Please forgive the rough format. I also only managed to capture things that really stuck out to me.

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What does it say that I’m kind of ashamed to be posting these the next day instead of liveblogging them? (more…)

You can find notes from the mirror world section of the meeting, which included my presentation, on Friday over at Virtual Worlds News.

Some of the highlights:

• Twinity’s Valentine’s Day party
• We have a couple of positions available in 3D modeling
• Yesterday was the Metaverse Roadmap meeting
• Today and tomorrow is Metaverse U

Have a great weekend!

Here are some rough notes from yesterday’s Metaverse Roadmap meeting. They are in rough format, so they may not be 100% coherent.

Jamais Cascio, Institute for the Future, started with some encouraging opening remarks.

• Let’s move forward
• Keep talking & working together

Sibley Verbeck, The Electric Sheep Company

• Pepsi is an example of something that has worked surprisingly well in-world
• Virtual worlds are a new wave – yes, there is a lot of hype, but many businesses feel like they can’t afford to miss

Raph Koster, Areae/Metaplace

• Mentioned two books: Halting State and Rainbow’s End
• Of the 4 Metaverse Roadmap quadrants (virtual worlds, mirror worlds, augmented reality, lifelogging), virtual worlds are the least interesting
• There are too many walled gardens
• Kids worlds are the low hanging fruit now
• Entertainment is the long term driver
• Most major developments will take time, like years
• Open source will play some role, but user experience is always a challenge there
• Metaplace will open up almost everything

Corey Bridges, Multiverse

• There is too much to build right now
• He talked a lot about how virtual worlds are more than Second Life and how quickly companies left SL
• The interoperability summit at the last Virtual Worlds conference was interesting, but a lot of companies were upset about the IBM/SL press release after summit
• Open standards should come first then interoperability will come later
• Hype cycles happen, and we should use them not fight them
• People are seeing through the hype and optimism, but they still see a lot of potential in virtual worlds
• 3d will win in the end

Eric Rice

• Story narrative & people are in control in MMOs
• Users make the rules
• wherecamp.crowdvine.com is the URL for the Wherecamp 2008

Trevor Smith, Ogoglio

• Showed Tomorrow Space
• The web will eat virtual worlds

Mitch Kapor

• 1st investor, chair of Linden Lab
• He thinks hardware will be a key
• A 3d camera will be involved
• The Minority Report gesture controls will come
• They will replace the mouse/keyboard
• They have cameras working in prototype in his lab
• The will be posting videos about it on YouTube soon
• The price now $400/500, will come down with scale, etc
• The form factor will be like webcam

I didn’t get many notes from the mirror world segment that I spoke on, nor on the augmented reality segment, but those were both very interesting. There were lots of ideas about getting a selective stream of metadata in an augmented reality display.

Overall, it was an interesting day, but I might have been a little too jetlagged to get the full benefit of it. Looking forward to Metaverse U!

You were probably expecting the regular end of week wrap-up, and I will try to get that posted later this evening, along with some notes from the Metaverse Roadmap Summit today.

Again, a busy Friday delayed my posting. Some highlights from last week:

• We had another fairly large update to Twinity. The technology continues to evolve rapidly during the beta, so please expect all the next releases to bring a lot of new stuff.
• Updates to my travel schedule: Metaverse U, GDC and also a meeting of the Metaverse Roadmap group in California. Drop me a line if you want to meet up. My email is jeremy (at) metaversum dot com.
• Reminder: The Twinity satisfaction survey is live. Please give us your feedback!

Hope you all had a great weekend!

I forgot to mention in my previous post that I would be glad to meet with anyone interested at those conferences. Just drop me an email at jeremy (at) metaversum dot com, or just look for me and say hi.

I’ll be out of the office most of the next two weeks, so expect the blog to be somewhat quiet, although you should see some thoughts from the events I will be attending, which are MetaverseU and the GDC.

Sorry for the late posting. A few highlights:

• We had an in-world event last Thursday night. You can see some screenshots from it.
• We also sent out a rather large round of Twinity invitations.
• We set up our first customer satisfaction survey for Twinity. Please click here to take the survey!