Architecture Islands to link up with EOLUS

I just received this and thought you might be interested:

From Common Interests to Common Borders

Eolus One, arcspace and Architecture Islands are announcing that they will be moving to a new location on the Second Life grid, and will now be sharing common borders as a contiguous group of islands. The move is part of a concerted effort to unite some of the brightest minds as well as the most ambitious projects in Second Life.

While each group will retain its own identity and function, the new archipelego will now collectively represent a wider range of the complete life cycle of the real estate industry, including education, development, architecture, construction, facilities management and investment management.

arcspace Island is founded by KK Jewel (Kirsten Kiser in real life), publisher of arcspace.com, an architecture and design magazine that features today's most creative projects, as well as the most influential of the past. KK made the move to Second Life in early 2007 to build the arcspace Community as a platform for interacting with readers from across the globe, for collaboration, for building, and for exploring new tools and techniques.

arcspace provides customizable cubes to readers and members of the arcspace group and, in addition to supporting and building a sense of community for its readership, arcspace holds exhibitions, discussions and competitions. (http://www.arcspace.com)

Eolus Islands, founded by Eolus McMillan (Oliver Goh in real life). On July 6th 2007, some of the worlds top technology innovators unveiled a think tank, called EOLUS One. These unique, multi-cultural, geographically dispersed individuals put Eolus One in a position to come up with new ways of working in the competitive, dynamic, intercultural global business environment. EOLUS One brings together service providers and innovators from many disciplines and industries as one community to create new solutions that take full advantage of the 3D virtual environment to research and develop innovative real to virtual integrations to create virtual operation centers and dynamic 3D visualization tools for the Real Estate Industry. (http://www.eolusone.com)

Architecture Islands founded by Keystone Bouchard (Jon Brouchoud in real life), and was intended to serve as an incubator for architects, designers and students who wanted to explore the potential for Second Life to be used for both professional and academic applications. The islands hosts meetings of the 'Architecture in SL' group, and provided space for the first two Wikitecture experiments, intended to explore the potential for Second Life to be used as a platform for architectural collaboration. (http://www.archsl.wordpress.com)

IBM, Virtual Transactions and Spatial User Interface

Virtual World News have just run the following story: "IBM Looks at New Virtual Transactions Methods"

It's not exactly a huge article, so I have taken the liberty of re-printing it whole:
"IBM aims to invest the majority of its research and development dollar into building software that can link traditional transaction systems to modern interfaces, for example, releasing automatic teller machines that link to banks in virtual worlds such as Second Life," said SVP Steve Mills. Of course, IBM also has its eyes on its own platform, Multiverse, so Second Life is likely only one application. The Smart Bank Application simulates high-volume banking environments and links virtual ATMs to real-time authorization from a core banking system over the Web. The ComputerWeekly article highlights three purchases that build into IBM's transaction strategy. The company announced plans to purchase Princeton Softech to give users cheaper storage and greater access to historical data; in July it bought Data Mirror, a package that allows real-time transfer and identification of data; and in June it bought Telelogic to help users develop industry-specific software.

This seems to be something of an emerging trend with Second Life - and doubtless other Virtual Worlds. In effect - and to simplify over-much, I admit - this would see the use of 3D environments as a sophisticated development of the User Interface (UI). Let's step back in time...

WARNING! What follows will fall somewhere between "ludicrously technical" and "childishly simplistic", depending on your knowledge of IT. Sorry.

In the beginning, the UI was a set of manual switches and some flashing lights. Time passed, and in due course along came the punch card and the printer, followed by the teletype. Up until this point, computers were only to be used by people with bad haircuts, beards and pipes - and I'm not being gender-specific. The first great democratisation of the UI came with "green screens" - suddenly ordinary people could use computers, new applications allowed trained people to wallow in the richness of a 24 line x 80 character display, awash with information. The advent of personal computing saw the introduction of the GUI - the Graphical User Interface (thank you, you foresighted folk at Xerox Palo Alto). Graphics helped deliver (supposedly) vastly more intuitive and powerful representations of information through the "windows metaphor" - we entered a world in which each pixel could convey meaning, and computing was open to just about everybody.

Client-server architectures were a logical step forward, linking the friendly user interface of the GUI with the grunt power of enterprise applications - the ones that had previously been accessed through "green screens". The web user interface and multi-tier client-server architectures have been a further refinement. Here, just a tiny slice - the visual display element - is run on the client's own machine, while virtually everything else, the logic and information (the "big chunks") of the application, is stored and run on big, grunty machines elsewhere.

Now we have reached the next logical progression - the Spatial User Interface. In 3D, we are granted spatial depth, freeing us from the limitations of a flat graphical display* and allowing us to build ever more creative metaphors and models with which to take input and deliver information. Visualisations can be more interactive and more compelling than ever before - and it is this that IBM are tapping into. In effect, the virtual world is acting as a spatial user interface to large commercial back-end systems, using multi-tier client-server architectures. I said this is something of an emerging trend, since the Eolus One Project, previously covered in this blog, is also working with the same metaphor (and also includes IBM as one of its core participants). I think we can expect many more such initiatives in the coming months and years.

Interesting times...

* I know we still see Second Life on a 2D surface, but the interaction is spatial. I am also aware of ignoring the brave souls in the world of CAD-CAM. Such is life.

Eolus - A Big Leap Toward 3D Internet

Before I went off on my recent city break to Tokyo, I was chatting with my good friend (and, coincidentally, my SL landlady), Ludo Merit. During the course of the conversation, she asked me whether I had heard of a think tank called EOLUS(I hadn't) and would I like to get in touch to find out more (I would). She put me in contact with Eolus McMillan, who invited me over to the EOLUS ONE island for a chat. I came away from the chat with my head buzzing with all manner of stuff that would take a while for me to inwardly digest. As a sizeable chunk of the discussion was about the convergence of Second Life (and Virtual Worlds generally) with making "a Better Planet", and recognising that I would not have time to blog it, I got in touch with Tara5 Oh (Tish Shute of the excellent Ugotrade blog) to see if she would pick up the cudgels on this one. I was certain this would be of huge interest to her, and so it proved - check out her giga-post here.

Normally, I'd give you a rundown on the island, its features and its raison d'etre. However, I think Tish has already covered that more than adequately - as has VeeJay Burns at Mindblizzard. My main reason for this post is to talk about what I derived from the EOLUS session(s) - plural, because I also spent an hour or two there today. Before that though, here is the EOLUS conceptual architecture - not quite Zachman, but it works!



EOLUS as Think Tank
Perhaps the key philosophical driver for Eolus is to act as a think tank where creative minds can get together and explore how to apply Second Life as a vehicle for achieving a Better Planet. Some of this comes from the pioneering work being done by Implenia (one of the RL companies in the "EOLUS consortium") in the use of technology to improve building efficiency. But already ideas have been streaming in for using SL as a visualisation tool - for example: to illustrate solar water disinfection.

EOLUS as RL-SL Integration Solution
The think tank is a great idea, but is not unique within Second Life, which teems with forums and think tanks. However, where it wins out is in taking the visionary ideas from the think tank into practical implementation. There are already a number of integration points between SL and non-SL applications. However, the majority of these exist as "proofs of concept" and are aimed at improving personal communications between SL and internet-based applications. EOLUS takes the idea much further - into integration with large-scale business applications like SAP, the world-leading Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. In this model, Second Life acts as a sophisticated 3D user interface (UI) that is able to display data from the back-end systems (eg: SAP) in ways that cannot be done with other UIs, employing the 3D environment to its full effect. By extension, Second Life can also accept commands or instructions that can be fed through to the back-end systems.

Let's consider an example: order processing. With EOLUS you can view and select items for purchase within Second Life. When you come to actaully request the items, an order is sent from Second Life to the SAP application, which returns an order reference. Thereafter, you can track your order's status from within Second Life, which gets the information in real time from the back-end SAP system. In effect, this is like using Second Life as a particularly powerful form of web browser.

Another example is in housing energy management. EOLUS can show you a house that has been modelled in Second Life. Data from various sensors in the corresponding Real Life house can be displayed in a readily understandable visual format in the Second Life model. Controls can be set on the model which are passed back to feedback devices in the Real Life house. Such controls could include thermostat settings, air-con settings and so forth. It is then a simple matter to replicate the model as many times as required to handle the energy management of an entire estate.

EOLUS as Virtual Operations Centre (VOC)
The housing energy management is a simple example of a virtual operations centre. However, far more complex operations centres can be constructed. In fact, pretty much any application or system (or set of applications or systems) that provides control information could be managed through a virtual operations centre. The visualisation of this information will depend on context - but Second Life provides a rich palette of options. One could model something akin to a RL operations centre (basically, walls of graphs, and alert lamps), but virtually any form of 2D or 3D visualisation that simplifies the system management could be constructed.

But why is this such a big deal? Two answers: first, this approach can be delivered at a fraction of the cost of a RL operations centre; second, as it is in a virtual world, accessible from across the globe, it can be manned around the clock at a fraction of the cost of a manned RL operations centre.

One point to bear in mind - this is not (yet) appropriate for mission-critical operations, as Second Life cannot yet provide the levels of availability needed for such operations. However, there are many scenaros in which a VOC could deliver improved management over other (more costly) solutions - indeed, scenarious in which a RL centre would not be feasible due to cost.

EOLUS as Enabling Technology
Concepts like the VOC rely on the ability to pass information between SL and non-SL applications. To this end, EOLUS have devised the Virtual Worlds Communication Interface (VWCI) - a combination of hardware and software that sits between SL and non-SL, and provides a common interface between them. There is actually a lot more to this than meets the eye, and I am awaiting more information from EOLUS about this. However, suffice it to say, this is an essential component for getting information in and out of Second Life.

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And that's about it (for now). I am sure I have over-simplified some things, over-complicated others, and simply forgotten a whole lot more. However, to state my position on this - in its use of Second Life as a 3D User Interface, together with the VWCI, I think EOLUS have taken a massive leap toward 3D Internet.

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Sorry about the paucity of pictures.... I promise I will get back on track with rich visuals very soon. But in the meantime, here's one showing the key companies participating in EOLUS:

Thanks to Eolus McMillan for his time and patience in trying to explain all this to me!