Rescheduled Ode Hunt for Wednesday, January 21, 5 pm SLT

Courtesty of SL’s bumps and pains over the past weekend, the second Ode butterfly hunt has been rescheduled for this Wednesday, January 21, at 5 pm SLT. Join us on the lovely islands of Shengri La for the only five sim Ode butterfly hunt. With any luck, the grid will cooperate and we can all hunt butterflies! See you there!

Last Day of Peace on Earth Hunt…

We participated in the Peace on Earth Grid Wide treasure hunt, and today is the last day to visit the lovely Shengri La sims and collect our offerings.  Two of our designers, Wollemia Sands and Xand Nagy, chose to participate, and of course, Debutante and the Fashion Research Institute also placed globes.

Debutante offers Viva Glam! in black:

 

The Fashion Research Institute offers Jingle, in Turquoise:

Xand Nagy of Kicks and Twirls has this to say about her offering:

This ensemble, which includes 2 flexi dresses with companion glitch pants (short and long), a skirt, 6 different shirts, a lacey undeshirt, and silk stockings, is based on a texture from a photo of a stained glass window in the Saint Louis Cathedral, the oldest Cathedral in North America, founded as a Catholic Parish in 1720 along the Banks of the Mississippi River in New Orleans. We all know the story and tragedy of New Orleans, and this building has witnessed almost 300 years of that history. While the texture has been modified and abstacted to make an attractive outfit, remember as you wear it the story of the stuggle behind it all.

Wollemia Sands of Bull & Bear Career Wear offers Nicole, a lovely outfit for the professional:

Beautiful People….

Collaborators (and others) take note: the Fashion Research Institute has made available new resident avatar kits in the welcome area of our corporate sim complex in Second Life tm Shengri La. The Departure Ruth to Ruthless kits are currently only available for femme avatars, and include hair, a choice of shapes, a choice of skins, jewelry, shoes, and several outfits as well as a basic avatar overrider set.   Choice from five skins; five shapes; four hair colors.  Included is jewelry, several outfits per set, matching shoes, and various and sundry accessories.  Each makeover kit is available for a mere $0L.  Yes, free. 

Men’s kits to follow.  Women’s avatar makeover kits available by following this SLurl.   While you’re there, make sure you check out our resident (and visiting) artists’ exhibits.

Long-Awaited Final Sale for Prim & Proper

To my customers of long-acquaintance, I’ve finally gotten around to setting a date for Prim & Proper’s final appearance for sale on the Second Life tm grid. I’ll be hosting the sale on behalf of Relay For Life, so you get to have the satisfaction of knowing that while you’re satisfying your last P&P need you will also be doing good.

The dates selected are June 14 to 21st. The vendors will be placed the evening of the 13th going into the 14th, and the sale runs till 5 pm SLT, June 21.

On June 21, we’ll be hosting an Ode hunt in the morning in honor of Midsummer’s Eve. To kick off the festivities, we’ll be hosting an early Midsummer’s Night Eve Rave starting at 6PM SLT.on June 14. More details on that to follow.

Where’s Your Data?

I’ve received several comments with wild-eyed claims and various anecdotes about OpenSim, including a recent one about a simulator with a build of 100,000 prims. Folks, this entry is for you.

While I’m waiting for Spirit to be groomed and tweaked and made ready for my next assault, I’m going to take the opportunity to talk about why we’re doing what we’re doing.  The Fashion Research Institute didn’t actually set out to be alpha testers of open source code. 

As CEO of the Fashion Research Institute, I’ve done my due diligence about virtual worlds. I personally have explored all of the virtual worlds out there in the last year of developing the Fashion Research Institute, and our virtual world-based product design and development technology solution.   But after a hot-eyed tour of the many virtual worlds out there: Blue Mars – stunningly beautiful.  World of Warcraft - lots of users.  Stardolls? Shopping for the tween set…and the many other worlds out there…it became crystal clear that none of the existing virtual worlds was going to be what we needed for our solution.  

These virtual worlds all had issues, not least of which is that most of them are games.  Entertainment for the marketing demographic of choice, which means we can’t use it for our solution - the Fashion Research Institute isn’t serving the media and entertainment industry.  We’re building an enterprise-ready virtual world-based technology solution. 

There’s nothing playful about it, unless you regard business like Edith Wharton: “He had the Saxon love of games, and the best game of all was business.”  We’re in business in the apparel industry, and part of our business demands that we have an appropriate platform.  As I’ve reiterated at my many talks, the real value proposition for virtual worlds isn’t in marketing or serving the consumer base.  It’s in helping enterprises succeed at their business by using virtual worlds to enable their work flow – at which point, the consumers will follow.

The Fashion Research Institute was facing a dilemma.  Second Life tm has graphic quality that is ‘good enough’, and a richly immersive experience.  But Linden Labs’ tm Terms of Service agreement alarms me as an entrepreneur.  It’s fine for individuals, but an enterprise that is serious about their business information and intellectual property would never allow their proprietary information to sit on a Linden Lab server. 

And then, OpenSim was presented to me as an option.  It was an option that was ringed and garnished with a lot of cautious warnings like ‘well, you know, this is very alpha code’, and so on.  And at the point where I first went in, in October of 2007, it really was quite rocky.  But it was also very clear that it was our future, and I’d better embrace it.

And to that end, I had my people set up the first of our OpenSims, and we started playing with them.  I now have the abandoned ruins of four or five OpenSims laying about on my boxes, and of course, Shengri La Spirit alive and well on an IBM-hosted Blade.

Fast forward to where we are now: testing the code.  And, I’d like to think, doing a service to the OpenSim community, and in the spirit of open source, making our data available for everyone to see and use, in the form of this blog, and feedback from Kurt, Sean, Dale, and Zha into the community.  Open source means just that: being open about what you are doing, and showing your work.  Being transparent about it, so everyone can benefit. 

For example, I’ve had a lot of technologists tell me that the prim limit in OpenSim is arbitrary.  I am first and foremost a visual learner – I like to look and see for myself….and that means actually seeing the  performance limitations for substantive builds.  Now, it is true, I could have just asked my IBM team to create a script that would have rezzed prims in a loop till the system ground to a halt.  It wouldn’t really have impressed anyone, particularly those who write loops. And we wouldn’t have learned anything in the process – a machine cannot alpha test because it isn’t human and it does not have the sensitivity to learn from the experience.  All it would have done is dumped in as many prims as it took to grind the machine to a halt. 

But having a server full of prims, with no active observer, or worse yet, an observer who is unable to log and report what she observes, really doesn’t serve any useful purpose.  You can’t actually learn where the FUNCTIONAL prim limit is – you know, the one where the overall user experience degrades to the point it becomes unacceptable to the human user – a clearly human condition that a program can never identify. 

So we’re building out to find and push the functional prim limit, on a specific box, and we’re benchmarking the performance of that machine, with the given installation, and with a lot of user parameters being fed back.  I make no secret about the fact that we’re performance tuning as we go along; that we are not yet pushing textures, inventory, scripts, or a range of other parameters (that’s coming, soon enough).  We’re systematically focusing on prim limits first, which in our case is a human-created substantive build that uses primitive-based objects, including basic system, tortured system, sculptured or flexible primitives.

And we’re going to keep running out onto the ice until we fall through, at which point we will know where the functional prim limit is, for this set of parameters, and we’ll push it further.  When we find that functional prim limit based on our parameters, tuned for the IBM Blade hosting it, we will have a benchmark, which we will share so that the OpenSim community also has that benchmark. 

And this is why Spirit is so important.  Benchmarking performance, and sharing our data.  If you, my reader, have done something awesome with your OpenSim and you haven’t shared your data….well, anyone can SAY they did something.  But in the Spirit of scientific exploration, if you haven’t shared your data, you’ll forgive me if statements about ‘what you did in your OpenSim’ aren’t received as anything more than your marketing material to be circular filed. This is an open source community effort, and in that Spirit, I’d ask you, “Where’s your data?”

I’m not clearing space on my calendar to beat on Spirit because I love games or alpha testing.  I’m doing it to move the platform forward, because alpha testers who can actually test and provide worthwhile feedback are tough to find.  And I’m talking about our work because I feel strongly that the results of my alpha testing are important to the community as a whole, and that there are some very dedicated and capable people out there who will grab the results of what the Fashion Research Institute is doing in our collaboration with IBM, and run with them. 

Personally, I cannot wait to see the results.  Thank you again, to all of the dedicated open source & OpenSim supporters, coders, programmers and technologists who share their work openly and publicly.  You rock.

The Prims Abuser – Gore Suntzu’s Swirly Thingies Exibition

The Fashion Research Institute is pleased to host Gore SunTzu’s sculpture exhibit in our corporate office at Castle Queen Pea in Shengri La Peace.  Please visit his opening, Thursday May 15, from 4-6 PM SLT.  If you can’t make it then, his show will be up through June 15th.  I do hope you’ll visit his show in Shengri La Peace.

The Prims Abuser – Gore Suntzu’s  Swirly Thingies Exibition, in his words:

From 15 of May to The 15 of June

Reception (mean i will be there if u wanna come and say Heyya!) : Thursday 15 4-6 PM SLT

And now for (..bore you some more) your joy… some lines about my abuses and me:

My  abuses are unreal prims sculpture made with sculpties , and with some lil scripting to make them alive, the best word i can use for describe them is “pulsating”, they have a meaning? boh i dont know, but if the music is nice, the moon is full sometime can happen that they catch the mood of the ppl that are looking at them.

Artist Statement (iz serious stuff really..)

I never considered myself the artistic kind of man, Secondlife helped me discover this side of myself.

I don’t know if what i do can be considered art , for me is more an act of exploration looking for a a symmetrical dynamic movement, a metaverse heartbeat.
It  all start with a prim  abused , that’s why i call them prims abuses (but don’t worry  most of the times they don’t complain, to tell you the truth i believe they like it), than i look what happen.
I never start with a plan in mind, i believe that the prim know by itself where to go. (kai this line is sily lol)

I believe this is a good example how powerful Second Life can be ( and i hope this will not change in the future).
Without this place well i hardly imagine myself, in the quest of tryn to explain the meaning of my “art”.

and for finshing a quote that make all the note more intellectually appropriate

The object of art is to give (Second) life a shape.
William Shakespeare

Uncharted Territory: 23,582 Prims in IBM OpenSim Shengri La Spirit

The money shot: 23,582 prims.

Ask and ye shall receive.  I asked, ” posestand?” and lo, Script Wizard Dale dropped one into Spirit. Yay, Script Wizard Dale! If only other requests were so easy…

 I can has posestand!

Back to hammering on the box today.  Yesterday’s little glam shoot notwithstanding, it didn’t add much to the database – a couple hundred more things in my inventory, some understanding of what’s up with attachments, but not much to Spirit’s actual asset server. 

Curly Vines over the Gazebos

Today, on the other hand, I kicked it hard enough for it to start paying attention.  We had a couple of crashes and a couple of buggish looking things that popped up.  The server still chokes when I try to copy more than 300 prims at a time, so I have to plan that out a bit.  And the code struggles with textures and a couple of other issues.  I sent my reports all off to our IBM OpenSim Liaison, Kurt Taylor, so he can get them into the fix-it queue.  Go, Kurt!

 

Swans in the sunset: Romantical!

Zha has been really great about putting in every new patch that comes along, so we’re always testing on the bleedingest (yes, bleedingest) edge code.  And that is, ultimately, the point of the IBM OpenSim Shengri La Spirit – to test the code and to see how or if  I can break it.  Having highly skilled and dedicated people right there, with their finger on the pulse of the machines, who really know what they are doing is just an amazing experience in pushing the envelope of OpenSim.  I don’t generally have a chance to talk to non-IBM OpenSim developers, who are also working very hard on getting the OpenSim code up and running, so I don’t have the up-close view I have of the IBM team.  But those of the OpenSim community who I have had the good fortune of meeting have all been great people.

A long view of the settees and vines

And the result of all this hard work on their part (I’m the one having fun here!) is that the server code is getting more robust every day.  I’m hammering Spirit as hard as I can for as much time as I can devote to it, and I can feel the code getting better every day.

A different perspective: parallax in action down the gazebo galleria

So much better, that we made it to 23, 582 prims in IBM OpenSim Shengri La Spirit.  We’ve set another prim record set as we climb to the pinnacle of what Spirit’s Blade server will support.  And of course, we’ve done it gracefully and with elegance.

Luxuriant arrangements of prim roses crown the settees…

Thanks again to my IBM team.  You folks just rock.

 

Zha and I and the company of 23,582 prims….

The REAL value proposition of virtual worlds

This morning I read yet another pundit’s informed view that virtual worlds are ‘just another marketing platform.’  I don’t know how people get to be a ‘pundit’, but they don’t seem to need any real knowledge, or they wouldn’t say such uninformed things.

 

Given what we know about virtual worlds – not just OpenSim, not just Second Life(TM), nor any of the others – it should be obvious by now to anyone using them for any length of time that the user base, the consumers, just isn’t there in any real, meainginful metric.  You have hardcore gamers, you have nongamer early adopters, but what you don’t have is what makes the grist for the marketing wheel:  namely, the mass market consumer.   

 

Given that I spent the last several years successfully designing product for the mass market, I am rather more intimately acquainted with that marketplace than the pundits who want businesses to roll their brand campaigns into virtual worlds.  When I designed a product style, I put anywhere from 300,000 to 1,000,000 units into production for the North American marketplace alone, and I could safely expect to sell 18-20 such product styles.  Given the statistics out there, I think anyone can see that real mass market numbers just don’t equate with the consumer actually being in any one given virtual world at any given time, to receive a marketing message to ‘buy my stuff’.  The mass consumer just isn’t there yet.  She will not be there until enterprise steps up and figures out how to use virtual worlds specifically to enable themselves to do business more efficiently and effectively, and then pays to harden the virtual world in a way that makes them ready for business, which will have the collateral effect of making the user experience consistently easy.  Then and only then will we see mass market adoption of virtual worlds.

 

Until then, enterprise enablement is the real value proposition for virtual worlds.  Virtual worlds enabling enterprise to conduct business more efficiently.  It’s not brand extension, social networking (consumers, remember?)  or even collaboration.  Sure, all of these are important trends, but they are trends that are time units away from seeing their full florescence.

 

RL businesses entering virtual worlds to use as another marketing channel need to understand that their consumer base probably isn’t there yet, so these businesses need to use caution about rolling out branding campaigns.  Think about what sort of ROI they really expect, and get real about returns.  Tie any virtual world marketing into a longer term, full marketing campagin with the full bricks and mortar backing and you’ll get buzz.  But I would be seriously surprised if any enterprise is getting anything more out of a VW than a good, targeted direct mail campaign would give them. 

 

Likewise, the case studies for using virtual worlds for collaboration are fairly well known by now, including some of the pitfalls businesses may experience in bringing their workers into a virtual world, and what sort of accelerants and benefits they can hope to achieve.  It’s harder to put metrics to achievement with regards to virtual collaboration, though, especially metrics that the executive staff is going to get excited about.  Savings improve margin, so talking about travel costs and travel time saved is great, but savings don’t actually increase the company’s top line.  

As an executive, I am always looking at both the bottom and the topline of my company.  A solution that enables me to address both of these concerns is something I’ll look at closely.

 

We’re more forward about our use of virtual worlds, because I do see the very real value of using virtual worlds to enable business.  That’s where I see the real money is – and anyone looking at my product development numbers realizes pretty quickly that I’m all about making my numbers.  We’re specifically interested in using virtual worlds to enable product design and development both synchronously and asynchronously.  This is where businesses will see huge gains in productivity, in savings, in waste reduction, and in business intelligence and management metrics.  The Fashion Research Institute currently has a research agreement with IBM, to investigate how to best use virtual worlds in this way.  We are specifically addressing the apparel industry, which is an old and traditional industry that has never been computerized in any meaningful way. 

 

Our initial results have shown that the entire process of design work can be expedited using virtual worlds, substantially reducing development time.  Substantial waste can be cut from the process with concurrent time and cost savings. Executives have data transparency and management metrics for an area that has been traditionally resilient to any attempts at time management. 

 

The ease of collaboration helps with the product development process, but the true value proposition for us lies in the inherent nature of virtual worlds like Second LifeTM: 3-D modeling capabilities, real-time design capability, persistence of the work space, and above all, the data transparency to all stakeholders in the design and development process. 

 

We’re using OpenSim as our virtual world of choice for our enterprise solution.  OpenSim is open source, and it’s still being developed.  It has some advantages, in that it uses the standard Second LifeTM client to connect to an OpenSim backend.  New users can be trained to use virtual worlds using Second LifeTM, which has deep user-generated content and a rich, immersive experience which is critical to user acceptance.  When the user is trained to use virtual worlds, they can be easily brought into an OpenSim backed environment with no loss of accuity to the user.  The user ’sees’ the same user interface and does not have to learn a whole new set of commands. 

 

Virtual worlds used to help business do business is where enterprises will see real value for their investment. Ultimately businesses that do not make the digital leap will simply not be able to compete against businesses who have cut their costs and have better business intelligence data gathered from their virtual world installations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Waiting for Godot

I still feel like my IBM OpenSim Spirit is slow, so I’m going to hold off burning everything to the ground and rebuilding till Team Leader Zha gets a chance to take a look at it.  Everyone’s busy right now working on more project critical enterprise level matters, including me, so it’s not critical to me.

Back in Shengri La SLtm, Calli almost has her gallery completed.  I’m waiting till she’s done installing her pictures before I take a picture for posterity.  Calli and I have been discussing the use of the small galleries that we added to Shengri La, and we’ve decided that she will curate the galleries.  SL tm artists are encouraged to get in touch with Calli in-world if they are interested in exhibiting in the small galleries in Shengri La.  They should drop her a notecard with their name, a paragraph about their work, and one or two representative images.  We will host two concurrent artists in the galleries with their show openings and closings staggered.  Please contact Callipygian Christensen in SLtm.

We’re finally more-or-less finished with Shengri La, to the extent that I am ever finished with a build. There’s a few tweakings I want to do – adding a few more underwater ruins, and the opensource horses so people can come and ride on the islands.  But overall, I’m pretty content with the islands.  I need to turn my attention next to the actual corporate offices, and finish off the community gateway. I hope to finish those off later this week, and with luck Spirit will be ready to do, too.

While on hiatus…

The Blade that Shengri La Spirit ‘lives on’ has a twin.  While I’ve been doing executive/business things, the twin has been being tweaked – MySQL and the latest build from the OpenSim tree being the most notable additions.  Spirit was being built on SQLlite and an older OpenSim build, which meant a lot of the innovations and new code hadn’t been implemented yet. 

The twin is now about ready to go live. I was in yesterday looking around and briefly use-testing its performance. I thought it was a bit slower than Spirit, but it may simply be that my memory of the case is dim since it’s been a month or so since I was actually IN Spirit. it may also have been that since  I was busily twiddling terrain, perhaps that was what was causing my sense of ’slowness’. 

I guess we’ll see. I’m not sure if the Spirit build is going to be ported over to my new Blade or if I am going to start from scratch and do something different.  In some respects, I’ll be sorry if the old build doesn’t come over, but in others, I’ll be happy to start over. There were challenges in building in a sim with older code that made building not so thrilling.  We still won’t be going to grid mode just yet – the new sim will be stand alone until we can get more benchmarks. 

It’s been interesting to see the commentary from VW08 that has developed around OpenSim and other platforms, and the concurrent fallout from the great trademark flap and the pending land cost changes by Linden Labs.  As a concierge member of Second Life, with five islands inworld, I’ve been following the debate to a small extent; as someone who is banging on an OpenSim island with the intent of using it as soon as its hardened as my virtual world of choice for enterprise solution, I’ve been mostly amused by the commentary about OpenSim. 

OpenSim is a baby. It’s creeping, not even crawling yet, but that will change.  Comparing OpenSim to any of the other worlds out there is specious.    OpenSim may take awhile to acquire the rich depth of content that worlds like Second Life have, but on the other hand, once OpenSim grows up and is running on IBM hardware, the performance issues plaguing Second Life simply won’t be there in OpenSim, and I tend to trust my IBM technology partners more than a much smaller technology company to ensure that my datacenter stays up and functional and ready for work. 

So what’s better for a user? For those of us with enterprise aspirations, we want stability, we want power, we want security…and above all, we do not want our business intelligence in the form of our data sitting on any else’s servers, especially not anyone else’s servers whose terms of service agreement may prohibit us in any way from using our data as we see fit. 

For those who are using someone else’s platform for their business model, it’s critical to keep in mind that this means your business model is at the whim of fate or of the executives of the company providing you with this service.  These executives can change their terms of service at any time in a way that may well be prejudicial to your business but supportive of theirs.  They are in business ultimately to make money for themselves and their shareholders, not necessarily for the benefit of their customers. It’s certainly clear to me that many have forgotten this, or perhaps never knew it, or knew and chose to ignore it.  From an entrepreneur’s point of view, that’s a dangerous barn blindness.

For the average user though, none of this is critical.  The richness of content of more mature worlds is what will attract them and keep them.  For a lot of users, worlds like Second Life are great entry points and training grounds to learn to use virtual worlds.   The Fashion Research Institute will continue to keep its presence in Second Life for training grounds to teach people to use virtual worlds.  But we’re also eagerly awaiting the day when OpenSim becomes robust enough to let us develop our business entity in greater depth.  And we hope the right people talk together and develop appropriate interoperability standards so we’ll be able to drop our OpenSims around Shengri La.