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| TALKING SHEEP, with Chris Carella and The Electric Sheep Co. |
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| Written by Bonnie Boglioli Randall | |
| Wednesday, 16 May 2007 12:21 | |
I hooked up my new Vivox headset and logged into the Second Life beta test servers to meet him. I found his avatar, a robot named Satchmo Prototype, on Sheep Island and he greeted me using the integrated voice system that was added to the grid just two months ago. Utilizing spatial proximity enables unbelievable voice capabilities, or so I was told. “You gotta check this out,” Chris’ voice tells me through my headset. He begins counting 1, 2, 3, and so on, while walking his avatar away from mine. By number 5 or so, his voice is clearly diminishing. By ten, his avatar is across the room and his voice has grown faint. By fifteen, he’s distant and I can no longer hear him. “Wow,” I say to him, forgetting that he can’t hear me either. He runs over to me and slowly but surely, his voice comes back as natural as if I were indeed standing in the same room as him. “I can see where a voice system such as this would be very beneficial to a company like The Electric Sheep, where you have employees disbursed around the country.” “Yes, there’s a practical advantage to the integrated voice in Second Life for us for sure. We used to use Skype all the time, but when this came out it was very exciting. We were holding a conference in one of our rooms upstairs and when several people spoke, it gave us the feeling of all being in the same room because it’s spatial! Multiple people could talk at the same moment and you hear them from the correct direction and distance away from your avatar. It makes voice a real business tool.” Chris is clearly enthralled with the voice integration, and to be honest I am too. The fact that it makes the interview process easier and more lifelike is also a nice advantage. The Electric Sheep Company is clearly not the average sort of company, offering designs and software for 3D virtual worlds. While there are other companies that offer similar services, The Sheep (as they are affectionately referred to), are the largest. Counting some sixty employees (not including additional contractors) geographically sprawled around the globe their home base is within the virtual world of Second Life, where they often can be found intermingling with participants or conducting meetings in their very own Sheep Tower. Their employees provide a wealth of knowledge and know-how to their clients, who range from MTV to Reuters. They are very prominent at industry gatherings, in the media and even in academia. Chris himself helps to teach a course on virtual worlds at Columbia University. “I can’t peruse any virtual world site or blog without seeing The Sheep make headlines on a weekly, if not daily, basis. How are things over there- busy as ever?” I inquire. “Yes, always very busy. The amazing thing is we’ve not had to solicit much business ourselves. That’s really incredible when you think about how much we’ve expanded over the past year. I was the fourth employee of the company, and my wife was the fifth. At that time, it felt like we each had to wear many hats and do lots of different things. In many ways, we still have that same small business culture here, even though we have about sixty employees now,” he tells me. “You were previously a producer with The Sheep and you had a large role in creating MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach (on There platform) and some machinima as well. Now you are the Creative Director. What exactly does your job entail Chris?” “Tough question,” he laughs, “I still do a lot of producing. But my role as creative director has evolved. We now have sixty extremely talented and intelligent employees, and my job is often to quiz them and get their thoughts going.” Chris has worked on and produced many of the headlining news stories for The Electric Sheep Co., including the very popular L Word build in Second Life based upon the ShowTime TV series. I ask him if he had a hand in The Sheep’s latest breaking news story, the NBA build (National Basketball Association). “I didn’t work much on the NBA build, but it really peeks my personal interest,” he told me. “On Monday there was a virtual press conference announcing the build! It was great. David Sterns was there (the NBA’s Commissioner) and we were all on a conference line while on the build itself,” Chris says enthusiastically. Sterns discussed the excitement of the NBA upon entering a virtual world and embracing new forms of media for its fans. The NBA build by The Sheep is decidedly unique, offering a full sized basketball court and arena, 3-D diagrams of NBA games as they occur, NBA merchandise for avatars in a replica Manhattan NBA store, and even the ability for users to easily switch views of the game and the scoreboard overhead with a simple flick rather than a combination of camera controls. “Does the NBA or Major League Baseball (another organization The Sheep has worked with) have a particular appeal and ability to attract new participants to a virtual world and keep them coming back for more?” I ask him. “In the history of mediums, from radios to televisions and even in 2-D web, entertainment and sports have proven to be mainstream. Certainly, the NBA and others have a unique opportunity to utilize multiple mediums to gain attention to Second Life or other virtual worlds. The NBA definitely has the ability to market themselves,” he says. I obviously need to check out this NBA build myself, which apparently is complete with a court available to play a pick-up game of H-O-R-S-E with fellow fans. “How do you guys come up with these things?” I joke. “The creative part is what we do best. That’s where we feel most comfortable,” he tells me, not surprisingly. “Sibley (Verbeck, CEO Electric Sheep Co.) spoke about some hindrances that currently limit mass participation in virtual worlds at the Virtual Worlds Conference. Where do you think changes need to be made for the industry to evolve and attract more participants?” I inquire. “There is a combination of things. There needs to be more marketing of virtual worlds so when someone is watching an NBA game or logged onto the NBA’s website, they see details about a virtual world and have some incentives to log in. But there also needs to be an easier, more simplified interface. Just taking Second Life as an example, it’s so natural to walk around and even talk, but there are still lots of buttons that can be daunting. Even I don’t know what some of them do and I’ve been here a long time!” he laughs. The industry as a whole accepts the fact that currently, the learning curve for new virtual world participants is rather high. In order to attract more people and eventually create more fulfilling and useful virtual spaces, things such as interfaces and server stability and reliability will need to be addressed. But with virtual worlds attracting more media attention by the day, there is a growing contingency of companies and others eagerly seeking their piece of the virtual pie at this time. I ask Chris if The Sheep has to clearly define the current parameters and restrictions that their clients may face. “The majority approach virtual worlds as a must-get-involved-now sort of deal. And most of them are not expecting any immediate returns,” he says. Certainly that seems to be a healthy attitude, recognizing the future of the industry and letting it progress organically. For companies like The Sheep, it also enables them to think a bit outside of the box and test interesting ideas out. Another issue facing eager companies is learning to understand the platform’s community. A company’s enthusiasm may quickly dwindle if they find the landscape to be inhospitable thanks to concerned or even cynical community participants. One such thing happened to a car manufacturing company, which began giving away free virtual cars much to the dismay of the veteran car building populace already in place. There’s a fine line to walk, and The Sheep are acutely aware of how imperative it is to develop trust within a community. “There is that core community and you need to ensure that they are happy. It’s very important to get the support of community leaders for a build to be successful,” Chris tells me. Apart from recognizing this need, The Sheep inherently understand the values of any community, as their own collective makeup includes arguably hundreds of years of gaming and virtual world experience between its employees. Pushing the limits and provoking development is something that takes more than a single person or company. There are various avenues that need to be explored if virtual worlds are to go mainstream. Among them, an area near and dear to Chris himself: machinima. Chris has a strong affinity for this genre of film making, having produced the short machinima promotion piece that aired prior to this year’s SuperBowl for a CBS sitcom, among others. I ask him to tell me a bit about machinima and how he believes it can help the industry. ”Machinima evolved out of the Quake community (the game which is now in its fourth incarnation). It used to be very gamer-centric, but since the growth of virtual worlds, it’s become more about stories. Evenso, machinima is still really grassroots,” he tells me. I ask him which are his favorites, and he cites TrashTalk and the classic Red vs. Blue. Obviously Chris is a big fan, but from a business perspective he sees even more fruitful bounty to come from machinima. “From a marketing perspective, machinima can be huge. It wouldn’t surprise me to see it on major media soon. It is low-cost storytelling to express yourself and get discovered, and there are lots of varieties of it.” he states. In looking over The Sheep’s portfolio, it’s evident that most of their designs have been limited to Second Life (with a prominent exception being MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach on the There platform). It’s no small wonder either, given the programming capabilities of Second Life, which are only limited to the programmers themselves. Yet there is a sentiment within the industry that, in some ways, is clearly looking for additional platforms to offer some competition. As Christopher Barry of Sundance pointed out, Second Life is not going to be a perfect fit for every company (Virtual Worlds Conference). I ask Chris for his take on this challenging topic. “There will definitely be competitors to Second Life that will offer a unique platform, but it will be hard to match the Second Life userbase. With Linden Lab possibly open-sourcing the backend, ultimately it should open source the industry and make it like a 3D internet,” he tells me. Certainly, there are conjectures that virtual platforms must integrate with one another and that possibility remains promising, though not without its hindrances. “Global identity and being able to take my avatar from Second Life and place it in another world is tough for platform integration. But if Linden Lab takes the lead, there isn’t a reason why others wouldn’t do the same.” In speaking with Chris, there’s a sense of comraderie between The Sheep and the greater industry as a whole. There are, of course, other companies that do what The Sheep does. I ask him if he doesn’t feel any sense of competition with companies offering similar services to The Sheep, thinking of Rivers Run Red or Millions of Us. “We’re all quite friendly actually. The spirit is doing it together and discussing and creating things that will help the entire industry,” he says. He admits that he likes to see The Sheep get bids on various builds, but seeing builds by other companies serves to get the creative juices flowing. Coupled with the fact that business is booming for all of them, I get the distinct impression that he’s stating the truth. I thank him for his time and candidness and agree to keep him informed of anything of interest in the future. As I sit down to type up my article, I decide to pay his blog and MySpace page a visit to get a few more interesting tidbits on him. I discover that Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat is among his favorite books, and I can’t help but draw the connection between its theory (globalization is connected to new technologies, particularly the internet, and has evened the world playing field accordingly) and The Electric Sheep. According to Friedman, globalization can be viewed with enthusiasm or cynically. The same might be said of virtual worlds. Certainly, The Sheep are used to dealing with many conundrums and limitations in the virtual worlds landscape. Yet the optimism seems limitless, offering new avenues to explore each day. The little company that owes its name to the significant sci-fi novel by Phillip K. Dick, later immortalized in the film Blade Runner, has certainly come a long way since its inception, and Chris’ own growth within the company reminds me of how much promise the industry holds. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites           |
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