I believe the following was a tweet by Trevor Smith, whom I met at Startup Weekendlast year this year and recall as one sharp cookie (that he has spent time at PARC does not come as a surprise once you spend some time with him)
Imagine a city the size and detail of Liberty City, but dedicated to professional collaboration and culture.
Out of curiousity, I had to ask what this was all about. The answer; Ogoglio. At one level Ogoglio is a virtual world, not unlike Second Life, but if you take a deeper look, there is much more there. Just take a look at the goal: Creat an online city for work. The goal is to build a world, Ogoglio City, which mirrors the network effects and structures of the real world. While obviously there is technology involved, the end goal is to make this about collaboration, not a technology project, almost detaching the concept from the technology.
We’ve all, well some of us, have spent considerable time in Second Life, using it for scientific communication. What if we have a true virtual world, one where we could actually work together and do our tasks? Is this futuristic? Perhaps, but instead of being some kind of distinct application, the goal of the Ogoglio project is to function as part of the existing fabric of the web. I quote
Information that sits on the shelf is wasted. Ogoglio spaces connect to your existing databases, documents, and web services to become a nexus of information for your project. They provide a persistent working environment which is shared between offices and continents. Whether you need to set up a Big Board to simultaneously display all of the text, video, and news feeds relevant to your project or you just need a quiet place to go over your notes with a coworker, Ogoglio spaces gather everything together for your team.
The architecture is the part I really dig. It emphasizes the goals of the Ogoglio project to be part of the web, to use existing protocols and rendering technologies to build a metaverse that spans the world. Of course, the software is all open source.
The project is still young, and little known, but I dig what it stands for, and the possibilities. In fact, of all the virtual worlds out there, this is what comes closest to how I’ve always envisioned a metaverse, much like the concept of the holodeck, providing us with a world to actually get work done, without necessarily making it feel like a computer game.
There is a video on the homepage for the project, and a set of screencasts. Screencast #1 is embedded below.
WDYT? Do you think that some day there will be a metaverse embedded onto the web (or multiple metaverses), which will allow us to do real, useful collaboration, perhaps this amalgamation of todays virtual worlds, irc and FriendFeed? I don’t think such a world is realistic for at least a couple of decades, but the idea is still appealing.
I think we're not too far from cities on the web. It only took $100M and 2000 man years to create Liberty City and the technologies and social structures underpinning an open, web based city are being built today.
It will be interesting to see how this evolves differently from Second Life - there are people busy connecting SL to real world devices. The benefit of Second Life right now is the magnitude of the networking opportunity, not so much the technology.
I think we're already seeing real collaboration in SL and people are doing things on there that can be done better there - like having meetings.
Fascinating stuff, Deepak. If you haven't already seen it, you might be interested in the Croquet project (opencroquet.org), an attempt to build a collaborative virtual world by Alan Kay et al.
Ogoglio Project: Open virtual collaborative
Uber-geek alert!!!
I believe the following was a tweet by Trevor Smith, whom I met at Startup Weekend last year this year and recall as one sharp cookie (that he has spent time at PARC does not come as a surprise once you spend some time with him)
Out of curiousity, I had to ask what this was all about. The answer; Ogoglio. At one level Ogoglio is a virtual world, not unlike Second Life, but if you take a deeper look, there is much more there. Just take a look at the goal: Creat an online city for work. The goal is to build a world, Ogoglio City, which mirrors the network effects and structures of the real world. While obviously there is technology involved, the end goal is to make this about collaboration, not a technology project, almost detaching the concept from the technology.
We’ve all, well some of us, have spent considerable time in Second Life, using it for scientific communication. What if we have a true virtual world, one where we could actually work together and do our tasks? Is this futuristic? Perhaps, but instead of being some kind of distinct application, the goal of the Ogoglio project is to function as part of the existing fabric of the web. I quote
The architecture is the part I really dig. It emphasizes the goals of the Ogoglio project to be part of the web, to use existing protocols and rendering technologies to build a metaverse that spans the world. Of course, the software is all open source.
The project is still young, and little known, but I dig what it stands for, and the possibilities. In fact, of all the virtual worlds out there, this is what comes closest to how I’ve always envisioned a metaverse, much like the concept of the holodeck, providing us with a world to actually get work done, without necessarily making it feel like a computer game.
There is a video on the homepage for the project, and a set of screencasts. Screencast #1 is embedded below.
WDYT? Do you think that some day there will be a metaverse embedded onto the web (or multiple metaverses), which will allow us to do real, useful collaboration, perhaps this amalgamation of todays virtual worlds, irc and FriendFeed? I don’t think such a world is realistic for at least a couple of decades, but the idea is still appealing.
Technorati Tags: Ogoglio, Trever Smith, Metaverse, Collaboration, Virtual Worlds