Original story

SatWeb 15.10.2007

IBM builds world’s largest virtual forum, sweeps ITF Awards

IBM has built the world’s largest-ever virtual forum. The computer giant’s efforts were rewarded with a clutch of prizes at the annual IT Olympics, arranged by the Internet Task Force (ITF).

Nearly 1000 people arrived at the IBM forum before the system reached its design ceiling and the managers were obliged to restrict access. With this emphatic win, Big Blue proved to doubters that the company still has what it takes, and can still lead the way in large areas of the IT branch.

The virtual forum is a meeting place in cyberspace, in which each participant appears as a three-dimensional animated character or avatar, in such a way that the video image of the individual’s face is “glued” to this particular cartoon character. In other words, the actual face and facial gestures are visible.

Visitors to the virtual forum can discuss with one another, but the limitations of current audio technology and the sophisticated behaviour of the human ear have restricted the number of participants. In order for the conversation to be natural, each individual should be able to hear the other parties’ voices clearly. Naturally, those in the immediate vicinity should be more easily audible than those further away. The human ear is also selective: the hearing centre in the brain always amplifies the sounds we find most interesting.

IBM has developed a special chip which calculates and sums the various voices, based in part on analog technology. The company notes, however, that computers are still not sufficiently fast to handle the calculations that traditional transistor technology and active amplifiers can manage with ease. The chemical and gas transistors currently under development will nevertheless probably increase dramatically the performance of the special chips.

The method used at the recent ITF gathering involves separating the virtual forum into 10,000 screens. The system, comprising rather more than a hundred of the chips, is capable of dealing with the checksum calculations on the sounds present in this volume of screens. ITF Chairman Brian W. Rosenberg regards the solution as a very significant development along the road to natural human intercourse on the data networks.

“The natural audio landscape is the critical factor as we develop authentic virtual spaces. The human ear is capable of discerning and filtering a great deal of information from sounds. In the virtual space the influence of the auditive senses grows markedly as and when the effects of distance and mobility can be brought under control.”

Rosenberg expects that the IBM chip will be released onto the market before very long, and that product development and competition will push down prices rapidly thereafter. “It may well be that in five years or so, the idea of a 1000-strong virtual forum will be a commonplace for the hundreds of millions of Internet users”, Rosenberg forecasts.

Rosenberg also has high hopes for the development of virtual walls, now still in its infancy, since he considers that the experience of the virtual forum will only become truly realistic when the individual humans are viewed in their natural size.

One of the guest speakers at a seminar held in connection with the IT Olympics was Orwell Castell, Vice-President, R & D of the Denver-based Unirobotics Corporation. Castell stressed the way in which human hearing does not always select out the loudest sounds, but the most interesting. The entire concept of intangibles such as interest triumphing over concrete considerations like volume nevertheless contains such a vast amount of information that modelling for large groups has not yet been feasible. Factors bearing on the issue include such things as movement, echoes and delays, and the vertical location of the listener. All these parameters can be realised in the lab for individual sound sources or listeners, but the capacity of the present generation of computers is inadequate for large groups, let alone crowds of several hundred.

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  • Ilmiön toteuma: 5/5
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Second Lifen kaltaiset virtuaalimaailmat, avatar-kokoukset ja myöhemmät metaversumiympäristöt toteuttivat mallin. IBM järjesti jo aikaikkunassa laajoja virtuaalitapahtumia ja kokouksia.

Johtopäätös: ennuste toteutui vahvasti ja oikeassa aikaikkunassa.