Metaversatility :: Blog

The San Antonio newspaper (Express News) has a couple of articles on virtual worlds today, one covering a recent MV presentation to the Technology Advocates of San Antonio (TASA) and the other covering virtual worlds for kids with mentions of Webkinz, Club Penguin and Whyville.

Now it’s time to go pick up a few RL copies.

A while back, I came across an awesome commercial on cnn.com for Dassault Systemes which showed some crazy sort of tactile 3d system people were using in a demonstration.

Fast forward to today…

3dVia looks to be an ambitious new project to bring 3d to the masses. From their website, “3DVIA is the newest of the 6 Dassault Systèmes brands. Its mission is democratizing the usage of 3D so that everybody can use it in its everyday life, either at work or at home, through the web. Our objective is to give you the power of 3D.”

Included on their site is a set of 3D “experiences” which let you do lots of neat things with the models in a browser based plugin, including building and riding your own rollercoaster, configuring and setting up lighting scenes, racing cars, and more.

I really like what I see so far and will definitely be keeping my eye on future developments here.

(Hi — I’m cross-posting this from Terra Nova. Hope to see many of you there! Aaron.)

State of Play V: Building the Global Metaverse is the fifth annual State of Play conference on the future of virtual worlds. Organized by New York Law School, in conjunction with Trinity University, with the support of Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, this year’s conference invites experts across disciplines to discuss the transnational dimensions of the Metaverse and the impact of virtual environments on education, law, politics and society.

Virtual worlds are crucial building blocks of global civil society. As such, they harbor great potential for relationship-building and cooperation across national borders. We hope you will join us for this important interdisciplinary conversation about the future of the global Metaverse. The conference will be held on August 19-22, 2007 in Singapore.

The conference will feature experts from around the world speaking about:

• Cross-cultural communication and avatar-to-avatar diplomacy
• Strategies for understanding behaviors and values of virtual world residents
• Regulating speech, property, and addiction in the Metaverse
• Building transnational businesses in virtual worlds
• Using virtual environments to teach kids and teenagers
• Space, place and virtual world cultures

We also present two new documentaries about how global virtual worlds intersect with real-world economies and social structures: Gold Farmers (Ge Jin, 2007) and Ideal World (Snyder, Thomas, and Portocarrero, 2007). On Wednesday, August 22nd, we offer several half-day workshops on topics including virtual world journalism, using virtual environments to transform global business, educational applications of virtual worlds, and managing virtual identities.

For conference schedule and registration please visit: www.nyls.edu/stateofplay. We hope to see you there.

Sincerely,

Aaron Delwiche (Conference Co-Chair)
Dan Hunter (Conference Co-Chair)
Beth Noveck (Conference Founder)