1. At the TV Show Australia next week he is presenting about Social Television now and in the near future and how Inspiring the stories of tomorrow with social mediawill make TV truly and finally interactive
   

   Santa Clara Convention Center

2. In Santa Clara, CA he is opening the business track by presenting New Augmented Reality Business Models at the worlds biggest Augmented Reality Conference known as the Event
3. And in June Gary is presenting at GameTech on Pervasive Entertainment and the exciting merging of Games, Film/TV, Geo-Caching and Social Media

Gary is also presenting at various adhoc conferences such as Creative Sydney here where he is MC’ing & presenting on various Transmedia & Multi-Platform Content sessions.

More details on each of these below and if you want to speak to us about how MUVEDesign can help you realise your projects in these areas look at our service area and contact us here.

‘Multi-Platform’ TV Show

Australia 2011 27-29 Apr Sydney

Day 2  2.10pm Inspiring the stories of tomorrow with social media

The Augmented Reality Event 2011

May 17-18 Santa Clara, CA, USA

The Augmented Reality Event 2011 will feature industry luminaries: Bruce Sterling, Vernor Vinge, Will Wright, and Blaise Aguera y Arcas. ARE 2011 will include more than 100(!) speakers in 30 sessions organized into 3 tracks: business, technology & programming, and production & design.

The 2 day event will feature more than 33 hours of talks running the gamut of AR essentials in 3 tracks: Business, Technology and Production:

1. Business – For executives of established and start-up AR companies, as well as mobile hardware companies – in search of business models and promising verticals for AR;  a venue to form partnerships, learn about latest innovations, and most importantly speak with clients.
2. Technology – For Developers, programmers and technologists seeking the latest and greatest engines and tools for AR; learn from case studies and post mortems delivered by experienced developers from the leading companies in the space.
3. Production – For Producers, designers, project managers (in gaming companies, agencies, marketers, brands, and artists) hungry for proven techniques to leverage augmented reality to advance your brand, attract and keep your customers, and build successful campaigns and products that will delight users.

Day One – Tuesday 17-May-2011

• 8:15-9:00 am ARE 2011 Press Conference  Moderated by Ryan Wagner Great America XK – First Floor. Opportunity for AR companies to announce new products with major tech media
• 9:00-9:45 am Keynote: Bruce Sterling Wired Main Theater
• 10:00-11:00 am AR Market: Today and Tomorrow Business Track  (Great America J – First Floor)
  • Gary Hayes (MUVEDesign)- New AR Business Models
  • Laurel Papworth (Community Crew) – Building Mobile AR Social Communities for Business

GameTech

21-22 June 2011 Sydney

Video games and interactive entertainment has come of age, and it’s serious business. Games have emerged as the pinnacle of consumer entertainment. The interactive entertainment industry is now faced with unprecedented popularity, unparalleled growth and significant opportunity.

“The global video gaming market is expected to grow at a CAG Rate of 8.9% to reach $76.1bn in 2013”*

The benefits of this are not just restricted to the video game developers and publishers- all areas of the value chain and the wider industry arereaping the rewards of this growth opportunity. As users are shifting towards new platforms developers and publishers are changing their business models to wrestle for market share.

• Gametech is a 2-day conference blitz of learning, inspiration, solutions, and networking. It is the most comprehensive event on games and interactive entertainment in the region, and will provide an unparalleled event experience.
• Gametech is for those who wish to benefit from the explosive growth in video gaming. Whether you are part of the industry value chain or whether you are considering interactive entertainment as a tool for your business.
• Gametech features visionary presentations, insightful case studies, lively debate and expert information on timely cutting-edge business topics of interactive entertainment and gaining from video gaming technology.

Gary’s is presenting on key areas of Merged Media and how Gamification is acritical component of all multi-platform content forms

1355 – Pervasive Entertainment – Games, Film, Music, Print & TV merging with audience networks

• Assessing the concept of Pervasive Entertainment and how it is affecting the games industry
• How are brands extending to transmedia?
• Reviewing the business models behind geo-social / augmented reality games
• Learning form relevant case studies
• What models of media production, distribution, and consumption are implied by these future
• visions of entertainment?

Gary Hayes, Director MUVEDesign & Founder StoryLabs

ROUNDTABLE 15.10 - Unleash the Power of Interactive Entertainment – Diversifying Your Product Offering with Video Games

• How has the appeal of video games widened to new audiences?
• Underlying the process of developing games to compliment existing products
• Is there a limit as to the nature of business capable of benefiting from games
• Finding the right monetization model to support a standalone games product
• Key ingredients for successful games for social media platforms
• How can games and interactive entertainment incorporate features such as user-generated content, sharing, rewards and referral programs?
• Key steps to monetize new social gaming environments?

Sam Doust Creative Director, Strategic Development
 ABC

David Peattie Managing Director
 Hasbro

Hugh Baldwin Director of Television and Content Acquisitions 
Nickelodeon, MTV

Gary Hayes Director MUVEDesign & Founder 
StoryLabs

But the purpose of this pretty detailed post is to simply list and try to categorise the many types of business Augmented Reality apps appearing in the market and to try to identify opportunities.

Augmented Reality Business by Gary Hayes

According to wikipedia, the first manifestations of AR appeared in the late 60s, became real in the 70s and by the 90s were already being used by major companies. Now portable computing is finally powerful enough to deliver AR to anyone who has a smart phone or latest generation PC or console. For those unfamiliar here is my simple definition of Augmented Reality.

Information, 3D models or live action blended with or overlaid onto the physical world around us, in real time. A camera & attached screen is used to view the combination of real world and metadata or rich media. Devices or systems commonly used for AR include:

• Mobile devices with inbuilt cameras such as iPhone, DS Lite, PSP or Android
• A head mounted display HMDs (eg: glasses or futuristic contact lenses) attached to a wearable networked computer
• A PC or Mac with webcam
• A games console with camera accessory
• A large TV screen with advanced Set Top box and Web cam
• Others in development

There will be hundreds of business, marketing and educational applications alongside the many 1st generation entertainment examples currently emerging. As usual the video game and porn industries are pioneering the research and development of the technology but we are about to see a plethora of more mundane utility & life enhancing applications about to swamp the market. Combine this with hundreds of space cadet ‘toys’ and viral fluff and we start to see the beginnings of a large industry. Of course the usual caveats apply but unlike say virtual worlds which suffered from too much early hype, these apps are much more accessible to anyone with a decent smart phone, up to date games console or computer with webcam – there is a big difference.

But before going onto my list (which is of course non-exhaustive) here are my basic types of Augmented Reality from a slightly technical perspective but which we can apply to commercial and marketing applications. My presentations and paper have much more detail with specific case studies of each.

GARY’S FIVE TECHNICAL TYPES OF AUGMENTED REALITY

1. Surface – The most understandable form of ‘reality that is augmented’ would be screens, floors, walls etc that respond to the touch of people in them providing them with virtual real time information or collaboration
2. Pattern – The AR system performs simple pattern recognition on a shape, marker (usually on a framed card in the real world scene) or face and replaces it with a static or moving element e.g: a 3D model, info, audio, video stream or loop etc: You view the ‘items’ in the scene with you
3. Outline – This is where your hand, eye or body outline is picked up and seamlessly ‘merged’ with the virtual elements. Simple example where you can pick up a 3D object that doesn’t exist because the system is tracking your hand outline.
4. Location – Based on detailed GPS or triangulation location & position/view of the camera/device the AR system can overlay information precisely over buildings or people as you move through real space.
5. Hologram – Using ‘smoke & spinning mirrors’ literally in some cases, virtual or real items are ‘projected’ into the physical space you are in and can be interactive with based on cameras tracking real world impulses e.g: hand gestures or audio signals

Before the more detailed list I embed my summary flickr chart whose purpose is to try to categorise types of business orientated augmented reality apps so to identify opportunities. The graph places 16 on axes of commercial value (likely revenue or marketing potential) vs adoption (scale of popularity vs a niche, client user base). It is a starting document to aid classification of this emerging commercial sector that I hope you find useful. The AR types, color key linked to each model is suggestive only. (Click on image for enlargement over at my flickr pages)

Below are longer descriptions of my top 16 Business Applications/Models for Augmented Reality and I suspect I will develop twenty more before the day is out! I have tried to break up some of the big AR areas such as ‘locative AR’ and separated them into several opportunities. This is an exercise looking at the marketing or commercial ‘intention’ vs a traditional pure business model, broad approach. It is a starting document to aid classification of an emerging commercial sector that I hope you find useful.

1. IN SITU: Aiding sale by seeing projects & products placed in the environment before completion. The benefit of a customer or client seeing a finished project, before it is complete. For example 1) real estate agents can scan and show an empty house full of stylish furniture or 2) an architect who can show the billion dollar client the skyscraper as a model perfectly aligned with the other buildings on the empty site and 3) Customers who want to see what the clothes look like on ‘them’ (as in the Zugara video above and Cisco below). The list of applications goes on.
2. UTILITY: Selling life enhancing AR applications perceived as useful. Development and commercial sale of applications such as underground train orientation, bus stops & times, traffic alerts, airport gates & plane arrivals etc: all overlaid in real space. Sometimes called AR browsers as they cross reference what or who you are looking at with anything or everything off the web or like this UPS example allows you to see if your ‘stuff’ will fit the ‘virtual’ postal boxes.
3. TRAINING: Hands-on with complex equipment and work scenarios. Using ‘outline’ recognition this allows us to be virtually ‘hands-on’ with complex equipment in difficult-to-practise work scenarios. Bomb disposal, surgery, flight simulation. . Indeed according to wikipedia the actual phrase Augmented Reality was coined by Tom Caudell in 1992 while at Boeing where workers trained to wire aircraft on AR systems. A massive industry for the developer community charging b2b rates.
4. SOCIAL GAMING: Both connotations of the word, pay-per-play mixed reality games in physical space. The potential to run pay per play (e.g: virtual paintball style) games in physical location and also live connected betting on sports or other competitive play – e.g: You point your iPhone at the horse and wirelessly place a bet – mid race! (odds adjusted of course) or using basic surface AR you play with others in a new kind of ‘games’ room!
5. LOCATION LAYERS: Blended guides to new places, tourism, enhanced travelling or themed space. For travellers just arrived at your city, theme park or other experience you can provide them with pay for tools that will help them take the most ‘mutually beneficial’ route after they arrive. Free data from wikipedia, local bloggers or more commercial entities add depth.
6. VIRTUAL DEMO: Display to promote sale, of product in pre-release or remotely via catalogue etc: To promote advance sales before the consumer gismo hits the stores, an AR display or the device/s so potential customers can manipulate it, see it from all sides, even customise the order. We may see future stores displaying the majority of items on the shop floor as AR while the item is shipped to your house before you get home! The reverse of this, an AR catalogue (as in the Ikea video below) that pops up models to help you build or see the product in 3D.
7. EXPERIENTIAL EDUCATION: Pay-per-visit educational services to museums, ancient sites etc: Pay-per-visit (ppv) to visit highly experiential museums, theme parks, zoos, ancient sites or exhibitions but with a higher purpose of providing deeper levels of information & visual sense than a simple plague or hard to follow guide book ever will. The sleepy animals in the zoo come to life, the ancient fossil is animated into an overlaid Google Earth, the Battle is enacted ‘on the original battlefield.
8. ENHANCED CLASSIFIEDS: An AR directory that promotes local 3rd parties product & services overlaid at the location. One of the obvious apps where someone in a city or town looking for a specific item could be ‘guided’ to it. A very affiliate model where the company that owns the Augmented Reality listing mechanism will take a slice of any fulfilled sales. A lot more to this of course.
9. 3D VIRALS: Branded company or personal promotion & ads using ‘cool’ 3D toys. Pattern based 3D model that entertains and is spread virally. The YouTube moment as a million links to cool ‘3D stuff’ that takes place next to you. Already we see some AR apps that allow you to record scenes of you interacting with said ‘3D viral’ and pass those around too, titillation, quirky giveaways– JibJab-type, put ‘you’ in the cartoon but revered, they are with you in 3D space.
10. PERSONALIZED SHOPPING: Walking around stores made relevant, opt in personalization and targeting. The oft mentioned Minority Report example. But in the pulled model, here you can deliver information to potential customers scanning stores, streets or shelves for discounted or personally relevant products.
11. COOPERATION: Service industry for augmented virtual meetings. We are all familiar with video conferencing, a few have dabbled in 3D virtual world get togethers but AR meetings are a game changer. The potential here using ‘discrete’ personal screens is to have the inevitable remote meeting with live feeds of your colleagues, blended into your room – pay-per-ARmeet
12. BLENDED BRANDING: The equivalent of hoardings, virtual poster ads. Once given a reason to be scanning outdoor areas with their AR devices the potential to deliver topical, timely and relevant ads or branding into the scene. Again care must be taken as AR spam (like social network spam) will quickly irritate, but like free to air TV, using various sponsored or freemium biz models will mean a certain amount of branding will be acceptable.
13. AUGMENTED EVENTS: Pay-per-use of enhanced sport or pop concerts. At live events spectators can pay and then scan their view of the ‘match’ for the latest information on sporting achievement or pop star gossip and of course tracking trails or watching replays in situ, merged over say a static real sporting scene.
14. INTERTAINMENT: New form experiential TV and films. Following on from my ‘AR story’ post, we know people will pay a premium for a new kind of ‘film’ experience where you ‘live the experience’. How about one that plays out at ‘your’ place. Semi customised marker or location AR apps will layer Brad or Angie into your lounge, onto the coffee table or your ‘composited’ in real time into the latest Mixed Reality TV show. Combined with 3D viewing technology will make Blu-Ray seem so 18th century.
15. UNDERSTANDING SYSTEMS: Creating AR for internal or exploded views of complex objects. Primarily useful in training or helping sell something where physically taking it apart is not possible a view of a car or other complex object can be enhanced. Labels or even an exploded view in real time can help get the message across.
16. RECOGNITION & TARGETING: Pushing ‘relevance’ to outdoor consumers – facial recognition linked to online data. To be used with care! It will be interesting to see how privacy laws affect this but in a pushed model you could ‘scan’ visitors to your store, identify their faces, do background links to their ‘social networks’ followed by personal targeting while they are shopping. We all know this is going to happen!

Some examples:

CISCO’s future of shopping

BMW Future of Car repairs

Augmented Reality in Marketing and Sales

James Cameron’s Avatar – Augmented Reality Entertainment

IKEA’s Future Augmented Reality Catalogues

To finish a few lines that describe one of my presentations coming up that acts as a nice conclusion…

It has been called the future of social mobile networking, experiential marketing and entertainment, Augmented Reality is about to snowball. With hundreds of apps launching onto iPhones, Games Consoles, Advanced TV and your PC this new technology allows us to view our world in exciting new ways. Once the domain of science fiction or super computers this new technology, blending the real with virtual, is now literally in the hands of everyday consumers and business. Augmented Reality is simply using a camera with screen to layer rich media and information over ‘our’ real world, in real time so we can now scan and layer web info over products and people in the store or street and provide virtual, ‘in situ’ hands-on demonstrations and deliver the ultimate ‘guide’ to our complex physical world. Is AR the new 3D viral experiential marketing or another temporary fad?

Finally, finally for those interested here is my Augmented and Mixed Reality YouTube playlist if you have an hour or so to spare to view the current collection of 60 +

Tran-social-media-play [tran-soc-shuh-mee-dee-uh-pley] noun, verb

1 noun – a new form, a means of collaborative communication through play in constructed shared ‘media-rich’ environments

2 verb – taking part in game-like activity across and within online and offline social networks and media portals.

Can we truly create meaningful immersive media ‘experiences’ for others? Ones that last, are memorable, have impact & emotion and keeps the ‘experience players’ coming back for more? I am currently building services, working on papers and delivering courses on Experience Design and this post is a quick summation of some of the background thinking and good case studies.

Life is filled with so many exciting twists and turns. Hop off the straight and narrow whenever you can and take the winding paths. Experience the exhilaration of the view from the edge. Because the moments spent there, that take your breath away, are what make you feel truly alive. © 2000 Stacey Charter

Filmmakers and marketeers are clearly moving into #TranSocialMedia Play in a big way with a triple whammy at the moment of Star Trek, Terminator & Lost (fan) ARG’s and a raft of social media campaigns across other film and TV properties (some much better than others!). I have written about worlds immersion and cross-media design many times in the past but this post looks at the addition of social play into the mix – a permanent fixture.

Transocialmedia play design has historically been the domain of theme park builders, after dinner murder mystery writers, letterboxers or installation artistes – always based in the physical realm with the best examples reliant on group social interaction. But immersive play like this has also been with us since the first MMOGs social games inside fantasy environments and are another side of a triangle which also includes the new kid on the block (adolescent teenager) 2D social media. The main premise of the below diagram is simple – all encompassing transocialmedia design should be centered in the triangle and incorporate these three dominant forces. (there is a lot more to the diagram especially around hybrid services, but it will have to be another post)

TANGENT

A minor diversion but totally related to hybrid services, I was sent a tweet from Ms. NPRIL last night.

BettinaTizzy“Could Disney-Pixar’s 3D film up lift virtual worlds?” this blogger asks. http://tr.im/lEkm – What do you guys think of this? @GaryPHayes?

@BettinaTizzy Good 3D opens the door, inside? the anim film delivered as an auto story route in a home 3D engine where you can also explore!

The actual article was about exposing large numbers of non-gamers to 3D and whether this would turn them into ‘virtual world’ participants. But more than this I am always keen on drawing attention to media forms in collision and future looking mash-ups – as cinema becomes 3D and games engines become filmic (quality wise) why not deliver the film inside the game engine – not as cut cinematic 2D but the whole thing in 3D. You press play and the story arcs unfold around your avatar (perhaps your invisible perhaps your an extra – who knows!), voices play out from the characters and in some scenarios you can interact where the story makes sense. You as the film player can move around inside the environment the drama is taking place, certain action scenes you can jump inside characters and so on. That way from a screen entertainment point of view at least, you can also play/backchat with your social peers inside and around the story – now that would be an experience?. But this is really another whole post so I will continue…

BACK TO THE STORY

The ‘online distributed story’ courses to Directors and Foundation students at AFTRS often start with thinking about what is the nature of true meaningful collaborative play and what serves the story. What does one need to ‘create’ to turn passive story viewers into active story players? When we talk about play there are two key ‘spaces’ – within the screen and with-out the screen. Students already immersed in online 2D social space immediately don’t see the value of the social mediums – asking a fish to explain water. They soon see the potential though unlike many ‘non-social online’ creators who often try to merge crude old-school practise into fragile social media and like a bull in a china shop find it hard to engage. I use a variety of tools and exercises but the simple workshop template below helps story tellers plan and quickly understand two sides of the triangle – 2D social media and 3D online worlds.

But as we know screen media only tells part of the story which is why promotion agencies and enlightened storytellers alike are (to borrow from Dale’s Cone of Experience again) moving into memorable forms of contrived and direct purposeful experiences in the real world and realise that real stickiness will come from the activities at the bottom part of Dale’s Cone.

This is all leading to a few recent examples in the transocialmedia space – mostly campaign casestudies hence the marketing bias and hat tip to casemovies for some. The first is from 42 entertainment, demonstrating how to create purpose, community and elements of role play on massive scale as part of the lead up to the Dark Knight film last year.

Another major launch last year was for Halo 3 and as they were really promoting 3D virtual space it made sense that the unique elements of this transocialmedia offering (albeit low on the social side) was the creation of a large physical model to bring virtual into physical space and then promote the ‘memorial’ throughout urban environments. Halo 3 incidentally became the biggest entertainment launch of all time.

I often use these four simple levels of cross-media design that I wrote on wikipedia some years ago as a framework to differentiate using platforms as just distribution (CM1) at one end to a seamless contiguous experience at the other (CM4). The fan created Star Trek Alternate Reality Game linear summary of a typical user journey, certainly adheres to the description CM4 ‘experience’ and goes where other ARGs have not gone before!

Cross-media 1.0 – Push. Minor variations of the same content placed on different platforms. E.g.: A slight re-edit of the audio for podcast or a transcript diced and sliced for a making of type website and more of now, watch the TV show on the TV, web or the DVB-H or 3G mobile phone or an iPod video download.

Cross-media 2.0 – Extras. Content that is already being produced but not destined to be delivered and repackaged onto other platforms so it appeared to be ‘original’ or at least specially created. More about the wonders of a good content management system than the true potential of cross-media.

Cross-media 3.0 – Bridges. Where most innovative 360 thinking is currently rooted – where the content placed on the other platform is critical to staying in touch with the narrative or service.The narratives tease you towards investigating or moving (via a bridge) to another media form/platform.

Cross-media 4.0 – Experience. To some extent this is producer ‘hands-off’- in that they have created an environment, much like a game, that the participant/s ‘lives’ inside of, following their own path, personalizing the experience. A cross-media 4.0 property is at its height a creation, a collaboration with the audience across many devices, which evolves and grows a life of its own.

As an interlude, an example that only uses two sides of the triangle that I had to include which demonstrates the power of a contrived, controlled physical event that then massively propagates across 2D social media – yes it’s Antwerp Train Station does Sound of Music.

An example of traditional ARG design that fails to use two sides of the transocialmedia triangle and will get lost in the noise is the rather stalled Skynet series of videos that were being used to launch the new Terminator movie. It does have an interesting Twitter element at http://twitter.com/skynetresearch that is now spilling out into Facebook and beyond – worth keeping an eye on. “Skynet Research is dedicated to eliminating human error.”

I had to add this example for two reasons. It is very clever marketing first and foremost morphing the meaning of a basic food product into one of the scariest browser ‘environments’ on the web – also it combined the two sides of the triangle 2D social and 3D world by creating the browser world – Hotel 626 as real horror experience. Many users were actually too terrified to explore this space – not bad for Dorritos!

Transocialmedia play design is still in its infancy as all sides of the triangle above evolve. Social networking is constantly moving towards being more real time as twitter growth demonstrates. 3D worlds are becoming much more integrated with real and 2D social space as well as becoming a far more ‘representative renderl’ of the real world which itself is being invaded with highly sophisticated mobile and pervasive computing devices. The real challenge at the moment is avoiding gimmick and surface superficiality but developing deep well threaded stories that afford a deeper more investigative engagement. I have noted the design of recent ‘media plays’ to be rather linear, find clue A that leads to clue B and so on vs much more non-linear quest. Many also fall into being over authored, complete and don’t allow contribution or collaboration (although that will happen regardless somewhere else if you haven’t allowed for it). One of the biggest challenges is to mature the form.

There are many who see transocialmedia play as purely marketing, there to sit on the coat tails of existing well known brands (such as AI, Halo, MacDonalds/Olympics) vs being of themselves for themselves. Admittedly there are a few of these scattered around but the player base is usually much lower. To finish a small, mini ARG transocialmedia play I designed last year called the Old Forest – which had a good mix of 3D mashed with physical world and a team social component. The story was fictional, looking at witches, spells and fires – you can find more detail about this and other mARGS on the Laboratory for Advanced Media Production wiki.

There was a rather sad epitaph to this mARG as exactly a year later the whole town of Marysville was tragically burnt with great loss of life in the worst Bushfires in Australia’s history. Truth is far stranger than fiction.

Appendix

For reference here is a abridge copy/paste from a post on an immersion post from 2006 – looking at the factors that enable immersive experiences.

SCALE – of the experience. The size of the screen and the amount of story world to explore has enormous impacts on immersion – as well as the detail of individual objects within the ‘world’. One of the reasons cinema will exist for a long time is that the large dark room filled with people is a captivating environment. Now, imagine a cinema where the image is a locked off-shot, of a shared world and all the audience are controlling and representing different characters engaged in a common goal or story. Ummm.

SENSES – goes without sayiing that the amount of senses that are engaged by an experience gives it most potential to immerse. Now as I have said before we dont need to consider full immersive reality rather make sure as well as intellectual and emotional engagement you consider sounds and the grammar of visual. Probably forget about touch, taste or smell for the moment – leave that to the porn industry to work out.

SERENDIPITY – how the world or show you are watching has elements of surprise. As mentioned earlier the more scripted and formulaic the less immersive. People only watch a film for the fifteenth time, I believe, because they strangely hope that there may be something different OR they are peeling back the layers, looking at minute detail and looking way beyond the basic narrative.

STORY – does the narrative engage. This is obvious, if there is nothing for you to be drawn along by (even your own story in some cases) then you will switch off.

PERSONALIZATION – Hence the title of this blog. How much can you minutely affect the world and yourself in it? How much will the world reflect you for being there? Most importantly, how much of your real world personality can you bring with you into the experience.

RESONANCE/CHOICE – How much control or agency do you have over the experience? Are your actions permanent and seen by all? Can you really do and say what you want – freedom of choice. True resonance is like a virtuous circle, you do something and there is a response that forever changes the environment. Like real life. The pushed media of TV, radio, cinema has zero resonance, it all happens in your head. Which is why stories ‘have’ to be based on life’s shared drama. In truly interactive models your actions have impact and will reaction will take place.

TEMPORALITY – How real time does the experience feel? Scheduled TV never feels real time – the only successful shows in the future will be live events, music, sports, live news etc: Everything else has a dubious future in the scheduled world. MMORPGs feel real time when you are in them because of all of the above. Ones that have scheduled events or require you to invade or fight at a certain time are more about story than true immersion.

ESCAPISM – or ‘play’. This goes back to my earlier point about the reason for play and associated spirituality. Is it as much about escaping reality or constructing ideality?

Does the representational nature of these ‘experience’ worlds mean so much more subconciously than endless souless advertisements on TV, or another episode of a soap, or fomulaic hollywood film? Does selecting an identity that is impossible to achieve in real life become a most powerful addictive escape? I suspect all of the above. In terms of building ‘play’ – it should be as fun making it as doing it. I have mentioned before that sometimes authors of experience get so lost in the creation process they forget someone has to watch, play or take part in it! Then it is much weaker an experience.

But back to social virtual worlds and I have quickly mapped some dates and SVW events (most are recent) onto a slightly modified Gartner ‘hype cycle’ curve. For the uninitiated here is a brief wikipedia definition.

Since 1995, Gartner has used hype cycles to characterize the over-enthusiasm or “hype” and subsequent disappointment that typically happens with the introduction of new technologies. Hype cycles also show how and when technologies move beyond the hype, offer practical benefits and become widely accepted.

Of course in reality we have really been through a sine wave quite a few times since 1987 through 2005 but since the relative maturity of services like Second Life, There and others true and robust applications are emerging, beyond the traditional ‘gamer/entertainment’ use. MUVED created a post a few weeks ago showing widespread investment in a range of niche virtual worlds and this trend is seemingly continuuing apace. Raymond de Villiers, CEO of Wisdom Games is very bullish about the use of these worlds for business communication in a post entitled Growth of Virtual Environment Expected in 2009…

Throughout 2008 the corporate world was exposed to the reality of virtual worlds, which has seen a growing influence on how companies train, market, advertise and communicate. This is a trend that is expected to continue into 2009 as organisations begin to recognise the merits of incorporating gaming into their basket of communication tools.

Raymond makes some mature philosophical points about how the corporate world is now host to a new generation of employee who don’t see these spaces as for geeks and timewasters

For those who have never played a computer game in their lives, virtual worlds look foreign, sinister, scary, and like a waste of valuable corporate resources. However, for those who grew up in a world where they played virtually, their expectation of being able to apply the consequent life lessons will be expressed in their expectations of the work environment. Computer gaming, and the associated virtual worlds, will, as a result, be seen as an increasingly important infrastructural consideration.

Virtual Worlds News puts more of a realistic spin as regards raw investment (tracked over at VirtualWorldsManagement also) into new ventures with a decline (albeit way ahead of the global recession) of venture capital put into worlds – around $101m in q4 2008. In its item $101M Invested in 13 Virtual Worlds-Related Companies in Q4 2008 VWNews believes that there is a move into older generation worlds and those with much more of a niche focus.

With the harsh economy looming larger than ever, it seems like more and more focus is being put on unique niches and markets, established business opportunities, and quick-to-market strategies.

Around the world there are major government and state agency investments looking at the efficiencies and cost savings of using Virtual Worlds. Close to home (Australia) we have the MDA in Singapore committing overall around $70 million to project and services in the virtual world education space, creating around 300 jobs in the process too. I could go on with many examples of global investment in the public sector but we are also seeing expansion of existing services in the private sector a good example being Linden Lab buying two Virtual Goods companies XStreet SL and OnRez. As reported by Venture Beat the micro economy around Second Life is still in growth and Linden Lab will need a slice of that pie (in small rev share of the user to user transaction) to continue its own growth. This is long overdue by the Second Life creators and Venture Beat were keen to state the obvious also

Virtual goods have expanded to become a $1.5 billion market, but Second Life was engineered in the days before the business model was fully proven. Linden Lab residents exchanged more than $360 million worth of virtual goods and services in 2008, making the virtual economy and the ability to make a living one of the big draws of the virtual world. Top merchants in Second Life have made more than $500,000 in real money in 2008.

So there is definitely something afoot at the moment even in serious global recession there is a kind of exodus into virtual alternatives happening. The most important message is that developing on a reasonably stable and mature platform is not a big investment and companies, education departments and entertainment property owners should still see this investment as two key returns in the ‘real time, immersive arena’  – how to create experiential services and how to engage with a community. I leave you with a diagram I created nearly 3 years ago that shows a transition from web 1.0 to web 3.0 and let you decide if and how it maps onto my mapped Gartner hype curve above.

Social Media and Web 2.0 is a lot about providing the tools and therefore the means for everyone to create content, that they believe others may want to see. I have personally created a lot of corporate, professional entertainment and music films over the years using high end equipment but now, like many millions around the world, find it a fun and satisfying process to be able to create films and stories in virtual worlds, aka machinima. (Quite a few are over on my personal virtual blog justvirtual)

There are literally millions of machinimas emanating from the likes of World of Warcraft, Sims, Movies, Halo, Second Life, Half Life and many more. Most are done for the love vs the money and some make it onto the big screen. For the creators it is about expressing ‘their’ world and experiences to each other but of course there is something else as important here.

Laurel Papworth talked recently about a machinima I did in Twinity and the ‘free advertising’ it offers for the brand or platform. For me it is also about creating an environment where simple tools encourage large numbers of people to come together remotely and do real-time, collaborative content creation for extended periods. It makes the world very, very sticky when they have shared creative goals and purpose – not just pre-constructed game play. Some may say game quests are social too and I believe when the players get ‘creative’ with the mechanic and ‘bend the rule’ together it certainly is.

Comfortably Fun

Using game or social virtual worlds to entertain each other in this deeply immersive way, leads us to imagine what the potential will be when bandwidth and graphic realism are no longer limitations. Perhaps a portent of the future here is a machinima I did of a forty three minute performance of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, in a social world, Second Life. It was captured last week and it is useful to remind us all what is going on here. There are around 70 people logged in together in real time from around the world, most audience a few performers. About 8 are ‘animating’ on stage or controlling lights, effects or triggering scripted animations and I am recording the whole thing at the same time. This is digital puppeteering. I captured elements of the performance three times and put together this compilation edit. More after the embed…

So this all started with an invite from a self motivated group, led by Debbie Trilling, who for the love of what they do, created an inworld, cross-reality, musical tribute. CARPs (Cybernetic Art Research Project) inventive and emotionally driven version of Pink Floyd’s 1980′s album was a truly international affair and many hours were spent developing and performing a Virtual Show to this music that reaches a new audience every few years.The reason the music reaches new audiences is because of its use in ‘community created content’ just like this, a far more poignent way to share digital content. More than 2000 avatars have experienced this particular concert inworld generating 10 000s of impressions across blogs and media sites. That is the key point – don’t dismiss game or virtual worlds as being irrelevant because of perceived low numbers – these are active and proficient online users who see the 2D web as a ‘simple’ publishing tool and become prolific creators of content and by implication major influencers.

Professional marketeers need to be aware of the power of machinima (consumer films in worlds they are very loyal too) and how by allowing the use of often locked down content is probably the best way to introduce ‘old’ content to new audiences. As an example, while I was putting together this ‘mash-up’ compilation I tried a recording of the reunion performance of the Comfortably Numb at Live 8 a few years ago and was entranced by the synergy of visual and song. Hope you do too. BTW a medium quality (90MB MP4) download of the YouTube above is available here. Worth playing full screen with the volume up and the lights down

To further consider how effective game world movies are. I created again out of a moment of relaxation a ‘flycam’ film around some of my ‘builds’ in Second Life. I like others were entranced by the new feature in the engine, Windlight. This rendered more naturalistic reflections and skyscapes for example. The machinima was a self expressive piece, some improvised guitar and piano and flowing movement, not really an typical ‘traffic’ generating video.

Ticking along at a few hundred views over a month on YouTube then Linden Lab decided to feature it on their machinima page. For a week or so it was getting between two to four thousands views per day. Over the past four months or so it has been viewed over 30 000 times, not bad for an ‘art’ video? But outside the numbers what is the dynamic at play here? Well it is really simple. If you own any space where people frequent, make it really, really easy for them to share their experiences. You scratch their back and they will yours. Give them the tools to make it easy to create professional looking content. Let them do the viral marketing for you. Even though the community realise they are doing you a ‘big’ favour, the joy they get from sharing is part of their own virtuous circle.