Back on April 19, Cheerie posted a couple of photos of work that had been completed in Second Life for Cisco Systems. Here are a couple more pictures from the rebuild of the Cisco Live area including the inside of the Photo Sphere and Video Center. The biggest change was a refresh of the “look” that matches the branding for this years Cisco Live! physical world event to be held in San Francisco.

On a personal note, I am happy with the evolution of this build. We took the comments we received last year and try to incorporate as many improvement for ease of access that we could, for example we removed the elevator that traveled up and down from the Sphere down to the Video Center and installed a simple teleport up into the sphere. While the elevator was real cool, it did not engage people enough to go up into the sphere. And it was slow. We also improved the entrance into the Video Center to make it more inviting and easier for a new Second Life user to get into the building. There were other tweaks here and there to numerous to mention. All of this is important in building a more effective engagement for Cisco and its community.

I would love to hear others opinion on this build.

All day events will be held here on June 30 and July 1.

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Banana posted a couple of pictures on his personal blog of two projects that were recently developed by Meta Magic Studio for Cisco Systems. The first was an updating of the successful Cisco Live build that we did last year and the second was a demonstration build of Cisco EnergyWise Office. Both projects were installed at Cisco Systems Virtual Campus on the Second Life grid this past week.

Banana also wrote that Dedric Mauriac did an outstanding software development job on the EnergyWise demo.  I know the 3D demo was easy to use and brought to life this very cool concept. Go Cisco!

Cisco Live 09 Update

Cisco EnergyWise Office

Today, Jan 27, 2009, Cisco® opened its Sustainability Center demonstrating its new EnergyWise Technology and their Networked Sustainability Network in Second Life®. This center is located at Cisco Systems Sim 2 and demonstrates Green technologies and products. The center was developed by Meta Magic Studio.

Virtually all large enterprises are conscious of the image they project, and corporate responsibility is an important part of that image. Green technologies represent an opportunity for corporations that extends beyond brand reputation and can affect overall profitability.

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Meta Magic Studio Blimp

We have received a few emails wondering what Meta Magic Studio has been up to lately. Some are even worried that we have gone away on vacation! Ha!

As usual, we are under NDA with our clients, so there is not much to say at this time. But we are happy to say that we are busy with two new clients developing their Second Life community presence. We also continue working with a number of companies and not-for-profits in building their web 2.0 networks.

Plus we continue our long term relationship with Cisco Systems and are currently working on their AXP Pavilion and other updates to their four public sims in Second Life.  Cisco also has an extensive plan for their very successful tech chat series with presenations starting again in September and planned through May 2009.  Dannette Veale recently posted a blog entry on this subject.

Our team remains very busy. Mike and Jen have been putting in major hours with new clients while Dot keeps us organized. As for me, I am spending about 50% of my time in Second Life, 20% on OpenSim, Multiverse and Google Lively, while the rest of the time is spent with other web 2.0 projects for our clients.

From a long term perspective, we remain bullish on the Second Life grid despite the doom predictions. We are also beginning to work with OpenSim projects with an eye on the universal avatar and universal permissions systems.

On a personal note, I am not that “excited” by Google’s Lively. It remains a poor example of community 3D space, but since it is Google, we are not writing it off.  We are supporting a couple of efforts at this time.

All the best

Guy “Banana” Schilling

Dedric Mauraic - Genius Scripter - is putting the finishing touches to a collaborative game that will be used for Cisco Live!. I am not going to give the details away but let me tell you that in our testing at the Meta Magic Studio, we were laughing and having a great time with the game.

I am always impressed when some one is able to execute a non-violent game. And able to execute it in Second Life® with all of its inherent limitations. Stay tuned for more on this….

Photos from our morning testing. That is Cheerie and Dot with me.

Collaborative Game Testing - Meta Magic Studio