Clever Zebra - Top Ten FAQ Profile

1. What is a mixed reality event?
2. What makes Web Alive such an innovative development?
3. Can you address some of the issues surrounding Second Life?
4. Describe some of the challenges unique to a virtual event.
5. Is cost more a factor of the platform or the services required?
6. What are some of the problems typically encountered by speakers?
7. What kind of attendance numbers will current technology support?
8. What are the consequences of overloading the event space?
9. What factors do you consider when recommending a platform??

10. Are closed events more secure than open events?

What is a mixed reality event?

A general mixed reality event is where you take an audience in a virtual world, perhaps at an exhibition, perhaps just in a meeting hall or in a simulated board room and using video and audio, you connect that audience, that in-world audience with a physical audience, perhaps also at an exhibition or in a meeting hall or in a boardroom, and the two audiences connect via video and audio and can actually communicate together. So, part of your audience is virtual, part of your audience is physical.

What makes Web Alive such an innovative development?

One of the nice things about this is perhaps not so significant to the meetings industry crowd per se, but in general what makes it exciting is that the 3D virtual world can integrate fully with the browser around it. So, you can have the 3D window and be moving around talking and have spatial audio, be able to hear somebody coming up behind you on your left as they’re speaking to you and watch a presentation, attend an event. But also, on the same browser page, objects that you interact with in the 3D world can change the dynamics of the page around you. So, in the Lenovo world, for example, you click on the laptop and at the bottom of the screen, on the actually html webpage, the screen changes and you see all of the laptop specs and you’re able to buy it and so on.

Can you address some of the issues surrounding Second Life?

I understand that Second Life can have what I’d like to term “game taint.” It has this appeal, this persona as a game, and people don’t acquaint that with business. But it also has this sort of adult side and these scandals and all the kind of things that we’ve heard about in 2006, which also taints the Second Life world. I understand it from a human point of view, but the argument I would put back. The problem I have with it when we talk about Second Life having adult content, we don’t talk about the internet in those terms. We’ll use the internet every single day; we use email, we use web pages, and you can go and find porn and all kinds of other good stuff on the internet at any given moment and open the wrong email from a friend and have not safe for work pop up, and this stuff happens all the time. And we don’t talk about the internet like this. Why are we worried about Second Life?

In Second Life, there are business environments and there are private secure places where you can hold your meetings and do stuff and there are adult websites or adult islands, and there are game islands, and there are all manner of other things. And Second Life is a vibrant and diverse culture of magnificent proportion. I mean it’s enormous the amount of different things you can find going on in Second Life. And I think that the CD aside, Second Life is just one very small facet of the larger whole.

Describe some of the challenges unique to a virtual event.

Well there are a couple of big ones. First you’ve got a problem with whether or not your audience will be able to understand that median, whether they’ll accept the median. Now RIMS, the Risk Insurance Management Society recently held a conference for 511 of its members over two days I think it was. And their membership was sort of average age, around the fifty years and above mark. So they’re not kids and they dealt with it fairly well. But there are some audiences and some demographics that perhaps might not deal with the virtual world as well. You also have to get over hardware issues. With Second Life for example, you have a massive hardware issue right from the get go. Say you’re in an association and you’re doing an event like RIMS to extend the reach of your annual general conference. How many of your potential attendees actually have hardware capable of running such a high end piece of software like Second Life? And that doesn’t mean that you can’t do it, but it means that you need to think about what platform you’re using.

Is cost more a factor of the platform or the services required?

The latter. It’s something that I’ve given a lot of thought to just very recently actually because this space is still very new and, along with other companies in the space, we are still figuring out pricing models. It makes some difference but not a massive difference between platforms because they’re all reasonably comparable.

But, the services that go with those and actually make a virtual event successful are not fairly constant, and things like training audiences, training speakers, setting up the virtual space, securing the space, making sure that everything is choreographed, coordinated, and run smoothly, and all of the other event services that you might lay on. You might do sort of a virtual lanyard for example, social networking functionality to go with an event. All of these things are fairly constant and you know they’re needed by most events. The platforms whether it’s Second Life, Active Worlds, OLIVE, or one of these other platforms are not… they’re all fairly comparable in cost. (Michael, he seems to contradict himself in this statement. Above, he says services are NOT fairly consistent, but at the end, he says they are. Not sure which is right. I’ll leave that edit to you.)

What are some of the problems typically encountered by speakers?

Speakers tend to think that this is going to be easy: “I just have to walk up to the stage and start speaking.” And they invariably have the wrong kind of mic, or the wrong set ups, or don’t know how to walk to the stage, and it can make for an untidy and unprofessional looking event. We solved that problem pretty dramatically by just saying if you’ve not gone through speaker training, you’re not speaking.

You have to absolutely make sure that if you want to run a professional event as opposed to a debacle, you have to make sure that your speakers know exactly what they are doing. And that they feel comfortable with the technology, and that your speakers are actually going to have a fantastic time, just like the audience. Nobody wants to stumble physically or virtually, and metaphorically tripping up the steps on the way to the microphone in a virtual world is just the same as doing it in a physical world. It’s embarrassing and nobody wants that for their speakers.

What kind of attendance numbers will current technology support?

That’s a point of contention with virtual worlds at the moment. In Second Life there are hacks that will allow you to get more than the sort of average amounts of people you can get on one island. You can think of an island, if you’re not familiar with these terms, as a server, as a piece of hardware housing the code for your website.

So there are ways that you can push forward with these islands together and you can hold an event intersection so you can get fifty to seventy people at each island and ramp up your figures a little bit. But it’s a hack, and these things have a tendency to fall apart, and we’ve used it and we continue to do things of that nature, but it’s not the best results one would hope for.

With virtual events, you’re still looking at fairly small figures. You’re still looking at participants… events under a 100 people at any one time. And the sort of active world setup that we currently use, we can get about 250 people running in that environment, which runs reasonably smoothly. In Second Life we can accommodate really up to about 250 to 300 people but like I said, it’s not ideal.

Typically we recommend people keep virtual worlds meetings reasonable small. At least for now or at least until the technology matures to the extent where you can reliably get hundreds of people into a virtual space at one time.

What are the consequences of overloading the event space?

The more people you have in a virtual space, the more likely it is to go bang. You know, we’ve had a hundred people on one server. And you can do that kind of stuff, it’s doable. But it feels like the floor is shaking; it feels like at any moment the whole thing might go pop. And occasionally it does, the whole server reboots and your meeting goes down.

Your having a hundred people on one island is something you do for fun if you like messing around with this stuff. It’s not something you do at a professional event. If you’re running a professional event, you want really no more than fifty people on average on an island.

What factors do you consider when recommending a platform?

We’re platform agnostic. If you want to do an event for 100 people and you want exhibitors, the way that we look at this is that we’re platform agnostic. If a company comes to us and they want an event for a small amount of people, Second Life is often a very good choice under a hundred people.

If they come to us looking for an event for 200 to 400 people with stools, with booths, with breakout rooms, Second Life often isn’t the choice and we would push them to an Active World solution. If they cancel us and they want a solution that can sit behind the firewall for a high level, high security meeting, neither Second Life nor Active Worlds would be the preferred platform of choice. We’d look at something entirely different. We might look at OLIVE for example. It really is a question of “horses for courses”. I don’t know whether you have that phrase in the states but you can guess what it means. “The right tool for the right job.”

Are closed events more secure than open events?

I think in terms of private events, that’s [producing a closed event] actually an easy thing. It’s a myth, for example, that in Second Life, if you hold an event all kinds of hooligans might turn out to disrupt your event. It’s certainly possible if you don’t take the right precautions, but the right precautions are ever so easy to take. It’s just a matter of switching a couple of switches on a control panel and you have a private secure event. Not military grade secure but certainly secure enough to hold [off] the majority of immaturity of internal corporate events.