IBM Moves Further Into Second Life
We knew that IBM had two researchers officially poking around in the virtual world of Second Life, but now comes news from CNet that the company is setting up a business group specifically to address opportunities in Second Life and other virtual worlds. It seems the effort is being led by Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM’s vice president of technical strategy and innovation. This could be a seriously interesting development, as it will bring IBM’s weight to bear on the challenge of making Second Life and other virtual worlds and similar platforms into more useful and functional places. (IBM has also mentioned it will be working with the Multiverse world-building platform in some form.) If you ask me, that’s one of the most important things that virtual worlds still need to bring to the table; they need to demonstrate ways they can be easily useful to broad numbers of people. So far, we haven’t really seen it happen, except as entertainment. Here’s hoping IBM’s move helps make these places a useful part of more people’s lives.
Feeds
I have to just say that our poking around which has turned into a full time evangelizing job has led us to have over 900 IBMers to come and have a look and spawned multiple project, and work with customers.
Not too mention the fact the our worldwide innvoation jam led to virtual worlds being in the top ten of things to investgate :-)
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_47/b4010068.htm
How are all these virtual worlds going to tlak to one another, what standards are going to form to support them. How can we make it more scalebale, whataver ‘it’ is.
Its an interesting time, and there is still lots to be discovered. Whatever the tipping point was this year that got us all to this point with Second Life has caused rapid growth and opened up many possibilities that people just did not care to consider.
Twelve months ago we would not have even been able to talk about having 330,000 IBMers in a virtual world intra/metaverse now thats something that we almost need.
I am reminded of what happened with the web and in particular Wimbledon.org
In 1998 we used to count hits per minute. We had over 100,000 a minute at the Nagano winter olympics. By Wimbledon the record peak was 144,000. By the next year we had started to approach millions. It was something that had to be done with a live audience on a large infrastructure in order to learn how deal with the issues.
The interest in SL and the acceptance of the metaverse concept now gives us that audience, so the tuning and experiments can begin to deal with virtual worlds in the same we we deal with rapidly explanding traffic on websites, sparking machines up on demand etc.