Get a life

Business Week.com reports:

IBM Corp. said Friday that it collaborated with electronics retailer Circuit City Stores Inc. to open a big-box outlet in the virtual video-game world, Second Life.

IBM said the prototype store is part of a bigger complex Big Blue plans to open next week in the virtual world.

The store contains replicas of real-life Circuit City products. People can direct their avatars, or in-game characters, to walk down the aisles, pick up and examine items, and order online for home delivery, IBM said.

The two companies are also working on virtual customer service and a place for shoppers to recreate their real-world living rooms, then test different TV sizes and sound system setups.

At a holiday party last night, some of us discussed how immersive-world technology is evolving. Imagine, say, that in a few years, Second Life looks like a movie, not a cartoon. What a great place for learning and collaboration! Or is it? Once again, the technology is advancing more rapidly than the humans who work with it. Absent a port from Second Life directly into my central nervous system, I can’t imagine an interface to endow my avatar with the semblance of life.

IBM’s metaverse evangelist, Ian Hughes, says IBM is thinking about creating a virtual world that would be primarily used by its 340,000 employees for internal communications, company meetings and much more. In January, IBM will focus on virtual worlds as an Emerging Business Opportunity, or EBO. Those of us who track the learning industry will remember the hoopla when learning was an EBO for a few years.

One of the only voices of dissent I have found is Len Bullard, who posted a well-reasoned comment on c|net.

As the power consumption of the server farms is being shown to be a contributor to the problems outlined in “An Inconvenient Truth”, it looks weird to have a puff piece on IBM’s entry into the VR market via SL right above the article on the Al Gore movie and beneath Cooper’s piece about it.

The future of VR is not server farms. That is the distant past from when IBM sold iron for a living. OTOH, they are dimly beginning to understand the potential of the presence applications for supplanting video conferencing and enabling customers to be observed and interacted with. They have yet to encounter the harder policy social problems.

Three people are almost enough to build one world. So far, IBM isn’t even dabbling here scale wise. Meanwhile, the guilds of world builders using the open systems and international standards are growing in skill as they become fed up with the rich-vs-poor schisms of SecondLife which has no middle class. We shall see where the real future of 3D on the Web And Everywhere Else is found: on the closed proprietary systems that IBM endorses, or in the open mature international standads that enable everyone to assume the same risks.

The cards are still out on how business use of SL will evolve.

Update, December 16, 2006

A researcher at IBM’s Almaden Lab says the IBMers are going nuts over SL. They foresee it as the office reality of the future.