eirepreneur 's Profile

in this forum I will illustrate various aspects of proven 3D ROI in collaboration and education and also pontificate about even higher levels of enterprise use of immersive mediums.

I imagine this is why businesses and educational institutions are buying a lot of land. Inworld collaboration is going to be a killer application.

Tish: OpenSim is beginning to get a lot of interest from major corporate players. IBM, Microsoft, Intel, are three of the big ones. How do you think this will effect Rex and the developing ecosystem of OpenSim?

Solipsis is a pure peer-to-peer system for a massively shared virtual world. There are no central servers at all: it only relies on end-users' machines.

While it might be possible to build a 2D tool with functionality similar to MPK20, the spacial layout of the 3D world coupled with the immersive audio provides strong cognitive cues that enhance collaboration. For example, the juxtapostion of avatars in the world coupled with the volume and location of the voices allows people to intuit who they can talk to at any given time. The 3D space provides a natural way to organize multiple, simultaneous conversations. Likewise, the arrangement of the objects within the space provides conversational context. If other avatars are gathering near the entrance to a virtual conference room, it is a good guess that they are about to attend a meeting in that space. It is then natural to talk to those people about the content or timing of the meeting, just as you would if attending a physical meeting. In terms of data sharing, looking at objects together is a natural activity. With the 3D spacial cues, each person can get an immediate sense of what the other collaborators can and cannot see.

AWG's mission is to develop the protocols that will open up the Second Life Grid from something operated solely by Linden Lab to where others can run parts of the grid.

IBM now has several full-time employees working on nothing but coding as part of the OpenSim team, and an Architecture Working Group made up of OpenSim, IBM, and LL devs meet on a regular basis.

Linden Lab is redesigning its own infra-structure to allow growth well beyond their existing technology. To wit, they want to design an interactive system of virtual worlds hosted by innumerable different companies and individuals which are compatible for login, teleportation and/or "walking" between worlds, avatar display, virtual property display, virtual property "ownership," virtual property building, currency exchange, group Instant Messaging and all the other features that make Second Life useful and enjoyable, while giving individual virtual world operators/owners/designers room to innovate and offer unique services and characteristics that complement and/or supplement the "core" Second Life features.

SimGis - A university[?] use of OpenSim to visualise geographic data availible from the USGS.

Shengri La - OpenSim being used by a fashion designer to quickly prototype and present their models to suppliers without having to go through many design proofs

We’re specifically interested in using virtual worlds to enable product design and development both synchronously and asynchronously.  This is where businesses will see huge gains in productivity, in savings, in waste reduction, and in business intelligence and management metrics.

The ease of collaboration helps with the product development process, but the true value proposition for us lies in the inherent nature of virtual worlds like Second LifeTM: 3-D modeling capabilities, real-time design capability, persistence of the work space, and above all, the data transparency to all stakeholders in the design and development process.