Jules, Maxping undercover reporter, participated BIZZin3D at Berlin, Germany. He took notes. Now you can read them summarized in a nice and concise way.
Yesterday, Berlin was home to the Bizzin3d event, which
hosted four interesting panel discussions and a high number of
equally interesting audience members. In the course of the evening,
many topics concerning virtual worlds were explored including the
"big players", who had representatives on the panels, German
virtual worlds, applications for Opensim and Second Life as well as
a vibrant and discussion oriented panel on the business uses (and
readiness) of Opensim, on which I participated myself.
First was the Immersive Internet panel
which had Clare Rees, Linden Lab's European marketing director, Mirko
Caspar from Metaversum, the creator of the new virtual
world Twinity and Dick Davies, representing AmbientPerformance and Forterra in
Europe.
Clare began her talk by presenting Immersive Workspaces, Linden Lab's centerpiece
for tackling the corporate market. Before the World Wide Web became
heavily used, there were many companies who could not see the value
of having a website, she said. They had shops, phone lines and so
forth. However, it's hard to find any business without a web
presence today. This analogy is yet to be proven
true for virtual worlds; however companies like Linden Lab are
doing their best in providing software solutions that will make
this happen.
Dick Davies showed how the Olive virtual world is more a software platform
than "a virtual world". He showed a complex traffic system which
can be used in training of emergency services personnel. When asked
about the virtual worlds industry, he made a comparison to emails.
When email came out, many executives did not know how to type,
which limited the adoption rate of email, until the new generation
got to the top. Kids' virtual worlds are growing rapidly, so we may
have to wait for this generation to see mass adoption of virtual
worlds.
However, he thinks that once it takes off
virtual worlds will be the death of social distance. In three to
five years, he thinks virtual worlds will have "crossed the chasm"
and become something accepted beyond the early adopters.
Mirko Caspar from Twinity showed us
examples of Twinity, which replicated Berlin quite accurately in a
3D environment. He said that web 2.0 has greatly reduced the
transaction costs of all kinds of methods. It may also relate to
the time-investment cost, as the usability of the web for ordinary
users went up quite a bit. He thinks that virtual worlds could make
working together and interacting with each other even more
accessible and lower transaction costs even further.
Next up was a panel where only German
virtual worlds were represented.
What these had common was high usability by
being either browser-based (Smeet, Habbo Hotel) or very small in
download and installation difficulty (Club Cooee). As Habbo Hotel
has more than eleven million users and the other two are quickly
growing, these worlds seem in an excellent position to attract
consumers to virtual worlds with their low barriers of entry and
clear benefits to their users. A different unifying factor was that
none of them allow users to upload their own content like Second Life does,
however they instead rely on selling virtual goods to their users.
For example Habbo Hotel releases catalogs of furniture for virtual
hotel rooms at least once every month. They say it's a highly
lucrative business as almost 10% (that's one million users) uses
the paid-for content. Scalability and high user numbers is
essential for the viability of consumer-oriented virtual
worlds.
After a short and entertaining break with
live music we headed on to the next panel on applications for Opensim and
Second Life. Most notably, the creator of Second
Inventory (a program that allows you to export your inventory
from Second Life or Opensim and also import it back into Second
Life or Opensim) was present on the discussion. He talked about his
plans and his real life company which backs the development. We can
expect many new and exciting apps from them in the near future. I
also spoke with him about making Second Inventory compatible with
realXtend.
He agreed that this would be a small challenge, so hopefully we
will see a version of Second Inventory that is compatible
within the next few weeks!
The last panel was there to answer the
million-dollar question: "Is opensim a playground for geeks or
ready for serious business?". The panel was slightly biased as four
out of five members were already using Opensim or RealXtend for
business applications. As the audience was not highly aware of what
Opensim and RealXtend actually is, Kai from TalentRaspel
quickly explained. Afterwards, the discussion could begin. Melanie,
an Opensim core developer, commented that she thought the platform
was almost 70% feature-complete with the 0.7 tagged version to be
released soon. She also mentioned there was talk (although shot
down) about moving from alpha to beta and that there is some
discussion going on to implement a feature-freeze and focus
development exclusively on stability and bugfixing.
I commented that while the difficulty of
running virtual worlds remains high, crashes are frequent and the
usability is not very great, they will not go mainstream. However,
realXtend (and opensim to some degree as well) provide features
that extend beyond what current platforms such as Second Life
offers and moreover offers them for free. Hence, some early
adopters are ready to start using these platforms for business uses
today. Take a look at Second
Life - Opensim comparison article at Maxping.
The Opensim panel concluded the
discussions. Afterwards there were many talks, especially on how
we, as a community of virtual world users, creators and fanatics,
can start using the power of these new platforms such as Opensim,
with its low operating costs and rapidly increasing stability, and
realXtend, which offers professional 3D content tools and soon also
a more effective virtual worlds viewer. If the
new realXtend viewer and platform lives up to its expectations,
we will start seeing many more use cases of virtual world
technology based on Opensim very soon.
Jules on twitter: http://twitter.com/doeko
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