Day: July 10, 2018

VirBELA: A Brief Introduction

VirBELA.png

VirBELA bills itself “the social virtual platform for business and education.” (There seem to be a lot of these popping up lately! Maybe I’ve just gotten better at finding them.) Here’s a couple of short videos describing the project and its aims:

Their website gives a bit of background about the company:

VirBELA was founded by Dr. Alex Howland and Dr. Ron Rembisz, who submitted their idea for VirBELA to the Graduate Management Admission Council’s Ideas to Innovation Challenge, in 2010. The challenge sought the most innovative ideas to improve management education. Alex and Ron were winners in the competition and went on to secure a large grant from GMAC to implement their idea in collaboration with the Rady School of Management and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UCSD (University of California-San Diego). Since then, VirBELA has built a world class multi-disciplinary team, and has joined forces with strategic partners and clients.

…

More than a decade after Second Life’s release and Avaya Live Engage shutting down, our vision required a fresh, modern approach. We built Virbela on top of the powerful Unity Game Engine which allows us to take advantage of their on-going development. We build activities into our virtual world platform to support learning objectives and then utilize data driven techniques to assess participants. See below for a list of some of the collaboration features our software offers.

Communication

  • Voice Over IP
  • Text Chat
  • Private Text Chat
  • Private Voice Over IP
  • Avatar Gestures

Basic Collaboration

  • Collaborative Web Browsing
  • Google Slides Presentations
  • Google Docs
  • Whiteboards
  • Virtual Laser Pointer

Advanced Collaboration

  • Team Building Activities
  • Business Simulations
  • Record/Replay System
  • Participant Data Visualizations

Client software for VirBELA is available for both Windows and Mac. There are complete instructions available on how to install and set up the software. This is one of the few virtual world platforms that has links to a university, as opposed to a private company. For that reason alone, it’s worth keeping an eye on as it develops over time.

MeetinVR: A Brief Introduction

MeetinVR is another social VR app targeting the business market, created by a Danish company. There’s not a lot of information on their website, but they have released the following promotional video on YouTube:

The software is not currently available, but they are taking applications for their Early Access Program, so be sure to sign up if you are interested in being a beta tester!

Hyperfair VR: A Brief Introduction

Hyperfair VR 9 JUly 2018.png

Hyperfair VR bills itself as “Social VR for the Enterprise”, and it is squarely targeted at businesses who wish to create a social VR presence. The website offers a free browser-based demo, and also says you can contact them for a demo with VR headsets. Everything I saw here was virtual world environments you would visit on your desktop. Their virtual world platform reminds me a lot of OpenSim and early, pre-mesh Second Life. Here is what my avatar looks like:

Hyperfair 2 10 July 2018Hyperfair 10 July 2018

There’s a four-year-old video on the website which gives an overview of Hyperfair.

Another YouTube video extols the value of setting up a Hyperfair VR Site for businesses:

And finally here’s a more recent video showing their new Android app:

Looking through the Hyperfair VR website and wandering through their demo world gives me a weird sense of déjà vu. Second Life went through a period (around 2006-2007) where many real-life companies, like American Apparel and Playboy, trooped in and set up shop. Almost all of those corporations left after a year or two, not seeing any real value for their investment of time and money in SL:

Mentions of Second Life first crept into the UK media mainstream in early 2006.

A year later, newspapers fell over themselves to cover it, devoting many column inches in their business, technology and lifestyle sections to profiles and trend pieces. By the end of 2007 Second Life had secured more than 600 mentions in UK newspapers and magazines, according to the media database Lexis Nexis.

IBM bought property in 2006, American Apparel opened a shop the same summer, Reuters installed avatar journalist Adam Pasick – also known as Adam Reuters – to report on virtual happenings, and countries established virtual embassies.

The number of people joining the site jumped from 450,000 to four million in 2007.

But just as quickly as it had flared, media interest ebbed away. References plummeted by 40% in 2008 and dropped further this year. And businesses diverted their resources back to real life.

American Apparel closed its shop just one year after opening. Reuters pulled its correspondent in October 2008. When asked about his virtual experience, Pasick says: “It isn’t a subject we like to revisit.”

Not much, says Wired UK editor-at-large Ben Hammersley, and that was the problem.

“You could go and open these stores and no-one would turn up,” he says.

“They would have 20 to 30 people there when it opened, and after that no-one would bother going in there again. It just wasn’t worth the spend.”

And I don’t see anything especially different from Second Life in the Hyperfair VR platform, so I would suspect they are going to have exactly the same problem attracting—and keeping—corporate clients. The problem is further compounded by the fact that Second Life was and is a relatively well-known and popular virtual world, whereas Hyperfair VR is a little-known (and presumably little-used) platform.

Given all this, I think that Hyperfair is going to be fighting an uphill battle to attract  corporate attention and customers.