Please forgive the rough format. I also only managed to capture things that really stuck out to me.

(more…)

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What does it say that I’m kind of ashamed to be posting these the next day instead of liveblogging them? (more…)

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You can find notes from the mirror world section of the meeting, which included my presentation, on Friday over at Virtual Worlds News.

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Some of the highlights:

• Twinity’s Valentine’s Day party
• We have a couple of positions available in 3D modeling
• Yesterday was the Metaverse Roadmap meeting
• Today and tomorrow is Metaverse U

Have a great weekend!

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Here are some rough notes from yesterday’s Metaverse Roadmap meeting. They are in rough format, so they may not be 100% coherent.

Jamais Cascio, Institute for the Future, started with some encouraging opening remarks.

• Let’s move forward
• Keep talking & working together

Sibley Verbeck, The Electric Sheep Company

• Pepsi is an example of something that has worked surprisingly well in-world
• Virtual worlds are a new wave - yes, there is a lot of hype, but many businesses feel like they can’t afford to miss

Raph Koster, Areae/Metaplace

• Mentioned two books: Halting State and Rainbow’s End
• Of the 4 Metaverse Roadmap quadrants (virtual worlds, mirror worlds, augmented reality, lifelogging), virtual worlds are the least interesting
• There are too many walled gardens
• Kids worlds are the low hanging fruit now
• Entertainment is the long term driver
• Most major developments will take time, like years
• Open source will play some role, but user experience is always a challenge there
• Metaplace will open up almost everything

Corey Bridges, Multiverse

• There is too much to build right now
• He talked a lot about how virtual worlds are more than Second Life and how quickly companies left SL
• The interoperability summit at the last Virtual Worlds conference was interesting, but a lot of companies were upset about the IBM/SL press release after summit
• Open standards should come first then interoperability will come later
• Hype cycles happen, and we should use them not fight them
• People are seeing through the hype and optimism, but they still see a lot of potential in virtual worlds
• 3d will win in the end

Eric Rice

• Story narrative & people are in control in MMOs
• Users make the rules
• wherecamp.crowdvine.com is the URL for the Wherecamp 2008

Trevor Smith, Ogoglio

• Showed Tomorrow Space
• The web will eat virtual worlds

Mitch Kapor

• 1st investor, chair of Linden Lab
• He thinks hardware will be a key
• A 3d camera will be involved
• The Minority Report gesture controls will come
• They will replace the mouse/keyboard
• They have cameras working in prototype in his lab
• The will be posting videos about it on YouTube soon
• The price now $400/500, will come down with scale, etc
• The form factor will be like webcam

I didn’t get many notes from the mirror world segment that I spoke on, nor on the augmented reality segment, but those were both very interesting. There were lots of ideas about getting a selective stream of metadata in an augmented reality display.

Overall, it was an interesting day, but I might have been a little too jetlagged to get the full benefit of it. Looking forward to Metaverse U!

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You were probably expecting the regular end of week wrap-up, and I will try to get that posted later this evening, along with some notes from the Metaverse Roadmap Summit today.

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Again, a busy Friday delayed my posting. Some highlights from last week:

• We had another fairly large update to Twinity. The technology continues to evolve rapidly during the beta, so please expect all the next releases to bring a lot of new stuff.
• Updates to my travel schedule: Metaverse U, GDC and also a meeting of the Metaverse Roadmap group in California. Drop me a line if you want to meet up. My email is jeremy (at) metaversum dot com.
• Reminder: The Twinity satisfaction survey is live. Please give us your feedback!

Hope you all had a great weekend!

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I forgot to mention in my previous post that I would be glad to meet with anyone interested at those conferences. Just drop me an email at jeremy (at) metaversum dot com, or just look for me and say hi.

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I’ll be out of the office most of the next two weeks, so expect the blog to be somewhat quiet, although you should see some thoughts from the events I will be attending, which are MetaverseU and the GDC.

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Sorry for the late posting. A few highlights:

• We had an in-world event last Thursday night. You can see some screenshots from it.
• We also sent out a rather large round of Twinity invitations.
• We set up our first customer satisfaction survey for Twinity. Please click here to take the survey!

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