Christian Renaud's Blog

Metanomics Monday

For those of you who are interested in such things, I’m appearing on Metanomics tomorrow at 12:00 Noon PDT on a panel discussing Robert Bloomfield’s recent interview with Second Life founder Philip Rosedale. Other panelists include TIG Contributor Benjamin Duranske, Wagner James Au, ‘Dusan Writer,’ Nic Mitham, Tish Shute, ‘Betinna Tizzy,’ and Roland Legrand.  You can catch Metanomics “live” in Second Life or via the web.

90 Days Later

When I originally announced that I was leaving Cisco 90 days or so ago, the reactions I received from friends and colleagues ranged from overwhelming support to stunned silence.  After all, Cisco is a behemoth in the technology industry, and the job I held was practically an intellectual and technology fun-park for grown-ups....why change?

The answer is never simple, ranging from the standard dysfunctional organizational politics to 'if you do the same thing every day for seven years, you get REALLY BORED', regardless of how entertaining and challenging the job is.  If I had stayed on at Cisco, it would have meant moving to a different group and probably continuing to do a role very similar to those I did in 1998, running product lines and product development teams. Same old same old.  Professional stagnation = slow mental death.

Fast forward 90 days......

Metanomics and Rosedale's future vision

Robert Bloomfield forwarded me some exerpts of his recent interview with Linden Lab's founder Philip Rosedale asking for me to publish my feedback.  I think that Philip's viewpoint has really evolved over the last two years from his early unbridled enthusiasm to his middle unbridled enthusiasm to his more recent tempered enthusiasm.  He deserves credit for driving popular opinion in the virtual worlds market with his bold pronouncements, and his recent proclamations have been no less controversial.

The exerpt that Robert sent is below with my thoughts on Philip's most recent interview.....

Symposium 3- Amsterdam. Be there!

On September 23rd, the Eduverse Foundation will be hosting a pre-Picnic event Symposium 3.  Looking at the intersections between Serious Gaming, Virtual Education, Web3D Technology and Social Networking, the event looks certain to be worthy successor to June's Symposium 2 event. 

For those of you who are not familiar with Eduverse, it is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting virtual spaces for educational uses.  On their blog, they list six over-arching goals of their mission:

Serious Virtual Worlds Roundup & Kelley Executive Partners Launch

As was the case last year, last week's Serious Virtual Worlds conference was a highlight in the busy conference season.  Sara de Freitas and David Wortley with the Coventry Serious Games Institute aggregated an excellent cross-section of industry and academia for two days of insight into mixed-reality, medical simulation, interoperability, and mobile interfaces into virtual spaces.  This, combined with their special form of Coventry Hospitality (which invariably involves a castle older than my country, beer and some video game guitars) adds up to a fine learning experience. Add this one to your show calendar next year.

Next up on my speaking agenda is a panel discussion at today's debut of Kelley Executive Partners' Virtual Campus and their "Virtual Worlds and the future of Business Education".  Ironically, I pursued graduate studies at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business for one year during the roller-coaster-ride of spinning up Cisco's Networked Virtual Environments efforts.  Having their excellent faculty and content available virtually, via Second Life, would have been a boon for frequent flyers such as myself.  Say, perhaps they still have my records and I can pick up where I left off.........

Be sure to attend today's event in Second Life by registering at: http://kelleyevents.com/

Religion, Sex and.......

Politics is something you don't discuss in polite company.  Since you are reading my blog, you'll know I am anything BUT polite.

This is a CafePress custom shirt overnight shipment candidate if I ever saw one.  Harsh.

[Crosspost from TIG blog] Serious Virtual Worlds '08

Original post here

In beautiful Coventry, England today and tomorrow is the Serious Virtual Worlds '08 conference, as part of the Serious Games Institute of Coventry University.  Hosted by Sara de Freitas and David Wortley, the conference has been at the forefront of mixed-reality events and location-integration between the real and virtual worlds.

I had the good fortune to keynote the conference last year and again this year.  Below is a link to a swf (flash) file of my slides, which I will annotate with audio (or link to the show video recorded) when I get back to my home base next week.

Download coventry_svw08.swf

Riddle me this......

More than one vendor I spoke with at the Virtual Worlds Expo last week mentioned that they were working through 'scaling' problems with regards to their datacenters.  These were not only children or tween worlds for playing games, but also 'business virtual world' advocates.

I began to think about this a bit more on my ample airplane confinement last/this week and the thought occurred to me that this could present an Achilles heel to the growing use of virtual worlds within the enterprise.  Bear with me, I am jet lagged as all hell and 1.5 intimidating-German-machine-espressos into my morning, so feel free to point out any blatant miscalculations or misconceptions I may write forthwith.

Look at Warcraft.  They have nearly twenty datacenters worldwide.  Why?  Because they don't want people having a degraded game experience due to cross-ocean latency on the Internet, especially when that latency isn't manifested as just a dropped voice or YouTube packet or two, but the difference between a live level 70 elf and a dead one.

Now, Warcraft comes as a big-fat-DVD of pre-loaded code, little user-created-content to speak of (within a limited palette), and so they are sending coordinate data (what we used to call 'telemetry data') to players to pull down assets from their pre-loaded library.  From a traffic perspective, pretty lightweight, albeit latency sensitive.  In this regard, it is analagous to the old TN3270 Mainframe emulation code that we used to ship around indescriminately in 1992. 

Fast forward to the office of the future, the virtual office version.  You have packetized spatial audio.  You have user created content.  You have streaming video and powerpoints and presence information.  You have ever-changing mixes of synchronous and asynchronous traffic types all over walls and tables of your virtual headquarters.  This is much more bandwidth intensive than Warcraft, and if you are having a staff or funding meeting, the voice/video latency is arguably more critical than simple 'the dragon killed you before you hit it with your sword' telemetry data.  The PowerPoints can be a little delayed without anyone complaining, admittedly.

So, given that you can't 'shard off' the different offices (you are trying to facilitate the 'death of distance', right?) and  you need to have a single virtual office where people can intermingle and interact richly, how are you going to accomodate the insane bandwidth and latency requirements of a fully-annotated virtual environment?  Or, are the geographically remote participants going to have to suffer the latency inherent in such a rich environment as the cost of global collaboration?

I don't know the answer yet, just the question.  I will be doing some more thinking about this this week in Coventry England where I have the honor of being the keynote presenter for the second  year running at the Serious Virtual Worlds conference.  I will bring up this issue to the virtual world vendors and customers present and see if any of them can quickly dispell my concerns.  Else, feel free to suggest solutions or disabuse me of any misconceptions in the comments.