The Far Side

Return on Investment-Justifying Virtual Worlds

Dr. Manhattan — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:55:31 GMT

Guess what, the below is NOT security!

"If we want to put a life-size prototype of our super-secret product in Second Life, then there are many creative ways we implement extra layers of security such as making it invisible unless we're in the room."

Really? Did you just say that?
A recent "Letter to your boss" from the Lab recently got me laughing a bit.� In a nutshell it suggests there is no lack of security, no lack of tools, and no lack of return on investment in Second Life.� It suggests that your boss is missing out already, that a powerful collaboration tool is ready to go that will overnight change your business by virtue of things 3 dimensional.� They even dare to say SL is inexpensive! Crikies when did tens of thousands a year become inexpensive? Maybe since they say the Navy uses it (on the expensive Nebraska behind a very secure firewall) we're to assume�they are keeping our nuclear secrets there in a notecard?

Reality Check:
Virtual worlds are not a collaboration tool by default.� By default they are game-like as that is their lineage.�You have to work really hard to make virtual worlds fit into business processes from corporation to SOHO.� You have to understand the business goals and audience on a deep level, designing a space that fits their needs.� You cannot simply plop down a patch of land and then suggest business is ready to flourish inworld.�

Our experience & success with clients like Microsoft has taught us this.� Yes they have tons of cash but guess what, you have to work for it.� You have to prove the medium, not suggest your boss "check it out".� Instead of this letter to your boss get in and work on some projects, experiment yourself, this is the power of user created virtual worlds.�The first collaboration step should simply be how to use the space yourself for business before you invite upper management in.

In addition why else would you even care to benefit your managers unless you had a stake in the process?�So if you have an idea on how something can be done more efficient make it happen, sell it to management or become your companies virtual world consultant by virtue of your efforts and success.� Even better take your idea, after proven, to market yourself!� If anyone should get the letter of encouragement to press forward with virtual worlds it is the very people already using it.� You do not have to be a 3d or scripting guru to get your ideas to come to life.� You can find people to do such things or learn them on your own.

Second Life & other virtual worlds hosted in public are also not secure enough to protect IP or trade secrets. Nowhere even close!�We host virtual worlds but would never suggest a public one is secure no matter what current platform. �It is ridiculous to insinuate a disappearing prim is a security feature.� Please do not tell your boss any virtual world hosted publically is secure for mission critical data.� Behind the firewall is the only place for such a thing.�You will look silly when the IT department realizes its all unencrypted traffic.� My job in aerospace made me familiar with government security, being on the F22 Raptor & F111A development teams required a regular government G-Man type interview each year.� Working with secured documents requires many layers of security, none of which do virtual worlds address in any way.

Second Life is also not affordable.� If it was on-demand yes, this is a great way to hold meetings.� Our own system using OpenSim allows for on-demand meeting spaces, a service we're rolling out this summer in fact.� It will be filled with tools from our "Trusted Developer" group who are right now collaborating on how this space will look.� Pricing for even full time secure worlds (you can even lock out our team by changing your dedicated server password!) starts at $75 monthly for the base system for up to 25 users on OpenSim. That's affordable & secure!

Finally the issue of X rated content has not been addressed by Second Life properly.� Moving the content to a certain section of the world will only annoy those who want to use virtual worlds for entertainment.� Our program of deploying OpenSim behind your companies firewall assures you of no contact by proxy or otherwise with anything x rated.� Your server, your application, your database, no one else gets in period.

Conclusion:
I appreciate what was attempted in this letter and why.� Getting business & education to use virtual worlds is our companies focus because it yields amazing return on investment when used properly.� But the key to success is not sending a form letter to management via your users.� It is helping your current users do things so amazing (after all they are the pioneers) that one day they then feel compelled on their own to talk with their boss.�

ReactionGrid is far from flawless but we keep our users expectations on a smart level.� We do not suggest security where there is none, we do not suggest every business is today ready to use this new medium.� We only suggest we can take a good hard look at your business with you and see if there is some low hanging virtual fruit we can find a foothold of ROI with and build upon that.� Business & Education will love this new medium but it will come by word of mouth not pre-fabricated letters with fill in the blanks.� I mentioned I worked in aerospace and proved 3d data visualizations can change the way a company works overnight. If you consider overnight years of hardwork, feedback, refinement & love.� So meet us inworld on ReactionGrid & lets talk together about how your company works before sending you off on a mission you're unprepared for....

See you in 3D!
Kyle G

2009-The last & next 6 months for RG

Dr. Manhattan — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 09:15:58 GMT

In our first 6 months of virtual world hosting & development we have achieved many goals. �We are at almost 2000 registered users meaning we are on track for our goal of 5-10,000 by years end.

We have dozens of private worlds we host as well with enterprise training, language schools and K-12 being the most common use case. �Hyper-V has allowed these users to have a low cost of entry and total ownership and security of their data.

Microsoft has a private world based on our platform for internal collaboration along with other companies just moving in such as the American Cancer Society. �

Our first Virtual BanBury behind the firewall solution is being deployed to an Australian university proving we can deliver a plug and play world using virtualization software on local existing hardware keeping costs low and setup easy.

We recently rolled out Service Pack 2 to all our servers taking the burden off end users of worrying about such things. �Hyper-V R2 is our next upgrade when released and vetted. �

The power of this new way to deploy and manage operating systems and virtual worlds has caused us to decide to deploy all worlds 100% on Hyper-V virtualization. �This will protect the underlying dedicated server operating system and allow us to deliver on-demand power upgrades without the normal expense of upgrading hardware.

In a new partnership with IBM we are now offering hosting on their branded hardware in an incredible new green facility they launched with RackForce. �We now have Cari & RackForce solutions available depending on the end users needs.

Our new shop http://outpost.reactiongrid.com�is also very exciting to us. �Focused on PG items oriented towards education & collaboration every item has been tested and thus recommended by our team. �Items listed here can be assured to deliver the functionality stated and work fine in OpenSim environments.

So what is coming?

In the next 6 months you will see the rollout of groups with associated permissions. �Vivox voice integration is on the roadmap when the details are hammered out. �

Our shop is being integrated with the virtual world so ordering things like servers and their many options will become a 3D walk through event. �Choice of RAM and CPU will be made easier by 3D wizards explaining how to properly select them and other options.

Configuring hosted or BanBury worlds will also be made easier so you can outfit your world with education and collaboration tools and workspaces right from 3D or web wizards. �Dozens of new options for full sim and world designs will soon appear as our content partnerships made early this year begin to pay off.

On the hardware front we will move up to more and more powerful host hardware. �We started on Celeron D machines, today we deploy dual Quad Core Xeon's with 24GB RAM and soon quad Quad Core's with 60GB and more RAM. �Virtualization has helped us become greener by using less and less machines as more powerful CPU's arrive.

Our website will undergo another revamp this year catering more to our global community of which we have clients in China, South Korea, UK, Australia, Spain, USA and more. �Support staff is coming online in many of those same countries as well meaning 24/7 and localized support is on the roadmap.

Integration with Content Management Systems and other data and authentication systems will advance. �Single sign on, inworld and web friends synching and more is already underway. �ESRI GIS software integration is underway in an upcoming development partnership with that geospatial firm. �

Finally telemetry work integrating virtual spaces with real world machinery for the purposes of automation and control will continue to advance. �Watch for the release of kits to monitor and control devices from home to factory and more.

Of course there is much more planned as well but this will give you a flavor of the major goals. �I hope our Gridizens remain happy & find these new advancements coming up will enrich their virtual world experience. �More news as it unfolds!

Kyle G aka Dr Manhattan

NetGenEd Events Post Mortem

Dr. Manhattan — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 12:53:37 GMT

We just completed our 100-200 person event for NetGenEd.� I thought I would write a quick post on the Good, the Bad, & the Ugly!

The Good:
The good for ReactionGrid is this event challenged us to try and manage a large event on OpenSim technology. We did testing we normally would have not which proved 30-50 avatars could be logged onto a single for 30 to 60 minutes with little trouble. This led use to estimate we could handle 4 sims on our grid loaded to 25 avatars each for an event. Unfortunately this estimate did not include many human factors and the inescapable Murphy's law.

We were able to prove our streaming audio system worked pretty good grid wide with only a couple of dropped audio sections. Our use of YouTube video streaming of their .MP4 worked fine when sims were not loaded but try and change parcel media settings with 10-20 people on a sim, it simply wouldn't work until of course later in the event when not needed. But this let us know that you can stream full size video onto a grid using YouTube.

We had estimated likely the event would be 50-100 users, this turned out to be accurate.� However we had more users than we thought who had not dressed beforehand and this "edit appearance" group event was something we had not allocated enough power for and the grid strained because of it. Again the upside is we will know best practices for our next event.

We were able to record the audio stream of presenters, we were able to capture some video, and we were able to interview Don Tapscott the event speaker.� In addition we were able to announce the NetGenEd winners to people worldwide.

The Bad:
ReactionGrid tested like mad pre-event so why did we only get 20-30 users stable for the event? Especially after successful 40-50 users tests?� We made some assumptions which did not pan out. We assumed we could get an early start on the user staging process. A power outage at one of the schools ruined this plan mid-stream, aka Murphy's law. We also assumed our avatar tests simulated properly what a "real" avatar would do on a sim. However when we tried to enforce the same "no fly-get seated asap" rule we practiced with it didn't work on any level with real users.

For this reason login was chaos. Once the kids, teachers and others started to pile in at the same time we could no longer handle the load.� Our best was 30 or so avatars attending the event far short of the 100 minimum we had hoped to accomodate.

The Ugly:
The ugly was simply the failure of not accomodating all 50-100 participants.� We achieved only about 30% of this target and those had a rocky time.� I call this "The Ugly" not because we didn't put real effort into trying to make this work smoothly but because we didn't do enough real practice and testing before trying such an event with live users under a very narrow event time window.� We simply cannot expect all users to do as we think they will and as such instead of entire classes logging in we should have had a few representative kids and teachers from the schools participate until we properly tested more.� The Ugly happened simply due to not enough pre-event testing and practicing.�

On the upside, we won't ever be able to learn how to accomodate 100-200 users if we don't try, and possibly fail, to do it.� This event was invaluable to us learning how to make this work and the next large event will benefit from today.�

Summary:
So did we learn today OpenSim cannot handle large events? No, we simply tried to go for the gold and allow all avatars to be within sight of the stage for presenters.� Had we gone with a multigrid event with chat bridge we likely would have come much closer to our 50-100 concurrent users goal.� We also learned we need not 1 hour before events to stage users but 3-4 hours especially when dealing with people around the world under a very tight window of time.

This is not a reflection on the attendees merely a best practice forming�for large events.� We achieved 25-35% of our estimated true attendance over the events course, we streamed to dozens reliably and we recorded video which means we can now setup the event sim to show the 3 videos that were winners 24/7 along with the video capture and audio capture of the event being available on the sim for anyone to see and hear. In addition to live events the real payback of virtual worlds is persistent event elements long after the event which usually accounts for a larger number of views than did the live event.

I want to thank the attendees, my ReactionGrid team and especially�Trevor Meister &�Vicki Davis the event organizers. While we cannot call today's event a qualified success we did get enough materials to recreate it persistently & we are very happy to have hit 20-30 users on one grid node�as opposed to the 6 max we got when we started ReactionGrid.� Things can only improve from here if we keep hammering away as we are dedicated to doing!

Kyle "G" aka Dr_Manhattan

How ReactionGrid will Expand its HyperGalaxy

Dr. Manhattan — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 07:47:11 GMT

A question I full well knew was coming recently cropped up. ReactionGrid has promised a closer touch with it's Gridizens, or virtual world inhabitants. How will ReactionGrid both technically handle the load of more Gridizens using the grid and how will you keep that personal touch as you expand in size?

The answer is�HyperGrid technology recently introduced to OpenSim, the platform ReactionGrid is based on. HyperGrid is the start of what can be reduced to as being HyperLinks for 3D Virtual Worlds.�This means we can keep ReactionGrid as a portal grid, like MSN, Yahoo etc. We can then branch off smaller grids connected to us via HyperGrid portals.

For example we recently had a growth spurt in K-12 educational simulators. As these expand on ReactionGrid we will form a partnership with one or more�of the educators who will help us manage the new, completely�isolated,�spinoff grid focused on K-12 that can allow traffic to and from ReactionGrid via HyperGrid. This allows the grid to maintain its own local OpenSim database of users, scripts, prims, everything.

When this specialized grid wants to connect to ReactionGrid this is available to them at anytime. After the visit they can the de-establish the HyperGrid portal and know they are secure from any traffic other than their local users in their local database. All of this travelling carries clothes, hair, all inventory and requires no login from ReactionGrid at all.

I will be hosting an event soon to explain this technology and it can be experienced on our grid right now by going to the HyperGrid Core sim using our inworld map.

Below is a very early, still formative plan on how ReactionGrid will�partner with specialists in each category of sims to expand and in fact bring a smarter personal touch over time as the managers we partner with will know much more than we about their profession/industry. I will translate the image below into a 3D model next that with some new HyperGrid tricks just coming out will make it a clickable model for traversing the Metaverse.

�

Watch soon for an event to show HyperGrid to you personally when the 3D portal translation of the image above is complete.
Kyle "G" aka Dr_Manhattan

2009 Goals for ReactionGrid

Dr. Manhattan — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 20:41:21 GMT

Ok so it is 2009 yay! The economy is�a challenge but all such things can and will recover over time. I consider it a challenge to virtual world thinkers to look at the ability for�collaboration and education done�with 3D�which will provide ROI in addition to Earth saving "green" benefits. We do not think virtual worlds are a replacement for one on one experiences but as a supplemental tool and a tool to reach users in far off places who cannot get certain educational classes locally�I see tons of opportunity.

This does not preclude artistic or entertainment based concepts either. We feel proud to be bringing back an old drive-in theater vibe with our Retro-Fright Night events where we can hurl virtual tomatos at the screen and now have something to do on weekend nights that we normally do not go out much on anyway.

So with the more mature Second Life platform not to mention dozens of other virtual world platforms why have we focused on OpenSim? Do we feel you should abandon Second Life to come to us? Well our company was born from focusing on ROI using 3D and data visualization to deliver "return on investment". Second Life has proven in many areas that it offers rich tools to achieve ROI and our company has used their system with great success with�small clients and large.

However when we work with clients such as schools, the enterprise, hobbyist, families, we find ourselves explaining alot of what to be scared about with Second Life. It is diffcult explaining to a mother, Microsoft, engineers and other PG oriented users about the X rated side of Second Life. It can be a frightening place. This is not because Second Life does not care about this issue they simply are trying to provide an all encompassing platform with deep level of freedom of expression. I very much respect that challenge and how they struggle to handle it.

That said I want to test my own set of concepts for a grid. OpenSim allows for this experimentation albeit on a far smaller scale. But that is exactly the idea, smaller, but more focused, more niche, like a sim is now to Second Life a small grid will be to the overall OpenSim universe. So for�ReactionGrid the base concept is what I refer to as a mix of the classic "World's Fair" where art, innovation, science, production, music and more merged with families but also we want a glimpse of the far future, something like Syd Meads incredible futuristic concepts.

Very much like blogging changed the web from a few large portals to a mix of many smaller sites yet still with a viable need for the Yahoo's & Amazon's we feel smaller grids will so change the metaverse. Our company has always had a soft spot for the underdog, the little business struggling to show the big guys that they have something to offer too. As such we are looking for all sorts of people to both join our grid and build their own. We may over a years time end up with grids whos user base is measured in the thousands per grid each but if these are loyal visitors, people who actually use their accounts, isn't this a win?

And if we do have success with smaller more focused grids to complement the huge ones and if we can connect our smaller grids (and we can!) wouldnt this make up a rebellion of sorts to the accepted norm? Like wise King Arthur I suggest a round table of worlds which unite to form a larger universe based on many varying concepts. We can each experiment with our own concepts and learn from each other. My PG rated grid may not accept your R rated grid in a direct link but through various partner links perhaps we could all exist in a logical order. An order which the 2D web has yet to smartly achieve.

So I suggest you try OpenSim. It is free and open source and under the very flexible BSD license at that. You can drag that old hardware out of the closet and have your own small grid in a few steps. Check our Virtual Events page for free classes we conduct monthly on how to build your own OpenSim island for free. Your school or business can install it behind your own firewall. And you can consider it complementary to Second Life as well as a replacement if your needs fit the current OpenSim feature set.

Join up, its a great time to experiment. Don't try and be a Second Life or XYZ platform killer, those are unrealistic goals. Just try and do something in a better way and success will be yours. Prepare for a future where you start with connecting your sim or grid to a larger OpenSim universe then expect to see more and more XYZ platform integration over time. That's just the normal evolution path we are likely on for 2009.� I am very proud of our "Gridizens" and we look forward to our first�HyperGrid trials in the very near future to begin building the OpenSim universe. See you in 3D in 2009!