CTO Blog

Ron,

Please provide us (Capgemini employees) soon with new laptops, so that we can join this Second Life frenzy :-D

Lee

Hi Ron

you have given me the chance to admit something! Now Ron has come out and admitted he is not a fan of secondlife i can be brave and say the same! There are things that intrigue me, and the ability to run public meetings is one of them, and the other is to test new products, or at least user interfaces, virtually within secondlife.

There is one flaw with both possibilities, and that is the 'audience' are not representative of the true public. They are at best technology savvy and at worst maybe 'different' personalities to the more usual range.

There is in the public meeting, the one area that i have hopes that secondlife is a starter for the development of something new, currently one other issue. There are few people whose avatar is actually a recognisable version of themselves. It is usually an extreme, or flattering version, and this is not good for public democracy where the whole point is recognisable public participation.

Still what ever i think it is becoming yet another force of change in a world were the 'people' are increasingly providing the leadership of where they want to go!

andy mulholland

@Lee: not sure if you really want a 'business pc' to be suitable for Second Life. Graphics on laptops (even on ours!) are generally bad. And SL obviously needs excellent graphics support... Still, would be a good requirement for the next gen Capgemini laptop.

I too had a look at Second Life, and was wondering why it is so attractive. Talking to virtual people who probably are completely the opposite of who they really are. And, in a graphical world which is - to say the least - more like the games of 10 years ago (even Doom looked better).
One thing: our new laptop will be running SL without any problem, otherwise Vista won't run properly....

Indeed "our friends within IBM already explored the concept a bit"... to the tune of $10M in Second Life alone (this year), part of a larger investment of c.$100M in virtual environments.

Also I would far rather put up with the "clunkiness" of a virtual meeting with (say) Indian, British, French and American colleagues than
a) wrestle with conference calls;
b) wrestle with videoconferences (with attendees in so many places? I'd be hard-pressed to see that working!) or
c) incur huge costs and time - not forgetting those "carbon miles" - by actually attending a real, honest-to-goodness, face-to-face physical meeting.

C'mon, pimp that avatar! You know you want to!

A couple of other points...
First off - you can have a lovely new laptop capable of running Second Life, but until Capgemini MIS open the firewall ports to allow access then you're stuck, I'm afraid. Also some tweaking of websense would be required to avoid the Red Screen of Death that tells you you're busted for accessing www.secondlife.com. Or maybe this is just a problem for UK users (along with no access to Skype or MSN - both used widely in Europe, or so I'm unreliably informed).

In response to Joost, SL is not for everyone. In my first dabblings, I found it an unholy mess, with lots of dodgily rendered empty shops trying to entice me to part with my Lindens, and pushy, over-familiar people whose interests were decidedly not in tune with mine. I would've happily walked away from it (or TP'd maybe) at that point - but then I read about companies coming in, and thought I'd take a deeper look. I found that there are many, many aspects to SL - way beyond it being just a medium for some quick PR. An example of this was IBM's Innovation Jam last year, co-hosted with the New Media Consortium - an association of over 200 universities and colleges from across the world, who have built extensive learning and meeting facilities in Second Life. The investment that IBM are making, in part at least, arose out of this.

Second LIfe consultancy company Rivers Run Red have stated that virtual meetings saved them over $175,000 in one year.

There are large areas given over to libraries, working on a variety of outreach and new media projects.

I'm afraid a comprehensive list is too lengthy to provide here - but let me do a bit on name dropping. From the world of commerce: IBM, PA Consulting, General Motors, NBC, BBC, Channel 4, Microsoft, Reuters, Dell, Adidas, Sears, Reebok,Philips, ABN Amro, ING bank, Vodafone...

Enough? OK, here's a few other places that may sound familiar. In addition to their involvement in NMC there are Harvard Law School, MIT, Princeton and Cornell, plus a host of less familiar (to European ears) Universities.

Despite its drawbacks - and there are many - Second Life is working for more than just a bunch of tech-heads and saddoes. (Though I agree 100% with AH's view that it does not represent a meaningful, useful sample of the true public).

A final point about interaction in SL. Joost wrote "Talking to virtual people who probably are completely the opposite of who they really are". First, of course, you are not talking to virtual people - you are talking to real people, presenting themselves via an avatar. While it is true that they could be the opposte of who they really are, I would argue that the same applies (to a distressingly large extent) in Real Life. A key difference is that SL people can't do you physical harm - while RL ones can. As in Real Life, you need to choose whether you want to accept what you see & hear as meeting your mental image of the person in front of you.

I think I would take issue with both Ron and Andy's dismissal of Second Life (SL) as a game enironment for geeks and wierdos with an identity crisis. If you step aside from the idea that SL is "just a game", stop being distracted by the fact that avatars can "fly" and rejoice in the fact that you can shed both years and pounds from your appearance, then SL (or 3D environments generally) have some teriffic advantages over other means of internet communication.

Compare viewing something in a 3D world with simply browsing a web page:

If you start exploring a location in (the Cybrary in SL for example) and see another another users' avatar looking at the exhibits, it is only natural to strike up a conversation; exploring your common interests. In fact, it feels quite rude NOT to speak to someone if you are about to invade their personal (virtual) space.

Once you "meet" someone in SL, you are able to quickly pull up their profile to get an instant view of their interests and experience. So you are able to establish at a glance, whether or not this is someone you wish to speak to.

Compare this to the more solitary pastime of browsing web pages..... you have no idea how many other people are looking at the pages you are reading. Even if you ARE given details of how many other people are visiting a particular web site, you have no idea who they are or what they are looking at. More fundamentally, you have no simple mechanism for striking up communication with them.

Take a look at IBM's SOA building in Second Life - the experience of exploring the building to gather information is more like visiting a trade-show exhibit than simply reading dry web pages, with the benefit of being able to chat to salespeople, consultants or other customers but without the hassle of travel.

Reports from events in SL show that participants felt more involved in the presentations, and were more at ease in approaching senior figures to follow up on points raised. Perahps it is because of the visual clues that are available when avatars are involved. You are able to see who is speaking (or, through the avatar's hand movements, who is typing). You can see if someone gets bored and starts to wander away from the discussion. If you have a question to ask, you can "approach" the speaker (or whoever you wish to address) so that they are aware that you are intending to speak to them.

Similarly, if you find a group of people who you would like to chat with outside of the main meeting group, it is simple for you all to move away, "out of earshot" of the main discussion to have your break-out session. Equally (compared with a chat-room) it is harder for someone to "lurk" in the background, eavesdropping on a discussion without being noticed.

The whole experience is more immersive. You feel that you are "there".

I'll hold my hand up to being a "bit of a geek" as far as Second Life is concerned, having been exploring the environment for a few months now. I would agree with comments about Second Life per se not necessarily being the ultimate 3D metaverse of choice - but it is THERE, it is available, and it provides a useful environment for getting to grips with the concepts of using a 3D metaverse and exploring the potential of such environments as a possible next step in internet evolution after Web 2.0.

Sweden's Second Life Embassy Explores Nation Branding

The Swedish Institute, an agency of the Swedish foreign ministry who spearheads global information about Sweden, announced it will be creating an official Second Life embassy.

The Institute's director Olle Waestberg says the purpose is to act as an information portal about Sweden. Waestberg believes Second Life provides an opportunity to broaden people's exposure to Sweden easily and inexpensively.

Stefen Green who is the project manager for the initiative, says the plan was for the project to be completed before it was made public, but the Swedish media got wind of the story (english).

The Swedish Institute believes they need to understand 3D space which is driving the decision to build in Second Life. In a comment left on the Virtual Economy Research Network Stefen says:

"We're using Second Life to explore the 3D space as a platform for our nation-branding projects. While the protocols of the coming metaverse haven't been settled on yet, I do think a metaverse is coming, and we'd like to start getting our expertise sooner rather than later. SL citizens will be our de facto focus groups, so we can start figuring out what works and what doesn't."

January 28, 2007

http://freshtakes.typepad.com/sl_communicators/2007/01/sweden_second_l.html

http://powerlevels.mgsale.com/