Metaverse 2.0: There, I Said It
Tony Parisi, Media Machines
Was one of the creators of VRML, currently at MediaMachines.
It’s good think about this as Metaverse 2.0 for one reason: it’s time to do some rethinks, we are stuck in a rut, there’s a chasm to cross. So I am not going to talk about warm fuzzy potential, though we share those visions here in this room. It is going to talk about tech, how it crosses adoption barriers.
Virtual environments and the future of work (I missed the intro, so don;t know the actual title here… rapid notes, forgive the typos!)
Christian Renaud – Cisco
Byron Reeves – Seriosity & Stanford
Reuben Steiger – founder & CEO of Millions of Us
Byron: We need a shoe metaphor for this session. Reuben’s shoes (very colorful sneakers) represent how much fun it is, emotional arousal, meet new people, go new places. Enthusiasm. These others (Christian’s) are work: sophisticated, sleek, serious. And mine… well.
I think the potential, opportunity, for these environments to be important in work is huge. The potential in entertainment, etc, pales in comparison to their potential for use in work. If we can figure out how to entertain a few thousand call center representatives as they worked, and got them to stay longer than the average 9 month tenure in that job, we would have a $100m dollar business.
That was fast!
Areae’s Raph Koster: Virtual world cash to go to entertainment
My comments were pretty brief — nothing like a full session, more like a bunch of us here getting up and giving ten minute takes on where things are and where they are going.
If one more conference asks me to provide an avatar headshot for their website or materials, I may shoot myself. The last few articles for gaming magazines asked, and it’s common with all the MMO/VW centric conferences too: “Please supply 150 word bio, and a picture of your avatar.”
Things get even busier for me starting tomorrow at 6:40am, when I fly out of San Diego and up to Stanford for a Metaverse Roadmap Meeting and the Metaverse U event at Stanford. At the latter I’ll be participating in a nice long on-stage conversation along with Cory Ondrejka and Howard Rheingold.
Then I am off to GDC. First up, I am opening the Worlds in Motion Summit:
Why Gamers should Care about Virtual Worlds
Speaker(s): Raph Koster (Areae)
Time: 10:05am – 11am
Virtual worlds may be a nascent medium, but already lessons on user behavior, open worlds and content democratization have begun to surface, promising to provide new insight and evolution on the way we play and socialize. Industry pioneer Raph Koster, whose company, Areae, is set to join the revolution in a big way, saw these new insights coming before wider adoption had even begun, and he will discuss why virtual worlds and online spaces are more than a fad—and why you absolutely should care.
On Friday afternoon, last session of the week, the redoubtable Sean Riley (lead programmer for Metaplace) and I will be doing an “antemortem” of sorts on building Metaplace. It’s called a postmortem in the program, but really, we’re not done yet, so… 😉
