Xploration Article

The Coming of Inhabited Cyberspace

Bruce Damer,
Digital Space Corporation
343 Soquel Avenue, Suite 70 Santa Cruz CA 95062 +1 831 338 9400
www.digitalspace.com our Webmaster  

Bio Bruce Damer spent nine great years in the electronic document industry first with Elixir Technologies, where he authored a number of key products, became chief technologist and helped set up their Prague laboratory. He then consulted for Xerox helping to guide their electronic document strategy around Adobe's PDF format. Bruce was named Xplorer of the year at the 1992 Tampa XPLOR conference. In 1995 Bruce co-founded the non-profit Contact Consortium and the for-profit Digital Space Corporation to pioneer a whole new medium: "avatar" inhabited virtual worlds on the Internet. In this article, Bruce returns to the electronic document industry with a report from this new frontier of cyberspace, and shows us how it can be a powerful new mechanism for one to one customer communications and yet another home for the humble document.

The Evolution of One to One Customer contact through technology It seems that the first half of this Century was devoted to the concept of mass movements: broadcast media, mass advertising, mass production, mass ideologies, and mass destruction. Popular culture and commerce in the second half of the Century has put high value on the individual: the sixties, customer service, profiling and target marketing, the entrepreneur, and the personal computer.
Don Peppers and Martha Rogers book One to One Future (Currency/Doubleday, 1993) crystallized the concept that customer relationships needed to be created and nurtured one at a time. Beyond the front counter at the store, technology has been the driving force behind the 1:1 phenomenon. Databases have been the key technological tool, paired with the postal system, telephone and now the Internet. The Internet as a revolution in document delivery In late 1993 I was visiting a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In his laboratory, students were crowded around workstations running Mosaic, the first Web browser. As someone who had been focused on the electronic document for most of the past seven years, this was a moment of epiphany.
I realized that an enormous change was coming for the industry and community served by XPLOR. I presented a session at XPLOR ’94 in which I forecast that the need to produce paper-based electronic documents would not go away, it would likely continue to increase, but that time sensitive documents used as a primary way to reach the customer would move to this new medium and become fully interactive. As the readers of Xploration are well aware, we are only part way through this revolution. Just placing statements, policies and forms on the web was only the beginning. Years of reengineering of the very processes of supporting customers and the entire framework of companies is required to support the interactive electronic document as a 1:1 channel to the marketplace. One of the most impressive successes I have seen is Fidelity Investments, whose transposition of their statement to the Web preserved the look and feel of the paper statement while building a powerful database back-end to make that online document into a customer service center.
The Internet beyond the document: the shared space in cyberspace Another revolution is waiting just over the horizon. This is the arrival of a "true cyber-space" and it will change the very face of software and our use of computers. This revolution is about the direct representation of people on the Internet. The World Wide Web is fundamentally a linked document database that connects people second-hand. Email, instant messaging, chat rooms and text-based virtual worlds establish more of direct person to person connection but have played a back-seat role in recent year. As Microsoft, America Online and others are now discovering, people may be visiting web sites for specific purposes but they are spending far more time in direct communication with friends, family, coworkers, and strangers. Estimates of the population on simple instant messaging systems alone run from 20 to 50 million users, with daily message traffic at around 500 million. Perhaps it built into our social Primate nature, but we are inexorably drawn to real-time interaction with flesh and blood people. In simple messaging or text chat systems, people are represented as their "handle", usually a pseudonym on a line of chat text. It seemed like an obvious next step to represent people with some kind of graphical character.

In fact, way back in 1985, Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer, working with Lucasfilm, created Habitat, an online virtual world with graphical representations of spaces and people. Chip coined the term "avatar" to describe your visual identity in cyberspace. In 1995, the first avatar virtual worlds came to the Internet. Since then there has been an explosion in "avatar cyberspace". In the section Visit Our World at the end of this article, you can visit these worlds online or see some of our reportage on the medium. Some virtual worlds inhabited by people using avatars are for game playing, some are for socializing or creating personal spaces, and some are being used experimentally for business conferencing (see figure below).

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Datafusion World: a business conferencing virtual world showing meeting attendees as "avatars" represented as streaming video and audio. This environment was designed for datafusion Inc. of San Francisco. In October 1996, the non-profit industry organization I helped to co-found, the Contact Consortium, held the first conference on the avatar virtual world medium. Our keynote speaker was John Sculley, who ran Pepsi and then Apple Computer. I asked John what interested him in this raw new medium. His answer: "I am a marketing guy and this is the greatest one-to-one marketing medium I have ever seen." Taking this as a challenge, my company, Digital Space Corporation, took on the task of creating a meaningful set of business applications for inhabited virtual worlds.
One example is the world for datafusion above, a concept space that illustrated how coworkers could collaborated in a shared 3D space filled with "knowledge maps", graphical representations of problems and their solutions. In this world, users could navigate as a group through both knowledge map spaces and documents while communicating through live voice and video. I then realized that my many years as a volunteer with XPLOR had taught me the true value of conferences and tradeshows to business. In 1998 my company designed and produced a completely online conference/tradeshow for the Contact Consortium’s third annual conference, Avatars98. This event was a great case study on a successful business application and one to one marketing tool. A case in point: Avatars98, a tradeshow in cyberspace

View of attendees standing at the "ground zero" at the
Avatars98 conference
and tradeshow Introduction On November 21, 1998,
the Contact Consortium hosted the world's first conference
and tradeshow inside cyberspace. By "inside cyberspace"
we mean that the main interaction of the conference was carried out
within 3D virtual worlds on the Internet.

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Avatars98 was not just a connection of sites by streaming video; attendees interacted in real time within the 3D space employing "avatars" or digital representations of users online. This session will briefly review the logistics, design, social engineering, hosting and analysis of the event, which hosted 4,000 attendees in a 3D online virtual world with 6 speaking tracks, an exhibit hall, art show, parallel webcasts, and 40 globally connected locations. Background behind the event Avatars98 was produced by Digital Space Corporation for the Contact Consortium, a global forum on the development of inhabited virtual world cyberspace. The Avatars98 conference was the third in a series of annual conferences hosted by the Contact Consortium and its corporate, institutional and individual membership. The first two events were held in traditional facilities in San Francisco in 1996 and 1997. It was decided to put the medium of inhabited virtual worlds to the test and hold the entire conference online in 1998

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Exhibits for companies and participating organizations such as Boeing
Technology platforms and operation A number of virtual world platforms and webcast technologies were uses but the main focus was the "AV98" conference hall in the Active Worlds platform. The Avatars98 world was designed to be usable by attendees on low end (Pentium 100) computers on minimal net connections (14.4 BPS speed modems). The Active Worlds technology provides streaming and reuse of 3D objects in a Lego-like manner and so the designers produced a series of components (struts, signs, potted plants) that were put together to make the conference hall. Avatars, animated 3D models of users, were also specially designed (some wearing conference t-shirts). Once these objects streamed into the cache of attendees' hard disks, rendering would be done locally. Streaming webcasts were presented on some of the 3D surfaces to bridge some of the 40 physical locations into the virtual attendees within the world. Communication was carried out by text chat, which was also logged for the conference proceedings.

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Active Worlds browser showing the 3D view with conference chair Bruce Damer waving in his custom avatar floating by the schedule board, chat window below, webpage document showing the exhibit hall to the right and a list of active users on the left. Visiting the Avatars98 Virtual World and Conference Report You can still visit this space by dowloading and installing the browser from www.activeworlds.com and selecting the AV98 world. A full report on the event, including proceedings, is located at: http://www.ccon.org/conf98 The Avatars98 Virtual World The AV98 world is a one kilometer square space into which a conventional conference hall was constructed. Digital Space worked with dozens of volunteers, including the prime object and hall design team of Koolworlds (brothers Max and Dax from Vancouver Washington in the USA) under the guidance of Digital Space partner Stuart Gold, an trained architect in London UK.

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Art Gallery with streamed JPEG images from artists all over the web Within the conference hall were built a "ground zero" landing zone for new attendees, a series of 48 exhibits for participating companies and organizations, an art gallery, a webcam wall showing two dozen webcasts from participating locations, a "big board" conference schedule, an awards area, and six "speaker pods" for parallel tracks in virtual "breakout rooms". Behind the Scenes at the Avatars '98 Educators' Track

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Presenter Margaret Corbit of the Cornell University Theory Center presenting in the "speaker pod" to a collected audience of educators interested in the use of virtual worlds in the learning setting. Margaret's slides are being changed in real time by session coordinator Bonnie DeVarco The Avatars98 Educators' Track was one of the most well attended and best produced of the tracks at the conference. Bonnie DeVarco, track coordinator, will review the behind the scenes planning and operation of the track, covering the following points:

Introduction to the pod, the track and the speakers

Setting up a speaker series in Cyberspace

Realtime slide shows and panel discussion in a distributed environment

Student experiences from the panel

Instant logging and posting of conference proceedings

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Session attendees in the "speaker pod" at the Avatars98 conference What was Learned Avatars98 exceeded all expectations: attendance calculated at over 4,000 visitors was ten times that of the previous "physically located" conferences. The budgetary outlay, excluding the extensive volunteer time costs, was 10% of the previous years. By moving the conference inside cyberspace, we empowered local groups and organizations to host their own events. Art museums had public openings with the virtual worlds displayed on the walls, cybercafes created evening parties and discussion, school and university classes convened and connected in, and people hosted gatherings in their own homes. Attendees reported to us that they had enjoyed presentations and discussions in the parallel tracks and other areas such as the art show. Order was kept by a volunteer organization "the PeaceKeepers" who disciplined unruly attendees by ejecting them from the world for periods of time. No attendee reported undue offense or disappointment with the event other than reflecting the sometimes slow performance of their browser in heavily populated areas. The sale of booth space in the exhibit hall raised funds for the Consortium (although much of this space was donated, as the exercise was still very experimental). The use of "bots" or automated agents helped answer some questions, direct attendees, and provide entertainment in the form of marching bands. Bots will be used more extensively in the future to occupy exhibits and interact with attendees, offering them web tours, video promotions, capturing visitor data in "card swipe" fashion and awarding prizes. The hosts of exhibits found that they did not want to stay in their booths the whole time but instead mingled with the crowds at the "ground zero" and elsewhere. We will also attempt one way audio broadcast for speakers in a future event. In conclusion, while quite labor intensive, virtual conferences and tradeshows modeled after Avatars98 will produce wide coverage an easy access for large audiences, could be packaged for a number of themes including a cyberspace extension to existing "real world" events, and some of the most interesting activities yet offered on the Internet. We expect events like this to be increasingly part of the on-line time of ordinary and business net users alike as cyberspace The role of the document within virtual world cyberspace As one can see from the above case of a cyber-tradeshow, documents appear as essential tools at almost every step of the attendees experience. As one would expect from a "real conference", the integrated web browser shows the conference program, booth layout, late breaking news, BOFs, bios, and presents marketing literature at vendor’s booths when an attendee clicks on an object. The documents become an active interface used to move the user’s avatar through space, book their schedules, contact people, and fill out forms for further information or special offers. One other innovative role of documents in shared 3D spaces is that the spaces themselves are built from components assembled by filling out web forms. So documents build the cyberspaces and enable meaningful interactions within them. Documents can be found in these worlds attached to objects, layered onto surfaces as posters, or dispensed by "bots" (automated agents). Documents also track where people move, what they look at and record speaker sessions for auto-proceedings. The humble document is truly reborn in this new cyberspace.

Visit Our World If you would like to visit our worlds, please contact me by email at our Webmaster and I will arrange for you to receive a tour online. We have plenty of resources on this medium on the Web.

Our company pages with plenty of examples of virtual worlds in business and education: http://www.digitalspace.com/ How to order a cyber-tradeshow or virtual meeting for your own organization can be found at: http://www.digitalspace.com/virtualmeetings/ Papers on the medium of virtual worlds: http://www.digitalspace.com/papers/ My book "Avatars" (PeachPit Press 1998) is available through: http://www.digitalspace.com/avatars/ Datafusion world: http://www.digitalspace.com/worlds/datafusion/index.html

The Contact Consortium, a global non-profit research and development forum for virtual worlds and host of the annual avatars conferences: http://www.ccon.org If you are interested my life and "the Digital Garden @ Ancient Oaks", my cyber-world in the real world here in the Northern California Redwood forest: http://www.damer.com My history with Elixir Technologies and XPLOR International: http://www.damer.com/pictures/elixir/ (c) Copyright 1999, Bruce Damer