Is it Time for Hospitality to Reevaluate Virtual Worlds?
The hospitality industry is responsible for getting myself and Ener Hax into virtual worlds. In the media frenzied coverage of Second Life in 2006, two hospitality giants received a fair share of coverage and worked that to their advantage.
Starwood had the Virtual aloft built as an architectural feedback project and International Hotel Group (IHG) had Crowne Plaza branded meeting rooms. Some of my video work featured those Crowne Plaza meetings rooms which were bookable via an online engine, just like much of their function space is.
Both of those are now gone. The aloft had an exit plan which included donating their island to a worthy endeavor – Global Kids. Crowne Plaza stayed longer but quietly closed at some point last year.
Second Life was an exciting new technology with so much media coverage that it was hard to ignore. Couple that with the promise of virtual meetings sweeping the globe and it was natural for the hopsitality industry to explore it. Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, touted an end to face-to-face meetings with IBM case studies (IBM poured 12 million into virtual worlds in 2006-07).
Fortunately for the hospitality sector, there will always be a need for “real” meetings and, at best, virtual worlds could supplement those and be used as an upsell item. Certainly some small meetings could be, and are, done with virtual worlds, but they should not be viewed as a threat.
Meeting Planners International has explored virtual worlds and there is an opportunity for properties to be the source for virtual meeting space no differently than real function space. Virtual events have similar needs as real events and do generate real revenue (Dan Parks’ Virtualis, complete with MPI certified professionals, attests to this).
Up until last year, Second Life was about the only viable choice for this and had many issues that led to users, such as IHG, ending their virtual presence. Some of these factors include cost ($295+ per month), being part of a larger “world” and the potential lack of privacy, not truly owning your virtual assets, and being subject to a third party’s terms of service. Another factor may also the stigma that has been associated with Second Life being viewed as a game or world full of sex-craved avatars.
In the last year a viable alternative has quietly been growing. Its adoption is primarily by educators and business users who recognized the power of Second Life but did not want any of its limits. OpenSim is an open source virtual world server side application that uses the Second Life viewer (or third party Second Life viewers). While the platform is not Second Life, it does look, and act, like Second Life due to the viewer (the client side).
Freedom from high cost results from OpenSim being an open source software which can be installed on your own servers (in fact it can even be installed on a USB drive, making for some interesting possibilities for meeting planners to show room setups to clients). Being able to host this application yourself means it can be fully under your control and security.
OpenSim may be poised to be reevaluated by the hospitality industry and has matured to the point of opening achievable opportunities in this sector. From offering virtual space as an upsell for a real event to being used in the visualization of function room setups, virtual worlds seem to now be here to stay and be adopted steadily according to Gartner.
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Defining Enclave Harbour
What is Enclave Harbour and why being counted in OpenSim stats don’t matter?
Counting the regions that come and go in OpenSim is a bit like counting sites using Flash was ten years ago. Flash was new and allowed for new things to be accomplished in the World Wide Web. Today, Flash has enjoyed a bit of news with Steve Jobs waging his war against useless content on the web. Steve Jobs can do anything he likes but I take offense to him making the decision on what is useful and of lasting value on the web.
Apart from that, Flash has enjoyed ubiquitous reach and is a part of a great many things, including being a large and significant part of eLearning. Ten years ago there was a lot of bad Flash and so many “Skip Intro” buttons that it’s a wonder it did become mainstream. Today Flash serves many purposes and for the most part, people don’t realize that they are using it.
OpenSim may become like that one day, a vehicle to deliver an experience, eLearning, entertainment, or any of a number of things that have shaped the Internet into such an important part of modern day life.
No one counts the number of sites using Flash because Flash is so well integrated.
No one needs to count Enclave Harbour because it is a vehicle to teach with. Enclave Harbour does not rent land to others and is just a medium like a photograph in a school text book is. If we do our job well (and Ener is an ace at building these activities out) then the OpenSim part of Enclave Harbour will simply be just the instrument and not the focus.
Our grid runs so incredibly well that no one will think about lag and thus can focus on the activities, which is its entire purpose. When you view this or that on the web, you don’t wonder what version of Apache that site is running. When you watch Lord of the Rings, you don’t wonder what brand of microphones they used or how many they used. If Enclave Harbour can achieve its goal to be part of reaching out and teaching kids science, then we will have achieved a good thing.
I would like to see OpenSim reach the level that Flash has been at for years, to be a vehicle to deliver content. With great hosts like James at SimHost and the passion of the core OpenSim developers, this goal is become a reality.
So don’t count us as simply a set of OpenSim regions, that has little value except to show others that OpenSim is hitting the proverbial nail on the head as a great platform for delivering immersive content.
Now to get back to writing and I hope I do justice to all the wonderful work our Ener is doing!
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