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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?"
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.
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.
heheh... seriously though, I think something like Second Life will only really take off when an open-source, decentralized metaverse comes along. Though, even then... I dunno. VRML didn't really work out.
But the idea of being able to visit rooms hosted on people's computers, and finding other rooms by walking through doors ("hyperlinks") might actually be interesting.. you walk through a door and are then in a room hosted on another server. Common protocol, running on whatever operating system. The problem with attempts like Second Life, and even with games like WoW, is that it depends on the company running it. If such a system could break off from the host and live a life without needing a central heartbeat to run it, it might have a chance to become a real part of the internet. However, until we find ways to interact with 3D environments that provide an actually useful user experience we probably won't be seeing it..
"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.
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;
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
think.
It's a big room. There's 20+ people in it. You're on the other side of the world. There is *no way* you are getting *any* information about the body language of the occupants of this room by controlling the web cam remotely. By the time you figure out who is talking you have less than a second to get the camera pointing at them. You can forget about facial expressions.
What you need is some smarts in the camera to look at what you would look at, if you were there. Now, this would probably be so fuckin' annoying that it would also be useless.. and besides, the camera can move a hell of a lot faster than an observer of the stream could tolerate it moving (that's why security cameras pan so damn slowly, if they panned faster the people watching the stream would go nuts). So why not let the camera move as fast as it can, aggregate together all this data and present it to you in a way that you can control.
Apart from the fact that it is a hell of a lot of research and development that is.. if/when the technology is invented for some profitable application, then maybe someone will slap it together on the weekend.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Or you could use any of the existing videoconferencing hardware/software and actually see their real faces. Sure, that's not quite as cool, but I bet it's several times more productive and it already exists.
... as opposed to collaborating apart, I assume?
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.
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
Send them an email
I'm sure people said "We don't need email, just call them on the phone!".
call somebody on the phone
I'm sure people said "We don't need phones, just write them a letter!".
Write them a letter
I'm sure people said (gestured:)?) "We don't need to write letters, just stay in our hunter-gatherer band!"
While I don't want to imply that Second Life is the next communication revolution, I do want you to notice the trend. Just because something exists that can accomplish roughly the same thing, doesn't mean it won't kick the other one's ass.
It's called progress, buddy, and it's telescoping, whether you like it or not.
Think of it like retail. You can have all the stores you want, but for the most part, unless you're a destination store, people are gonna go to malls. Second Life is a huge mall. It has enormous foot traffic that stores like Bed Bath and Beyond could never, ever generate.
Decentralization is small-scale poison. MUSHes and MUDs have existed (and been graphical and scriptable - one of the big VRML clients, Chaco Pueblo, was actually a MUSHing client) for 20 years, but none of them stuck, because their player bases were too small. Lots of them are still around, but they don't even have the population of a Perplex City, let alone a World of Warcraft.
Centralization is the win here, not the other way around.
StoneCypher is Full of BS