I don’t usually blog specifically about ESC here, but I’ve had a number of people recently ask what ESC is focussed on these days, and today we’ve made an announcement about one of our initiatives. You can follow ESC news and its thinking on virtual worlds at the aggregate Sheep blogs here.

The Electric Sheep Company has for 3.5 years now been a company dedicated to bringing about the mass adoption of the metaverse through building virtual world applications. We’ve built considerable expertise through building applications for consumer entertainment, marketing, enterprise communication, recruiting, R&D, and other purposes. We’ve learned how to design the right experience for a particular audience through the use of interactive tools available, and keep learning with every project.

Creating new technology has always been a key part of that process. Because virtual world software is generally in its early stages, we often find ourselves extending it to attempt to accomplish what we need to. Second Life in particular is a fantastic platform for experimentation; our very first consulting project was building a search tool for Linden Lab, and in the last 3 years we built quite a bit of software connected to Second Life.

Last year we made a major first attempt at overcoming usability barriers in Second Life by creating our own downloadable viewer and launching it as a part of the CSI:NY in Second Life project. While that viewer was only a first step, it caused us to conclude that without more access to the server side of that platform, we weren’t going to get the feature set to a point where it was complete for any specific mass market virtual world application that we believed could have near term success.

That thinking extends across the virtual world technology landscape, as I’ve written here - considerable amounts of technology have been built over 20 years, some of it great, but from my point of view we remain without the feature sets needed for most applications that are likely to quickly obtain ten million regular users outside of the under 13 year old demographic.

With that in mind, one of the things ESC has been working on is software designed to fulfill some light-weight virtual world applications on the Web. We’ve announced today our WebFlock application; a tool set for embedding flash-based virtual spaces within Web sites and integrating those into any existing Web applications.

This isn’t a consumer virtual world play by ESC; rather we’re adding to the roster of virtual world tools available for anyone creating a consumer experience, and we think this tool will be a great fit for a set of use cases that isn’t currently well served. Primarily we see it as enabling virtual spaces for casual audiences who are already coming to a given Web site. WebFlock allows for taking a community of interest, whether around a movie, TV show, sport, pop culture, etc. or around an activity, like dating, and adding the core value of virtual worlds - synchronous experiences where users feel like they are in a space together. We’ve announced that we’re using WebFlock to create an experience for Showtime’s The L Word, and we have other projects underway as well, from simple promotional spaces to entire new virtual worlds that are based on WebFlock.

ESC is continuing to perform projects on any virtual world platform. We typically are hired in part to help organizations choose what technology stack makes the most sense for them to use. I certainly continue to believe in the power of 3D, for example, that would lead certain use cases toward the downloaded virtual worlds, including the new crop of 3D Web plug-ins.

For many of the potential projects we encounter, though, we are excited to now have what we see as an optimal tool for creating an entirely white labeled (no 3rd party network users have to sign up for), and no download/install/plug-in virtual experience that can be highly customized and woven throughout a Web application. We believe this will quickly help spread virtual spaces around the Web. As we’ve watched and been a part of the latest spurt of growth in virtual worlds, it seems to us that one of the most important ways to move the industry forward is through bringing large audiences into virtual worlds one step at a time, which means no barrier to entry, clear relevance to something they already are engaged in, extremely easy interfaces, and clear value for their time. Those have been the goals driving the WebFlock feature set.

ESC looks forward to not only using WebFlock to create such virtual world applications, but also in making the software available for other companies and studios to use and customize themselves.

Of course if you want to know more about WebFlock or ESC’s services across any virtual world technology, please contact us.

I’m thrilled to see Google announce their long-rumored virtual world technology. This will cause all the more companies to look into virtual worlds seriously, and the platform, with no license costs or hosting fees will be great for experimentation. (And I’m also thrilled to pay homage via the portrait below of the former ESC futurist, Jerry Paffendorf, who has been attempting to taunt Google into virtual worlds for years via bold fashion statements.)

(Picture by Annie Ok.)

What causes me to be skeptical about the likely success of Lively is that I can’t tell from the outside that there was a “Roadmap”-like logical exercise behind its design. Was there a need for particular applications identified that would have a competitive advantage by using virtual world technology and then product design and featured decisions made based on the use cases for those applications?

It may be that there was, although the typical characterization that Google acts as highly talented engineers creating interesting and innovative solutions but without business direction would predict otherwise. ESC is a company always in search of better tools for any virtual world job; therefore we would love technology that opens up new use cases. Here’s the results of my thinking on the case for using Google Lively.

• By far the most active part of the virtual world industry is in entertainment for tweens. My understanding of the Google Lively terms of service as well as the feature set and structure is that this demographic is not supported and likely won’t be soon.

• Significant experimentation, at least in the form of many small scale projects, is being done by companies looking to use virtual worlds inside the enterprise for meetings and training applications. These companies all tell us that they want to host the virtual world inside their firewall and in many cases customize the software; those actions are not supported by Google Lively.

• Large media companies who are publishers of virtual worlds, including efforts to expand beyond the tween demographic, have told me directly that they are not interested in having their work in a new medium hosted by Google; they fear that they’ll lose more advertising models to Google down the road.

• Advertisers thinking of using virtual worlds want one of two things: either a) execute a great marketing effort in a virtual world that already has a lot of eyeballs that they can easily get in front of, or b) an experience they can easily drive their own traffic to that adds to the effectiveness of their other marketing expenditures. On a) Lively doesn’t yet have users (obviously they just announced, so give it some time and we’ll see), and on b) Lively requires the installation of a plug-in, which even the most enticing ad just won’t get that many mainstream users to install in order to interact with a brand on-line.

• There are indeed many Web sites that have large communities, but all but the very most tech savvy and fanatical communities (MLB comes to mind as a very rare counterexample) also see huge drop off for any activity that involves installing a plug-in or registering for a 3rd party registration system.

• A significant portion of virtual world efforts currently underway are built around the ability to sell virtual goods as their primary business model. This doesn’t seem to be supported currently in Lively - of all the shortcomings listed here, I’d assume that this one will be over come soon, but still may take a while to set up since the Google Warehouse doesn’t currently seem to support virtual good sales.

All of this would seem to indicate to me that Google Lively might end up being another Google Video, at least in its current direction.

That said, it should be noted that Google executed very well on what they chose to pursue, and the unpredicted could happen. One of the best things for innovation is to have free tools to play with, and this is a pretty major addition to what aspiring publishers or entrepreneurs can easily use. Second Life was a major innovation in its ease of 3D content creation and scripting; that certainly got more of the latest virtual world party started. Google Lively is a major step forward in having a space on the Web with free hosting, industry-standard content formats, and lots of available content via the warehouse.

The completely critical factor in Lively’s potential success is adoption of the plug-in. Google Earth and the Google Toolbar have taken years and in the latter’s case a lot of marketing dollars to get to modest usage (the installed base is large but the use doesn’t seem to indicate truly mass adoption, from my point of view). It may be that with ties to social networks and significant effort Google can work its way up over the next 3 years to mass adoption of its plug-in - that would be a HUGE step forward for virtual worlds. I’d love to see it happen.

But given the points above, I don’t think that will be an easy path; publishers aren’t going to throw all their users at it any time soon. My bet: other companies come up with the perfect virtual world applications, and Google eventually acquires some of them.
If you have any insight into great applications for Google Lively, I would very much love to hear it!

Forrester, publishers of business and technology research, recently published “Web3D: The Next Major Internet Wave.” I wish it were freely available so that I felt in the clear to dissect it in great detail here, but understandably Forrester has to make money by charging $279. Here is a little free commentary on the report, though.

The first half of the report is not interesting to those of us in the industry, as it’s a very high level overview of some of the applications of virtual worlds that will eventually be used in enterprises. You know the drill - in 5-7 years (it’s probably been 5-7 years for 15 years now) companies will be more innovative and efficient by using virtual worlds for training, simulation, improved remote collaboration, 3D presentations of data and prototypes, and remote sensing and control of infrastructure. While many of us could write a version of that content in an afternoon, if you need a renewed tool to get someone outside of the virtual world industry to take these sorts of ideas seriously and a list of topics their enterprise should be thinking about, point them to this report.

More importantly for our topic here, I was pleasantly surprised that the report spent a portion of its limited scope on doing some initial roadmapping. The thesis of this portion is:

“Web3D will evolve during the next five to seven years from an immature emerging market to a standards-based, interoperable global environment — assuming that gating factors are addressed (see Figure 3). “

Forrester researchers, led by Erica Driver, concluded that the most likely scenario for the future is one where open source projects, standards, and collaboration between technology providers will create a compatible global virtual world, or Web3D. More importantly, they contributed a list of what they see as the major barriers that must be overcome to reach this point, including

• improved software interfaces and new hardware-based and mobile interface devices
• standards, such as for servers, client software, avatars, profiles, inventories, animations, scripts, and identity

Less likely, but the main alternative described in the report, is that proprietary walled gardens are most successful, open source projects do not provide a layer of compatible underpinnings, and therefore innovation is stunted, taking additional years to achieving great value from virtual worlds.

As you know if you heard my talk at the Virtual Worlds 2008 Conference, I think that these are not actually alternatives, but that we are in for both of these scenarios simultaneously over the next few years. Because gaming, social networking, and today’s prototypes of virtual worlds are all combining, we are likely to have a blurred spectrum from today’s fully proprietary, big budget MMOs, to standalone virtual worlds that may just use standards for one or two features for the benefit of security or cost savings in content creation, to the 3D Web where open standards are used to publish virtual spaces across millions of Web sites.

So as with determining the question of “when will application X of virtual worlds take off”, which ends up being a complicated analysis of when an array of technology features will arrive in compatible ways, the realistic answer to “proprietary vs. open Web3D” is much more complex. I see one of the tasks of roadmapping the virtual world industry to be taking each type of virtual world, or each virtual world application, dissecting BOTH the technology required and the business environment in which that application will likely come to market, and then making an educated guess as to how proprietary vs. standards-based that virtual world application is likely to be in its first successful versions.

Some applications will surely be walled-garden, but that doesn’t scare me as much as the Forrester authors seem to have been because I don’t see that as preventing a wide swath of virtual world potential being more compatible.

So stay tuned - as I try to come up with more roadmapping content here, hopefully we’ll get to the bottom of such questions - at least as best we can until reality plays out and shows us where we’re wrong.

Almost regardless of what virtual world experience one wants to create, there exists no technology today that can support that experience really well straight out of the box. Whether creating a 2D flash virtual world for kids, 3D enterprise collaboration space, or anything in between, you have to select a technology stack among a rapidly evolving and imperfect set of choices based on the features you need and then perform the software development to put those pieces together and fill in any gaps.

As an introduction to that process, ESC has written a white paper, “Technology Evaluation for Marketing and Entertainment Virtual Worlds” on some of the technology choices available and some of the topics one should consider when picking among them. This is written with entertainment virtual worlds on the Web in mind, but much of the content is relevant to other situations as well.

To get the white paper, please fill out the form on this page and it will be e-mailed to you.

More specifically, here’s what you’ll find in this draft paper:

1. The near-term evolution of virtual worlds can be seen as the gradual intersection of multi-user gaming, social networks, and today’s virtual worlds. One of the ramifications of this convergence is that future VWs will gravitate toward a new place in the “Engagement Plane”, as explained herein. I’d be very interested in any commentary anyone has on extending the “Engagement Plane” analysis;
2. A list of the typical items that incur cost when one is creating a virtual world;
3. Examples of design trade-offs considered when picking & creating a virtual world technology stack;
4. Feature and performance criteria for virtual world technology choices;
5. A high-level summary of how some of today’s technology options compare with that feature and performance criteria list;
6. A long list of other topics worth considering that are not otherwise addressed in this report.

Please use it and let us know how it can be improved!

This blog will be discussing the current and near-term state of virtual world technology: the wide array of technologies that exists, what those are good for in combination, what gaps can easily be overcome to achieve useful applications. It attempts to create a roadmap of what efforts are required to achieve various parts of the truly huge potential value of virtual worlds. While the content here will focus most often on technology, it is meant to summarize the technological details in a form useful for making business decisions.

Linked below are the presentation slides I used at the Virtual Worlds 2008 Conference in New York last week (April 3-4).  As soon as I get the audio from the conference organizers, I’ll put a more useful post here with a voicethread of the talk.  Also coming shortly is the ESC whitepaper comparing some virtual world technology choices - check back later this week.

See the slides on Slideshare

Download as PDFs from Slideshare