Monday, August 31, 2009

Virtual Thin Clients

From the Yesha blog, a great link to an article about the use of LLMedia to show the output from a desktop application on a prim in SL.

This introduces all sorts of possibilities in the area of visualising running process applications, as you can show the application running in real time on a "terminal" in the Virtual Environment.

Now, if only we could open up the event streams in an OS to the Virtual Environment message passing scripts, then we could have some very interesting thin client, virtual application servers.

Ross

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Second Life Business Report Q2 2009

Second Life continues to grow, despite doom reports about its demise. These results are from Linden Labs., so some sping is assumed. However, there are rules about financial reporting for businesses that should be assumed here as well. So despite reports to the contrary, Second Life continues to be a viable and growing environment.

For me this is not such an issue, since my work in this space is around the Open Simulator project, in particular, using such a world to visualise Business Process Models. But I do have to comment, that this field is still gaining pace as a serious place for business...

Just wish I could get some content out (once purchased) and into my other sims!

Ross

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Business Process Model in a Day

Have been putting together some code in Open Simulator recently, and have noticed the effort involved in creating 3D Business Environments to support any 3D Process Models. Traditional CAD oriented modelling is problematic in this space, as it requires doing the modelling by hand, so to speak, and lacks industrial level methods for generating content. Procedural methods, while able to generate content from programmatic and grammatical constructs, still do not help with representing the information in a specific business.

This is where image-based modelling techniques are invaluable, due to their ability to generate three dimensional geometry from images of an object. Reading the BoingBoing blog today, I came across this project at the University of Washington. The intention is to create techniques and approaches which will allow the building of geometric models of Rome from images in Flickr with Rome location tags.

With such approaches maturing, it might be feasible to use such techniques when trying to generate a 3D model of a business for a process model visualisation. This means that a business analyst could create a 3D model of components of the business from movies or photos taken of key sites in the business.
However, I think the techniques need to mature a little before I would hand them over to an MBA Graduate, just yet. ;-)
Ross