Metaverse U, continued 4
Written on February 16, 2008 by Katherine W. Prawl
One of the panelists at the Metaverse U conference just mentioned that he doesn’t live in California, so he had to get on an airplane to come to Stanford to talk about virtual worlds, and how hypocritical that is. Good point! Right now the technology is really not quite advanced enough to have really interactive blended reality events, mostly because of bandwidth limitations, but we’re getting there. One of the purposes of this conference, in fact, is to try to promote such things. Streaming the event into SecondLife is a start, but so far it is only by passing comments through a moderator that virtual attendees can participate.
Some previous smaller events I’ve attended have had 2-way visual contact by displaying a computer screen showing the view of an avatar in SecondLife in Real Life while streaming video onto screens in the SecondLife location. These events are presently plagued by halting video and the necessity to explain to newcomers how to turn it on, but eventually this will be almost automatic and certainly ought to smooth out technically as broadband becomes more reliable and widespread. Only then will we be able to feel like both worlds are truly interactive.
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