ActivePort Julie Fogg and Virtual World Opps

Dec 16th, 2009 | By omar shaikh | Category: Featured, Virtual Worlds
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Julie Fogg / her Second Life avatar Violet Field

Julie Fogg / her Second Life avatar Violet Field

Eavesdrop soon via audio on the discussion between ActivePort.com’s Julie Fogg, a virtual world passionista (also known as evangelist), discuss Avaya’s web.alive and Second Life. For now, read the transcription.

Suzanne Bowen: How could this interview be different if we used Avaya’s web.alive or Second Life as opposed to Skype?

Julie Fogg: I’m glad you asked that. Earlier this morning while I was trying to prepare for this meeting I was having a fit of giggles over thinking about doing this call with you. Gosh, I wish were doing this in a 3D application because I know that I would be instantly calm if we were interacting with both a visual and audio element.

Suzanne Bowen: So visual and audio… I don’t have any experience with either web.alive or Second Life. I have friends who use Second Life. When you mention video and audio, please explain how this would make someone feel calmer?

Julie Fogg: I’m speaking for myself. It’s more like being in a face to face conversation with someone. Imagine you and I are sitting at a conference table in an office for this interview. It is the same thing but in 3D. Did you see the Matrix?

Suzanne Bowen: Yes. I have all the sequels, too.

Julie Fogg: Great! As do I. It reminds me a lot of that because it is a software program written where you can interact with people when you are not in the same physical space together.

Suzanne Bowen: I can see now where it might make you feel more comfortable because you are actually seeing your audience; whereas, straight audio, it may make you wonder… or is there more to it than that?

Julie Webb: I have no idea what you’re doing. You could be microwaving popcorn. There is just something comfortable about being able to interact with all of one’s senses.

Suzanne Bowen: So what I know about Second Life is that everything has a virtual appearance. The people do not actually see each other but instead they see a character of each other like an avatar.

Julie Fogg: I’m glad you brought that up because the movie is opening on December 18. I would encourage you to see it for a sample of something (where if you don’t have time to pop into Second Life) you can get a very good exampleof some of the examples of the software programs.

Suzanne Bowen: I’ve watched all the trailers. It’s look really cool. So what would you say is the difference between web.alive and Second Life? What do you like about each? What’s the good, bad, and ugly?

Julie Fogg: It’s like a closed enterprise system like a PABX versus Skype. With Skype you can get spam. It’s kind of “open source-ish.” Not a good term.

Suzanne Bowen: It’s a little more natural. Anything can happen. More opportunities available. It’s not a walled garden.

Julie Fogg: There is a gal who works on my computer sometimes. My Skype was up. I walked into my office and noticed that Skype showed a women with no shirt on. I immediately closed that. There is just no control of Skype. It has some benefits, but as soon as you click on Youtube, forget it, the microphone doesn’t work.

When you go into web.alive, it is an enterprise 3D chat application. It has presence where you can see when someone is available or not. You have an administrator and all a controlled environment. That is how it is different from Second Life. Web Alive is like a cocktail party. Our digital representations could be standing next to each other. We could be speaking but still hear the people around us like at a cocktail party. That’s how the audio is on web.alive, very interesting.

Suzanne Bowen: It’s pretty easy to pay attention to everything. You would kind of tune out what is not interesting to you and tune in what is just like at a cocktail party.

Julie Fogg: Yes, and you can also go into a private room where people can’t hear. Maybe I want to interview you as a potential employee. The IRS uses Second Life for that.

Suzanne Bowen: IRS uses Second Life. That’s interesting. With Second Life, there are probably all kinds of plugins but what about recording and would we be able to save and upload to QIK, Viddler or Youtube?

Julie Fogg: I’ll tell you what. I’ll find out and I will get back to you on that.

Suzanne Bowen: That is my favorite answer to any customer service request.

Julie Webb: Before I forget, I wanted to mention that web.alive is very eco-friendly. If we were to do this interview in person, you’re in Florida. I’m in California. It would cost a lot of money, the costs to the environment, wear and tear of travel on individuals involved. If we use web.alive instead, it’s hosted, just a call over IP.

Second Life has more of a footprint than web.alive. I can get you the technical information on that if you would like a comparison but the way the engineer explained it was very compelling.

Suzanne Bowen: I hope you will tell us a little bit more about this especially because of the fact many of the listeners on DIDX podcast channel are in business. So what are some of the most important business applications?

Julie Fogg: The technology is an extension of both the PBX and unified communication. Maybe not an extension, but a second version of it because take unified communications, add a visual element. That is 3D chat technology, great for enterprise, especially people who are right-brained thinkers. Left-brained thinkers can appreciate it as well.

Suzanne Bowen: It also “speaks” to what I see is a more visual-oriented global community. I was a teacher for 20 years and I saw through the years a constantly higher percentage of students wishing for visual instruction and projects instead of the traditional “taking notes while listening to a lecture.” These students are among a generation who are adults now. This would make sense.

Julie Fogg: Check out thinkbalm.com. Erica Driver (http://www.linkedin.com/in/ericadriver) is on Twitter. She has done an excellent job of researching this technology. Another site to check is http://www.immersivetech.org/. They are doing an event like TMC event coming on immersive and such.

Suzanne Bowen: Pretty exciting. I just want to thank you. We met on Twitter, just chatting and showing support for each where we think alike or to help each other. I’m looking forward to another talk about ActivePort.

Julie Fogg: Thank you so much.

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  • http://www.activeport.com Julie Fogg

    @suzannebowen

    Thank you for interviewing me. It’s funny that I stumbled onto this post right after a video demo from a prospective vendor. The gal bounced in her chair the entire duration of the demo and I was completely distracted. In light of that experience coupled with reading your interview, I would like to list communication technologies from my favorite to my least favorite:

    1. 3D aka a virtual world like web.alive or Second Life (voice can be done in-world or separate for privacy).
    2. Voice conference with collaborative capabilities like Google Docs or Sonexis Conference Manager.
    3. Skype or enterprise VoIP calls (Avaya or Nortel).
    4. Mobile calls (lower quality but acceptable).
    5. In-person (this creates carbon dioxide and is my least favorite unless really necessary).

    Thank you again for taking the time to speak with me about a technology that I am so passionate about. I’m definitely an evangelist.

    Here is a link for some of the most well-known people on Twitter using 3D technologies: http://twitter.com/EricaDriver/immersive-internet

    Here is a link for the Association of Virtual Worlds: http://www.associationofvirtualworlds.com/

    Here is the link for the gentleman I attended UCLA’s Anderson School of Management MDE Program who is heavily involved in augmented and immersive technologies: http://www.immersivetech.org/

    A link on Second Life launching their enterprise product: http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/enterpriseapps/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221600198

    And the web.alive website: http://www.projectchainsaw.com

    Thanks again!

    Julie Fogg
    @juliefogg

  • http://uomovies.com Minsc

    Just a few quick comments – the bold highlighting of the names stops about halfway through, and the name is mistakenly shown as Julie Webb while the title says Julie Fogg. :)

    I’m just a fan of 3D tech (I don’t work in 3D at all) but I’ve been playing around in 3D online worlds since the late 90s myself. I enjoyed reading your take on this. Having used both web.alive and SL, I have seen the differences, and there’s certainly a lot.

    I agree with Julie’s thoughts that WA’s 3D positional audio makes for a more immersive, natural experience where you hear what you are standing next to and at a volume relative to distance, as opposed to SL where audio tends to be “either you can hear it or you can’t and there’s one volume for everyone”. The cocktail party analogy is apt, and so is a work board meeting or large conference, for web.alive. SL is much more of a free for all most of the time, though SL does provide tools to own and control property the same way, it’s more about the fact that the SL population are usually whom get invited, while in WA, the entire population of the world is strictly controlled.

    I can also relate to the comment about nervousness/giggling with regard to the interview. Interviews can be a little stressful for sure, and an in-person meeting does tend to mitigate that. A 3D meeting can have the same effect, to a degree. You feel a bit more in control of the audio and visual experience in an online world versus a phonecall.

    Julie’s comment that it is a controlled environment is key. web.alive does give the world owners more control, and out of the box, it’s more appropriately restrictive of avatar appearance. For example, in a typical corporate web.alive world, you won’t see someone running around as a wolf or a flying phallic symbol, but in SL, that’s very possible. The idea is to give the owners complete control over the experience. The default set of avatars in web.alive are far less extensive than what can be done with SL, but when you’re trying to get work done, that’s what matters – a simple set of politically correct avatars.

    web.alive is based on Unreal technology, though scaled down for high compatibility with older machines. SL is also very compatible so this isn’t really an advantage that WA has, just a feature enabling it to compete in that area. They’ve done some interesting things with streaming video out of web.alive and embedding presentations and other mundane office-type functions, whereas Second Life has focused more on diverse property ownership and avatar customization.

    Probably the most significant difference with WA is that it is web-enabled and the barrier to entry is reduced significantly as a result. Compartmentalized, online worlds can be embedded into a webpage and strictly controlled by the owner, such as the Lenovo E-Lounge, and entered by non-tech visitors with a highly automated plugin-based install-and-go model. Second Life requires a full client download, account setup and registration, and while it may seem simple to most people who have used computers for more than a month, it’s simply too much for many people.

    I can send anyone the URL for the e-lounge and just about everyone could get in with one-click and then following a few basic instructions, the first time or every time. If I create a Second Life world, the instructions to invite someone who has never been are… excessive to say the least. SL is a single monolithic world with it’s own culture and goals and web.alive gives that power to companies to run controlled worlds specific to their work.

    Regarding recording, I also don’t know the answer here, but you could certainly screen record with something like Fraps on either platform, and upload the resulting video to YouTube or whatever. I don’t believe either system has this function built right in, but I could be wrong.

    Both systems help the environment, but only if they’re adopted and used. web.alive makes it easier for corporations to get into this technology for sure, cutting travel and all that, which is great. SL, to be perfectly honest, is just full of a lot of very weird people who are more focused on SL itself rather than the subject at hand.

    Check out the Lenovo E-Lounge for a real-world implementation of web.alive:
    http://shop.lenovo.com/us/Sitelets/eLounge/welcome

    I hope this technology is adopted widely soon. I’m sick of conference calls on my cellphone sounding like garbage. The sound quality through the PC is much, much better – when people can get their mics to work. :) WA has made this pretty easy as well, I must say.

  • http://www.rocketwatcher.com April Dunford

    What a great discussion, thanks for sharing it!
    Anyone that does a lot of audio conferences knows that the experience is far from what you get in a face to face meeting. Simply being able to look around and see who is in the meeting and who isn’t would get rid of what we typically do for the first 10 minutes on any call. What makes web.alive so interesting is that they are tackling a very real problem that enterprises are facing every day that costs time and money. The way we collaborate today as groups is really inefficient. I’m really excited to see how we can make use of more immersive technologies to improve that.
    Great post!
    April

  • http://www.activeport.com Julie Fogg

    @aprildunford

    Considering your background, I would like to thank you for commenting on the interview. I saw how you made the list of influential women of the web 2010 http://bit.ly/6VJ5zH and your blog http://www.rocketwatcher.com/ is insightful for tech start ups like web.alive. Oh wait…. you promoted web.alive & are the reason I found the technology. Plus I learned how to sell complex futuristic applications from your blog.

    @juliefogg

  • http://mellanium.co.uk/application-areas.php Ken Rigby

    see:

    ec3v3.projectchainsaw.com for high res models, etc.

  • http://blog.knowsense.co.uk neil

    Useful interview. As someone working with these technologies to bring teams together, there are a couple of things I could add. One advantage of Web.Alive that is well pointed out is the ability to launch it fairly easily in a browser and the comparative complexity of getting Second Life (SL) up and running. There are currently various efforts underway to build browser-based clients for SL but none is enterprise ready yet. However, on the other differences that were stated between SL and Web.Alive, actually these need to be qualified. The voice in SL is 3D spatial audio, falls off with distance and has the flexibility to be anchored to the avatar or to the camera, which can be freely moved. In addition each individual speakers volume can be adjusted by you as a user, or muted. You can also have entirely separate private one-one voice chats – these then are not spatial. The concept that SL is public is incorrect. You can lock down your piece of land, allowing only those you wish into your meeting space, or for complete control you could have your own island / server which would give you complete privacy. Should you wish to own the data too, and stay inside your own firewall, there is now the Second Life Enterprise product – your own SL server to run inside your organisation.
    In terms of getting media into the 3D space, and also recording/logging, you might be interested in the work I am doing with colleagues at FlyingIsland (http://www.flyingisland.co.uk) – our knowledge management system allows great collaboration and then a simple one click to launch a meeting in SL – chosen content is automatically there to see and browse and chat is logged automatically – there’s a demo video on the site. Note that we chose SL as the meeting platform but we are also looking at Web.Alive and other 3D immersive platforms. You’ll find more on the whole area of 3D meetings on my blog. (http://blog.knowsense.co.uk)