SIEMENS

Star Zanzibar often flies to meetings. In fact, you can see him, arms outstretched, Superman style, effortlessly winging his way over golf courses and office parks, coasting through buildings, and touching down at a packed conference table or a neon-lit control center. To the casual observer, Zanzibar’s peripatetic life has all the trappings of a video game — the ability to levitate, choose from multiple identities, and travel to far-off places in seconds. But like the virtual world he inhabits, Zanzibar is the product of two opposite trends: the quest to escape reality and the steadily improving capability to duplicate and augment it.
"The virtual world is undergoing a maturity curve that is carrying over capabilities developed for gaming into the world of training," says Zanzibar’s real world incarnation Steve Russell, PhD, a member of the Integrated Data Systems Department at Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, New Jersey. A specialist in virtual world conferencing, Russell points out that major virtual world sites such as OLIVE, Unisfair and Second Life now have millions of members, each of whom is represented by one or more avatars, which may be realistic or fantasy representations of themselves.
But virtual world sites are also home to the virtual counterparts of countless corporate and government organizations, many of which have paid tens of thousands of very real dollars to buy "land" and build often elaborate facilities for a wide range of purposes. Why are organizations as diverse as the U.S. Marines, the University of Kansas, and Siemens flocking to the virtual world? The reasons are as much psychological as practical. "When you’re in the virtual world, it’s very different from a phone call or a teleconference," says Russell. "Participants feel they are sharing a place and an experience. It’s social, you see expressions on avatars’ faces, you hear the real person’s voice. All this is good for team building." At the same time, the practical advantages are clear: they range from greatly reduced time and travel costs — with associated reductions in CO₂ emissions — to hybrid forms of training and service that aren’t possible in the real world.
Take Siemens’ "Virtureal" site in Second Life, for instance, a demonstration project that is ready for real-life deployment. The site was inspired in part by an actual Siemens building in Dallas, Texas. The Dallas facility contains a control center that continuously monitors the real-time status of a range of automated systems in buildings in other cities. But the Virtureal site can do the same thing from Second Life — offering the potential of eventually replacing a real building with a virtual one.
Sites such as Virtureal open the door to dealing with problems that technicians might be unable to resolve today. For instance, such a center can "fly in" a remote specialist for a visit to a virtual copy of the actual work site, which can include live camera feeds from the on-site technician’s cell phone. "At that point, simply by knowing which panel the technician is looking at, the specialist can embed his avatar into the virtual environment, walk it to the technician’s exact location, and see what’s on the read-outs," says Russell. "The on-site technician and the off-site specialist see the same thing, and they have the illusion of being together."
Defended by multi-level security or hosted within a company’s own powerful firewalls, facilities such as Virtureal can be effectively invisible and "unsearchable" to unauthorized individuals. Virtual worlds thereby offer an ideal venue for a variety of other purposes, including employee motivational events, training, and everyday meetings. Earlier this year, for instance, according to Linden Lab / Second Life, IBM’s elite Academy of Technology held a conference in which the avatars of over 200 people attended some 37 breakout sessions. IBM estimates that the event cost one-fifth of what it would have in the real-world, with much of its price tag going for virtual real estate, buildings and associated design services.

Just Face It.For those who find that avatar-based environments do not offer sufficient realism in terms of eye contact and facial expressions, Siemens has developed ViviConf — software that allows people to see each other as they really are in the context of a virtual meeting using nothing more elaborate than a single off-the-shelf PC video camera and microphone. Unlike other dedicated conferencing systems, which partition views of participants in boxes or use specialized meeting rooms painted in exactly the same color, ViviConf uses patented software developed by Siemens’ Technology-to-Business Center (TTB) in Berkeley, California to subtract each participant’s background from each image in real time. This allows users to choose from a number of common, shared backgrounds that can add just the right atmosphere to a meeting. All that’s needed is a very brief training phase in which the camera sees the background alone. After that, participants in a ViviConf meeting can move their heads, hands and arms, and these movements will be accurately and clearly seen by all other participants without background-associated artifacts.
"A common background is the key point in terms of maintaining the illusion that participants are in the same place," explains Stuart Goose, who, along with Jinhui (Jason) Hu, PhD, developed ViviConf at the TTB for Siemens Enterprise Networks, which is now analyzing a number of implementation scenarios. The illusion of presence even works for people who don’t have a video camera, since ViviConf allows them to insert an avatar of themselves into a meeting. "Having a visual representation of each participant is important," says Goose, "because then people can’t forget that you are present, even if you are very quiet."
The illusion of presence in ViviConf meetings is also being extended to the audio domain. At Siemens Corporate Research (SCR) in Princeton, New Jersey, for instance, developers have come up with a system that connects people’s voices with their faces. "When someone speaks, the software synthesizes a stereo effect in order to give the other participants a sense of the direction of the speaker’s voice that matches his or her location in the virtual environment," says Yakup Genc, Program Manager for 3D Vision & Augmented Reality at SCR. "The critical feature here is to make this technology automated and absolutely dependable."
Although it relies on a single inexpensive desktop camera for each participant, ViviConf offers plenty of potential for advanced applications. "We would like to carry this technology to the point where groups of engineers can use it to collaboratively design CAD models, perhaps even using haptic gloves," says Goose. Already, he points out, participants can use it to virtually walk inside relatively simple models. "But imagine," he says, "if you could invite your customers to walk — or even fly — through part of a virtual plant, complete with animations of production lines and associated sounds." Now that’s the kind of flight that even Star Zanzibar might wish to take.