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IBM and Sun Launch Intranet Metaverses

Posted by samzenpus on Wed May 16, 2007 09:59 PM
from the meet-me-in-thunder-bluff dept.
Networking IT
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?"
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[+] IT: IBM Finding Business Uses for Virtual World 96 comments
jbrodkin writes "IBM has an unconventional take on virtual worlds for business use. Rather than strictly adhering to the laws of physics, IBM is letting its employees hold virtual meetings up in the air and under water. Employees are also being given wacky chores, such as kicking a giant boulder 1,400 kilometers. The virtual world, known as the Metaverse, has been in development for two years. Michael Ackerbauer of IBM says, 'I'd say more people are still finding it a novelty than a business tool. But ... if you build enough tools that they can use, they will come.'" IBM seems to be following a trend of involvement in virtual worlds, which we have previously discussed.
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  • It is. (Score:4, Funny)

    by affliction (242524) on Wednesday May 16 2007, @10:02PM (#19155915) Homepage
    This is the worst fucking idea ever.

    • Re:It is (Score:4, Funny)

      by Harmonious Botch (921977) on Wednesday May 16 2007, @10:37PM (#19156233) Homepage Journal
      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 )

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Hal_Porter (817932)
        And when it comes to layoff time, they can see who spends the most time online.
      • 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.
    • It reminds me of the Dilbert cartoon about intranet collaboration tools [itcilo.org].
    • You don't get it. This is the first step in IBM's plan fire 150,000 workers world-wide and then hire virtual people to the virtual work that they plan to charge at real prices. It's a brillant strategy!

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by skarphace (812333)

        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.

        Yet I don't see you trying to school us ignoramuses.

        Fact is, it's not really that great of an idea. It's noting like real life where you have limitless expressions, can write on white boards in front of them, assemble models, etc. Now if they pack that into the 'metaverse' engine, then maybe it could be useful.

        However, IM, Webpages, e-Mail, a

  • IBM (which also runs a private, no public access Second Life island as a development lab)
    I wonder how long until pranksters start breaking into these systems to put in an appearance as a merry prankster.
    • flying penises

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by mbook (782023)
      It's been a while since I read Snow Crash, but I think Hiro Protagonist spent most of his time in two "gated communities" -- the Black Sun (a private club) and Rife's HQ (heavy security to keep out the uninvited). Not much time spent in public spaces. Seems like you'd want both public and private spaces, just like in Real Life.
    • im in ur boardroom, readin ur pwrpointz

  • Try Croquet (Score:4, Informative)

    by MarkWatson (189759) on Wednesday May 16 2007, @10:03PM (#19155933) Homepage
    Check out http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page [opencroquet.org]

    Open source and well funded, based on Squeak Smalltalk.
    • Could have been worse I suppose.. you could have said it was based on LISP.

      Go read The End Of History And The Last Programming Language.

      Stop living in denial.
      • I decided to go on Google and see what that book was about, and guess what? The book is old and its major prediction, that nobody will ever use OO because "MOOOOOOOOOOMYYYYYYYY, IT'S TOO COMPLICATED!", has pretty much fallen apart.
        As for living "in denial", it worked pretty well for Paul Graham.

    • Open source and well funded, based on Squeak Smalltalk.

      I have wanted to give it a go for a while. The only download seems to be the SDK. Does that mean you have to write code to get it working at all?

      I tried to get the SDK via a torrent once but I got an error from bittorrent and didn't take it further. It seems rude these days to download 70M at a time from one server.

  • 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 spea

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Osty (16825)

      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.

      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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by QuantumG (50515)
        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 f

  • Answer. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 16 2007, @10:08PM (#19155991)
    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.
  • Why are Sun and IBM collaborating on something like this? They tend to be direct competitors in many markets...

    • Re:Sun and IBM? (Score:5, Funny)

      by larry bagina (561269) on Wednesday May 16 2007, @10:24PM (#19156125) Journal
      They've leveraged forces to combine synergies to collaboratively multitask new paradigms for shitcanning their entire US work force.
      • Before you start solutioneering, lets have a sense check and rationalise the paradigm shift towards metaverse solution providers. I want this project firing on all cylinders! Ratify some face-time - I'd like to stir-fry some ideas in your mind-wok.
    • by working together they can instantiate new markets() to compete in.

    • Re:Sun and IBM? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by QuantumG (50515) <qg@biodome.org> on Wednesday May 16 2007, @11:33PM (#19156631) Homepage Journal
      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.
      • ... and in the mean time, they are losing old and potentially new customers to Linux because they are too busy screwing around with things that "someone might use someday" (as the person who gave the presentation about raising the limits on the number of nics said) vs. revamping and upgrading other critical toolsets. [C'mon: This is 2007. Why isn't rsync being bundled yet? Jumpstart is great and all, but why can't I mirror *and* patch without having to worry about blowing up my root filesystem or doing
        • Yep, all those researchers at Sun Labs should just get busy on fixing the problems at Sun Microsystems.. I mean, shit, are they too good to work on existing projects?

          Or, ya know, maybe they have nothing to do with that stuff and we're just being a little unfair here.

    • Re:Sun and IBM? (Score:4, Informative)

      by hutchike (837402) on Thursday May 17 2007, @12:20AM (#19156943) Homepage Journal
      Sun and IBM are not collaborating on this. Sun is using its Darkstar [sun.com] gaming server to deliver Menlo Park 2.0 [sun.com]. IBM is using a private island in Second Life [secondlife.com]. No connection - just a similar initiative.

  • What an immense waste of time (Score:5, Insightful)

    by spoco2 (322835) on Wednesday May 16 2007, @10:30PM (#19156175) Homepage
    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.
    • "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?"

      Why spend all that time navigating around the WWW (which has to be built) and doing things in the these websites when really you should be actually working?

      The problem is that a lot of people see the metaverse as a "Game". A better way to think of it is as the next extension of the web. You don't have a game client, you have a 3D browser.

      Webpage

      • Webpages are not always fully interactive. But lets say if you turned up at a webpage and you saw three other people viewing it at the same time. You could chat to them, find out if they found something interesting or maybe they have a common field you need a question answered on.

        Um, you mean, like, this [slashdot.org]?

  • The Metaverse will be a lonely place. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rhs.coder (1068158) on Wednesday May 16 2007, @10:41PM (#19156271)
    "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.
    • You just described both William Gibson's world and —brace yourself— Second Life! Yes, I know many people here hate the guts of SL, but this is exactly what it tries to be. Whether they achieve it or not is debatable, and there is the matter of it being centralized rather than distributed but that's just the idea behind it.

  • We're Meta, They're Endo (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby (173196) on Thursday May 17 2007, @12:01AM (#19156815) Homepage Journal
    Those virtual worlds aren't "metaverses". "Meta" means "beyond", not "inside", which is "endo". If anything, real life is the metaverse of these endoverses.
  • 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.
  • Finally, a reason to keep buying more powerful processors. Even if much is offloaded to the graphics board, all the intermeshed video, real time gesture and what the heck else will all be good for the bottom line if a metaverse is required for business. They've been salivating about this for years. No more having to fund music startups and whoever else comes up with a product that requires serious processing (had a friend who got investment from them for such a purpose).


    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).

    • 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

  • Well (Score:3, Interesting)

    by suv4x4 (956391) on Thursday May 17 2007, @02:12AM (#19157613)
    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.
  • ... as opposed to collaborating apart, I assume?

  • History of network development (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Morrigu (29432) on Thursday May 17 2007, @08:10AM (#19159977) Homepage Journal
    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 [wikipedia.org] 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. :)

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by radarsat1 (786772)
      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 probl
      • No, Second Life sucks because it's pointless. If you want to "collaborate" (awful word), call somebody on the phone. Send them an email. Write them a letter. Why do you need a poorly rendered world to get work done? You don't.

        • Re:wow... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by fimbulvetr (598306) on Thursday May 17 2007, @09:14AM (#19161207)
          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.
    • 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.
      • 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 sprea

    • Re:metaverse??? (Score:5, Informative)

      by bennomatic (691188) on Wednesday May 16 2007, @11:39PM (#19156667) Homepage
      First time I heard it was in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Worth a read.

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