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The well known metaverse blog Ugotrade has an article about Exploring Reality in Virtual Worlds where, among other interesting things, Tish Shute talks about her and others’ experiences with Qwaq Forums. With the growing bad press and negative opinions about the suitability of Second Life as a business and “serious applications” oriented metaverse platform (but read more below), there are more and more reviews of professional collaboration oriented alternatives like Qwaq Forums. Qwaq Forums is a commercial value added application layer based on the open source platform Open Croquet, and provides a good showcase of the advanced capabilities of the platform.

We have been testing Qwaq Forums for a few months as part of our collaboration with Philippe Van Nedervelde, CEO of the award-winning VR company E-spaces, Preferred Content & Solutions Development Partner of Qwaq, Inc. as well as member of the Croquet Architecture Review Board, and demonstrated the platform to several firms and organizations. The picture above shows some interesting features, like in-world web browsing (the metaxlr8.net website), the mirror and the fan used to demonstrate distributed physics computations, replicated on all participating nodes. Probably the most interesting part of a Qwaq Forums demonstration is drag-and-drop importing MS Office and Open Office documents from the desktop and collaborative editing.Of course, Qwaq Forums has integrated text and VoIP chat.

From a system point of view, one of the most interesting features is the native P2P capability of QF and the underlying OC platform. Philippe writes: “Croquet employs the principle of replicated computation (synchronization) together with a peer-based messaging protocol that makes it possible to coordinate the activities of people within highly collaborative 3D avatar mediated worlds without the requirement of maintaining central server resources (other than those needed for specialized data and institutional middleware services). The Croquet software provides a seamless, dynamic architecture, framework, and interface for delivering data and visual/auditory content that is persistent (over time and distance), fully extensible, timely, and reliable—and yet scales to a large number of participants without central servers. Qwaq Forums themselves are secure, multi-user online 3D virtual spaces purpose-designed for doing actual, real work collaboratively. Like offices and meeting rooms, Qwaq Forums are places where users can go to work, to collaborate with others, and to identify and solve issues. By creating a complete, virtual space with all the tools, data and interactivity needed for a single topic, Qwaq Forums creates a highly immersive environment where ideas can be explored, solutions to issues tried out, and where content can be created and used. All work done in Qwaq Forums is persistent; all users can see all previous changes and additions; this allows team members to capture all progress made and to hand off work to each other as needed. Users can occupy many different virtual spaces in the course of their day to help them organize work on different topics or with different teams”.

See also this video presentation given by Philippe inside Qwaq Forums. Since the presentation was recorded a few months ago (that is, in the Stone Age of these rapidly evolving accelerating technologies), it does not cover some of the most recently introduced features.

One of the first observations of Tish is that “I had a bit of culture shock when I checked in and found myself not the rather lovely Tara5 Oh, my Second Life avatar, but a block person” (see pictures of block persons below). These very simplified avatars are no impediment to a work session -actually one could even argue that realistic avatars would shift the concentration of the participants away from the objectives of the session- but I believe realistic avatars would add to the immersion and feeling of “being there”, and I understand that realistic avatars will be included in one of the next releases. She continues: “Luckily being able to drag Powerpoint presentations from my desktop onto a wall in a virtual room in one second with one mouse motion saved the day”, and in fact providing a collaborative workspace with productivity features to enable users to get real work done fast is one of the unique selling points of Quack Forums. Call it Webex in virtual reality and on steroids.

Tish mentions that one of the next releases may, when the technology is perfected, include the option to paste a realtime webcam feed onto the “face” of an avatar. I think if this option is implemented well (for example without introducing different delays in audio and video streams, which will permit accurate lip syncing), this option will add a lot to the magic (and productivity) of VR meetings. In a recent article on Virtual Laboratories and Virtual Worlds, Astrophysicist Piet Hut reports that “The main attraction for coming into Qwaq Forums was presence. Presence in a persistent space, a watering hole that quickly became a familiar meeting ground, this is what was felt to be the single most important aspect of the whole enterprise. Everything else was clearly secondary”. This impression of “being there” doing real collaborative work is certainly enhanced by the availability of realistic 3D environments such as the lobby and the classroom in the images above and below, developed by E-spaces. The platform permits importing textured 3D models developed with external 3D modeling tools such as 3DSmax.

In summary I think Qwaq Forums will occupy a growing niche in the emerging virtual workspace market. The company Qwaq Inc. seems solid, after the announcements of a $7 million funding and a partnership with Intel. At the same time I do not think it is a “Second Life killer”, because the two platforms are clearly aimed at two very different audiences: Second Life is meant as a game-like social VR world with an added (still limited) set of groupware features, whereas Qwaq Forums is a virtual Intranet / Extranet for productivity-oriented groupware aimed at professional users. A company or organization may use QF as an internal workspace, training system and meeting space, and SL for public outreach to wider audiences in “fun” game-like settings (thanks Tish for this insight). Moreover, it seems that Second Life’s days as a closed proprietary platform may soon be over, with projects like OpenSim developing open source alternatives based on open standards. An interesting possibility is merging the two approaches by integrating Qwaq Forums’ virtual groupware features in OpenSim.