An experience of working in Second Life

Today I set a new virtual work record, spending six hours straight in Second Life doing what could be described as work. Five of those hours were spent at the virtual campus of Case Western Reserve University attending a conference titled Collaboration Technology and Engaging the Campus 2008. The other hour was spent with a group from the American Society for Training and Development, led by Anders Gronstedt. My previous record for continuous time spent in Second Life was 4-5 hours, for three days in a row, during our first virtual recruiting fair.

The conference was streamed into Second Life and onto the web. I initially planned to watch it on the web, but I switched to watching it in Second Life. What made me do that?

1. I found the video experience more engaging in Second Life. Have you ever passively watched five hours of video on the web and found it something to write home about (like I am now)? It was simply better in a virtual world. For a start I could zoom in and out. I could look around and see the small crowd. There was a bit of chit-chat from time to time, ranging from questions about the name of the current speaker to approving or disapproving comments about ideas presented.
2. I was taking notes in the virtual world. For each of the sessions I created a notecard in Second Life and took notes. I wasn’t switching between applications.
3. We could ask the panel questions via text chat and we heard our answers over the video stream.
4. The in-world coordinator engaged with us by asking us to answer short surveys after each segment. The surveys were conducted on the web using SurveyMonkey.com, but the shift to the web was not jarring.
5. I noticed a fellow blogger (nay, the queen of SL bloggers) Tara5 Oh come online just before Cory Ondrejka’s presentation. I sent her an IM and a teleport offer so she could hear his talk.
6. Tara5 Oh arrived a bit late and asked what Cory had said. Rather than chat and miss what else was being said, I gave her a copy of the notecard I had made while he was talking.

Compare that with the web video experience. It’s like night and day.

At lunchtime I teleported over to my first ASTD meeting. I had corresponded with Dr. Anders Gronstedt several times since our recruiting fair. This time we got to meet personally, as it were. The guest speaker was Julian Lombardi of the Croquet project. Julian presented the case for Croquet and Cobalt over Second Life and took questions from the audience.

I wouldn’t normally get a chance to travel to a conference where Julian was speaking. Nor would I be privileged to do it in the company of a small number of people. Everyone did this over lunch, with zero T&E - not even conference call charges. This was truly an effective use of technology to exchange knowledge and build relationships. 

 

realXtend and the virtual workplace

realXtend is a partnership of two Finnish companies, ADMINO technologies and LudoCraft. The team is extending the open source OpenSim server in a highly focused way to deliver a reliable platform for both business applications and games. The heavily revamped realXtend website went live today, so it’s worth taking some time to see how realXtend intends to support my quest for a virtual world for real work.

realXtend delivered web page textures on prims before Second Life did

The following is lifted more or less verbatim from the site. I’ve underlined the elements that I find particularly relevant to work in virtual worlds.

There are several short term goals for 2008.

• Right now the realXtend team is focusing on enhancing the realXtend avatar. This project phase is scheduled to be finished in June 2008.
• After that, we intend to turn our attention to server stability and scalability until November and are creating a showcase multiplayer game towards the second half of this year.
• During Autumn 2008, we will be shifting our focus to office tools, by integrating different file formats and enabling collaborative workspaces.

Present features:

• OGRE rendering
• Particle effects
• 3D objects, lights and shadows
• Integrating web pages within virtual worlds
• Desktop application sharing (VNC) to share your applications with other users
• Voice chat
• Scriptable teleports between worlds
• Second life compatibility mode for use in SL and Opensim worlds
• Sprites
• Address field in client login screen to select world
• Python scripting to make your own applications
• Free-form non-humanoid avatars
• Avatar generator to import your own avatar design and modify your appearance
• Avatar attachment tool to help set objects to your avatar
• Unlimited amount of attachments
• Teleports between realXtend and SecondLife
• Media library for world builders

Roadmapped features:

• Direct3D rendering for better performance
• Support for OGG Vorbis
• Support for video (other than quicktime)
• Avatar generator and attachment tool integration to rexViewer
• OGRE materials support
• Improvements to in-world building tools
• Weather support
• Integration with skype/google spreadsheets/openoffice
• Avatar face/head animation based on live video camera data
• Lip synch for VOIP
• Clothing physics
• Vehicles support

On the applications page we find this:

Top 5 applications for realXtend (in our own opinion):

 

• Virtual meeting tools
  Reduce travel costs and enhance quality over traditional telephone and video conferences
  
• Collaboration and social interaction
  Imagine your team members sharing applications and thoughts while they are geographically distributed, but virtually co-located.
  
• Advanced user interface
  Complex applications, such as home automation control, are easier to understand and use when they are presented in 3D applications.
  
• Collaborative Games
  realXtend is an ideal platform to make novel multiplayer game titles. It features many aspects that do not exist anywhere else. Collaboration, co-building and dynamic worlds offer rich possibilities for entirely new kinds of games.
  
• Visualisation technologies
  Visualize enormous amounts of data and make it comprehensible for the end user. For example, building information models and architect’s drawings can be presented as a 3D world, where users can walk around and visualize how things are going to look. 

Tish Shute did an extensive interview on the Ugotrade blog with Juha Hulkko of realXtend. In the interview he elaborates on his vision of multiple virtual worlds with a unified avatar storage system to enable the presentation of a consistent avatar image across all of them. He also discusses the remote controlled shortwave radio station on Arkala Island in Second Life and how it has influenced his thoughts about connecting virtual worlds to the real world. (realXtend already includes a working X10 interface that allows you to control your lights or appliances by clicking on representations of them in the realXtend world. See below for an example of mapping an object to an X10 controller.)

 

The realXtend team held a getting-to-know-you meeting in Second Life recently. After a short presentation on the vision and the roadmap, the floor was thrown open to questions. You can read the transcript of the meeting or listen to the audio here.

The realXtend version of OpenSim is being merged with the main trunk of OpenSim, so in time most of the distinctions between them will disappear. The platform is easy to use, looks great, and has some really useful features. For my money, the server-side Python scripting is the killer feature. With this you can integrate directly with web services, databases, Microsoft Office objects or anything else accessible from Python like SMS or VoIP. Imagine interfacing to RFID or Zigbee devices and using server-side code to indicate the state and location of those devices. The other killer feature is real meshes instead of those strange sculpties in Second Life. Admittedly, the process for creating them outside of realXtend is messy at present, but the whole concept is so much cleaner.

The realXtend client is also fascinating in that it can connect to Second Life, OpenSim and realXtend servers. I have successfully logged into Second Life, OpenLifeGrid.com and my local realXtend server. I highly recommend that you try it out. (The banner on my blog shows my avatar hovering over one of the houses in the out-of-the-box realXtend instance.)

realXtend will be central to my solutions for integrating the virtual workplace into the enterprise.

 

The employee-centered virtual workplace

Photo licensed under a Creative Commons License

 

I have been thinking a lot about my ideal virtual office, influenced by four ideas from different spheres:

1. My experience with social networks at EMC has shown me how I can develop working relationships with people I would normally never meet, either because of distance, or because they sit in a different silo (business unit), or because they are separated from me by several degrees in the management hierarchy.
2. A video about the new Microsoft Research Lab building in Redmond introduced me to the idea of buildings being designed for reconfiguration by the employees as needed.
3. Jon Brouchoud’s presentation on wikitecture, where he identified the ideas of modularity and remixing of design components
4. Enterprise mashups which allow the user to configure any elements they desire into their user interface

I have started to imagine a workspace where I position near me the offices or desks of people I interact with (or would like to interact with) most frequently. These people are related to me by virtue of their proximity in the hierarchy or matrix, my connections to them through projects, or by our shared interests discovered through social networking. Their avatars would be present if they were online in one mode or another (either in-world, or available through IM or a a voice chat to VoIP bridge). As they went offline or their status changed to Do Not Disturb, their avatars would walk away from their desks, off-stage as it were. The soundscape would include untelligible distant conversations, and optionally printers, photocopiers and other office sounds.

So, inspired by Jon Brouchoud’s wikitecture, this environment would allow me to create a 3D mashup of reusable components (including offices, cubes, desks, and avatars). I envisage a toolset like the wiki-tree containing office-appropriate objects with embedded scripts that tie them them to the communications framework. They might also interact with the social networking fabric to calculate the social graph and position the people automatically. 

This idea is currently Not Possible In Second Life (NPISL) because avatars can’t be replicated or proxied into more than location. Moreover, it’s hard to imagine how I might resolve the conflicts inherent in depicting my manager sitting at her desk when in her view of her virtual world she is standing in the office talking to a passer-by.

The idea could be partially implemented in Croquet using its concept of portals. My simple world might look like a collection of these portals, each looking into the island of another employee. The visual effect would be less pleasing than the idea above, and sounds would not travel through the portal. On the other hand there is no issue with conflicting representations of avatars and their own worlds.

Whatever the implementation, the idea has a certain appeal as way to more closely connect the isolated employee with the enterprise. I believe it’s important to put oneself in the context of the enterprise (or the customer if you’re consulting) in order to make the work experience as immersive as possible.

Let me know if the idea resonates with you, or if you have thoughts on how to resolve the conflicts introduced by multiple independent views of avatars.



 

 

GreenPhosphor wins 2nd place in Sun’s Wonderland JavaOne Showcase competition

A little while ago I wrote about an innovative data visualization tool called GreenPhosphor from a company called Glasshouse. GreenPhosphor was the second place winner in Sun’s recent Wonderland JavaOne Showcase Competition. The GreenPhosphor solution now joins a very small set of integrative technologies which target multiple virtual worlds. It will be on display at the Java One Conference in San Francisco May 6-9.

I wonder how long we’ll have to wait for the JavaOne conference to be fully accessible in a virtual world? The confluence of a poor US economy and the resulting restrictions on corporate travel, escalating fuel costs, unsatisfactory air travel experiences, and the recognition that we have to reduce the carbon footprint of these wasteful conferences will no doubt cause many more firms to follow the lead of CMP and Dr. Dobbs Journal in running the Life 2.0 Summit completely in a virtual world.

 

Communicating with colleagues via voice chat

This will be a short post because there’s not much to say yet about voice chat between in-world and out-world parties except for the Vodafone InsideOut service discussed in the previous post.

Creative Commons License

There is good news on the OpenSim front. Dr. Scofield, an IBM researcher in Zurich, announced that he can see the light at the end of the tunnel for the integration of OpenSim with the popular Asterisk open source PBX. I would predict that a number of the public OpenSim grids will race to offer this service as a differentiator.

What then of Linden Lab? If I were they, I’d join the movement and take advantage of the serendipitous build-out of POPs (point of presence) all over the globe to position Second Life against Skype and VoIP networks like Jajah.com. Imagine being able to place a call to someone anywhere in the world by taking advantage of some open source infrastructure that bridges into the POTS network. They could even offer a revenue-sharing model for those that offer the bridges.

There are many issues to be addressed before this could become a reality. I can think of a few, and I’m sure you can too. Feel free to add your thoughts by adding a comment.

• issuing phone numbers for all avatars
• issues of anonymity versus publicly listed phone numbers, both in directories and callerID
• jurisdiction - this is global, so your state or national regulator will have a hard time dealing with it and taxing it
• when I call from the Second Life grid, hosted in San Francisco or Texas, but I live in Brazil, whose laws do I operate under?
• 911 and location-awareness. Is 911 required? Do location-awareness services provide my physical address (using my IP address) and my virtual location?
• do existing laws regarding telephone crimes and wiretapping apply to a virtual phone in a virtual world communicating with a physical phone?
• how do you protect against VoIP spoofing when the infrastructure is distributed, open sourced, and unregulated?
• how do you support end-to-end encryption?
• Can you support strong encryption when one or both of the parties may be in a country that is subject to export restrictions on encryption technology? How do you know which country an avatar is in, especially if its puppeteer is using the Vollee service on a cellphone while flying across Asia?

 

 

Communicating with colleagues via chat

Working in the virtual world - the challenge [updated May 1, 2008]

In an earlier post I outlined my goal of creating a virtual workplace where real work could be done. I should elaborate further so that I don’t confuse you. I have two principal goals in mind. The first is to identify how remote workers who choose to work in Second Life (or another virtual world) can interoperate with their colleagues in the conventional office environment who cannot or choose not to operate in Second Life. The second goal is how do it almost entirely with the virtual world. It is quite feasible to operate in multiple spaces today, switching from the 3D world in one window to conventional applications in other windows. In practice, you will want a dual monitor setup which enables you to see your unobstructed virtual world on one monitor while running all the other applications on the second monitor. Erica Driver of Forrester Research describes this arrangement in her post on virtual offices.

What I want to tackle (as a long-term project) is the identification of solutions for moving much of that work into the virtual (3D) space so that you don’t switch between the 3D and 2D worlds as often. The switch involves more than just an adaption to a different dimensional space - the virtual world is immersive (which derives from the fact that it involves both visual and auditory attention), and it is based on real-time synchronous communication. There’s also some level of emotional attention as evidenced by the fact that you want to turn and face the person you are talking to, and you want to convey the right body language.

The objects around you in your virtual office are an expression of your personality. Here is a picture of Erica Driver in her virtual office.

(While her projection of her office says a lot about her sense of self, there’s nothing in this office or in the Second Life interface that allows her to write on the paper or send it to anyone outside Second Life.)

 

The 2D world has a completely different attention model. Most of its applications were originally modeled on the metaphor of the desktop, with sub-metaphors for papers (or stacks of papers), an in-tray, an out-tray, desk calendar, file cabinet, etc. Oddly, the whole time that the desktop metaphor was being refined, we kept representing these objects with 3D icons, but every interaction with the objects was performed in 2D. The objects on the desktop are impersonal. Admittedly, there have been some attempts to create 3D interfaces for filing or search, but they have not gained much traction when everything else is 2D.  Recent Mac and Windows operating systems have tried to create a slightly more convincing 3D layering effect with animation and transparent shadows, but the interface is still fundamentally 2D and impersonal.

Business task 1 - chatting with colleagues

I thought the first area of work I should tackle was chat, since the functionality is part of Second Life and most corporate enviroments. I thought initially that the principal problems would be gateways and protocol mappings, but it has turned out be more involved.

Firstly, let’s quickly review what’s available in Second Life and see what’s available for communication outside.

1. Text chat in Second Life can only be used between residents of Second Life. It has an advantage over some IM systems in that you can IM people whether they are online or offline. If offline, they will be sent an email. When they login, the stored IM is presented to them.
2. The SL Messenger chat device (worn as a watch) allows your avatar to chat with friends on MSN, AIM, Gtalk, Gadu-Gadu, ICQ and Yahoo! IM. It is free to purchase and available in-world by following the instructions on www.sl-messenger.com. It sends messages to your friends as if you were logged into your IM platform. This is the closest solution except that it doesn’t provide a mechanism for an ou-worlder to message you by your in-world name. While I have been able to send messages to AIM users, I have been unable to communicate with Windows Live Messenger. I haven’t trid the other gateways.
3. ChatBridge from Intersections Unlimited supports IM between Second Life and AOL or Yahoo. There are several products including a customized corporate product which does not require the corporate users to have Second Life accounts. I’ll write more on this product after I’ve seen a demo.
4. If you just want to send a message to a resident in Second Life without launching the Second Life client, there are lightweight clients like Second Messenger and Metabolt which enable this as well as other functions. However, both parties must have Second Life accounts and must refer to each other by their Second Life names.
5. Vodafone offers the only product that effectively crosses the boundaries. The Vodafone InsideOut virtual cellphone allows anyone in Second Life to speak or TXT with anyone, either in Second Life or the real world. Calls to the real world cost $300L (just over $USD1.00) per minute or per message. Incoming calls are a function your local carrier’s tariff.     (UPDATE May-01: Upon closer reading of the product description, InsideOut seems to be restricted to Second Life residents. What is unique about the service is that you associate your real-world mobile number with your avatar identity. If you are offline when sometime tries to call you, the call is deflected to your real mobile. The callerID presented on your phone is the avatar’s name and a number which cannot be mapped to the caller’s real mobile number. The goal of the service is to preserve the anonymity of avatars and hide their real-world phone numbers while extending Second Life’s voice chat to the cellular network.)
6. IBM offers guidance on how to create a bot that acts as a gateway between SL and Lotus Sametime.

 

Deficiencies

Those solutions above that interwork with IM platforms do so with Consumer IM (CIM) rather than with Enterprise IM. Many companies refuse to allow CIM solutions to be used because they don’t provide provide sufficient security and cannot be managed by IT. (See this and that for more background.) With customization, I believe that ChatBridge Corporate can interface to Lotus Sametime, Microsoft LCS or other EIM platforms.

Mapping of a user’s enterprise identity (typically their corporate email address) to an avatar name is seldom supported by the standard directory services. Email gateways don’t know how to map an address like 1cb024f5-79d4-d9ea-419c-af21d137c72f@lsl.secondlife.com back to a corporate email address.

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure require that electronically transmitted information be discoverable. While the enterprise can log IMs received from an employee in Second Life, it cannot effectively record IMs to a customer, competitor or government official by that same employee. In theory, LInden Lab maintains the logs. You can imagine the discomfort that organizations used to central control feel when faced with this situation.

Know another solution?

If you’re using or know of another IM solution for interworking with SL from the enterprise, please add a comment.

 

More on VRworkplace

Dave Elchoness pointed out in the comments on my last post that I had not fairly reviewed his VRworkplace and he’s right that I didn’t include references to the coffee shop, the beach and various outdoor areas for meeting or relaxing. Here are some pictures to correct any misimpressions.

The coffee shop at VRworkplace

There are a few different areas to mingle or relax outside. The picture below shows a patio outside one of the the office towers, and way off in the distance, my avatar is relaxing on an inflatable mattress in the shallows at the beach.

Places to mingle or relax

 

 

 

This is not my idea of a virtual workplace

My quest to understand whether I can create a functional virtual workplace emphasizes the work in workplace. Others think that the place is what matters. Here’s an example of a virtual workplace from VRworkplace, a company providing virtual office space, an amphitheater, a beach and other places to relax during your virtual lunch break. This scene shows one of many areas for small business discussions with other team members or customers. It’s the kind of seating arrangement that you’ll find in hotels, convention centers and building lobbies. There are no affordances to support any work activity except sitting down and talking with other people. One of the other discussion areas nearby has a projector screen for presenting slide shows.

 

The overall design of the island is like so many office parks. Large buildings overwhelm you. There are vast open spaces, and not many people. (I haven’t seen any during my early morning and late evening peregrinations.) It’s a mirror world of so many office parks that leave me cold. If we have to have places like these to get corporate buyers to approve their use, let’s create some atmospheric places to meet. At a minimum, get a coffee franchise with some piped music and background conversation, or a lively Brasserie.

For a good example of this ambience, check out the Melbourne Laneways in Second Life. This project recreates the atmosphere of the little businesses in the small laneways in Melbourne, Australia where I grew up. When you sit down here for a coffee you hear all the hubbub of the city, the conversations, the clinking glasses and crockery. Around the corner you’ll see accurate reproductions of the graffiti that adorns the laneways. Notice how the scale is human, not corporate.

 

So I do think that place matters, but it has to be human, interesting and a place where someone would want to visit you. The soundscape is as important as the landscape in creating the mood that supports the purpose of the place.

But the quest is about creating a place to work, and getting work done. In the next post we’ll discuss the ways you can communicate with your fellow workers in their real-life industrial parks who aren’t in the virtual world.

 

 

 

What does a virtual workplace look like?

We’ve been working on new guidelines for employees and their managers who work remotely, whether full-time or part-time. Like many high-tech firms, we employ growing numbers of professional services staff who travel the country, working mainly from customer locations. We also have a lot of highly-talented people who, for various reasons, would prefer to work from home at certain stages of their lives. Whether it’s because of the effects of long commutes on their lifestyle and the environment, or the need to be close to a child during its formative years, or the need to support an ailing spouse or parent, these employees need our support to create effective work environments away from the office.

We provide great network connectivity for remote workers. They have access to all business functionality, including our corporate IM system, our Documentum eRoom collaboration tools and our social networking platform. They use landlines and cellular phones for voice communication since we can’t yet justify running our own VoIP network, with all of its associated security concerns.

Virtual worlds could enrich the daily work of employees in a variety of ways:

• by making meetings more engaging than is possible through 2-D web conferencing solutions
• by creating a sense of a workplace separate from the employee’s home environment, helping to focus the employee on the tasks at hand
• by creating places for real-time collaboration with other employees
• by creating a workplace that can be seen from afar, reducing the likelihood that the remote employees will be “out of sight, out of mind”
• by creating places for remote workers and their office-bound colleagues to hang out with each other over lunch, after work, or after long meetings

In the following posts I plan to examine what can be done in Second Life and its clones to support real enterprise work now or in the near future. In the meantime, check out Ian Hughes’ thoughtful posting on his model for describing business interaction in the metaverse in the dimensions of instrumentation, communication and expressiveness. I think he’s onto something here, though I feel that his communication and expressiveness dimensions are not independent. I think that what he lumps into the experience of expressiveness is more akin to an anthropocentric delight in dealing with something that isn’t an collection of abstract, object-oriented metaphors for office work.

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Photo attribution:
From the BreckenPool collection on Flickr.com, tag telecommuting
 

 

Visualizing information outside the box

Last September I was looking for tools to import content into the Second Life® virtual world from external design tools. One search result introduced me to The Arch, a blog on architecture in SL. A recent post at the time introduced me to the concept of reflexive architecture - constructions that respond to the presence of the viewer (avatar) in some way. I was a newbie to scripting at the time and was unaware of the sensor functions which permit the built environment to sense the identity, position and speed of avatar. Jon Bouchoud’s Gallery of Reflexive Architecture demonstrated a variety of constructs that could move, change their transparency, emit sounds, materialize and dematerialize as avatars aproached them.

These examples crystallized for me how I might build special tools for data visualization - 3D bar charts for example, connected to enterprise data via web services, but with a twist. Inspired by the reflexive demos, I envisaged charts which could change depending on the viewer’s identity or on some attribute of the viewer. I was thought about the idea of displaying the drivers of a company’s business. At my disposal might be various hats. With my HR hat on, the graphs would morph to show me the relationship between growth in each geography and the growth in headcount. If I switched hats and put my finance hat on, the charts might show me the cost of labor and fringe benefits compared to the revenue in each geography. Putting my CTO hat on, the charts might reveal the number of innovative ideas generated in each geography through various internal competitions and innovation networks.

I didn’t get beyond building a single bar proof of concept at the time. Fortunately, a company by the name of Green Phosphor has blazed a new path. It has created an on-demand data visualization system. The design includes an external database, controller and data shaper which feeds selected data to the in-world charting object, which looks like a glowing green phosphorescent orb above your head. You pre-stage relational tables in the data server by uploading CSV files into the data server. Once you have a green phosphor object in your posession, you can issue commands to it via the chat channel to select data and specify some display attributes. The video below shows the creation and manipulation of a 3D bar chart on my land parcel. The data follows you around. I guess the concept is that it represents a visible thought bubble. The problem is that my ceiling height is a bit too low for comfort!

 

Enterprise objections to the current design would be that possibly sensitive data has to moved outside the firewall in order for it to be served to Second Life. However, there’s a lot of interesting data outside the firewall that your staff might want to discuss in a collaborative setting. Green Phosphor is building a rich library of public data from UN data sources, and possibly from Swivel, which will encourage the visualization of data in Second Life.

The Green Phosphor product is really the seed of an idea for data wizardry (Green Phosphor’s term) in Second Life. The next step is to move from relational to OLAP data and explore the natural ways of slicing and dicing multi-dimensional data in a multi-dimensional world. Virtual Worlds already have distinguished dimensions (an old Microsoft OLAP term) for time and geography. Local X, Y, and Z, color, material, texture and sound are other available dimensions. Binary attributes are also possible with individual object shadows and glowing colors. Other small dynamic range attributes can be represented through pulsating color, vibrating or wobbling objects, visual effects that suggest something almost bursting at the seams. Add to that particle effects like steam or smoke rising from bars on a chart, or flames burning above them, and you can see that there’s a lot of potential for visualizing higher dimension data in a virtual world.