I noticed a great post by Christian over on the Cisco virtual world blog about the rise of expectation in new interfaces. I think in nearly every pitch I do towards the end I remind people that we seem to have tied ourselves to keyboards, supposedly to stop typewriters jamming, mice for navigation of 2d windows, and a few other metaphors for interaction that we are now in a position to break away from. I wrote some of this last year in a mini predictions post
One of the things people always seem to say on entering a virtual world (those who are not metarati or gamers) is the fact it is hard to move around. That may not be the case in reality, but just as people struggled with a mouse and menus and windows 15 years ago, they are doing the same with arrow keys, mouselook and the various other convaluted ways we seek to interact with the computer.
Clearly people’s expectation of display devices will be changed by the multitouch iphone, or simple gesture interaction as we see with the wii controller. All that is well trodden technology in some respects now. It has become commercially robust and is now in all our hands to push things forward.
Another exciting development and one I am sure we will cover in a lot more depth in the near future is Emotiv. There is a great BBC article on it here and you will notice a certain company mentioned alongside it and those of you at GDC may well have seen it. A very soon to be available commercial device to detect brain patterns and allow us to interact with the machines in yet another way.
Combine all these with the augmented reality, projection, headset approaches and we have a very rich set of tools to work with to see how we as humans are able to free ourselves from some of the self imposed shackles we have for interaction. Another article here on Kurzweil’s keynote at GDC hints at an even deeper future
Of course, thats not to throw away any of the old ways, we still use command lines where needed, we still use books and print where needed, but having more and richer things more suited to an indivuals neuro linguistic programming stack, or adding in accessibility for all so we can all interact however and wherever regardless of particular limitations can only be a good thing?

Well you have seen eightbar represent itself all over the place. A meta-guild across multiple virtual worlds, a very large Second Life group, Eve corporation, even a Halo 3 clan. We have tshirts virtual and real, custom ferrari’s on Xbox and even been in a book. However our very own Graham spotted that we were missing what can best be described as a gang sign.
Last night in Winchester as a night out paid for by Daz (thankyou again Daz, who also pays for the hosting of eightbar.co.uk) this sign was thrown for the first time. It’s fairly self explanatory 🙂

At the VW Forum Europe in October Holly Stewart was thrown in front of the camera for a BBC click interview. Holly/Ada Alfa has been in with this since very early on and is very much core to eightbar. Not only that but she is currently the jointly elected guildmaster for our Virtual Universe Community.
It has taken a while but the BBC just ran it on BBC click as part of a virtual worlds piece. The page is here and UK people can watch the video.
A few small things, Its Holly Stewart not Stewarts, and the other IBMer is Paul Ledak not Paul Ladek, but you cant have everything can you.
**Update as Holly just pointed out on twitter the IBM SL machinima used in the piece was Rob Smart’s work too so credit where credit is due too 🙂
The key angle is also about interoperability, as you will notice this has been a bit of subject lately.
Anyway well to done our Holly for a great piece to camera. At last I cant take Click off series link on Sky+
Also greta perfomances from Valerie from ESC, the ubiquitous Justin from RRR and a great advert for Corey’s Multiverse in the middle of it.
Just for the record I think we (eightbar) have appeared on virtual worlds on click 3 times now in some way or another. Now where is the royalty cheque?

As part of a bit of forward thinking I have been doing more experimenting with some levels of visualization. Working on the assumption that all video or all avatar is not the only way forward.
One way and another I ended up using Daz’s very amusing photo from flickr to illustrate the point here.
This is a mix of a static photo (an insane one) blended into an emotive 3d-ish representation, but with a synthesized voice from txt.

Daz crazy talked up from his 2d http://www.flickr.com/photos/shawdm/2… photo they will not read my mind
and speech synth lyrics by kanye west
I did a one of these the other day on my epredator.com blog which was a little more just to see if the technology worked, but also let me see if that would help in expressiveness and enhance a pure video conversation (which I think it does).

Metaverse technology and approaches to how people can interact in a MMO type way are appearing thick and fast. It always opens debates around one world versus many, it starts technical arguments around platforms. However that diversity is both a rich source of ideas and approaches and a restrictivce and confusing situation in social media circles.
Eric “Spin Martin” Rice comments on some of the problems of this in a recent post Just where and why are people choosing to gather in 3d spaces.
Recently Roo and I have been discussing the evolution of all these fragmented spaces. I dont think it is enough that we just tell people what is out there at the moment. It is by no means solved or possible may not be solvable, but it is worth considering some things here. Often interoperability reduces to a pure technical discussion when in fact its a social and organizational problem too. As virtual world companies and communities attempt to own their customers/members in a traditional sense they clearly want you to come to them to experience their wares and their way of doing things. This is a wider web2.0 conversation around who owns me and my stuff.
We are starting to see some words appear in up and coming virtual environments that start to hint at maybe some different metaphors. “Widgetized” is a forced word but if you read the press around RocketOn (props to Xantherus for twittering this company the other day) you start to see that we do not have to stick with the real world analogies that we have today. I am second guessing what Rocketon is doing but having a thing you take around with you from world to world appears to be their approach.
So I made a little picture, not so much a roadmap as a suggestion of where we are today and the ? as to where we need to evolve to in our understanding tomorrow. It is fairly self explanatory I hope.
We have gone from not knowing about anything going on around us, to our friends being online and sharing their thoughts/pictures/videos asynchronously to a set of single worlds where our avatar presence is part of the experience for us and those around us with a nominal amount of the previous steps awareness pulled into that environment too.
The trick is to think about the evolution from that, not to just replace real world metaphors but to extend them.
We already see this adoption as people start thinking about metaverses. They start with the replicas of themselves and of their offices and of their existing assets. They very quickly start to evolve their thinking and challenge why we need to stay on the floor in an office, do powerpoint, market with billboards etc. The non-real world representations start to flow as ideas.
My suggestion here is that the very container of those ideas, the world itself may also need to have this sort of evolutionary thought applied to it.
Single worlds and single avatars and a single live presence may be too restrictive, though is a comfortable metaphor to help people adopt metaverses and to feel some benefit from the.

This idea I think flows across each of the quadrants we see from the metaverse roadmap with the distinction being made with the types of virtual worlds and metaverses. Mirror Worlds, Virtual Worlds, Augmented Reality and Lifelogging.
Any thoughts?

We have just had a note to the emerging tech group here in Hursley inviting us to the 2nd rocket day. (I nearly said annual but it was back in September 2005 that we had the last one).
It reminded me that it was so long ago I had not youtubed the video I cut of the event. Unlike most video I do now which is small mobile snippets I had used a DV camera and then spent hours editing it up and cutting a soundtrack into it. Daz did a great one too with stills and a Kanye West track.
Making video like this is a very rewarding experience. So here is the 5 minutes of madness in a field in Hampshire.

Who knows, if I get to go to this maybe this will be a live webcast on epredator.tv into multiple virtual worlds (batteries and people willing)

Whilst Roo is off at SXSW doing his thing on March 5th/6th I will be at the Web 2.0 and Beyond: Applying Social and Collaborative Tools for Business Problems(this is the upcoming.org link) conference here in the UK explaining all things metaverse and also the use of Web 2.0 to move a corporation into action as we have done with eightbar and our various other creative outlets.
So if you are wondering what this is all about, and there is way more than just hearing me talk about life as epredator, then sign up and come along to this one.
The full page of speaker details are here, we also have Ian McNairn from IBM Software Group talking on day 2.