BusinessWeek has an excellent article on IBM’s business makeover which discusses how, as their operation evolves, it’s becoming less grounded in real products (which are more and more just commodities) and turning increasingly to “virtual” services. This provides an excellent example of the flipside of VR: as virtual worlds and simulations become increasingly realistic with graphics and simpler interfaces, real world operations are migrating towards them as well. I think there’s a collision on the horizon – a “rebang”, if you will. Even if IBM fails, the trend is there. Now let’s wait and see if Big Blue can successfully shed that earthbound hardware heritage.
Tag Archives: #transreality
The Virtual Office
I’ve been spending a bit of time in Second Life. Having bought my virtual land, I’ve learned the modeling tools and built a virtual office (cleaner than my RL office, sad to say).
And if you want to read a real blog entry (and I’m getting tired of typing tbh; in-world “chatting” is killing my fingertips – getting hoarse, so to speak), feel free to drop in on the Core77 Software & Technology blog where I post related (and often overlapping) entries. If you read my previous entry here called “The Anti-Sony“, today’s entry on Core is essentially a continuation. The dance is the same, just different partners (didn’t some character in STNG say that?)
Xbox 2 : Virtual Markets and Micro-transactions
Blue’s News has posted a portion of the features listed in the “Guide” to Microsoft’s upcoming gaming platform: the eagerly anticipated Xbox 2. Among the features of note are:
* Marketplace. Browseable by game, by genre, and in a number of other ways, the Marketplace will provide a one-stop shop for consumers to acquire episodic content, new game levels, maps, weapons, vehicles, skins and new community-created content.
* Micro-transactions. Breaking down barriers of small-ticket online commerce, micro-transactions will allow developers and the gaming community to charge as little as they like for content they create and publish on Marketplace. Imagine players slapping down $.99 to buy a one-of-a-kind, fully tricked-out racing car to be the envy of their buddies.
Some of you out there understand why I initially chose “reBang” as my company name: it referred to the creation of real world product additionally leveraged as virtual content. This makes sense since the modern development of tangible goods almost always now involves the creation of a virtual 3D representation.
I’ve been waiting for the chance to straddle two worlds for some time, and the implementation of Marketplace and Micro-transactions features in MS’s console signals that this may now soon be possible (the first issue, high-rez content, has been resolved with the latest technology as demonstrated in Half-Life 2, Doom3, and the forthcoming Unreal 3 game engine).
Looks like I need to get myself in gear and position myself appropriately now that the time is fast approaching for this to happen. And that may mean less “shotgun” blogging and more focus. It was coming anyway.