Author: Stearns

Howard Stearns works at High Fidelity, Inc., creating the metaverse. Mr. Stearns has a quarter century experience in systems engineering, applications consulting, and management of advanced software technologies. He was the technical lead of University of Wisconsin's Croquet project, an ambitious project convened by computing pioneer Alan Kay to transform collaboration through 3D graphics and real-time, persistent shared spaces. The CAD integration products Mr. Stearns created for expert system pioneer ICAD set the market standard through IPO and acquisition by Oracle. The embedded systems he wrote helped transform the industrial diamond market. In the early 2000s, Mr. Stearns was named Technology Strategist for Curl, the only startup founded by WWW pioneer Tim Berners-Lee. An expert on programming languages and operating systems, Mr. Stearns created the Eclipse commercial Common Lisp programming implementation. Mr. Stearns has two degrees from M.I.T., and has directed family businesses in early childhood education and publishing.

Oh. Canada.

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Our weekly engineering meeting has a conference table and a huge projection screen. On this Monday, the Vancouver Olympics had just closed, and our three Canadian engineers were celebrating their climactic hockey victory. Being virtual, it was ridiculously easy(*) to find a flag image on Google, drag it in-world, and throw it up on the projector. No mess, no fuss, and no disturbance of the meeting. It might have been an afterthought, but it was appreciated.

In public social virtual worlds, a lot of attention gets paid to avatars — that’s your primary dimension of expression. But in private business worlds, the whole environment is yours to personalize, and it’s easy to change frequently. The discussion referenced in my previous post spoke of spontaneously creating a whole meeting room reserved and named in honor of a visitor.

* Much easier than the mechanics of adding a picture to this blog. See this video, and especially the last minute.

Situation Room

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Real situation rooms devote an awful lot to physical requirements.

Here’s a virtual situation room from Forterra’s Olive platform, where there is lot more emphasis on dealing with the situation.

Of course, a real operations center needs to control and interact with the physical world, pulling in not just media, but also manifestations of live data. And the participants must be able to take actions that effect the real world. See an older video of a Teleplace network operations center doing that here.

If virtualization can produce an effective result for much less money, why not apply it in business as well as government? Here’s an example from industry analysts at Think Balm.

Physical situation rooms have costly recording equipment and people to operate them. This is an area where virtual situation rooms can not only be cheaper, but better because easier-to-use means more-likely-to-happen.

Of course, the point of a situation room is to bring experts and stakeholders together to deal with a changing situation. All the participants need to be able to quickly interact with resources, without physical or technological limitation. Unlike the set-in-concrete behemoths, a virtual environment can do better than bunkers to facilitate brainstorming and bringing new ideas together.

Sit Down and Shut Up

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Impressive Steve Jobs product presentations are built around a unifying theme. Really, the theme of our last version(*) is scalability for large institutions. This is largely architectural work hidden from most users, such as network topology or administrative support.

So far, actual users seem to have been most taken with the manifestation of this theme in the ability to control their colleagues.

posse

*: After prototypes and two commercial versions.

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Asset Risk

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Julian Lombardi makes some terrific points about asset risk for virtual worlds on his blog. I think the issue is a pretty fertile area for exploration as we all continue to invent new ways of working together, but Blogspot simply doesn’t allow that much content in discussion, so I’ll have to fork it here.

I see the asset risk issue-space as breaking out into at least two dimensions:
* Bit storage vs bit usage
* Point assets vs context

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