Why did metameets 2010 rock so much? The answer is simple, it is the same one I gave to John Mahon’s initial question on day one for what the killer app is for virtual worlds. People. Too often a conference will be about an particular product or artefact that needs to be sold/monetized/promoted. In the case of metameets, whilst there is a heavy Second Life focus, it is about us all connecting with one another. Some of that involves close proximity of one another’s carbon atoms gathered in a physical location, however lots of it was powered by people being present from wherever they happened to be at the time.
Clearly we are all enthusiastic about the use of virtual worlds and its related tech as a medium for the things we do. Also we are very tolerant and understanding of the various ways locations real and virtual got connected. We knew the tech would not always work, however the team how put it all together and made it run had so many bases covered it was very impressive.
Consider what was actually going on.
1. A group of early adopters fly in from all over the place to be at the Dublin Institute of Technology, many who know one another from purely online interactions and the mini fame bubble we have in all this.
2. A group of early adopters drop into the sim in Second Life where video from the DIT is streamed in.
3. The video of both Second Life and DIT is also streamed/recorded to a web chatroom
4. Some speakers present in Second Life as a talking head, some present as a more TV style chat show interview format.
5. Some speakers present in the DIT, mixture of slides, body language, stage performance etc.
6. Some speakers present as a Skype stream mixed with slides.
7. The whole thing gets threaded on twitter with a #metameets hashtag
8. Inworld chat in SL, and twitter, and web chat, and skype and physical voice are all used to present questions to speakers wherever they happened to be.
People in the physical room were also engaged with the online parts, some people in world, some on twitter etc.
How many conferences have you been to where there is not even a web stream, or a suggested hashtag, where the whole thing has been designed to be closed off. This was 100% open.
The team were both in the conference and organizing it, and as participants were were equally enabling and helping. A whole set of people were also not in Ireland but directing the streams from elsewhere
We realised that sometimes the remote presentations either direction meant we were a little detached form one another atmosphere wise. However, those are solvable. I was not in SL very much as I happened to not sit by a power socket, so it really was a very old fashioned problem of needing more electricity (we had wifi) to then engage in SL or webchat. I did though use my iphone a lot on the wifi to engage on twitter.
So not only did we have very interesting people saying very interesting things, we were doing it in the ecosystem that we all talk about and thrive in. After a talk people would go for a break, gather in small groups and chat about things, just as the groups in SL and wherever else were able to gather and chat. Chat sounds like a trivial word, but really it was to extend one another’s understanding, to challenge and support the various conversations, to share war stories.
The threads that came together though were so intriguing. The first night in Gogharty’s pub in Temple bar, talking with Ham Rambler about how his very famous Dublin in SL came into being. How the Blarney Stone in SL was modelled on the pub we were in. For me that had lots of serendipity, not least because the builder of said Dublin in SL was originally Robin Winter/Shukran Serendipity who now works at Imperial College with Dave Taylor/Daveee Commerce and who I have been working with on some medical training sims. The blarney stone also featured in one my earliest evangelist moments helping a client persuade the rest of his team about the benefits of virtual worlds, in particular the mirror world aspect. He described to me in front of them how I would reach this pub using verbal directions only. I then sparked up SL and turned the very corners he described to arrive at the Blarney Stone. They then almost 100% got that particular point.
So to all the organizers, speakers and attendees I have to say a huge thankyou. It is so nice to be amongst friends sharing ideas and leaving feeling motivated.
For me it was a great honour to do my pitch, to think some thoughts and also to do them as almost a warmup act for Philip Rosedale who was on straight after me.
Thankyou JojaDhara for inviting me to speak (via my old colleague Rick Reesen 🙂 )
Well done to Malburns and the crew for the remote TV studio direction and wrangling too 🙂
Slimwarrior and BevanWhitfield for seemingly powering the entire place with frantic keystrokes and electric enthusiasm.
Sitearm Madonna for keeping it all on the straight and narrow, and asking some damn good questions.
Other things and people you really should check out.
StuWarf should be an inspiration to us all. As he pointed out he probably was the youngest person in the room, yet he has driven into existence a whole business with Rezzed.tv whilst still being a student. I hope he will be at the next metameets and get to present his life experience to us too.
Chantal/MaMachinima and her marvellous machinima that the edit her pieces of work certainly bounced around with my emotions , a few brought a lump to my throat, others made me laugh. It is very inspiring too that her work has been show at the world expo in Shanghai.
Slimwarriors album Slimgirlfat is on itunes, I know that because I am listening to it now whilst typing this 🙂
It was brilliant to hear Lisa Feay/Elfay Pinkdot’s rant/monologue/empassioned plea and list of words she never wants to hear again (monetize anyone?). Her radio show and Jazz geek out is worth checking out http://www.coffeeandpajamas.com/
Claus Uriza and his pop art lab are certainly worth hearing more about and visiting.
On the tech side of things it was great to catch up with my fellow colleague at the old firm and travel with justincc. He is Mr opensim and it was great to see him in the mix and hearing some cool things to geek out to.
Jon Himmoff of Rezzable had some very interesting things with opensim and unity3d to talk about and show. Something dear to my heart, that kind of integration.
Now of course I realize that this post could go on and on, Jessica Pater, Tim Savage, Paul McDonagh-Smith, Tim Goree, Justin Bovington, Robin Harper, Joel Foner, Mark Kingdon, Philip Rosedale ….. all had cool things to say.
Who could not though be inspired by all this? All in the beautiful city of Dublin.
So yay for bangers and mash
Rock and roll fish and chips
(I hope epredator makes it onto the roll of honour up there with U2 🙂
Guinness and the Blarney Stone/Gogharty’s
The megaprim needle in the centre of Dublin
My one concern is that somehow we may have excluded some of our virtual world peers as they seemed to be a little annoyed and have made a film about it.
Next year more furries in RL please. Thankyou……
Helping organise thoughts, and speaking freely
Once again for my pitch at metameets I used a little bit of virtual world technology as a mental aid to help me figure out what it was I was going to say and in what order. I am finding thins an increasingly useful technique, so as this is the second time around for it I thought I would explain it again.
I created the presentation in the usual fashion a set of keynote/powerpoint slides, mostly because I had ones from other presentations that I wanted to thread in and re-use. Once I had the single threaded narrative sorted, and the slide in the right order a structure, for what is in effect a story, appeared.
In order to preserve this structure I took images from all the slides and put them into my local Opensim.
Once in there these simple flat panels take on a relationship to one another that just does not happen when you are flicking from slide to slide.
In the picture above the pitch really started at the back. The back row is the underpinning, an introduction. Seven related slides to go through at any pace, but ideally quite quickly.
Next is a challenging step forward, as the next row comes forward. To support that is a another row, which is held to the side a little as it is really optional. In this case its a slide about how it feels to attach things to your avatar. That allows free expression, no script but just a memory of a feeling.
Then the next row is group into three groups. This is a change of pace, a set of ideas with an example in each of the three.
Then the penultimate row as you come forward is the tying it all together picture. Ideally by the time I get here the other 3 ideas have started to make a little sense.
Then there is the final slide to finish on.
Rather than sit and read the slides or over rehearse I just had this image on my iphone of the layout. It is enough that I can see the sort of pages I had created and when presenting I can think where I am in the flow. So if there is some sort of distruption, or an idea that comes to mind whilst talking I can think quickly as to where it will fit in or if it has missed its chance.
This is really just storyboarding meets mindmapping, but the multiple dimensions of it and the visual memory of having been there is incredibly powerful and I recommend anyone try and structure some thoughts or ideas or keypoints in some way like this to see how it feels.
Does anybody else do this, I would love to hear stories about it ?
Not all avatars and islands – Metameets 2010
I am over here in Dublin this weekend for a very good gathering and conference Metameets 2010. I was lucky enough to be able to present yesterday, and as I mentioned in a previous post I decided to suggest we had some more places and directions to go.
The underlying premise of this is that a thread of narrative, and event, a set of ideas do not have to live in one virtual world or in one place. Threading and augmenting physical and virtual and web in multiple ways may start to give us new metaphors for connecting our ideas and improve human communication online. This is because though I love virtual worlds at the moment, and they are not going away, I know there is more we can do, better ways still to use all the ways we can interact and engage. It’s not all avatars and islands.
What was a great honour too was to effectively be the warmup act for Philip Rosedale, talking about Love Machine and Mark Kingdon talking all things Linden Lab/SL. Both those presentations were streamed in. In fact quite a few in the afternoon had to be streamed in due to the ash cloud stopping some travel.
I will write a post on the whole experience and some thoughts once we are done, but for now the slideshare of my pitch is up.
One of the anecdotes to describe this that came to my whilst I was talking was to consider being in an irish pub, with the band playing and wanting to join in on the penny whistle. You don’t have one to hand so you quickly check out the virtual world shops and find one you like, 3d print it out in the pub, join in and then find the whole thing is captured and streamed into another virtual world, like the blarney stone in Dubln SL. It’s not one place or one experience.
Social commentary on privacy 100 Robots style
It is well worth checking out 100 Robots, this video Jim Purbrick just posted is really well put together, a catchy song with a bite of social commentary and some great mixing in with Aleks’s interviews from the Digital Revolution (I still have not managed to get to a live gig much to my own annoyance)
” song about biometrics, click tracking, online privacy, Phorm, governmental data loss, corruption and the surveillance state. Features interviews with Chris Anderson, John Battelle, Sherry Turkle and Lee Tien from the BBC Digital Revolution rushes. Filmed and directed by Chris Cole.”
Nice work I think. The lyrics indicate the potential benefit that someone has of providing a “free” service but that we pay with with our information, our Kudos, our time or our support. Done well of course it can be for common good. Done badly, i.e. like a government system that loses data, or where information is abused for profit to the detriment of others, it is a concern.
Of course you can just sing along with the hook 🙂
Open source software really has come of age
The past few weeks I have had my head in an installation of Drupal 6.16 the content management system that sits very nicely on the LAMP stack. So I got to spark up another Ubuntu linux server off in a cloud somewhere,using the great apt packager on ubuntu/linux to go and fetch the extras I needed AND their dependencies. All the extra instructions I needed were on slicehosts forums for various pieces of config. So a full OS, all the extras I needed without having to trawl trough patches and dependency trees manually. In the good old days the stuff was pretty disorganised. If you came to it all fresh, or had been away for a while the “obviously you would have x, y or z” would be quite a pain.
The whole apache, mysql, php installation and config is also very straightforward. Yes you still need to know a few of the more arcane system command lines, or be able to look them up and editing even with nano or vi on a terminal is still rather annoying (terminals being a hangover from before we had more complex machines on the front end of servers). However, doing what would be the simplest task in a drag and drop world in a command line typing all the paths correctly etc makes you feel you are in charge of the whole thing. Which is why sysops are usually quite stroppy 🙂
Drupal’s install goes like a dream to. Again a whole set of extra modules are contributed to the let you do other things with your content, thinks like the CCK (content creation kit) which layers some new fields to be able to add to the page creation forms you make.
Back in 1998 I wrote content management systems, mainly in Lotus Domino, I know the problems and also the sort of things you need to do in the systems. So for me Drupal was great, once you get used to the naming convention of the template overrides and the ability to use views (SQL selects) on the data its all pretty slick. It is of course a long while since 2008, and it is interesting that whilst there were lots of commercial CMS packages that attempted to emerge none of them seem a patch on Drupal and even on WordPress. That is for most things, most web applications it is a pretty good fit.
Of course with any themeable template based system with a multitude of user contributed modules and gadgets there are going to be times when things just are not where you need them to be for your particular layout or information design. I spent a fair bit of time with one piece of data and layout trying to do it “properly” in the end I just changed the module, which let me put the class id’s in that I needed to make more sense of the display for the CSS. Not ideal but the point was it was there to do.
Commercial software has all to often been put in place to keep you away from the engine. Opensource be it opensim, drupal, wordpress, linux, freeswitch etc really do let you be the mechanic on the engine if you want, but you clearly don’t have to as the slickness of the design ethics in these applications through crowdsourced cooperation is quite stunning.
To do the full thing from commissioning a server to creating data structures in Drupal and then adjusting templates and style sheets is still a great swathe of skills needed, but when you have been in this for so long you know the patterns and roughly how things need to work. The ability to look up and search for problems, similar situations and generally fix on the fly though really helps to and can’t be understated. Much better than routing through a cupboard of manuals as we had to back in 1990!
Gotta love the web
Next week live and direct at Metameets Dublin
Time flies by so quickly and it is nearly time for Metameets 2010 in Dublin on 7-8th May. I am doing a 30 minute talk at the event, live and in person on 7th. If you look at the schedule you will see a good few familiar names . The speaker list is in an interesting order too I like the billing order 🙂
So what am I going to talk about in my slot.
The whole conference is right where I am interested in talking about things, the theme being “Old Myths and New Realities – The New Realities of Virtual Reality in the Old World.”. With the cast there I feel a little pressure to keep up. It is odd but when you are thrown in the ring with the people who you have been influenced by and whose work and thoughts you respect, with an audience who is well informed and educated on the subject, it becomes a different discussion to the usual evangelical one of “hey this really is a good idea people!”.
I want to build on my washing away cave paintings and where my current thinking is with how we are already changing things quite dramatically for society. So I was planning on this.
Synopsis: Virtual worlds have already acted as a disruptive technology and combined with other web movements have caused a positive social disruption to all parts of our lives, work politics and friendships. However many people are already scared by our new ways of communicating and interacting. Yet have we, as virtual world exponents, already got too comfortable with avatars and islands? Should we be considering where we go to next layering and combing real and virtual. How do we start to thread our online existences? Is there another step to take in the not so distant future that lets us communicate our ideas online in ways we have yet to evolve to consider.
Quite often things come up as I am presenting, its sort of an adlib performance as I am not big on writing scripts and sticking to them. If there is anything anyone wants to ask beforehand or see me weave into this then let me know here or on twitter etc.
For instance Rita King/Eureka DejaVu posted this article on something we did in world the other day where we met to discuss a drupal based web project and some wireframes. I quickly sparked up some shared media screens pointing to google drawings so we could walk and talk our way around the ideas, and a live version of a site on another panel. It was good to be able to move around the space and refer to things by our avatar position, though sometimes it felt there should be an event better way to negotiate and explain the concepts to one another in this space other than clunking our avatars around. However, it worked and it was quick, simple and almost cheap (if you ignore the fact I am paying Linden so much for an island!)
I have included Rita’s video here form her original post. You even get to hear my Norfolk accent droning on about how good drupal is as an example of voice comms 🙂 Rita said “go on say something interesting” 🙂
A new virtual world to visit – Wonderverse
I have just popped in and signed up to Wonderverse. http://www.thewonderverse.com a new virtual world application. It is good to see new ones appear as we have lost a few recently.
It is, of course, still an early beta, but (aside from being a windows only app) its quite a stylish look. The avatars are elongated cartoon style.
There is already storefront (you seem to have to use the web pages for that) that enables you to spend some of your initial credits on some basic clothes and styles. There seem to be a few more hairstyles for female avatars, I could not see how to get my green spikey hair I am so fond off 🙂
Chat is by chat bubbles over head and a range of emotes using / or right click are available.
It certainly plays a lot of music. I am not sure what streaming service it is attached to or where the music is from but its a pretty good selection.
I am not sure there is much to do just yet, but who knows 🙂 It does not seem to be a UGC environment though there were a number of tv screens on the wall of the clubhouse. Maybe see you in there sometime, you can guess my handle 🙂
I really do like this shared media
I keep finding myself bemused by the anti-slviewer2 comments in Second Life. Yes a few things are in different places, the colours have changed, but….. you get to interact with content in a whole different way with the media containers and true web on a prim. It may be that many people not being builders will not find a space to create an surface and mess with the texture settings to get access to this great addition. However I have shown a number of people some very powerful things very very quickly. For me that is all win!
Yesterday I was in world when we had the great British Airways storm the front moment as their planes headed to an ashcloud closed UK. We all became plane spotters on http://www.flightradar24.com/ watching the stacking trails as the natural disaster met health and safety met commercial pressure. I augmented my experience by happening to be in SL and stuck a web on a prim under my previously created gas cloud sculpture. It just added to the experience. Not only watching live flights and a historic moment but being logged into my favourite virtual world and embedding the data into it.
The real kicker though is how easy it is now, in particular with googles new google draw to work on shared diagrams. Yes whiteboards are just a click away. Being a web app you can also have people contribute who are not in world with you. You can leave a diagram and come back to check multiple updates later or work on it all collaboratively seeing the effect of one anothers work as it happen. You know just like standing in a room with someone doing a chalk and talk. I still prefer to use in world objects to get most points across, but sometimes, just sometimes scrawling on a wall does it for me.
I hope that if one thing good comes out of the air travel confusion it is a whole host of people asking “isn’t there a better way to work than emailing these attachments around and having telephone calls”. Of course many of us know there is, and regularly use them.
The ability to do up to 8 shared screens, so above we have both a whiteboard and my previous post and video on working differently available side by side. The option to use a forced privacy method by having the web page as a hud gives all sorts of options. I am still experimenting with how wearing the web can be used for some interesting effects too.
Its all good, give it a try.
AR, virtual worlds,3d printing plus me
Today I cut a video for a conference presentation, that may or may not make the cut. However I was happy with my 5 minute monologue. A single take I might add! Edited it all up threw up some overlays and viola.
Its about AR, where that fits with virtual worlds and 3d printers. Obvious really.
See what you think.
Don’t they test software anymore?
This is not a rant about the constant patching of my PS3 everytime I turn the thing on, nor about the minor updates hear and there in various operating systems and platforms. Well actually it might be, but its not intended to be rant at all.
Whilst playing the wonderful Just Cause 2 on the Xbox I bumped into a few bugs and glitches. They all happened around the large radio antenna dish up in the mountains.
The first saw me accidentally get inside of the buildings. The buildings tend to be texture walls to climb so once you are inside they seem to be invisible as there is not texture to render. This was amusing until I realized I could not get out at all. I was not able to spoof an evac and had no ammo to self harm so I had to quit 🙁 Still these things happen.
I then popped back to the same place and found a little glitch with the top edge of a building.
i.e. I am standing on nothing due to some odd collision detection.
For me I do not regard these are terrible flaws but it does raise the question of how, with such large expansive experiences it is ever possible to get enough test coverage and QA in place. Just Cause 2 has 400 sq miles of terrain, trees, building water. Vehicles moving around. Clearly the physics engine can be tested with a relative few vectors but when the place is built by hand, building placed its almost impossible to not have a few errors in place. Equally with a free roaming game its hard to tell when something is a bug.
I had driven a speed boat straight at a yacht. The speed boat was forced underwater with me still driving it, I had a submarine in effect. That is less of a bug a more an unintended consequence, the thing was it then became my mission to try and recreate it, which I eventually did.
Testing and coverage is actually not an instinctive thing to do as I have found with some clients. Where an atomic action happens with the same start and end conditions, but where it is held in a different part of a flow or sequence each time it is not always so necessary to run a test for every permutation and combination. Test the changes, test the extremes and test the critical path.
The software I used to build way back for internal corporate systems testing was a straightforward job in many respects, as we started to get more and more service, more and more permutations and many more functions it clearly has got a lot harder.
It is why I am not surprised that some tests really don’t get done in favour of patch later over the web, though at the same time I suspect some don’t get done because “hey we can patch it later”.
Anyway I am not moaning about Just Cause 2 as I am still in awe of its size and scale, just as I am with GTA IV and will no doubt be with Red Dead Redemption. Free roaming FTW!