Christian Renaud, Cisco’s metaverse evangelist has just announced today is his last day at Cisco. He explains quite clearly in his post that its not a bitter move. The thing he is off to do is a startup of an unspecified nature, so we look forward to seeing what that is, and everyone at eightbar wishes him good luck.
As the CEO of Cisco really gets the whole metaverse drive we know that it does not mean the end of Cisco’s drive into this. So its still IBM and Cisco pushing the envelope.
So another change, another indication as with my previous post on the growth of this industry.
Author Archives: epredator
Virtual Universe Community – Guildmaster(s) visit Wimbledon SL
Last night the VUC meeting popped into Wimbledon and annouce that Robi is the new guildmaster vote winner. It was brilliant to suddenly have a whole load of people, the acitivists in all this, pop in to say hi. Such a rush I cant really explain how good it made me feel. Thanks all.
Metaverse-tv and SL5B opening ceremony
Over at the IBM 7 Wimbledon build we just spent a little while chatting with Recka Wuyts of http://www.metaverse-tv.com/. I had not been able to get along to SL5B at the start, mainly because of needing to be in Wimbledon all the time to be able to talk to people like Recka and our other visitors about IBM and Wimbledon
By way of a thankyou for popping by and staying and taking the tour, and becuase I am interested in the whole dynamic of this years 2 week 5th birthday of Second Life and because the event coincides with Wimbledon and because its good to here Phillip talk and because….. enough already, here is the metaverse-tv video from blip
Wimbledon roof garden – Pimms or Prims
Judge has built a roof garden based on the real life media centre roof garden. When Tara5 Oh came to visit we had a misunderstanding on the bottle of Pimms (a Wimbledon tradition of sorts) and the word prim (somewhat popular in Second Life)
I cut a video of both the real and the virtual to illustrate the interpretation
Cisco CEO John Chambers on future of virtual worlds
Tish over at Ugotrade has just posted some transcripts from the an event in Second Life yesterday. The Cisco CEO John Chambers appeared and answered some questions. Now I know I am biased, but it is good to hear many of the same themes and reasoning I/We use when evangelizing coming from someone else, and in particular a CEO of major company like Cisco.
Read the full article on ugotrade
“John Chambers: …..very often if there is one thing that I have learned in my thirty years in high tech is sometimes concepts are a little bit too early but when they do take off they take off with tremendous speed and efficiency.
This where I think it is important especially for the business communities and the entertainment industries to understand what is possible because when the market does move it usually moves at speeds faster then anyone anticipated. ”
“I think what is exciting to here is that where last year we were talking about that in theory and this year we are beginning to see people grab this is going to happen. We may disagree on the time frame but it is not longer a question any more of if, it is now a question of when. ”
Real Life Wimbledon still Rezzing
Wimbledon is building a new court number 2. I got to go and have a look. The whole place is currently plain concrete and also has some terracotta warrior style statues of the players. All in all it looks like a Second Life render of a place that has not had any textures applied yet. (It was Ricky that pointed this out first yesterday to me and so I had to go and see, and he is right I think)
The avatars of the players ar in the video below, along with a nice particle effect (they were watering the real grass with real water and getting a real rainbow)
Replacement video as the other one was incorrectly identified as copyright infringement. Still doing the paperwork to clear my good name
Wimbledon goes Live
The gates are open at the venue, the website is starting to provide all the fantastic extras. There is a more official twitter feed this year, with an author ready to share some things, likewise a facebook group for those of you who like that too. We also have the soft launch of the IBM 7 Wimbledon build in Second Life. One of the coolest things this year is Judge Hocho’s build of the roof garden. This area is a press/media/IBM only area on top of the broadcast centre. Judge has built a retreat in Second Life representing this. Everyone here who has seen it on screen have appreciated it. Nice one Judge.
Some of the faces behind eightbar
There are some notable absences from this video that quickly zooms around some of the people behind eightbar and its extended family. They are by no means all virtual world people, but there is a healthy coverage and interest along with all things web2.0
Just a shout out to the band really as we were saying goodbye to Alice (well sort of goodbye as she is back on Extreme Blue as a student contributor on monday)
If you click through to youtube you will get something annotated using the new youtube annotation feature.
I dont want to get too gushy, but you guys rock 🙂 (as do those who could not be in the pub that night)
Applying Virtual Worlds and MMO’s conference coming up July 10th London
Before the Wimbledon frantic time hits I thought it worth mentioning a conference comin up just after Wimbledon finishes. I will be on a panel at the applying virtual worlds and MMO’s conference, talking about interoperability, service orientated architecture(SOA) approaches and where I think things are going in general. The more full invite from Martine Parry is below. Hopefully see some of you there.
Apply Virtual Worlds & MMOs is a 1-day conference within the Visual Web Convention, discussing and debating the future for the visual web and virtual worlds – across platforms, functionality, content and business model. The leading MMO games developers together with leading developers in the virtual world space come together to identify the future opportunities and direction resulting in MMO and virtual world convergence over the next 6-12 months.
Conference speakers at the coal-face and architects of the new Web platform and tools – affecting the way consumers, developers and organisations play and do business – include:
· Bruce Joy – CEO of virtual worlds platform developer VastPark
· Thomas Bidaux – Development VP virtual world games developer Avaloop
· David Solari – VP Online games publisher Codemasters
· Thor Gunnarsson – VP CCP Games (Eve Online)
· Bernard Horan – Senior Engineer Sun Microsystems (the Wonderland platform)
· Rob Davis – CEO Solaris Media a leading developer of casual virtual world games for broadcasters (e.g. UKTV, BBC)
· Justin Bovington – CEO Rivers Run Red a leading in-world brands and media communications agency
· Ian Hughes – Metaverse Evangelist IBM
More at www.viswebconvention.com/pages/schedule.htm
10% discount to all who book online before end of this week. Unlock code is TEN
Wimbledon 08 in Second Life, the build progresses
With Wimbledon looming large and already qualifying starting this week you may think we are leaving it a little late to complete the build and presence in Second Life. In many ways you would be right. However, we are all giving it some time, knowing full well that we will also build during the event. It has been interesting to see what has happened to some of our scripts, in particular the tennis ball rendering with all the various updates. The base scripts done by Pipe Hesse are still htere, were still active, but seemed to have been damaged a little by the many upgrades that have occured. We are still unsure about representing the ball flow again this year, for various reasons as I alluded to in the previous post around web page on a prim. For me the complications and social interactions that can happen around collaborative web browsing this year are the key part.
In jointly building this with Andy Remblai, Judge Hocho and Laronzo Fitzgerald we have given ourselves a platform to try some things. I am accutely aware that it will be my stage for 2 weeks too and that being live in world for the event will be as big a challenge as last year, if not more so. Of course if nobody comes to visit next week that too will be a challenge, but I hope that will not be the case. Avatar fingers are crossed as we are 5 days from live (though live is a time for continuous development not a traditional hard stop, this is a virtual world and this a dynamic build environment after all.
