Over at Wonderland is a great write up of Philip Rosedale’s talk at Picnic 06 a cross media event. Of note are the statistics. These are constantly getting bigger when referring to Second Life.
In a meeting I had this week the statistic was quoted that the Second Life virtual turf is the size of Boston. In this regionally adjusted pitch its the size of Amsterdam 🙂
I particlarly like the quote “We hear a lot of anecdotes about people improving their real lives after having done it first in Second Life.” As someone whose entire job has changed to focus on this very real emerging technology and let me make a lot of new friends and contacts with some very inspirational people inside and outside of the company I work for, I would say i am one of those anecdotes!

Well my international jet setting has taken me form San Jose including popping down to Fishermans Wharf in San Fran, back over the US to Danbury for some great meetings with the IBM Innovate Quick team that Roo and I are part of now as Metaverse Evangelists.
We are off to Somers and Southbury as Roo has just arrived in the US too.
However, today being a Sunday, I took a GPS enabled trip to NY city in my hire car.
I have not been to New York before so I was not sure what to expect parking wise. The GPS did its thing, I aimed at the Empire State Building as I noticed there were a lot of parking garages around.
I passed a convention centre on the way to west 34st. Lo and behold there was “Wired Nextfest” on.
Well, much as I wanted to see the sights, events like this need to be visited. So I did.
It was relevant as well as Second Life appears in Wired in a massive spread this month, and I had been reading Wired at Washington where I was delyed for 5 hours on my way to NY.
Anyway, there were some really awesome things to see there. I dashed around but saw lots of amazing robots includingan Einstein one that walks very spookily and a very human animatronic. A door that opens to be the right size to fit the person going through, an art installation of 50+ nabztag rabbits sponsored by Atari. A VR ball like a giant hamster wheel for people to interact with a simulated world, the virgin space plane, robot football, loads of display that reacted to people in the space, brain ball in action (using brain waves to move a digital ball in a contest of wills), lots of bio solutions fuel, building light. Clever displays, interesting gestrure based military devices, scanning equipment, a bionic suit the works in fact.
I did go to Times Square and up the Rockafeller building so I did not just geek out.
There are some mini videos of things from my little pentax. Very rough and one is not rotated properly.
Anyway the next few days are full on metaverse days and nights including meeting up with some very cool SL people over in New York, more on that later.
It is odd that the all things metaverse help us to not travel, but somehow I am now in jet lag hell becuase of pushing these technolgies so much. Its odd how things work out!

Jeff Barr in his blog has written up what he has been doing to get a snapshot of a webpage on a prim. He mentions the ubrowser, and the fact that it has been tried but is as yet not in production to put full web functionality as a texture on any object in Second Life.
Many of us (us being people interested in such things) are chomping at the bit, as we did with the http requests, to be able to have this sort of function. It makes the integration to web1.0 and web2.0 complete. People will be able to build active bookmark walls with existing content and services as one way to not require a complete re build of content, whilst they move to a more Services Orientated Architecture. A spectrum of options for integration makes this sort of platform even more attractive.
I really like the way that many of us in Second Life are all trying to do similar things, but some people get there first. This is a prime example as I know I had considered ways of doing this. Its great that a wide team of people are all trying to both be productive and push things forward, with a hint of competition.
As usual its where you read it first that changes your perception of who did it first (before anyone hassles me by saying they have already done it).
Jeff has turned his snapshot text on a prim through the media parcel (not unlike the flickr integration on hackdiary) but is doing some rendition of images with an out of world proxy service.
I popped over to see it, and bumped into Jeffronius Batra, and he pointed me to the demo area.
I asked if it was OK to take some snapshots and to do a trackback. I also asked myself permission to reproduce eightbar as a graphic on a prim via the service 🙂

We have been putting on quite a show the last few days. We have been doing press, writer and analysts interviews on why we regard things like Second Life and general metaverse technology as so important.
To underline this importance we had Dr Irving Wladawsky-Berger our vice president of technology strategy and innovation at IBM over here in UK from the US. He is a well known figure inside and outside of IBM becuase of his very open attitude to ideas and his smart way of understanding so many areas that IBM works in. He freely admitted that he was put on the track of considering anything related to games technology a few years ago by Hursley’s Chris Sharp.
We put on a show for everyone around having a truly global meeting in Second Life as a backdrop to all our conversations. We had people from India, UK, US, Canada and even Australia, so some people were well into timezone hell.
We illustrated in the actions of the group how we had all taken to the excellant multi gadget chairs by Timeless Prototype. As this lets us indicate we are indeed having a meeting despite the fact that you really dont need to sit down in a virtual world.
We also showed Hugo’s Amazon interface, and Yossarian’s translator.
To show how we energize brainstorms we used a favourite of Idz Ni’s (and now most of eightbar) of the Abramelin Wolfe canon that lets us fire ourselves about the island. This is the equivalent of taking a 3 min break for chocolate in RL.
We also showed onbaording new employees, and the real educational benefits of this environment.
Roo had to dash over to Zurich but popped in to say hi and take some photos.

Anyway, it was great for us to all talk and explain what we have all been up to to a new audience.
Irving also did some radio and tv interviews, with the tv interview having our backup machinima playing in the background.
All the various write ups and programmes will start to appear. I will post them here as we get told about them or bump into them.
The first one is here by Martin Banks on The Register
So now that is all done I can prep for my trip to Almaden in California next week. I should be there weds thru Friday, then Roo and I have meetings in New York the following week. I thought the metaverse meant less travel 🙂
** Minor update to point to the new blog article on Irving Wladawsky-Berger’s site and trackback

I have been away on Holiday the past week. Deep in West Wales, with no grid to speak of. So I missed the 12th September IBM Virtual Community Kick Off and 3D Jam.
This event has been in the works for some time. It is combined with the more official IBM innovation Jam where we gather with lots of people around the company and outside to discuss new ideas and directions.
Due to an increasing number of us in the eightbar group in Second Life, and the growing number of IBMer related islands we diced to have a big kick off and see how we could run an event to get lots more people into the metaverse.
One of the great things about SL is that some really interesting communities form. One of these communities, that I came to know about through Timeless Prototype, is the Alliance Navy.
This group has formed themselves to be an anti-griefing group. i.e. they are white hats. even more i.e. they are people who try to stop others from messing up our worlds and events.
Judge Hocho from eightbar is also a member of the AN. When we were planning this big Virtual Universe Community kickoff he came up with the great idea to invite the AN to come and help.
The AN put in a great deal of time and effort to produce a show of force on the currently mostly empty IQ island next door to Hursley.
The presence of AN, there as both a show of skill and knowledge of how to use SL and an anti griefing service really made a huge impact to lots of my collegues.
It makes a great difference to be able to see people protecting your property. Normally hacking of any sort if under the covers, as is anti-hacking.
The Alliance Navy have a large number of ships and vehicles, and a military style approach. They tend to police some of the sandbox areas, where people go to experiment. Its another style of mentoring to persuade those people who would rather take the grid down, to not behave in that way.
I have not asked too many questions of Judge or Timeless about the AN. I prefer to just know that they know all about it. Some of the power is the mystique after all.
Anyway we owe a great big thankyou to the AN members who both put time in helping us and who directed their efforts to our 3d Jam rather than policing their normal routes.
Also a big thankyou to all my fellow eightbar members who ran a great event. I think it safe to say we have arrived.
Judge took some cool snaps on snapzilla.

We also have a logo, the Virtual Universe Community is wider than eightbar and wider than just the metaverse. So look out for this in the future. A nice design by Tood Keen.

Over at out to pasture Giff from the Electric sheep has written about the Text 100 Second Life island. Text 100 are a very large PR firm. This is a case of wheels within wheels as the article is about a piece of machinima that Text100 have done to show businesses the value of Second Life. Ironically the eightbar team are busy creating our version of one of those.
Also I was contacted a few weeks ago, by a representative of Text 100 as IBM is one of their clients. You may see the IBM logo on their Second Life build in various places in ads and films.
They were asking me what the point of Second Life was, and to be able to give them why I and more recently ‘we’ were interested and active in Virtual Worlds, so that we could do a press interview. It is good to see these sorts of firms representing themselves in this space too.
Once again the direction and trend mirrors that of the original web, though moves much quicker, as certain sectors discover what they can do in Second Life.
The build, which has a very ESC distinctive feel is unusual in that it is floating islands and strange angles. So it does break the mould a little.

I am not sure why all our favourites are on the wall, but no eightbar. Oh well never mind.

Over at 3dpoint there is a very good article (as per usual) on the Virtual Worlds session at Austin. These examinations of where we currently are, what the key players in the new industry are thinking and saying are important words at a pivotal time. Also they gel with my thinking on the subject. I first put up MMORPG on a post-it note brain storm session back 2000. I had no idea we would be where we are today on 2006! I certainly was not expecting that my job title would have become “metaverse evangelist” and that I would be working in this medium full time.
As a company we have a number of key things going on both internally an externally. I wont let the virtual cat out of the virtual bag just yet though as I am just about to go on holiday for a week, and shock, horror, I am likely to be totally off the grid. So far in the past 6 months it seems something new, interesting and pivotal has happened almost every day. I hope, as the article says, I can keep up with the rapid changes.

Jeff Barr has had a nice blog report written up over at the click heard around the world
He also mentions that he drove the event at the NMC campus, in his virtual Toyota Scion as created by millions of us
I have to admit, being in the UK I have no idea what a Scion is.
It is of interest though as I cut my web teeth back in 1997-2000 on the Vauxhall website, where we did lots of interesting firsts as IBM, including trying to do what Second Life is doing with a small start up from iceland called Smartvr. Just a few years too early. I also remember at Hursley a Ford Galaxy demo with an old style VR helmet.
Aagin this goes to show that the ideas have been around but now the technology is maturing to teh point that Jeff can drive an accurate model of his car to an event and also pitch his companies web services to an audience he can see.

Christian Westbrook of the Electric Sheep Company has written about a text to speech application that he created. He cites the fact he had missed blogging about his babel fish translator and that Yossarian Seattle had got all the press for his translator HUD 🙂
We had been talking about voice to text but we have been beaten to it in this case.
It will certainly benefit from the soon to come change for http requests per object, assuming thats how it works.
Its well worth a l$25 rating for building skill.