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IBM Research

© 2010 IBM Corporation 1

Virtual Worlds and the Human Experience

Grady Booch

IBM Fellow and Free Radical

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IBM Research

© 2010 IBM Corporation 2

A Way Of Looking At The World

● Observation

● Feelings

● Needs

● Requests

http://www.cnvc.org

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IBM Research

© 2010 IBM Corporation 3

Cognitive Surplus

● Human imagination is not a scarce resource

● We have a cognitive surplus

● Wikipedia ~ 100 million thought hours

● TV watching in US ~ 200 billion thought hours

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IBM Research

© 2010 IBM Corporation 4

The Coming Sea Change

http://en.oreilly.com/et2008/public/schedule/detail/1597

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IBM Research

© 2010 IBM Corporation 5

There Are New (and Unexpected) Uses of Media

● The media is our palette (DJ Spooky aka that Subliminal Kid)

● The consumer is the creator, thus forming a read/write culture (Lawrence Lessig)

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IBM Research

© 2010 IBM Corporation 6

And It’s Not All Just About Entertainment

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IBM Research

© 2010 IBM Corporation 7

Business as a Human Activity

● Strong vision plus fundamentals in execution

● Fundamentals in execution

Predictability

Repeatability

Tangible artifacts

Measurable results

Stable intermediate forms

Continuous evolution

Continuous refactoring

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IBM Research

© 2010 IBM Corporation 8

Points of Friction

● Cost of start up and on-going working space organization

● Inefficient work product collaboration

● Maintaining effective group communication, including knowledge and experience, project status, and project memory

● Time starvation across multiple tasks

● Stakeholder negotiation

● Stuff that doesn’t work

● High semantic density artifacts

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IBM Research

© 2010 IBM Corporation 9

CDE Pain and Purpose

● A CDE attends to the issues of geographically and temporally distributed

collaboration.

● The purpose of a CDE is to create a frictionless surface for development by

eliminating or automating many of the daily, non-creative activities of the

individual and the team and by providing mechanisms that encourage

creative, healthy, and high-bandwidth modes of communication among a

project’s stakeholders

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IBM Research

© 2010 IBM Corporation 10

The Collaborative Development Environment (CDE)

● A CDE is a virtual place where the stakeholders of a project - even if separated by time or space - can meet, share, brainstorm, discuss, reason about, negotiate, record, and generally labor together to carry out some task.

● CDEs have emerged in a number of disciplines to address the social and technical problems involving distributed teams whose members must collaborate to solve some problem.

● Collaboration has always been an essential part of the fabric of the Internet

Email

Instant messaging

Chat rooms

Discussion groups

Wikis

Social networks

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IBM Research

© 2010 IBM Corporation 11

Infrastructure

● Social networks

The watercooler/trust problem

● Blogs

Information sites

● Mailing lists

Small groups with a common purpose

● Message boards

Asking and answering questions

● Chat rooms

Scheduled events/real time discussion/backchannel communication

● Whiteboards

Brainstorming/communicating/discussing

● Net meetings

Point to point discussions

● Portals

Communities of practice

● Wikis

Message boards on steroids

● Video conferencing

Point to point discussions

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IBM Research

© 2010 IBM Corporation 12

Jazz: From XDE to CDE

Eclipse Way

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IBM Research

© 2010 IBM Corporation 13

Collaboration in Other Domains

GeheryTechnologies, Digital Project Designer

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IBM Research

© 2010 IBM Corporation 14

Avatars

● From the Sanskrit word meaning “incarnation”

● In computing, a computer user’s representation of himself/herself or alter ego

● In computing history

Ultima IV

William Gibson

Neal Stephenson

In games

In IM

In blogs

In AI

In games

In virtual worlds

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(computing)

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IBM Research

© 2010 IBM Corporation 15

15

Sametime 3D

Business Value:

Supports enhanced collaboration activities

using virtual worlds, integrated with

Lotus Sametime 8.01(or later)

Business Venues:

● Boardroom

● Collaboration space

● Theater

Platform features:

● Reusable meeting spaces

● In-world tools to support virtual meeting

activities

● Optional spatial voiceAccess control,

integration with Domino User directory

or Enterprise LDAP

● Web Portal with User and Administrator

roles

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IBM Research

© 2010 IBM Corporation 16

Business Needs Driving Virtual Space Events

● The business case

No travel

No physical meeting room

No hotel services

Small carbon footprint

● Examples

IBM Research global kickoff

GBS kickoff

Tech talk

BizTech showcase

Software Quality Group

Internal training/education

Academy of Technology

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IBM Research

© 2010 IBM Corporation 17

The Human Experience

● Organized labor

● Shared stories

● Tribal memory

● Rituals

● Trust

● Serendipitous connections