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IBM and Sun Launch Intranet Metaverses
wjamesau writes "Sun and IBM have launched intranet metaverses designed for business and built to work behind their corporate firewalls, so their worldwide employees can use them to collaborate together. Most interesting to game developers, IBM (which also runs a private, no public access Second Life island as a development lab) created their intranet world from the 3D Torque engine from Garage Games. Will the metaverse actually be thousands of gated community metaverses?"
This is the worst fucking idea ever.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Check out http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page
Open source and well funded, based on Squeak Smalltalk.
WTF is a metaverse?
Can you do mo-cap without getting into a blue lycra suit with dots all over your body?
How about doing multiple humans at the same time?
Can it be done in real time?
Ok, great. How about making a system that can take a video feed from a web cam (with pivot and tilt) and map the body and facial movements of the humans it is look at onto models in a 3d environment?
Then I can collaborate with my co-workers on the other side of the world at the weekly meeting with more to go on than just their voice over the speaker phone.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Will the metaverse actually be thousands of gated community metaverses?
No, that's just silly. A metaverse will be a single line of the first metapoem.
I thought I might go like a whole week without seeing "second life" mentioned on /. Reset the clock!
I used to be with IT..now IT seems strange and scary to me.
Why are Sun and IBM collaborating on something like this? They tend to be direct competitors in many markets...
Its not what it is, its something else.
How is it any different from Internet/Intranet?
I mean, why spend all that time building your altered reality avatar, the altered reality objects for demoing etc. (they show sun objects in one of the video demos)... why spend all that time navigating around a virtual world (which has to be built) and doing things in the virtual space when really you should be actually working?
I work from home every couple of weeks, and really the biggest thing I would like is a live video link to the colleges I most often talk to, having to break from working to go into a virtual world to talk to colleges is just such crud.
They show their 'virtual boardroom', which has video streams from other locations. Why bother with the virtual boardroom at all? What's wrong with just having video feeds?
Urgh... this is almost doing something for doing something's sake, without actually considering how useful it really is.
One of our community's major employers said in its SEC filing: "Our customers are our major competitors." This company could be out of business tomorrow if its customers decided to build their own stuff. The customers have the engineering talent to do so. But they don't. As long as everyone's paradigm is to make the most money then we will have these seemingly unlikely alliances.
Of course, if you have a nutso CEO who thinks business is about squashing the competition then things get dicier. I can think of a couple; Oracle and Microsoft come to mind. I'm not sure if they are the exception or the rule but I can think of lots of businesses that cooperate with their competition.
Not really. They ARE going to play games on company time. At least this way the employer can sort of put a cap on it. ( And freeze your avatar when you are behind on a deadline )
"Will the metaverse actually be thousands of gated community metaverses?"
I sure hope not. If the Stephensonian concept of a Metaverse were ever to take off in full cyberpunk force--VR goggles, gloves, and fiber lines in all glory--I sure don't want it to be a community of gated communities.
The entire idea of a Metaverse embolized existentialist absurdity: the idea of an "unending avenue of lights," 24 hours a day, is supposed to suspend reality. We're supposed to make this irrational and, frankly, just have fun with it.
For the thousands who don't work for IBM, Sun, or have some other connections, a gated Metaverse will be a bad place and waste of time. Not everyone (especially those who have few friends in real life) will have these connections. A Metaverse could be the perfect place to interact and meet others who want nothing else to do but relax and enjoy a little digital vice. This triumphs over EQ or WoW because you DON'T have a goal: it's not competitive and you can just relax.
In short: a filfilling Metaverse could be a great place for the (bored/lonely/connectionless/antisocial). Making it a world of gated communities will only make it some fancy social party.
This is the worst fucking idea ever.
The worst fucking idea ever was definitely: doing the porcupine.
And when it comes to layoff time, they can see who spends the most time online.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
...can you dispatch your boss with a katana?
You're right: we have no style in inventing words. The problem is that you think that style matters. It doesn't. What matters is functionality. That is why so many people in the world speak English as a second language.
I saw a webisode about that celebutante Paris Hilton finally going to jail!
Of course style matters. For a start, in part at least, it's what makes people adopt, or, in the case of those made up in the US, not adopt new words.
> That is why so many people in the world speak English as a second language.
Bollocks.
The reason so many people speak the English language as a second language is that there are so many people who speak the English language as a *first* language. The reason so many people speak the English language as a *first* language is that the English people have spread it so effectively (for better or worse - mostly worse, but not as worse as others, perhaps).
Max.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Those virtual worlds aren't "metaverses". "Meta" means "beyond", not "inside", which is "endo". If anything, real life is the metaverse of these endoverses.
--
make install -not war
Never read Neromancer? Stephenson and everybody else who did CyberPunk coped off of Gibson. Gibson coined the tern Cyberspace in his short story Burning Chrome, the very idea you just described, and perfected it in the books Neromancer, Mona Lisa Over Drive, and Count Zero. The idea of "full cyberpunk force--VR goggles, gloves, and fiber lines in all glory--" is hardly the idea of Stephenson, as talented as he may be.
Ever since the days of Neromancer this idea of "gated communities owned by mega corporations" has been around. Gibson saw it right. This will happen and the "Metaverse" world of "CyberPunk style Cyberspace" will be the providence of the rich and powerful. Enjoy the days of the "Free Internet" where people like us have a say, as small as it may be. It won't last long.....
Has no one read William Gibson, the Grandfather of CyberPunk???? Bah, go read Neromancer. Stephenson owes his CyberPunking ass to Gibson....
as a developer I think I would hate this idea. Having to go into a virtual world to collaborate? Email and IM is just fine.
Also most of the time when I'm writing code, having another channel of interruptions is just suicide. Already with email, IM, phone, and in person interruptions its difficult to get 2-3 hours of solid coding in in a day. Add this to the mix, who knows, if at any time someone can just jump on and request a meeting on the thing...
Just maybe we're already all in a metaverse, making these fully contained microverses.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It is spelled Underverse. Once there you are forced to join legions of coders programming for the grand ruler, the MCP. Eventually you come to terms with your metalife, metawife and your metapaycheck. Your only hope for survival is successfully saving against MCP (metachlorian count + roll). You must seek out the golden D20 of Yendor! Go forth adventurer... don't forget your towel!
Torque sounds neat but extremely expensive. Just how much did IBM spend on liscensing it and how much to upgrade hardware to support it? And is it that good? They could also have invested in becoming the top sponsor of croquet too, though it seems to require significant resources. (in terms of max. people in a room, and also how well it works on different pcs - I've had it crash mainly due to a gl bug I think or fail to run on a number of machines).
Ok, I rate this comment because it mentions Endo and Endo is cool.
However, You've given the Greek meaning of "meta". The Geek meaning is an extension (a "metameta" if you will...) of this, meaning "based on", "connected to" or "extension of".
None of which matters because "metaverse" was coined by a novelist. Fiction writers use what's called "poetic license" so the invented word or phrase cannot be judged against the same rules to which "science" (bwahahaha) is allegedly held.
In any case, command of language does not appear to have much relevence, be it a metaword, a metaverse or an entire damn metainterview....
Ergo, IBM is developing a badly-written piece of fiction, not science, to be picked up in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to find some holiday reading at an airport bookstore?
Any prizes for jokes about Big and Blue?"
Now we now Sun has totally lost it.
But wait, no, if they can make all our development and design tools run INSIDE their 3D world, on virtual computers, and make their workers use the virtual computers to work, then we know they lost it.
Seeing from what we have here though, I wouldn't be surprised if they're already working on it.
I used to work for Sun, and we did indeed play Doom on company time.
Only on Solaris of course.
... as opposed to collaborating apart, I assume?
Um, you mean, like, this?
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
What is gained by the use of a Metaverse, over the use of cheaper, more user-friendly and established technology such as forums, email, and video conferencing links?
I just don't get it. This reminds me of 1994-era thinking, when some people were convinced that the Internet would have to be 3D in order to take off. They said we would need 3D shopping malls, for example. That would be better than a simple easy-to-use website in some way. And while they were still trying to get the technology to work, Amazon and friends came along with a simple website solution that just worked. 3D environments only took off for games: the one place that they are actually useful.
Perhaps IBM are just hedging their bets but this sounds like money down the drain to me. How about spending the money on useful R&D, or not laying off thousands of people instead?
What codswallop. I like English, but the reason for it's widespread
adoption is the pair of English-speaking Empires that have run the
world for the last 200 years.
It's merits as a language per se are beside the point.
Of course style matters; you spend too much time reading websites; read a book. English is not functional; it's a mish-mash of linguistic influences. The reason the world speaks English as a second language is that Britain had the biggest Empire at a time when mass communication became common.
If you don't understand how a 3D virtual world can extend internal communications way beyond the limits of mail, IM, webpages, etc, then you have no insight.
95% of the responses to this story show how riddled with dumb, non-tech plebs Slashdot has become. Pretty sad.
Fortunately companies like Sun and IBM still have techs and planners who can see beyond the end of their noses on issues like this. Yet all you can do is criticize with empty insults or cheap shots for +Funny mods. I guess there's no shortage of morons here.
As long as I get to be a talking penis...
Throwing out a guess: I'm guessing that croquet is slower than torque, given that croquet is written in Squeak, and I can't get Squeak to run on my 64-bit machine, haven't even considered trying dual-core. Guessing (again) that Torque is written in something like C++ or C#, and thus, will be able to do both of these things -- and it's probably easier to port a game engine than an entire language.
Also, Second Life is not what you should be using to measure how much horsepower this takes. Pretty much anything that can do compositing (Vista, Beryl, or OSX), and probably a few things that can't, are capable of playing World of Warcraft. Worst case, you'll have to turn some settings down.
Consider, also, that most offices tend to have standardized hardware that they upgrade every now and then anyway, and I'd say it should be easily possible to have some sort of "virtual reality" going on. I'd argue further that the reason most people seem to think this takes hardware is because all attempts I have EVER seen at "virtual reality" that weren't directly tied with a commercial game (not a "game" like Second Life, but a GAME like Counter-Strike or WoW) simply had sucky 3D engines. Embarrassingly sucky ones.
Let me put it this way: Take Half-life. The original. As in, released in '95, and can run at full quality at several hundred FPS on just about any computer since 2000. Now consider a mod for this game: Natural Selection. Now, NS does have somewhat higher graphical requirements -- it might lag slightly on a computer made it 2000, maybe. Run it on anything made in the last 3-5 years, and you'll be able to easily play games with teams of 25-30 people. And it takes at least two teams to make a game. And you're not just standing around a boardroom talking, you're using voice chat, a HUD, you're shooting, building stuff, gathering resources...
Any 3D "virutal reality" app that is forcing a hardware upgrade is either sloppily written or overly detailed, probably both.
But hell, we're in an age where ACT requires a gig of RAM to run comfortably. (Tell me again why Outlook/Kontact/Evolution isn't enough?)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Metaverse?
FUCKING METAVERSE?!
What's Google and Wikipedia?
This is the same crap that people said about VRML in the 90's. That didn't go anywhere and this won't either, regardless of how many media idiots proclaim that things like Second Life are the new frontier.
And isn't it interesting that crap like Second Life and it's ilk still look like 90's VRML?
Hi, I am a great cyber punk science fiction buff, and so, I'll take it upon myself to explain what the metaverse is. The metaverse is a 3D representation of reality that is fully networked. Instead of a website, you would have a block of real estate on "the street". It's essentially the internet with 3d goggles. The term metaverse was coined by Neil Stephenson in the book "Snow Crash". However, Stephenson's metaverse bears a striking similarity to :cyberspace" as coined by William Gibson in the book "Neuromancer".
In response to the question, is the metaverse going to be thousands of gated communities, I would say, yes. If you read these two books, the metaverse/cyberspace was never an open place where everything is free and available to anyone with an avatar/net connection. Quite the contrary. The premise of Neuromancer is that cyberspace consists of corporate blocks that contain valuable information and data that is only available to a few (military, clans, etc). In the metaverse of Snow Crash, Stephenson clearly stipulates that only some people can access some places. Your home for example, people only can gain access to your "site" or real estate if you make it available to them. I guess an apt response to this question is, do you expect it to be?
The internet is not totally free, and is in essence created of thousands of gates communities. That's one of the reason's that it works so well for both recreation and for business. Private communications, business transactions, pr0n sites, there are tons of legitimate arguments to be made for why communications systems like the internet/cyberspace/metaverse are made better by having these "gated communities".
Maybe it's inevitable that the metaverse will start off as individual islands. Look at the history of computer networks - they started off as individual LANs, then people started bolting on wide-area connectivity through the phone network, and then after a great deal of work you get to something like ARPAnet circa 1977 with its disparate links to military, commercial and educational sites. And then it takes another 15 or 20 years to get to the point where an average PC user can easily get connected and Do Something Useful on the Internet.
:)
Since the usefulness of networks is directly related to the number of users connected to them, it makes sense that eventually these isolated corporate worlds will set up interconnections, bridges, tunnels, whatever to let people wander back and forth. And eventually there will be public interfaces, and inter-world-networks.
I see Sun + IBM's work on this and Second Life and World of Warcraft and all the other current worlds as something akin to old information services like CompuServe or GEnie or Delphi. Eventually they'll come to their senses and allow greater interconnectivity, and once the protocols get standardized, they'll end up selling different add-ons or levels of service or GUIs for your metaverse experience. WoW may be selling awesome fantasy-style avatars and Blizzard goodies for PvE/PvP games, and IBM may be selling four- or five-nines reliability and excellent customer service.
Of course, I'll be 65 years old by then and will *still* get my butt kicked by random 13-year-olds in deathmatches.
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
Isnt This just another word for...... a LAN?
"Gentlemen, You cannot fight in here, this is the War Room...." - Dr Strangelove
If you've ever played Second Life, then you know that it's really a fancy chat room. IBM, and lots of other companies, run on Sametime (IBM's Lotus branded chat program, works pretty much like AIM or any other chat program).
I'm not surprised that there's a new chat-room product built like Second Life. I just wonder if it meets the business requirements as well as or better than the chat program we already use.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
There you go. The first metapoem, in iambic verse. Written by Short Circuit.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Somewhat sadly, after a moment of thinking about company metaverse-meetings, I pictured a conference table surrounded by WoW, EQ2, Anarchy Online, and SL avatars.
And you just know that some people would show up with opposite-sex avatars too.
To a certain extent, of course it will. Just like "the world wide web" itself has lots of "gated communities" of various types. Really, "the metaverse" is a lot like "the web" with a different UI metaphor.
I was going to post something like this on an internal company mailing list as an April Fools joke - I didn't know it already existed. Guess I must be new here.
The nice thing about ideas is they're language independent. Go read some of the Croquet papers.
"Meta" means "after" or "beyond", as in Plato's "Metaphysics", so called because it was bound in a volume subsequent to Plato's "Physics", so it was the book "after" Physics on a bookshelf.
The universe beyond the real one is "heaven" or the imagination (or nothing), depending on your faith. These virtual universes are contained within the real one, and so are "endo", as in "endodontic", "inside the teeth".
I am a writer, of Slashdot comments at least, and so I have used my own prose license to correct the word to endoverse.
--
make install -not war