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 
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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.
