Name droppings

Yep, we have been written up in the news again at Metaverse Online Journal.

Ross

BPMVE In the News

It has been a while since I have blogged here - due to a double teaching load this semester. So I will start proceedings off with a bang. My work, as blogged here, has made it to the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and the Courier Mail - Brisbane. All the papers are owned by the same people of course.

Apparently I am the creator of YAWL now...not sure Arthur ter Hofstede will be that impressed.

Ross

Web Two Point Gazillion

This is a vision from Mozilla labs regarding web browsing in the future. My guess is that it has many applications in the area of process and service visualisation. Note the use of a 3D Mouse Like interface - like the one available here.

Sublime navigation cues...

This would have to be the best use of the Human Visual System's capabilities for navigating 3D environments correctly via visual cues. It is installed right here in OZ, at the Eureka Tower Carpark.

One criticism of using 3D environments in the first person, is the difficulty of navigating them correctly - slapping such textures over your visualisations might just do the trick.

Ross

Kzero Metaverse Analysis Information

Kzero have released their analysis of population and marketing statistics for virtual worlds. This is represented as a Universe Graph. Note the position of Second Life in the 30 plus age bracket. Others are larger, but have a younger demographic.
Possibly suggesting more scope for serious use of the technology, than other fields.

I would argue that this is due to the configurability of SL, and its ability to garner information from other sources on the internet, and produce visualisations as such in situ, as we have shown with business processes at QUT.

BTW, the graph is a nice intuitive visualisation of Age Demographic with Age of World using a Polar Coordinate approach.

Ross

YAWL and Second Life Linked

My intern student from France has been very busy, and has completed his project with me at QUT. We now have YAWL and Second Life talking to each other, in a similar way to my earlier work with Half Life Two in previous posts.



I have embedded a video from Youtube of the system in action, titled Clik Goes to Hollywood. What we have done in effect is to facilitate the 3D collaborative visualisation of dynamic business process models. The visualisation has been developed from the 2D YAWL control flow model illustrated at the top of this post, into a 3D animation in Second Life, embedded below as a video. The process model illustrated is drawn from the YAWL4Film project being undertaken by the BPM Research Group at QUT. Clik, the avatar in the animation, is not controlled by a human, but is controlled by the YAWL workflow engine.



More will be revealed as I duly publish some papers...

Ross

IBM and Linden Lab Interoperability Announcement

Maybe I should have title this one "Beam me up Scotty." Over at the Second Life blog there has been a recent announcement of the ability to teleport out of Second Life, and into Open Sim environments on other servers. Thus a portal technology, developed as an OpenGrid protocol, means that avatars (not real people yet :-) ) can move between different forms of virtual worlds.

Suddenly struck me tonight that this is a change in perspective, with regards to logging into an IT system. Your embodied avatar (your ego centre in these worlds) is able to transfer itself along the Internet. Thus instead of you having a sense of being stationary, and traversing the computer systems you use, now your ego centre (embodied as an avatar) moves to the location of the computer system you are interacting with in a faux spatial transformation.

What has this to do with business processes? This means that instead of dealing with an abstract system with menus, dialogs and such, you actually can map the process system into a 3D space for interaction. My questions are:

• What does this do to your perception of an information system?
• Does it make it seem more immediate? - as its controls are mapped to intuitive, spatial and temporal artefacts for you to manipulate.
• Do you have a greater/lesser sense of control?
• Does it change your understanding of what the process model is doing?

Lots of research questions here to explore...

Ross