Notes from Metaverse U, Day 1
What does it say that I’m kind of ashamed to be posting these the next day instead of liveblogging them? 
Mike Liebold
- Mike was a good speaker to start the day. He was really excited, had a lot of energy, and his piece was a lot of fun.
- Mike: let’s hack interfaces. Let’s get our coders together and let them experiment with mashing up concepts and products.
- Development is in silos - companies are either working in augmented reality, mirror worlds, lifelogging or virtual worlds, but there is not much cross-discipline work
- And yet, cross-discipline is where the most interesting stuff could happen.
Gene Yoon, VP of Business Affairs, Linden Lab
- He talked about fallacies in assumptions about virtual worlds, like that if you don’t get the weather right, the virtual world will be hurt
- Basically, people assume that real world policies and structures will naturally apply, but they don’t always
- But emotions are basically the same
- Random question from the audience brought this response: Predictive markets are a fascinating tool
Round table: Christian Renaud (Cisco), Byron Reeves (Author of The Media Equation, Founder of Seriosity), Reuben Steiger (Millions of Us)
- Byron:
- If you could increase call-center tenure from 9mos -12mos by adding game-like mechanisms, you have a $100M business
- Reuben:
- MoU has to evaluate all platforms and projects and somehow stay neutral
- This stuff can cross to the enterprise easily because it’s not high-cost
- Challenges: hard to get a hosted solution or one that works behind the firewall in major corporations; and hard to have an avatar that looks like you
- MoU remote employees are less happy than in-office employees
- Christian:
- For business, productivity is the key
- They look for real collaboration tools, whiteboards, powerpoint, secure chat, etc
- But why can’t we do this conference in SL?
- Christian basically works virtually most of the time
Tony Parisi
- Started with the buzzword Metaverse 2.0, which was just a joke about buzz words
- Was one of the founders of vrml
- Now part of media machines (stealth mode)
- There has already been one boom/bust cycle on virtual worlds, with the vrml days 14 years ago
- Walled garden worlds is where we are now; but this is orders of magnitude less than the web
- Democratize access - virtual worlds are a media type, not an application
- Provide filters - open directories, good & familiar UI
- More web is better
- Don’t reinvent the wheel
- VRML the first time around failed mostly due to timing and competing with the web
Vladlen Koltun
- Showed Dryad, a 3d model editor
- Supposedly standard parameters, but how is a tree standard? The design space for the tree has 98 dimensions
- It all works based on density estimations
- The mathematical approach can be used for many other things
- Humans and buildings are next
- Give people tools and you will be surprised what all they can build
- Don’t limit what they can build
Wikitecture, Jon Brouchoud
- Open-source design
- Showed a bunch of stuff in SL, like collaborative building projects
Virtual communities round table:
Raph Koster, Corey Ondrejka, Howard Rheingold
- Raph:
- We don’t manage communities or shape them; we just have a chance to see how the communities work and we can interact with them
- It used to be a perk that admins could snoop on users in virtual worlds
- Gave a history of how the rights of avatars was created
- Avatar was only the visual representation before, but now it’s a larger question of identity
- Presence is the big question now - you may be here but are you present?
- Most broadcast stuff like Twitter takes an arrogant assumptive position that if you broadcast, others will track you and you leave it up to them to stay informed.
- Raph made a good point that most users are not like Silicon Valley people. We build systems for Silicon Valley-types but that is rarely the target group.
- Corey:
- SL launched with 400 users
- If you ask people to build, they probably need to own, and subscriptions don’t align with having to build
- What rights do avatars or users have? corey doesn’t know and doesn’t necessarily see it. But what about the rights of players?
- Raph and Corey discussed how real world regulatory devices pose complications
- You have overlapping identity projections and portfolios of presence (Twitter/Dopplr, etc). some aggragate and re-broadcast.
- Howard:
- Community is hard to define
- Mixed reality is more interesting for howard for the future
- The internet is a big distraction. it’s always there for anyone without training
- How do you train attention?
- When we are immersed in web 2.0 or mmo’s, and we make a lot of assumptions that others are as well.
- The internet has made it easy to find your tribe of interest, either in a synchronous or asynchronous community. people generally don’t leave their communities of interest. the same is true in real life.
