Serious Virtual Worlds, Coventry : Second Life, Forterra, IBM et al

Am wondering how the predictions made last year in Kuala Lumpur are going – so taking a day out to visit the SGI and the Serious Virtual Worlds Conference in Coventry live streaming on their page. I got here late but my colleague , Rain Ashford, has written up the morning before coffee.

I am no live blogger but I am highlighting something of a theme in this session which is all about interoperability. And that theme s that interoperability is not simply a technology issue. I’ll put in some more links and pictures later.

John burwell from Forterra– told us not underestimate technophobia as interoperability issue.

He went on to say that it’s people who need to do trials and want to. So make it possible for them or teach them how. Beware of Lock out – dangers of single source solutions. Make sure you can move around. Interoperability needs to be driven by commercial forces. Necessity is the mother of invention = mash ups and native integration. Delays in pilots and implementations as a result of these issues.

What other elements need to be interoperable? This is the list that Forterra’s clients keep on coming back with.

Content = eg clothing. Answer – adopt industry standards eg 3d studio max, maya, sktechup instead of building modeling systems

Interchange formats – eg Collada = answer they developed native importer for collada

scripting and animations

legal issues and intellectual property – who owns the data? Cap off to Linden – if you make content in SL you own it and you can take it wherever you like.

terrain

beyond islands and fractals

non-player characters

learning management systems

avatars , log in s etc

Next up was Jim Purbrick from Linden Lab – “a little interoperability goes a long way”

In Second life you have always been able to upload content and take it away . He went through some examples of this, but dwelt longer on CarbonGoggles – more later, with a nice plug for the BBC and in particular that he did some work for this application at  Mashed 08.

Images – James Au remix

Audio –

Animation – standard motion caption

Streaming Video – is enabling us to have this conference in Second Life now- people go to Second Life for speakes but stay to talk to each other – there will be more of this in the future

Streaming Audio

Web = embedding web pages in SL – not static – seen as huge step for interoperability

Should web browsers be enbedded in virtual worlds or should virtual worlds be in web browser – Jim thinks former

Web services – objects built in SL have links to real world services to pull data in – making the invisible visible – eg carbon data . Can’t do it in real life , can do it in SL. Takin gexisting stuff in SL and overlaying with data – much deeper integration – can actually pull in data from real world by reaching out to the web LINK here to carbon emissions data – app built in 24 hours at MASHED, nice plug here. Real deep application bang for buck most important type of work CARBON GOGGLES.

Machinima – most important area for ip in SL

Economy – i need some chairs, here are some good ones, they are here for 20 linden dollars so I will buy soe of them for my virtual world who needs a 3d artist – that is becase the economy is interoperable

have been working with IBM and Virtual Sims – The Future

Virtual worlds to be operated by different people eg IBM, Forterra, Linden , Uni – and some screenshots of Open Sims being teleported into SL regions and elsewhere.

Early work, long way to go before it can support big applications and reliability but in other ways very interesting, building in modular ways , using phsyics engines etc not for the fainthearted.

Open Source and Open Sims means you never get stuck (never get stuck good title) can always download source code if necessary! so small scale is poss, and so is large scale – this sounds good to me as a layperson as it will allow lots and lots of people to experiment.

Second Life has always been interoperable – this is not new. It has had media upload streaming media web embedding, web services, but imperoperability is not just about technology and talking to the web is more than puting viewer in a browser.