Metaversatility :: Blog

I’ve been really busy with an as-of-yet-unannounced MV project which I’ll be happy to tell you all about at the end of October, but I did find some time to go to a couple of great events that were part of the Dr. Dobbs Life 2.0 Summit last week. The Life 2.0 Summit once again proved that there is a value to virtual worlds conferences, and both events I went to were well attended across the two-sim build.

The first panel I went to featured some of my favorite griefers libSL developers and was all about the fabulous things you can do with libSL bots. I was surprised that, all teasing aside, many of the audience questions did focus on the use of bots in griefing and traffic gaming. We use them extensively to enhance web-SL communication, extend SL functionality, and generally do a lot of awesome work.

The panel featured libSL lead developer Eddy Stryker/John Hurliman, libSL project manager otakup0pe Newmann/Jonathan Freedman, CMP Metaverse’s John Zhaoying, Baller City’s Dirty McLean, and surprise guest Christian Prior/Westbrook of Wello Horld and the OpenMV project.

I was also thrilled to attend a keynote by Tateru Nino about user engagement and experience in virtual worlds, which featured graphs on satisfaction, friction, and misconception.

Panel transcripts and recordings will be available on the Life2.0 site in the coming weeks. Thanks so much to Dr. Dobbs and sponsors for putting on this great week-long event!

I have an ever-compiling stack of paper items that i’ve been given or have found over the past while … they’re either so terrible or wonderful that i’ve never thrown them away, despite their uselessness. The mountain of business cards I’ve collected over the past couple months sits pensively next door. I’ve transferred the consciousness of each piece of the best of this pile of ephemera into the digital realm.
Take a look (note: some of these things are non-things)

the archiving effort was brought about by the very best business cards i’ve ever gotten, collected at GDC last week…

Brent is a sound engineer/multi-instrumentalist based out of LA, working with the Squeak E Clean outfit. Neglecting their amazing repertoire, experience, etc., it truly wins a number of awards, including ‘least informative/most memorable.’ The latter qualification is a difficult one to achieve, and they pass this with flying colors.

Brent and his crew are new to game production, but their cards are one of the best ephemeral manifestations of role-playing or the mutability of identity. It’s blended reality in the very best way.

Now, you can imagine what happens when everyone at a conference is carrying cards that act as real combat currency…

I could think of a few panelists that’d attempt to consume my soul…

We seem to be about 80% accomplished on the summer/fall conference run. With SoP, SLCC & GDC behind us, we have just a couple more acronyms to look forward to… namely VWCon & SxSW. I’m excited about both, will look forward to handing out cool shwag at our no-doubt spectacular booth, but my dark secret is… I’m looking forward to southby much more, even though it’s so far off. Last year, Peter & Adri attended the interactive conference, and Sarah & I caught the tail end of it with the wrapup party (that my smooth operating got us into sans badges, high-five to pretending to know Britt Daniel). And we did have an inordinately fantastic time during the following days of sxsw music fest. I’m looking forward to immersing myself into both this year, hopefully with a booth and a couple mv panel cameos.

A scattered batch of images, some pertinent to SoP & others not so much, are here

headlined, of course, by a granulated photo of Aaron doing his thing on the education panel. Yay educatainment

Aaron, Matt and I will be at the Metaverse Passport meetup in Austin tonight, and Matt will be sticking around Austin for the Austin Game Developers Conference.

More information on the meetup, where you can also RSVP, can be found here. Important details below:

Date: Today, Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Time: 5:30pm - 7:00pm
Location: Cuba Libre, 409 Colorado St, Austin, TX 78701

Apparently over 90 people have RSVP’d so far, it should be a good time. Hope to see you there.