eBusiness moving from the web to virtual reality?
Sat, Jul 21 2007

By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director

Right now there's a major upheaval going on in the realm of eBusiness and most people haven't woken up to it yet.

Over the last couple of years several "virtual worlds" have been growing at an astounding rate. The most popular so far is called Second Life, a system that has been under development by San Francisco-based Linden Labs since 1999. In many ways it looks like a computer game: the client software runs on your local computer and allows you to log into a place called "the grid", which is a virtual reality system running on a cluster of about 3000 servers. Once you log in you're presented with a 3-dimensional view of a virtual world that you can explore along with any of the tens of thousands of other people who happen to be logged in at the same time.

And that's the fundamental difference between virtual worlds like Second Life and the traditional world wide web: you're not alone when you use it. In the last eBusiness News I talked about the problem of being alone when browsing a website, with no concept of whether there is anyone else looking at the same site at the same time. Unlike the local shopping centers you'll never have to fight through crowds at a website, but also unlike a local shopping center you have no way of interacting with other shoppers or getting a sense for how busy a site might be.

Virtual reality systems such as Second Life are like a half-way point between the web and the physical world. Just like with a website you can visit a virtual Second Life shop run by a company anywhere in the world, but the difference is that just like the physical world you'll also see any other users who happen to be there at the same time as you. You can even talk to them. The shop can actually look like a shop, and there can even be human shop assistants there to talk to you and answer questions. Instead of being an isolated entity like a website, the virtual shop exists in the context of a complete virtual world. You can see what shops are on either side. You can "meet" friends and go places and do things together, unlike visiting a website.

I had an odd experience a week ago which really underscored how different virtual reality is to the web we know today in terms of how we interact with it. I was at home in Melbourne and logged into Second Life chatting to a friend in Sydney, and because we were at the same "place" in the virtual world we could see virtual representations of each other while we were chatting. I was doing several things at once on my computer and so was he, and at one point I needed to "go" somewhere else inside Second Life to work on a certain project. But because we were "virtually" in each other's presence I found I couldn't just walk away and go somewhere else in the virtual world. It would have felt like walking away from a real person while they were in the middle of a sentence. In Second Life distance means nothing: you can chat to someone even when they're in a totally different part of the virtual world totally out of "sight" just as easily as if they were close by. But I discovered that the strength of my association of my friend's virtual representation with him as an actual person meant that moving my virtual body away somewhere else would have felt as rude as actually walking away from him in the middle of a conversation if we were standing face to face.

It was a very strange feeling which really drove home to me how much a virtual reality system like Second Life can make us believe that we are actually in someone's presence merely because we can see a representation of them on a computer screen. The strength of the emotional engagement is far greater than just messages flying around in email.

But is it just a fad or is this actually the next big thing in communication methods? After all these years of people telling us that virtual reality was just around the corner, is it finally here? Will systems like Second Life make the web fade into the background and become the technology of yesterday?

Maybe. Maybe not. But it's certainly starting to make people sit up and take notice. IBM, for example, has budgeted US$100 million to Second Life development and a couple of my IBM friends are now working full-time on it. They've completed some stunning projects, including complete recreations of both Wimbledon and the Australian Open tennis tournaments complete with accurate ball motion using data captured from the Hawk Eye ball tracking system. Imagine "walking" around Wimbledon center court watching all the action - while actually being at your computer in Sydney. They've also built extensive virtual office facilities where IBM staff from all over the world "meet" in virtual reality, with their voices carried on a telephone conference call while they "sit" in a virtual conference room to discuss projects. They even run meetings with clients in Second Life now!

If anyone questions how seriously IBM is taking the Second Life phenomenon just have a look at some of the blog posts by IBM Vice President Bob Suter at www.sutor.com/newsite/blog-open/?cat=124. It's obviously a big undertaking for them and it's getting into every corner of their business.

By the time you read this I'll probably be on a plane on my way to Portland, Oregon, where on Monday I'll be presenting a tutorial on customising Second Life to connect it to actual devices and objects in the real world. This represents a whole other dimension to virtual reality: instead of just meeting people online and manipulating virtual objects and shopping at virtual shops, my tutorial will cover ways to link objects in virtual reality to actual physical objects. Click a virtual representation of a thermostat on your virtual holiday house and your real central heating system at your real holiday house turns on, before you even leave work on a Friday night to travel there. Or a fault is detected on a production line, and a virtual representation of the equipment displays the location of the problem so a technician thousands of kilometers away can diagnose it without leaving his desk. It's making physical reality intrude into virtual reality, and vice versa. Blending the two together until the lines become blurred.

Will virtual reality replace the web? Not entirely. Email didn't replace physical mail. The web didn't make all previous forms of communications obsolete. Virtual reality is the same: it will find a niche and become a fundamental part of the way many businesses operate as part of an overall communications strategy involving multiple media. Like the web there will be early adopters (in fact they're already there, doing business inside Second Life right now to the tune of millions of dollars every day!) and those who lag behind. Even today some businesses don't have websites, and ten years from now there will still be businesses that don't have a presence inside virtual reality. But for most it will be a normal part of doing business, just like the web is today.

If it sounds interesting have a look at www.secondlife.com to learn more about it.