Virtual Worlds, MMOGs, Serious data -Informix Technology for Persistent Worlds

About a year ago, after my visit from the VW Expo 2008 (now called the Engage Expo) I wrote about how enterprises were cautiously approaching virtual worlds by deploying small pilot projects around support functions. One of the main concerns that were brought up at the conference was around how to measure Return On Investment and whether organizations would be willing to publicly talk about their success stories. On the other hand, there was widespread belief that the areas where there would be some clear benefits would be around training and collaboration – operational cost savings, efficiency and productivity.

Well we didn’t have to wait too long to see what happened. By April of 2009, 3D  TLC 1.0 happened, a conference around the application of 3D worlds towards Training, Learning and Collaboration. Not only is it commendable that they were able to pull off a whole conference around this, but there were a plethora of enterprises present to talk about how these new technologies helped them. The 3D TLC 2.0 is being held with the Engage Expo in San Jose on Sept 23-24^th. I am also encouraged to see that the event continues to attract enterprises from various industries.

So is the case with social media. Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are being increasingly used today by enterprises for viral marketing, collaboration and even advertising by companies such as Home Depot, Best Buy and Wal-Mart. More importantly, they are also able to gauge the effectiveness of using these media. Best Buys’s Twelpforce is an innovative way to provide online customer service with a personal connection; so did HomeDepot. Wal-Mart’s elevenmoms leveraged the power of collaboration to bring together money-saving communities – something central to Wal-Mart’s messaging.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that these immersive environments and social media technologies have become main-stream in enterprises. But it certainly shows that enterprises are finding real applications for these in solving business problems. And it definitely provides a boost to other companies on the fence who have thought about trying it but haven’t made the move yet.

I was part of IBM’s Data In Action Virtual Event back in February and therefore got to experience this first hand from the “supplier” side. There were some clear benefits to this:

• Obviously it allows for many interested parties to take part in this event who otherwise would not have traveled out to a conference

• Registration and lead tracking is far more automated

• “Floating” around the VW via your persona is obviously time-saving and efficient

• The ability to replay a presentation in the conference was certainly very useful

It also brought to light some things that could enhance the experience, notably, if there was a notification mechanism for the booth staff if someone visited (so I wouldn’t have to poll the screen all the time I was on duty) and also if there was a mechanism to exchange files or e-business cards.  But I am sure these capabilities – and more – will be available soon.

While this wouldn’t necessarily replace a full blown real world event, it does compliment it. A virtual conference before a real world conference would allow me to either better address or keep focus on key priorities. A virtual conference after an event would give me a venue to follow-up on key feedback items from the main event.  And that’s really how I see the value being played  out today.

The technology is only getting better and so are the options for the enterprise. This is exactly what OpenSim offers – an open source choice for customers who would like to deploy virtual worlds inside the enterprise.  With the integration of OpenSim and Informix, you now have a “best in class” OLTP database to manage scalability and growth – enabling companies to start building best of breed solutions – that’s what progress is all about!

Informix is now integrated with OpenSim. This means you now have the option of running Second Life (SL) clients with Informix via the Opensimulator. OpenSim is a 3-D application server. To read more about OpenSim check it out here : http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page

There is also an OpenSim grid where you can get started quickly: http://www.osgrid.org/elgg/

A very Happy New Year!! Here’s hoping for an exciting year ahead in virtual technologies. Judging from this article on virtual architects, it looks like virtual technologies are slowly but surely finding their place in solving real business problems.

I nearly forgot to post this rating that came out over 3 weeks ago!! Informix was rated the #1in customer satisfaction by VendorRate. Check out the report.

Sorry for the loooooong break! With the election fever and kids homework, things got really wound up . Now that one is out of the way, I have found some lost time! Today I want to touch on a powerful Informix capability that can either help solve some interesting problems for game developers or find new applications! This capability is known as Informix Extensions – a capability that allows users to extend the capabilities of the Informix data engine and thereby open the door to some really innovative solutions.

Informix provides extensions using it’s datablade technology. Extensions in the Informix context can be thought of as domain specific data-types and their associated routines that are treated as a standard data type by the engine. As an example, consider the Informix spatial extension. The Informix spatial extension consists of data types such as Point, Polygon and include manipulation and query functions such as Intersects(), Boundary(), Union() and so on. The power of extensions is obvious when you consider that they are loaded on demand , executed in the data engine’s process space and accessible via regular SQL, thereby providing both flexibility and performance.

Informix provides an API that allows users to define their own extensions. These extensions can then be registered with the Informix engine as user defined extensions. Let’s say you wanted to manage asset dependencies in your game (see visual below) – for instance, let’s assume that changes to a mesh would trigger changes to the compiled model, the texture page file and the final character. Tracking these dependency changes becomes complex and error prone if it’s done using application business logic. However, by creating an Informix Node extension that represents these dependencies and the actions to be performed on them drastically reduces the complexities and makes it so much easier to use by encapsulating the data type and providing functions such as GetParent(), Compare(), Ancestors() and so on.

If you are excited about the potential this holds and would like to dive into the details let me know. Also I recommend starting with the following material :

The IBM Informix datablade family overview

Developing Extensions to IDS (from the online Informix Information Center)

In the next post, I am going to lead you into another built-in extension in Informix that can be useful in MMOGs and Virtual Worlds.

The GDC 2008 kicked off Monday Sept 15. The exhibit floor seemed very familiar to what I saw in 2007 in terms of technology platforms and vendors, some of the prominent vendor exhibits being Icarus Studios, BigWorld, Simutronics, Multiverse and of course many of the service providers were present – like Vivox and Aria systems.

In terms of the overall roadmap and business models, many vendors continue to focus on “serious games” along with attracting MMO developers and publishers. Learning and education seemed to be primary areas for serious games. There is also an increased focus on the need to get more out of the data from gameplay – improved metrics and deeper data mining.

Icarus Studios exhibited “Fallen Earth” which is now content complete. I believe Fallen Earth would be the first MMO in production on Informix.

In the overall scheme of things, providing rich content and intriguing gameplay to keep customers challenged, happy and coming back still ranked as the top priority. So was there talk around and interest in database technologies ? Indeed yes if you talk to MMO developers who are serious about managing data efficiently and having flexible options to scale data – which by the way most of them are serious about. I am going to blog the database perceptions and challenges in this industry in a separate post – I invite any experiences from you as an MMO developer or publisher on this topic.

I had the opportunity to be gorgeous LA attending the VW Expo. This was my first at any of the VW conferences.  I frequent the GDC

more. Anway, the thing about this being my first event was that I didn’t really have any particular expectations set. I was to there to take in the technology, the business models and the trends. And from that standpoint, it was a reasonably valuable experience for me! My colleague Karen Keeter forwarded me a few photos from the expo that I post here!

The details of the location and track can be found at the VWExpo site. There were 5 tracks for sessions and i spent my time in the Enterprise, Futures and Technology tracks. The keynote sessions were interesting in that they were more of a Q & A format with an industry expert interviewing the “keynote” speaker. My main interests were really around the application of VW for business value. From that perspective let me first kind of highlight what my takeaways from the conference were:

• Virtual Worlds hold a lot a lot of potential, however, enterprises are taking a cautious approach by deploying small pilots around support functions
• Adoption has several challenges – security of assets, scalability, integration with enterprise applications
• Nobody thinks or expects there to be a killer app, but many panel experts suggested that if there was one it may come out of IBM
• A lot of interest in bringing custo mized virtual world hosting inside the firewall

Effective collaboration continues to be the area where VW deployments are providing benefits – examples of sales training, education, online conference rooms were frequently mentioned. IBM incidentally has a large mindshare in this industry. One of the keynote speakers was Colin Parris, the VP of IBM’s Digital Convergence business unit. Stay tuned for some Lotus innovations with integrated 3-D interaction capabilities.

In terms of potential I get pretty excited just thinking about all the avenues this opens up – think of the post Katrina University of New Orleans and their virtual campus as a risk / contigency management investment – there’s a direct application of VW for disaster recovery!!

There was an Informix demo around 3-D commerce. That’s right. Shopping carts in 3-D worlds! If you look today, while there are a lot of companies with islands inside of SL, much of it is targeted towards brand marketing. But what if you could visually model an item in the world itself for fit,review it’s looks and then add it to a shopping cart inside the 3-D world itself? Leveraging Informix’s spatial capabilities , Lance Feagan (an Informix R&D engineer) whipped up a framework on top of IDS to enable these aspects of commerce as well as get some data mining capabilities. Here is an article on this topic.

Then there was the IBM demo of virtualizing the whole data center for enhancing data center monitoring – adding the “situational awareness” aspect to remote monitoring. It also greatly enhances “what if” scenarios and capcity planning. Now if they could capture the live sensors in those data centers, one can get real-time visuals on elements such as energy consumption and temperature!! I told you I could drum up some potential applications .

Yes there were some really neat demos  – I personally liked the Qwaq demo – Qwaq has some impressive capabilities around virtual conference rooms – sharing and editing a variety of document formats inside of the conference room, meeting room and document persistence, collaborative editing, integrated voice, etc.

I also liked the ESC demo (Electric Sheep Company) and their concept of “2.5 D” – personally I didn’t think you could do a whole lot with Flash,but I was impressed with the amount of immersiveness it can produce. So with WebFlock (their flagship product), your virtual world can be inside of a browser – no client downloads. I think the 2.5 comes from the fact that to interact with an asset inside the world such as a document, it has to be done outside of the flash world.

Now I flat out will let you know that I am not an expert on all things about virtual worlds and MMOGs. But I do know a thing or two about databases . And I do know about game data and some of the challenges and requirements for their management. For starters about how Informix capabilities can help manage game data, check out this white paper I developed – Fun and Games: The Data Server for Interactive Entertainment.

I look forward to your feedback and comments!

If you are new to Informix, I recommend you visit the IBM site for Informix.

And if you still need some real life validation that database technology matters, read this article on why one company Icarus Studios, switched to Informix.

My colleague George Dolbier, who is a well-respected IBMer in this industry has this valuable article on sizing.

Also, here is a nice article by David Kennerly on aspects of game data mining. If you are an MMO developer, this article gives you good insights into why (and why not to !) , when and what data to mine from your game.