Business week has an interesting article “The End Of Work As You Know It -
Increasing connectivity will change how and where we labor—even the very notion of an employer”

The article mentions upcoming Virtual World SIG presenter Seriosity and also touches on augmented reality, Mechanical Turk, telepresence, and distributed workforces. We have discussed it in virtual world circles before but it’s the first big publication mention I have seen of how work processes could be deconstructed, distributed, and completed by contractors working around the world.

I’ve also tossed around the idea that work processes themselves could be deconstructed. For example: the task of identifying a tumor on an x-ray could be represented as a map or other image and then “acted upon” or spotted by a player (contractor) for a digital currency reward. Couldn’t other data manipulation tasks be abstracted as well? I can imagine a future of monotonous data entry or auditing being accomplished by a workforce that only viewed the data as “a game” or as elements in a virtual world. The source data would be even be somewhat encrypted by virtue of this “virtualization”. Great things to consider as we continue to redefine “virtual worlds” as they emerge.

Let’s continue the discussion at the upcoming SIG and I’ll also be speaking on the topic at the Virtual Worlds 2007 conference enterprise track where SDForum will have a presence with a booth and a VC forum.

Book discussed in the article:

The Future of Work

Just announced from SDForum: 

SDForum members get 10% off on the current registration rate, ($60 off the $595 price or after August 24, 2007, $80 off the $795 price), for the Virtual Worlds Fall Conference. October 10-11, 2007, San Jose
The Virtual Worlds Fall Conference

Virtual Worlds Fall is dedicated to helping businesses harness the power of virtual worlds to engage with their customers, partners and employees. The event follows the highly successful Virtual Worlds Spring Conference which took place in New York in March.

The conference has five primary tracks: Entertainment and Marketing; Virtual Worlds for the Enterprise; Business Strategy and Investment; Community and Customer Service; and Design and Development. Leading companies will be showcasing the latest technologies and services at the Virtual Worlds Expo.

Please email Bridget DiMambro to get the discount code for the 10% off on the current registration rate,.

REGISTER NOW at http://www.virtualworlds2007.com/,

San Jose Convention Center, San Jose, CA

Registration/More Information

From what I can see, this is a great example of what augmented reality should NOT be. Endlessly clicking on low-rez photos of a place that you are already in. Comes to us via http://www.hci.uniovi.es/

Now, with all due respects to the video and the application, (Vadinia) the video depicts a nightmare augmented reality. Navigating through real space while tied to a handheld device. This would probably be better illustrated within a museum or other controlled area, with the point being - where does the user begin absorbing information for herself? When does the user begin to form her own impressions based on classroom learing? Can this type of information input - output be done through the interface? I welcome your comments and discussion….

This unusual film depicts a hypothetical team of augmented traders which apparently are in charge of managing asset trading during world crises in real time.

They have really important jobs to do. When these high-performing traders are stressed, their headsets automatically prioritize the information they receive and minimize or maximize windows on their computer screens. We see the character “Claudia” stress out and the system helps her to focus in order to identify a suspect in the world unrest. Later, to calm her down the headset plays “a personal musical phrase” which “alerts her and supports the cognitive rebalancing process”. In other words, the headset knows when you are stressing out and provides you with direct-to-brain stimulation to keep your concentration stable.

The technology shown would likely require a user which had been trained (perhaps from a young age) to use and rely on such augmentation. There are a couple of clues in the film that make the predicted reality believable:
1.) the lives these characters lead are not that different from traders today and
2.) the idea that this device could make those decisions about personal sensory input accurately is outrageous - but outrageous new technology is accpeted rapidly, and can become mainstream within a couple of years. That is the speed at which augmentation is adopted.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

From http://www.augmentedcognition.org/video2.html

“This short film takes place in 2030 in a command center that is tasked with monitoring cyberspace activities for anomalies that could threaten the global economy. The economy, which functions largely in cyberspace, is the link between countries and is extremely susceptible to instability. As might be expected, given the ever-increasing amount of data to be analyzed even in today’s world, the workers in 2030 are inundated with information from all sources. They have so much information to contend with that they are literally unable to process it all unaided.”

TechCrunch.com has posted a roundup of Virtual Worlds they visited.

The post is here: virtual world hangouts-so many to choose from

They also include a matrix summarizing some qualities of the worlds, which is similar to the chart by Virtual Worlds News located here.

So now with so many worlds getting online, the question will be shifting to: Which worlds for which users?  Which functions work for which users? And on to the next generation of all of these worlds. That’s the purpose of the Virtual World SIG to sort these things out for investors, companies and users.
It’s good to see virtual worlds getting attention, as of course MRO thinks that they are a model for many elements that will form the future of the metaverse.

Aug. 27 join us for a discussion of the latest virtual currency to hit your inbox.

-MRO

This official video from Cisco’s YouTube channel explains that the design of the system was centered on “human factors” and “the experience”. How much unspoken human communication can be transmitted through this real-time interface? Would people prefer to be “avatarized“? Like the video phone before it this may seem both useless and indistinguishable from magic. Either way, it illustrates further how “the Metaverse is not a simulation” but rather a newly created space that is experienced. Fascinating, Captain.

Industry Week online Computerworld and Business Standard online have some new articles about telepresence - remote real-time, life-size conferencing. Businesses offering such systems include Teliris and Codian, Polycom, and Cisco Systems.

Business Standard cites the average price of a telepresence system to be around USD$300,000. With a little math you can see that such a system would pay for itself in saved travel expenses within a very short period of time. Although the videophone has been available since the early 1960’s it never saw adoption specifically because the use of the voice telephone interface allowed freedom of movement, appearance, and multitasking that is simply not possible when looking at a small screen.

What’s different now? The wall sized screens and bandwidth allow for a completely new experience.

Notice how the participants in the video call it “unsettling” and “hard to get used to”. On the plus side - it makes everyone look like a news anchor! These systems are big, clunky and expensive now - how soon until telepresence is small, convenient, and cheap?