More of my notes from the Virtual Worlds conference. Again, my mistakes, my opinions, and I can't vouch for the accuracy of these notes.
Jerry Paffendorf, Electric Sheep.
Mark Wallace. 3pointd.com
Reuben Steiger, Millions of Us
John Donham, Areae.com
Corey Bridges, Moderator - The Multiverse Network
Steiger - People say we need a second life competitor. OK, let's say you decide to build one. You go after the content creators. you import 3d mesh models. You work on standard internet ports. You make it 200% better than SL. Then it will take 1.5 years minimum for you to do it. By then SL will have 20 million users. You'd have to fight two big opponents: friends and money. It's like taking on ebay and aim at once.
donham. That's like saying how can WOW beat everquest? Just make a different game.
Steiger: A year ago the number of registered users in SL was just over 200K. Now it's over 5 million. Competition is a good thing but we may be looking at a different thing here.
Bridges: I doubt it.
Audience: rather than debate what is, let's think about what might happen. We mapped the genome - take it apart. Basically what virtual worlds are allowing us to do it take socieites apart and put them back together. what are the unintented consequences good and bad?
Paffendorf. Google earth is innocuous now. It will be built up with avatars and assets. That information will become integrated with how we nagivate the world and move aournd. In the futue, vws will allow you to externalize your imagination good and bad. The real world ones.. the best and worst of imagination.
Wallace. how are information spaces governed? Lots of questions. how do we do in the space that's already online? taxing ecommerce, whether gambling is legal, digital rights mangement issues etc. As these kinds of media drive themselves into our lives we depend on techonlogy to maintain a lifestyle we've grown accustomed to.
Steiger - a lot of our work takes place in SL with a large distributed workforce, where language ceases to be an obstruction, other things that hinder effective outsourcing, maybe we'll ultimately have hypereffective teams where geography doesn't matter.
Bridges - MMPOGs are one version of virtual worlds, the media complains that since they're at home their social skills are turning to much. On the contrary the team-oriented conversation, is good for people who don't get real-world conflict resolution and socialization, they become more efficient at communicating. A benefit.
Audience (Entropia) - what about Snow Crash and Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)? This is our one panel about the future.
Wallace: 10 years? How closely are the different little corners of the metaverse linked together? This isn't really useful until all the palces we can go in the real world and the virtual world are connected in some way. I should be able to take my identity from world to world. It would be nice to be able to take my assets different places. An interconnected model that resembles the web. We're not anywhere near it but it's important to develop if we're really gonna take advantage of what this space holds.
Reuben Steiger: I met Neal Stephenson once, and he was not really that excited about the idea of us building the universe in real life. Who knows if people decide to get tired of avatars and turn off their computers?
Dorham - the amt. of content is overwhelming. It will balloon. You will naturally start participating every say, you won't realize the turning point from when you stopped interacting wiht the web and wth a 3d world.
Audience: as a teacher, I'm disappointed you're not talking about education here... we're giving away the scripts about how to moderate chats, we have huge numbers on our sims. You're gonna have the attention of every child and parent. What role does business play to invest in their learning even when it's not putting money in the pockets of the shareholders?
Wallace: this type of business is not used to investing in education. You should be telling us. Where is the education panel in this room? We can't tell you the answer to your question.
Steiger - the work happening in educational environments is inspiring. But if you look at the web you can count the successful distance learning companies on one hand.
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Bridges - come talk after this, we'll get you on a panel next time. We have people building worlds on our tech to do socioeconomic modeling. It's more than just distance learning. you can get far more deeply motivating.
Audience - we want this improvement, but the US is at the bottom. The goverment is spending millions of dollars but they can't fix it. My son is autistic, he can't learn in school, but he's modified an xbox and engages two hundred people with online games.
Donham - if your child has fun they are more likely to learn. Do games teach? We know they do, the general public may not agree. Maybe we should be adopting new teaching methods. then vws and games will rise to the top of the most effective teaching methods that exist.
Steiger. SL has an incredibly vibrant educator community. hundreds of them for every 1 business. Sadly, there's a systemic thing about the way we fund education in america.
Bridges - We're free for educational use.
Paffendorf. Educators are much more likely to collaborate. They share.
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