Gehorsam on the Military-Entertainment Complex, Open Source and the Future

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The transcript for my interview with Robert Gehorsam, President of Forterra Systems, Inc., is now available here. This one has been particularly well-received, and has lots of gems. I'd like to highlight a couple here. First, our discussion of Forterra's work with the University of Maryland's Transportation Laboratory (which is using a virtual world to train I-95 emergency response teams) led to a broader discussion of the role of simulation...which led to an interesting discussion about work being done at the University of Central Florida, and my favorite term of the day: the military-entertainment complex

More highlights, after the jump.

ROBERT GEHORSAM. ....So UCF is one of the biggest sort of unknown universities in the country, certainly, and it really is, for various reasons, probably the simulation capital of the United States. Something I didn't know until a few years ago. As some people have sort of drolly put it, it's at the center of the military entertainment complex. All the Services have their simulation commands based in Orlando, and you also have all the theme parks. And when you look at the birth of simulation, which really someone noticed earlier, related to flight simulators, which led to motion simulators. The different between a ride, a motion simulation ride, at Universal and flight simulator is kind of minimal. So there's an enormous amount of talent in the digital film and media departments, in the computer science departments and all throughout that area. So for those of you who are students or interested in looking at sort of more studying in these areas, that would be an interesting place to look at.

Robert's response to my question about open source and open standards was also very thoughtful:

ROBERT GEHORSAM: ... Open Source shouldn't be confused with Open Standards, and they often are. I think there will always be a debate, which will have a practically religious or ideological overtones about whether things should be Open Source or not. We are much more oriented to the Open Standards, that it's okay to have proprietary software because that's a business model that does enable innovation. I suppose you could argue, in some cases, that it doesn't but, in other cases, it does. But certainly it encourages innovation, but it also allows for interoperability so that different parts can work together. And so we're really firmly on the Open Standards side, and you can see that with certainly the decisions we've made about content creation. And you can also see it by something that is upcoming that I think we're pretty much the first people to do a very specific virtual world standard or protocol and put it into the open community. And that is a new format, which I think I mentioned to you, Rob, called Paged Terrain Format. So if you're going to build a virtual world, you need something to build the world with. I think I've been implying we're really interested in the issue of geo specific fidelity.

Finally, I usually give my guests a chance to pontificate about the future. Mr. Gehorsam shows himself to be exceptionally practical. I really hope that players in the industry look carefully at what he has to say about the future. Here goes, nearly in its entirety:

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: So we are just about out of time. I'd like to give you the last few minutes just to talk a little bit about what you see in the future. This can be what you see for Forterra in the next few months or a year or ten years. Or you can talk about short term or long term in the industry, but just sort of what is guiding your thinking and where do you think this car is heading.

ROBERT GEHORSAM: I could go out 20 years and start talking about implants sitting on my optic nerve, giving me a real augmented reality view of things. You know what? I think that stuff actually is going to happen. I think what's really important to happen in the next year especially is for us to have, I guess, a reality check so all of us who are here are here because we really believe in this stuff, and we're really excited, and we're really enthusiastic. I've been 23 years involved with some aspect of this, so I really must be nuts to be doing it. But there's a sense that now, for a wide variety of reasons, this is a time when there can be reality. But when you actually look at what has been going on for the past, let's say, 18 months, there's been an enormous amount of work in the sort of social networking and entertainment side. We should never forget what the MMOGs represent to all of this because that is the real business at this point.

But, if you want to imagine other parts of human activity migrating to this, then we really need to start to see the results of all the early experimentation and pilot programs and the corporate efforts. We need to see somehow publicly described results that this stuff works. That people can learn better. That people can train better. That people can do things better. And I think we all have an intuitive sense of that, and maybe some of even know some examples for sure, but we don't really know that as a community. I think, this year, we need to start to see some of those results. So what I described with the University of Maryland, for example, they're doing work, and they're going to start to get results, and it should be pretty interesting. We do a lot of work in the medical area too, and some of it I can talk about, and some of it is with clients I can't talk about. But we're going to see results this year and, hopefully, they'll be published, and they'll be published, in some cases, in a proper research form. I think we need to see that. Otherwise we really run the risk of hype meltdown because the money won't be there to do the things we want to do, and the disappointment factor will be really high. So that's a very short term view, but I think it's a gating factor for getting to the longer term.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Yeah, well, I would also see that as maybe more of an immediate call to action than anything else, and I think it's an exceptionally useful one. I know, from where I sit in academia, people talk about using games, use Serious Games and virtual environments for learning. And the thing that always comes up is assessment. Is anyone actually learning any better this way or really anything at all?

Finally, the backchat was particularly active for this talk--and our speaker dove in headfirst, responding directly to it. I was quite pleased to see this backchat/distributed event model get some real traction yesterday.