Courtesy of Linden Lab, I am attending the Virtual Worlds conference in NYC. Congratulations to the talented Tim Williams for handling an oversold crowd with grace under pressure. My comments on my blog do not reflect the opinion of Linden Lab.
Another disclaimer: I am taking notes, not quoting. Much of the notes are my interpretation of what I heard said, and I could be wrong. Please do not interpret any of my notes as quotes unless they are in quotes.
Here are some notes on the opening address by the Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale. As he's my employer, I may be biased, but I found him appropriately humble about his role and awed by the potential of virtual worlds. I don't think he used the words Second Life once by the way; he said Virtual Worlds.
Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab: Starts in by talking about sim crashes, gender pretenders. Second Life is not perfect. Tells a story. "Who would you be if you could be anyone?" The best answer is "me". 2nd best, Richard Feynman. You can have a whole world really small. Or space exploration. We have the power to simulate an infinite possibility.
You can dream you become someone new. Anything can happen there. How exciting. We can do that with virtual worlds. Philip speaks of virtual worlds as a place of possibility, not a built out "finished" product.
At Linden Lab we have focused on the physics; we didn't focus on people at first. But the most important thing about virtual worlds is people. For me making a virtual world was just a playful place where I could make neat things, I didn't think about people.
I used to think - what a dumb idea to put a book in a virtual world, when it's much simpler to buy it on Amazon. What I see now is, this is a place with other people on it. Amazon doesn't have this. You can't talk to the 1,000 other people who are looking at that book right now. What we really want is a technology enabled experience that includes us in it. We're there, we can laugh at things together. We can make things together.
That feature, which was not obvious to me in the beginning, tells us the most about the future of where this is going. The virtual world we're immersing ourselves in together will change the nature of who we are. It might make us demand change in the real world that is so easy to effect in the virtual world. It's so easy in the virtual environment, to change one's haircolor or body shape. We make a terrarium, a little thing, and the technology may end up fundamentally changing us.
It's still early, nothing is working perfectly yet, it's reminiscent of the early days of the internet. Internet in 1993. "Ooh, Hyperlinks, this is going to change everything." Friend told me a story. The young NY lawyer saw the Internet in 1993, and said "yeah I get it", but now he knows he didn't. Because if he had really gotten it, he would have quit his day job and gotten right into it right then.
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