Visiting V-business Grid

My visit to the V-business Grid

This is my 6th visit to an OpenSim Grid

V-business is an IBM initiative to encourage the adoption of Virtual worlds. I believe the Grid is a volunteer effort by IBM staff. It would probably be best to keep this in mind during my comments. I was using the recommended Hippo Viewer



The website lists these regions

Welcome

Community    
      
Education
          
Energy
    
Finance
    
Government

Health

Molecule    

Research
               
Retail
      
Shengri La vBusiness
          
Smarter Planet
          
Transport
      
I'm guessing these are the themes for each region

The Welcome area is quite nicely done, as you can see it has a few
building and some sculptures, well I guess they are sculptures.
The checkered object is a lighthouse, with a TP from the base to the top.

Here you can see two windmills, a theatre in the distance, a geodesic dome, a building with a tree growing in it,and a model of the Earth inside a building.
The tree building was the one that caught my eye, I think it would be nice to actually live or work in a place like that.

Below we see a Ferris wheel, it's much better seeing it in the dark

The Map shows how small the Grid is, I immediately wondered why Molecule was out as an Island. One thing to notice is how much you can see on the map, as Welcome is quite built up, and Education, Transport, and both Finance regions are quite bare. Why Finance needed a mature area, I don't know? (rude accounting perhaps)

"To boldly go where no Avatar has gone before"
But not in that plywood ship  :-)
The ship and the Hypergrid Gateway are pretty much all their is in the Smarter Planet area. There also seems to be a breeding program for plywood cubes

No Prizes for guessing this is in the Retail area, but..no one on the check out, and no clothing section.

From here I went to the Community area, but it's mostly taken up by Rackforce, actually I think the Library is in Research.

But you can see that Rackforce is showing some plans, and looks to be checking them by making a mock up of them. So far they only look to have some doors and server racks.

Looking back to Education Sim. Some of the region crossings where quite bad, and could take up to 5 seconds to do.
At one point I had to quit, and relog.

Next stop was the Fashion Research Institute.
While I was here I picked up a few free clothes, hair, and skin.
Slight problem happened when I couldn't open my inventory to actually see what I had. Grrrr

This looks to be a miniature version of Shenlei's build on SciSim.
Now this probably wasn't all built on site, with OpenSim, you can use a .oar file that's a backup from another OpenSim, and just unpack it on site, and instant build. W00T!

 About this time I decided to have a look at Molecule, and it does look like it's been given some love and attention.

A Welcome Card from Kurt Taylor is a nice touch, "Feel free to look around" he says...Thanks!!
The best place view is from on top of the hill.
The information panels look to be well done, and probably make much more sense to anyone with a chemistry background, unlike me to whom chemistry means bunsen burners and whirley glassware, and things going BANG!

As I said, makes no sense to me whatsoever.

There are also some models of molecules, but I don't seem to have got a picture of them. D'oh!

And here is the obligatory picture of me as a noob

I did another fly over of the Regions to see if i missed anything, but most were empty, or had been wiped clean.

I stopped by the Hypergrid Station, and thought to jump to Cyberlandia. But the Hypergrid didn't work.
At this time I got a system message to say my inventory had been repaired.
I decided to test it by going back to FRI, and getting some clothes.

As you can see the Inventory was fixed, and I was able to change clothes, and put on a new skin. For some reason the bald base for the hair would not attach, and the shape is not able to be altered. But I still think it looks pretty good.

 

But as I  said, this seems to be set up as a sandbox, so it's not meant to be pretty.
 I don't know where it's hosted, I suspect due to the rather dire Sim crossings that it's across different servers, and some Sims are very slow to cross, so possibly even in different datacentres.

Further Reading


http://www.thinkbalm.com/2009/08/27/the-v-business-grid-a-vision-of-the-future-immersive-internet/


The only person who I could find with some connection to the v-business Grid was Peter Finn, he twitters here http://twitter.com/Nink


Every time we've moved ahead in IBM, it was because someone was willing to take a chance, put his head on the block, and try something new.
Thomas J Watson - Founder IBM