I've recently been involved in a data warehousing project, and of course I immediately thought how useful it would be to be able to represent vast volumes of data in an immersive 3D environment, to be able to walk through or fly over the data, to 'experience' it.  Two videos released this week demonstrate the ongoing efforts to do exactly that using environments such as Second Life.  The work from Green Phosphor below shows data from a spreadsheet be in displayed immediately in Second Life as a grid of 3D bars, dynamically updatable.

This is great, but only a first step.  I imagine the data being represented in a much bigger way that can be flown over or through.  But it's a great start.

The other is a video of the new ThinkBalm 'data garden'. 

This is an attempt to represent the results of their report on the business value of immersive environments in an immersive way again in Second Life.  I should say that I haven't had time to explore the data garden in Second Life itself yet, but I think the video highlights one problem with using video clips to demo these environments.  It's impossible to see the value of the immersive technology from the video.  Frankly I found myself heaving a huge sigh of relief each time the video zoomed in on the 2D graph - at least that made sense!  Many of the things in the garden seem to be using 3D for the sake of it without considering the value added.  So I love the idea, but the video just doesn't convince even me, a real 3D evangelist. I'll post more observations after I've visited the garden 'for real'.

The Clever Zebra guys have joined the OpenVCE project which aims to proved an open source set of tools and artifacts for collaboration, meetings and training in 3D spaces well integrated with traditional 2D tools like blogs and wikis.  See Nick Wilson's post for more details.

This interests me greatly as there will be significant overlap with some work that we're doing to provide an integrated system for taking content from a collaborative 2D content management system and allowing the collaborators to launch a meeting in a 3D space (currently SL, soon to be OpenSim too)  taking the content with them to display on a scrollable, clickable browser, and having tight integration and archiving of the meeting chat with the original CMS.  All part of a big push to make 3D environments easier to access and really useful. I'll be fascinated to see what come out of the OpenVCE project.

Analyst outfit ThinkBalm have published a detailed report 'Immersive Internet Business Value Study 2009' outlining the results of a survey of 66 organisations and 15 in-depth interviews covering 2008 and Q1 2009 focussing on the value to businesses of adopting immersive internet technologies, by which they mean virtual world environments.  The report makes highly encouraging reading, giving weight to the anecdotal evidence reported in previous studies that these environments are of significant value and utility.  I would urge reading the entire report, but here are some headlines:

• 95% of those surveyed reported some level of success ("Is or feels like a success")
• More than 40% saw positive total economic benefit, ranging from $10k to more than $1Million and 42% said they 'didn't know' (which probably suggests that they didn't have mechanisms to measure it, not that there wasn't any)
• 74% said they would or might expand their investment this year or next
• Learning/Training and meetings most prevalent use cases
• Reasons for preferring over alternatives - low cost, increased engagement
• Biggest benefit - enabling people in disparate locations to spend time together, followed by opportunity to show innovation and cost saving
  

There is a wealth of interesting information in the stats and charts, and the usual range of technical hurdles  were raised by the interviewed participants.  One of the most fascinating conclusions was that the level of engagement means that "Immersive meetings are more like real meetings than they are like web conferences"

Given the stature of some of the participants - Microsoft, IBM, BP, BAE - a report like this should be taken seriously by anyone wanting to improve the nature of collaboration in their organisation.  And if you've read it and want to know more, see a demo or launch a pilot - contact us :-)

IBM's Social Computing group have published an interesting paper entitled "Acquiring a Professional 'Second Life': Problems and Prospects for the Use of Virtual Worlds in Business".  It details the trials that the group have done with a variety of business users and outlines both the issues met and the benefits to be had.  Rather like the Forterra 'Recipe For Success' paper that I wrote about, the most useful aspect are the user anecdotes and quotes.  For example "Comparing other technologies, big step up. Can probably adequately replace F2F for some tasks.", or "I really do think there's potential in using Second Life to collaborate in teams".  It's worth a read.

So just as my interest in Sun's Wonderland virtual world platform starts to really kick in, Oracle goes and buys Sun.  Now what?  Is it worth investing time building tools and solutions on Wonderland?  I don't expect Oracle to allow resources to continue to be devoted to the platform given the rather speculative nature of the technology and the lack of any kind of prospect for income from it in the near or even middle term.  But the virtual world community is one of the most enthusiastic and committed of any I've seen, so I'd venture that Wonderland might end up as a truly independent Open Source project, like OpenSim and, from an enterprise viewpoint, a better bet for collaboration. 
My growing interest in Wonderland has been triggered by the incredibly hackish ideas I've had to come up with to do useful collaborative things on the SecondLife/OpenSim platform.  For example, I've got prototype ideas for a scrollable in-world browser/document displayer for SL, but there's a lot of work required to achieve something that Wonderland just gives you via the X11 shared applications support.  Similarly, collaborating on say a spreadsheet or a text document in SL involves either rendering it as a bitmap and uploading it (automating the upload via a bot is also a hack but one I've already implemented),  working in an online equivalent like google docs or a decent collaborative online CMS, or using a desktop streaming client viewed using the QuickTime capabilities in SL.  Again Wonderland supports shared apps, so no issue (especially if you already use OpenOffice).
I've got a lot invested in tool development in SL, and for the moment it is still the most expressive and immersive platform, so I plan to continue working with SL but any spare time I get I'll be pushing Wonderland too.