IBM and Sun Launch Intranet Metaverses 123
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?"
Sun and IBM? (Score:2, Insightful)
What an immense waste of time (Score:5, Insightful)
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:wow... (Score:3, Insightful)
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..
The Metaverse will be a lonely place. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:It is (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sun and IBM? (Score:4, Insightful)
We're Meta, They're Endo (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What an immense waste of time (Score:1, Insightful)
For instance, without physical presences, many colleagues and managers have a natural tendency to believe you are not working or that they are not in control. Or perhaps the problem that co-workers don't feel a certain easy access to colleagues when they can't peak their heads around the cubicle. Or not being able to just sort of meet new colleagues that could be useful contacts for your job. Virtual worlds fill much of that need for the human element of collaboration and forming new relationships by simulating an office environment, yet I could still be on the beach with a corona and still attend a conference or work in the virtual office.
These things may seem trivial, but to your normal human working from home, working from remote is not as conducive to creating a unified business culture, supporting relationships while forming new ones, collaborative thought, or productivity in general as people thought it could be with our simple communications tools like video conference, IM, phone, and email etc.
Re:How good is computer vision these days? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:How good is computer vision these days? (Score:2, Insightful)
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:What an immense waste of time (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
It is a bit silly to throw away as a waste of time at this stage.
As for gated communities, that is kind of what we have now with the web and to be honest it is the only way I can see the metaverse surviving. The Second life model is horribly flawed imho.
"Collaborate together" (Score:2, Insightful)
Responses show Slashdot no longer technical (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Similarity to Gibson and Stephenson's metaverse (Score:2, Insightful)
History of network development (Score:4, Insightful)
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:wow... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:wow... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Responses show Slashdot no longer technical (Score:3, Insightful)
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, and phone, are superior for the majority of intraoffice communication. I need to have an answer to a question, I double click the person's name on Gaim and type my question. Two seconds later I have my answer. With a metaverse, I have to start up the program, login, try and find them somewhere in the place, then type my question anyway. And there's no way I'm going to run something so resource intensive while I'm not using it.
Some of my gripes you can get by with better design of the system. However, even if you got all that right, you still need to give the users better machines to handle the 3d graphics and on top of that, work at the same time. OR a separate computer.
Waste of money for something that probably would never increase productivity.