NewMedia On the Go » Blended Reality

Great Presentation about Science in SL

Katherine W. Prawl — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 02:35:12 +0000

Troy McConaghy, who in SecondLife™ is known as Troy McLuhan, gave his presentation about “science stuff” in SecondLife tonight for the Serious SL in Boulder Meetup group. This blended reality event was primarily a SecondLife event projected into real life via projected computer images.

If you wonder how many science places SecondLife contains or just how serious work can be done in a virtual world, be sure to watch this slideshow, and turn on your speakers or headphones for the narration.

I should also mention that Troy has made enormous contributions to the International Spaceflight Museum, where he has been one of the planning group officers and an officer of the nonprofit corporation that supports it. As Kat Lemieux, I am one of the founders of the museum.

ISM is Not NASA!!

Katherine W. Prawl — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 23:29:45 +0000

I was just watching the video of Rep. Ed Markey’s committee hearing yesterday about virtual worlds, during which Philip Rosedale (CEO of Linden Lab, creator of SecondLife®) and others testified. Rosedale showed a machinima that included images of several parts of the International Spaceflight Museum (ISM), of which I am a co-founder and CEO. That’s wonderful! But what was not wonderful is that the whole time one watches images of rockets and robots on the ISM, the voiceover is talking about the great things NASA is doing in SecondLife! As a matter of fact, they didn’t show any of NASA CoLab, which is the next island over, and which, incidentally, ISM people helped people from NASA Ames Research Center get started. No, we were not contractors, and in fact the ISM has never received any support from NASA or any other US government agency (although we have had some welcome financial support from the UK’s National Physical Laboratory). And yes, I’ve pointed out the non-NASA character of the ISM to Linden Lab people before.

Many thanks to ISM Planning Group member Paradox Olbers for the info about and link to Markey’s hearing. Be sure to check out his blog for more details and his followup interview with Markey’s staff.

NMC and VWs

Katherine W. Prawl — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 10:59:19 +0000

I was just following some links found in advance slides from an NCOIC conference that’s taking place on Feb. 26th in Denver, when I clicked a link in one of the sites and stumbled across information about a project New Media Consortium (NMC) has announced. They are embarking on a 2-year collaboration with Sun Microsystems called Open Virtual Worlds, which includes “developing and extending” Sun’s Project Darkstar and Project Wonderland by creating content for those virtual worlds.

Not only have I been aware of NMC in SecondLife since they burst on the scene there, but their CEO, Larry Johnson, is a director of the ISM Corporation, which is the nonprofit that supports the International Spaceflight Museum, which I lead. Small world. Or small worlds. Here’s a video Larry recorded and posted on YouTube about their project:

By the way, Bob Marcus has promised to make the NCOIC conference proceedings available to members of the Serious Second Life Group in Boulder, of which I’m a member. So I may have more to say about this event later, even though I won’t be able to attend since there will not be a SecondLife blended reality event.

Metaverse U, Day 2 #2

Katherine W. Prawl — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 00:04:46 +0000

During the break I’ve been catching up on email. One of the messages waiting for me was from Erica Driver of Forrester Research, whom I’d met at a previous blended reality event with a different group. She had done a presentation about a research report Forrester had recently published that she worked on. She asked me to add her blog to the list I started yesterday of people who are blogging about the Stanford Metaverse U conference. Absolutely!

There are several other bloggers who have mentioned their URLs in the SecondLife chat. I’ll pull those out later and add them tonight.

Metaverse U, Day 2 #1

Katherine W. Prawl — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 19:14:14 +0000

I’m at the Metaverse U conference again today, but I’ve been participating in text side chatter in SecondLife instead of blogging about it. We had quite a discussion about the way this event has been presented in world, which I’ll try to summarize later when I have chance to review my chatlog about it. Some very good points (and some not so good ones) were made by several people, especially Prokofy Neva, a well-known (notorious?) commentator on SecondLife.

In a posting yesterday I mentioned a blog by Mark Brown in which he said the problem with attending conferences in virtual worlds was the lack of networking opportunities. I took exception to that, and today he has retracted graciously, in his write-up of an interview we did after we met at the conference.

Back to the conference now. Brewster Kahle is speaking and he’s fascinating.

Linking to Metaverse U

Katherine W. Prawl — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 04:20:02 +0000

Here are some links I’ve found to people who are blogging about the Metaverse U conference this weekend. I’ll edit this post to add more as I stumble across them. I met several other people at the conference site in SecondLife who said they are blogging about it, but until I see a post about it I won’t add them here.

Metaverse U, continued 9

Katherine W. Prawl — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 01:14:46 +0000

Paradox just gave out the URL for his Flickr URL about Metaverse U. More pix will be posted as the conference proceeds. Unfortunately, the afternoon session had a lot of streaming video glitches, so it’s a good thing the video will be available on the Web soon.

The conference is in its final plenary session for the day. It starts again in the morning, so I’ll resume live blogging about it then.

Metaverse U, continued 8

Katherine W. Prawl — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 22:57:12 +0000

Someone in the SecondLife audience at the Stanford Metaverse U conference, listening to the presentation by Jon Brouchard about Wikitecture said Jon has blogged about this at http://archsl.wordpress.com.

One of the points in Brouchard’s talk was something about people always asking if they can import their content from other 3D worlds into SecondLife. He said, not at the moment, but the wisdom of crowdsourcing won — an avatar mentioned the 3PointD.com article about doing that, published back in 2006. However, the Blender object import tool created really, really messy objects made of hundreds if not thousands of primative pieces, using far too many resources. So, a true format conversion is a much better solution, but one that so far is not available.

Now, after another long break an my computer crashing (thunderstorms in the area), we’re back. The panel on the stage now consists of Raph Koster, a game designer, Cory Ondrejka, former CTO of Linden Lab, Inc., and Howard Rheingold, a noted futurist.

Metaverse U, continued 7

Katherine W. Prawl — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 22:44:13 +0000

I’m just messaging with a friend of mine who is also at the SecondLife version of the Metaverse U conference, Paradox Olbers. He tells me he’s posting pictures of this event on his blog, too. He says he’s going to make a tag there specifically for this event, so if you go there after the fact you should be able to find them easily.

Metaverse U, continued 5

Katherine W. Prawl — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 21:29:06 +0000

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.