Again, my notes, my mistakes, my opinions. from the Virtual Worlds Conference in NYC.
Sibley =It's time to focus on bringing in the mass audiences. Mass audiences want entertainment, not necessarily just to build stuff. That's the engine, how can we participate? It's entertainment that will drive them in in masses.
There is no commercially available virtual world today that has learned the important lessons from Web 2.0. How important it is to link to other people, express yourself through profiles, collect your favorites. And that's really important for this industry to succeed. And we need to extend to the mobile interface as well, for that reason I've asked an expert in this space to contribute.
(IWH didn't catch this mobile expert's name)
New guy: Mobile IS your avatar in real life
Mobile enables deeper social avatars (you're online even when you're offline).
Social functions and games that freely pass from one world to another. The WII is an excellent example. We are carrying devices that could be used in a completely different way, controlling your avatar. Use the phone to control your avatar in world.
Mobile is a two-way remote control.
Mobile bridges the RL/VL divide lets you operate in both simultaneously. Real life plus virtual life equals integrated life? for this - we need user experience research. It's everything. We've hired virtual enthnograpehrs, we are doing avatar focus groups.
GUI concepts - small divices are limited from a performance point of view, everyone is just copying stuff from PC to mobile. We need to get more creative.
Keep the GUI simple.
To monetize, you must cross the chasm and reach the mass market. Provide services instead of features.
Audience: when does this all move to TV?
Sibley - it must be user-friendly, so the user can talk to people in the virtual world. we need an input communication mechanism and that is what is missing with the TV (broadcast) platform. The cable industry should be involved as well.
Audience - We're under no illusion whether this is going away if your business is television. This Christmas, 10% fewer children watched TV than the year before. We know what is going on. We're scripting full interactions in the virtual space run by characters, rehearsed and captured in machinima. We call it, as others do, "the tv show you can live inside".
But the digital domain has not really ever managed to engage the audience emotionally the way TV does. We developed panning and closeups and montage, people can jump, we can adrenalize them. We can make them drink Pepsi, thank god. We can't make them fall in love yet. We feel very excited about this. the standard train of thought here is linear media needs to get on board with interactive media. But you need to learn how to make people cry.
Sibley : people have fallen in love through virtual worlds. On the web, social networking is just connecting to other people, you use other ways to become emotionally attached. In the virtual world, it's actually socializing, not just social networking.
Audience: We're in danger of asking people to show up and watch endless ads. Let's be careful.
Audience: the user experience goes beyond a smooth transition to the orientation island. Everyone in this room is responsible for creating a usable experience. We like to blame the platform. Oh, Second Life doesn't do this or that. But we need developers to create usable sites within the limitations of the current technology. Many of SL's usability problems have nothing to do with the platform. You are the ones who can decide to care about usability
Sibley. We have before us perhaps the greatest usability challenge we've ever had. We have event planners. What is usability? The wayfinding is conceptually complex. There's been very little that's done excellently. Please give us feedback with questions that have come up at this conference.
We want to find a lot of people who do experiments. I'd love to have those ideas.
Audience: Big Brother was a train wreck in Second Life. Do you have advice on how to think about the approach for TV going into a virtual world? What works in real life does not always work in a virtual world.
Sibley - this was one of the first attempts at a tv show in second life, I don't want to criticize a different provider. We'll have more train wrecks to come. Kudos to them for trying.
Audience - how can you view the content without even going in world?
Sibley: we've tryed essentially webcams, we've made machinima shown to millions of people on TV live and recorded. But we need great things going on in the virtual world first. Virtual worlds are an amazing creative platform. Maybe someone here will come up with the idea and go for it. You could have a great virtual world reality show. So it didn't work with Big Brother.
I'd like to see a far smoother graduation from 2D to 3D, but that has not been thoroughly explored.
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