Posted by on January 28, 2009 under Ideas, howto | 
First reaction of many people to virtual worlds is that they begin to think about possible applications. One of the most common idea is the meeting application.
It is so strongly in peoples minds, that if a virtual world platform does not support some basic technology enablers for the meeting use case, the platform is considered useless.
The key technology enablers for successful virtual meetings are:
- Application sharing
- Document sharing
- Web co-browsing
- Spatialized voice support (3D audio)
- (Powerpoint) Presentations
- Streaming real time media
- Customizable avatars and rich interaction
I believe that moving our current 2D User Interface paradigms to virtual worlds is only an intermediate step towards true 3D applications. In true 3D applications brainstorming, training, planning and many other (collaborative) activities are not done in front of flat virtual screens. The real 3D approach takes current strengths and weaknesses of virtual world technologies into account (as I wrote in an earlier post - Virtual world advantage over real life).
But for now, it is still important to get basic things working as people have tons of legacy Powerpoint presentations and other 2D material. Follow the following steps to use your ppt files inside realXtend:
- Open your .ppt file in OpenOffice Impress, check the slides that everything looks good
- Make a new empty folder for the resulting files
- Select file->export, type “rexslides.html” for the file name and “export as html” to the new empty folder
- Select “New design” -> next -> “Webcast“
- Now you can select ASP or Perl solution, depending on your web server platform - Perl should work for most - the rest of the steps assume perl. You need a web server for this to work; CTN recommends http://www.hosting24.com
- Set URL for listeners to “index.html” and presentation URL to “http://www.cybertechnews.org/webcast/” and URL to perl scripts to “http://www.cybertechnews.org/webcast/perl/“
- In the next screen, use jpegs and set the resolution to highest: 1024×768, in the next dialog you can save the design if you wish
- copy txt files to the /webcast/perl/ folder at your web server, and set them writable (permissions to 666)
- copy pl files to the /webcast/perl/ folder at your web server, and set them executable (permissions to 755)
- copy all the other files to /webcast/ folder at your web server
Now you are ready to use the presentation in realXtend. Just use a texture’s media URL property, set it to http://www.cybertechnews.org/webcast/ and apply the texture to your favorite object.
To control the presentation, open a web browser and point it to http://www.cybertechnews.org/webcast/rexslides.html
Posted by on January 25, 2009 under Ideas, howto |
Collaborative web browsing plays an important role in meetings. Meeting rooms have usually data projectors so that people can plug in their laptops and show slides, documents and web pages to support their message in a meeting.
In realXtend 0.4 it is possible to show web pages with live flash content, like a Youtube video (see CTN article about that). The web page to show is defined in the texture properties as a media URL.
However, it is a bit clumsy to use texture properties to change the web page when there are lot of people attending a meeting and possibly wanting to share something.
CTN built a server side solution to the problem using PHP and javascript.
Follow these steps to test the solution:
- download php and html files (unzip webscreen.zip) and upload them to your web server (if you don’t have a web server, get a free hosting from http://www.000webhost.com/. For professional use CTN recommends http://www.hosting24.com.)
- set texture’s media URL to http://www.cybertechnews.org/webscreen/webscreen.html (use your own server name here!) and apply the texture to a cube
- open a browser window to http://www.cybertechnews.org/webscreen/seturl.php (use your own server name here)
- write a URL (e.g. http://www.realxtend.org) to the text input field and press enter, after a few seconds, the web page shows in realXtend viewer, and the same web page is shown to all participants in the virtual world at the same time.
Extra benefit of this approach is that people who do not have realXtend can also follow the presentation from the same URL using a standard browser (you can test it by using the CTN URLs in the steps above).
If you wish to have several webscreens showing different content, it is easy to copy the same web files to another folder at the web server to separate URLs. To develop the solution further, learn the tricks from this book.
The next topic will be about how to share your Powerpoint slides in realXtend - stay tuned!
Posted by on January 15, 2009 under Ideas, howto |
realXtend project used the Scrum methodology from the beginning. The reason for this was the nature of the project. It was really hard to estimate what we could achieve within 6 calendar months we got the funding for. The goal was simple enough; to make a demo prototype of a future virtual world platform that is good enough to get more funding to continue the effort. So we really needed to do as good demo as possible.
A screenshot from a testing session.
The Scrum methodology we learned from an excellent book: Scrum and XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg. The book is absolutely the best and easiest to read about how to use Scrum in practice.
realXtend project started with two participating Finnish companies, Ludocraft and Admino technologies. The companies are both located at the Oulu area, but they are still located quite far from each other. In the Scrum methodology the whole Scrum team must be co-located for two main reasons; to maximize the communication bandwidth between team members and secondly, to have the daily scrum meetings together.
Initially we had everyone working at the same scrum team and we used skype between the two offices for the daily scrum meetings. It was working, but not as good as it should. Irc, physical visits, email and skype were all used every day to keep things synchronized.
After two months of work, the realXtend platform was at the stage where we decided to move our daily scrum meetings to the virtual space. It was awful. Everyone looked the same - our first woman avatar, which was later called as “crack-slut madonna” by someone, she had just white underwear and no hair… voice was working through team speak software. Opensim had some serious problems at that time, objects were lost and big craters appeared to the landscape. We partly moved back to skype, but continued to use realXtend for the meetings weekly.
Eating our own dogfood did good to the development. Scrum helped us to always work on most important issues and we did not need to worry about changing a project plan like we would have done with the waterfall project management model.
Scrum did not work so well with some of the content oriented tasks. Artists need time to think and be creative and they did not like Scrum. If I had to do the first six months again for the realXtend, I would left artists out of the daily Scrum meetings and keep their tasks out of sprint backlogs. I would still have them present at the sprint planning meetings as it is essential to synchronize their work with the software developers.
At the end of the six month period we had moved realXtend sprint and product backlogs to Google docs, and we used a big virtual wall with sections to move tasks around. Tasks were small notes containing the name of the task. The synchronization between Google docs and the virtual wall was done by hand, and they were quite often not in sync.
The effective virtual world Scrum work clearly needs a virtual world application to support it. Copying the real world task wall did not work well enough - see a previous article, where I discuss about how to effectively use virtual worlds and avoid their weaknesses. The synchronization between virtual world application and a spreadsheet should work instantly and automatically.
After the fist six month the realXtend project moved to more traditional project management for a period of four months (March 2008 - June 2008). The reason for this was that the new funding source wanted to have exact task lists for the Avatar 2 sub-project. Even as the results were good in terms of software and content, this did not work very well when compared to Scrum. Many tasks slipped over their deadlines and the project management felt like a real work for a while.
From July 2008 the project used Scrum again.
The key findings summarized:
- Scrum works well for high risk projects with limited visibility
- Scrum does not fit well to content oriented work
- Virtual worlds allow Scrum teams to work in a multi-site setting
- A specific Scrum application built on top of realXtend would dramatically increase the efficiency
- Virtual world applications need to be integrated to old fashioned applications (like the spreadsheet).
Posted by on December 13, 2008 under Ideas |
In my experience, copying Real Life environments and work methods to a Virtual World does not work. In theory there is nothing wrong with that approach, but in practice all the limitations we have due to hardware, software and network latency, you can usually get a better user experiece by having a meeting (or whatever you plan to do) in Real Life.
This realXtend meeting area is not copied from Real Life
I still believe that Virtual World applications can be made efficient and enjoyable to use - and even to degree that they are better than Real Life counterparts. To make this happen, we need to carefully take advantage of all the benefits we get from using a virtual world, while avoiding any obvious shortcomings.
Benefits:
The use of space; it is expensive in Real Life to use a lot of space. In virtual worlds, the space is practically free (although Linden Lab is seriously trying to limit this aspect in Second Life - but they need their business, right?)
The use of objects; it is expensive and difficult to move around big/huge objects in Real Life. In Virtual World environment you can create and throw around house-sized rocks if you wish.
Moving around; In Real Life, it takes hours to move back and forth from a meeting room to lunch and back, to home and to office - not to even mention long haul flights. In Virtual Worlds, the whole working team can be teleported to another working location to do something else. You can fly from a place to another. Physical location loses its grip (but you need to eat, lets not forget that).
Shortcomings:
Communication; In Real Life, much of communication is said to be non-verbal - included in tone of your voice, body posture, movements, tiny change in your eyes. Virtual Worlds are not even close here - in better ones you can use voice over IP, in most, you need to use bare text chat. This is getting better over time, though.
Fidelity; When using desktop virtual reality, we are bound by the size of the monitor. When compared to reality, it is like looking world through a small box. Sound may not be spatialized. In other words, the experience is of low quality. This is something which will get better over time - there will be new hardware, better software and faster networks.
When the technology matures, we will see more and more applications being possible and appealing for virtual worlds. The technology is already at such a level, that many applications become possible. I will post about these applications in the future as I have many interesting ideas to share with you.
In case you want to add benefits/shortcomings, please comment below or mail me and I will edit the post to contain them (in case I agree!).
