Metaverse U, continued 5
Written on February 16, 2008 by Katherine W. Prawl
The Metaverse conference has broken for lunch, and most of the virtual world attendees are “AFK” (away from keyboard), too. So this might be a good moment to catch up with what has been happening on the side during this event.
I have to disagree with John Brown’s blog on one point. He said he thinks virtual conferences afford fewer networking opportunities than being there “in the flesh”. But just in the first morning of this event I’ve been invited to join two groups and befriended two avatars I’ve met here. At real life conferences this kind of thing usually takes much longer, in my experience, and can rarely occur in the middle of a presentation.
Also, the diversity of the virtual attendees is something that one might not find at many real life conferences. The conference wiki has a page where some of the virtual attendees have signed their names (RL and/or SL) and locations in “meat space”. There are avatars here in SL from every continent except Antarctica! (Australia isn’t listed in the wiki, but someone claiming to be an Aussie spoke up in the chat early on.)
OK, the event is starting again in about 10 minutes. Next panel will be Tony Parisi, CEO of Media Machines, Vladlen Koltun, from the Virtual Machines lab at Stanford, and Jon Brouchoud, an independent technologist who was a founder of Wikitecture 2.0.
The Metaverse U speaker list is on the conference website, too.
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