Belatedly, but as promised, here is the SlideShare link to the Emerging Technology: 2020 presentation I delivered at the Emerging Technology Conference at ISU, as well as the Federal Consortium of Virtual Worlds conference at NDU. I will provide an annotated one in the near future as well.
For those of you who are interested in such things, I’m appearing on Metanomics tomorrow at 12:00 Noon PDT on a panel discussing Robert Bloomfield’s recent interview with Second Life founder Philip Rosedale.
Other panelists include TIG Contributor Benjamin Duranske, Wagner James Au, ‘Dusan
Writer,’ Nic Mitham, Tish Shute, ‘Betinna Tizzy,’ and Roland Legrand.
You can catch Metanomics “live” in Second Life or via the web.
On September 23rd, the Eduverse Foundation will be hosting a pre-Picnic event Symposium 3. Looking at the intersections between Serious Gaming, Virtual Education, Web3D Technology and Social Networking, the event looks certain to be worthy successor to June's Symposium 2 event.
As was the case last year, last week's Serious Virtual Worlds conference was a highlight in the busy conference season. Sara de Freitas and David Wortley with the Coventry Serious Games Institute aggregated an excellent cross-section of industry and academia for two days of insight into mixed-reality, medical simulation, interoperability, and mobile interfaces into virtual spaces. This, combined with their special form of Coventry Hospitality (which invariably involves a castle older than my country, beer and some video game guitars) adds up to a fine learning experience. Add this one to your show calendar next year.
Next up on my speaking agenda is a panel discussion at today's debut of Kelley Executive Partners' Virtual Campus and their "Virtual Worlds and the future of Business Education". Ironically, I pursued
graduate studies at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business for one year during the roller-coaster-ride of spinning up Cisco's Networked Virtual Environments efforts. Having their excellent faculty and content available virtually, via Second Life, would have been a boon for frequent flyers such as myself. Say, perhaps they still have my records and I can pick up where I left off.........
Be sure to attend today's event in Second Life by registering at: http://kelleyevents.com/
Original post here
In beautiful Coventry, England today and tomorrow is the Serious Virtual Worlds '08 conference, as part of the Serious Games Institute of Coventry University. Hosted by Sara de Freitas and David Wortley, the conference has been at the forefront of mixed-reality events and location-integration between the real and virtual worlds.
I had the good fortune to keynote the conference last year and again this year. Below is a link to a swf (flash) file of my slides, which I will annotate with audio (or link to the show video recorded) when I get back to my home base next week.
More than one vendor I spoke with at the Virtual Worlds Expo last week mentioned that they were working through 'scaling' problems with regards to their datacenters. These were not only children or tween worlds for playing games, but also 'business virtual world' advocates.
I began to think about this a bit more on my ample airplane confinement last/this week and the thought occurred to me that this could present an Achilles heel to the growing use of virtual worlds within the enterprise. Bear with me, I am jet lagged as all hell and 1.5 intimidating-German-machine-espressos into my morning, so feel free to point out any blatant miscalculations or misconceptions I may write forthwith.
Look at Warcraft. They have nearly twenty datacenters worldwide. Why? Because they don't want people having a degraded game experience due to cross-ocean latency on the Internet, especially when that latency isn't manifested as just a dropped voice or YouTube packet or two, but the difference between a live level 70 elf and a dead one.
Now, Warcraft comes as a big-fat-DVD of pre-loaded code, little user-created-content to speak of (within a limited palette), and so they are sending coordinate data (what we used to call 'telemetry data') to players to pull down assets from their pre-loaded library. From a traffic perspective, pretty lightweight, albeit latency sensitive. In this regard, it is analagous to the old TN3270 Mainframe emulation code that we used to ship around indescriminately in 1992.
Fast forward to the office of the future, the virtual office version. You have packetized spatial audio. You have user created content. You have streaming video and powerpoints and presence information. You have ever-changing mixes of synchronous and asynchronous traffic types all over walls and tables of your virtual headquarters. This is much more bandwidth intensive than Warcraft, and if you are having a staff or funding meeting, the voice/video latency is arguably more critical than simple 'the dragon killed you before you hit it with your sword' telemetry data. The PowerPoints can be a little delayed without anyone complaining, admittedly.
So, given that you can't 'shard off' the different offices (you are trying to facilitate the 'death of distance', right?) and you need to have a single virtual office where people can intermingle and interact richly, how are you going to accomodate the insane bandwidth and latency requirements of a fully-annotated virtual environment? Or, are the geographically remote participants going to have to suffer the latency inherent in such a rich environment as the cost of global collaboration?
I don't know the answer yet, just the question. I will be doing some more thinking about this this week in Coventry England where I have the honor of being the keynote presenter for the second year running at the Serious Virtual Worlds conference. I will bring up this issue to the virtual world vendors and customers present and see if any of them can quickly dispell my concerns. Else, feel free to suggest solutions or disabuse me of any misconceptions in the comments.
Over the next two months, I will be doing a fair bit of speaking regarding the future of the virtual workforce and workspaces, which will coincide with the release of Technology Intelligence Group's Industry Outlook 2008-2009.
Tomorrow, I am virtually participating on the "Future of Virtual Worlds" panel as part of the vBusinessExpo in Forterra OLIVE, organized by Clever Zebra. I will be joining Bruce Joy of VastPark, Nicole Yankelovich of Sun's Project Wonderland, Darius Lahoutifard of 3DXplorer, Corey Bridges of Multiverse, and John Swords of the Electric Sheep Company. I guess I am the only non-platform person there. :-)
Next week, I am traveling to Los Angeles (and bringing my children to the House of Mouse) to speak on Rita Turkowski's panel at the Web3D conference attached to SIGGRAPH. The panel, on Sunday August 10th, is entitled "I see Web3D's Future in..." and will have panelists from diverse parts of industry so it should be an interesting cocktail.
Shortly thereafter, I return to the City of Angels (fulfilling the curse laid upon me when I moved from there in 1996 warning that people can never actually escape) to speak at the Virtual Worlds Expo 2008, where I will be participating on the September 3rd "Technical Visionaries Discuss and Debate The Future of Virtual World Technologies" panel with an august group of visionaries including John Swords, Ian Hughes (epredator), and Mark Wallace. This one should be fun to watch, and if it wasn't so early in the morning, I'd bring a bottle of Tequila to get things rolling properly.
To round out September, I will be returning to beautiful Coventry England to keynote the Serious Virtual Worlds conference held by David Wortley of the Coventry University Serious Games Institute. If you haven't followed the work they are doing there, and those that are working closely with SGI, you should take the time to do so.
The good news is that all of my other engagements during August and September are virtual in nature and will not be emitting the carbon of actual air travel. Now, I'm off to go plant a forest in my backyard to offset these trips.
The indefatigable Ren Reynolds is helping coordinate tVPN's Virtual Policy '08 conference in London, in conjunction with and hosted by the (British) Department of Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) on the 22nd and 23rd of July. I will be there speaking about the past/present/future of virtual worlds with an eye towards what government activity is needed (and not needed) to help accelerate the widespread adoption of virtual world technologies.
If you are in London in late July, please drop me an email and perhaps we can all get an informal roundtable together.
On a related note
In 2006, I took my family to London and Norway over the Summer holiday. This morning, I broke the news to my girls that daddy had to go on a business trip to London for the conference. Partial transcript follows:
Daddy: It's in London girls, do you remember London from our vacation?
Emma (6): Yes, that's where the Queen lives!
Daddy: Yes Emma, that's right, the Queen. The Queen called and wants daddy's help!
Emma: What, to wash her floors?
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, it seems.
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