Notes from Metaverse Roadmap Meeting, Feb 15, 2008
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!
February 17th, 2008 at 6:03 am
I have said in past posts direct input is to 3D environments what the mouse is to flat ones. Which is basically the point of Mitch Kapor in this article - http://www.news.com/8301-13772_3-9873205-52.html?tag=tb — We are using surface devices with Edusim now of course … but as other more natural forms of input emerge I can see this having an impact in immersive education as well.
Cheers,
Rich
http://edusim3d.com
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February 17th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
[...] Metaversum’s blog notes [...]
February 18th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
[quote]# Kids worlds are the low hanging fruit now
# Entertainment is the long term driver
# Most major developments will take time, like years
[quote]
I think that’s too pessimistic, and not an accurate picture of the virtual worlds market. If interoperability standards take the right form (and I’m trying to help the Virtual World Interoperability Forum to do just that), then we can see interoperable virtual worlds next year, rather than ten years from now.
For more information: http://www.interopworld.com/members/node/31
February 18th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
@ Jon, you may be right, but I do have to somewhat agree with e.g. Corey at MultiVerse. The efforts are not really so inclusive and they are being driven by a small segment of the industry. The assumption seems to be that a few bigger players can define the standards that everyone else will have to adopt.