History
The Virtual Universe Community was officially launched on September 12, 2006, in conjunction with the IBM Innovation Jam. This component of the Jam was a self-organized collaboration and brainstorming event and was referred to as a 3D Jam. 130 IBM employees collaborated on ideas in the virtual campus of New Media Consortium. [4]
On November 14, now 400 members strong, the Virtual Universe Communities idea they had logged in the innovation Jam was voted number 1 out of 50,000 entries. The CEO of IBM Sam Palmisano and Irving Wladalsky-Berger presented the results in the world's first virtual town hall. [5]
The community grew rapidly and when it reached nearly 1000 members a new organization was formed. [6]
The community celebrated its first anniversary on September 12, 2007, and, at its height, was 5000 members strong working on sectors ranging from education, training, and accessibility to cutting-edge research and client as well as serious gaming showcases. Several social events to reunite IBMers and HR training projects were held in Almaden island, in Second Life.
As the industry focus moved on from virtual worlds, the participation in the community declined. The community also explored other areas along the way such as augmented reality and virtual reality hoping to converge multiple concurrent technologies led by some VUC Emeritus Guildmasters.
A Virtual Universe Community isn't well understood. To date, the most comprehensive understanding of VUC or innovation jams has been done by Steve Diasio† of the University of South Florida and Anne Elerud-Tryde‡ of the Chalmers University of Technology.
A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and large-scale transaction processing. A mainframe computer is large but not as large as a supercomputer and has more processing power than some other classes of computers, such as minicomputers, servers, workstations, and personal computers. Most large-scale computer-system architectures were established in the 1960s, but they continue to evolve. Mainframe computers are often used as servers.
Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished from conventional high-performance computing systems such as cluster computing in that grid computers have each node set to perform a different task/application. Grid computers also tend to be more heterogeneous and geographically dispersed than cluster computers. Although a single grid can be dedicated to a particular application, commonly a grid is used for a variety of purposes. Grids are often constructed with general-purpose grid middleware software libraries. Grid sizes can be quite large.
Howard Rheingold is an American critic, writer, and teacher, known for his specialties on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities.
Second Life is an online multimedia platform that allows people to create an avatar for themselves and then interact with other users and user-created content within a multiplayer online virtual world. Developed and owned by the San Francisco–based firm Linden Lab and launched on June 23, 2003, it saw rapid growth for some years and in 2013 it had approximately one million regular users. Growth eventually stabilized, and by the end of 2017 the active user count had declined to "between 800,000 and 900,000". In many ways, Second Life is similar to massively multiplayer online role-playing games; nevertheless, Linden Lab is emphatic that their creation is not a game: "There is no manufactured conflict, no set objective".
World Community Grid (WCG) is an effort to create the world's largest volunteer computing platform to tackle scientific research that benefits humanity. Launched on November 16, 2004, with proprietary Grid MP client from United Devices and adding support for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) in 2005, World Community Grid eventually discontinued the Grid MP client and consolidated on the BOINC platform in 2008. In September 2021, it was announced that IBM transferred ownership to the Krembil Research Institute of University Health Network in Toronto, Ontario.
David A. Bader is a Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Previously, he served as the Chair of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Computational Science & Engineering, where he was also a founding professor, and the executive director of High-Performance Computing at the Georgia Tech College of Computing. In 2007, he was named the first director of the Sony Toshiba IBM Center of Competence for the Cell Processor at Georgia Tech.
PowerLinux is the combination of a Linux-based operating system (OS) running on PowerPC- or Power ISA-based computers from IBM. It is often used in reference along with Linux on Power, and is also the name of several Linux-only IBM Power Systems.
Habitat Jam was a massive online event organized by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT), the Government of Canada and IBM. It was held on December 1-4 2005 to help solve urgent problems of the world's cities.
Collaborative innovation is a process in which multiple players contribute towards creating new products with customers and suppliers.
Virtual collaboration is the method of collaboration between virtual team members that is carried out via technology-mediated communication. Virtual collaboration follows the same process as collaboration, but the parties involved in virtual collaboration do not physically interact and communicate exclusively through technological channels. Distributed teams use virtual collaboration to simulate the information transfer present in face-to-face meetings, communicating virtually through verbal, visual, written, and digital means.
The IBM Cambridge Scientific Center was a company research laboratory established in February 1964 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Situated at 545 Technology Square, in the same building as MIT's Project MAC, it was later renamed the IBM Scientific Center. It is most notable for creating the CP-40 and the control program portions of CP/CMS, a virtual machine operating system developed for the IBM System/360-67.
In the virtual world of Second Life, there are a number of in-world business and user-groups founded specifically for the game, some of which have become legal entities in their own right, as well as preexisting companies and organizations that have involved themselves in the world.
Midrange computers, or midrange systems, were a class of computer systems that fell in between mainframe computers and microcomputers.
Unified communications (UC) is a business and marketing concept describing the integration of enterprise communication services such as instant messaging (chat), presence information, voice, mobility features, audio, web & video conferencing, fixed-mobile convergence (FMC), desktop sharing, data sharing, call control and speech recognition with non-real-time communication services such as unified messaging. UC is not necessarily a single product, but a set of products that provides a consistent unified user interface and user experience across multiple devices and media types.
OpenSimulator is an open-source server platform originally launched in 2007 for hosting virtual worlds and metaverse environments. It is largely compatible with the virtual world Second Life but full compatibility is not a design goal.
Koinup was an image and video hosting service, web portal and online community for virtual world users. It was used both as a photo and video repository platform and as a tool to share virtual world screenshots, photographs and machinima. As of November 2008, it claimed to host more than 100,000 items uploaded by its members and reaches about 100,000 visitors monthly.
Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) was a provider of modular mid-range and high-end computer data storage systems, software and services. Its operations are now a part of Hitachi Vantara.
Virtual worlds are playing an increasingly important role in education, especially in language learning. By March 2007 it was estimated that over 200 universities or academic institutions were involved in Second Life. Joe Miller, Linden Lab Vice President of Platform and Technology Development, claimed in 2009 that "Language learning is the most common education-based activity in Second Life". Many mainstream language institutes and private language schools are now using 3D virtual environments to support language learning.
Ian Hughes, also known as epredator, is a British metaverse evangelist, technology industry analyst, and television personality. In 2006, he set about leading a group of like-minded individuals and subsequently many thousands of colleagues at IBM into virtual worlds like Second Life, and beyond. This sparked a massive growth in interest from enterprises and press alike. Hughes was a public figure in Web 2.0 and, formerly, a blogger on Eightbar, a site maintained by former and current IBM employees on the fringes of innovation within their labs.
A gameframe is a hybrid computer system that was first used in the online video game industry. It is an amalgamation of the different technologies and architectures for supercomputers and mainframes, namely high computing power and high throughput.
