We will continue to distribute, support and build applications on the OLIVE platform for the European market with SAIC and are working with the same great business development professionals we were before.

While we were saddened by the departure of many outstanding Forterra employees we had the pleasure of working with, we believe the best prospects for growth of the OLIVE platform is with its new owners.

We're excited about the prospects of working with SAIC to continue to deliver outstanding enterprise virtual world applications. They have a significant engineering and program delivery track record which should help extend what we and customers can do with truly initeroperable virtual worlds.

Here are the slides from my talk. I wished I had remembered to record it! Lots of good questions arose.

The abstracts and speaker bios are on the site as well as posted previously here.

It was a great day, lots of real world examples were shared across sectors.
I managed the technical aspects of streaming live into Forterra Systems OLIVE to try and help it be a more engaging experience with Paul Turner who did a great job facilitating. It worked really well but next year we will have to find a more distributed video streaming service for our overseas participants.

I gave a brief talk on Ambient work in progress to solve training scalability opportunities and new applications with artificial intelligence integration and better emotional display capabilities and interfaces (below).

The 3rd Annual Serious Virtual Worlds conference to be held at the Serious Games Institute in Coventry is nearly sold out. The Introduction to Enterprise Virtual Worlds workshop we are running the day before there is fully booked but if you bring a decent laptop we can probably squeeze you in.

The conference agenda can be found at seriousvirtualworlds.net.

There are still spaces available to join us in OLIVE on the day where you will be able to interact with the speakers, facilitators and each other. The cost is 99 pounds + VAT. Send me an email or tweet if you want in and we will get you set up.

I have put the abstracts below for reference to give you a better idea of the content before booking. Speaker bios are on the website.

Magnus Reigstad
StormFjord
Industrial Gaming:
Initiative for a global 3D infrastructure to support "integrated operations" in the oil & gas sector
StormFjord is planning to build a 3D infrastructure supporting need for collaboration and communication, visualisation, simulations in oil and gas industries.
The motivation and plans will be presented with a description on how this infrastructure will be used.

Rob Edmonds
SRIC-BI
Drawing on SRIC-BI’s virtual worlds industry research over the last year, this presentation provides an overview of today’s markets for serious virtual worlds and their future direction. Topics discussed include market drivers and barriers, platform choices, integration and interoperability issues, user interfaces, and reaching the mainstream buyer.
David Burden
Daden
TheatreBase is a project funded by Advantage West Midlands Interactive Digital Media fund to investigate how virtual worlds technology could be used to help major touring companies such the Birmingham Royal Ballet, and major theatrical venues such as Birmingham Hippodrome, to plan the technical design, get-in and get-out of major productions.

The initial phases of the project have involved an analysis of technical options and standards, and available virtual worlds platforms. From this two different platforms have been chosen for the proof-of-concept development, Unity and Second Life. User Requirements interviews were led by the University of Coventry (whose expertise on the Theatron project has proved invaluable) were held with the two artistic partners, and on the basis of this the virtual representation of the theatre and sets are being developed - together with the tools to allow their easy manipulation and use within a collaborative meeting environment.

The project is due to complete in December 2009, and so we will be showing work in progress. Whilst the initial focus of the project is on the technical backstage issues, the wider opportunities of the technology for education, artistic design and of course performance are already becoming evident.

Dr El Parker
Coventry University
The research project is a collaborative undertaking by Ambient Performance and Coventry University. The project uses Forterra Systems’ On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment (OLIVE) platform to provide an immersive 3D virtual learning environment aiming to aspire emergency managers to develop the strategic decision-making skills required to manage a major wide area flood emergency effectively.

The storyline for the exercise separated into two phases: pre flood during the flood warning phase and at the peak of the flood event. The templates used are the H19 and H20 national risk register extreme flood scenarios, which requires a multi-agency response from multiple regions.

Paul Turner
walk in Web
The Walk in Web is working on a number of projects in Second Life. Two of these will be demonstrated. Firstly, The Technology Strategy Board’s virtual island which will be launched soon and secondly a 3D shopping experience being built for Retail World.
Both projects take full advantage of the interactive nature of Second Life and the benefits of a virtual world presence, compared to a standard website will be discussed.

Joe Little
BP group
Joe Little works in the Chief Technology Office of the BP Group. The group looks at new and emerging technologies and seeks to accelerate adoption of those technologies within the group where there is real business value. His specialisation is in Virtual Worlds, Immersive Training and Collaboration and social networking. Over the past 3 years Joe and the rest of the CTO team have experimented with virtual worlds in a number of scenarios from IT strategy planning, training, collaboration, online events and consumer education.

Marcus Carter
Virtual Farmers Market
• Introduction to how the concept came about
• How it will benefit the producer and consumer
• How we got to second life and lessons learnt being there
• What are the current barriers to shopping for independently produced food on line
• How the market will work
• Distribution and consolidation
• Consumer journey from logging on to receiving the goods at home

It's great to have another independent voice articulate the benefits of using OLIVE for enterprise collaboration!

You can read his original blog posting on the Toolbox for IT Knowledge Management Community (looks very intersting!) here.

We are running the 3rd annual Serious Virtual Worlds Conference with partners Serious Games Institute on 17 September in Coventry. This year it will be held at the Serious Games Institute itself so a great opportunity to visit and network.

The theme this year is 'Real Value for Public and Private Organizations' so all presentations will feature real projects and clients rather than a mix of experimental, developmental and early results as highlighted before (you can view the video archive of these here (Select tab SVW08 for last year, select tab SGI for previous year which is mixed with other presentations that year at SGI).

There is a great range of virtual world applications being discussed featuring BP, Afiniti, StatOil, Highways Agency, Coventry University Disaster Management and more.

More information and registration is here: http://seriousvirtualworlds.net/
Twitter: #svw09

We are also running a 1/2 day workshop on the day before (16 September) for those new to enterprise applications of virtual worlds. The price is only 99 pounds!

Here's the workshop overview:

Wondering how a virtual world works and how to operate in one?
This practical workshop introduces you to a variety of Virtual Worlds and applications

During the half day session you will be:
· Introduced to Virtual Worlds and how they work
· Shown how to navigate virtual worlds
· Introduced to a variety of application examples including events, meetings, training and visualization.
· Provided with an overview of the key differences in leading serious virtual worlds

Virtual World experts Ambient Performance will be on hand to demonstrate and assist, giving information about how
Virtual Worlds can cut costs, offer new ways of working and support innovation.

Schedule:
14.00 Introducing Virtual Worlds
14.15 Hands-on Session 1: Navigating in Virtual Worlds
14.45 A Tour of Established Virtual Worlds
15.15 Hands-on Session 2: Collaborating in Serious Virtual Worlds
16.00 TEA
16.15 Professional Uses of Virtual Worlds – an overview
17.00 Hands-on Session 3: Using Virtual Worlds Professionally
17.30 Deploying Serious Virtual Worlds in the Enterprise and Public Sectors – Q&A.
18.00 Close

At the very beginning you can see the camera zoom through OLIVE showing a California city which then morphs to a live view on the ground. The imagery is from Pictometry and was developed by Lockheed Martin, Forterra clients and developers.

Forterra are leading the pack when it comes to realistic terrain capabilities and have one of the ONLY geospatially accurate virtual worlds which enable these types of mirror world applications. It's great to see it in prime time!

If the clip below stutters, let it play for a bit to buffer with the audio off, then restart.

Current projects under development include brand marketing and cultural heritage. We've explored some interesting projects involving embedding AR images into optics for industrial and military apps but those are still in the idea stages.

Comments and project inquiries welcome!

You can read the summary on their blog and download the report here: http://thinkbalm.com/2009/05/26/thinkbalm-publishes-business-value-study/:

There are many charts included in the 36 page report which I found to be well written and useful.

I found this one especially compelling with my PhD research interest in 3d collaborative visualization. It is shown as the next biggest application after training, events and meetings as shown below. Our clients are very interested in 3d collaborative visualization but are mostly only in the exploratory stages.

Image courtesy of Thinkbalm, used with permission (thank you!).

I took a few pictures of the trade show and put them on Flickr with some comments:

I was fascinated by the Microsoft Surface display used by T-Mobile where they had several connected to look like a koi pond. I loaded my first HD video to YouTube of it (try it in 'HQ'!)

Here's the conclusion:

Cost cutting during a downturn is often necessary to ensure a company’s current profitability and future competitiveness. Rather than freezing all hiring and employee-development programs, companies should use this period as an opportunity to upgrade talent and better engage existing staff. This means reinvesting a percentage of the capital liberated from cost cutting into, for example, selective recruiting and development programs and in efforts to safeguard the culture and to redesign jobs so that they are more engaging to the remaining employees.

I think our new Virtual Instructor Led Training V-ILT just announced which we're developing with Brey Leino BroadSkill couldn't come at a better time. Effective training delivered more efficiently and at lower cost.

Meanwhile, interest in using the Forterra OLIVE platform for collaboration to save travel costs, improve efficiency and engagement continues to outpace pure training applications so it will be interesting to see whats more popular in a year or so. (Disclosure: Ambient is Forterras European service provider).