabled this “moment of change” was the in-world creation tools, that enabled co-creation and a new form of collaboration. Chatting in a 3D environment may be good, but extending that chat with 3D forms of expression gives us a whole new way of communicating.

Current virtual worlds take different approaches to user-generated content. The more controlled environments give the users almost no way to alter the world, while more open platforms give users almost complete control of their surroundings. Allowing user-generated content is attractive, because, hey, free content development! Of course, there are risks also, like copyright infringement, “mature” content, and teh ugly.

However, even when user-created content is allowed, many of the current and emerging virtual worlds require users to create 3D models in external applications, and then import the models into the world. A sensible approach, reusing existing tools, and not trying to reinvent the 3D modeling wheel.
The risk is that it leaves the users with little or no way to modify the environment directly. The problem is nicely illustrated in a post on Journeys with Jayce, describing how to be an effective raid leader in World of Warcraft:

For some reason, we could not manage to keep the mob in the middle. So I decided to use a player corpse, positioning it right smack in the middle of the pit, and using that as a marker for where to place the mob. The goal was to make that drake die and land right on top of the corpse. We never had a problem with positioning after that, and it worked so well, I ended up dragging along a dead gnome all the way up to the back of NToV, and using him as our mob marker for all the nameds.

Being able to change objects in the world and move them around, enables users to develop their own collaboration tools as they need them, when they need them. Activities like highlighting, voting, and brainstorming, can all be accomplished by moving and altering objects — No further application support is necessary. Of course, built-in support for those activities might be much better than what users can come up with on the spur-of-the-moment (”stack your dead gnome next to the proposal you want to vote for!”), but it will be difficult to come up with all possible tools that users might need.

Voting by manually stacking blocks (no gnomes were available)

If your virtual world only allows you to talk to other users and interact with the environment in pre-defined ways, you lose much of the benefit of collaborating in a 3D environment. By providing tools for changing the environment directly, even if it’s just dead gnomes, virtual worlds enable users to interact with each other in new ways.

Wednesday, I joined a bunch of other virtual world enthusiasts for the first VastPark multi-user stress-test. VastPark is one of several virtual worlds platforms that’s currently in development. VastPark seems similar to Multiverse, in that it offers tools to create virtual worlds, that can be accessed using a standard client.
The VastPark creator tool has been available (to beta participants) for a while, but Wednesday was the first time we got to try the VastPark browser to access a multi-user world. The model is that you create 3D environments called ‘parks’, which are then hosted as multi-user worlds using “VastServer“.
The stress-test nicely demonstrated the difficult position new virtual-world platforms are in: trying to make sure they get the fundamentals right while trying to catch up with established platforms like Second Life (SL has the opposite problem, trying to stay ahead in the features race while at the same time re-architecting their basic infrastructure).
The VastPark direction seems to be:

• Open source VastServer from the start (allowing users and corporations to host their own virtual worlds).
• Use a peer-to-peer network architecture for scalability. VastPark announced that they are licensing a “decentralized network engine” from NICTA, that will enable millions of concurrent users.
• I asked if anybody was working on interoperability with OpenSim, and Craig Presti, VastPark Lead Developer, said they were “thinking about it”. The question wasn’t that serious, and the answer may not have been either,but it certainly wasn’t a flat denial of the possibility.
• The VastPark worlds are described using a markup language called IMML, base on XML. Using IMML rather than some hidden internal structure could make interoperability simpler, as well as tasks like importing and exporting content.
• One of the stress-test participants discovered that clicking on the blue buttons floating in the room started a Skype chat. It would be easy to speculate about whether this feature indicates future in-world voice using Skype, or tight integration with other applications in general.

However, we’ll have to wait some time before we can see any of the VastPark ideas in a usable form. Though it was a lot of fun to see the platform in its current raw state, it was hard not to wonder how Second Life and Multiverse (and Qwaq and MPK20…) will evolve while VastPark is still implementing basic functionality. Hopefully the different virtual world platform developers are not in a race to reach a specific destination, but are instead using different approaches to explore different parts of the space.

Thanks to the VastPark team for letting us bash on their software – If you missed the fun, take a look at some of the screenshots from the event, and prepare to sign up for the Open Beta in April.