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.

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.

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.

One of the best part of hanging around in Second Life, is the number of smart and creative people you meet. For some reason, a completely pliable 3D environment where you can create almost anything you can imagine, seems to attract a lot of creative energy. But even in the crowd of geeks, artists, inventors, and thinkers, there are some people who stand out from the crowd. Grace McDunnough is one of them, and anybody who is trying to get a handle on the real meaning and impact of virtual worlds can get some valuable insight just by reading her (far-too-infrequently updated) blog.

In addition to being one of the few who really “get” Second Life, virtual worlds, and new media in general, Grace is also a terrific guitar player and singer. Combining both areas of expertise, she has created “MUSIMMERSION” – an event that is to SL concerts what Cirque de Soleil is to acrobatics. These are live concerts, but for each song, Grace transports the audience into a new environment. The settings sometimes complement the songs and other times extend the song into a new direction. Looking around the environments while listening to Grace voice and guitar, I felt partially like being in a music video, and partially like being inside Grace’s mind, seeing her vision of the songs she was performing.

The below screen-shots (click on them to get larger versions) give some idea of what MUSIMMERSION is like, but it is really something everyone needs to see and hear for themselves. There are still some performances left in the series, and seating is limited, so send Grace an IM and ask for an invitation.

Nights in White Satin

Vincent

As I came out of the concert, I was thinking about how while most of us are working on creating cool gadgets, useful tools, or beautiful and entertaining things, and wondering how this translates to business value, Grace has created an experience and answered all the questions.

In an article for the Second Life Insider, Eloise Pasteur asks, “How should we talk to each other?” She describes the development of the ways Linden Lab communicates with the residents of Second Life. The progression goes from being able to IM CEO Phillip Linden on a regular basis, to the current blog, which limits the number of comments allowed per post. In other words, there has been a shift from dialogue to broadcast. Eloise does not mention the occasional town hall (admittedly plagued with technical issues) and regular in-world office hours held by some Linden employees, but it’s fair to say that many residents feel that their views are not listened to.

Ironically, one of the main reasons put forward for why corporations should move into Second Life is that they will be able to use the virtual world to interact with their customers, get immediate feedback, and create a more personal relationship with them. So… that makes the current situation with Linden Lab kind of inconvenient for us virtual world proponents.

Maybe there is a limit to how many customers you can dialogue with — once Linden Lab hit a couple of million residents, using IMs to communicate, or even having public forums became ineffective. Having sufficient resources to have interactive dialogues with all your users maybe is a problem that all business in SL will need to face. But what a lovely problem to have: “We’re getting too many visitors on our island — take down the camping chairs!”

The answer to Eloise’s question seems to be the advice one should give to any corporation wanting to communicate in the virtual world:

• Have staff available during business hours to talk with visitors to your location.
• Hold regular communication events to share your vision, ideas, and strategy.
• Foster the development of user communities around your products.
• Provide effective ways for people share their ideas about how to improve your product offerings.
• Expect and welcome criticism.

Businesses in SL are already applying these principles on a small scale. Perhaps the answer is as simple as ensuring that as your customer base grows, you also grow the number of opportunities for dialogue. If you find yourself forced to revert to broadcasting instead of interacting, you may have forgotten the reason for going into the virtual world in the first place.

One of the wonders of Second Life is the new variety of ways businesses and individuals can spam you. Apart from posting billboards all over the mainland, spammers can offer you objects,notecards, and textures, as well as send you IMs and group invitations. The latest releases of the SL client have included some features to try and limit “object-spam”: muting an individual or an object lets you ignore any offers of items, not just chats and IMs. Spamming also seems to be against the Terms of Service, though in an article in the official Linden news letter Torley Linden implies that it is only repetitive spam that is a virtual world faux-pas.

In any case, abuse-reporting and muting spammers doesn’t prevent the spam from reaching you in the first place. I’m starting to get a fair amount of group invitations and IMs from people asking me to try their latest products, which is doubly annoying, since these messages get forwarded to my email. The only option available at this point is to turn off email forwarding, which is too blunt of an approach. Some more fine-grained tools would be helpful. For example,

• Only forward IMs from people on my “friends” list
• Allow IM forwarding on an individual basis
• Automatically reject group offers

Anybody have other ideas? I looked in the Second Life Issue Tracker, and could not find any request related to IM spam, so maybe there’s a possibility to fill the gap and influence the development.

The real problem is that Linden Lab has created a communication mechanism without considering the spam issue at all. Given the history of USENET, email, wiki vandalism, blog comment spam, as well as other examples (I’m even getting spam on Twitter), it seems that building in a filtering mechanism from the start of any new communication medium is an essential feature.