Virtually Useless - A Response #fote09 #fote09vw

Seeing as I am debating about SL and Virtual Worlds with @AJCann on a panel at FOTE09 today I thought I ought to a point by point response of his infamous blog post - as he does do a pretty good job of summarising typical objections to Second Life.

Badly designed user interface.

Fair point, I'm always accidentally closing windows I had open, and users often miss controls because they've slid off the bottom of the screen. But:

• SL has a new user interface coming and its very different and based on the demo I saw from Tom Hale ( LL CPO) a few months ago it will make a BIG difference to usability. We should see it in the next few months.
• Increasingly we're developing HUDs when we develop projects in SL, so the HUD actually becomes the primary user interface (after "in-world"), not all the SL menu choices. That means you can tailor the HUD and UI to exactly what the user needs for that exercise (whilst keeping to common conventions), significantly increasing usability.
• If you really don't like the LL interface then since the client is open source you can write your own. Many people use browsers like Emerarld and Impromptu and Katherine's excellent work. And there's Snowglobe if you want a more "official" open source browser. In fact one of the things that we've been talking about is creating a "training" client which actually rips out almost every existing SL menu option since most students don't need them, and leaves you to use HUDs to "skin" the client to what you want. Forterra's Olive takes this very slimmed down client approach and it works well for ordinary, non-power users.

Ports and Security

Got us there. Helping commercial and educational clients to get SL actually through there firewall is always a major headache, and LL know it but I can't see a solution any time soon.However you can always move to OpenSim and put that behind your firewall, or LL's own Project Nebraska. But yes, it's not an issue that some other virtual worlds have (although most commercial ones are designed for behind firewall operation anyway), and it is one that LL ultimately needs to crack. There again I remember the first days of the web when my employer (a FTSE100 plc) would only let us have the web on standalone PCs with their own dial-up connection to the Internet and no LAN connectivity for "security reasons".

New Client Versions

The days of monthly mandatory updates are long gone. I think there have only been two major releases (1.22 and 1.23) in the past year, and I don't think either was mandatory (unless you wanted to access Adult content!). Mind you I'm never again goign to complain about downloading the SL client and its PC requirements after downloading the 1.2GB Blue Mars virtual world client and discovering it failed to run on my laptop (which happily runs two SL Windlight sessions)

Lack of Imagination

Yep, we appear to spend half our lives at Daden persuading clients NOT to build a duplicate copy of their RL campus. Yes put something in their to "anchor" the experience (for Southampton University it was actually the stream through the campus), but otherwise just build the spaces you need for the sort of training and teaching you want to do. And you can even use Holodeck approaches to repurpose a space instantly (as at Coventry University), or use the same simulation space for mutliple subjects (a street scene we did for UFI worked for both customer training and basic communications skills.) We are though still only seeing quite "normal" uses of SL. We talk about a spectrum that runs something like the following:

• Level 1 - Using the virtual world purely as a remote communications/meeting tool, just using the VOIP and IM chat features, and powerpoint slides and maybe a white board
• Level 2- Using the virtual world to create simulations which would be just too costly to stage in RL - whether its a paramedic street scene, a moon landing, the inside of a jet engine or strands of DNA hundreds of meters high.
• Level 3 - "Not Possible In Real Life", doing stuff that you can ONLY do in a virtual world, usually because in the real world we have things like gravity, or the inability to create 3D holographic projections or perfect robots.

I'd guess that about 50% of educational projects are at Level 1, 45% at level 2 and only 5% at level 3. But this isn't an issue with SL, it about people lack of familiarity with the possibilities of the system - but that familiarity will come, and with it more creative applications.

Cost

There can only be two real commercial reasons for using virtual worlds:

• They let you do the same level of education for less whole cost
• They let you do better education for the same whole cost

The commercial sector appears to be better at tracking ROI for virtual world education than the academic sector. The recent Serious Virtual Worlds conference at the Serious Games Institute in Coventry had a whole host of commercial ROI studies - things like the Highways Agency saving around £65,000 for each day of training they did in the virtual world instead of in RL. Even in Academia there are some good quantitative studies emerging - one from Imperial College (presented at ReLive I think) showed that for their "operating theatre induction" students who undertook the induction in Second Life not only did better than those who had the traditional lecture based induction, but also did better than those who had their induction in a real operating theatre.

As a "firm of developer building stuff" (and probably having worked in SL with more UK educational institutions than any other company) you could expect us to take exception to the idea that universities are "sub-contracting pedagogy" and "can't use the tools". We always work closely with the front-line educators, and the closer we are to the educators then usually the better the project. We understand some of the pedagogic principles, but there is no way that we manage that side - these are joint projects. Also almost every project we have done has involved skills transfer - so at the end of the project the university staff (and even some students) can manage, maintain and develop the system. Indeed one of the students from the original Coventry project now runs her of SL development business.

And of course through the support of JISC we have been able to create tools like PIVOTE that make creating and maintaining virtual world exercises even easier, and release them as licence-free open-source back to the community. PIVOTE has now had over 120 downloads of its server code, and we host over 20 institutions on our PIVOTE hosting service, and we've had emails from institutional users as far away as Canada and Argentina!

Online Identity

It is a fascinating debate about whether students should have a different identity in SL, or their RL indentity. But SL hasn't forced you down the different identity route for a couple of years. Through the Registration API you (or we!) can create a set of SL registration pages on your own Intranet. You then ask students just to enter their real world first/last name, and then you then automatically concatenate them to create the SL account name with a common bespoke surname. So for instance as David Burden I could have an "office" account of DavidBurden Daden (eat your heart out Lindens!). You could and even bypass the sign-up process completley and just fire your whole student database at the RegAPI and auto-create all the accounts - and bypass any issues about creating multiple accounts from the same IP address! And with OpenSim the possibilities are even greater.

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And if you really want your own face on your avatar there are several third party applications which wil let you do it. BUT the results are generally awful. I still think that well crafted SL avatar still looks far better than any of the virtual worlds that try and do "real image" faces. Image is important though - the QWAQ business meeting virtual world started out with the "head in a jar" model (actually more like "head on a Lego Minifig") and vehemently defended their decision to avoid "real" avatars. But they have now introduced real avatars and in their recent publicity shots to accompany their re-branding as Telepace (an equally awful name but for different reasons) only about 1 avatar in 10 is a minifig.

Data Portability

Does he mean Data or 3D Objects?

For 3D objects yes its been that case that what's built in SL stays in SL, but thats mainly becuase the prim based model was needed to make the build process an in-world experience that could be learnt in minutes - and that is why SL has been such a creative place and I for one would rather have creativity than portability - at least at first. But SL is growing up. In OpenSim we're already seeing import and exprt tools emerging, and some can be used with SL itself. And in 2010 we've been promised mesh import into SL itself- I've seen the demo and it looks awesome. SO we might have the best of both worlds - high definition builds being done in 3D Studio Max and imported into SL, but nice simple build tools still in SL itself. And remember that none of the other virtual worlds let you export buildings - you create them outside the platform in Collada or 3DS or whatever and then bring them into the world, and re-import if you want to change anything.

I'm actually more concerned with data, and here the trick is to actually keep as much code and ALL data on the web, and treat SL purely as a user interface. LSL is a SCRIPTING language, you aren't meant to be building big applications with it. Use robust tools on web servers (like Java or C# or even Perl) to create your applications and store your data, and then use the excellent llHTTPRequest call and the new HTTP-In event to move commands and data as required between SL and the web. We've used that approach for years and found it pretty much 100% reliable. That is how we built PIVOTE and our chatbots, and Datascape and our Navigator web browser. And of course the by-product of this is that your "application" is now a web service, so you can potentially create interfaces for ANY virtual world, or for the web, or for FLASH or even an iPhone.

Sleaze

I hate to have to say it yet again but have you seen some of the sites on the web? We don't not use the web because of the porn sites - we just avoid them. The same in SL - and even easier now that adult content has its own continent. In fact we are increasingly seeing our clients build not only on private islands, but also with their own registration pages (see above) and their own orientation - so their users just aren't exposed to sleaze. You can take things even further, there's a switch we can throw in the RegAPI which means the student accounts can't even leave the University island - making things safe still. And for the ultimate level of safety you can even customise the client as described above so there aren't any search or map functions that might show students content that you want to hide from them, even if they can't get to it.

There are however two remaining issues, both of which we've flagged with Linden Lab and hope to progress with them:

• Even if you create an account through the RegAPI you have to maintain it (like changing password) through the main SL web site. This might not have any sleaze but its focus is undoubtably on dancing and partying not studying. So we've asked LL if ultimately the RegAPI can be extended to cover account management functions (so we can do client branded account management pages), and if in the mean time they can put up a "neutral" skin for the account management pages on the SL@Work/SLGrid microsite that we can deep link to - and maybe even "hide" in a client branded frame.
• The separation of Teen and Main Grid causes educators (and others) real problems, and with the move of Adult content off of the main grid is almost an anachronism. Other similar virtual worlds don't have this distinction (Active Worlds is probably closest to SL in many ways, and has run far longer that SL with purely a voluntary flagging of sims as PG/15/18). Whilst we hope that ultimately LL merges the two grids there is in the meantime a lot of scope to let private islands owners use the RegAPI to lock accounts to their sim and to manage their own users - regardles of age.

Other Points

AJCanns does recognise that virtual worlds do have their merits - in particular for carbion reduction. He doesn't though think that they make good conferencing tools, he prefers Skype and Eluminate. But they are different types of tools for different uses. Yes I use Skype a lot, mainly for 1:1 calls, in group calls it suffers the same problems as any audio conference (all disembodied voices), and you need additional apps if you want to start sharing presentations, documents and the like. With virtual worlds you get a far better sense of the participants, of it being a shared event, you can share information and 3D models (the next SL iteration will have a fully usable web browser including Google Docs sharing), and anecdotal evidence is suggesting that just by having a virtual location for the meeting you remember the content far better.

Google Lively - well that died. The idea of a simpler 2.5D virtual world is fine, and can work alongside a richer environment like SL. We've been playing with Metaplace and really enjoy it. More importantly we can take our applications like PIVOTE and chatbots and drop them straight into Metaplace - so Metaplace and SL users are accessing the same applications and the same data. Others have already done SL-to-Metaplace chat bridges, and with the new Media API it is conceivable that you could have Metaplace running on a screen inside of SL!

World of Warcraft - as I game I find it boring (even my kids do), but lots of people like it, and yes I can see that for some requirements its an interesting space to teach and learn it. But its NOT a true virtual world. You can't create content or applications, you can only bend the game so far.

Conclusions

OK I've been writing this since Birmingham and we're almost at Euston so time to finish off!

The feeling I get reading AJCanns post is that he is just not aware of what SL can really do nowadays. It sounds like he hasn't been really USING it much recently, and that he's only been exposed to some relatively basic "Level 1" educational builds. Yes we have a long way to go with how we use virtual worlds, but to my mind, and to many people I speak to, SL may have its faults but it's a far better implementation of the sort of virtual world we want to end up with than ANYTHING else out there. Interestingly none of the new virtual worlds that have luanched in the last 5 years have tried to do what SL did - create a completely user malleable virtual world. That's a tough thing to do (which is why SL used to have the stability issues it did) - but it's the RIGHT thing to do. And with with growing OpenSim community to push Second Life even further forward then the future can only be bright.

I'm often asked "is Second Life going to be 'the one', or will it be replaced by something else?". I don't know if SL will be the one, but I am sure that when we reach the "final" virtual world solution, the 3D equivalent of the web, we will see more of Second Life in its spirit and design than any other virtual world.

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Toward Semantic Virtual Worlds - A Thinkpiece

One of the things that has struck me over the last few weeks in discussions about where virtual worlds are going is that we are in danger of making the same mistake made by application development and the web, by concentrating on the wrong thing. With virtual worlds, and the moves towards interoperability and standards, there is a real opportunity to get things right first time.

The "mistake" is that we tend to concentrate on the visual. It's only natural, it's probably our most powerful sense and the one that most of us would least wish be without - and hardly a surprising one for virtual worlds!

Since the first computer read-out and green-screen VDU we have developed computer applications and their user interface as a single entity. Even with the move to client-server this did not change - one application, one user interface. However with the arrival of the web, and of mobile phones, things began to change a bit. Users wanted access to the same application (be it a CRM system or Facebook) regardless of the device they were using. In fact almost 10 years ago I had a slide in my Aseriti slide pack (selling utility billing systems) that called for "Different Users, Different Needs", showing a user interface less application engine surrounded by optimised user interfaces for mobile, consumer, web and call-centre users.

The development of the mash-up culture has pushed this even further. Once we replace applications by user interface-less application engines, and then create user interfaces (and even other application engines) which talk to the application through an agreed API (typically a web service) we can unleash a whole new set of creativity in how we create applications.

The web unfortunately made a similar mistake, hardly surprising since its was based around HTML, but disappointing given Sir Tim Berners-Lee's own original vision, and that of Alan Kay and the Dynabook. HTML is mostly about marking up the display, not the content. David Burden means nothing more but the characters D-a-v-i-d-%20-B-u-r-d-e-n displayed in bold type. If you search for "David Burden" on Google you'll find lots of the same characters in the same order, but you'll have to guess that they actually refer to different people.

The "solution" of course is the Semantic Web - championed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. But trying to retrofit it to the Petabytes of text strings that make up most of the web is an enormous challenge. Formats like RSS, and even Twitter hashtags, begin to give us some sort access to a semantic web, but the true semantic web languages of RDF and OWL (which at Daden we are using to give our chatbots semantic understanding) are woefully under-used. Even less used are things like Info URIs - agreed semantic codes, like an ISBN number, that say that info:people/davidburden/515121 is me, and not the CIO of the Post Office. If every mention of me on the web was marked up semantically then finding all references to me on the web becomes trivial. It's good to see that Google is beginning to introduce aspects of semantics into its search results, but without the original content being semantically marked up its only a small step - the mistake has already been made.

So what's all this got to do with virtual worlds? Almost any initial assessment of a virtual world starts with how well it looks - how good are the textures, the avatars, the sky, water and shadows. After that it's about functionality - how naturally does the avatar move, how can you interact with objects, can you view the web or MS Office - and about deployment issues (does it run on a low spec PC, can it run behind the firewall, can we protect children). There is active debate at the moment about standards in virtual worlds - Collada, X3D etc - and whether virtual worlds should be downloads or browser based (and this itself offers a spectrum of solutions as pointed out by Babbage Linden at the recent Apply Serious Games conference).

But to me all this is missing the point. Virtual worlds are NOT about what they look like, but about what's in them.

Let's not repeat the mistake of application development and the web. Let's start thinking about virtual worlds in terms of how we semantically mark up their content, and then treat the display issue as a second order problem. The virtual world is not HOW you see it, it's WHAT you see (or more precisely what you sense and interact with).

Some examples. These are all based around Second Life, since with libsecondlife/libomv we can actually get access to the underlying object models (which is as close to a semantic virtual world model as you can get).

• With Open Sim you not only have a different application sharing the same object model as SL, but also different clients using different graphics engines to render "SL" in subtly different ways.


• We have been working with the University of Birmingham to use their expertise in robotics to help create autonomous avatars in SL. The University uses a standard robot simulation application to visualise and model physical world spaces and test robot software, before downloading the code to the physical-world robots. To work in SL they've taken the SL object/scene description and dynamically fed it to the bot modelling tool - so SL "appears" as a wireframe model in the simulation application just as their physical world spaces do.


• On my iPhone I have Sparkle, a great little app which lets me log my avatar into SL. No graphics yet, just text (and not even a list of nearby avatars) but adding a radar scan of nearby people - and objects - would be almost trivial, and adding a 2D birds-eye view of the locale only a little harder. Even a 2.5D "Habbo" rendering of SL would not be impossible.


• We've already played around with using LSL sensor data and libomv to generate live radar maps in web browsers - why not push this a bit further and use Unity, X3D or similar to "re-create" Second Life in the browser - it won't look "identical", but in reality it's all just bits anyway.

Four situations, four different ways of rendering the Second Life "semantics".

Our own work on PIVOTE shows another approach to this problem. By creating the structure and content of a training exercise away from the visualisation tool we are free to then deploy the exercise onto the web, or iPhone or virtual world of our choice without having to change the semantic information or the learning pedagogy. If that semantic model could be extended to include the virtual world itself, then we would have a true write once - play anywhere training system.

One final issue that our bots particularly suffer from, is that having access to objects is no real guarantee of having access to true semantics. I might create a plywood cube in Second Life and call it a chair, a snake, or anything. The bot cannot guarantee that reading an object's name will tell it what the object is. To be truly semantic any future editing system should ideally force us to put accurate semantics on the objects we create - and in particular their place in the ontology of the world. Then even if we can't recreate a "chair" as the specified collection of prims or polygons we can substitute our own.

So this is my challenge to the virtual world community. Stop thinking of virtual worlds (and especially the future of virtual worlds) in terms of how they are rendered, but concentrate on their object models and the underlying semantics. I have every confidence that the progressive increase in PC power and bandwidth - and the existing capabilities of computer games - will mean that the look and feel of virtual worlds will come on just fine. And those of us deploying virtual worlds into enterprises will find that with wider adoption and real business need/demand will come the solution to all our problems of firewalls and user account controls (just as it did when the web first arrived in enterprises). These are (almost) trivial problems. If we want to create truly usable and powerful virtual spaces (and I even hesitate even to use the world virtual) then we should be focussing on the semantics of the spaces and the objects within them. That way we will avoid the problems of applications and the web. We will know what the objects in our world are - we only have to decide how to render them.

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World Builder - stunning short film - tech enabled love story

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

Stunning video - SL meets Star Trek Holodeck meets RL love story

Now if only SL building worked like this - but another classic case of its easier to virtualise us (as avatars) rather than try and virtualise things around us.

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BBC Radio 7's Planet B - cult classic in the making?

The BBC's Planet B is growing on me - characters hunting through a series of virtual worlds for a friend, and dealing with "virals", avatars which are not being driven by humans, and "rogues" - virals which have become sentient. With the vagaries of iPlayer you just need to make sure you catch all the episodes before they die - I think I missed the first 1 or 2, and heard some out of order, but am now trying to go back through in the right sequence.

Could become a cult classic.

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Coca Cola Avatars in the real world

Great Super-Bowl ad from Coca-Cola

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NOAA's Second Earth and US EPA transport builds in SL

Every so often you follow a link to a great location in SL, and then stumble on something else (almost) as amazing.

Followed the link from New World Notes to NOAA's stunning Second Earth. I've seen a sculptie earth before, but this one is huge and has live data (and satellites) on it. Stunning build and makes me want to renew our efforts to find a (UK) sponsor for a 1 - 6 sim scale UK model. Next time I visit I must put my spacesuit on too!

Looking at the local map I saw some ship and aircraft shapes on an island to the East (this is all around Scilands - where else!). What I found was a whole sim of very high quality, full size transport from NOAA exploration ships (an a wonderful rusting hulk), to trains and Concorde and even an Imperial shuttle. The island is owned by the EPA, so would love to know what they have in mind! Note the parcels are private, but you can hover over and cam in to see the detail.

Stunning places, and the potential applications enormous. I'd challenge anyone to go visit them and then not see just how important virtual worlds are going to become!

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Video: 15 Minutes of Sony Home

http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/11/video-15-minutes-of-sony-home.html

Sony Home video. Looking very nice, just those scene transitions and awkward gestures. Love the shadows. Assume the ghosted avatars are waiting to download, or are they non-friends?

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Will the Moon and Mars be Virtual Worlds' Coronation?

In the UK it was the Queen's Coronation in 1953 that drove TV's into the mass market, as people bought sets purely to witness the historic event. Perhaps virtual worlds will become de riguer when man returns to the moon, or first lands on Mars.

ln 1969 I was 8 years old. I remember sitting on the floor of our school corridor with the rest of my school watching the grainy black and white images of the first moon landing. At the time TV technology was over 50 years old.

In 10 years time humans might return to the Moon, and in 20 years we might land on Mars. Are we really going to experience this event primarily through a technology which by then will be 100 years old?

The most interesting alternative (well beyond the simple re-packaging of a headcam feed to a wrap-around headset display) are virtual worlds.

When that astronaut (or taikonaut) steps out onto the Moon I (and you) could already be standing on the surface waiting for them.

NASA are already out to tender for their own virtual world. But this won't just be one world, but also a virtual Moon, a virtual Mars. As we collect more and more data about these worlds their virtual analogs will become ever more accurate. Scientists will gather in them to plan missions, analyse data, and decide on the next move or dig of a robot explorer.

But when the landings come these worlds will be crowded. The mission specialists will have their private world, the rest of us will have our own public instances, as crowded or as private as we like. Some might immerse us, forcing us to wear spacesuits and move in reduced gravity, others let us party around the virtual BBQ.

Using video or other motion capture analysis the movement of the astronaut will drive the million copies of their avatar. We'll watch from wherever we want to stand, we'll hear the words as they are spoken, and watch their actions as they do them.

For some this may seem less real than video. But both are just streams of data - and digital video (particularly with emerging object based standards such as MPEG7) has no monopoly on, or even claim to, truth. And in the virtual world you will be immersed, not just viewing but part of the action, it becomes subjective not objective.

Of course Mars offers an additional challenge - lag. The Moon is only 1.2 light seconds away. Mars is 200 - 300 light seconds away. As a one way experience that will be fine, but it disrupts the two-way experience - particularly important for the astronauts, their controllers and scientists, and perhaps even their families. The solution to this may be the flip situation - we virtualise ourselves as an AI based personality construct and run ourselves in the virtual Mars on the astronauts servers on Mars.

So perhaps my grandchildren will remember the return to the Moon or the first Mars landing not as something they saw on a screen sat on a cold wood floor, but as something they experienced unfolding around them.

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Real vs Virtual

Jim Purbick of Linden Lab has a slide headed 'beware false dichotomies' when comparing Work and Fun. I'm thinking  that I should use the same slogan when people start comparing Real and Virtual. The true opposite of Virtual is not Real but Physical. We are back to the Nicholas Negroponte split between the world of Atoms and the world of Bits. Our experiences in the Virtual World can be just as real as in the Physical World. We work with real money, real people, real relationships, real emotions, real time, real brands, real reputations and real risks in both spaces. And the opposite of Real? Perhaps it's Imagined? Or Fictional? Or Unreal? Or perhaps, devoid of context, it has no opposite - everything is real in some way.

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Dipity Virtual Worlds Timeline #relive08

http://www.dipity.com/

Social Media version of SIMILE?

Virtual Worlds timeline by Xantherus

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