Back in the olden days, well a few years ago, I helped talk to some MBA students from Warwick University about Second Life and its potential. In fact the entire UK crew at the time got involved in this as the Warwick business school is well respected and the team we talked to were very switched on.
So I was contacted a few months ago by Benjamin Ruschin who said “do you remember me from way back?” It turns out he is now heading up an out of hours association of young marketing professionals called Marketing Natives and they were having an event in Vienna and he asked me to come and speak about what the world would be like in 2020. Right up my street of course
So I popped over to Vienna on Friday, spoke and then flew home Saturday (narrowly missing the massive snowfalls in the UK!)

We presented in a nightclub environment. Lots of stand up tables dotted around and a packed crowd.

We have a cool rear projection screen and a radio head mike for the stage. We had to fiddle around between one or two computers. I usually present from my machine as I have live demos of Opensim and Unity3d and Minecraft, but instead I presented from Benjamin’s machine which meant a little bit of resolution change and keynote to ppt required.
My fellow presenter Stefan Bielau went first as a mobile, apps and media consultant. He spoke in German, but we had chat before about what he was speaking about. Lots about the next generation of location awareness, about touch less technology too and how that fits into the landscape of the marketeer. Stefan is also well versed in startup land so we went and had dinner after the event and swap tales and worked out who we both knew of. He works out of Warsaw but is often over in London.
I got introduced as a TV Star in the UK (amongst other things). I am not sure star is quite the word but I though what the heck lets go with it
I had a cut down version of my much longer presentation but the core feature was still the blurring of physical and digital and how maker culture spreads into lots of places from making cars in Forza4 to making reprap 3d printers that then print digital goods back to physical. It is still proving a rich and sup rising area for people as the feedback from the very large event crowd proved.
For once I was not actually wearing my striped leather jacket whilst presenting, but I did have some “costume” on with the original Cool Stuff Collective g33k tshirt.
I showed some clips form the show (which are the place holders in the slideshare version below). It is a real pity that my future tech pieces are not sitting on youtube or still available on the web as they make handy little story pieces that could be used in schools and colleges and also as a take away for conferences. As people could then listen and see about the tech at their own pace after the event. Oh well, digital rights is a complicated area.

There was some press coverage and I had a good long conversation with Dr. Jürgen Molner who was covering the event. He asked some very good questions afterwards as we discussed and expanded on the ideas I had talked about. Making this clearer as we bounced between languages was enlightening for me too. Apparently there is not direct translation for Geek in German
There is a picture and some coverage from Dr Molner here
It was a great trip and it was nice to see a bit of a city I have not visited even though when I walked around at 8:30 am in -13c it was like a film set with no extras around. I have never seen a city so empty. In part because large areas are pedestrianised too so there we no cars zooming past.
My little photo tour is here
I did see a very unusual looking electric bike amongst all the cartier, gucci and tiffany stores too.

I really enjoy sharing these ideas with people, and it is great that it does translate to any audience, from kids to adults from one country to another regardless of level or profession. Which gives me some encouragement that I am still on the right track working to help people invent their own future.

Yes ok a terrible Take That pun. Never thought I would type that. However I am recovering from the excellent Relive 11 conference we just had at the OU in Milton Keynes. It was a really good gathering of fellow metaverse evangelists mostly from Academia. As it was academic there was a humbling number of detailed well researched papers being presented in the sessions. Every one I heard I was impressed by the way that virtual environments were being pushed forward.
What was equally good was the degree of discussion, all based on a large body of experience and perspectives that all the delegates brought with them.
There was clearly a lot of disappointment at Second Life’s failings in education and customer service and huge respect for Opensim in particular as the natural place to move to as SL user. There was though a fondness for SL.
There was a great deal of effort put into the organizing with things like these

We had discussion cards, a subset of at least 50 different questions about avatar identity, future direction, best experience etc. These were great to have an I would love the full physical set of them, but my personal set I will remember and treasure.
Robin Wight from Engine (a Marketing guru) kicked off the event with lots of examples of virtual worlds but not as you might consider them from this industry. The virtual worlds of brands and imagination and aspiration. Some of the examples, for a converted audience were a little off but I was impressed by the discussion around the genetic brain and the task brain and the science and thought that goes into appealing to the right bits, in this case to get you to buy into an advert.
This is of course what I do when I am helping people come to terms with games and virtual worlds. Though I had not considered the brain chemistry past a little NLP.

I was at Relive to both absorb and join in the conversations but to run a few sessions. The end of day 1 was the live link up to Vpearl the IEEE VW conference/game happening in Hollywood. As I wrote before this link up was itself part of the game really for Vpearl and to Relive. How smoothly could we do it with consumer tech.
Well as expected when you are at a site that you do not control the tech, not using your own machine etc its bound to not work.
We had trouble with the task PC having enough bandwidth to run Second Life (as we planned to do a metaverse linkup). At the other end there were problems trying to patch into voice without causing massive feedback. We tried skype and the local network barred us. Yet between us we found a path through. What we ended up doing was using Andy Piper’s machine that could get on the local wireless and was just about able to IM in SL to text talk to Sandy Kearney in Hollywood, who relayed the questions to their room. At the other end they had a roving camera and microphone and an excellent and enthusiast presenter. The video was delivered on the public Ustream channel. This all felt pretty exciting as I was keen to see the activity at Vpearl. The tweets the day before had been very informative too and it was so cool to see so many people getting on with big ideas live in the Rita Hayworth ballroom at the Sony Centre ! Just as vpearl was about documenting the results the live link up and what happens, whats missing with tech and process will all get fed into the public resources to I thank Relive11 and my audience in the room for their patience.
After day 1 we headed to the hotel and that was an amazing gathering of minds riffing ideas too.
Day 2 began with our panel. Paul Hollins was chairing me, Bill Thompson (BBC Digital planet/Click) and Rebecca Mileham author of Powering Up: Are Computer Games Changing Our Lives. We had a stack of questions that had been sent in and hopefully I can patch in a link to the recording of the webcast too soon. The beats line though in our discussion about getting people creating was Bill saying “If you are not programming you are being programmed”.
I did manage to get in my real virtual to real augmentation loop at some point.
Also Paul introduced me as being scared of Milton Keynes. This was becuase I told him the last time I was here I had to film my first on the road piece to camera and get thrown into a skydiving tube for The Cool Stuff Collective

We had another interesting discussion on a session run by my fellow BCS animation and Games Dev committee member Jane Chandler. It was a goldfish bowl session around the subject of the when and where will the integration of virtual worlds into the web happen.
This session placed 5 chairs in the centre of the room. 4 of us had to sit on them and 1 was empty. The rest of the chairs were in a circle around us. You can only speak if you are in the middle. So you have to move to the empty chair and one of the others have to leave. This worked brilliantly well. The ebb and flow of ideas was one of the best I have experienced. Well worth doing.
The final session was Andy Piper’s keynote. It was good to hear Andy talk as we were seldom at the same events way back. He did a bit of a retrospective where things had been the last few years but also put his finger on the nub the problem. The lack of expectation that people should create things, or the empty room problem as he called it. He was very passionate, and many of us were nodding in agreement, people should expect to create, they should build and contribute because it is much more rewarding to be part of something than just consume.
I was happy to lend him my Mac too for his pitch as at this point below….

there were some video issues getting a feed to the screens. However, as with the IEEE linkup we all just get on and sort it out.
So huge thanks to everyone who organized this and thanks for Anna Peachey for inviting me it was a great honour and I heard and learned things which is always brilliant, plus met some fantastic people.
Hopefully see you all next time.

In a few hours over in LA at the Sony Centre the inaugural vPEARL Summit will kick off, the first event from vecolab.org.

This is IEEE backed and aims immerse many people from around the world, all with the goal, to make human connections and to advance the medium of virtual environments. Together creating an UBER source for practices in virtual environments that can be analyzed and used by all of us in the future. The 2 days will also be being filmed to create a documentary of the journey.
The experience is based around taking teams of people to different virtual environments and setting big challenges, in an unconference and game format. Each team will be exploring and doing, whilst trying to share whilst they go along.
Each team in each environment has a team twitter ID to share live so feel free to listen in http://twitter.com/#!/search?q=vpearl.
There will also be a live link up (I am crossing my fingers for this) that I will be initiating from the uk Relive 11 conference at the Open University.

We will dive from our conference across to the start of day 2 of vPearl and see how the exploration is progressing. Which means we are also part of the best practice exploration. With all the people online and present at each location this is one major gathering of virtual world experts and evangelists!
What there is to share and how we get on with it we really wont know until 4pm tomorrow but I wish the teams luck in creating cool content to talk about.
Very exciting times. I wish I was in LA but I also want to be at Relive 11, which sort of proves the point about needing to explore the ways we can be at so many places at ones doesn’t it? What better groups of people to try it with!

At the Develop conference this year I was asked if I minded doing a quick interview for http://www.gamecareers.biz/ so I popped along and this is the result.

We had a very quick chat before and then we just blasted through in 1 take
I am in good company if you look at the actual site here
Between Colin Anderson of Denki and Mick Hocking of Sony.
The BCS and its role in careers may be of interest or resonate with some games industry people looking for some structure.
I am pleased with the points I got across too. Thanks to @davidsmithuk for putting this together and asking such good questions in the interview.

At Develop last month I got talking to the guys on the stand for the SpecialEffect loan library project 2011-2013. @SpecialEffect is a charity which aim to make all games accessible to everyone. The library aspect is to provide specialist controllers, emrging technology solution and software patches for young people with vary degrees of accessibility issues with games in particular.

SpecialEffect Loan Library Project from William Donegan on Vimeo.

The charity points out that many games can be too quick or difficult to play for many young people with disabilities. They aim to either provide new interfaces or changes to the games, or actually tell people which games already are playable with suitable settings for specific needs of a specific audience.
If you think about it this can be as easy as providing subtitling on dialogue to hearing impaired, or enough changes in speed and skill level to allow the game to still be enjoyable and a challenge.
On the stand there where examples of console games adjusted to take single oversize reactive button input, or shoot em ups that had context sensitive directions. It was very inspiring and thought provoking.
We have often talked about the affordances virtual worlds give us, a digital environment, haptic feedback etc all providing ways that anyone could interact. The reality though is that accessibility is not a focus of mainstream gaming, but Specialeffect are pushing the right direction.
There is also a games database called gamebase that indicates what features existing games already support to help people understand what can be done with them.
It is well worth checking out, and considering.

Septmber 2011 sees an even in L.A. It is sponsored by the IEEE but it is not about the usual technical interchange standard. Instead it is about getting people from diverse fields and setting then some social challenges in a rich creative settings and seeing who comes up with what to harness both existing Virtual Environments and spotting the gaps missing for the future.

The event is titled vPEARL (Virtual Play Exchange Advise Renew Learn), it’s going to be on 20-21 September 2011, Los Angeles, California. In the US of A. Registration is $150 and spaces are limited to 100.

The official event page and registration is here: http://standards.ieee.org/news/vpearl/index.html

There is an upcoming page too here

Just so you know the context of this a large number of people from around the virtual world business, academia, film, the arts and many others have come together already to start this movement. As an example you can see Ren Reynolds post on the same event over at Terra Nova. You can also see some of the names of people gathering together to make this happen (as we all have good intentions to push the metaverse to its next level) here on the VeColab.org site.

“vPEARL Highlights

Keynote and Catalyst presentations
A set of real-world challenges developed by the VECoLab, a community of virtual world experts sponsored by IEEE and supported by e426.org
Summit focus on “Breakouts for Solution” teams with onsite and virtual participants facilitated by the VECoLab
A variety of virtual world platforms from sponsoring vendors for use by participants
A planned one-hour virtual world link to another conference in the UK to share key findings
Awards for the best solutions developed by the teams, based on creativity and applicability”

The UK conference will be a live link to ReLive 2011 I will be at that conference ready to do my Terry Wogan bit and say “Hello Los Angeles”.

Pass it on, check it out, lets make things happen.

In all the google+ messing around I had not got around to writing up my remaining thoughts and experiences at the Developer 2011 conference in Brighton. Day 1 for me was the Evolve conference a sort of future thinking bolt on that is gaining some traction with the industry. The Evolve strand then blends into the next 2 days which are the official Develop conference when everyone else turns up.

Breakfast Serendipity
The day started heading down in the lift from the 6th floor. I was already wearing my badge and a fellow delegate asked me at the lift where the registration desk was. we got chatting and then sat and had breakfast. The usual sort of conference chat, who are you what do you do. The bizzarre thing was that my fellow delegate was called Iain, (I am Ian of course). It also turned out we were both doing a presentation at 3pm that afternoon. This was Iain McCaig who was going to be doing the Art Keynote as an artist and conceptual designer. For those of you who don’t know he has worked on some the biggest movies and characters including creating Darth Maul! of all time. Clearly I was going to lose a “who does the coolest things” competition but we were actually talking about our shared interest in inspiring kids to create. For him it was drawing for me it was tech. We talked about 3d printing a bit too. As he is from the movie biz it was the first time anyone has said in a matter of fact way “yes we use those all the time”. I left breakfast completely inspired and to be speaking some of the same language and ideas as someone so successful gave me a real buzz.
More Media Molecule
In a reprise of last year the opening keynote was the guys from Media Molecule talking about their journey with Little Big Planet. It was done as an interview style with Phil Harrison. For anyone at previous Develops they will have heard many of these stories before. However it is interesting stuff. There was, of course a little more about Phil and Sony’s side of things. The key people who green lit LBP.
TV to Games and Back Again
The next session I popped into was part of the Evolve track, it was also in the room I would pitch in later so it all fitted nicely. Simon Harris of BBC worldwide explained the different approaches BBC Worldwide (the commercial arm of the BBC) is approaching tight integration of TV and games and the various other offline media. In many ways it was similar to the Moshi Monsters direction from the day before. It is not about bolt ons or after thoughts to cash in but about enriched branded experiences. There was a lot about Torchwood and how the growth of this to a US based series was also joined with specific threads being written for episodic games that track and augment the TV show. Top Gear also was very prominent with the deal to weave Top Gear into the Forza 4 experience. Though they did have to get Clarkson to re-record he dialogue as when it went to the certification boards it was not longer a 3+ game but had moved up to teen ranking. The future of the BBC in games and related interesting content seems assured with a lot of focus and investment and this very rich integration. A great session.
Mickey Mouse gaming
The post lunch keynote was the gaming legend David ‘elite’ Braben talking about of all things a virtual world There were some amusing moments with the projector, that decided to clip the presentation (which did get sorted. Not a great picture but ‘king Disneyland’ made me laugh anyway.

This virtual world is Frontier’s new game in conjunction with Microsoft and Disney. It is Disneyland adventures. They have completely and perfectly modelled the California disneyland and players are able to wander around the park using where they then join in in rides, quests, minigames etc. This did look very cool though we did see the same attract loop a good few times. David talked about the language of the Kinect and how we are all forming the vocabulary of interaction. In his game you navigate by pointing, but not with a tiring arm out point, but an elbow at your side at 90 degrees movement, using a turn of the shoulders to go left and right. The attention to graphic detail had to be obsessive as this is disney, and being a real place that millions have visited and will visit it had to be a mirror world location.

So you think virtual worlds aren’t important
This was me and my first foray into persuading people in the game industry of the changes brought about by virtual worlds and 3d printing. I gave a live demo of Opensim too. Of course The Cool Stuff Collective features as well as this is validation that if you don’t get this tech and its uses then next generation already are because we are telling them about it. I also dropped in unifier and kitely as examples of services that are evolving to support the demands for virtual worlds. This was very handy as I had an audience question that it was too much messing about to get into a virtual world to have a meeting. My answer was that people are trying to simplify it, but it is also based on demand. if the games industry applied its approaches to running and hosting, and to usability they would have a whole new market to reuse and expand into. They wont do that until they are made aware there is a need.
I also did a straw poll in the room of how many people had heard of the BCS. There was only 1 hand went up which is indicative of the work we have to do to help people in their careers in the games industry.
Raspberry Pi
It was back to David Braben again, this time at the other strand of the conference Games:edu. I already explained a little about this over here. Create a computing device so simple and cheap that allows kids to explore and program. As opposed to just being able to play and consume. This fills the chasm between the creativity of little big planet and other creative tools to the world of computer science. I am very hopeful as whilst we harped back to the 80′s back then we only had the computer to write code on. we did not have the feeder of the creative platforms, the virtual worlds and UGC were not a thing we experienced.
Day 3 – More 3d
Day 3 began rather like day 2 with a reboot of a previous years presentation. This was Mick Hocking of Sony talking about a year of PS3 3D. Last year it was a lot of slides and a quick demo we all had to crowd around. This year we were all in the Odeon with passive 3d specs on. It was a good pitch when we saw examples of design considerations actually played out in 3d. breaking planes, reversing images, forcing convergence and divergence past comfort levels. However a lot of it was 3d powerpoint which was really very annoying. It was a waste of the tech and the time to float bullet points IMHO.

I missed the next session as I was having a few meetings and conversations about beta’s and new tech with people.

Finally the next 2 sessions were the best of the entire conference.

Happily ever after: The Story of one girl’s refusal to delegate
Nat Marco from Honeyslug told a brilliant story of how she was persuaded into learning to code a game in LUA and XML by Ricky. I knew this would be good as I was enthralled at the Kahoots story last year from Honeyslug
How this led to a whole host of remote working relationships with artists around the world producing content for her. She also talked about the relationship with a script writer and how Nat made sure she imposed her own direction and creative will to keep her project how she wanted it to be. It was lighthearted, yet covered some very important points. The team that worked around Nat was global, it was not about co-location. The programming she had to learn was a start, and she saaid it was not as bad as she thought. She was also completely immersed (and supported in that immersion by a publisher) in the project in order to maintain its quality at every stage.
Another year down the gaming toilet
I met Ricky back at the first independent keynote I did at the ACE conference in 2009 and I know we share a lot of the same ideas and humour. Last year he told me I must go to this one particular session. I didn’t get to it but this year I made sure I did as it was running again.

Jerry Carpenter is an artists and developer, he has spent years, each day on a bus on the way to work, writing down short crazy, eccentric and bizarre games ideas. He has a completely different presentation style to anyone else as it kind of rambles, bumbles then hits you square in the eyes with a flash of genius or comedy or both. His inspiration for describing mad/bad games was someone commented one of his games was like watching paint dry. So he made a watching paint dry game that you could only win by sitting watching the paint dry for 24 hours So his entire site is now dedicated and full of these brilliant cartoons and succinct ideas for a game. Much of it is NSFW BTW . I loved 1080 qwerty extreme – a game where you turn you keyboard upside down and stand on it to snowboard, and Ultimate feline optimal area tester (a cat swinging game in a room). The ideas do stand up on their own buy the way he tells about the train of thought had us all in stitches and was brilliant. He should have his own show Much of what he shows hits at the heart of some of the terrible grind that is part of social gaming at the moment and is combined with film and political references too. if you get a chance to see him speak please go!
I decided I needed to get back home after that. I could not see anything topping those two sessions for inspiration so I headed on back, collecting all my 3ds spot pass new connections one the way. I look forward to another great conference next year.

This year was my annual pilgrimage to Brighton for the games dev conference called Develop. I have going to this since I chose my independent career path with Feeding Edge. What I do and what I work on is still at the periphery of the games industry compared to the full on AAA title producer firms, but I do have a huge affinity for the indies.
After last year, sitting hearing something was impossible in one of the sessions, when in fact it is exactly what Second Life and Opensim do I was determined I needed to push a few more game company buttons and so volunteered to talk this year and was accepted. I was part of the Evolve stream which is all about new stuff. In a fast moving innovative industry like the games industry it is surprising that many of the things I have to share are still so leading edge, or if not leading edge then woefully ignored.
The industry itself has a huge part to play in where virtual world and online communication fit into the our lives. They have all the tech and know how to get a double bonus from assets. Games are inherently fun and cool, with very a very creative core at the start, then though they become product. Each game follows the same path as any startup, passionate founders, workers making it real and then the dreaded monetization.
It is also still amazing that all these multi site studios with outsourcing etc are not clamouring to use more efficient or creative ways to communicate with one another, that includes the very things they are building.

I think there was a set unifying sentiments, backed up by some action this year though. Three years ago hardly anyone bothered with “social”, last year everyone botched about it, this year everyone wants to do it properly and better. There is also that realisation that developer community is shrinking, the grand masters are getting older, kids are not getting into programming. It’s not really even being taught. From the newest quirkiest indie dev’s, to higher education to the grand masters of UK game development and even to me with my Cool Stuff Collective show strand we are all doing things to try and let people know that there is more to tech than just using it. You can build with it, you can program, you can share and rather oddly there has never been a better time to be able to get together with others and build. There is though a gap in the technology, which was brought out in David Braben’s Raspberry Pi session. The driver behind this is to try and push towards a small very simple device that you can just plug into a screen and get to code, create build share. In a way that it is not complicated to hit the reset button, just as we did in the old 8 bit days. Lots of kids have access to computers but not to develop on, as they may “break them”.
It really is a great plan and aiming to make a £15 machine with a developer community building the right tools for it and then giving those to entire classes years at schools really opens up the potential for a massive wave of technologically capable builders. In the session the spectre of school ICT came up. How once ICT was brought in computer science dropped out. ICT is about using basic tools on a computer, all skills that are needed, but programming is about problem solving and making things happen. My 8 year old (predlet 1.0) referred to here ICT as “I correct text” which I guess she heard somewhere. It is very different learning to drive a car to knowing how to build one. You need both avenues to be available.
Anyway my highlights of Develop
1. New Stories for New Platforms : A great freeform conversation between Adrian Hon, Alexis Kennedy, David Varela and Charles Cecil moderated by Patrick O’Luanaigh. This was away from the pure tech of games and into the narrative. Dicussions of the stories that form in playing simple board games, storyline narrative versus multiplayer shared experiences. Charles Cecil told some tales of how they remastered broken sword on the mobile years after they had thrown all the assets away.
2. Browser – The place where console, web and social games come together Ilkka Paananen. This was partly an advert for gunshine.net but it was based on experience of pushing to the browser. The mechanics of doing social features better seemed to be a theme too. In Gunshine your friends characters become available to play as your team mates but they play in the style of your friend as AI’s. They also get to level up for the other player (or atleast you can reward them for having been picked). So if you play well, you are more likely to get picked for the team.
3. Gamification – Extending the Game Play into business. Mo Touman gave a pitch on gamification. Which in itself had become a word that was both loved and hated in equal measure. Mo gave examples of lots of platforms toolkits that help with some of the basics of light gamification. Badges, points etc. He challenged the games industry to look at middleware. The tendency was to build from scratch still, which is fine if money is no object. He pointed out things like openfeint, plus+, bunchball(nitro participation engine), scoreloop. Bunchball is the one I need to take a look at having explored the others. In the QA the objections to gamification tended to be they indicated lazy bolting on of points. In fact this is a much deeper subject but I guess the early examples are just that.
4.Social Games, Music and Fashion : New frontiers. Paulina Bozek from INENSU gave a great pitch on their social clothed reuse/swapping project and also the up and coming superfan for the music industry. What I liked was the references to the madness of the record industry in trying to control and stifle creativity in the name of profit. Which in the long run fails. The example was of a Bieber fan video, lots of fans had put a montage of photos of themselves each with a word from the song written on a hand, a mirror, a placard etc and posted it to youtube. Bieber commented on how cool it was and that he liked it, then his record company proceeded to issue DMCA takedowns all over the place for breach of copyright. Hitting at the hardcore fans who want to share and create out of passion and interest is, lets face it, dumb.
5. What’s Next. A great panel which included Alice “@wonderlandblog @makielab” Taylor. It was lots of riffing on some ideas, Onlive and Xbox were both represented too. One discussion was have the consoles got good enough that we don’t need to bother pushing forward with the visuals any more. Will there be a next next gen etc. generally we all wanted to not have to bother with worrying what something was on, but be able to play anything anyway.
6. Keynote: Lessons from building Moshi Monsters to 50m Users. Michael Acton Smith was his usually chirpy and enthusing self. Telling tales of the dark days of nearly closing, of burning capital, changing course and then the explosion that is Moshi and moving into other non digital areas. To see the empire grow from those early ideas (which I remember seeing on a visit to mind candy way back) to what it already is and to see where it is heading really is like watching a new Walt Disney arise from the web. (Well done to Moshi Monsters for picking up their award at the ceremony the next day too)
More to come….

Finally I get to talk about the last parts of the Metameets conference gathering last month. It is rare that posts take this long as I prefer to fire a quick post up and not leave things lingering, however it was so packed that that just was not going to happen to do it justice.

First it was great to see Toxic Menges tell us all about the now famous Meroos. These virtual life critters are a Second Life phenomenon. They are not simple scripted in world creatures. Their evolution and life cycle is controlled on servers outside of Second Life. They are registered purchased goods expressed and interacted with in Second Life. I did buy a Meroo after the presentation, but it has run away as I forgot to feed it. A-Life is always fascinating and when combined with a virtual world and a value economy even more so. Meero’s evolution and breeding cycle, specializations and changes are all out there to be discovered and lots of people are farming them for profit, or caring for them as pets.
This is really advanced a-life in how it works within the scope of a shared environment. Toxic pointed out how the Meeroo’s come up and give your avatar a hug in world. This is not a standalone tamagotchi.

Next up was a remote pitch by film maker Bernhard Drax/Draxtor Despres on The making of SL/WoW documentary Login2Life. This was part in world (we all rezzed with him in virtual Amsterdam) and then heard all about this new reportage covering all elements of the SL and WoW experience. It is running on German TV very soon and hopefully will be available world wide as we all know Draxtor does great work.

We have Melanie Thielker back to do a second presentation specifically on Roleplay in Virtual Worlds. Melanie enthused about the potential of role play in virtual worlds, how characters form and play and act. It is a very specific form of entertainment that can be a little scary for people used to being handed their experiences. In some ways it is like the difference between a radio and choosing your own songs. Both work, both co-exist and virtual worlds provide an ideal way to explore what role play is.

Toni Alatalo got a chance to show off RealXtend and the subtle differences and extensions that this platform has over SL and Opensim. One of the key elements of the model this works on is that everything is a world object. There is no specific need to have an avatar or an island. (So much nodding and whooping from me). Toni also gave his presentation with the virtual world, mixing and zooming around screens and examples of eagles swooping and catching fish.

Timo Mank came to talk TMSPTV a meditative space and a playground for co-creation across realities. This was an intriguing project that turns the island idea on its head. This was a creative collective that represents its stories and ideas in Second Life in order to reach a wider audience yet is drawn from a physical location which is itself a communal physical island. It has a culture of storytelling and each day the stories are retold as part of a daily routine. That culture is capture and placed in world.

Karen Wheatley talked about The Evolution of Virtual Theatre. This was a fascinating insight from a theatrical production point of view. Karen stages live plays in Second Life but adapted for Gorean culture. The Jewell Theatre has been staging full-length original plays in Second Life since August 2007, so there is a lot of experience on hand. In staging plays Karen has to consider the fact that the audience actually may be sat in one place but can move the camera anywhere. There are no cheap seats in SL. Set changes can happen very much quicker too, with objects rezzed and moved as needed. Most of the plays have been text based due to unreliability of voice sometimes. Chat was adjusted with the equivalent of a text microphone that relays the chat labelled as the character name not the avatar name. Yes thats right a person with an avatar playing a character lots of levels of redirection there. Actors also have to be aware that they need to explicitly puppet their avatars with a directors missive “T*ts to the action people”. Having had to deal with the challenges of locations and tv studios I appreciated the challenges of staging in SL in this more directed way. As Karen said you use what you have got and the challenges of a platform or place become part of the production.

Steve Zapytowski continued the theatrical strand with Blended Performance: Live Actors and a Virtual Player. Steve is professor of Design and Technology, Kent State University. Founding member of the Institute for Learning in Virtual Environments (iLIVE). He presented from in SL and we watched some local videos of his work. This was about a physical production of Hamlet but the ghost was a stage effect that was pre-render animation of a human figure. They had to mix the pre-renders with suitable lighting and cueing to make the ghost move, appear, puff away etc. It look very powerful and very interesting. There was lots of discussion about live puppetry versus the pre-canning but again thats a choice of the environment and how to work. Each has its flavour and challenges.

Finally up was Chantal Harvey / Mamachinima that strangely I already blogged, it was where I started this thread of metameets.

http://www.feedingedge.co.uk/blog/2011/06/21/metameets-2011-part-1-of-n/
http://www.feedingedge.co.uk/blog/2011/06/23/metameets-lazy-teachers-and-revolving-doors-part-2-of-n/
http://www.feedingedge.co.uk/blog/2011/06/28/metameets-part-3-of-n-grid-wars-and-envelope-pushing/

So that was Metameets. An amazing collection of ideas, people and passion. I throughly enjoyed both being the MC and hearing everything and meeting everyone. The Club Karlsson venue was very cool too and everyone was very helpful . What a blast ! Well done all. In particular joja dhara for bringing us all together in the first place (though she asked me not to thank her at the time so I have messed that one up )

Metameets might seem a long while ago at web speed but the themes and trends emerging are still relevant. So I make not apology for this being a long run series of posts
On day 1 we got to another section about the grid and kicking this off was a discussion about Second Life third party viewers or TPV’s as they are called. This is a fascinating case study in both competition and symbiosis with a load of niche and specialised interests thrown in for good measure.
Kirstenlee Cinquetti/Lee Quick is the driving force behind the very popular TPV Kirstens Viewer Lee has a great passion for the Second Life environment and also is very interested in photography and film making.

So the aim of his viewer project was to take the Open Sourced Snowglobe code from Linden Lab and enhance it and improve it to make a very focused viewer that presents a great visual experience, as good as it possibly can be. He makes no apology for the spec of machine needed and this is where the cooperation with SL comes in. He is able to provide a focus and a niche built on top of the standard open source code to enhance some users experiences. However he is, and has to be, so on top of the releases of the code and changes to the grid (servers) that he finds things out before they go really public. When a function appears, hidden away, he and his team will find it, test it and patch their viewer to use it, or work around it if it doesn’t work properly. In many ways he is quality assurance for SL, whilst being completely independent. He said the Lab hates him but i am sure they love him in equal measure too. It is difficulty for many commercial companies in andy industry to understand this user/developer/prosumer model. Kirstenlee is pushing the envelope with access to features that are intriguing (like stereoscopic 3d). He is restructuring major parts of code to treat the user interface in a much more engineered way to allow for cleaner layout and transparent parts of the interface. He is now looking at better camera controls, fixed views, dollys etc for the machinima makers to use. All of this is good for SL (and also the related platforms like opensim potentially). The Lab benefits from this focus, but I can imagine that it can also be difficult as when developing an releasing products time and priorities are different for different people.
Next up and on the a slightly different co-op confrontational path was Melanie Thielker. She is another (of the very rare) core opensim developer and has done a lot of the restructuring work. Here though Melanie was talking about her hosted business based on Opensim Avination This venture is a growing business, with a focus on roleplay. It is very impressive to be able to both spark up and push forward a customer facing grid whilst also living in the open source development world. However that gives Melanie a great perspective on what needs to be done and real life systems architecture to keep her grids running and growing. This grid is of course in direct competition with the Second Life one, but exists because of the spin off of Opensim and the open source approach to development in taking something closed and making it better.
Next we had a bit more of a standard product pitch, though it is still a leading edge idea. Fred van Rijswijk from C2K dashed in to share some of the interesting things being done with Layar. Layar is a “traditional” augmented reality application. The client allows the merging of real and virtual content based on location of the client. I say traditional as I think AR is about anything from anywhere merged with anything from anywhere else in more than one way. We do have to evolve to that though. Rather like the early web AR generally requires someone to make things for you. Design and game agencies can craft the 3d models and register them in layers to be viewed. It is interesting to consider all the content creation in various virtual worlds done by general users and how that might be liberated by AR applications? Augmenting one AR with another etc. I do like many of the Layar examples and the increasing move to go from flat HUD styles to more interactive 3d objects in space is an interesting direction.
Finally for the day Tim Goree of Nokia and a rather well known metaversanlity riffed on some ideas without the aid of a power point (yay). Tim knows his stuff and I am happy he has managed to stick with it in a large corporate environment and keep pushing. Tim was musing on the avatar, not just as a single mesh used to represent you in a virtual world, but as an identity construct that flows across all digital media. He talked about some of Microsoft’s work in ultra realistic avatars (which help with the concept of visual identity) but he also talked about the underlying need to choose how and what to share with who and own your own identity.
I am borrowing Tim’s quote from Roland over at Mixed Realties (as I took no notes )
“Count up all the virtual worlds user hours, gaming user hours, chances are all this is more important than the web”, so Tim continued. “Avatars have been used to validate transactions for hundreds of years – think stamps, coins for example. These days there are billions of (virtual) avatars out there, why not use them to change society?”
It was then left for me to wrap up, as Tim had said some cool forward thinking things I just mentioned the IEEE Virtual Environment Colab and its event coming up as validation that many people are gathering again to push the industry to the next step and not just considering moving data from a to point b (though we still need to do that). I also pointed to the Btween3d conference in London sponsored by Sony that is bringing thought leaders from lots of industries to consider the whole of the domain.
So with consensus driving bodies such as the IEEE looking for the patterns and exemplars in the virtual world and related technology domain, and a major gathering in London on the subject it was good that the pioneers in the room at Metameets were still very much on the leading edge, pushing things forward whilst the world catches up with them
Next Day 2 (which is more art than science and a shows the breadth of what goes on out here/there)