metaverseu or metaverse flu?

A little over a week ago, I left MetaverseU with a full plate of topics to blog about. My panel with Raph and Howard. Some thoughts on why being transparent and positive about competitors pays off in the long run. The latest MacBook Air plot twists. Prep for the upcoming Microsoft conference on Game Development in Computer Science Education. I was really looking forward to the week.

Then the flu hit.

A week later and I’m barely back on my feet, having learned some valuable lessons. Especially the “if you’re getting feverish, don’t fly to LA for your class as the flight home will be very unpleasant”-one.

I missed GDC. All of it. So, if you saw something cool, please let me know because I didn’t get to GDC at all. Nor am I going to make the Microsoft conference, which really sucks.

I’m finally reading email again, so apologies if you are waiting on a response from me. I’ll try to get to you today or tomorrow! After that, this blog will get rolling again.

brand connection

Reuben Steiger just gave an amazing stat from the "60+" campaigns that Millions of Us have run:

The average user spends 3 to 24 hours engaged with a brand over the course of a campaign

That is an astoundingly large number. It also speaks to how different virtual world marketing will need to be compared to web marketing.

henrik's questions

Henrik has posted 4 questions about the metaverse that he hopes Metaverse U participants will answer. As the day gets underway, here are my thoughts.

What excites you about current metaverse technology?

The diversity of exploration is the most exciting aspect of where virtual worlds are going, especially the wide range of unannounced projects we'll see over the next year, whether a full world approach like Second Life, or the myriad approaches leveraging the web-as-platform that will impact media consumption, production, community formation, and a whole host of not-at-all sexy business uses. Sure, we're seeing a host of social kids games and tiny advertising worlds, but these explorations are good. Like the Web in 1997 (or 1995, or whatever), most of these experiments will fail.

And we will learn from all of them. The fact that people are kvetching about this leads to...

What concerns you about current metaverse technology?

This is less a technological concern than a concern about how virtual worlds are sometimes discussed. There is tremendous technological overlap between mirror worlds, virtual worlds, middleware, and games, equally significant differences exist between use cases, business models, audiences, and interfaces. Buildings may not be as fun to play with as Scrabulous.

Some of the protocols will surely become standards but we should keep in mind Mitch Kapor's statements about the mistake of premature standardization. It is critical to the long-term success of virtual worlds that small commercial worlds and games are starting up in parallel to Google Earth and corporate uses. We are just gaining enough experience to start thinking like virtual world natives rather than tourists, so we have the opportunity to be expansive in our thinking and imagination.

What will be most the surprising impact of metaverse technology on society within the next decade?

Even the dreamers aren't thinking big enough about virtual worlds. The walls between the digital and the real are falling -- personal fabrication, mass customization, alternate reality gaming, crowdsourcing, open spectrum, remote collaboration, increasing access to the Web, pervasive sensor technology, virtual corporations -- and virtual worlds will accelerate these changes. Consider the changing use of information technology from '88 to '98, or '98 to '08. Virtual worlds, metaverses, et al are another step along this path and their impact will be at least as significant.

What barriers will metaverse technology never overcome?

This is like asking what barriers communications technology will never overcome. Or, technology in general. As Linda Stone has discussed, time is the scarce resource that technology is never going to overcome. Or, as she argues, is actually making more scarce.

Virtual worlds, like other technologies that reduces the cost of learning, can help regain some of the time, by reducing travel time or increasing the rate of trust production. Moreover, by improving collaboration and innovation, virtual worlds join the Internet and Web in generally reducing scarcity of goods and services. Until we eliminate sleep and really understand genomics, the 24 hour day and lifespan will be tricky to overcome.

Everything else is fair game.

metaverse roadmap summit

Spent most of today at Stanford at the Metaverse Roadmap workshop. It was a nice chance to catchup with a lot of friends from the space, most of whom I have not seen since leaving Linden. The day was a mix of lightweight presentations and mingling time, which was great. Some of the presentations were very interesting. Sibley of Electric Sheep did a good job concisely explaining the challenges and surprises of selling virtual world experiences to corporations. Outside of the usual set -- compatibility, performance, smaller downloads -- he called out data exporting as a key requirement. Businesses have web services for their data and get frustrated when they can't leverage that data and those systems. Mitch Kapor gave a great talk introducing his current exploration of 3D cameras. Using a mix of technologies, 3D cameras generate good 3D data on their entire field of view, opening up a host of interesting UI opportunities. The most important thought from the talk, I thought, was a point about the distinction between recognizing ideas while remaining agnostic to the which technology or approach wins in the market. Obvious, I suppose, but it is easy to conflate the two when considering projects to work on or invest in. Raph Koster spoke a bit -- claiming he would be cynical :-) -- about the trends toward commercial, small, and advertising worlds. He also raised the good point that we need to remember to read our speculative fiction for inspiration. He called out "Halting State" as a particularly good read.

All-in-all, a useful day, although I personally found the talking-with-others portions of the day the most interesting. As I start zeroing in on what I want to work on next, being able to bounce ideas around with lots of smart people is worth its weight in gold.