Will Collaboration Be Enough For Qwaq?
Qwaq, a company I blogged about last June, has been planning to “enable a rich ecosystem of interlinked Croquet spaces, that is as easy to navigate and extend as today’s Web.” News from the company yesterday flags its first product, Qwaq Forums, which offer customizable “virtual spaces for real work.” The spaces are built on the peer-to-peer open-source Croquet platform, which was demo’d to great effect last fall to a bunch of metaversal types, but which we haven’t heard much from since. It sounds like Qwaq is a custom build-out of a Croquet implementation, tweaked for the needs of a specific business. It would offer multi-user interactivity, and a persistent 3D work environment. And because of how Croquet handles external applications, it should be relatively easy to drag something like an Excel spreadsheet into a window in Qwaq, and then let anyone in the space edit it.
The Qwaq press release sells the service pretty well right up front, but we’ll see what adoption is like. Pitching 3D spaces as business tools is still a hard sell. Stanford University’s Media X project apparently uses Qwaq. But what’s on offer here is little more than collaborative capabilities, which is something you can do in 2D almost as well. I suspect that most executives will need a bigger push before they can get over the energy barrier into 3D.
There’s also the issue of avatars. The Croquet team (which overlaps quite a bit with the Qwaq team) seems to have done little to improve the Croquet avatars since last fall (see the red robot in the image above). While this may sound like a quibble, it’s anything but. 3D worlds are like other planets to most people; sending them there in the guise of a robot or a rabbit is more alienating still.
That said, Croquet’s demo last year was pretty exciting. If Qwaq can find an effective way to offer business services, it could catch on. One thing that would help: tools for visualizing data in 3D, and offering functionality beyond mere collaboration, which can already be done effectively elsewhere. Meanwhile, veteran business giant IBM is pushing more and more people into virtual worlds giant Second Life by offering them just such tools. It’s still early days for Croquet, though, so it will be interesting to see where all this leads.
Feeds
A canary has entered the coal mine.
I think the Croquet story is going to be tough to sell to most IT folks because it’s based on advanced alien technologies (Smalltalk, the OC server, …) which aren’t generally understood. I hope they have a good story about how they bridge the OC workspaces to the rest of the web.
Mark, you seem to think that something interesting happens when you drop an Excel spreadsheet on the workspace. Does that mean that they have smalltalk parsers for MS Office formats built into the client? Yowch.
Or do they spawn the entire Excel app and map its display directly into 3D spaces. Also, yowch.
This is really very exciting. Tixeo, etc. are great, but it is good to see someone working toward the business metaverse on an open platform.
I tend to think that the avatar customization will follow usage. My “business” avatar in Second Life looked like a noob for as long as I could get away with it. Finally synched up skin, shape, etc to my personal avatar, but it wasn’t my first priority.
I agree with your comments about Qwaq: I think they are trying to make a translation of business collaboration to virtual worlds that is too literal. It will take a bit more time to understand which aspects of virtual worlds can have a relevance for managers in a business collaboration context. For now, my money is more on aspects of fun, enjoyment and motivation.
Cisco, WebEx, Qwaq, Ning, etc…
I was doing a bit of research into the state of today’s PLM (product lifecycle management) offerings and while there’s not been the kind of progress I’d hoped, there’s definitely a trend… toward services for small busines…
Hey you posted about Miramar way back when….Thanks for covering Croquet and the Qwaq implementation of it. I wish you had shown the Mirama UI from Intel IDF which is much prettier and more functional than the image shown above. When we were working on marrying Miramar to Croquet as a platform for developing a prototype of what we need for globally distributed, multiple team collaboration, we met a lot of the same arguments against voiced above. The fact is though that a more conventional OS just could not have done this. The scalability and navigation capabilities of Croquet (the latter looking much nicer in Miramar) are necessary for the kind of immersive collaboration environment we will eventually need and eventually be seeing. We deliberately did not limit ourselves to “what we can do now” but focused on “what we need to do eventually.” see messy history here http://blogs.intel.com/it/2007/09/innovation_ad_hoc_systemery.html