In the first wave of the big virtual worlds hype (which was a Second Life hype, actually) the canonical application for this new technology was "marketing" - maybe because marketeers are the ones, which just love new ways to reach the minds of customers (and the costs for some experiments in Second Life did not mean much in relationship to typical marketing budgets). They were disappointed after a while, when they discovered the size of their target groups, which they could reach through Second Life ... and the anti-hype began.
At the same time, quietly and steadily, another group of people began to discover virtual worlds. And actually, it seems as if at least in the "corporate world" there is a lot more immediate potential for a real ROI with applications in the context of intranets and education/training. The big advantage of virtual worlds, immersion, the feeling of being together with other people, no matter, where they are in the physical world, is extremely interesting for these application areas, too. That is not just a virtual worlds fanboy's opinion. IBM, Gartner, Forrester or McKinsey do agree.
So, while we might have to wait a few years until the global Metaverse appears, there will certainly quite a few Intraworlds around in the near future. I would like to define an Intraworld as follows:
Intraworlds are to virtual worlds what intranets are to the web. An Intraworld is a virtual world, which is accessible to the employees of one company. The server side of such a platform usually runs in the company’s own data center and the users access the world with PCs connected to these server(s) through the company’s LAN (or through a VPN connection). Additionally, an Intraworld is optimized for similar purposes as an intranet: communication, information sharing and general collaboration. Typical applications are meetings, conferences, presentations and sometimes training.
In a similar way you can define 'Extraworlds', too, of course.
The first products, which are optimized for this market, are Sun's Project Wonderland and Qwaq by a company of the same name. Both are intended to help companies set up their own Intraworlds. Qwaq is more of a packaged service offering (see here), while Project Wonderland is a real "tool kit" in a more technical sense. You can build a virtual world with it, but you can not simply "log in to" Project Wonderland. Sun has used Project Wonderland to create their own demo intraworld, already, which it calls MPK20.
I will be looking into both products in some detail in the coming weeks.
Technorati Tags: 3d web, second life, virtual training, virtual worlds, web 3.d, intraworld
Funnily enough, our company is actually called IntraWorlds.
We are building 'IntraWorlds' for companies, but have found that the virtual reality approach is an interesting techy gizmo, but not really as professional as many companies would like - most are looking for a knowledge exchange and professional network application - an internal version of linkedIn or XING that is customised for their purposes.
Posted by: Mark Burk | July 07, 2008 at 11:09 AM
>> most are looking for a knowledge exchange
>> and professional network application - an
>> internal version of linkedIn or XING that
> is customised for their purposes
This is certainly true! But please let us not forget, that in the time, when we tried to suggest the advantage of intranets to the same people, they were "looking for" a fileshare on the company LAN. And when the first pioneers suggested internal "social apps" a cantina menu and some downloadable forms were considered a state of the art intranet ...
Posted by: Markus Breuer (Pham Neutra) | July 07, 2008 at 08:24 PM
Second Life for your lounge
The following is pretty interesting but fairly unknown in the German-speaking countries and probably the rest of Europe.
There is now a viable alternative to Second Life, called OpenSimulator. Although still in alpha status, it is already intensively in use with an increasing number of open grids and a fast growing community.
It is a freely developed system, which works exactly like Second Life. The server system is open source and can be operated independently. To use it just take the Second Life client or one of the many available community clients that also are open source.
Since the beginning of 2007 a very large and distributed open source developer community is building a server for the Second Life protocol. Many well known companies (IBM, Nokia, Microsoft, …) and the major key players of the VR-industry have at least partially applied to this project and donated manpower to push the topic.
OpenSimulator is not just a plain copy of Second Life. Instead the developers work on creating an universal 3D application server for VR systems. Second Life is currently the main use case for OpenSimulator but there are many more. OpenSimulator is based on the Second Life protocol for virtual worlds, which probably will prevail as the future standard for networked VR. Possible applications are entertainment, edutainment, Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), Online Business Collaboration Solutions (OBCSs) and many more (new buzzword please !!!).
OpenSimulator is on its way to become the Apache of the Web 3D (just call it Web 3.0 from now on, it’s not the VRML crap from the past). The future clearly lies in the combination of the solid technologies of the Web 2.0 with the currently emerging interactive VR systems and their networked virtual worlds.
Web 2.0 + OpenSimulator = Web 3.0
Actually, we are facing the new era of the 3D Internet in the same stage (or at the same threshold), as we did in 1992/1993 with the era of the WWW. The technology is ready for use, but nobody is aware of it. Kicking off at any time, nobody dares to start or use the potential. “WWW? What the heck is that?” In the meantime the good old Internet has been fully integrated with our daily professional life. It is happening again. The market for the 3D Internet is raising at present and we are located at the beginning of an exponential development cycle. Naturally being at its beginning very shallow so most slumber away the start of this new development. But soon it will take off forcefully, taking its early adopters to the top.
Another highlight is www.realxtend.org, which bases on OpenSimulator. It is open source too and offers even more features. Outstanding is the possibility to visit all virtual worlds with one single avatar having its global inventory with it all the time. The RealXtend and OpenSimulator teams are working closely together to merge their developments targeting an OpenSimulator version with RealXtend as plugins.
We at TalentRaspel virtual worlds Ltd. engaged ourselves in OpenSimulator, RealXtend and the analysis of the related impact on the future of virtual worlds and the Web 3.0. Seeking to provide the impetus for this technology in Europe we are looking forward for anyone willing to join helping us. Contact: [email protected].
In addition we offer our assistance to everybody, whether professional or hobbyist, interested in getting an impression of the new world of the now open Second Life.
Greetings from the real world,
Kai Ludwig
Director
TalentRaspel virtual worlds Ltd.
www.talentraspel.de
Posted by: Kai Ludwig | October 29, 2008 at 01:32 PM