mobile notes – detail to follow
Introducing Second Life to Your Business – Lead by David Burden, Daden Ltd. David is running a very interesting operation providing consultancy on using Second Life as a place for professional meetings, training and business. In a fast paced and changing space, David is providing a balance of entrepreneurship and thought leadership.
All slides on web page. Active worlds platform to create new universe (90 ppl online) but still interesting – voice, data etc. Croquet gives more flexibility – portals & hubs between worlds, window on another world. You can even embed excel and create, edit and manipulate in real-virtual. Kaneva (could be indicative of Sony Home) and you can import other social worlds into Kaneva. With a 150Mb update and good 10min login, very laggy. Embed YouTube video etc. (can do the same in 2nd life wit mpg4 formats) (30 ppl online). Has NPC avatars for running shops etc, conceivably possible to write sophisticated chatbot behind npc for fooling people (popular on US blogs but still beta). Second Life running at 30k to 40k users simultaneously. Very easy object creation process – no programming experience. There.com (issues over maintaining identity between worlds the same log in does work between worlds) very good physics engine, better than SL. Probably want to be in 3 worlds at once (biggest, bespoke, and pre-teen).
Virtual worlds for presence in video conferencing, and visualisation & shared space for collaborative analysis / exploration. Using for emotional experience where that’s not possible (field trips to experience different cultural awareness). Sloodle (SL moodle mashup). Visualisation of RFID usage to see where it makes sense and where it don’t. Virtual worlds mainly synchronous and experiential & immersive. Marketing in VW more like real world marketing campaign – there tends not to be ‘word of God’ way of letting people know what’s going on. Potential for inclusion and digital access, Simon (Wheelies nightclub). Guardian running Second fest. Wimbledom ball tracking data used by IBM to replay matches.
In sorting out business case, determine compelling use case before choosing the platform. Typical start up costs are around £20k but shouldn’t just be prototype otherwise becomes valueless.
Second Life used to be a development platform where most people could do most things. Now people are becoming specialised and highly skilled modeling & scripting. Currently around 13 specialisms.