I was recently invited to join a Virtual Spaces discussion through the Thinkbalm™ Innovation Community on LinkedIn™. They arranged a conference via SecondLife®. It sounded fun - we'd each choose an avatar and participate as if attending a real life conference.
Admittedly, this wasn't an entirely new idea for me. I started playing with Avaya's inherited web.alive service (http://www.avayalive.com) almost as soon as it joined Avaya via the Nortel Acquisition. Yep, "playing". After all, it isn't often you can legitimately play PC games while at the office. And this thing is undeniably fun.
Disclaimer: Marketing cautioned me not to over-emphasize the word "play" as it might give readers the impression that this isn't a serious business tool. So if you have that impression, wherever you see the word "play", please substitute: "engaging in an intuitive environment that encourages exploration and interaction with people both within and outside of my company".
Sure, there's truth to that. Nic Sauriol who leads this project observes that there are real benefits to using virtual spaces vs just a regular audio conference call. For example, sidebar conversations and virtual eye contact drive people to stay engaged rather than multitask. For this habitual multitasker, after joining several meetings in web.alive, I'd have to agree. Yet it's still fun.
Anyway, back to the LinkedIn virtual conference. I downloaded the 23Mb SecondLife file and tried to use it only then discovering that I would need to work with our corporate IT to assure access. While in many cases it can be straightforward to unblock a specific URL and port for firewall traversal, SecondLife is a bit tougher on firewalls than typical enterprise applications. This is a known problem, and SecondLife provides engineering guidelines online (the SecondLife's configuration guide).
Since I was new to the Immersive Internet, I assumed that the complexity was inherent in Virtual Spaces. But then it dawned on me that I had joined lots of meetings in web.alive without encountering the traversal problem - even with folks outside of the firewall. So I asked the experts.
The folks on LinkedIn offered a variety of answers (you can find the discussion by joining the Thinkbalm community here) that salved the firewall challenges of SecondLife. Darius Lahoutifard CEO at Altydyn™, observed that SecondLife and other virtual spaces started out as consumer games, and proxies/firewalls weren't as much of an issue. Several folks suggested system integrators that will design and realize a virtual world solution - including firewall traversal. Another approach for vendors is to build a custom SecondLife client based on an open source platform, such as Snowglobe, that will point to a cloud-based proxy which incorporates simplified port management and would have an easier time traversing corporate firewalls. Another vendor, nTeams, partnered with the ALCUS virtual world design firm to provide a corporate customized collaboration platform based on SecondLife and will engineer traversal approaches.
New solutions such as Avaya's web.alive have been designed from the bottom up for corporate use. In addition to ours, I was pointed to Altydyn™'s, for example. And David Gardner, CEO of Venuegen observes that it's VoIP that typically has a problem with firewalls (e.g., observe in the table above that most of those listed are VoIP related ports) so his company permits telephony dial-in as a fallback.
While that LinkedIn conversation confirmed that there is a common issue around NAT/firewalls for virtual spaces, it only fueled my curiosity. Why didn't I run across this problem with web.alive? It turns out that this is an inherently complicated problem and was the focus of considerable investment in designing web.alive 2.0 released last fall.
Coming from a vendor familiar with VoIP as well as data networking, they engineered the solution to reduce the number of ports required to just a few, (the exact number changes based on the enterprise environment). Part of their answer was the acquisition of DiamondWare who lent this program 3D spatial audio: a client is fed the audio stream via RTP, and 3DVoice properties controlling spatial presentation are sent via a second port consolidating the audio requirement to just a couple of ports. Additionally, using their data networking experience the web.alive solution automatically analyzes typical port configurations - for example http and/or https tunneling through port 80 when they can, or automatically testing connections as administered within corporate-approved browser settings. If there was just one browser, proxy method, operating system, and firewall in the world this would be simple. But the myriad of combinations, incompatibilities, and even browser software bugs made this difficult. I have to hand it to the web.alive team in tracking down and mitigating the problems so the program is friendly for corporate IT use.
So while enterprise firewalls can inhibit adoption for some legacy virtual worlds, vendors mitigate this via integration services for IT departments. Meanwhile, more recent Virtual Collaboration solutions such as our web.alive were developed specifically for businesses and can ease adoption. They're designed to be firewall/NAT friendly, and more-and-more people should be able to join these conferences without first consulting with their IT org. So the odds are improving that one day we'll meet while playing with these new serious business tools.
Posted 3 Jun 2010 at 08:54 AM
Comments
I regretfully omitted that my introduction to Erica Driver at http://www.thinkbalm.com came via Julie Fogg of http://www.activeport.com. Both of these people patiently shared their experience in pragmatic adoption of Immersive Internet technologies helping me understand that it's not a toy. You can find them as I did on twitter at @ericadriver and @juliefogg
Posted 3 Jun 2010 at 12:37 PMI used to work at a large Semiconductor company which has around 5000 employees worldwide. I remember a mandatory attendance company-wide conference call during a financially difficult period. What a disaster - it was a struggle to understand even one word being spoken by the multiple people on the other end. It really made us feel disconnected from the company, and when I was laid off, I didn't really miss the place. A solution like this would have been welcomed by many of the employees (many like myself had gaming backgrounds and could bird-dog support issues and push adoption.) The firewall challenges would be minimal for the IT staff of a company like that to overcome, really.
Posted 3 Jun 2010 at 01:48 PMGreat Post!! I'm excited to learn more about web.alive - It seems to fill a niche that isn't be touched by anyone!!
Posted 3 Jun 2010 at 02:13 PMI am curious as to how this application can be applied in the litigation field. I foresee its imminent use in alternative dispute resolution, mock trials, and perhaps farther in the future as an inexpensive forum for certain kinds of hearings.
Posted 3 Jun 2010 at 04:12 PMI see several applications for this technology as an extension of telepresence. It could help reduce the need to travel for large corporate events or sales meetings (Vegas may lobby against it).
I think it has interesting marketing implications in the sports/entertainment field. What if I could re-enact the exact experience of sitting in the seats before I buy the tickets?
Posted 3 Jun 2010 at 07:15 PMActually, on the government services side, we are working in conjunction with the College of William and Mary on their Courtroom 21 initiative. It's their courtroom initiative that introduces new technologies into the courtroom and we're currently piloting web.alive with them.
Posted 4 Jun 2010 at 09:49 AMGreat !! I'm excited to learn more about web.alive - It seems to fill a niche that isn't be touched by anyone!! Thank for your sharing this information.
Posted 28 Jun 2010 at 03:56 AMHas anyone heard of any enterprise worlds which involve the corporate library/librarian/information center? I am researching library involvement in VRs, and would appreciate any pointers. You can reach me at VirtualLibraries@yahoo.com Thanks a lot for any help!
Posted 28 Aug 2010 at 03:01 PM