Is the Matrix background too much of a cliché?

This is an example of what I'm tending to find is the best way to set up the UI for a meeting in SL. The trick is to offset your character from the center of the screen by using the ALT (examine) option on a distant object and swinging the camera to the side. Pop the chat window up on one side then the people, movie or presentation can go on the other side.

Judging by the size of this window, a 1024x600 (wide)screen is the minimum to pull this off comfortably. (Which is a shame, because there's some nice ultra-portable tablet-esq computers that run 800x480.) I came up with technique because I was having serious problems fitting things on a 1024x768 monitor.

(The event was "Men's Support Group with Alex Bradley" as advertised on NWN and it was... interesting.)

I've attended a few presentations in SL now, so this is a first impressions/gut reaction post. In point form.

• The times suck. But I've been through that.

• SL needs a bigger screen to present the same stuff

  If you had a PowerPoint presentation, a text chat channel and streaming audio in a normal browser, 1024x768 would be plenty. In a 3D environment where things aren't laid out in a 2D-friendly way, 1024x768 is way too small. Even 1280x1024 is pushing it because it's hard to neatly line up a chat window and a 4:3 presentation in a 4:3(ish) window. Like I worked out even before I got my triplehead system setup, you really need at least dual-head to fully participate in a SL presentation.

• The technology involved is at least an order of magnitude more complicated than a standard PowerPoint presentation in a RL classroom. Which itself is an order of magnitude more complicated than a chalk and talk. The number of things that can go wrong with a whiteboard and a whiteboard marker can be measured with single digits. Once a single computer gets involved, the list of possible problems really does increase ten-fold. (And they're not helped by people that don't prepare.) Once you're dealing with a presentation method that requires not only a computer for the presenter, but a separate computer for every audience member, you're easily staring down the barrel of hundreds of potential problems. So many it's almost impossible to avoid some.

• They rarely start on time. In a world where transportation is instant, the number of people who are late doesn't seem to have decreased. Also, the technical complexity often means that the first 5-15 minutes of the session are taken up trying to get things to work. I hear that delays of 30-45 minutes are not unheard of.

The reason why these points are mostly negative is only partially because I'm like that. It's also because I haven't been to any presentations that have shown themselves to be any more than an on-line version of a classic meeting or lecture. This isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but it can be a little negative when analysed relative to the hype that tends to surround the latest technology.

This is not new. My degree is a Diploma of Technology (Instructional Multimedia). 10 years ago when I was doing it, Computer Based Training (CBT) was going to revolutionise the way people learnt. It really hasn't. What it has done is, much like Australia's old School of the Air, given people access to education that wouldn't otherwise have had it.

It's hard to top face-to-face education, if available, just by throwing technology at the problem. It's trivial to top no education. I obviously haven't seen every example of on-line teaching, but it looks like we could benefit more from using the technology to connect people than from using the technology to show off. I'm sure there are some wonderful new things that only exist in virtual worlds, and classes dealing with that will need to be, at least in part, in a virtual world. But the essence of SL and what it offers to people spread around the world needs to be distilled out of this "my polygons are cooler than your polygons" environment that exists at the moment.

Hopefully I'll be able to put together a post soon suggesting educational opportunities in virtual worlds.

I'm currently watching a live video stream of the Supernova tech conference in San Francisco from inside SL. The technology of the video cast and the SL room is very interesting. The presentations themselves are being heckled by people in SL, which is even more heartwarming. I hope I'm able to get to more events like this.

Thanks to Jerry for pointing me to Seriosity (more useful link here). Their basic thing seems to be that if work was more like a computer game people would be more interested in doing repetitious tasks in the office.

Let's examine that, shall we.

On the one hand we have World of Warcraft. I've levelled up a number of characters, fairly evenly distributed across the two factions. Let's say the most tedious single task requires me to do something 50 times, on average. I've probably done it 200 times in the year and a half I've been playing WoW. Some players may well have done any given single task no more than 50 times. The game may seem repetitious, but when you actually consider similar tasks to be different, it's not.

On the other hand we have where I work. Some details withheld to protect the guilty. We have nearly 9,000 records in our main customer database. We've been running for approximately four and a half years. That means that the most tedious tasks involved in creating these records are done, roughly on average, 2,000 times a year. Trust me when I say they're not distributed amongst 10 people.

So, even if we assume I didn't get bored trying to complete the more tedious of WoW tasks (I did), real life is an order of magnitude more tedious than an on-line game.

The reason that people do these tasks in a game is that there's a clear reward. I've worked at a place where there's a clear reward for doing stuff, it's called "commission". And it breeds a fiercely competitive environment in which staff regularly screw each other over, hide information, hide mistakes and externalise as many costs as possible. It's like every day of your life is dealing with a Pick-Up Group.

And not everyone likes computer games. Not even everyone likes games. I pulled out a deck of Fluxx at Friday night drinks a few weeks back and you could hear the crickets.

So, while some UI elements from games might be useful to the average worker, there are many concepts in a game like World of Warcraft that do not function when removed from the game.

I therefore wait with great anticipation to see what Seriosity will be offering the cube farms.

There is currently a 14 day trial (17 for paying FilePlanet subscribers) for City of Villains (CoV). I grabbed a copy of the 2.2Gig installation files from a friend, got my free FilePlanet account password reset so I could get the required account creation code, activated the account, downloaded another 50+MB of patch only to find on the second day of playing that there's a daily maintenance window that's 9pm-11pm my local time. Compared to that, World of Warcraft's weekly six to eight hour shutdown starting some time between 6pm and 9pm Tuesdays is positively generous. And I complained bitterly when that became regular.

It's really hard to take any virtual world seriously when it's down so much. Whether it's a forced client upgrade for SL, an eight-hour patch deployment in WoW that turns into 24 hours of downtime, or a daily two hour block at the tail end of primetime for CoV, none of these "worlds" offer a level of reliability that allows the average person to take the idea of a "metaverse" seriously.

Until you can be "present", in some form or another, in a virtual world 24/7/365, it's not much of a world. (I'll leave the discussion of 3G mobile phone clients for virtual worlds to another post.)

Update: It's a defined window but has only been used once in my first three days. Friends report that it's only been used once in the last six.

This entry could go "Dear home of Star Trek. Contrary to your popular SciFi series, the entire planet does not have one time zone. Love, Krisjohn".

If you haven't read Cory Doctrow's Eastern Standard Tribe, go grab a copy and have a read. I can wait.

Welcome back. Being eight hours ahead of GMT, or 13.7 hours ahead of American Mountain Yeti time, or whatever, makes attending pretty much any decent one-off event in Second Life fairly impossible, unless it's at least 24 hours long (or 12 on a weekend). There was a very useful-looking tutorial on streaming video in Second Life that I rather needed to go to that was essentially impossible to attend since it was on for 45 minutes around 4 am yesterday morning. What's on now?

"Blood 21 @ !CyberKitten Games!, BEG2 *Teazer's U* Attachment Fitting class, @~@YARD SALE in PALAU@~@, Eternal Fate, the Dungeonevent!, **Yard Sale**, Brand New Store! Uneeq Trendz! Urban Clothing and Accesor..., EveryDay Male is BACK OPEN! ALMOST FREE STUFF!, **** YARD SALE **** (inventory), ~Slingo w/ Calli@IceDragon's Playpen~, Blood 21 with the Bandits, BINGO IN BINGOLAND PARK!"

Seriously, why do the people that run SL allow the events list to fill with this crap? It took me less than a month to workout that this is the events list you want to read.

At which point I realised that if I want to attend anything interesting, I have to set my alarm clock and probably take a day off work.

I'll leave the discussion of using different time zones to provide 24/7 service to another post.

I've been in and out of Second Life for a few weeks now, so I feel qualified to offer my first impressions. This is done in the hope that they can be used to make SL "better", because there is a lot of potential in the world.

First impressions are that the world is a cross between Las Vegas and a cruise liner. And in no way is that good. I understand that a virtual world is inherently a pure tourist destination. But to have it primarily filled with casinos, bars and sex joints is tacky beyond words.

While there are some admirable efforts to legitimise the world, Cory Doctrow and the BBC have had a stab at it, it's far from corporation friendly. If I went up to a business development manager I know and said "You think that a foothold in Canada is cool? Wait until you see Second Life" I know I'd have one chance to make an impression. After struggling to keep their interest through all the unavoidable techie stuff due to the very fact that it's a purely virtual world, I know I'd lose them as soon as they visit any of the "popular" places, or even pull up the current event list. The active SL population is, what, 80% scantily clad girls? They're going to see the repetitive dancing, hear the banal copyright-infringing music streams and then they're not going to consider a virtual shop-front for another five years.

Unless this particularly tedious aspect of human nature can be partitioned into its own pocket universe, Second Life faces a rather steep uphill battle. At the moment, I'm not sure I'll hang around after the WoW/SL Crossover event I'm hoping to be part of.

I joined Second Life a couple of weeks ago in preparation for a crossover between SL and World of Warcraft. I come to SL with a background in multimedia, IT and gaming. I see SL from the perspective of both an IT professional and a gamer. I'm hoping this weblog will provide some insight to those people heavily involved in the development of immersive environments such as SL.