[...] the other presentations at Metaverse U:Dmitri Williams’ ResearchTony Parisi (creator of VRML)Virtual Environments and the Future of WorkNext up was the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, CA.  A great summation of GDC can [...]

[...] in an interoperable system, security, interoperability, suitability for real-world businesses and where to go from here, etc., but I have faith that they will be overcome in the not-too-distant [...]

[...] in an interoperable system, security, interoperability, suitability for real-world businesses and where to go from here, etc., but I have faith that they will be overcome in the not-too-distant [...]

I felt that the commentary on using games to spice up dull jobs in call centers was offensive, frankly. These jobs are dull — and unpleasant — because they involve massively selling stuff to people who don’t want to be called at the dinner hour to buy stuff. Make a game of that if you will, but essentially, it’s a lousy business, all the way around.

Perhaps eventually robots will check airport baggage, and only suspicious shapes will trigger a request for a human to look.

I’m puzzled by this statement: “high fidelity webcams that use infrared to take things like gestures and puppeteer your avatar.”

If you have a high fidelity webcam that can pick up your face and voice and broadcast it to others, even multiple others on interfaces like Yahoo Live, then…what would your reason be to go fool around loading up a virtual world and puppeteering an avatar? I’m big on avatars; I *am* an avatar; but I’m not getting this. Wouldn’t you just skip the world and do the webcam?

Christian is spot on about serendipity, and also a kind of deep conversation that can take place in the “third place” between home and work that isn’t always easy to arrange in real life but very easy to whip up in a virtual world. Those spaces are lulls in the routine and the crush of information and interruption, and the focus and depth that you can get within a virtual world are unparalleled. A virtual world is simply an application for creating attention. Attention is scarce, and hard to get, and in a virtual world — you get it. And you get it, with still the ability to do some multi-tasking in other applications in other windows, or in the world itself, with IMs and content exchanges even as you have the room chat.

It need not have high-fidelity; these kinds of conversations and collaboration on subjects like art or politics were/are possible even in the Sims Online.

I’m wondering if, like voice, more intrusive puppeteering features might ruin the immersion, by intruding one more menu to operate. It’s actually easier to reach a state of harmonious “parallel play” (the way children do at a certain age) where you communicate and collaborate with others precisely because you are not looking at them, interpreting facial expressions, etc. etc. There’s actually an advantage to being in a hushed world, where voice intonation and facial expressions are taken away, especially the part of them that is artifice. That isn’t to rhapsodize about this kind of communication, because of course things get missed. That’s why people have this yearning then to go have the real-life meeting.

All the comments on the future of work strike me as very removed from the real lives of most normal and ordinary people, and a discussion about a special niche of high-tech people living in the Valley and *their* future of work as telecommuting geeks.

Lots of other people still have to get up and drive to the store and make the donuts.

I’d have to say in the information analysis and advocacy business that I’m in, I don’t think it would be possible to consume, interpret, edit, report, etc. the vast quantities of information and text from all over that we have to handle without being telecommuters who just burrow in and do only those functions. Being in the office would mean to function at less speed and capacity, because of the interruptions. It would only mean to substitute more and longer office dramas and politics for the shorter and less frequent flames that happen from email friction.

A lot of the world’s business is still transacted face to face, in the marketplace…

[...] Metaverse U: VWs and future of work [...]

[...] Virtual Worlds and the future of Work [...]

[...] Metaverse U Panel: VWs and future of work http://www.raphkoster.com/2008/02/16/metaverse-u-vws-and-future-of-work Scanned by: Accel Rose 1 day ago [...]

[...] Virtual Worlds and the future of Work [...]

[Did you have an audio recorder or do you just type really fast?]

I just type really fast.

[Did you have an audio recorder or do you just type really fast?]

I think the last point, what are the human factors that are lost (conscious and unconscious) in electronically-mediated interactions, is really important for us to understand. We’re working with Tom Malone (above, MIT, future of work) to attempt to capture and quantify these factors, however I think it’s going to be a long time before we are able to understand them all.

When I went remote, I became 3x more productive as far as being able to stop and think, process tasks, and so on…because I wasn’t being interrupted every 5 minutes by a knock on my office door. The downside over time is that those interruptions were actually keepalives with co-workers that helped build trust and relationships, and when that communication stops or slows down, your ability to work with that team suffers. More understanding needed there.

Thanks for the capture. Christian