What is virtual reality?

Earlier this week, I recorded a short video program for Computerworld about virtual reality in the enterprise. As I prepared for the presentation, I realized that it was important to define "virtual reality" for the audience. Many might associate the term with older technologies, namely the cabled goggles and haptics gloves that came out of academic computing labs in the early 1990s and was the subject of media reports from that time. While the basic concept of "virtual reality" is still the same -- an interactive, 3D representation of space, objects, and even people, built and delivered using a combination of computer hardware and software -- I pointed out that the technologies have advanced to the point where they are widely available to a great number of people. These days, VR is usually delivered via a Web browser or client application on a desktop computer, and can take the form of virtual worlds, 3D models, and 3D simulations/simulators.

How many people have experienced virtual reality? In this country, surely tens of millions. Gaming is so big right now, and I believe it's fair to assume that most people from the video game generation have tried some type of 3D game in the past 15 years, whether it be a single-player title or an MMO game. In recent years, millions more have tried out some of the Internet-based services. I noted in the video presentation that a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found 72 million Americans have reported trying a "virtual tour". The methodology did not state whether or not respondents associated the term "virtual tour" with 3D imagery, such as the Keyhole flyovers that Google offers, as opposed to a selection of static 2D photos that one might see on a real estate website. However, even assuming 20% did think of 3D, that represents more than 14 million people who have tried virtual reality tours.

I've presented about 3D technologies and virtual worlds in the past, but this is the first time I've done so on video. I'll link to the program when it is posted to Computerworld.com.

The 3D Revolution: Cartography for the masses

The New York Times has a report describing the rise of inexpensive or free Internet-based software tools that have turned cartography into an amateur activity. You may have heard the term "mash-up," which has been used to describe pointer-filled Web maps based on Google Maps (such as ChicagoCrime.org), but the article discusses the impact of newer tools and services, such as Microsoft Collections, Google's "My Maps," and MotionBased. Professional cartographers have taken notice:

The maps sketched by this new generation of cartographers range from the useful to the fanciful and from the simple to the elaborate. Their accuracy, as with much that is on the Web, cannot be taken for granted.

"Some people are potentially going to do really stupid things with these tools," said Donald Cooke, chief scientist at Tele Atlas North America, a leading supplier of digital street maps. "But you can also go hiking with your G.P.S. unit, and you can create a more accurate depiction of a trail than on a U.S.G.S. map," Mr. Cooke said, referring to the United States Geological Survey.

April Johnson, a Web developer from Nashville, has used a G.P.S. device to create dozens of maps, including many of endurance horse races -- typically 25-to-50-mile treks through rural trails or parks.

I've discussed how GPS and other consumer electronics might change the way we find out about events. In my "Meeting the Second Wave" essay from February, I described the following usage scenario, involving timestamped images tagged with GPS data and automatic image tagging:

In the second wave of new media evolution, content creators and other 'Net users will not be able to manually tag the billions of new images and video clips uploaded to the 'Net. New hardware and software technologies will need to automatically apply descriptive metadata and tags at the point of creation, or after the content is uploaded to the 'Net. For instance, GPS-enabled cameras that embed spatial metadata in digital images and video will help users find address- and time-specific content, once the content is made available on the 'Net. A user may instruct his news-fetching application to display all public photographs on the 'Net taken between 12 am and 12:01 am on January 1, 2017, in a one-block radius of Times Square, to get an idea of what the 2017 New Year's celebrations were like in that area. Manufacturers have already designed and brought to market cameras with GPS capabilities, but few people own them, and there are no news applications on the 'Net that can process and leverage location metadata -- yet.

Other types of descriptive tags may be applied after the content is uploaded to the 'Net, depending on the objects or scenes that appear in user-submitted video, photographs, or 3D simulations. Two Penn State researchers, Jia Li and James Wang, have developed software that performs limited auto-tagging of digital photographs through the Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures project. In the years to come, autotagging technology will be developed to the point where powerful back-end processing resources will categorize massive amounts of user-generated content as it is uploaded to the 'Net. Programming logic might tag a video clip as "violence", "car," "Matt Damon," or all three. Using the New Years example above, a reader may instruct his news-fetching application to narrow down the collection of Times Square photographs and video to display only those autotagged items that include people wearing party hats.

The party hat example may still be years away, but the New York Times article describes how "geotagging" has already become a reality, thanks to features associated with Flickr and Google Earth.

Google positions itself for the 3D Web with SketchUp

I spotted this today, thanks to Nathan Weinberg and Tech Dispenser: Google has developed (or bought?) a 3D modeling language called SketchUp, which it is offering to users for free. Here's a summary of what the product does:

SketchUp is easy to learn and use, and is designed primarily for the conceptual phase of design.

People use SketchUp to create architectural, mechanical, landscape, and woodworking models, as well as to design the levels in games, and the sets and storyboards for movies and television shows.

SketchUp can export models to a variety of 3D* and 2D formats. Many of the standard CAD programs can import and work with files that have been exported from SketchUp.

Why would Google want to offer such a product that doesn't have any obvious connection with search? I think it's about positioning. Partially because of the success of several existing products, such as Google Earth and Google Maps, and the growing importance of VR and 3D gaming as entertainment and social media, Google has realized that the 3D Internet will be a big deal. They want to have services and software in place to offer developers and consumers when the 3D Web really takes hold.

There's a pattern here. Google has developed some vital services for the 2D Web and text-based Internet that have become indispensable for hundreds of millions of people around the globe. SketchUp, and earlier purchases such as Keyhole fit this M.O. -- the company wants these services to become part of the suite of software tools that hundreds of millions of people use for the 3D Web.

Second Life hype returns: The mainstream media takes notice

My colleague David Ramel has posted an amusing, side-by-side comparison of fresh Newsweek and Wired coverage of Second Life. Newsweek is apparently the gushing newbie, while Wired has a long-overdue reality check:

Fun factor

Newsweek: "The power of Second Life lies in its utility for the gamut of human activities. It's a potent medium for socializing -- it provides people with a way to express, explore and experiment with identity, vent their frustrations, reveal alter egos."

Wired: "Then there's the question of what people do when they get there. Once you put in several hours flailing around learning how to function in Second Life, there isn't much to do."

Marketing value

Newsweek: "More than 45 multinational companies, including the likes of American Apparel, IBM, General Motors and Dell are beginning to use the medium for customer service, sales and marketing."

Wired: "Companies say, 'It's an experiment'" but what are they learning?' Tobaccowala asks. 'Basically, they're learning how to create an avatar and walk around in Second Life.' Which is fine if that's what you want to do. Just don't expect to sell a lot of Coke."

You get the idea.

It's interesting that just as many members of the business/computer press corps are taking a more critical look at the virtual world, a new crop of mainstream media outlets are finally discovering Second Life -- and turning back the clock to the hype-filled days of 2006. For instance, last Saturday, my hometown newspaper, the Boston Globe, had a front-page article about the city government working with Emerson College (and one of the Harvard instructors from the Cyberone course) to set up a virtual version of parts of Boston, such as City Hall and the Hatch Shell. That's an interesting story, but I was somewhat disappointed to see the Globe propagating the misleading population figures (e.g., "Captivated by the promotional possibilities and the potential for providing services in Second Life's cyberscape of some 8 million digital people ...") and failing to note the tepid results of various corporate forays into Second Life.

Mandarin Chinese video games/MMORPG terms

I am a proficient Mandarin speaker. I lived in Taiwan for six years, studied for more than two years at the Taipei Language Institute, and traveled extensively throughout mainland China. I have family members from Taiwan and China, and we try to speak Mandarin with our kids as much as possible.

However, even though I am proficient in Mandarin, I have not achieved fluency. I often study specialized vocabulary lists prior to conducting interviews or preparing for visits to Asia. In advance of my trip next month to Singapore to participate in the State of Play V conference, I wanted to get a handle on the Mandarin terminology used to describe virtual worlds and popular gaming platforms. These are words that do not appear in my Oxford putonghua dictionary, so I asked a friend and former colleague of mine to help translate some of the Mandarin used to describe the videogame industry and related software concepts.

It was interesting to see her list. I recognized many of the characters right away, and many terms made perfect sense -- these phrases tend to be direct translations of the modern English expressions, such as massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG, 大型多人線上角色扮演遊戲, da4xing2duo1ren2xian4shang4jiao3se4ban4yan3you2xi4).

Others were readable, but were not word-for-word equivalents. According to my wife, some of these terms may have been derived from classic Chinese literature, or older translations from foreign sources -- for instance, the term for "dungeon" is 地下城 (di4xia4cheng2), lit. "underground castle," or 魔洞 (mo2dong4), lit. "monster's cave." It's also interesting to see how -- in certain cases -- the terminology has split in Taiwan and China.

Here's the list:

3d (3d image): (3D 影像）or 三度空間影像
video game engine: 電玩遊戲引擎
Software platform: 軟體平台 (Taiwan); 軟體平台 (China)
Hardware platform: 硬體平台 (Taiwan); 軟件平台 (China)
Tolkien: 托爾金 (Taiwan and China)
Lord of the Rings: 魔戒
Gaming experience: 遊戲體驗 or 遊戲經驗 (in different contexts)
Players: 玩遊戲者 （could also be 玩家）
Gamers: 玩家
Fans:（電玩）迷
Massively multiplayer online game (MMOG, MMO game): 大型多人線上遊戲
Massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG): 大型多人線上角色扮演遊戲
Subscription model: 訂購模式
Micro-transactions: 微交易
Virtual goods: 虛擬物品
Dungeons: 地下城 or 魔洞
player-vs-player: 玩家對玩家
Online account: 線上帳戶
Username: 使用者名稱
Online community: 線上社群
Beta: 測試版
Concurrent users: 同時上線使用者
Game industry: 電玩業
Internet cafe: 網咖 (Taiwan), 網吧 (China)
Prepaid cards: 預付卡 (Taiwan), 預付費卡 (China)
Prepaid playing time: 預付遊戲時間

Attending State of Play V in Singapore

A few months ago, I was invited to participate in a panel at the State of Play V conference in Singapore, and I have just confirmed my participation after sorting out the travel-related details. This is the third public speaking engagement I've had in the past year that touches upon virtual worlds and 3D media. The title of the State of Play panel: Understanding Virtual World Inhabitants. From the program:

As the virtual world landscape matures, industry and academic researchers are developing systematic methods of measuring user behaviors and understanding resident attitudes. This panel explores the value of quantitative and qualitative approaches to such investigations.

This is a chance to discuss the role of the media in shaping public opinion about virtual worlds and their inhabitants, as well as the expectations of new residents. There is also a lot to say about quantitative research and data relating to virtual worlds and behaviors in virtual worlds. These are topics which I have discussed several times in the past year on this blog and elsewhere.

The rest of the program looks interesting, too -- the list of panelists and speakers includes a few people from the Chinese gaming industry, which has grown very rapidly in the past five years. I've heard that there will be a screening of a documentary about Chinese "Gold Farming" at the conference.

As part of my preparations for the conference, I've been reading up on the state of gaming and virtual worlds in China. There's been lots of news about the incredible popularity of World of Warcraft in China, and the virtual demonstration that I remarked upon last year, but there are some new products that are worth mentioning, too, most notably the emerging VW platform, HiPiHi.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to try out the beta version of HiPiHi -- like many software products designed for the Chinese market, it's PC only, and my Mac is too old to effectively use Boot Camp or Parallels.

Over the next few weeks I'll try to log some of the reading and other information that I am gathering as the conference approaches. The event takes place August 19-22, so I am going to combine it with a family trip to Taiwan, which will also give me a chance to do a little pre-conference research about the Taiwanese gaming scene. This is not a work-supported trip, but I was able to secure a small travel grant through my Harvard association, and the other out-of-pocket expenses and use of vacation time seems to be worth it -- this is an exciting field, and the conference seems like a fascinating event and opportunity.

The MSM notices the Second Life marketing implosion

A few weeks back I wrote about the business press turning on Second Life. Now the popular press is taking aim at the failed marketing activities in the virtual world. The LA Times' Alana Semuels raises many of the same issues that others have observed -- the virtual ghost towns, the pranks and attacks on corporate properties, and the fuzzy population picture -- and also notes that some companies are exploring the alternatives:

Consulting firms that were set up to bring brands into Second Life are busy helping clients explore other worlds.

One such agency, Millions of Us, recently announced that it had formed a partnership with Gaia Online, a site popular with teenagers, and CEO Reuben Steiger said it would be unveiling more soon. Millions of Us had previously worked only with Second Life.

"It's not about whether Second Life is good or bad," Steiger said. "It's just that there are a lot of alternatives."

Slashdot picked up the LA Times piece, as well as the Second Life Insider, which actually praised the article.

Pong was not the first video game

I am just old enough to remember Pong, a mid-1970s black and white video game loosely based on tennis. Pong was the first video game that Americans were exposed to. For many years, I supposed Pong was the first video game ever created, but a book by John Hight and Jeannie Novak, Game Project Management, notes that "Naughts and Crosses," (British English for "Tic Tac Toe") actually predates Pong by more than two decades:

The first computer game was created by programmer A.S. Douglas in 1952 as part of his doctoral thesis on human-computer interaction at the University of Cambridge. It consisted of simple naughts and crosses (tic tac toe) programmed on a vacuum tube computer called EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator). EDSAC was one of the first computers, and it literally filled a room. The programs were crude by today's standards: A few lines versus millions of lines of code. Douglas adapted EDSAC's monitor tubes to fashion a 35 x 16 pixel screen. ...

The text adds that the first video game system was developed in 1966 by Ralph Baer. The system, "TV Game," used "video signals to place game objects on the screen of an ordinary television set." Baer was also behind Magnavox's Odyssey system in the 1970s. I don't remember Odyssey, but I do remember Odyssey2 from the latter part of the decade.

Then there's Spacewar, started by three M.I.T. students in Cambridge in the early 1960s.

Of course, the big system from the 1970s was the Atari 2600, which all of the boys in my neighborhood were obsessed with for several years starting in 1978 or so. It was far more advanced than Pong, but the graphics seem primitive now. However, the gameplay on some titles was quite good -- I still remember Pitfall, Frogger, and a simple head-to-head tank war which had dozens of variations to choose from (obstacles, guided shells, etc.).

NTT's 3D haptics gloves

This is cool -- a haptics technology from NTT that lets users "feel" 3D objects -- no goggles required! The New Scientist has a good overview, but the NTT website lists some interesting potential uses of the Tangible-3D Technology:

(1) Tangible-3D Museum
This technology allows visitors of the museum to handle items of exhibits with 3D images such as fossils. Multiple users can see and touch one exhibit at the same time by increasing the number of client at the recipient end.

(2) Tangible-3D Classroom
If this technology is applied for a remote classroom to make ceramics for example, the students can obtain a perceptible information of a work such as the real shape while the teacher shows the 3D image on the screen while explaining how to make it. This technology is effective to create a classroom to access from a location far away for areas that was impractical with the traditional system.

(3) Tangible 3D Video Conferencing
This technology enables an interactive communication on video conferences. The participants of a conference can shake hands or allow the other to touch an object located far away while meeting on the three-dimensional video conferencing. This is to achieve an advanced perceptible communication.

The technology is still in the prototype/demo phase (it was recently shown at the 15th Industrial Virtual Reality Expo & Conference 2007 in Tokyo). NTT says its developing "a two-way system that allows tactile impressions to be transmitted back and forth between multiple users." Some work clearly needs to be done on the hardware end, as well -- the glove shown in the New Scientist photo trails five heavy cables, and appears to have a sizable metal apparatus attached.