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Virtual Worlds: Live Beyond the Real
Continued from page: 1
Rahul Sah and Saurangshu Kanunjna
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Opportunities for enterprises
The virtual world contains 3-D representations of people and landscapes from
the real world. It's a world where users are life-like representation of
themselves and they interact with each other through messaging, voice or even
video. Second Life, which is considered as the next phase of Internet revolution
became widely popular for social networking and is now becoming a host to
various activities happening from enterprises. Due to high membership and the
option to manage and customize avatars and virtual properties easily, it has
become the choice of platform for enterprises aiming new business opportunities
to venture into the virtual world. Enterprises are foraying into Second Life for
exploring more business opportunities that they can harness from the virtual
world of Second Life. They are buying lands and building stores on Second Life
for hosting their products and services on the virtual world. Some of the key
areas where enterprises have explored business opportunities include:
Marketing: Virtual world provided organizations with an innovative way
of promoting their business. With virtual world sites sites such as Second Life,
organizations have got the opportunity to open their stores in the virtual
world, where the users can go and check out the products of their choice.
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| Dell uses Second LIfe as a
platform for users to configure their PCs or notebooks |
Dell, one of the largest PC and notebook manufacturers went a step further
and rather than just showcasing their products on Second Life, they gave users
an opportunity to configure their own PC/notebooks; the user can then have the
same configuration PC/notebook shipped to his place after confirming the
transaction details over the Dell's website, which is connected to Second Life.
In fact, companies like BMW, Adidas and Toyota also have their storefronts in
Second Life for brand awareness and marketing. An avatar (user) can visit
Toyota's store, learn about the car and not only that, he can even go for a test
drive (though in the virtual world) and use all its features. Interesting way of
luring customers. Isn't it?
Communication and Collaboration: Second Life allowed users from
various geographical locations to connect to a virtual meeting place as an
alternative to conference calls and video conferencing. Such kind of a setup is
appealing, readily-available and interestingly it won't cost a bomb for the
enterprises as they needn't to invest on the hardware and installation costs of
the conferencing hardware tools. A simple webcam and an audio device will enable
an employee to connect to a virtual meeting and participate, while for an actual
web conference or meeting the organizations might have to spend an exorbitant
amount. A viable option for the enterprises having multi-country presence; such
a meeting place for conferences and meetings will be far less cheap and more
collaborative.
Companies like IBM and Sun Microsystems explored the social networking and
collaboration aspect of the virtual world. The IBM employees developed avatars,
which could interact and conduct meetings in a virtual environment. Sun
Microsystems used Second Life as an alternative for conferences, seminars and
even announcements. Their 'Project Darkstar' was announced on Second Life; they
even shared their Q3 fiscal reports via Second Life with their worldwide
employees.
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| Sun's MPK20 allows employees to
work in collaboration and interact with each other in a 3D virtual work
environment |
Education and Training: Virtual world has created new avenues for distance
learning. There are many educational institutes having a presence in the Second
Life-like Harvard University is already there. The enterprises can conduct
training sessions for their customers in a virtual environment wherein they can
get the knowledge and usage-training right from their homes. Sun, IBM, Cisco etc
are effectively harnessing the potential of second life for training their
employees at minimal costs.
One of the best uses of Second life toll date is done by an Egyptian company,
IslamOnline, which has hosted a close replica of the Hajj pilgrimage. Not only
do the users get familiarized with the Hajj rituals, but they also get a chance
to exercise these rituals in a 3D virtual environment.
Experimenting:Companies are using Second Life as a platform to test and
develop products, before they actually start building them. They are also using
it for getting feedbacks on the product before they've actually launched it in
the markets to predict user acceptance. For instance, Starwood Hotels built a
concept hotel called Aloft Hotel and used the Second Life residents' feedback
for refining their plans before starting the construction of the hotel. Nike and
Adidas too used this platform to gain consumer's feedback for their new shoes
before its actual launch.
|
Building Second Life
Spaces |
| compression and graphics
rendering. Most of the enterprises who buy land or islands in Second Life's
virtual world are not building the virtual properties by themselves. There
is a scripting language called Linden Scripting Language, which is used to
design and build the virtual properties in the Second Life's landscape. But
making appealing and impressive Second Life property is not an easy task.
There are technology companies specialized in developing a real-life
enterprise's virtual presence. Crayon is one such company which built the
virtual properties for Second Life. In India companies like Anantara
Solutions and IndusGeeks are helping enterprises to build their
virtual presence felt by leveraging Second Life as a platform for business. |
Technologies behind Virtual Worlds
The Web 2.0 technologies combined with advanced graphic rendering
technologies have made it possible to create Virtual Worlds. Along with the
availability of high-broadband coupled with progresses in PC's computational and
graphic capacities, it has become possible to make these virtual worlds
available to users over the Internet onto their browsers or a client program
installed on their desktop. The success and popularization of virtual world has
to be attributed to the recent advancements in graphics technologies both in
terms of software and hardware where rendering real-life images onto a computer
screen at a high frame rate has become possible.
The above reasons have attributed towards the easier reach of virtual world
environments to the users across the Internet. But which technologies are used
in creating such virtual worlds is something to wonder about. Virtual Worlds
like Second Life and Sun's MPK20. Virtual Workplace is built on open standard
technologies combined with Web 2.0 standards for user interactivity. Though the
client-side program of the Second Life is open source, the main software of
Second Life is based on C, C++ and other proprietary technologies. For
simulating such a vast world space a powerful backbone of server capable of
calculating and rendering millions of users simultaneously. At Linden Labs, they
use around 2000 servers to run Second Life.
Mainly the open source 3D virtual toolkits like Project Wonderland or Croquet
are used for creating virtual environments. The Croquet SDK is powerful enough
that provides developers with an infrastructure for creating and deploying
deeply collaborative multi-user online applications and metaverses on and across
multiple operating systems as well as devices. Its architecture makes it easy to
develop virtual world applications without having to put in a lot of efforts and
expertise in understanding how replicated applications work. On the other hand,
the Project Wonderland toolkit is built upon Sun's Project Darkstar server
infrastructure which provides scalability and security needed for multi-user
enterprise grade applications for the virtual world. This toolkit provides means
to the developers for creating virtual world, avatars and the animations within
it. Virtual worlds created using Wonderland can have shared applications, live
and immersive audio/ video where an exploring user can see and hear much in the
same way as happens in the real world.
The scripting language used to control and manipulate objects in the Second
Life is Linden Scripting Language (LSL), which is similar to C. LSL determines
how the objects will behave, controlling the waving of virtual hairs, driving a
virtual boat or automobile, or behavior of a virtual gun etc. Everything in
Second Life is a combination of prism, textures, and LSL scripts. Also the
building tools which are used for creating landscape objects are based on
geometric primitives. The technology used for streaming voice and video uses
VoIP with video compression and graphics rendering.
Most of the enterprises who buy land or islands in Second Life's virtual
world are not building the virtual properties by themselves. There is a
scripting language called Linden Scripting Language, which is used to design and
build the virtual properties in the Second Life's landscape. But making
appealing and impressive Second Life property is not an easy task. There are
technology companies specialized in developing a real-life enterprise's virtual
presence. Crayon is one such company which built the virtual properties for
Second Life. In India companies like Anantara Solutions and IndusGeeks are
helping enterprises to build their virtual presence felt by leveraging Second
Life as a platform for business.
Second Life is not the only place where lots of activities are happening in
the virtual world; companies like Sun, Google and Microsoft are now venturing
into this arena to create their own virtual spaces. Sun's MPK20 Virtual
Workplace is a virtual 3D-environment concept where employees within an
enterprise can accomplish their work, share documents and interact with
colleagues. Employees working in their virtual MPK20 team room can turn and talk
to any other colleague in the room regardless of a person's physical location.
This capability provides single place for distributed teams to work, collaborate
and communicate.
The road ahead
The virtual worlds have no longer remained a disruptive world to the
real-world for loners and geeks. It has evolved through the constraints of
technology and is rapidly being accepted as a world that will co-exist with the
real-world to form social as well as business associations. It is a must for an
enterprise to keep itself informed about the happenings in the virtual world so
that they can also evaluate the business prospects for them through this next-gen
of business models where the user experiences the close to real-life 3D
simulation of the product or services.
Second Life and other virtual worlds have demonstrated that the next-gen
Internet revolution will be in the field of virtual world where the interface
for content and communications will transform from 2D to a 360 degree 3D
experience.
We imagine that in future an employee can log in to his office in virtual
world and commence his official work right from his home. Well, just an
imagination, but possible too. So, all those who have still not explored the
opportunities in the virtual world or have maintained a distance from it-get
ready, the action is on and you've to keep it rolling.
Rahul Sah and Saurangshu Kanunjna
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