The Future of the 3D Internet
Yesterday was the final day of the vBusiness Expo hosted by Clever Zebra on Forterra’s Olive platform. The presentations were spotty…some repeated well known information, but some were insightful and thought-provoking. One of the questions asked of the closing panel group was “are mobile devices the future of the 3D internet?” The answers were interesting. Keeping in mind that the speakers were talking conversationally, and not from prepared remarks, their answers were spontaneous and intriguing. Also, these notes are my notes from what they said, not direct quotes!
Darius Lahoutifard (Altadyn): Virtual worlds started with “immersive” as a criteria, which meant that using them on phones was out. But mobile phone capabilities are exploding, and using java is viable. The interest and market is definitely there. It’s not yet mature, but it’s coming.
Bruce Joy (Vast Park): The US market has been quick to uptake the iPhone, which has a great 3D platform. Other smart phones have amazing 3D chips on them, too, so mobile is an incredible environment for 3D worlds. The ideal solution should should run on different platforms (write once/run anywhere solution). All of Asia is mobile focused…much more than Europe and the US. These devices are now computers that just happen to sit in our hands. They are powerful. The UIs for mobile devices have to be different to work on small mobile screens, though, and it will be interesting to see what emerges.
John Swords (The Electric Sheep Company): The first thing people will be interested in is augmented reality type applications…location based services that run off GPS. Secondly will come linking people outside the virtual world and using mobile devices with people who are in immersive environments. Linking people and their attributes/avatars and linking with GPS and all kinds of hybrids is very intereting, and it’s coming. There will be a totally different kind of UI on phones. There will be reduced, simplified applications like we are seeing now on the iPhone.
Nicole Yankelovich (WonderLand): A barrier to corporate adoption now is that people don’t necessarily have the hardware to run virtual worlds. We need “graceful adoption”, that makes it easy for users to participate without having high-end graphics capabilities. You can anticipate being able to enter a virtual world without having a client. The world could be text based with a thin client, or people on a desktop (with more computing power) could have a thick client.
Christian Renaud (Technology Intelligence Group): For enterprise adoption, if you tell people that they have to get into a virtual client to meet, you won’t get adoption. But if you have hybrids integrated with different work styles and with the modalities available to them, then users will each get the experience appropriate to the device they have. We have to have contextually relevant interfaces appropriate to the device the world is running on. They don’t need to be 3D or even graphical. Designers need to be very clever and design new interfaces that permit the virtual world experience to scale up or down and change the user experience according to the device hosting the environment.
I’m in the same camp as Christian Renaud. It’s time for a rethink about the functions and uses of virtual worlds, and especially if we are going to try to incorporate them with the real world. We don’t necessarily need to be able to move around or fly or dance our avatars in a large 3D world all the time, but that is one useful view. “Movement” is not the main driver of the new UI. Maybe users access the full, rich environment only when they are on their desktops with high powered video cards. “Chat” is a main driver of the new UI. It must be done right and be so intuitive that even a first time user doesn’t need to read instructions to use it. “Building” (or content creation) may or may not be a driver of the new UI. Building a new office may be unnecessary on mobile devices, however, perhaps there are some aspects of it that could be done satisfactorily on the commute home. “Memory” may or may not be a driver, since heavy graphics drain batteries faster than text over a static background.
“Meetings” are a main driver of the new UI, too. There are ways to make them more accessible, for example, limiting access to only the meeting space, or limiting the chat UI to the traditional two pronged main conversation and “whispered” private comments while viewing only text or slides. Different tools and different levels of detail are needed for these different views, and perhaps that’s what the new UI needs to be…a choice of “views” that the user can choose according to what they want to do at that moment or what device they have at hand. Or even better, the device knows its limits and automatically accesses the virtual world in the way best suited to the device. Workers in the field on mobile devices could still feel connected to their teams if the device is smart enough to scale down the virtual environment to their tool set and the power available to it.
One thing is sure. Mobile devices and virtual worlds have a future together. Like most relationships, though, there will be a lot of talking and disagreements before they successfully arrive at the altar.
