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?"

Comments

It is.

[affliction]

This is the worst fucking idea ever.

Re:It is.

[schwaang]

Actually the Torque engine is a relic from Tribes 2. Everybody hold down your space bar to ski between cubicles!

Answer.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Sun and IBM?

[larry bagina]

They've leveraged forces to combine synergies to collaboratively multitask new paradigms for shitcanning their entire US work force.

What an immense waste of time

[spoco2]

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.

Re:WTF?

[Andrew Kismet]

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.

Re:metaverse???

[bennomatic]

First time I heard it was in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Worth a read.

Re:Sun and IBM?

[hutchike]

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.