3pointD.com

Gideon May, Birgit Frenzel and Dirk Lusebrink (l to r) of I-D Media, the team behind Lifecrawler

Faithful readers may recall the Lifecrawler service I blogged about a couple of weeks ago, which looked like it would give users the chance to put a streaming Second Life window on their Web page. I had the opportunity to meet up with the team behind it while I was in Berlin, and learned a bit more about what’s planned for the service and the company behind it while we hung out surrounded by techie hipsters at the Sankt Oberholz on the edge of Prenzlauerberg. Lifecrawler is the project of a small R&D team within German marketing agency I-D Media who’ve been given more or less free rein to start pushing into the virtual world of Second Life. Though they’re just starting out in the virtual services space, I-D Media plans to leverage the company’s 20-year track record in marketing to bring new and existing clients into the virtual world. Besides the streaming service, the team is also designing a metrics package that will be offered to clients.

Before speaking with the team, I’d gotten the impression that Lifecrawler would offer anyone the chance to stream Second Life video live to a Web site. Turns out that’s not the case. Streaming Second Life to a Web site — even a series of still pictures, as the Electric Sheep Company’s DTV does — requires a dedicated machine tucked away in a kitchen cabinet somewhere (usually somewhere in Williamsburg), doing nothing but transmitting data from the 3D world to the 2D web, according to Gideon May, who’s not part of I-D Media but who was brought in to do most of the heavy lifting where the code is concerned (and who can be seen at left in the photo above).

Instead, I-D Media plan a DTV-like product, but with full commercial services on offer: though details of how scheduling will work have yet to be hammered out, you should one day be able to arrange for the Lifecrawler to come to your event and put the stream on your Web site (perhaps at the cost of a small fee). It’s kind of like an SL cameraman for hire — but a live one, which I’m not sure I’ve seen before (though I’d be surprised if it hadn’t been done yet). When idle, Lifecrawler also comes with DTV-like avatar controls so that it can be controlled from the Web, except they’ve been mocked up to mimic the camera controls in the SL user interface. The Web interface is working well enough at this point to accept “crowded” input (i.e., a crowd of people on different browsers all clicking the controls at once), and I was even able to control it from the browser on my new Blackberry — though I couldn’t view the QuickTime stream there. The Web-based controls, though, come with something like an eight-second delay due to QuickTime compression.

I don’t know how much money you can make from a service like that, but it’s a nice proof of concept. I know DTV has been much sought after at various events (we had her at the Second Life Herald’s third birthday party), but I’d love to see a service like this that was scheduled on some kind of commercial basis (i.e., first come, first served, etc.) so that it was a reflection of its customers rather than its creators.

The metrics service also sounds like it could be a winner, at least in concept. There’s a ton of information available to be harvested from the SL client, information about who’s where in your corporate build, what they’re doing there, when they do it, who they do it with and what they might want more (or less) of. You can also record more stats than just how many copies of promo item X have been given away (hell, you could have them send you a message each and every time someone rezzed one). I can’t think of any specific metrics packages that are out there, and certainly nothing that sounds very sophisticated — though again, I’d be surprised if it hadn’t already been done. If I were a company coming into Second Life, I’d want something like this for sure. It’ll become a standard offering as things progress, but the market looks wide open at the moment. (It might even become something you could buy in separately, like you might pay for a sophisticated Web site traffic package, regardless of who’d designed your site.)

Though they haven’t yet brought in any clients to Second Life, it sounds like I-D Media, who’ve been hanging out on Idea Island in SL since January, are starting to make their pitch, to clients both new and old. With the Second Life hype at overpowering levels in Germany, I don’t imagine they’ll have much trouble finding a willing guinea pig. Their biggest hurdle will be their lack of SL building and scripting experience, and the current dearth of talent waiting to be picked up. But this is something that’s been inevitable for some time: more and more marketing firms are going to start offering 3D online services themselves, rather than through a specialized house like the Sheep or Millions of Us, for instance. After all, it’s not that hard to get the hang of what’s going on in these places, especially for smart professionals who are used to translating a client presence in one medium into a client presence in another.

Interestingly, I-D Media, which was founded in 1988, does have some experience in avatarized virtual environments, and apparently created the first eCommerce site in Germany, according to Dirk Lusebrink, who I think heads the Lifecrawler team (and can be seen at right in the pic above). In the late 1990s, it was also responsible for something called CyCosmos, an avatarized community that peaked at 200,000 users before being shut down in 2002. The company also did early work in widget-like “living screen” software — a little too early, apparently. This is all explained, Dirk says, by the fact that I-D’s founder, Bernd Kolb, who left the firm two years ago, was a science fiction freak with a soft spot for Snow Crash.