Really

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.

Tateru Nino has written an article on why virtual worlds are not the future on the web (and summarized it quite concisely on twitter). Tateru argues that the web and virtual environments have different purposes, and may continue to evolve together, perhaps enhancing each other, but still remaining largely separate. The web is for efficiently finding and understanding connected sets of information, whereas virtual environments like Second Life are best used for visualizations and immersing yourself in an environment to experience data: “A virtual environment is a representation of data through digital synesthesia into forms the user will find meaningful or familiar.”

If I understand the argument correctly, it comes down to the notion that some tasks are simply more effectively done in a 2D environment like a web browser; search results, or amazon product listings are best viewed in a list on your web browser, where you can quickly click on them to achieve what you want to do. So, in the future, we’ll still have our web browsers for getting information, and we’ll pop into the virtual world when we want an experience, or want to hang out with other people.

My issue with this argument (and apologies to Tateru if I mis-stated it) is that I’m not sure that the 2D desktop is the best way to interact with and create data. I think this is the problem (I mean, the opportunity - since this is a corporate blog…) that we’re only starting to address. We are so used to dealing with lists and windows and linear pieces of text that it is easy to believe that these are the best ways of doing things on computers. But there is nothing particularly natural about those techniques, and often they seem to be results of physical constraints of our devices. The interface for browsing your files on today’s computers is not significantly different from using the DIR command in MS-DOS. Apple’s use of Cover Flow to browse files in the upcoming Leopard release, is still essentially a one dimensional list, but (as I may have mentioned before) perhaps an initial step on exploring how a 3D space can be used. Other examples are The Ivory Tower of Primitives and the Particle Laboratory in Second Life, showing how a 3D environment can be a more effective mechanism to convey a tutorial than a document or a wiki. As experimenting with 3D virtual environments becomes easier, and the results of those experiments can be used on affordable consumer hardware, people will discover new interface techniques that will displace the standard browser and desktop metaphors.

Email was said to be the original “killer-app” of the Internet, and while email client apps are probably not going away any time soon, web-based email continues to grow. I don’t think it is unreasonable to believe that in the same way that people figured out how to use the new affordances of the web to enhance email, we will start to discover how virtual worlds will make our current web-browsing tasks more effective (though 3D Mailbox’s tool representing your emails as people at a virtual pool party may not be the best approach, there is something to be said for feeding spam to the sharks in the pool….)

It’s been a while since I posted anything — partially because I just spent some time in Montana with no access to the Internet. However, since I was surrounded by gorgeous landscapes, Casinos everywhere, and furry animals popping up when least expected, it was similar enough to Second Life to lessen any withdrawal symptoms.

One piece of news that came out while I was away was Linden Lab’s announcement of the impending arrival of the “Hetereogeneous Grid”. Apparently, the latest upgrades have set up the underlying architecture of Second Life to allow different versions of the server software to be running on the grid simultaneously. This will allow the Lindens to run Beta versions of the server on the main grid, or gradually roll out the latest version of the server to a small set of regions, only affecting those residents who chose to visit them. Viewer upgrades are also optional, so users can run older versions of the client without crashing or being forced to upgrade.

Enabling the heterogeneous grid will hopefully lead to a more stable Second Life, where new features can be tested more thoroughly and shutting down the entire world on “upgrade-Wednesday ” is no longer necessary.

What else is possible? Linden Lab could offer different versions of the server software to sim owners, perhaps a “premium server” with additional features (for a moderate fee, of course). If they were in a more benign mood, they could allow users to develop and run their own versions of the server (once the server code is open sourced). Land-owners could then try to lure residents and businesses by offering more features than the competition. One could even try to lock-in residents by providing features that also require a custom version of the client. The result will be a truly heterogeneous grid, with different clients and servers, only unified by a common protocol, similar to the World Wide Web.