In researching a presentation on virtual worlds I’ll be giving at EDayz in a few weeks, I came across a tweet about a blog post from Gary Hayes called Inching Towards the live Web 3.0 - Layered Social Virtual Worlds.
In the article, he demos some avatars (virtual representatations of real people) that inhabit not a virtual world — but your browser.
One of the options involved pre-recorded videos of people standing in front of a chroma key background (blue or green can be made invisible, so objects in front of these colours can be background-free). It was reasonably eyecatching, but what went beyond eye candy for me was the browser plug-in available from rocketon.
What this does when activated is layer an avatar and chat tool over any web site you happen to be visiting. If another person has the plug-in - they can walk their avatar over to yours and have a text chat.
I see such potential for this tool — imagine web tours freed up from overheads and online conferencing tools. Have your participants install this tool and have some fun while you train.
For younger learners — what a great way to lead them on a facilitated web quest!
The software is very simple to install and use — unlike Exit Reality where I found it slowed down my browsing and that web sites had to be purpose built to have it make any sense — the Rocket-on plug in was a snap to figure out and use.
It’s in Beta right now — so results may vary — but I’ve given it a quick test drive in both IE and Firefox and not had too many issues (clicking can take a few minutes to get a handle on).
If you’d like to have a play with it — let’s get together online. Download the plug in from the Rocket On site and meet me at this blog post tomorrow (Friday, 24 October, 4pm Australian Central Time (click here for the time in your part of the country/world).
My avatar’s name is KerryJ.
Here is a video from the people behind Rocketon from YouTube: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=I7JyIebkCfc
3 Comments
Almost but not quite….Maybe it is the lack of real ability to customise your avatar, or that there are not many people that have taken this up, but it just doesn’t “grab” me like Twitter or Friendfeed does. Maybe it is too social, with not enough input of where people are hanging out.
I’ll wait and see on this one
Thanks for coming and helping us test it out. A group of colleagues came online and had a play, we saw benefit in it and want to play with it further for web tours. I wouldn’t necessarily hang out in it like I do Twitter, but am not sure that’s the purpose for it.
Cheers and thanks!
KerryJ
Hi Allison, Kerry - thanks for checking out RocketOn. It was nice meeting you online. We designed RocketOn to be an enhanced, social browsing experience. Many great ideas and uses have come about as a result of users like yourselves, including the idea of web tours. The system can also be a vehicle for real-time events, which can take place right on any website. Thanks again! - Eric
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