Event Announcement: The Tech Virtual's First Exhibition opens June 4!

Looking for something to do on Wednesday? The exhibition I'm curating for The Tech Museum of Innovation is opening and we are hosting a summit on June 4 (in real life and in Second Life) for museum professionals to discuss the process by which it was created. The summit will be held at The Tech from 1-5pm PST and will feature:

• keynote address by Philip Rosedale, founder and chairman of Linden Labs (creator of Second Life)
• tour of the new exhibition with the people who designed the virtual and real versions of the interactive exhibits
  
• roundtable discussions on translating virtual exhibits into physical reality, open source models for development, marketing impact of virtual worlds for museums, community design best practices, and the future of museum collaboration
  

To give you a bit of background, the exhibition is called The Tech Virtual Test Zone, and it is an experimental gallery of interactive exhibit prototypes on the theme of technology in art, film, and music. None of the exhibits were initiated by staff; instead, they were developed online by a community of international volunteers via the web and Second Life from January-March of this year. In March, we selected the best of the virtual exhibits for translation into the real world. On June 4, the physical prototypes hit the floor of The Tech and the real fun (and analysis) begins.

While many people latch on to the Second Life aspect of this project, my primary interest is in the transformation of the exhibit process into a user-generated experience. Are community-driven design techniques viable for all kinds of exhibitions (and institutions)? Are the resulting exhibits better, worse, or in some way distinctive from exhibits developed via a more standard process? How do the community members feel about their involvement in the creative part of the exhibit process? What technologies help or hinder the success of these projects, both in terms of community satisfaction and quality of outcomes? Can you really build eight interactive exhibits based on virtual prototypes in two months without going insane?

I've been grappling with these and other questions over the last several months. And while I'm excited to engage in this discussion with other museum professionals on June 4, I'm even more thrilled to meet the real people behind the avatars who initiated these wonderful exhibits. They're coming here in person, and a few have already trickled into the construction space over the weekend. It changes the stakes when you feel accountable not just to visitors and donors but to remote community producers as well. Did we change too much? Did we honor their intentions? Did we breathe life into their aspirations?

I don't think I always made the right choices about how to respect, support, and foster the creative abilities of our community designers. I learned some surprising lessons about independence and institutional relationships with communities through this process and expect to learn a lot more in the week to come. Museum folks often sit in rooms and talk about how we can serve our communities. It will be refreshing to have some of those community representatives live and in-person to tell us what they're really getting (and where we're missing the boat).

So! Later this week, a post-mortem on the summit. In the meantime, join us Wednesday in San Jose or at The Tech in Second Life (in virtual New Venture Hall) for an afternoon of lively discussion. If you would like to join us live and in person, please send an RSVP note to summitrsvp@thetech.org

I hope to see you then!

Content from AAM: Virtual Worlds and Eye on Design slides (and more)

My more complete thoughts and reactions to the AAM (American Association of Museums) conference are forthcoming in a longer post soon. Today, I want to share slide presentations and interviews you might be seeking related to the sessions I chaired this week.

First, Charting New Territory in Virtual Worlds, which featured Paul Sparrow (Newseum), David Klevan (US Holocaust Memorial Museum), Chris Lawrence (NY Hall of Science), and Nora McCartney (NY Hall of Science). We talked honestly and openly about a range of virtual worlds projects, ranging from the funded to the unfunded, the small (serving 20+ students) to large. Chris bravely served as our "applause-o-meter" (see right) so that we could prioritize which questions to answer first. In fact, the slides (while minimal) contain content that was not covered in the session, since we focused only on the questions of most audience interest. You can view the slides here, or download them by clicking "view" in the player below.

| View | Upload your own

After the session, Jonathan Finkelstein, author of Learning in Real Time and blogger behind Real Time Minute, interviewed the panelists (sadly, I was rushing to session #2 and could not join them). You can read Jonathan's post and hear the panel interview here. Jonathan also interviewed me separately--to listen directly to the interview, click play below.

Download Interview with Nina as MP3

Next up was Eye on Design: Inspiration from Outside the Museum, which featured Emily Sloat Shaw (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden), Jennifer Rae Atkins (Andrew Merriell and Associates), Eric Siegel (NY Hall of Science), Penny Jennings (West Office Exhibition Design), Brianna Cutts (IDEO), Darcie Fohrman (Museum Exhibitions), and John Chiodo (Chiodo Design). The AAM blog covered the session, and you can download the slides here.

| View | Upload your own

This session was extremely well-attended and audience members shared some great comments. One man, upon seeing Smart Studio's use of a flashlight-like device to reveal interpretative content in a historic space, talked about how his museum used cheap flashlights as a "do it yourself" lighting source for small, intricate jeweled artifacts. Another woman talked about how the use of visitor-manipulated art (in her case, blocks of clay) transformed a quiet university museum space into an active, social opportunity for creative expression and exploration.

For those who want to explore the design inspirations in the slides further, here are some useful URLs:

• The Fenway Victory Gardens (presented by Emily)
• The Albuquerque Isotopes (presented by Jennifer Rae)
  
• Mandolin Brothers guitar shop (presented by Eric)
  
• 826 Valencia (presented by Nina), related post here
  
• Nike+ (presented by Nina), related post here
  
• World Without Oil (presented by Nina), related post here
  
• Body Movies (presented by John)
• Smart Studio (presented by John)
• On Air (presented by John)

What questions or thoughts did these sessions, explorations, and inspirations bring up for you?

Observations from The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop, Month 3

It's been awhile since I've shared the progress of The Tech Virtual, the web and Second Life-based virtual exhibit workshop that The Tech Museum of Innovation opened in December of 2007. (You can read other posts about this project by clicking Tech Virtual in the "Past Posts By Topic" sidebar on the right.)

The goals of The Tech Virtual are:

• to create an online space for museum professionals and creative folks of all kinds to collaborate on exhibit development and design
• to codevelop the best of these virtual designs as real exhibits at The Tech Museum (and to offer that opportunity to other museums as well)

Since opening in December, 166 members have initiated 70 exhibit projects on The Tech Virtual website, and about half of those projects have been built as 3D models within the virtual world of Second Life. More excitingly (to me), in the last month we have selected 6 virtual exhibits for codevelopment at The Tech as real exhibits, and we plan to put 8 "virtual to real" exhibits on the floor in June for an exhibition to coincide with the Zero1 festival. We got a lovely bit of press on the first four exhibit selections, and I'm thrilled by the diversity of participants and novel creations that have been submitted thus far. We'll be "closing shop" on the June exhibit submissions at the end of March, but we then plan to open up to the virtual community a much broader set of exhibition themes--both from The Tech and other museums--for experimentation and creative exhibit development.

In January, I wrote about the challenges and opportunities of using Second Life as a design space. This time, I want to talk about the codevelopment process--how we are taking these virtual exhibits and transforming them into floor-ready interactive experiences. Over the last month, my job has shifted from cultivating a creative community to serving as the liaison between that community and The Tech's exhibit engineers and fabricators. Functionally, I'm now project managing a very rapid exhibition production process... with a few significant differences.

First, there's the question of creative control. The exhibits that have been selected were created by members of our virtual community. Some of these people are professional artists or exhibit designers, but most are just talented folks with an interest in museums. They aren't commissioned to create exhibits; they're invited to take part in a contest. The winners do receive prizes from The Tech, but all of their work is under a Creative Commons attribution license, which means that any museum/institution/inspired person could take a virtual exhibit and run with it as long as they credit the original creator(s) by name.

All of this means that the codevelopment process by which the exhibits are translated from virtual to real is rather fluid and different for each exhibit. We told our community from the outset that the viability of exhibits in real life largely depends on Tech staff's confidence in our ability to design/build the exhibits based on pre-existing Tech expertise. Removing the burden of knowing "how" to make your exhibit in real life opens up involvement in the virtual process, but it also means that for the most part the exhibit conceptualizers/creators have little say in the final real life result. We did have a community member who left the community in January because she felt that the real life version of her exhibit being discussed did not appropriately reflect her vision; since then, we've tried to set clearer expectations of how translation to real exhibits might happen for each exhibit and talk people through what changes might need to happen on an individual level. Frankly, most people are just excited to imagine their vision coming to life. It will be interesting to see if that "life" accomodates their vision when they come to the exhibition opening in June.

That relates to a more general question: How do virtual exhibits translate to real exhibits? Consider the Wikisonic, a beautiful collaborative instrument initiated by Jon Brouchoud, an architect from Wisconsin. In Second Life, this instrument is a cylinder of nearly invisible spheres floating in the air. People can touch individual spheres, each of which represents a musical note, to activate them, and the spheres create a song that evolves as spheres are activated and deactivated.

It's lovely. It's multiuser. It also ignores the laws of physics, and, more subjectively, is a little more precious than Tech visitors may appreciate. In this case, we discussed potential real world implementations on the project wiki for Wikisonic. Jon was able to express what was most important to him (the instrument being accessible to multiple people at once) and that has helped drive the real exhibit design, even as we have let go of other elements of the original virtual design. What in Second Life was a cylinder of floating spheres will be a wall of buttons in real life--retaining the spirit, if not the 3D shape, of Jon's virtual creation.

This is how exhibits often happen in museums--an exhibit developer comes up with a core idea, and then designers twist it into something usable. When the developer and designer are both on staff, the conversations and evolution of the exhibit can be fluid and shared, but as more of us work with contract design/build firms, more of us find ourselves in the same position as The Tech Virtual's community: forced to communicate virtually to ensure that the exhibit is being created as desired/intended. In the case of The Tech Virtual, the fact that The Tech Museum is the ultimate client lessens this tension, as we are both the designers and the client (working with external developers/conceptualizers).

Working with contractors or communities across the country--or world--isn't easy. Holding virtual meetings and prototyping things in Second Life can be a useful alternative to endless conference calls and drawings that mean different things to different people. But that's just a start. Going virtual means we've been able to include international participants, but the not-so-surprising reality is that we have the best working relationships with the exhibit winners who happen to be local (like Richard, shown here with our exhibits team, who conceptualized a panoramic photo exhibit). In those cases, we can bring the exhibit initiators to The Tech to sit down with our engineers and brainstorm real implementations that reflect the initiators' vision and museum needs. We can do face-to-face, which becomes pretty darn useful when you are drawing squiggly lines on whiteboards and jumping up and down to demonstrate how visitors will use an exhibit.

A necessary next step for this project is to evolve our exhibit production process so that we are more clearly and openly documenting our work so geography doesn't limit these virtual exhibit designers' ongoing participation in the process. Theoretically, participants anywhere in the world could come to meetings, transfer content and software to us, and really be a part of the real world creation of their exhibit. We've already seen the value (and created the infrastructure) to develop exhibit ideas in this open way. Now we've got to keep virtualizing so we can keep sharing throughout the whole, and do it without slowing up the other pieces of the exhibit creation process.

Ultimately this is about opening up the exhibition design process, and it's useful whether to improve communication with contractors, visitors, or other museum professionals. Many people complain that it's too much work, that it's bad marketing to air our missteps and debates, or that it will erode visitor confidence in our authority. As a member of this field, I am enlightened and improved every time a museum shares its processes. Yes, I can read reviews of "what we should have done" on ExhibitFiles, but the lessons learned during a project are always more concrete than those expressed after completion. It doesn't have to be a blow-by-blow on your poor decisions; I love seeing how giant paintings get moved into museums (SAAM), early concept drawings for new exhibits (COSI), even how floor staff and visitors perceive exhibits (Exploratorium). When we're honest (and positive) about our work, we look good, whether we're struggling to get a giant totem pole in the loading dock doors or debating what the best user interface for an exhibit will be.

We're already at the point where documenting projects after the fact, via conferences, papers, and sites like ExhibitFiles, is par for the professional development course. As new technologies and approaches lead us to be more open with visitors, we should also consider how these can help us be more open with each other as well. I used to think that only other museum professionals (or contractors) would be interested in watching video from exhibit meetings or checking out other institutions' shop drawings. Now, I'm working with an outside visitor community, and that emphasis on open participation highlights our own closed doors. They want in on the whole process. The Tech Virtual is breaking down a barn door in the exhibit conceptualization and development process. But there are more doors to unlock before we can truly call ourselves an open museum. It's as practical as it is philosophical. And I don't know about you, but I prefer open spaces.

Observations from The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop, Month 1

The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop launches today!

This is not an analytical post (primarily); it's an announcement and invitation to join the new project I've been working on with The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA.

The Tech Virtual is a project that allows people to conceptualize and prototype exhibits online. The online platform has two parts: a website, where all projects originate, and a Second Life presence ("The Tech" in Second Life), where participants can communicate in real-time, share ideas, and build virtual prototypes. All participation is under a Creative Commons attribution license, which means that all ideas are available for use by anyone with no financial obligation--only an obligation to credit the originators of said ideas.

For The Tech, this is a new way to conceptualize exhibits. We don't have traditional designer/developers on staff; instead, we have a team facilitating this process and liaising between project participants and fabrication staff to develop these virtual ideas into physical reality. To that end, there's an added incentive for this pilot stage (through June 2008): $5000 to any exhibit concept deemed spectacular enough to develop into a real exhibit here at The Tech. To be eligible for the prize, your exhibit must be on the theme of "Art, Film, Music & Technology."

But this is not just for The Tech; our grant mandates that this project be a service to the museum community at large. Towards that end, we encourage you to use virtual workshop for your own devices, whether to vet exhibit ideas, create, steal, and share exhibit concepts with others, or to learn more about Second Life.

We know there are lots of people out there who have been "peeking in" on Second Life for awhile now, reading the articles, seeing the videos, maybe even creating an avatar. I know that Second Life can be a clunky, frustrating experience. But it's also a new online communication tool, one that significantly improves the real-time chat experience across time zones.

I don't see Second Life as the meat of this project. The meat is people coming together to design exhibits. Second Life is just one tool we're using as a community space for museum folks to discuss and share mockups with each other. I'm planning a full slate of programming, from museum tours to build classes to design reviews with the pros. Yes, Second Life can be a useful prototyping space. But for those who don't want to go through the trouble to learn how to build, it is much more accessible as a programming space, and we hope to offer many interactive talks, workshops, and more.

All of that said, I've learned a lot setting up the Second Life component of this project. A contractor, Involve Inc., built the virtual Tech to spec, so that eventually virtual exhibits could be tested in real dimensionality relative to the building. But the museum is mostly empty right now, since the goal is to fill it with user-created exhibits. I've spent the last month building some sample exhibits, as well as a tutorial on interactive exhibit design. This little building experience was an eye-opener for me. We started with a rather long document on what makes a good interactive exhibit, intended primarily for the non-museum folks who participate in this project. But no one was going to read all that text. Casting it as a walk-through tutorial, with a bit of interaction thrown in, will hopefully turn arduous "instructions" into a fun and informative experience. While I have a good deal of Second Life experience, this was my first time building something from scratch, and I can verify that it was much easier (and somewhat intoxicating) than I expected--and definitely the simplest way I can imagine creating an online "exhibit" quickly.

It's also been a fun team development experience for staff here. This picture was taken at the end of a building class in our virtual sandbox. We were building spheres, trying out the physics engine, when someone decided to sit on one of the spheres. Then everyone piled on, someone set it rolling, and... we had moved from building to experimenting to wacky fun. The Ontario Science Centre has a wonderful brainstorming system, the RIG (rapid idea generation) that relies on building real stuff from all kinds of junk very quickly. I hope we can soon be offering similar sessions in Second Life, where we are neither limited by a lack of stuff nor space nor ways to make things interact. Being in a virtual environment lowers some barriers to social, unorthodox interactions. Hopefully, by learning together in a playful way, we can all jump to new insights and become more brilliant, fulfilled, well-endowed designers.

I hope that you can have similar learning experiences that are directly relevant to your own professional interests and goals via this project. For creative folks still dreaming of a big break, here's a chance to shine. For old pros looking for new ways to design, here's a free platform to exploit for your own exhibits. For executives considering Second Life or distributed design strategies, please learn from and with us.

All of this is a work in progress. Part of the point of this project is that it's a community space--both on the web and in Second Life--and we hope most of the suggestions and improvements that take us to the next step will come with and from you.

So come on in! You can browse, create, and participate in projects on the website. If you don't have a full-fledged exhibit concept, you can browse and submit to the idea lab, a place for one-sentence flights of fancy that might someday become brilliant exhibits.

And the Second Life grid is down at this moment for maintenance, but starting at 2pm PST today you can join us in the virtual world. We are offering museum tours every day at 11am (today at 3pm), and build and script classes each day (starting Thursday) at noon. My name in SL is Avi Marquez. I'll see you at The Tech!

Looking for Your Input: What Might Bring You to Second Life?

Dear Museum 2.0ers,

As many of you know, I'm now working for The Tech Museum of Innovation on a new project in which exhibit designers, fabricators, curators, and visitors from all over the world can hook up to develop exhibit concepts and virtual prototypes in Second Life. We're launching very soon (mid-Dec), and I hope you'll all be a part of it.

But that's not what this post is about. I appreciate that Second Life is complex, frustrating, and has a very steep learning curve (but it makes great snapshots :)). Toward that end, I'm developing a set of classes and programs to welcome collaborators into Second Life and work with you from the perspective of museum/design work. I'd like to know...

• What's the biggest barrier keeping you from getting into Second Life?
  
• What might entice you to enter?
  
• Would you be interested in single events (i.e. a one-hour how to build session) or a multi-session program?
  
• Would you want events scheduled during the workday or after? On your time or on a fixed schedule?
  
• What kind of support would be most useful to you? Documents, people, videos?

In particular, I'm imagining creating a multi-session program that would take you from a first time experience in Second Life to a place where you would feel reasonably comfortable building, prototyping, and working with others in that environment. I do believe there's a professional development incentive here (especially if you can be "in class" with other awesome museum folk), but I also understand that everyone is busy and the desire to learn has to be balanced against the need to finish tasks.

My plan is to offer a smattering of classes and times in December, and then start more formal programs in January. So let me know what you think, and I'll integrate it into the planning! And if you want to be a test bunny for any of this, please get in touch.

Quickie Excitement: My Current Project in the News

There's a New York Times article today about the virtual CSI:NY experience that will be launching in Second Life on October 24. There's a link to a video clip from the episode that will kick it off here. I've had a blast working with The Electric Sheep Company and Anthony Zuiker (creator of CSI) to design the narrative game that will accompany the superlative CSI:NY virtual environment. For all those who wonder whether Second Life can be used for a mainstream, mass audience experience, the virtual CSI:NY experience will be a great test. Stay tuned for more...

See You at the Igloo: The Power of Club Penguin

When I talk with museum people about virtual worlds, the conversation usually centers on Second Life. And sure, by some metrics, it's the biggest, most fully realized 3D world out there, full of user-generated content, sex shops and waterslides, and a whole lot of buggy, experimental experiences.

But Second Life isn't the biggest, and it isn't the fastest growing. It's just the most open.

If you want to see where the real action is, waddle over to the igloo. Chances are if you know a kid between 6 and 12, you know a kid who uses Club Penguin or Webkinz, or both. Club Penguin is subscription-based and purely on the web; Webkinz requires the purchase of a plush toy (with an active virtual life). These virtual worlds are, as one father put it, "the cuddly G-rated version of Second Life." And they're booming. Club Penguin has 700,000 subscribers (at $6/month), about 12 million users, and was just sold to Disney for $350 million with a $350 million additional earn-out. And unlike Second Life, Club Penguin is 2D, highly controlled, and its primary users are too young to type.

But not too young to fall in love with virtual worlds. In January, there was an interesting CNET article about "Generation We"--kids growing up today who are constantly plugged in, not to their own personal gadgets, but to a larger social network. They expect their computer experiences, like in-person play experiences, to be social. While there's not much interest in playing with strangers, kids as young as 6 will make plans with school friends to meet up in the virtual igloo afterschool for scripted chat and simple flash games.

Talking to kids about these worlds, I've learned they know how to game the system (removing those pesky parental controls). But they don't use it to swear. They use it to play. They love the way it fuels their desire to quickly jump from one activity to the next. Now we're making pizza! Now we're playing hockey! It's not just one game, so it doesn't feel constrained. It emulates real social imaginative play and provides a realized (if virtual) environment for interaction.

They also love a part that creeps me out: the commercial aspect. Much of the gameplay in these worlds focuses around earning virtual money to buy virtual goods. And I can see the appeal; I felt the same excitement playing Lemonade Stand, filling pitchers and raking in the imaginary text-based dough. Whether healthy or not, acquiring, saving, and scheming with money is a classic child preoccupation--and one that cannot fully be realized in the real world.

One of the best places to get a good idea of Club Penguin without strapping on a beak is through their blog. Blogging may seem like an adult (or at least teenage) activity, but the Club Penguin creators realize that their users are enthusiastic and want to be involved in the action. You get a feel for the emphasis on new! improved! content, events, and the extent to which kids really feel this is "their" world. If only museums' blogs got such a wealth of poorly spelled comments. "THE MISSION IS AWSOME I WANTED TO BEAT THEM ALL AND I DID THANK YOU SO MUCH CP I LOVE YOU." Indeed.

So what does this mean for museums? Someone recently said to me, "the mass audience for virtual worlds is growing up with the technology." It isn't the Second Life early adopters for whom this technology will be ubiquitous: it's the young penguins in their virtual igloos. Adults may not expect social networks and virtual extensions of real experiences in museums, but within ten years, adolescents raised on Club Penguin and Webkinz will. In the same way that today's teens have grown up with the mobile phone technology, today's pre-teens are growing up with social networks and virtual worlds. If you are going to invest time looking into virtual worlds while thinking about future audiences, perhaps it's time to start getting out on the ice. Or, as the Club Penguin blog would put it, waddle on!

Jumping into Art in Second Life

When people talk about museum projects in Second Life and other virtual worlds, I'm often disappointed by the short-sightedness of the vision. Virtual worlds are a new, emerging technology, and like any new technology, overlaying old techniques onto new platforms is disappointing at best. So much energy is put into recreating physical spaces and their real-world limitations rather than experimenting with ways that virtual worlds create opportunity to do things that are impossible in real museums. These opportunities can be social--engaging with museum content with other visitors at their computers all over the world--as well as experiential--allowing visitors to jump into, smash, and manipulate content in ways that physics and conservators forbid in real space.

This week, a quick example of how each is possible.

1. VAN GOGH GOES EXPERIENTIAL

The video below is a gorgeous example of the possibility of substantive, emotional experiences with museum content via virtual world representations.

It's a machinima (video) by Robbie Dingo, a 3D recreation of Van Gogh's Starry Night.

As one YouTube visitor commented:

A masterpiece recreated. I watched the beauty unfolding in front of me. Maybe someone once watched Vincent creating the original and felt the same way.
I hope so.

Sadly, Robbie's goal was to use Second Life as a platform to create a 2D representation of the painting--so the 3D space of the painting is not available for visitors to explore. But imagine the possibilities for a museum to take an iconic painting or artifact and create a 3D version of it for visitors to wander. Narrative information could be embedded throughout the landscape, or an entire exhibition's worth of content could be embedded metaphorically in the space. The result is one solution to the "problem" of viewing 2D art--that it's hard to figure out how to focus and be attentive to the piece if you don't have a strong art background. Creating a 3D space to explore encourages visitors to spend more time with the piece, literally getting inside it.

2. GALLERY OPENINGS, SOCIAL OPENING

There have been many art events and openings in Second Life, perhaps most significantly Brian Eno's 77 Million Paintings, which was recreated in four Second Life locations for a weekend event earlier this month. Giff Constable of the Electric Sheep Company had some interesting observations about the unique social aspect of this event:

Was it real (a question perpetually asked by the perplexed)? Well, I ran into some people I knew, met some interesting new folks, got into the vibe of the art, and even ended up in an art conversation chatting about interesting artists like Stephen Hendee and Joshua Davis. But was I with those people in Second Life? We were certainly making mental connections, and frankly, I probably spoke to more people than I would at a real-life art opening. It is easy to feel lonely at a real art show surrounded by people who are strangers, but I bet very few people logged into that event in Second Life last night felt that way.

I've written before about the ways that adding a layer of technological barrier can open up people to more comfortable interaction with strangers. In the same way, virtual worlds may be a more natural venue to encourage discourse about museum content among strangers than real-world physical galleries, where social norms override desire to communicate.

Metaverse Museum? Guest Post on Second Life and Museums by Sibley Verbeck

Today, a guest post by the wise and attractive Sibley Verbeck, CEO/founder of the Electric Sheep Company. In January, I interviewed Sibley about the potential use of virtual worlds and Second Life by museums, but in the four months since then, the virtual world platform--and the hype around it--has exploded. People used to clip articles for us about Second Life every couple of weeks--now, it seems that hardly a day goes by without news about the use and abuse of Second Life. It seems that Second Life is both the closest and farthest thing from many museum professionals' minds. I hear everything from "I don't get it," to "I don't believe it," to "Well, how the heck would we do it if we get it and believe it?" Sibley's company has developed virtual world projects for CBS, AOL, the NBA, Reuters, and many others. Here's his take from the thousand foot level. -------------------------

Strictly speaking, Second Life isn’t Web 2.0. In fact, at this point it isn’t even on the Web at all. But it represents technology that has the potential to be a bigger part of Museum 2.0 than anything – maybe even than reality itself.

But that’s already sounding like the grandiose hype you read about Second Life or virtual worlds. And if you’ve ever logged into this brutally confusing new technology, you’ve probably been literally confronted the sense that your avatar, let alone the emperor, has no clothes.

So what does it all mean, and where’s the reality within the virtual reality hype?

Fundamentally, virtual worlds are a new communication medium. Just as with the telephone, television, the Web, mobile phones, e-mail, etc., this new medium doesn’t replace all that came before it, but allows humans to connect in new ways.

1. Eliminating Geographic Separation. Most importantly, virtual worlds are the first technology that really make people who are anywhere feel like they are in a place together. With a visual representation of people around you, voice communication (coming soon to SL, already present in some other virtual worlds), and most importantly a fully navigable and interactive 3D environment, everyone – whether gamer or not, technophile or phobe - has the clear feeling that they are in a place with other people.

2. Collaborative Experience. The primary value of virtual worlds is not only being in a place but acting freely within that space in social collaboration with other people. Hmm, interacting with other people you may or may not know within an interactive environment – that’s starting to sound very Museum 2.0…

3. Design. The environment of Second Life is the canvass on which it is 10 times more efficient than any other to (collaboratively) design interactive 3D experiences and share them with other people who can explore together in real-time. The wysiwyg tools in Second Life for making interactive content, while crude by the standards of the video game, animation, or industrial design industries, allow for a much more efficient and social design process.

So what does this mean for museums?

1. The Globally Accessible Museum. While the Web allows for information and communication about museums and exhibits, the virtual world could actually contain museums themselves. Very different ones than would exist in the real world, with different value propositions. This will never come close to replacing “bricks and mortar” museums, but is a first scalable opportunity to extend the museum itself – not just its literature or materials - into the home, classroom, or office. People will come back to the virtual museum more frequently than they will transport themselves to the physical one, and in turn make the museum more a part of their regular lives.

2. Events. One of the best uses of Second Life today is virtual events that reach people around the world. “Mixed reality events” can allow different people to attend the same event in-person and virtually. This suddenly makes museum-hosted events have the potential reach of a television broadcast while maintaining more of the intimacy and interactivity.

3. Museum 2.0. While you may hesitate to fully allow visitors to be the curators of your museum, why not let them curate your virtual museum? Or one copy thereof? The virtual can be more experimental, more user generated, more 2.0 in a way that can be used both within the real museum and at home – both synchronously and asynchronously. Undoubtedly this will lead to innovation that you extend into your physical space

“Sure, that all sounds great, but I can’t get my avatar off of orientation island!”

The fact is that we are in an early stage of development with virtual worlds. Most of the content you see in Second Life is poorly made, and the software was created for content creators, not a broader user base. Most of the commentary you read about Second Life ranges from shallow to completely incorrect.

Just because most of what you see on this radical new platform is not compelling or even understandable doesn’t mean that the platform isn’t ready to add a lot of value to your museum. For example, if you go into Second Life via a portal for Showtime’s TV show, The L-Word (here for US, here for international), you’ll see a better introductory experience for starting to use the virtual world. Still not ideal, but getting closer to usable by mainstream audiences.

New interface elements can be created today to make the Second Life software customized for a certain audience or application.

So if done correctly, a virtual world presence today can be user friendly, social, and highly entertaining and/or educational. A well done virtual world project today could not only make a museum more 2.0, but increase its geographic reach, and over time increase visitorship and revenue. But landing on the “right” project is not simple on a new technology with many limitations and few experts who know it well. While the answer would be different for each institution, here are some general tips:

1. Target Audience. Design the experience not for the current user base of Second Life, but for the target audience of your museum who is not yet in the virtual world. It’s the people interested in your content who will be interested in your virtual content. There may be some of those in the virtual world already, but the bigger potential lies with bringing your potential visitors in. They may not care about the virtual world, but they are interested in your content, so design the experience with that in mind.
2. It’s not about the “build”. Remember, Second Life is not first about 3D rendering, but rather about social interaction. You will likely want to create a place in Second Life, but more important than that place is the effort you put into building a community there. The people are more than half the content, so the experience you design should be fundamentally 2.0.
3. Marketing Plan. Just like opening a real-world location, you need to have a plan for how to get people there. People won’t just stumble onto it. Driving in people from your Web site, marketing within Second Life, viral promotions, focusing on scheduled events are all useful components.
4. Staffing. Just like a real museum, a virtual one takes staffing. Perhaps not as much or as costly, but just as in the real world, it is not most effective to just create a museum and leave it standing there unguided, unmanaged.
5. Effort. As the points above clearly illustrate, a virtual museum is not a matter of just putting up a Web page. It takes a lot of effort to achieve its potentially large reward.
6. Goals. The first step is certainly to understand what you hope to achieve. It is not worth a foray into the virtual world just to be cool. This new medium has the potential for ROI in revenue, visitorship, increase in brand awareness, and achieving an educational mission statement. But whatever goals are most important, they should fundamentally drive the experience design process.

Whether you dive into a virtual museum project soon or wait for this technology to develop, it is certainly the case that this medium is not going away. Whether Second Life or something that replaces it, the world will be using a Metaverse that allows us, in many ways, to go places and meet people while in our living rooms.

As with any major new medium there are opportunities to move in early and be a part of the re-alignment of how people communicate, are entertained, and are educated. If museums want to achieve a greater role in our social structure, whatever that role is, beginning to play that role early in the development of a major new medium is the best opportunity to succeed.

(Not a) Game Friday: Virtual Worlds 101

Today, an interview with Sibley Verbeck (Hathor's his virtual name), founder/CEO of the Electric Sheep Company, which does experience design for real-world companies in virtual worlds including Second Life. It’s a little disjointed, but the key points are: 1. Virtual worlds provide an opportunity for social engagement with content, and 2. Virtual worlds allow designers (and evaluators, and educators) to explore new modes of content delivery that are physically impossible in the real world, but may provide rich and new ways for visitors to learn.

Let’s start with the basics. How would you define virtual worlds?

Virtual worlds are a communication medium in which people use avatars (animated characters) to interact and have shared experiences in a 3D environment. Second Life is the virtual world to take off as an open platform where anyone can create content and own intellectual property for what they create. It’s not a game—there’s no goal or restrictions on how you use it—instead, it’s a technology platform for immersion and interaction, like the web.

Most museums already have websites. Why would they want a Second Life presence?

Well, they already have telephones as well. The point is that this is a very different kind of communication medium, and it’s good for different things. Virtual worlds are the first communication medium where people can remotely have shared experiences—not just communicating in real time, but interacting with each other and with content. That is its primary strength, whereas the web’s is efficiently communicating information.

I’m not an expert on museums who can comment on why museums have websites and what they use that platform for. It seems that the primary reasons museums have websites are to convey basic information about the museum and as a marketing mechanism for content. And while a website can increase interest in the museum, it’s not a way for people to have a museum experience. It’s not a way to do it socially. Websites are more like picture books about the museum—in virtual worlds, you can have a social, real-time, interactive experience. The browsability is much greater—you can walk into a room, turn your head—there’s no clicking through content. Content that’s inherently 3D can be shared more naturally in this way.

It seems like the real world museums that are starting to work in Second Life are pursuing the social interaction element of the platform through events. The Exploratorium did the solar eclipse, and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum is doing all kinds of programs around Darfur.

I think that’s partly because they are dipping their toe in the water—individual events are a less expensive way to try it out than having a sustained presence. But if a museum really committed to developing a space in a virtual world, there are so many other physical things to explore. Exhibits that can’t be built in real life because of any number of prohibitions could exist in the virtual world. You could also pursue iterations of objects and experiences from the real museum—in the museum, you only have one version. But on this platform, you could go in lots of different directions. You can also create a highly themed, immersive, living museum experience quite inexpensively and safely—no one’s going to break things. It’s not like being there in real life, but it has other strengths with regard to the extent of interactivity and immersion possible.

If a museum were to go beyond dipping a toe in the water to create something bigger…

Doing a really great project in Second Life is more substantial—and expensive—than just putting some pictures up on a virtual wall. Even if you rely on volunteers and users to help create and assemble the content, you have to manage that process. It seems similar to me to what would be involved in developing a temporary exhibit or set of programs.

How do you measure success of a project like this in Second Life?

There are some obvious metrics—how much time to people spend coming there, can you convert those people to visitors to the real museum—but I assume you’d look larger than that. What’s the mission of the museum? You would measure it in the same way you measure the success of an exhibit or a museum. What do people learn? How do they feel when they leave?

There are some philosophical barriers to extending the museum mission. For example, Richard commented that most people in the museum (and funding) world think of games as for kids.

The median age for time spent in SL is early 30s, so you have an adult audience. Those people are not confused about whether this is a game—so you can start by reaching out to them.

Is now the time for museums to get into Second Life? There are still a lot of problems and it’s not exactly user-friendly yet…

Some other people on your blog raised some issues also about the experience and features—like the communication features—which are going to significantly change this year. Linden Labs has expressed they are well along with audio integration into Second Life, and I think there will be many other features around communication and social networking and ease of use that will come along soon. I think we’re right on the cusp of a lot of that happening. And the usage of SL is continuing to increase exponentially.

So given the time it takes to plan and test something, I think now is the time for museums to go in and figure things out and those institutions that do so will become a leader in this area as this technology is exploding and those features emerge. I know this is a tough sell for grant-funded institutions, but there can be opportunities if the funding is to figure out what is this medium and how can it be used for our mission? Go and do some studies and publish them.

There are probably a lot of museum folks out there with expertise in exhibit design, experience design, and evaluation of museum experiences who could translate their skills directly to those kinds of questions.

I think that’s absolutely true. Whenever a new technology comes along, people talk about the evolution of use: people port their expertise in other platforms into the new one until they figure out how to use the new medium. But another reality is that a lot of people working in virtual worlds don’t have the experience design background, and they think of this as “totally new”—but there are lots of translatable experiences out there, and the museum platform is a huge example of that. Museum people could be the leaders in creating superlative learning experiences of all kinds in the virtual platform.

To me, one of the most exciting possibilities in virtual worlds is to be able to throw off all the barriers of real world physics, etc. and design something fantastical. The Sheep built something for Nature that I love—a bubble gum machine that spits out models of chemical compounds. Then again, there are some fun things you can do in the virtual world—step into a 3D rendering of a painting, ride a dinosaur—that some museum people would hate because they seem disrespectful to objects or antithetical to an educational mission.

This technology is only relevant for those who are comfortable with and want to pursue some of those more playful and creative opportunities. But there are “safe” ways to deepen people’s engagement with content, too. If you go on an audio tour in a museum—well, you could really do it in 3D and bring it to life—show the sculpture taking form, how it was built. And a lot of this you could do on the web in 2D—but how can you present in 3D in a way that’s better than 2D? That question is wide open, and I don’t think anyone’s addressing that really well yet in Second Life.

And exhibit designers, who are used to building in physical spaces, could do that—forget the restrictions and create something really hot.

Exactly. You could deconstruct objects. You could reorganize the museum, move things around, create new structures for content flow, in a way you can’t do in physical space.

I think this goes back to the strong reasons for museums to go into virtual worlds. There are basic rules of exhibition design that are mostly a good thing, but can also be limiting in terms of creativity. In the virtual world, there are opportunities to explore building things in whole different ways, which may, in turn, affect how we think about what we can design in real museums.

And it’s worth pointing out that while Second Life can be used in an escapist way as a fantasy land, it’s also a communication tool. Are we escaping reality when we use the web? Use the phone? And it’s a more advanced tool because it accommodates a more social, human experience.

This is already a much more human environment than the web, even though it’s clunky. For example, when we put on the Major League Baseball Home Run Derby in Second Life (in which people could cheer, wave foam hands, and chat in the stadium as avatars reenacted the actual hits), we had huge buy-in. People who watched the Derby on the web stayed for 23 minutes on average. In Second Life, they stayed for the whole thing. They were doing it socially. Here’s another example—the average unique person who logs in to SL in a given day uses it for four hours.

Couldn’t they be dormant for some of that time?

Well, you automatically get logged out if you do that for too long. The point is, if you pop to a website and browse around, maybe you stay 7-8 minutes and then you move on. If you pop into Second Life, you see something, you touch it, you build something, you talk to someone, and it’s been an hour and a half. So for museums who use Second Life instead of or in addition to the web, people will interact with the content more, talk about it more, engage more deeply in Second Life than they will on a website.
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There are many more conversations and debates to have and things to think about museums in virtual worlds. Personally, I am not someone with strong interest in designing or engaging in virtual experiences, but I appreciate that this is a technology that is growing, and while I--and many museums--may not be an early adopter, I think it's useful to be aware of what's going on. And I think there are other uses--networking, prototyping, distance learning--worth exploring that we didn't get to touch on here.

If you want to pursue more, here are some good links:
--There is a Museums in Second Life group led by Richard Urban that hosts meet-ups, tours, and discussions in Second Life.
--“We the Sheeple,” the Electric Sheep blog, which covers everything from the thousand-foot level to the nuts and bolts of virtual world projects.
--Metaverse Messenger, the premier newspaper of Second Life, is of mixed quality but can give you some sense of what's going on in-world.

Your Questions about Second Life?

For game Friday this week, I plan to interview the esteemed Sibley Verbeck, founder/CEO of the Electric Sheep Company, the largest "metaverse applications" professional services company out there. He's also my fiance. When Sibley decided to start a Second Life-focused business last year, I thought he was nuts. I argued strenuously with him about the value and importance of something that looked to me like a diversion for nerds with big graphics cards. Well, a year, 40 employees, awesome projects, and a whole lot of hype later, I've been converted. I now believe in Second Life, not as a game environment, but as a new platform for social interactions with people, objects, and ideas. I used to ask, "how would I ever use this?" But now it seems evident that this is a great platform for long-distance, contemporaneous experiences--at concerts, ball games, museums, workplaces, reunions--of all kinds.

There have been lots of posts all over the place about Second Life and museums. Sibley and I plan to discuss the potential--and barriers--for museums in Second Life. We'll talk about exhibits, collections, educational programs, and audience. We'll talk about good and bad reasons for museums to get into Second Life.

But don't let him preach to the (mostly) adoring choir. What would YOU like to know about Second Life? There are plenty of places to learn the basics. Check out Sheep Giff Constable's excellent commentary on SL good, bad, and overhyped. What would you like to add to the conversation?