Irving in (a Virtual World) Wonderland

I recently joined Second Life (SL), which describes itself as "a 3D online digital world imagined, created and owned by its residents."  Another way to think about Second Life is in terms of Virtual Worlds.  Wikipedia defines a virtual world as "a computer-simulated environment intended for its users to inhabit and interact via avatars.  This habitation usually is represented in the form of two- or three-dimensional graphical representations of humanoids (or other graphical or text-based avatars)."

In the last couple of years I have become increasingly interested in 3rd generation user interfaces (3GUI) inspired by advanced gaming technologies such as those found in Microsoft's XBOX 360 and Sony's PS3.  Over time I have become convinced that such highly visual, interactive interfaces will revolutionize the way people interact with IT applications of all sorts.  I have also become convinced that such virtual world capabilities will profoundly transform business and related institutions in society.   

A number of IBM colleagues from around the world, now numbering in the hundreds, have been experimenting with virtual worlds in Second Life, and they helped me get "in-world."  In SL, you pick whatever first name you want and then you can choose from a selection of last names. (You can also select a specific last name by paying a fee.)  Unlike most people in SL, I stuck with my First Life (FL) name - Irving.  Among the second names offered by SL at the time I joined, I picked Islander.  I sort of liked the sound of Irving Islander, and since I was born and grew up on an island – Cuba - Irving Islander felt just right.

My SL avatar or icon is a fairly realistic representation of what I look like in First Life - again, unlike most inhabitants of Second Life.  My IBM colleagues designed my avatar along with the clothes my avatar wears.  I have a suit and tie to wear for business meetings.  But most of the time I go around Second Life dressed informally in a Pedro Martinez New York Mets baseball shirt, slacks, tennis shoes and a Cuban baseball cap.  Perhaps not very imaginative by SL standards, but appropriate for someone my age hanging out in a virtual world. 

And what a world it is!  I have only been there a short time, and I have primarily explored the IBM sites my colleagues have built, but it is impressive how rich and innovative these virtual worlds are.  While generally virtual worlds are inspired by and sort of look like the real worlds they represent, their appearance and behavior can be just about anything you want, limited only by the imagination of the designers.  I can now appreciate how Alice must have felt in Wonderland.   

My colleagues have built virtual world sites that replicate the IBM Hursley Labs in England and the Almaden Research Center in California.  They are building a virtual Beijing Forbidden City.  They are designing a set of conference centers devoted to business with our customers, public policy issues and internal collaborations. And they are creating meeting spaces for ex-IBMers and current employees to meet, catch up and even collaborate – part of a new alumni program called The Greater IBM Connection.

Multiply that kind of activity 100-fold, just in Second Life, and then factor in the many other virtual world sites that are either already in existence or under construction, and you get a picture of the innovative energy being unleashed by large numbers of people around the world.  I think that what we are seeing is the evolution of the Internet and World Wide Web in incredibly important new directions. Foremost among them is a much more people-centric Web. 

We see this people-centric evolution of the Web in social networks and Web 2.0  - capabilities that enable people to find each other, form communities, share information, and collaborate on a variety of endeavors.  Now we are bringing to this new people-centric spirit the highly visual, interactive applications in Virtual Worlds.  This new breed of applications is being rethought around the people who design them, maintain them and use them, instead of asking those people to come down to the level of the computers.

All in all, this feels to me just like the rise of the Internet and the Web did in the mid-90s.  As was the case then, the underlying technologies now being discovered had been in use for a while in the scientific and technical communities – especially among those doing research in supercomputing applications.  I still remember seeing very impressive scientific visualization work at the Los Alamos National Lab about fifteen year ago.  I remember as well a visit to the Argonne National Lab over ten years ago when I first saw the virtual reality immersive environments known as CAVEs.

As with the Internet, the Department of Defense and other US Federal government agencies have had a major role in the development of these technologies, such as war-game simulations to help in the training of soldiers.  And once again, the huge advances in the power and price/performance of the underlying computer technologies - such as the supercomputers and graphics capabilities needed to simulate virtual worlds and create highly realistic visualizations - are now bringing  these sophisticated capabilities to consumer markets - in particular, to applications being primarily (but not exclusively) embraced by younger people, such as video games and massively multiplayer online games, including role-playing virtual environments like Second Life.      

We are poised for the next major step. We can now bring these exciting capabilities, already in wide use in science, engineering, defense and consumer applications, into the worlds of business, education, health care and government.  This was the step that led to IBM’s e-business strategy ten years ago.  Could we be at the onset of v-business?  Based on my initial experiences in Second Life, we are all in for an incredible ride.      

Comments

[David]

Irving,
do you think in future IBM might do business through SL ? for instance : - provide courses/training in a virtual classroom (easier than bring people physically over), or give marketing demos, or teasers ?
thanks.

[Prokofy Neva]

Hi, Irving, welcome to Second Life!

I think IBM is right to get in on the ground floor, so to speak, of the new 3-D Internet.

It's the right place to be to experiment, push the limits, see what you can do to make it better. I think you should just buy up 40 islands, frankly, which on the one hand would support this struggling California start-up, Linden Lab and make them not try to expand at such a breakneck speed, and also help them fix all the problems in this asset-server dominated world.

Given your knowledge of the history of the Internet and virtuality, I'd love to hear you ponder what you really think this world can do. So far, I distill from what you wrote that you think it can be a powerful data representation machine and a powerful socializing machine.

Since there are already cheaper and more effective machines for doing this (aren't there?), then...what is Second Life *for*, in your view?

That is, I'm not asking you to identify what this not-a-game does (I've been there for 2 years and know it's a "not-a-game" game lol). Rather, I'm asking you to think backwards.

Instead of saying, oh, wow here's this 3-d thingie that looks like it's going to be super for data representation (although it is weak on storage, transfer, ownership) and looks like it's going to be super on socializing (although it also breaks up RL marriages and causes property loss due to the socializing of griefers and wreckers, too)....

....imagine what it is that people DO need for actual "better" data representation and "better" socializing, identify what that core set of needs are, then ask...does SL do this? What needs to be done to make it do that? etc.

Also, I'd have to ask about IBM what I'd ask of any big entity coming into a community that it will displace, realizing that you aren't attempting to "represent IBM" on this blog or in SL per se.

Are you planning to get out into the world at all and patronize the thousands of small businesses there, or are they not on your radar and not useful to you?

Do you think there should be a corporate rate, individual rate, and educational rate for islands, given the huge 50 percent increase that will wipe out many small businesses, but be negligible for a big corporation?

Does a platform like Second Life even need small businesses and ordinary customers who aren't your customers when giant corporations could in fact replicate an old model, the company town, and provide everything from housing to entertainment for their RL and new SL customers?

[Manuel Avalos]

Irving, same as you I just recently joining second live(SL) as nick name Manny Kalok, it was very interesting experience starting with defining the look of your Avatar, so you can try to represent yourself as you are or perhaps change the image a little be as the way you want to be. I'm just starting and my next step is to get familiar with all functions, services and interaction this new world is offering, at the end besides the virtual social experience I'll be looking to learn something that I can apply from this virtual world to my 1st. Life.

Regards,,, Manuel

[Kathy Mandelstein]

My comment is a response to David. Yes we are looking at second life to do developer training events. My friend Jeff Barr at the Amazon Developer Program has already been doing them successfully. Stay tuned for a schedule of events in 2007 off of http://www.ibm.com/developerWorks

[Chris]

I've participated quite a bit on ActiveWorlds when that first was new, but I've never even heard about this one.

(-Perhaps it would be worth a try; as ActiveWorlds have deteriorated quite a bit since it's origins..)

[Catherine Helzerman]

Irving..Welcome to Second Life. My SL name is Hajia Engawa. Hope to see you online. :-)

[Jitu]

Hi All:

Happy holidays and 'innovative' new year !

I recently had an interesting discussion about using 'Avatar concept' for SMB business client to help reachout to non-store-visiting customers. Thought, if we are able to create a 3D ( or 4D - adding time as a dimension) replication of store visit by customer - where SMB owner ( generally expert and passionalte about the business !) could address each virtual customer individually based on expert-program based logic that kick in realtime during the customer interaction - - a native conecept of 'avatar' per its original sanskrit defination ! ........thoughts about getting 'avatar' concept in business applications to enable a far reaching/quality-interactions to capture global customers ........thx jitu

[Emergency Cash]

Theres nothing wrong with a helping hand......

[MMO]

Second Life is a bit hyped up. Not a lot of people even play the game. It gets way more publicity than it deserves.