On November 19th Jean Linden, Director of International Initiatives, gave a keynote address at the Metaverse 2007 conference. Although the live event in Berlin was postponed until May of next year, they were still able to hold the event in Second Life. The audio recording comes to us courtesy of Bernhard Drax, machinimist and musician extraordinaire.
It’s worth a listen. Rarely have I heard the history of Linden Lab and Second Life summarized so clearly, and it’s a really well-focused look on the future of the platform. Worth the download.
La_Robotique_Cest_Fantastique_Str8nimE_viD video by M Dot Strange
M Dot’s comment on this video: So once I heard this track by Pnok I had to make an animation for it….and I did in 2 hours with Cinema 4d and After Effects ^^ Pnok’s myspace
Today I heard Jean Miller, director International Initiatives at Linden Lab (via an ultra-secret recording that Bernhard Drax has hidden on his site) give prophesy and lend humanity to this machine we’re building.
She said: “Where do you think this is going to go? Do virtual worlds have a future or is it just this fad? My response to that is usually: if you think the Internet is the end-all be-all to communication technology, your answer is probably no. But I think the Internet is the beginning.”
Suddenly I saw the past and future unfolding in a single explosive moment.
The written word. Messengers riding galloping horses. Carrier pigeons dodging trained enemy hawks. The printing press and suddenly, explosively, mass media. The Pony Express. The train. Short wave radio. The telephone oh my GOD the telephone! Television television everywhere and then VCRs and suddenly, shockingly, the Internet usenet/irc/worldwideweb/distributed computing/web2.0/viralmedia/virtualworlds *blip*
I think it’s foolish to make serious predictions beyond the next couple of years, and if “the singularity” is coming, it certainly will be more than a few years off. One thing we can do, however, is speculate about what it might be like. That’s a worthy endeavor, because if it is coming, surely we’ll be swept up in it long before we even have time to notice it has happened.
This is an interview by Rafat Ali of paidContent.org. I thought it was particularly timely considering the recent trendiness of CNN’s I-Reports (and the Second Life version), a citizen journalism site that’s making press for… well… being a citizen journalism site. Not that IndyMedia.org hasn’t been around forever already, not to mention Miro and YouTube (possibly too obvious)…
Where this all of leads is the interesting part, and often it’s the part that people leave out. The prediction goes as follows: cameras are everywhere, and people are finding new ways of releasing their content for anyone to use. Specialty blogs will skim the citizen journalism sites for content and post it. News outlets will skim the blogs for content, aggregate it and report it. Our news will increasingly become “at the scene”, without the extra foolishness of some perfectly-coiffed anchor in a suit pretending they know anything about what’s happening.
CNN is seeing this new work flow developing, and in the creation of I-Reports is hoping to place themselves at both ends of that work flow. I expect they’ll fail, partially because the web loves specialists. If you try to do too much at once, people turn away. NowPublic.com has a better shot at succeeding because they’re making citizen reporting their only priority. People can post text, video, still images, and even audio. They can also add to the content as well.
I can see tiny little communities springing up around stories in an environment like that. A fire down the street would have everybody in the neighborhood posting pictures, time-lines of the event, and video clips. I wouldn’t be surprised if these story-based communities split up and reassembled over time, eventually causing people to recognize each other as having similar interests. The stories themselves would have nanotails, remaining of interest only to a select group who would re-hash them over coffee and use them as ways to connect to one another.
Eventually people might even consider how events around them affect the people they care about. You never know, this might be the start of something much more personal than what one might assume.
The Designer’s Augmented Reality Toolkit (DART) is an enhancement to Director MX that includes real-time video, various sensors, and wizarding methods to support creativity in mixed and augmented reality. You can learn more on the DART website: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/dart/
We’ve seen augmented reality applications before, but they were always custom-built affairs. People will remember the earlier Augmented Reality attempt “Facade”, which got quite a bit of press at the time. The problem was that the obvious question, “can I play it”, had a disappointing answer.
This is a little different. We can download this software, and we can produce an augmented reality of our own. In the same way that YouTube made it possible to easily video blog, Flash made it possible to easily animate and Second Life made it possible to easily create a virtual environment, this makes it possible to easily create an augmented reality experiment.
Nobody really knows what to do with augmented reality yet it seems, but that’s ok. Nobody had a clue what blogging was going to be used for either. Now, however, the next phase can begin. People who are idly curious about what Augmented Reality could be used for can start experimentation, and new ways of implementing it will start to roll out. The DART platform won’t just spawn a bunch of applications, but it will also inspire the need for more user-friendly, flexible and feature-rich platforms.
Expect a cellphone-based augmented reality GPS mashup application that you can download for a few dollars in the next few years.
Monday at 11am PST Metanomics will be host to Ted Castranova, world-renowned expert on MMORPG economies and one of the first economists to do serious studies there. He has a request: “make me a dwarf female, high fantasy style.”
If you have the talent and the time today, drop your creation in my inventory! (I’m “Onder Skall” in Second Life) The best one will get bragging rights for having designed Ted Castranova’s avatar, and a special thanks during the event and at Metaversed.com.