First, what is our general scope of activities?

We design 3D online virtual areas, we make virtual objects, we build virtual areas, we run 3D online scenes for visitors and we incorporate some social web features in real-time to make it most engaging.

Design

The design part is still good old paper, pen and flipcharts. We are seeing a need for more activities to engage users rather than just drop them in interesting spaces to explore and chat with friends. We have some new ideas rolling out now on Heritage Key for quests and virtual field trips for educators. Part of the design is to also share achievements beyond the virtual area to the broader web social action via things like facebook apps, wall postings.  Check out the contest for winning £1,000 to get an idea of how this is working.

Make

This is about creating high quality virtual objects that can be combined later into complete scenes. Main things needed here are textures, meshes, animations, sounds and scripts. There are quite a few tool options for creating these individual elements such as photoshop, maya,  zbrush, qavimator and many more.  Unity3D has a studio set for object creation as does the opensource Second Life Viewer and the SL-compatible third party viewers that modify and extend that code.

Build

Once the discrete elements are ready, then they need to be put into a 3D space for build. The 3D space also has land to be shaped and other virtual world features to consider. Unity3D allows for this build work to be done offline, where the Second Life model is online connected to the server, in our case our own OpenSim grids. Unity handles, presents 3D meshes, where OpenSim is based on its own class of pre-configured meshes called “primitives” (aka “prims” which is why we love prims).

Run

Once the build is ready then it can be published to visitors. The major issue here is dealing with changes after the scene is published. This is where the Second Life model is strongest in allowing for changes to be streamed out to all the connected users. Someone changes anything in an area or rezzes a new object and then it gets sent quickly out to all the people nearby. Unity deals with content in a more static way and also runs game physics locally on the users pc. OpenSim will deal with the concurrency where Unity needs to connect to a service, such as smartfox server,  to deliver the MMO side.  The big opportunity with Unity vs SL-compatible viewers (we suggest Imprudence btw) is to deploy 3D scenes to the browser and mobile devices (iphone, ipad and android).

Social

Then of course we need to deliver all the Social elements including avatar identity and communications for chat, IM and voice. For both games and virtual area access there is also a need for rights, roles and points of some kind.  Ideally the social elements should be available across the web, mobile touch points and integrated with social networks (where possible and not annoying). It looks like Freeswitch is a good enough voice solution even though it is not spatial. Drupal is our core community solution (simple diagram for our tech layout here).

The OpenSim plus Unity3D Issues and Strategy

On the one hand, it would be useful to make everything around an OpenSim region. This seems to give us the greatest flexibility for content creation within the existing limitations of minimum target graphics cards, bandwidth and computers. Actually I think more interactive, smaller scenes are currently more engaging than larger, more expansive areas. It seems to be more interesting for users to see a lot of intimate detail within the context of “placeness” than have them flying across bigger online spaces. This also helps to push users closer to each other and increase social activities.  (see my notes on 3D Web about key features here) Certainly for iPhone, Android and even pc’s wifi access, tighter scenes will run better for more users.

On the other hand, the SL-compatible viewers do not deal with real meshes currently. Although OpenSim can hold the mesh assets, the viewers cannot show them.  Meshes from Unity3D studio and other standard tools are easier to make more photo-realistic as far as I can tell. There are also tons of existing meshes out there to use as parts for scenes.  Yet, getting to high quality complete builds also requires workmanship in either environment and each has its own eccentricities and I guess we currently understand OpenSim a lot better. The definition/boundaries of a single region at 256m x 256m isn’t a major constraint until better physics can be deployed.

The other big open question is how to deal with the avatar in Unity3D. In OpenSim it is possible to customize the avatar with skins, textures and attachments. I think this is also possible to make customizable avatars within Unity, but is quite a bit of work and will make the Unity scene a lot bigger. Unity3D for the browser plug-in also also tied to the browser cache which is a pain. Scenes will reload on a refresh and you cannot create specific content folders to allow for content caching independent of the session.

Unity also does not stream media onto objects–so watching video, slideshows won’t work currently from a live streaming source. Although you can play media if it is shipped as part of the scene contents.  Then again, you can have a stream window in your browser next to the Unity scene if that were useful.

So it all comes back to the fundamental question — how big a deal is using a web app to connect to an engaging 3D virtual online area? My sense is that it is more about the ultimate user experience than making them download something in a few minutes (ok, a massive download is a show-stopper for mainstream users).  It would be a large, challenging undertaking to shove something like the SL-viewer into the browser completely–and what would you really gain vs just making a new generation web app purposely built for OpenSim? Seems like a lot of effort for little real gain. People download things like skype,  openoffice even large videos because they perceive the value in having it running.

Is then our current approach to using Unity3D for an on-ramp to the more immersive offerings still valid. Show them what they are missing and then invite them in? Even if that means the Unity browser sessions will have kind of  monotonous avatars? It seems so today. So we are looking at mashing the concurrency of the Unity sessions with the SL-compatible viewers over OpenSim regions.  In this way people can share some parts of the experience, see who is near them and communicate. Again our goal is to get out to mainstream audiences and we know they are all already on browsers, so this is an important step toward them. The concern is to still pull them into something unique and engaging.

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3D graphical representation of digital information that is interactive and delivered within an online social environment.

The 3D Web is a lot more than a single virtual world. It uses some of the virtual world technologies, but goes way beyond to integrate with web and mobile.  It is a new way to engage with information and people across the global internet.  A lot of major forces are coming together now to enable the 3D Web to go mainstream. Following is a short video were I outline some of the key points about the 3D Web as we see them. Below are my more detailed notes on why that is happening, what is the 3D Web and how big are some of the opportunities.

Above: Watch Video Jon Himoff, CEO Rezzable Describes 3D Web and why it will be a serious factor online

3D is the Hot topic

The movie Avatar is the biggest grossing film ever, pulling in more than $2 Billion in box office (the franchise is planning sequels etc). 3D Movies (including Alice in Wonderland, Clash of the Titans, Train Your Dragon)  in the US market were more than 33% of all box office sales since mid-December. You can bet that there are a lot of new films being planned for this amazing format now. Some interesting detail on how Dreamworks makes 3D movies.  (check Intl 3D Society for industry info).

Beyond the big screen of course is your home television, where 3D is also headed fast and furious. Expect to see a lot of new  consumer electronics and digital cameras for capturing 3D and sharing it back online (some gadgets now for sale). Samsung is betting big that the market will be 85 million 3D televisions units sold in 2015. The 2010 Masters Golf tournament had a special 3D broadcast so there are even some experiments for 3D native content.

I think people love 3D because it is so much richer. You can absorb a huge amount of detailed, stunning, energizing, detailed information very quickly. Your brain is working a lot harder to assemble all this data into something comprehensible.  It is a much more stimulating time. Once you get into3D,  consuming flat content is like looking back at old Polaroid pictures.

Yet, it won’t be reruns of “I love Lucy” alone (ok, I would actually watch that) that will people will want to see after getting all their kit sorted in their home. This new format will also need new types of content (Cameron is urging TV to get into gear and start making new stuff).

For online consumers, the drip feed of single thread content is too slow=boring.  Active online consumers already don’t have the patience to sit passively still and slowly swallow 10 minutes blocks of shows in-between tedious ads. Already people are augmenting their tv viewing with twitter and facebook to make it more dynamic and social. They want to drive their own action. The want to be the stars of their own shows. They want to get to specific or related content fast.  They want to have a lot of chats, interactions flowing as part of their viewing time. It is a tough audience with increasingly complex demands to meet.

Collision of Gaming and Social Web

Games already grab the attention of millions of committed users. Online games are of course interactive and offer something to do online. It is a seriously big business. World of Warcraft (WoW) has more than 14 million customers paying about $10 per month. WoW owner Activision (ATVI) is blowing its numbers posting $1.3 Billion in revenues for the last Quarter. ATVI has a $13 Billion market cap today.  Farmville, a rather thin social game,  has attracted more than 75 million players–Zynga boast more than 230 million players across its games.  Zynga may even have an enterprise value itself of $5 Billion. Then there are the console games which have the kind of dedicated fans that sit out in front of stores waiting for new releases. (on its first day, GTA IV sold 3.6 million copies and generated $310 million in sales.)

• ITunes is projected to grow from $6 Billion in 2009 to $29 Billion in 2013 — and a huge portion of activity and revenue is from games.
• IBM is rolling out a corporate leadership training game called “CityOne“

Aside from the fun of playing them,  online games are also very social. One of the drivers for Zynga is the integration with Facebook to not only attract new users, but to give a sense of status back to the participants. So social is not just about meeting/making friends, it is also about staking and enhancing your identity in the online realm.

Game guru Koster teases out the impact of social games as: ” The value in these networks lies in the connectivity to friends, the easy distribution of content across the social graph, the web accessibility.”

The potential of the 3D Web is to deliver then the next level of rich media that takes the best of gaming and social web–but also delivers this for mainstream content (ie not the ole ultra-violence first-person shooter, porno, gambling or fantasy role play).

What is the 3D Web?

Elements of the 3D Web have already been imagined in science fiction and key parts are out there on the web today.  It is more than a lone virtual world–it is an ever-growing web of content that can be viewed via 3D graphics and eventually in 3D.  This will be a lot more complex than clicking between websites and browsing pages or watching videos.

In the near future, the best of the 3D Web will probably be described as combining all of the following factors:

• 3D Graphics and 3D
  3D scenes that you can move into in high quality and very detailed. It will need to be more than cartoons and 2.5 kid stuff to grab mainstream users. 3D graphics, in contrast to 2D photos,  are like videos you can walk (or fly) into in some way. It will also be possible to present these scenes in 3D to users with new viewing software– the content is already good to go for the glasses and just needs new viewing software.
• Synthetic Places
  There already are streets, cities, locations modelled from real or created new that have a digital geography and are bound by a sort of gravity and physics. People get to know them and understand areas within them just in the way you would know a public park or mountain trail. They can get crowded or be empty. When you log-off these synthetic places are still there and evolving. When you come back they may be different. Or they may disappear.  I like the term “Placeness” which sort of captures the real and the ephemeral nature of these digital venues populated by real people.
• Your Avatar
  This is your navigation, your presence and your guide to the virtual online areas. You control your Avatar like a sort of puppet. It is very tedious now to push it along with a keyboard and mouse. Our trusted computer companion the Mouse is on the verge of extinction.  New natural movement interfaces like Natal from Microsoft and Omek will remove that strain from users by allowing control from simple human movements. Further, the look of your avatar can be customized to reflect your real personality (or not). Personalizing avatars is also a big digital content sales opportunity that some are valuing in the $billions already.
• Real-time Social
  You are connecting with people in real-time across the web. It is much more immediate than swatting messages around the net. Meet/make friends and also establish yourself within the global communities that you want to dip-in/dip-out of.   The 3D Web pulls together the visualization, light interactions and status factors in a completely new way.  For many this phenomenon is very threatening, but also very liberating. It will open the entire world to itself — fast and dramatic.
• Useful & Varied Things To Do
  Mainstream users are seeking activities online that help them do something meaningful. And they also want enough variety within easy access to give them the freedom to dip-in and out of experiences. Hot online transactions today include things like tracking news, buying travel services, buying media and dating.  This is a key distinction from the gaming world or virtual worlds as they are today. People will use the 3D Web to add value to their real life and help do important things better.  Just in the way that people us Amazon to buy stuff or Expedia to book travel, the 3D Web will offer more efficient ways to do things online. As an example at Heritage Key you can learn about history in an entertaining way and then even plan a trip to a real world site.  Modern life in 2010 and beyond will be increasingly complicated (and maybe dangerous?) and the visualization, interaction and social capabilities of the 3D Web will be the platform to survive.
• Easy to Use
  Within the next 2-3 years all the clumsy, stumbling technical issues will be solved somehow. Already we see that software like OpenSim has made major progress in the last 12 months. The more people use it, the more chance things will get sorted. Then the complicated parts of the technology will be invisible. People can access the 3D Web across pc, mobile, tv.  Also the big improvements in natural movement control will allow users to enjoy their online time more.
• New Types of Content/Experiences
  It is a more complex environment and needs a more goal-oriented path to keep people from getting overwhelmed. Just because it is there, does not mean people will stay around any more than they hang-out on web pages after they scan them.  The 3D Web offers more and visitors will demand more, just in the same way you have an expectation that on vacation the real world place you visit should be better then the one you departed from.

Net Net: the results of the best of the 3D Web will be Immersive. This is where a switch in your head is released and you believe in the digital content that you are using. The engagement here is very high. It has a personal impact way beyond anything on the web today.

Massive Market Opportunities

• Reach 600 million connected users by 2013
  1.7 Billion PCs in 2013 and 1.82 Billion mobiles means probably more than 600 million users will have access to good enough systems and connectivity to tap the 3D Web usefully.  Intel is betting big on 3D Internet: Sean Kohl: “With the availability of all this computing power, we’re only beginning to exploit it. Now we’re adding more intelligence and more capability.”  That total market will continue to grow dramatically (add the 85 Million 3D televisions also!). More market statistics on the 3D Web here.
• New Online Use Cases
  The 3D Web will enable completely new things online especially around groups of people enjoying shared experiences in real-time. This will change how education is delivered and open new opportunities for people to work together on projects.  Visualizations will also be very exciting as well as role play and simulations. In general it is all the same kinda stuff that spurred the internet forward in the early 1990′s but in a more complex, intense format.
• Premium Customers
  The quality 3D offerings will be something that people will be willing to pay money for. There just won’t be that much good stuff and there will be tremendous demand.
• New Companies
  This is a fast moving space. New companies can focus in on creating new users experiences and tools to answer the challenges.  It is still amazing to remind yourself that Google and Amazon are only around for 15 years. Facebook was started in 2005. There are tons of 3d Web opportunities across technology, infrastructure and new content experiences.

The 3D Web is the newest Frontier

We have taken the first steps down the 3D Web road with Heritage Key.It is a new online community with a totally unique virtual experience. We think it can be the basis for a new range of “real-time, online communities.”

From our side, we are focused on delivering a powerful mix of educational and entertaining content (edu-tainment?). You can transport yourself to the Valley of the Kings and enter King Tut’s tomb. You can understand how small a tomb this is and then go to a surreal cosmic gallery to see dozens of the most incredible ancient world artefacts every discovered. Your only other chance to see the artefacts better is to actually go to Cairo and visit the museum. The best pieces of the discovery do not travel as part of any of the Tut touring exhibitions.

Online you can get up close to see the details with your friends or participate in a live lecture. And the virtual environment lets you even travel across time to go back to reconstruction of a day-in-the-life of King Tut (check our highlights video here). You can wander a stately home in Amarna and get a feel for how the Nile supported the vibrant Egyptian culture for thousands of years. Watch Heritage Key coverage on CNN here. The market for people that buy culture travel services and related media is global and large. We think Heritage Key can add something useful to actual visits as well as helping people learn about why the ancient world is relevant to their lives today.

I would point out that the main take-away on Heritage Key is that we are trying to mix the online community which has the broadest reach via web and mobile with the 3D, virtual experience which has the deepest possible engagement. It is early days on this, but we can see that the combination makes sense and has huge potential.

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Our web-oriented event and content series -- the Ancient World in London -- will run for 3 months. It is an example of how online communities to use a broad mix of media and tools to create new, popular content.

The Community Challenge

I don’t expect that just because we will make more web content and tools that those efforts alone will generate meaningful community effect. We will need to meet people live and mix events and contests into the action the online content. Part of our mission with Heritage Key is to make history/archeology more accessible and allow people to participate (somehow).

Visitors will be invited to join:

• Contest and Quests in London and in new 3d online virtual areas — and of course win cool prizes
• Contribute articles, images, video clips (and get paid a little)
• Attend lectures, discussions
• Help us complete a massive listing of places, artefacts, key people, timeline events and publications
• Share their ideas on good tours of London

Getting the balance between local London and sharing that online = globally will require attention. We are also excited about the Grand Finale event which will be live in London and webcasted/virtual simulcasted. It will be an ancient world costume party.

The content will be hosted using our Rezzable Real-time Community Platform which is comprised mainly of Drupal and Opensim plus a bunch of code of our own. More about our tech here.

Event Partners Still Needed

We have the main sponsor in place, but still are looking for Event Partners to support events and offer relevant prizes or services to the events/content series. If you might be interested please drop us an email at info@rezzable.com. It should be a great opportunity for a range of companies that might be interested in understanding more about the social web, online video and virtual 3D online.

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More brains the better? Sorry this is sorta disgusting. But the point is about getting more people involved via online communities. (French brains, not human btw).

It is of course ideal to have community members enrich content–but is UGC to hard to deal with online? Is it too random and too much spam? How to get to the next level = Community-Inspired-Content (CIC).

What is Online Community Content Co-Creation?

There are 3 main participant groups need for a co-creation program: 1) Brand 2) Community Manager 3) Community Members.  The Community Manager (which is how we see our role at Heritage Key) needs to create the focus and deliver the program.

The Brand and the Community Manager should frame the focus of the content and outline the mix (video, articles, interviews, virtual, real world events). The real new area is to get the right balance between commissioned work and user generate content (UGC).  UGC needs to be on-point with the focus, but more importantly needs to allow the Community Members their own space to participate.  I think the real world events are an important part of this.

The Co-Creation program should run over a period of time like 3-6 months. We think of it as a sort of series. People can then catch if from start or  catch-up through referrals or web buzz around the activity.  You can also have an endpoint where you can convert content into a final package.

Benefits to Brands

• New Relevant Web Content – Content is unique and will fit major interests of the community members. It should also be branded and embeddable off the main microsite (via widgets or YouTube players).
• No Other Brand Interference — it would be exclusive to the sponsoring Brand. No noise, no unexpected placement. And the microsite area would be much more engaging than an Brand controlled site.
• Community Interaction — program should offer people chance to contribute (for free or payment), share opinions, contests, join real w0rld events.  Ideally there should be some time-based momentum designed into the program.
• Leverage Existing Brand Assets – Brands can repurpose or simple use existing assets and place them in proper context/linking to new content.
• Fresh Ammo for PR — Program should give PR/Marketing teams new materials to work for customer and media outreach.
• Destination to Drive Promotions — Brands can use their existing email lists to drive customers/prospects to microsite for targeted promotions. Surveys can also be very useful to learn more about customer needs.
• Speed to Market – Community Manager should be able to deliver program rapidly and across 3-6 months time period to build momentum.
• Innovation – Brands should seek Community Managers that offer web site, websphere, and interactive applications that when combined with new content will be very exciting.
• Lower total costs — Co-Creation should not be massively expensive. It will have potentially high CPM metrics, but you would expect reasonable total costs and good CPA downstream.  It is key to understand that co-creation right now is a way to access the early adopters and thought leaders within the communities, so it should also be considered as a strategic play.

We are working on Content Co-Creation programs for Heritage Key that will be focused on visting/experience history of ancient world sites. These programs  will mix video, virtual and article content.  More info will be shared soon!  Get RSS or follow us on twitter @xlent1 or @heritagekey or for virtual content @rezzable .

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The video publishing process has a few important elements:

• Hosting — where the video is stored and how people can stream it
• Transcoding — converting the original HD show into various formats so people can view it on their choice of device
• Embedding — allowing other bloggers to insert your video into their blogs to add value and also drive traffic back
• Search = Findability — remember most traffic comes from Google these days, so make it Google-friendly
• Distribution – what other channels can your show zap across to reach as many viewers as fast as possible.

The biggest recent change in Video publishing on the web has been that Youtube allows you to post a 1-gig, 10 minute HD file. This was a big move and dented most/all of the competitive services. Google of course also crawls YouTube and weights popular videos high on results page.

But as we are aware now, YouTube is not organized for good/any customer/publisher user service, so now the competitive offers are about service and support unsurprisingly.

We hear a lot of great stuff about Hulu, but they only stream within the US at this time. Also they seem to be more oriented around the big studios, tv channels. So I had a look at some of the other options including Vimeo and Blip.tv .  While they both seem to have about the same publishing offer as YouTube, Blip has recently pumped up its capability for bigger distribution and even some hope for monetization support.

You could of course try to host your own video using server/hosting/player combo including Longtail JW Player, or Flowplayer. If anyone has any experience with these it would be great to know how good/bad these options are. If you are going to go on your own, then you need to have a good hosting contract (with unlimited bandwidth!).   The main benefit is that your content would only be available from your site/servers, but then again you might lose the audience hitting the other platforms.

Our feeling right now is that actually YouTube is not driving that much traffic to http://heritage-key.com, but Google is. So probably we are sending more of our traffic to YouTube right now, then the other way around–but we hope to see some lift as our heritage Key Channel popularity increase (so please favorite our videos!)

Hot-Swap Options for YouTube Videos

In addition to finding a hot-swap for YouTube in the event that something random happens again, we also wanted a better way to publish to iTunes–which Blip.tv offers as part of it distro mix.

Youtube is so big = 1.2 billion streams a day and growing, that they just don't seem to care about servicing the smaller content creators. You need Youtube, but you also need some hot-swap options

So first we had to make a quick tidy on how we even handle the Video files.  We set-up a Lacie NAS in our office to hold the final shows archive. We went for a 4terabyte rack mounted one, but actually you can get cheap 1tr desktop versions now also. Just make sure you keep back-ups!–as video seems to kill drives frequently enough.  Anyway, make an archive, organize all the show related stuff into folders.

Then in addition to posting to Youtube, also post the video to Blip.tv. It is a little more effort. Blip has an posting utility that works ok or you can use ftp.

Our site runs Drupal where we have a specific content type to post the videos and related information, descriptions (see an example). So to present the video to a site visitor we want to use the embed code from YouTube. Now we will also hold the embed code for Blip.tv in case we have to quickly switch over. We would just need to make a simple change on the Drupal code to present the blip.tv embedded player rather than YouTube.

Blip Does A lot More than YouTube — Distribution to iTunes

While I did send an email to Blip.tv people and still no reply–it would seem more likely to get someone on the phone from Blip than YouTube–which is impossible.  I even stumped up for the Pro Account, which is of course a nice show of support, to get the iTunes publishing capability. Publishing to iTunes is not so straightforward.  Blip will also flow your show across a lot of other sites, channels including aol, twitter, facebook, vimeo and internet archive. Interestingly they also send to Tivo and some hotel channels. See Blip.tv distribution info here. So if you want iTunes then Blip is an easy way, plus you get the additional benefit of other downstream audiences off their platform.

They also have a feed to YouTube. But as far as I can tell, the feed is to their Blip.tv channel on YouTube. I am not sure if this is so useful as it would mean our content would be on YouTube twice–deflecting the traffic from our channel and also annoying Google SEO. But if you didn’t have a website this might be a great option. Blip also will share the monetization from YouTube that only the larger YouTube content partners can get their paws on now.

So that’s our latest thinking about how best to publish, manage our video content using the big elephant YouTube but also watching out not to get stepped upon. If anyone has any other ideas, please share here. Any question drop them in the comments.

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