When I first thought of running the moot, it was mid 2007 and I had the notion 2008 would be the year of the virtual world: where the 10 year+ old dream of a public matrix/snowcrash digital network is finally realised. Despite this expectation, I was astounded by the meteoric rise in number of new virtual worlds and the strength of business interest in the first half of 2008. This sudden increase of interest was reflected in the membership in the Association of Virtual Worlds, which reached over 2,000 members in the first 3 months. In July TechCrunch reported $345 million invested in vitual worlds for the first half, not bad!
It was about time to have something on virtual worlds and social networks at SIGGRAPH conference, the biggest interactive graphics conference in the world. I did not know how well such a meeting would be received so I was pleasantly surprised by the strong responses to invitations. In 2007 I also felt that social networks and virtual worlds were made for each other and the two technologies would start to merge to form what I call super social networks. So I made this the theme of the first moot.
These are the main highlights observations from my perspective.
Merging of social networks and virtual worlds
Only some of the presenters addressed the theme directly. However, it was clear from the presentations that some kind of merger between social nets and virtual worlds is actually happening. Interestingly, it is two-way: not just adding a virtual world to a socnet such as facebook but pushing information back the other way. Tony Parisi, of Vivaty showed integration into facebook: Tony entered his virtual room via his facebook account. In the room he showed his facebook friends connections. Vivaty, There and others showed video from youtube, pictures from flicker. They also talked about taking pictures, video and other content from the virtual world into your favorite socnet site.
Target market
I found it interesting the target ages indicated in most cases is the younger generation (roughly 13 to 30) because I was expecting to see more on the case for businesses to save money and improve efficiency / effectiveness of operations, which would represent an older audience. Doug Twilleager was the only one to directly address this approach, at least in relation to Sun's own enterprise. Perhaps with the tightening of credit, the ideas of using virtual worlds for connecting, conferencing and collaborating within the global enterprise will soon come to the fore.
It was also interesting that There took on the role of PG13 and brand protection from the beginning. Perhaps as a consequence, they also took on the difficult task of content reviewing and now have a lot of tools to aid the process. I was surprised to hear There have got it down so that only three people are needed in the review pipeline. It was also noteworthy that Michael Wilson was up front about the extensive data collection provided to advertisers. This is something that I suspect is done more and spoken of less across the social network and virtual worlds industries.
Games
Trying to get a handle on what is needed to bring the "value" of gameplay into business products and in particular virtual worlds has been a bit of a preoccupation of mine. I have often enjoyed some good 3D games and felt there are aspects worthy of importing into serious applications. Michael Wilson articulated There's strategy to bring some of the aspects of games into business applications in his description of four elements of gameplay they are bringing into There.
Art is not big enough
The idea that the concept of "art is not big enough" to encompass what is happening in Second Life (and virtual worlds by extension) was most fascinating. Further, Mick Brady's choice of the concept of "creative" struck a chord as I feel virtual worlds are capable of unleashing the full impetus of the most powerful force on Earth: the imagination.
Thin/thick clients.
I have been struggling recently with the question of what is the one technology, or minimal set of technologies, to bring a virtual world to the widest audience. However, a number of presenters showed it is quite reasonable and perhaps inevitable to address wide accessibility with a range of technologies, especially on the client. Very thin to very fat clients were described as being supported by There and Sun and Peter Schickel showed BS Contact running on a netbook. Sun described support for collaborators to connect even by phone (I think that meant audio), There will run on 2003 vintage PCs and Multiverse has support for a 2D Flash client.
Education
It has been interesting to see the extent to which virtual worlds have been taken on board by educators. Note the comments by one of the audience: "virtual worlds are changing education", creating new ways for students to become involved in what they are learning and make something else of it. Virtual worlds are not just a form of eLearning. This idea backed up by Mick Brady.
Mind changing?
It was a pleasure to have an artist present at the meeting and Mick Brady's presentation of Not Possible In Real Life, griefer art, collaborative and individual works certainly demonstrated some of the unlimited possibilities of the empowered imagination. More on this subject can be found at http://www.mikimojo.com. I think that I saw the eyes of the mostly technocrat audience open a little wider during his presentation. Mick's comment: “The creative of the future is going to be a multidimensional thinker” plus the comments on education are painting a picture of a mind changing movement enabled by the emerging collection of new Web technologies.
Creative collaboration
A number of the artworks shown by Mick were exemplars of creative collaboration, in some cases with over 100 collaborators. It was a point taken up by a Linden employee from the audience who pointed out that, although many had emphasised how difficult it was to create content using the Second Life in world tool, most people did not create content on their own in Second Life.
Emotion/expressions
It was noted that a big factor that makes a virtual world better for meetings than a social network or a chat meeting was that once people are together in a meeting, embodied virtually, there was an improvement in the sense of connection/presence. This phenomenon was also highlighted in the Digital Earth Panel. It was further noted that facial expression or emotive gestures are very important but there was no indication of how this would be implemented.
Web 3D
Given the mention of Snowcrash, I was reminded about the past 12 years or so of Web3D development. Web3D became began in 1995/6 when tony Parisi, Mark Pesce, Gavin Bell and others created the Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML). At that time the dream of a matrix / Snowcrash inspired vrtual world was strong. The dream faded over the next decasde but now suddenly it seems here to stay. Apart from myself, three of the presenters were from the Web3D community: Peter Schickel, Tony Parisi and Don Brutzman. It is good to see some of the early proponents still carrying the dream into reality.