I am just telling my roadie off because I specifically asked for the blue M&M’s to be removed, but I caught mark wallace’s twitter and subsequent post on the future of the metaverse.
I had a chart I made about 6 years ago with some linkages of technologies and concepts, a sort of mind map for the future. On it I had MMORPG obviously, but I also had 3d printing and Augmented Reality (and a few other things).
The hunt for immersion and escapism is certainly one track that will continue, but the need to add to the world that we already have and connect people and information feels like an important road to take too.
As we have all learned, we talk about virtual worlds, but the people are very real.
We are also still constrained by Qwerty keyboards designed to stop old typewriters jamming, cursor buttons to enable us to move around spreadsheet cells and a mouse to let us resize 2d windows. The commercial games controllers, the wiimote and the ps3 sixaxis are showing that there are other ways to engage with content, we need to re explore the ways to render that content. 3D printers are one very solid way, and real headsup displays and personal awareness projections are another. Many people will look back at the ealry explorations of Virtual Reality and say “but that did not work all those bulky head trackers and data gloves”, but that is no reason to not push forward now that much of the technology has got very much easier and commercial. We also now have killer apps for 3d that are not killing apps such as most of the games have been.
I remember sitting in my room at college, modelling a Lotus Esprit on my Amiga. Creating a flypast movie, a bit of lighting etc. It was an interesting technical and creative challenge, but in some respects there was no point. I could not easily share it. Now we can share anything with almost anyone at any time. There are reasons to share, entertaining, informing and impressing.
So the world has moved on, so we can now bring back all those things tried before and see if they work now, and also invent some new ways of engaging. Its going to be a very interesting year methinks.

I am back safe and sound from Virtual Worlds 2007. The main thing I can say is how fantastic (personally) the entire conference was. One way and another I missed almost all the sessions but 3pointd has them very well covered, start here and work forward.
I was very proud to have not only a IBM stand, but Colin’s key note and Paul Ledak of IBM on one of the panels and lots of my IBM collegues in attendance.
I keep typing IBM because the mere fact IBM was there was the subject of many a conversation. I saw practically no sessions but at the stand lots of people either wanted to say “thankyou” for supporting and adding to the industry or ask ‘why IBM?’. The coolest ones were “we did not know IBM had people like you” where you was the entire IBM team there.
I went to meet many of the famous avatars and business leaders then realized I was one of them and people wanted to meet me 🙂 However as Mark Wallace from 3pointd pointed out “I made this guy” so humble time :-).
I am not going to get into the politics of Second Life being mentioned too much or the constant questions of ROI, but some things got aired and I had hours and hours of discussion.
For me personally this was the most vibrant and exciting conference I have been too. A large percentage of us there were there out of passion. Many of us had never met in the flesh, and we all recognized one another and just got on with communicating.
I did a lot of press including an interview for a ‘youth’ section where the guys had previously covered an elephant coming into town for the circus. I have to say that that is not usual territory!
What important points got aired?
1. Its about people. Even Philip Rosedale/Linden said this in his opening speech. When he started SL he did not start it with that in mind, but now we have all learned thats the important part
2. Don’t focus on just marketing the real in the virtual, think new products. Sibley from(as in Founders and CEO of) Electric sheep put this so well.
3. “Millions is spent on a feature film when only 400 people watch it together in a theatre” Another gem from Sibley. The worry about concurrency in a single space.
4. We need things to be made “fit for business”, my collegue Peter Finn just said of all the work in Second Life “It’s great business but it closes on a wednesday”
5. Second Life is not the only platform to consider. Its there its public, its easy. Take a look at ProtonMedia there have been building for 10 years look like a great virtual world with desktop integration and a web services/web2.0 design ethic. Let alone Forterra, Multiverse, There.com, kaneva et al.
The major media companies are also moving into the space. Games that are not games, films that are not films, Sony Home, MTV Virtual Laguna beach and pimp my ride to come. How to get people to choose to feel involved, and ways to keep them interested. Its got to beat a poster on a wall or a banner ad.

So, in 1 year exactly eightbar in Second Life moved from skunkworks to legit. I dont know where that will take us, but it is veyr exciting still. We can argue standards, platforms, motivations etc. However lots of people have a good inkling as to why the ‘metaverse’ is coming, and maybe some insight into why now. As Eric Rice said on his panel (I saw some of that on the screen) the next thing is to go and just implement, but he did have this gadget (Was still uploading when I posted)

Here he is rezzing in real life with said gadget.

Remember this stand in the future, early days but we woz there.

Just for comparison here is the Linden Lab stand

My view of the conference
Mark Wallace

Jerry Paffendorf

The conference was also powered by twitter though the phone signal was a little weak down in our room(s).

Either way, I think we all strengthened some bonds, there was a great deal of “Smeeting” going on, that weird molecular real life connection when you have only met in SL. Yes the conference should have been out in a virtual world or two, but its early days yet, and lets face it if it was in SL then there would have been complaints from some of the other sponsors.

So hi to everyone I got to talk too, looking forward to where this all goes next.

Can anyone imagine what this conference will be in 5 years time?

A fair few of the IBM emerging business unit for digital convergence and 3d internet are going to be at Virtual Worlds 2007 as of tomorrow.
I am also here now and we had a great get together meeting today.
So tomorrow will be some time on the IBM stand meeting and greeting, some press, some meeting all the people who blog and meetup in all the various virtual worlds. I may even get to some of the sessions.
I just hope I dont get Geek Sleeped by 3pointd

Its also my Rezday on the second day of the conference. Nice of them to lay that on 🙂

Our collegue WadaTripp has created a very good mashup of presentation and machinima entitled Virtual Worlds and the Future of Learning.
Its 10 minutes long and shows some perspectives and interesting concepts that are happening inside places like Second Life.
Well worth a look as a serious(ish) exploration of metaverse concepts.

His blog is over here

I am a lot later with the post that I had wanted to be, but it still is well worth writing about as it is gaining some traction, of course 3pointd has already covered it. and has some interesting extra services to check out in this post
Babbage Linden has produced a Slateit or Hateit heads up display to enable you as an avatar in Second Life to just look at something and then rate it.
I particulalry like the way this is done as a HUD it detects objects in you camera field of view, works out where they are relative to you and then overlays a rating number for that object for your HUD.
So thats a proper targeting HUD. If you move it recalculates and then re-overlays.
By clicking on the number in your HUD over the object you are given a set of tags to choose from then you hit the slateit or hateit button in the dialogue and the rating for that object zips off to slateit.org and will then be reflected in your HUD and anyone else that is passing.
I used it last night to rate Gingers Timeframe over on IBM 1 (Babbage had told me off for practicing rating things on our private islands)
You can go and get a HUD from Babbages kitchen, then pop on over to IBM 1 and rate Gingers timeframe if you like.

Picture from snapzilla

As you know we here at eightbar are big fans of both clever things in Second Life, but also any interaction with the outside world and other services.

Ginger Mandelbrot, a Hursley master inventor of some note has created something that I found fascinating both in Second Life and with real life potential.
He has built a ticking, rotating slat machine in Second Life to prototype an amazing cool idea.
The “timeframe”, currently previewing on Hursley private island ticks over the seconds using a collection of black and white slats, not unlike an old fashioned notice board. It represents, each second, a unique point in time by the status of the slats. This is also a date not just a time, and that is important as you will see.
In this video you can see CJ, Ginger and I waiting for a significant slat rotation.

Here is a still of a point in time on the timeframe from snapzilla

I asked Ginger to explain his thoughts on this, and this is where it gets really clever the second quote for the non unix geeks.

“The TimeFrame displays good-old geeky Unix time, which started on 1-Jan-1970, and will count the seconds until a fateful day in Jan 2038 when it rolls over the 31st digit and either goes very negative, or back to zero again, depending on how your applications decide to handle it. There will be (or was, depending on when you read this) a fairly momentous moment on 20th March this year at 15:38 GMT, when the 26th digit rolls over. The 27th digit won’t roll over until Apr 2008. ”

“it’s a piece of “conceptual art” that has a genuine purpose (unusual!). I’ve been thinking about it for a while, as something to build in FL, but it would be quite hard to build and expensive, so I thought I’d prototype it in SL so I could see if it’s really as cool as I imagine it’s going to be! It’s basically a clock, inspired by those indicator boards they sometimes have at train stations, with the slats that flip over with that lovely clacking sound. It’s reallly hypnotic to watch, but also has a real purpose: do you know when Google Earth did the last fly-by of your house? No, of course not. But if you have a TimeFrame in your garden, then next time you get snapped by a satellite or a fly-over, you’ll have a lovely bar-coded timestamp right there on the photo!”

So did you get that, you put one of these in your real life garden, and you get a unique timestamp of anything that takes a photo. Of course it works in SL too. I am going to run one as a HUD. A unique barcode timestamp on any picture.

When you think about this, which I have now, you have to say wow!

***Update
A timeframe has been placed on IBM 1 on Hughes Marina outside the Virtual Universe Community clubhouse

Whilst doing a long 2 hour customer demo I happened to be flying around the IBM islands. You may think that I must know everything that is going on but the joy of discovery still pervades the metaverse with so much happening.

I noticed Timeless “multigadget” Prototype’s excellent London Eye build on IBM 3. Its well worth a look. I had hooked Timeless up with Boris Frampton and the greater IBM guys, but had not yet seen the eye arrive anywhere.

I saw it originally as a part of the Walk for Life charity event last year.

Take a look when you get a chance its very good secondlife://IBM+3/132/193/139/

Picture from Snapzilla
Whilst on Timeless have a look at Adam’s article over at Reuters about the real life multigadget that someone has created.

I should have blogged about this earlier the official red nose day site has a link to some real red nose places for comic relief in Second Life
We should have all done this as a UK based charity with a world impact.
So its not too late come get a tshirt

* Oli Itoku’s House (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Mindulle/12/197/137)
* Corro Moseley @ Daden Limited(http://slurl.com/secondlife/nari/15/240/125)
* Valentino’s Design Studios (http://slurl.com/secondlife/achado/231/165/88)

One way and another epredator in Kaneva managed to get on the early beta so I have been wandering around the new virtual environment. Or as has been pointed out myspace with 3d.
I am sure that this will get a lot of press and be very popular, but as 3pointd points out, it is another place you have to upload content to and seems less geared to the mashup culture that we have all become used to.
However, that did not stop me. Last night I adorned my mini apartment with a picture of me in Second Life.

I also managed to set up eightbar as a private group and get us a conference room.
What it really lacks for me personally though is the creative freedom that we have in Second Life. The ability to change anything, build anything, express anything is lost at the moment in something like Kaneva. or There.com
I am sure that will change as more worlds emerge, but it really is a key part. Its the difference between a website and wiki. It would appear to also be like PS3 Home in that regard.
This is not wrong, companies want to own the brand experience, and provide support and control. However in this self organizing wave we have now I am not sure it is enough? Just my virtual tuppeny.

I have had lots of conversations recently about where things are, where they are hosted what platform they are on. This applies not just to metaverse conversations but photos, films and mobile devices.
Whilst there is clearly a current technical need for things to exist somewhere, either as part of a service or just personal storage the concepts of grid computing and peer to peer networks are likely to start to help us not consider where and what version, but just what do we have. This applies in a business and creative context.
Take this image for instance from snapzilla (which I read is about to have a major upgrade too)
Now, does it matter the path we took to get this photo? It happens to be a real life photo of Stae Youngs car on a texture in Second Life with epredator potato standing in front of it and the snapshot mailed through to snapzilla.
The services are all there to choose the way to make this composite image, and it also represents a point in time event in a metaverse.
However, I could have used photoshop to composite up the photo. I could have used green screen and a video to matte the two together the list goes on.
The point is the image is there, has some provenance and story behind it as part of a conversation Stae Young and I were having on a private Second Life island. Its now part of this blog entry so is being built upon.
If we can move data and creations around like this, in an easy way then we are able to combine things, as with mashups, to create things we need wherever or whenever we need them.
Does it matter is this is Second Life with a picture in it?, or some metaverse as a plugin in a browser? No not really. It matters that it was quick, simple and the “place” we both happened to be at the same time to allow us to have and document this conversation and collaboratively produce this picture.