METANOMICS HOSTS ROBERT GEHORSAM, PRESIDENT OF

FORTERRA SYSTEMS, INC. - FEBRUARY 4, 2008

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Welcome, everybody. This is Rob Bloomfield—Beyers Sellers in

Second Life--and I’d like to welcome you to another edition of Metanomics here on JenzZa

Misfit’s Muse Isle. JenzZa, thank you so much for allowing us to conduct our main

Metanomics event here today. Welcome to our event partners on the New Media

Consortium, Etopia, ComMeta, Rockliffe University, Colonia Nova and the Terrace. And, of

course, thanks to our sponsors: Cisco Systems, SAP, Generali Group, Saxo Bank, Sun

Microsystems and Kelly Services. And a special thanks to my own institution, Cornell

University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management.

Before I introduce today’s guest, I would like to spend a moment and just talk about what we

have coming up next week. So next week the Halle Institute of Emory University is

sponsoring a conference of Virtual Worlds and New Realities in Commerce, Politics and

Society. Sounds right up Metanomics’ alley, you might be thinking, and I was thinking the

same thing. So we’re actually bringing the two together at the end of the conference, 2:30 to

4 P.M. Eastern time, 11:30 to 1 P.M. Second Life time. We will have the final panel of the

conference. I am going to be moderating, and we are going to have some very interesting

guests, who are not only in Atlanta at Emory, but also here in Second LIfe. On the panel

we’re going to have Benn Konsynski, who is professor of Information Technology at Emory’s

Goizueta School of Business. We’re going to have Chris Klaus, founder and CEO of

Kaneva, a Virtual World. And, in Second Life, joining us will be John Zdanowski, better

known as Zeeland, and the CFO of Linden Lab.

And I actually suspect we’ll have other guests that I’m not yet in a position to announce, but

I think this is going to be pretty interesting. We will definitely be having feeds coming from

Emory into Second Life, coming from Second Life into Emory, and I’m hoping we will also

have feeds to and from Kaneva as well, but we’re still working out the technology on that.

Finally, before we get started, let me just remind our live audience that you should join the

Metanomics chat group in Second Life, to join in on the backchat. And we like it when you

chat away so that we can get feedback on what you’re finding interesting. If you have

questions, you can type them into chat. You can also IM directly, Beyers Sellers. You can

just right click on me, if you’re on Muse Isle. If you’re not, you will have to search for me or

just use the Metanomics backchat.

Okay. So all that said, let’s turn to our guest. Today we have Robert Gehorsam, president of

Forterra Systems, Inc. Now, Robert, welcome to the show.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Well, thanks, Rob. Thanks for having me on, and I’m happy to be

here.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Now you’ve got an impressive résumé here. You served as

senior vice president of Programming and Production at Viacom’s CBS Internet Group.

Before that you were actually, it seems like, closer to where you are now: You were at Sony

Online Entertainment and dealing with the creation of games and game platforms, ranging

from, what? Everquest to Wheel of Fortune.

Now when we talk about Forterra--so Forterra--and this is right off your web site, “Forterra

Systems builds distributed virtual world technology for the corporate, healthcare,

government, and entertainment industries.” And so my first question for you is how does

your background in media and in gaming fit into Forterra’s game plan? I can see the games

pretty directly, but the media may be a bit more of a stretch.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Well, I suppose we all have different hops in our careers but,

fundamentally, it’s all about communication as well. So one of the things that, certainly, if

your question was about the time at Viacom, it was a very interesting time as adoption of

interactive technologies for mainstream media companies. And so that was an interesting

thing to spend some time doing. But, overall, I guess my background in games--online

games, really, since ’85 was really a great prelude to what’s going on today as--I guess

more and more organizations are seeing people come into the workforce who grew up

playing games, and they want to have a similar experience with their software at work.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Well, I think you mentioned you saw in the backchat that people

were talking about Webkinz, so those are the real young people who won’t be in the

workforce for a while, but I definitely see your point.

Before we talk too much about the clients and the specific jobs that you guys are doing at

Forterra, I’m hoping you can help us out a bit with just understanding sort of the corporate

structure and your relationships with some very closely related partners. So we’ve got

Forterra, we’ve got vare.com, which I understand runs on the same platform as Forterra,

OLIVE. And then we also have Makena, which is being used heavily on the entertainment

side and is also using OLIVE. So can you just give us a sense of how these all work

together?

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Yeah. Actually you sort of made it complicated by one. I guess this

will be a little bit of a campfire story. Maybe it starts with, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

But the company actually--

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Can we get the wicked--cue the clouds, JenzZa.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Really; and the thunder. But the company actually began in 1998

as There, and spent quite a number of years developing its technology platform solely with

the intent to offer a Virtual World service, which is today known as There--or there.com, just

so that people know exactly what’s being referred to.

In 2004, we made a decision, sort of seeing where the market was going, to adjust the

company strategy to be much more platform-oriented, meaning that we saw that there were

going to be many, many applications that could be built on this kind of technology that

wouldn’t just be in the social networking or entertainment space.

So like I said, we sort of redid the company. We renamed it Forterra Systems at that time,

and a year later we spun out the consumer service to a company called Makena. So There

is part of Makena, as is Virtual Laguna Beach and all the other MTV products.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. That helps. Oh, go ahead.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: So the only other thing I would say is that There runs certainly on a

version of technology that is loosely called OLIVE, but the stuff we do in our sort of more

enterprise and public sector work is a slightly newer, I suppose, version, which has some

features that There has, and doesn’t have other features.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. So the implementation--I mean on the technical side, these

have diverged somewhat as they try to accomplish different goals?

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Yeah, they absolutely diverge that way. And we also saw that there

was going to be a need for more third-party development on the platform. So when There

was originally created, it was really envisioned that most of what would be created was

content, the way it is being done today, of clothing and textures and things like that. What

we saw was a future that really involved much more functional third-party development,

code development and, in particular, I’d say integration with outside systems. For example,

we have human physiology models that power some of our avatars. We didn’t write that; we

worked with a medical simulation company to do that. So that required some substantial

augmentation and enhancement to the code base.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Now, one investor that’s been involved with this is Incutel which,

as I understand it, is the venture capital that supports the U.S. intelligence community? So

can you talk a little bit about how that came about, and also how it’s affecting your strategic

directions?

ROBERT GEHORSAM: I guess I can only talk a little bit about it.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: I understand.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: And, really, there’s a press release, I think, on our web site which

describes what’s going on there, and what’s pretty much what we can say. You’re right;

Incutel is a very interesting and special organization--mandated by Congress, actually--to

enable the intelligence community to have some access to or to help create technologies

that I guess they felt they weren’t able to develop internally as well, relative to this pace of

innovation in the private sector.

Well, they’ve actually invested in one game company previously. That’s probably on their

web site, but they got very interested in us, really, at the beginning of 2007, based on seeing

what we were doing and learning more about what our architecture really is and what it

offers. And I think there was actually on the Second Life educator list there was just a little

bit of a discussion about that, about sort of the power of our distributed simulation approach.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Can you tell us a little bit about OLIVE? And on the technical

side, what does this mean for the type of clients that are most appropriate for you?

ROBERT GEHORSAM: That’s a good question. I’m not a technologist by background so

I’m not going to go--

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Well, that’s good because then I will understand your answer.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: So I won’t go super deep. I joined the company in 2002 and, even

though I come out of the game industry, I actually came to the folks at There, who I’d known

for a while, because I’d been doing some advisory work for the government on the impact of

basically massively multiplayer games on policy and security issues, which actually it’s a

very interesting topic and not maybe for this group, but for some other time.

And what I saw in the early alphas of There was something that was trying to solve the

fundamental problem of believable freeform human interaction, meaning that you have

game engines, right? But they have highly structured interaction governed by the rules of

the game, and even the social output of experience, or the social experience that’s created

from the game play, is fundamentally modified or contextualized by the rules. And what the

folks at There were trying to do was create something that was really believable and really--

to use an overused word--really immersive.

Well, let me just go off to the side. When you play a game, for example, you’re playing a

character. But in the world that we’re sitting in now and in There and in others like that,

nominally or notionally you’re you. So what does it mean to really be you? And so they went

to great lengths to create an immersive experience, which meant optimizing a number of

factors. One was believability of the world and the fidelity of the world. The other was the

security, which validated the experience. The reliability of the system. Did I mention

performance? If I did, then I’ll add redundancy. But what I saw was really something that

was less a game platform and much more of a real--call it a virtual reality simulation-based

platform. So it was really powerful and in some ways one might argue it was wildly almost

overbuilt for its light socializing goals, but for industrial-level clients, it’s fantastic.

The way that the physics works, the way that the architecture works, guarantees that you

always have accurate results from the simulation and that, if you see it happen in that

platform, it really did happen.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Now, I was very interested in hearing you talk about--you said

you have people who are writing simulations for things like--I think you said human

physiology, and that is then being imported into the world to affect--I mean I guess you

could have much more realistic shoot-em-uppers. I don’t know that the Department of

Defense would necessarily be interested in that, but that could be something that’s going

on. I mean the thought of trying to do that in Second Life, for example, seems like a real

technological stretch. So is that one of the aspects that you think differentiates yourself from

some of the other platforms?

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Yeah, probably. I don’t want to get too much into necessarily

comparing us to Second Life or to any other platforms. Each one of them has their own

virtues and vices, and we’re probably no exception. But lately I’ve been sort of using this

term--at least among my colleagues--of sort of “industrial-strength virtual worlds,” and it

seems to resonate.

And to be clear, no one has written a simulation for human physiology to plug into OLIVE.

We’re using one that is already existing, and that’s really powerful. So just as you can import

content in some Virtual Worlds--and I know now there’s a SketchUp exporter of some sort

and has been for a little while for Second Life. We work with 3D Studio Max and SketchUp

and Maya. So in addition to being able to use pre-existing content, what we’re looking at is

integrating with pre-existing functionality on sort of an application-by-application basis. And

that’s pretty powerful and for certain kinds of real-time simulations it requires some pretty

strong APIs.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: So now I know you were very politically correct and said you

weren’t going to compare your platform to others, but there are a couple questions that are

coming through the backchat--and I’m hoping you’ll be able to address them, and that, of

course, is your call. One is now Open Croquette, I guess, has very distributed processing,

and you mentioned that, so I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you see that

relative to what you’re doing.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Well, my political correctness probably masked the fact that I’m not

the person to do a technical dive on each of these platforms. And I know Open Croquette a

little bit less than Quack, which obviously runs on Open Croquette.

It’s my understanding that Open Croquette is fundamentally a peer-to-peer system, with

some server--call it adjudication. We are a client-server application, but we co-simulate on

the client and the server. So while the server’s running the master simulation for the world or

for, let’s say, a sector, the client is running the same simulation for the region that you, the

avatar, are in. And they’re sort of tightly coupled and checking each other so that the results

are always accurate. So that’s--go ahead.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: If I could, let me--so when we talk about how you relate to these

other platforms--I’m a business professor. I’m not a tech guy, so my question is who is it you

end up going head to head with when you’re--I know of all these project that are being or

have been shopped around. There’s a Virtual Congress project coming out of Indiana

University where, as I understand it, they’re going to get high school kids to play at being

Congressperson, senator and lobbyist--a useful reality segment there. Then the work with

Defense and so on. Who is it you end up going head to head with on these projects?

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Well, it always depends on the project. Sometimes the competition

isn’t even a Virtual World company or platform. Many times when an RFP goes out or a

customer goes out, they have a problem they want solved, and sometimes the Virtual World

is a solution, and sometimes it’s not.

But in cases where there’s Virtual World stuff, there’s a lot of sort of the usual suspects.

Certainly Active Worlds, which is a company that’s really been around for a while, has been

present. Quack, when it comes to sort of I’m going to say lightweight--and I don’t mean it at

all in a pejorative sense. It’s a relatively light client, low resolution collaboration system. We

see them sometimes. And we also see Proton Media, which is a company that I think they

really began as a Flash developer of corporate training.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: They’ve been working, I believe, with Duke’s Fuqua Business

School.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: I think so. So for example, where Quack has more of a

collaboration orientation, Proton has more of a corporate training orientation. I think they

really do training for Pharma sales reps, people like that. So we’re very, very general

purpose. So we have a very ambitious agenda, and what we see is occasionally these other

companies in very specific areas, but we don’t see all of them all the time.

And also, I would say a little bit in the medical area and also in the government, we see

Virtual Heroes, which is not a Virtual World platform company, but they’re the developers for

America’s Army, so we see them sometimes as well.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Now I notice you didn’t mention Second Life. Are they just, to

you, a totally different space?

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Well, I don’t think Second Life is really--and I could be wrong at

what I’m saying, but my understanding is Second Life is not in the application business.

They are happy to enable others to do so, but they’re not doing maybe specific business

development, for example, in places where we go, whether it’s public or private sector.

That said, there are developers--Electric Sheep, Rivers, individuals, whomever--and they

might decide to use Second Life as a platform. And so to that degree it’s an alternative

platform. But it’s those developers who would represent alternatives to Forterra and OLIVE.

We also have a small, but very quickly growing number of people who are starting to

develop their own Virtual Worlds and applications based on OLIVE. So it’s small now but, in

a year, you’ll probably see a similar ecosystem emerging.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. Great. I think that gives us a much better sense of the

business environment in which you’re operating. I’d like to move on now to talking about one

of your specific clients. I understand--and we had a little chat last week--I understand that

most of the clients you can’t tell me about or you’d have to kill me.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Well, not quite.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Yeah, that includes not just on the classified side, but on the stuff

that you’re not quite ready to announce. But one that I think it will be a great one to talk

about is your work with the CATT Lab, the Center for Advanced Transportation Technology

Laboratory at the University of Maryland. And so I understand they’ve been working with

you and the I-95 Corridor Coalition to create a training program. So I’d like to ask now a

Second Life cable network has some of the video that gives people a visual sense of what

this endeavor is all about. So if they would go ahead and cue that up, audience members

will be able to see that silently while you tell us a little bit about this project. So if you can

just give us a sense of what these people are doing and where Forterra fits in, that’d be

great.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Sure. Well, in 2007, we began a relationship--a discussion with the

Center for Advanced Transportation Technology at the University of Maryland. And they’re

part of a consortium of public sector and maybe some private sector organizations that are

really responsible for policy planning, training, security, all sorts of things that are tied to

Interstate 95, which, for those of you who don’t know, runs from Florida up to Maine and is

arguably one of the major economic arteries of the United States, from an interstate

perspective. And so there’s a lot of issues, obviously, with keeping it running smoothly. They

came to us actually with a very simple proposition, and they said, “Look, between Baltimore

and Washington there are just massive headaches with accidents and traffic. And, roughly

speaking, about every hour that traffic stops on Interstate 95 because of an accident.” It’s

cost about $100 million in lost productivity to the GDP. I’m not an economist, but I kind of

love that kind of idea that there’s economic value associated with a traffic jam, besides the

environmental damage and the emotional frustration from everyone in the cars.

So they said the reason those accidents last so long is because the emergency workers just

don’t get the cars off the road fast enough. They don’t set the scene property, and it’s

getting so bad that they’re actually thinking that it may be more economically viable to just

toss the car off the side of the road and buy the accident victim a new car. So I said, “If we

can just get these guys to put traffic cones down, we might have enormous benefit, and

injuries could be prevented, economic conditions could be improved. So we basically have

licensed to them their own OLIVE platform and tools, and they’ve been developing a

complete training system for highway emergency workers, from police to ambulance to road

workers, you name it. I don’t know if you can all see it up on the screen, but these are some

scenarios that they’ve created themselves, the content, the curriculum, the role players. All

of that is them. We provided them with certain training in technology, but what you really see

there is a homegrown effort. And so that’s a first step, I think, in what they want to do.

You can go to their website. I think it’s catt.umd.edu or umd.edu/catt. And you can read

more about what they do, but you can see sort of what the roadmap for them is, which is,

you go from training those workers to starting to integrate more AI models of traffic flow to

really understand the larger policy issues, the building out geo-specific versions, not just

geo-typical versions. And ultimately to integrating real time sensors from the highway to

have basically--I hate the term “command and control,” but to have an operation center view

of the highway in a virtual world. So that’s a kind of interesting progression of applications

on a scale that can be done with something like OLIVE.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: That’s so much to talk about and follow up on. I’d like to start, I

guess, by following up a little more on your working relationship with the CATT Lab. And I

know we have a lot of people who listen to the show, who are in a position wanting to do

something like what the CATT Lab is doing. So if you could talk a little bit about what their

experience would be like, what rests on their shoulders. And what exactly is it that you

provide, other than just licensing of the ability to use the OLIVE platform?

ROBERT GEHORSAM: We’re all in a very new and emerging market. It’s just one cliché

after another, I realize, but it’s a way of saying that flexibility is really important. So we have

a studios group, which actually will do several things. One is, it will build applications for

people who don’t have that capability themselves. We will provide training for content

developers, training for operations people, training for coders as well. Or, we can

recommend, in some cases, third party developers to a customer who also doesn’t want to

either avail themselves of our services or build it themselves. So at this point, really have to

be flexible for people who want to do these things. And we have no pre-stated preference or

judgment about how that should go.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: And you also talked a little bit about the mirror world aspect of

this. This is maybe getting a little bit speculative, but it sounds like you have in mind that you

can have sensors in the real world that are going communicate information into the virtual

world. People can be in the virtual world, making decisions that end up affecting traffic flows

directly. Is that the idea?

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Well, maybe not that specific example. I may not want to reroute

the traffic but, ultimately, the membrane between sort of agency in the real world and

agency in the virtual world is going to blur. You already can see it. It’s not that far off. You

can already see it, and there’s things going on Second Life as well where you see things like

air traffic and so forth. What sort of the next step is--well, there are several next steps.

One is a tighter integration that’s secure, obviously, that has sort of the much more

guaranteed performance. Because if you’re trying to affect the real world, you better want to

know that when you commit to an action, it’s actually going to be happening.

And the second is that, I think when you talk about mirror worlds, we’re talking about things

like Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth. And a lot of the data there is not timely. I

mean I look at Google Earth’s picture of my street in New York, and it’s three years old. So

how do you start to integrate call it real time content updating from GIS or Mirror World

sources that can then be rendered appropriately in a 3D world. So I think this is a--

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Go ahead, finish up.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Anyway, I would say, at this point, there’s an aspect of this that

seems sort of more cool and intriguing than it seems useful, but there are places that it will

be useful over time. And I think there’s a valid--how do I say it--there’s a valid interest that

these environments being distributed, being immersive and being very easy to use, relative

to other kinds of systems, could be really great operational control tools.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Now there’s a follow-up that came from Aldon Huffhines in our

backchat, asking us to take this further. He wants to know if you’re doing anything with

augmented reality.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: We’re not right now.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Actually, maybe we should define that. I guess I’m assuming

what Aldon means is actually being able to push additional virtual content into what are

normally real life interfaces. I don’t know. I hope that’s an intelligible description. But go

ahead. I didn’t mean to interrupt.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: We’ve looked at it. It’s certainly something we’re tracking, we’re

interested in. We’re doing some work with caves. I can tell you that. The sort of very, very

large chained-together displays, sort of holodeck kind of stuff but without the holograms. But

you go into a large room, and the entire environment is rendered on multiple giant screens

rather than just one screen. Someone has asked if you could repeat the definition, by the

way, of augmented reality.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: I’m glad that was a low volume definition because, boy, I don’t

know if I could actually define augmented reality on the fly. You can give it a stab, or my

guess is that there might be other people who can type it into backchat, and I’ll read it out

loud.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Right. There is another term, which is maybe a first cousin or

half-sister to augmented reality, and that’s mixed reality. And that is the idea of incorporating

activities in real life with activities in the virtual world. We actually helped establish a lab at

the University of Central Florida, called the Virtual Worlds Research Lab. And that’s

affiliated with the film and digital media school there. One of their theater professors did a

performance piece--I guess it was a mystery--that mixed live performance with virtual

performance. I’m not dexterous enough to find and type in the URL for that, but maybe if

individuals want to ask me later, I can get that to you. And that’s another area that’s

interesting.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Yeah. I know UCF has been doing incredible things with virtual

reality and, in particular, I’ve heard about fire control policies. And actually, I do have the link

right here to put into backchat.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Great.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: So yeah, that’s Glen Harrison is an economist there, who has

been really at the forefront of all of that. I hope to get those guys also on Metanomics at

some point.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Right. Well, UCF is--oh, I’m sorry. Go ahead.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: No, No. I’d love to hear about UCF.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: All right. So UCF is one of the biggest sort of unknown universities

in the country, certainly, and it really is, for various reasons, probably the simulation capital

of the United States. Something I didn’t know until a few years ago. As some people have

sort of drolly put it, it’s at the center of the military entertainment complex. All the Services

have their simulation commands based in Orlando, and you also have all the theme parks.

And when you look at the birth of simulation, which really someone noticed earlier, related to

flight simulators, which led to motion simulators. The different between a ride, a motion

simulation ride, at Universal and flight simulator is kind of minimal. So there’s an enormous

amount of talent in the digital film and media departments, in the computer science

departments and all throughout that area. So for those of you who are students or interested

in looking at sort of more studying in these areas, that would be an interesting place to look

at.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: I loved that phrase, the military entertainment complex.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Complex. Right.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: I know you’ve done a fair bit of the military and other government

work and just more generally on the Serious games. I notice actually we had David Wortley

from the Serious Games Institute at Coventry on last week, and I know they’ve adopted you.

Are you basically totally ceding the entertainment side to your compatriots like There?

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Well, we’re not ceding it in the sense of surrender. We have a

business relationship that gives them the rights to pursue that. Our fundamental focus is

really on the platform and getting as many people to begin to develop on that platform and

use that platform for a wide range of uses. So they’re really--

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Do you have clients coming to you from the entertainment side,

or are you just not going to go with that yet?

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Yeah. We’re not really going in that direction, except to the degree

that you could imagine a virtual world as a digital back lot, that it was a production tool

rather than a call it a distribution tool. And that’s kind of an interesting area. Whether we’re

doing something in that or not is separate. We’re really not. So Makena really is our partner

that faces the consumer for entertainment and social networking.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. Let me move on to what may sound like a technical issue,

but I guess with the two of us talking about it, it’ll be primarily a business issue, and that is

virtual world interoperability. Now I guess we actually met the first time in San Jose at that

Virtual World Operability Forum that was hosted by IBM.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Yeah.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: And everyone was there, basically all representatives of not just

the platforms, but the people like Adobe, for example, that makes 3D modeling tools that

feed into the platforms.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Right.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: And I know that’s been a slow battle to try to achieve

interoperability. And, along with those, we’ve also got the Open Source issues going on.

Sun has their Open Source platform. Second Life has made some movements toward Open

Source. So I’m wondering if you can just talk about, and primarily really from the business

perspective, how do you see this interoperability and Open Source and Open Standards

progressing?

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Well, let me take the second part first. Open Source shouldn’t be

confused with Open Standards, and they often are. I think there will always be a debate,

which will have a practically religious or ideological overtones about whether things should

be Open Source or not. We are much more oriented to the Open Standards, that it’s okay to

have proprietary software because that’s a business model that does enable innovation. I

suppose you could argue, in some cases, that it doesn’t but, in other cases, it does. But

certainly it encourages innovation, but it also allows for interoperability so that different parts

can work together. And so we’re really firmly on the Open Standards side, and you can see

that with certainly the decisions we’ve made about content creation. And you can also see it

by something that is upcoming that I think we’re pretty much the first people to do a very

specific virtual world standard or protocol and put it into the open community. And that is a

new format, which I think I mentioned to you, Rob, called Paged Terrain Format. So if you’re

going to build a virtual world, you need something to build the world with. I think I’ve been

implying we’re really interested in the issue of geo-specific fidelity.

There have been a lot of attempts to do databases that are very, very realistic in great

detail, but they tend to be at the aerial level. I’ll talk about Paged Terrain in a second, Aldon.

And they tend not to go down to the ground very well, and they tend to specifically not do

things like the deformation of terrain, tunnels, underpasses, overpasses, all that kind of stuff.

So we’ve been working on a standard that will handle very, very, very robust--the three

“very’s” is like the sixth sigma, I guess. Very robust terrain. Very, very large whole earth kind

of geo-specific that can work with pre-existing data as well and handle a lot of the

challenging physics issues that go along with that. and we’re going to put that into the

community, and, in fact, it is out there on our CTO’s website, interopworld.org. You can read

the draft spec, and it will be coming out in a near term release of OLIVE sometime this

spring. So that’s an example of an Open Standard that’s going on. I know that I’m being

longwinded in my response.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: No, no, this is great. No one wants to hear me.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: So that’s the first part. We just take a position that maybe there are

aspects that should be Open Source, but, by and large, we see that Open Standards as

also enabling the kind of interoperability that’s needed.

Now, on the interoperability side, I think there is a broad and general agreement that for

Virtual Worlds to take off to be a disruptive and internet-level phenomenon, you can’t go into

each virtual world with sort of separate sign-ins and all those sorts of things. That there

needs to be ways for aspects of Virtual Worlds to interoperate much the way that websites

interoperate. So I think everyone agrees on that. So there’s interoperability on the

production side. There’s interoperability on the run time side, I guess, and that’s what’s

starting to be discussed, certainly in--what is it--the Virtual World Interoperability Group and

a couple of other places. I think there’s an effort in Europe too, although why these things

should be geographically focused, I’m not sure.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Yeah. We actually had someone who’s working with the

European group, Dr. Yesha Sivan from Israel, actually.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Yeah. I know Yesha well.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Actually, that’s right. He presented also in San Jose at the

Interoperability Forum, and I will say one of his points is that he didn’t think we Americans

were ever going to get our acts together and that Europe would be able to actually do it

much the way they were able to deal with mobile phones. Now you may disagree on his

evaluation, but that’s the one he made.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: When you look at the companies in the room, they’re all global

companies, so I just don’t see how this is going to be a geographically specific effort by any

means.

So that said, I think the interoperability is really important. Once again, not being a

technologist, I think there’s still the question of which things are really important. To

interoperate? That’s the first question. The second order question is going to be: What can

we actually already use from the 2D web that works just fine? I mean is Real ID okay for

universal login to different Virtual Worlds? Maybe, from what I can tell.

COLLADA: I noticed that someone also talked about Colada. Is COLLADA a good

interchange format for all that?

So I think there’s a lot of questions that have to be answered. Do we need to create new

standards or can existing ones sort of be re-contextualized and re-factored to work?

And then you finally get to the question of what are the really essential interoperability

standards that are specific to Virtual Worlds and the 3D internet. I think it’s a really slow

process. I think there’s going to be lots of skeptics. I think there is what I’m going to call a

natural level of concern about trust between parties since all the people involved all have

different agendas. I don’t mean that in any snarky way. I think it’s just something that gets

rationalized when you have big diverse technology companies like IBM or a company like

Cisco dealing with Electric Sheep. Those are all different perspectives.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: So actually I got very much the feeling that that was going on

when I was sitting in the forum, but, from my vantage point, it was difficult for me to really

understand what those different perspectives are. So could you talk a little bit--and I know

you’ll want to be careful, but I do think that you could really give us some insight. What do

you see that, for example, the Intel’s and Cisco’s of the world, that sort of very low level

technology providers providing the most basic stuff--how exactly does their interest in

interoperability differ from the platforms like yourself and from the people using them, like,

say, Electric Sheep?

ROBERT GEHORSAM: You know, honestly, I have no idea. Our representative to the

group is actually our CTO, and so he participates on an ongoing basis. I do think that, at a

very, very high level, everyone has the same agenda, which is to increase the number of

people and the overall value that goes on in Virtual Worlds. So I think the interests will occur

at the implementation levels. That different people will be much more interested in having

certain implementations done in some area than another. I know that’s a really general

comment, but, like I said, I’m not in the ongoing discussions, so I don’t have anything

specifically more detailed to add to it.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: That’s interesting. I have the privilege, being an academic, that I

can spend my time as I please, not all of it intelligently, and one of the things that I’ve been

doing is following what this group is doing. I admit, first of all, it’s very heavily managed by

the tech people, not by the business side. And so I actually wonder, I worry a little bit when I

see technology folks at a big corporation potentially making key strategic decisions that are

going to affect the entire industry, without having the suits there to weigh in. I don’t know if

you want to react to that, but just my own little opinion.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Well, this group is not a group that actually has any authority to set

any standard. They are a discussion and recommending body only. And how standards

actually get decided on and adopted--it’s going to end up being a business discussion, with

a lot of support from the technologists. So I think that’s how we see it happening. That’s how

everyone involved sees it happening, and I think it’s a long way off before we see anything

concrete coming out of it. Which is fine.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Yeah, well, let the free market operate. See where we end up.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Yeah.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: So we are just about out of time. I’d like to give you the last few

minutes. Just to talk a little bit about what you see in the future, and this can be what you

see for Forterra in the next few months or a year or ten years. Or you can talk about

short-term or long-term in the industry, but just sort of what is guiding your thinking and

where do you think this car is heading.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: I could go out 20 years and start talking about implants sitting on

my optic nerve, giving me a real augmented reality view of things. You know what? I think

that stuff actually is going to happen. I think what’s really important to happen in the next

year especially is for us to have, I guess, a reality check so all of us who are here are here

because we really believe in this stuff, and we’re really excited, and we’re really

enthusiastic. I’ve been 23 years involved with some aspect of this, so I really must be nuts

to be doing it. But there’s a sense that now, for a wide variety of reasons, this is a time when

there can be reality. But when you actually look at what has been going on for the past, let’s

say, 18 months, there’s been an enormous amount of work in the sort of social networking

and entertainment side. We should never forget what the MMOGs represent to all of this

because that is the real business at this point.

But, if you want to imagine other parts of human activity migrating to this, then we really

need to start to see the results of all the early experimentation and pilot programs and the

corporate efforts. We need to see somehow publicly described results that this stuff works.

That people can learn better. That people can train better. That people can do things better.

And I think we all have an intuitive sense of that, and maybe some of even know some

examples for sure, but we don’t really know that as a community. I think, this year, we need

to start to see some of those results. So what I described with the University of Maryland, for

example, they’re doing work, and they’re going to start to get results, and it should be pretty

interesting. We do a lot of work in the medical area too, and some of it I can talk about, and

some of it is with clients I can’t talk about. But we’re going to see results this year and,

hopefully, they’ll be published, and they’ll be published, in some cases, in a proper research

form. I think we need to see that. Otherwise we really run the risk of hype meltdown

because the money won’t be there to do the things we want to do, and the disappointment

factor will be really high. So that’s a very short-term view, but I think it’s a gating factor for

getting to the longer term.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Yeah, well, I would also see that as maybe more of an immediate

call to action than anything else, and I think it’s an exceptionally useful one. I know, from

where I sit in academia, people talk about using games, use Serious Games and virtual

environments for learning. And the thing that always comes up is assessment. Is anyone

actually learning any better this way or really anything at all? For all we know. It’s very hard

to know what people are doing on the other side of the computer. I agree this is likely to stall

a lot of the progress that we’d like--you know, those of us who have already gotten excited

about this, you know, hoping for.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: Right. Right. I know we’re probably out of time, but I can tell you

there are some early results that we’ve experienced that are really promising. We’re also

doing a lot of, I hope, interesting and useful work in sort of taking more traditional eLearning

techniques, technologies, methodologies and starting to adapt them to really real time

3D Virtual Worlds, which is a lot different than [course we’re?] on a web page. So LMS

integration, SCORM compliance, doing analysis of team training of the individual in the

context of team training, that’s all stuff we’re doing in various ways.

But I’ll give you one little bit of research that was actually done, not necessarily on OLIVE,

but with one of our partners at Stanford University Medical School. They were studying how

effective simulation techniques were for surgeons. And I don’t know how many of you about

this, but surgeons they used to practice on cadavers and now they use these amazing

quarter-million dollar mannequins, which are wired up. And they have these physiology

models, which I just was talking about before. We just rerouted to the avatar instead of the

mannequin. And what they discovered was, in some cases, surgeons learned more

effectively working on an avatar in a virtual environment than on a mannequin, which is

counterintuitive for something as tactile. Not a deceased mannequin. It’s like a robot.

Someone asked. They’re really quite remarkable, and they’re actually controlled from a

control room by a teacher or what’s called an observer controller. So anyway. So there’s

piece parts that show that certain kinds of learning can be more effective. But I think this

year we’re going to see whole solutions start to be validated.

And then I just will point out, on a very practical level, that even if you can do that, even if

you can prove it, then you have to have a technology that can actually be deployed and be

deployed securely and reliably and that meet the institutional criteria for that kind of

deployment. So that’s the other piece that has to be solved.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. Great. Well, Robert Gehorsam, president of Forterra

Systems, Incorporated, I thank you so much for coming into Second Life today and talking

with us about where you are and where you see Forterra and the industry going. I do hope a

lot of people will take you up on that call to action to work on assessment and show firm

evidence of the short-term wins, basically, that the industry is going to need to see.

So thanks to our audience. Special thanks to Second Life Cable Network that really did a

great job. I think everything not only has gone smoothly, but we were able to add some bells

and whistles, which we are continuing to do as we put time and money into Metanomics. So

thanks so much to SLCN and, again, thanks to you, Robert.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: You’re very welcome. Thanks, everyone.

Document: cor1005.doc Transcribed by: http://www.hiredhand.com Second Life Avatar: Transcriptionist Writer