Posts Tagged 'עולמות וירטואליים'

Diving into Secondlife and ‘The Forbidden City’

Published November 23, 2008 Uncategorized Closed
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The Israel Internet Association is holding its November meetup today at IBM HQ, with an interesting session about virtual worlds – diving into Secondlife and a guided virtual tour of The Forbidden City, IBM and China’s Palace Museum 3-year long project. The meeting will start at 17:00, networking at 16:30. Feel free to RSVP at facebook event page.

About The Forbidden City:

The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time is a partnership between IBM and the Palace Museum in Beijing, China. For more than five hundred years, the Ming and Qing emperors ruled China from the palaces of the Forbidden City. The art and architectural treasures from this period are the cultural heart of modern China.

The principal goal of the project is to provide the means for a worldwide audience to celebrate and explore Chinese culture and history. As an IBM Corporate Citizenship project, the project marries world-class subject matter with world-class technology innovation. It is a premiere showcase of IBM’s leadership in virtual worlds and cultural preservation.

The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time is the world’s first online virtual world dedicated to a country’s cultural heritage. This is presented as a three-dimensional replica of the square-kilometer palace grounds called The Virtual Forbidden City.

IBM opens a virtual tour of China’s ‘The Forbidden City’

Published October 14, 2008 Uncategorized Closed
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Following the opening of The Hermitage Museum and Eternal Egypt, IBM unveiled the virtual version of China’s ‘The Forbidden City’, a 3 year long project, with The Palace Museum.

Links:
The Forbidden City – beyondspaceandtime.org
IBM press release (June 2006)
FT.com – IBM unlocks the gates to Beijing’s ‘The Forbidden City’
Calcalist – IBM presents a tour at ‘The Forbidden City’ (Hebrew)
The Palace Museum

The Hermitage Museum (Russia)
Eternal Egypt

Social networks, meet virtual worlds

Published July 28, 2008 Uncategorized Closed
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If you’re following my twitter it’s easy to understand why my blogging activity during the week is kinda slow – I’m out of the office most of the week, visiting customers, talking to business partners and speaking to analysts – not to mention the KM and Collaboration Event we’re throwing on Sep. 8th !!!
Register now!

My interest with virtual worlds began some 2 years ago, when I read about IBM’s activities in Second Life. Since then I spoke about those initiatives and held some public and internal workshops, trying to explain why IBM care about SL in particular and virtual worlds in general. Since taking Lotus Software sales under my arms I decided to focus on Lotus (big surprise), but still read and subscribe to some VR colleagues, local and international.

Coming Thursday (July 31st) I’ll be at the DiGRA Israel Summer Forum, ‘Where Games and Real Life Meet‘. My friend Dr. Hanan Gazit asked me to participate in a panel called ‘When Videogames, Social Networks and Virtual Worlds Merge‘, alongside Mr. Asi Burak, Mr. Guy Ben-Dov and Attorny Jonathan Klinger.

If you have Thursday evening off, and want to hear about the future of social networks, join us at Holon Institue of Technology. And don’t be a stranger, come and say ‘hi’.. 🙂

Links:
DiGRA Israel Summer Forum (En)
DiGRA Israel Summer Forum (He)
Registration
Holon Institute of Technology
Map

IM-ing and virtual worlds

Published February 3, 2008 Uncategorized Closed
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What the future holds for virtual worlds? will Second Life continue to reign the scene in 2008 or will other environments be introduced? maybe There.com? or Active Worlds? what business applications will flourish? and what do we want VW to do for us?
Many questions, not as many answers. Roo Reynolds and Ian Hughes have tried to answer these and other questions about virtual worlds in a recent podcast to Voices in Business blog.

One of Bob Sutor’s challenges for virtual worlds in 2008 is to allow instant messaging (IM) between virtual worlds.

Work to allow instant messaging between virtual worlds. I am “Nigel Paravane” in Second Life and I’m happy to provide that information on sutor.com or Facebook, for example, so that messages can be routed to me when I am in or out of that world.

I couldn’t agree more. As virtual worlds take center stage in 2008, the integration to real world will be crucial for survival. The opportunity is in that connections. One of the presentations at Unified Communication session at Lotusphere was given by Konrad Lagarde, Lotus Sametime development manager. Konrad showed some beta features currently being tested, that ‘may or may not be included in the future’.

Lagarde then showed his avatar running to a meeting in a virtual world. Once there, he uses a passcode to take control of the conferencing features in the room before putting up a slide show on a screen. The virtual room also was equipped with softphone voice communications and a whiteboard.

Already Lotus Sametime provides multiple services, other than the basic text chatting: integration with VoIP, integration with video conferencing systems, ability to add plugins (Eclipse based), chat outside the firewall (Sametime Gateway) and much more. Connection to Second Life is underway, and it won’t be long before you’ll be invited to a Sametime meeting, at a virtual place, with avatars representing the participants.

Links:
Bob Sutor: Seven challenges and priorities for virtual worlds in 2008
Networkworld: Lotus toying with Sametime features

Impressions from a virtual world

Published January 17, 2008 Uncategorized Closed
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After attending and speaking at the Virtual Worlds, Real People Conference this past week, I must say my interest level in virtual worlds has risen. First of all, IDC Herzeliya managed to organize excellent agenda, that really covered, or tried to cover, every aspect of VW. The speakers are active users, either academic of business, including Moshik Miller, a very passionate Ph.D student, doing his Doctorate on the economy of virtual worlds at the Technion. I also met Dr. Yesha Sivan, a metaverse researcher, who spoke about the Full 3D3C (3D, Collaboration, Creation and Commerce) – an interesting way of measuring a virtual world. For instance, World of Warcraft is superb at 3D (amazing graphics) and Collaboration, but lacks in Creation (everything is created by the game) and Commerce (no real economy). Secondlife is good at Collaboration, Creation and Commerce, but lacks in 3D (very low graphical quality). During the break-outs I had some discussions with participants who were intrigued on IBM’s activities and keen to find out how we can work together. There are 2 on-going projects right now, that obviously I can’t comment on, but will do so in the coming weeks.

Here are the slides I showed. You can download them [PDF format, 6MB] here.

More presentations are available at slideshare.net/dvirreznik.

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Mobile & Media Consultant. I help startup companies launch products to the consumer market. Reach out: dvir.reznik [at] gmail.com
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This is my personal blog. The postings here do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my past employers or of my clients. It is solely my opinion.