Really

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.”