Metaverse One

Reality became augmented this week in Silicon Valley at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The third annual Augmented Reality Event, aka A.R.E.2012, brought the best and brightest around the world to the Bay area for a two day conference. Companies, research institutes, artists, and more once again got a chance to show off and experience the latest in computer vision, head & eye displays, motion sensor, mobile, and related augmented reality technologies. " ARE is where the people working on and using Augmented Reality technologies come together to explore best practices and innovations in software development, tools, business strategies, design and marketing. Developers, technologists, marketers, hardware manufacturers, mobile operators, researchers, designers, startups, business developers, and entrepreneurs gather to share their experiences and learn from their peers" - website Event organizer Ori Inbar (CEO Ogmento) interviewed by ARnewsTV before the event. A...

A few months ago I posted about the Kinect device from Microsoft. Kinect, since its launch in November, has sold over 2.5 million units in less than 30 days. This makes it the fastest adopted consumer electronic device ever, surpassing the recent title holder the iPad. Now what is really impressing me is how the hacking community has gone wild with the device and I recommend visiting KinectHacks.net to see what I mean. The technology behind the Kinect intrigues me. I know very little about 3D depth sensors and RGB cameras, so to learn more I decided to visit the Intel Lab Seattle that has been doing research in this area long before Kinect was released. Located by the University of Washington, Intel Lab Seattle is a Center of Excellence in Context-Aware Sensor-Driven Systems. Interdisciplinary projects and an emphasis on prototyping novel systems and user evaluation drive its agenda. Led by Director Dieter Fox , the research staff are recognized experts across a range of topics fro...

This past weekend was the second iteration of Metaverse U put on by Henrik Bennetsen at Stanford University. The Metaverse U conference took place at Stanford University on May 29 th and 30 th . The goal of this years conference was to explore the cutting edge applications of virtual worlds and the open platforms that drive them. Henrik gathered an impressive lineup of speakers and I will embed their videos here once they go online. Some highlights from the presentations: Sirikata , Stanford's open source platform for virtual worlds, had a high representation this year with a demo that showed some of its editing features. Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Stanford University) talked about cultural heritage with virtual worlds stating "museums are the original 3D world" and the need to embrace (inter)active models of educational programming with an emphasis on bottom-up counterparts to traditional top-down approaches. John Hurliman (Intel) presented Cable Beach, a service based a...

So the last full week of March ran the Game Developers Conference at the Moscone Center here in San Francisco. I love this event as it offers a glimpse at the innovation coming from the Game Industry, and brings in so many colleagues and friends from around the globe to a spot less than a block away from my office. A jam packed week of meetings where many conversations happened and good alliances were formed. The GDC this year was very reflective of the economic crunch taking place. The career expo was just as busy as the exhibit hall with a steady stream of students and professionals passing out resumes and looking for jobs. More than less of the associates I chatted with from the virtual worlds industry were no longer with the companies they once were. Even the exhibit hall had a smaller presence than in the past. Regardless of size, there still was an impressive group of exhibitors. For game editors, Hero Engine had a nice setup where the rep walked me thru some of the features of ...

Last week I donned my Web3D Consortium hat and participated in the second meeting of the Virtual Worlds Roadmap . Sponsored by Intel, Samsung, Electric Sheep Company , NGI Group , and Digital Space , the Virtual Worlds Roadmap seeks to increase the success rate of virtual world-based ventures and the productivity of investment through the publication and distribution of state-of-the-art thinking and analysis on: Visions of what value virtual world technology will bring to specific applications Technical and business barriers to achieving that value Case studies on successes to date A roadmap and timeline for achieving mass adoption of specific applications. This was an intimate group full of familiar faces from the virtual worlds space. The 3D web open standard (X3D) had great representation at the event from both the Web3D Consortium and Exit Reality . Many in the crowd were impressed by the power of the open standard. A series of various industry demos and applications I showed thro...