Hi all, we are just starting 2007 and are now at a point where we are looking at ways to make VResources.org more visible and to greatly increase its traffic and see more forum interactions.
We are making this general "call for participation" to all our current members in the hope that many of you can contribute by helping us spread the word about this web site.
Bellow, I summarized important points that sminhinnick highlighted as key points to work on to make this site more visible.
* Routinely let various groups know of the existence of this forum.
* Universities with VR departments and labs may also like to post summaries of their work here as well.
* Attracting new users can be done on a low-key but ongoing basis, which will slowly increase activity at this site, which in turn creates repeat traffic. Examples of these groups would be: VR hardware and software companies, universities with VR departments, research organisations (e.g. HITLab), and the like.
* Notify other VR newsgroups and forums of our existence every few months, which has the added advantage of raising VResources profile with search engines.
Now the question is, can we do this, partially or totally, in a collective effort. I am sure that we can achieve great success if we all team up and participate in this effort. Those of you who think they can contribute to this effort, please reply to this post and tell us what you think you can contribute.
If you have other suggestions to add to the points above, please also feel free to append them to this thread.
I am waiting on your impressions about this call to participation and I hope we can count on many of you to help us make VResources.org the most dynamic and active Virtual Reality web site in existence.
One of the best ways to broaden the user base is to hold a contest. In the best case, you can get a few companies to donate some VR gear (they can write it off as a promotional expense). This will raise awareness of the site and also encourage VR hopefuls to join the scene.
I'm not sure what the best idea for a contest would be. Building an entire VR construct might be out of the scope of a 1-2 month contest. Maybe it can just be for the design specs of an innovative program. Or possibly an alternate 3d interface design. Things like that. If you could get Phillips to support the contest with one of their WoW displays, I'd imagine people would enter. TDVision is another company to look out for since they are trying to push into the consumer market.
Then spam a press release to get syndicated on techie sites like slashdot, and *bam* you've got like at least 100 new members right there. Just an idea.
That is a good idea that we will consider. cybereality, would you be disposed to help toward that goal? Any others that would like to participate in that effort?
At some point, we also considered starting efforts toward establishing a permanent annual VR conference and allow people to publish their VR-related scientific papers through VResources.org. These events would take place in the North-American territory.
I am wondering the kind of interest this proposition can generate. Let us know what you think.
« Last Edit: February 22, 2007, 08:13:47 AM by vresources »
Good idea about a competition, but I wonder if there are easier things we can do first? After all, companies are much more liable to donate prizes if there is already a wide audience for their sponsorship.
One way of generating more attention is by original content - and a relatively easy way of doing that is with interesting interviews of various industry experts. This does not have to be too often - it could be a monthly thing, and I am sure we could all suggest names to get a list going. Most experts are only too happy to talk about themselves and their specialist subject, expecially to an eager audience.
The 'interview' could even be done using interactive chat at a predetermined time, so we could all put our questions to the expert. Afterwards, the interview can be posted online. This also gives us the opportunity to (for example) "Digg" the interview so it appears on Digg.com under the "Tech Industry News" heading. Other ways of using this new content to generate more links to our site are obvious with a little thought, and they all get people coming for a look.
I tend to agree that the competition scheme is not the first step I would consider. I would probably favor more directions toward contacting key targets and try to get them to physically link the VResources.org. To that end, I was thinking of adding a "syndicate" button or section on the main navigation bar or VRe that propose ready to cut and paste HTML code with a logo that let other sites easily link to us. We could also try to put up a list of potential such targets right here. Feel free to make suggestions. I will setup separate threads for this purpose actually so it makes it easier for us to separate things.
The interview idea is yet an other interesting avenue we should consider. The key element here is the original content issue raised by sminhinnick. What should we add to VResources in term of new original content? VRe has always been acting mainly as a yellow pages of VR, linking to various resources that are human selected and filtered to ensure quality content is provided. We also did a few hardware reviews in the past but this is very time consuming.
Who would you like to see reviewed by VResources.org? Let’s put up a list. Once we have a decent list of potential individuals to interview, we will see if we can get some interested to participate.
Yet an other thing I would like to push further in the future on this site is the educational aspect. I see VResources as a vehicle to educate the population about what VR is and is not. We have not made much progress worldwide on that regard since 1990. That is a key element why VR has not caught on yet. The critical mass has not been reached yet in term of the number of people who know VR well enough to desire to look at it and try it in their own fields. Granted, more and more businesses are starting to use VR, but the number of adopters is still low considering the overall potential of VR and visualization.
Anyway, I feel we are progressing in this discussion and many good valuable inputs have been made so far. Let’s hope this will convince more people to jump in the discussion and share their thoughts.
Maybe the website should first be modified to suit your goals. Maybe you could revamp it and communicate around the revamp. (I'd have some comments on the design which we can discuss in another post)
If you want this site to be pushed by the community, give the community more power Like a wiki for articles, labs presentation. (the article submission process is scary =)
Also judging by the home page, it seems the site is closely related to your company. I'd prefer that this site is independant from any company, so maybe you should dissociate the website from the company and make it community only.
In the same manner you propose a link for commercial advertisement. I'd advise against this if you want the site to be as neutral as can be.
I don't like the google ads either but I can understand that it's to pay the web fees.
Who are you targeting ? Hobbyists? Professionals? Both I guess.
So there should be an interest for both to come here.
For pros, maybe team up with vroot.org (he's from québec too , and make a vr news site (which would be to my knowledge the only VR news site). With you, Mr Boulay , me and others we could get enough news. Pros could bring to the community their knowledge through interviews, articles, open questions etc. Requests could be done through the news site.
For hobbyists introductory articles (on the wiki so that everyone can improve them) would be welcome. Infos about cheap, diy vr would be welcome too. Hobbyists could bring to the community source code, material, ideas, discussion, questions..
As for interviews, several names come to my mind : pioneers: Jaron Lanier, Carolina Cruz-Neira, Evan Sutherland .. (I'll have much more if you want
The questions could (should!) be a collaborative process!
After this long post, I just think it would be really great to at last create a VR community, and I'd sure like to help create it
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Maybe the website should first be modified to suit your goals. Maybe you could revamp it and communicate around the revamp. (I'd have some comments on the design which we can discuss in another post)
If you want this site to be pushed by the community, give the community more power Like a wiki for articles, labs presentation. (the article submission process is scary =)
Wiki are great and trendy, but I wonder what real advantage they offer over this type of web based forums. People can already register and then post their comments, questions and thoughts on these forums. Granted, they cannot control as much the shape of the forum itself as they could with a wiki. That being said, I wonder again if this is necessary. I like the way that this forum contains the discussions in that it provide a basic guide or structure. I would definitely like to avoid the Wiki sandbox syndrome where things get created a bit in all directions without following some structure. The idea behind this forum is to provide to the VR community a growing information base about all kind of VR related questions they may have. A Wiki or any other type of web-based forums could be a nice addition to VRe, but I do not see it as the most important factor to enhance the usefulness of this web site as a VR resource. I may be wrong thought, and encourage people who think otherwise to voice new elements that could convince us all that we really need to go that route.
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Also judging by the home page, it seems the site is closely related to your company. I'd prefer that this site is independant from any company, so maybe you should dissociate the website from the company and make it community only.
In the same manner you propose a link for commercial advertisement. I'd advise against this if you want the site to be as neutral as can be.
I don't like the google ads either but I can understand that it's to pay the web fees.
This is an area I do not want to debate too much, lets just say that you can see Virtual Simulations, Inc. as the main sponsor through which this site (VResources.org) is possible. I believe we provide quite substantial information to this community, all this freely for the public, so that this should not be a concern to our visitors.
You are advertising your own VR related blog in your sign on this site but this is fine by us and is something we understand. Nothing comes totally free in this world we live in ;-)
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Who are you targeting ? Hobbyists? Professionals? Both I guess.
So there should be an interest for both to come here.
I think we already provide information for all level of VR expertise on Vresources.org. If you feel there are weaknesses, please highlight them so it gives us a base to know where to look at updating this site. What do we lack or need to improve in order to attract these types of individuals? Etc.
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For pros, maybe team up with vroot.org (he's from québec too , and make a vr news site (which would be to my knowledge the only VR news site). With you, Mr Boulay , me and others we could get enough news.
VResources has been in existence since 1995 and had since featured news on various fields of VR. There was also VRFresh which was excellent but recently stopped activities, which was there a long time before the site you mention.
The thing I see that could be an improvement on the news aspect would be to allow visitors to submit news. The problem we face is that more and more spamming is taking place on the Internet so this makes these type of efforts more complicated. Take notice that we already have such a section on this forum where people can post articles and news. Very few were actually posted surprisingly. What we could do is to couple more tightly the forums with what shows up on the home page. This is something that is technically feasible.
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Pros could bring to the community their knowledge through interviews, articles, open questions etc. Requests could be done through the news site.
For hobbyists introductory articles (on the wiki so that everyone can improve them) would be welcome. Infos about cheap, diy vr would be welcome too. Hobbyists could bring to the community source code, material, ideas, discussion, questions..
I feel all is in place for this with the current VRe forums… Now, we only miss more knowledgeable people to answer questions from others. In the beginning of VResources.org, the goal was to replace the USENET forum sci.virtual-worlds which was declining at that point. Unfortunately, the switch did not really materialize for many unknown reasons and pretty much all the contributors of that USENET forum vanished. This is a shame as there was a very solid community present in that forum at that time. The challenge for us all now is to try to do just that. Make this site as active as sci.virtual-worlds was at the time by attracting key players in the VR field.
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As for interviews, several names come to my mind : pioneers: Jaron Lanier, Carolina Cruz-Neira, Evan Sutherland .. (I'll have much more if you want
Please list all the names you can think of. That is the whole point of this initiative we started. I’d ask you to post your list on the separate thread that was created for this purpose thought, so we keep things organized.
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The questions could (should!) be a collaborative process!
After this long post, I just think it would be really great to at last create a VR community, and I'd sure like to help create it
Yes, I see no reason why people could not decide the questions asked. We could initially ask the members of VRe to give us their question suggestions, then we would pass them on to the interviewee and publish the interview on this site once it is ready.
As for the community you refer to, I feel it is right here, right now. VResources has in my opinion the ingredients to provide a vehicle for that community, but the main thing now is to regroup all the potential members together and grow our pool of participating members. I know that a lot of people read these pages daily, but too few actually take an active role while they visit, which is a loss for all of us.
We are progressing with these discussions. Keep the comments coming!
Marc Bernatchez
« Last Edit: February 27, 2007, 08:57:31 AM by vresources »
Wiki are great and trendy, but I wonder what real advantage they offer over this type of web based forums.
Well for example one could begin an article, someone else continue, modify, improve it, another one correct typos ..
One article wouldn't be written by one author only, but by the community, allowing for more complete articles.
One perfect example would be an article on VR applications, like the one you wrote. It is really good, and it could be enriched by lots of people, each one working in one different field and having its own expertise.
As for the structure, it indeed needs a directing hand to tidy, categorise articles.
Wikis have a different scope than forums. I think both have their place here.
Writing an article might be a long and tedious process, but with modern tools it can be done iteratively and collaboratively.
How many articles submissions did you get? On the other hand I think a lot of people might want to add parts to articles already written.
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Also judging by the home page, it seems the site is closely related to your company.
This is an area I do not want to debate too much, lets just say that you can see Virtual Simulations, Inc. as the main sponsor through which this site (VResources.org) is possible. I believe we provide quite substantial information to this community, all this freely for the public, so that this should not be a concern to our visitors.
I'm a visitor and it's a concern to me
This could be very well stated in an About page, you could also have banners on the site.
The way it is presented right now is confusing. At first glance you don't know the focus of the site. Is it a company web site? Is this community thing just to make publicity to this company?
I had to take some time to understand that apart from the home page, there's nothing about your company and that it's full of interesting resources.
I think people are more enclined at serving the cause community rather than the cause of a company. So I believe there should be absolutely no ambiguity on this.
So when driving the community maybe you should try to dissociate your individual self from the entrepreneur one
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You are advertising your own VR related blog in your sign on this site but this is fine by us and is something we understand.
That's my personal site and it has absolutely nothing commercial.
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I think we already provide information for all level of VR expertise on Vresources.org. If you feel there are weaknesses, please highlight them.
I'll do that later.
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Make this site as active as sci.virtual-worlds was at the time by attracting key players in the VR field.
I'll clarify my thoughts about why I think the news part is important. That would be a way to have people know about the site passively. If they read interesting news regularly they might find it a valuable service and so be more prompt to reply to the community's calls.
I think that news is a prime example of what pros need. There is no VR newspaper, and appart from vroot no vr news site. This is really missing now.
The resources part you created is really great for pros too. Your hmd info is really invaluable.
All this should be completed with regular updates about new devices, about companies, labs, about academic/industry projects, about people. That's what pros want to read about.
Yes you told exactly the same thing, I just wanted to agree =)
What do other think about those matters?
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I agree that you have a point. A Wiki would allow visitors to easily contribute / modify the site content in a more dynamic way. The other side of the medial is that we have set some goals for VResources.org and transforming the current way of working to one using Wikis may not fit in. One key element that I briefly highlighted is that we want at all cost to avoid the sandbox effect, that is, to see lots of little changes made to the content in time which do not always converge in a structured direction. I recall reading an article about Jaron Lanier being against Wikipedias and the like for this reason. He was basically questioning the fact that Wikis are assumed to lead to the most accurate facts as they are made in a way similar to the ants work approach, little by little. With time, the entire world population participating can’t be wrong… right? It is the normal curve law effect. This is what he was questioning I think. I do share some of these concerns.
I do think Wikis could bring advantages, but that would require substantial moderation and supervising. One way or the other, some human entity will have to review these changes and either accepts them or reject, based on the added content… And I am not even considering malicious spam posts here. It sums up to say that it is great to lend web space to a community, but this implies a responsibility in return to maintain that space clean. We see a lot of Blogs and Wiki-like web sites which have as much spam posts as useful content, which look like they were abandoned by their owners. This is something that we certainly don’t want to see happen here. I will look into the Wiki question and see if we could have one on VResources, and keeping a separate entity. We would basically have a standard web section with information, a forum and a Wiki… But what is going to happen to this forum? I expect one of the two would become unused as they address pretty much the same purpose.
The way I see it, a wiki section could be coupled to the fixed content section (the article page as you suggested as an example and other such pages) by adding a link somewhere on the fixed content version of a page to a wiki editable replica. The community could thus basically play in the sandbox so to speak and refine the content. At some point where we see that that edited content has matured enough, we could copy it over the fixed section and iterate like this a few times monthly or yearly. That would put sufficient inertia to the content so it doesn’t evolve out of hands. With that scheme, we would in effect combine the best of both worlds: 1) an easy to edit content to allow the community to quickly act on it and 2) a peer-review based acceptance process to contain and guide the changes in a structured way. The question is how much moderation time would we have to put into this, and who would be willing to act as moderators.
Let’s take some distance and look back at where we are so far. We have two folders to the current discussion I see:
1) Trying to broaden the visibility of what VResources is at the moment (which was the initial intent)
2) Discussing about a format change to offer things differently to the visitors in order to make VResources more current with the latest web trends and make the content more accessible in a community approach.
Both discussions are of course relevant here and can have impacts on one another.
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I had to take some time to understand that apart from the home page, there's nothing about your company and that it's full of interesting resources.
While we are not going to change the affiliation relation with VSI, we may look at making it clearer what the goals and intents of VResources.org are, right from the start of the home page.
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… news is a prime example of what pros need. There is no VR newspaper, and appart from vroot no vr news site. This is really missing now.
I agree with you that there is a crying need for better VR news sources. VRoot is displaying more or less the same news as we do by the way. This makes me think that what causes more problems regarding VResources to your eyes is the format rather than the content. We could also say that it is an information accessibility problem. Would you agree? I have been thinking about this issue for a while myself and this call for participation I made was probably the consequence of this thinking process. VResources needs to be more users friendly while remaining easy to maintain.
I think the issue raised here is sufficiently important to start a new thread. I will add a thread so that you can all bring your ideas up on the table regarding ways we should consider to make the content more accessible and user friendly. The current thread can be used for discussions pertaining to how we approach the problem of making VResources.org more visible.
Cbwan, thank you for your valuable participation in this process. From our discussion, I would assume you have an interest in actively taking part in that conversion process. Am I right? What I plan to do, once we have some format changes made based on the many inputs we get from users, is to look for knowledgeable people in this community that will become co-moderators so that the task of maintaining things ordered is distributed and thus remain bearable to all. That way, we would really start to have a dynamic community working on a common goal to share and propagate knowledge and advances about Virtual Reality.
You also seemed to have interest in participating in the news filtering and publishing process. This is something we can discuss off-line as well.
We need more inputs from new members and those who did not express their opinions yet. Keep it coming.
Regards, Marc Bernatchez
« Last Edit: February 28, 2007, 02:02:37 PM by vresources »
What about starting a monthly podcast? You or a friend could easily do a 10 minute interview of someone interesting over Skype (for example) and podcast the result. Get a few people to join in, and you have something like "This Week in Tech" or "This Week in Science" podcasts - light hearted, high energy and informative.
Of course you can edit out any mistakes, make yourself always look good and without too much effort you become the world spokesperson of VR! Joking aside, a podcast on VR would probably generate quite a bit of new traffic to VResources.
A wiki and a contest are great ideas, but what problem are we trying to solve here? And will these ideas actually address the issue? [...]
Why do people visit a site like this? It is to keep up with the news, to have questions answered, to see interesting content and new ideas, and to share the enthusiasm of like-minded individuals.
[...]
... I am reluctant to advise great changes to this web site as a first step. Instead, by making very targeted changes to the site, combined with generating some regular original content and increasing the number of other sites that link to this one, I think that it should be reasonably easy to get the participation level up.
In relation to this thread, we should now try to address who we target (we need a list - See the other thread made to that intent) and we need to come up with a "community plan" to execute it (split the actual work and have many persons do a small amount of it). That way, we should reach the best efficiency and get results faster.
I also think the news should be given more space on the home page. I will think about it. Maybe the whole news content (not just the titles / headlines) should be on the home directly. This would probably mean that we abolish the "News" section altogether. Let me know your thoughts on how you would see this done.
I note your interest and will see that you are given a place here on VRe so you can contribute more actively on the VRe content :-). Thank you for your involvement!
cbwan said "maybe the news sections should be more prominent on the start page?"
There is more to it than that. Sadly, there have not been too many people involved in these discussions. I think that many people who have registered with VResources have dropped away for one reason or another.
Just to be clear, this is in no way a criticism of you, Marc. Maybe the site never quite reached that "critical mass" where new content became self-generating from the user-base.
You have my 100% support for this site. We all share the same interest and enthusiasm for VR, and want this website to be popular and do well.
I was thinking about this, and suddenly thought - the thing is that the low response rate works to our advantage in some ways. We are all busy trying to work out what "they" (the target market) want in a VR website. But wait a minute! Aren't we the target market, as the hard-core supporters of this site?
Maybe, if we please ourselves we will find more new people attracted to the site as a result. Rather than try and second-guess what other people want.
What if we wrote down exactly what we would like to see in a VR website aimed at ourselves - and then change the site, build it, re-launch it (or whatever) as necessary? No time pressure because we are doing it for ourselves.
Assuming that you (at least partly) agree with me - here are some things that come to mind that I would like to see in a VR website:
1. Regularly changing content on the home page - with something like the latest news (summarized with a link to the main story), a related photo or two to add some eyecatching color, links to the last 5 forum posts.
2. Every so often, an original interview with some VR expert - to get an insight into the leading edge of VR, and to get a feel for the state of play of the VR industry as a whole, along with its possible future directions. This could be a podcast, an email interview, a chat transcript - doesn't matter.
3. A virtual worlds section - to draw in the gamers. With virtual worlds such a hot topic right now, we need to keep our fingers on the pulse. Whether we have time for Second Life ourselves, it is the popular face of VR. This also offers reasons for other sites to link to us, and encourages new members.
4. A topic of the month - designed to be very provocative and solicit lots of forum posts - e.g. Is Second Life true VR, or just chat with avatars? Is VR a deliberate con just like artificial intelligence or the "Year 2000 bug"? Or - Is VR's killer app going to be somthing like the "orgasmatron" as featured in Woody Allen's film "The Sleeper"?
Just a few thoughts...
And regarding the idea of news on the home page, I prefer to keep page lengths short, and be able to "drill into" what I am interested in. I don't like massive web pages which require much scrolling up and down. This also reduces page load times (even with wireless broadband). The ideas here are "cadence" and "click rate" - people like to quickly find what they are looking for, and then click onto the next topic. Too much waiting or searching, and you've lost them.
Regards Stephen
« Last Edit: March 05, 2007, 04:36:11 AM by sminhinnick »