Blogging Virtual Worlds Fall: Keynote-Chris Sherman, Reuben Steiger, Christian Renaud

Chris Sherman, Executive Director of the Virtual Worlds Fall Conference and Expo, kicked off the morning by asking how many of the attendees were involved in the virtual worlds industry and how many were looking to get involved, and the audience was split nearly 50/50.  When asked how many had avatars, almost the entire audience raised their hands.

Then Millions of Us CEO Reuben Steiger took over to discuss the “age of the avatar,” a concept that Millions of Us has been pushing as the appropriate way to look at virtual worlds. While Christian Renaud, Chief Architect, Networked Virtual Environments, Cisco Technology Center, was going to discuss the future of virtual worlds, Steiger looked back to the industry’s history.

“What I like about this [phrase] is it’s a way of categorizing this industry as more than virtual worlds,” said Steiger. “I like “Virtual worlds,” and I think I have a good idea of what it means. What I don’t like about it is that it sounds very isolated and niche-y and cut off.”

Instead, looking back to the idea of groups sitting around the campfire—even digital campfires—and telling stories, Steiger wants to explore all online communities.  The question, then, is what an avatar is.

“I think it’s important to remember what an avatar is and what that means in various contexts,” said Steiger.

The word comes from Hindu for the idea of a god descending to earth and taking a human shape. Today it’s an online person.

“It’s sort of an inversion,” said Steiger. “It used to be going from a more ethereal place to a more prosaic. Today it’s going from a more prosaic place to, hopefully, a more ethereal, exciting place. At the bottom, though, it’s about giving a face to users.”

Steiger sees a problem in advertising. According to a study (Yankelovich 2007), only 25% of US residents trust conventional advertising. By and large they want to Tivo over advertising.  Almost 70%, though, trust what their friends recommend.

“We’re in an age where if you’re spending money on anything that looks or feels like advertising, you’re wasting 3/4 of every dollar,” said Steiger. “And the television industry is supported by advertising. This is a big, endemic problem.”

Online communities represent 31% of Internet usage, according to Comscore, and it’s the fastest growing segment. Steiger displayed a slide to show what the market looks like, including virtual worlds, social networks, user-created content communities, and blogs, packed and arranged to age band

“Virtual worlds, if we look back a year and a half, the conversation has been dominated by two words: ‘Second Life,’” said Steiger. “The irony is that Second Life is a small part of the market. If you look at kids worlds like Habbo, Gaia, and Stardoll, it’s a market of 100 million people.”

That’s not a mass market, but Steiger predicts that the social networks that are mass market, like Facebook, will become avatarized in 2008. Likewise, virtual worlds will become more like social networks. The final element of mainstreaming is that television tie-ins will become more and more prevalent.

As an example of Moore’s Law, Steiger displayed a slide of Habitat from 1985 and Second Life from 2005. In 20 years, the experience has become immersive.

“Now we’re going to go way back,” said Steiger displaying a slide of Philo T. Farnsworth in 1928. “In 1928, he invented, definitely, the electronic television. Across the street, in 2007, we see Linden Lab. You can see in the reflection of the door, a plaque marking where Philo invented the television.”

The point, Steiger said, is that the transition explains why people are interested in virtual worlds. As television developed, the automobile became more prevalent a well. Like virtual worlds, the automobile brought us closer and also tore us apart, both radically changing the idea of communities.

Before the advent of the automobile, the core of towns was community. Towns were based around churches, walking, and neighbors. “Over the last 80 years, though, we’ve come closer together, but we’ve eroded the bonds of community,” said Steiger. “It makes people, I believe, profoundly sad. Virtual worlds are so important because it’s easier for us to reconstitute what was lost digitally than it is to go back in the past and rebuild with brick and mortar our forgotten towns.”

Steiger closed with a piece of film promoting Scion City’s new campaign in Second Life based on telling a story about a lost town set 500 years in the future. The videos,  very desert, post-apocalyptic,  will be posted to the Internet, asking users to solve the mystery, The machinima shows a group of salvage workers uncovering a buried monster truck, taking it for a spin, and running into a hidden message from the ancient Scion City, leaving viewers with the question, “What is Scion City?”

With that, Christian Renaud took the stage to address how the virtual worlds industry can move forward.

“So, what’s next?” asked Renaud. “We’ve seen all the great stuff next door, we’ve seen a lot of great panels, and there is unprecedented creative energy around the space. It would be very easy for outsiders to say, ‘It’s all done. Let’s take this and work with it.’”

But, Renaud, pointed out, this is not the first time many of those in the audience have tried to make virtual worlds, communities, and avatars a reality. Right now, the industry is boutique, he said. “How do we go from a few hundred people here, like we did in 1988 with TCP/IP, to five years later when I didn’t see anyone I knew in the room?” he asked. “I want to enjoy this time before the market gets very, very crowded with people we don’t know. There are a few things we need to do this time to move differently from the last time we tried this.”

Networked virtual environments, for Cisco, is the age of the avatar. The Cisco Technology Center is the incubator group that takes opportunities like virtual worlds and turns them into businesses.

“I say this because I have nothing to sell you today,” said Renaud. “There’s no product pitch. Let’s take this and work together.”

Out of the 6.6 billion people on Earth, 2.3 billion have mobile phones.  Approximately 1.2 billion have Internet connectivity.

“This right now, combined with the 2.3 billion, and there’s a lot of overlap, that’s the addressable market right now for people that can enjoy virtual worlds,” said Renaud.

Renaud recently searched for virtual worlds and out of the top 50, looked for the top number of how successful the world was. That number came out to 465 million, though that’s not including many of the emerging worlds in Asia and likely includes double counting.  When looking for a common use base, though, Renaud said that it’s likely a tenth of that number.

“We need to take it from what it is right now, boutique and the human interest story that makes people chuckle before dinner, in to something widespread,” said Renaud. “My personal goal is to make it widespread enough that I don’t have to explain what I do to the guy sitting next to me on the plane.”

Renaud then displayed a slide of previous communities, like Compuserve, AOL, Viewtron, and The Well. The communities that still exist broke down their walled garden. These groups, in individual peak subscriber numbers, add up to about 36 million people.

Renaud sees the situation now as a time for companies to decide if each wants to try and be the Beta of the world or if all want a piece of VHS. That doesn’t mean one world, to him, but interoperability. Not driving his jeep into World of Warcraft, but a linked identity.

“Instead of making consumers and businesses bet on one of the 36 roulette numbers, we should let them bet on just red or black, or not bet at all,” said Renaud. “If a number of advertising and marketing companies and brands step back long enough to let the market rationalize itself, starvation will set in. We want cross-breeding. That doesn’t mean anyone needs to lose competitive advantage or value add. It’s not the platform; it’s the content on the platform.”

The goal, then, is commonness
“When I say ‘common,’ I don’t mean ‘one,’” said Renaud. “There are too many uses for one size to fit all. These should not be discrete silos. They shouldn’t eliminate all my resources available on the Internet or the connections I have with everyone else online.”

Cisco offers an online trade show and matchmaking service in addition to a virtual campus in Second Life.  These environments, Renaud argued, need to be multi-modal, offering different levels of immersiveness.

“I realize this makes me sound like a big corporation looking to come in and bulldoze all the wonderful creativity and diversity in virtual worlds and turn them into one bigass strip mall,” said Renaud. “That’s not it. I want to take the fun into work. How about I don’t from this rich, immersing, complex thing that takes both sides of my brain into this flat, soulless, boring space? Why does it have to be so tough?”

The dichotomy between work and fun, Renaud argues, is false.  The problem now is that there’s no common yardstick or unit of measurement. Everyone can be the largest in whatever they do if they add enough qualifiers.

“The market has this tendency to create these magical distinctions between things that are very similar,” said Renaud. “You can’t take a crowd of people and say, ‘who likes to play Sudoku and who likes immersion?’ It’s almost a fallacy to say that there are all these discrete segments. It is an industry.”

In order to have that overlap, the Internet and virtual worlds need a strong concept of identity. One challenge to a virtual interview, is that there still needs  to be a point where the employer asks the employee for a phone number.

One solution that Renaud points out is Open ID and similar products. However, that is a limited proposition, he argues. There are times when it’s perfectly appropriate for users to not want a persistent identity. But there are times when its crucial for users to transport reputation and good will from one site to another.

The other aspect of identity Renaud is interested in is presence, the idea of making your availability and interactions implicit instead of explicit. Identity regulated by contextual activity provides presence.

The goal, though, isn’t to replicate real life. The virtual interaction doesn’t have to be as good as real life. There are other aspects that can be better than real life—providing meta-data in meetings—that compensate for not doing as well at things like reading body language.

Projects at the MIT Media Lab, the Serious Games Institute, Implenia, and Standford are all attempting to address these issues, working with virtual worlds to augment the real and vice versa.

Renaud closed with a concept of The New Math.

“If it’s just between us, we can throw around whatever numbers we want,” said Renaud. “If it’s people outside of the industry, we need to do a bit of pre-rationalization and provide them real metrics. We can’t give them numbers that make their eyes glaze over—‘500 million people. Oh sure.—and give them real numbers.”

With that in mind, Renaud announced the Metaverse Metrics Index in partnership with Metaversed and Robert Bloomfield of Cornell. The MMI, Renaud said, follows the basic idea of a stock exchange’s common denominators to provide subscriber numbers, members, and others to the outside space.

The second step is to provide common platforms and interoperability.

“There’s some work going on, for example the Open ID people, pushing in that direction,” Renaud said. “We had a great meeting on Tuesday with about 30 companies and 60 different people. We all agreed in principle that we’re going to move forward with the idea as an industry.”

The event, hosted by IBM, is a watershed event, said Renaud.

The final step is to ask not what we can do, but what we should do. Tom Malone at the Center for Collective Intelligence, of which Cisco is a founding sponsor, is examining what users can do for the wisdom of crowds across a digital campfire versus what they lose through the digital mediation.

The multi-year study will examine what is and is not working and how to address the shortcomings of virtual worlds.

The sum then, is the need to work toward Common Identity, Common Denominators, Common Platforms, and Common Understanding.

All the references from Renaud's keynote can be found at Cisco's virtual worlds blog.

Comments

[Ken Rigby]

SL is like BASIC was to programming in the 80’s; a good introduction; but totally useless as a serious programming language.

We need a professional 3D engine to be serious about creating 3D environments that will educate and entertain in the future.

Real-Time Films, realism in experience, animations to WOW, and simulations that are as near to the real thing as possible.