Metaverse One

Over the past few years I have been engaging a lot more with various entities in Denmark. One such group that has recently caught my attention is the Danish library system. Now I do remember coming across this report years back about the city of Aarhus Main Library's Transformation Lab and being impressed. Recently Dave Arendash, CTO at SpiralConcepts, and I were invited to present at SimLibrary, an event highlighting mixed reality technologies for libraries, held in Odense, Denmark. From the SimLibrary Website (translated from Danish):  SimLibrary is a cooperation between Odense Central Library, Aalborg, and Herning libraries with Euman A / S, and Educational Media Centers in the project cities. The SimLibrary project aims to develop libraries to a prominent place in the digital experience community with young people as drivers in a user-driven innovation process. To create virtual and physical environments that encourage young people to form relationships. ...

Charting unknown territory is definitely nothing new for the Danes. Danish companies such as Vestas , Lego , and Unity3D are conquering their industries in a way that would make their viking ancestors proud. Now entering this group is Playingmondo , a platform for creating and interacting with location based experiences. For those not familiar with location-based services , the Playingmondo app, available for iPhone and Android, uses the built-in GPS in the mobile phones to allow users to interact with digital content created around real world locations. This content can be viewed in a variety of ways including augmented reality. Already there are numerous Playingmondo playgrounds all over Denmark and in other countries, and even though a majority of the experiences are games, there are also experiences focused on health, education, tourism, and cultural heritage. The Playingmondo website is where you can join a community to find virtual playgrounds near you, meet up with your team m...

I want to share a well written post titled, ' Future of virtuality in-the-making: Reflections from Stanford University' by Ates Gursimsek for the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation's Blog. Ates is a PhD researcher at Roskilde University, friend, and visiting scholar at Stanford University's H-STAR Institute who studies collaborative design and innovation in virtual worlds. Ates states, "my observations have introduced me the rising culture of technological and social innovation through collaboration and co-creation in Silicon Valley (SV), as well as research and development studies on these emerging Web technologies, focusing on social sciences, humanities and educational studies, at Stanford University." Check it out . Here are videos covering a couple things he worked on and experienced while visiting Silicon Valley. Tesekkur ederim for all the great info Ates. I look forward to seeing where your research takes us!

At the end of this past summer, I got the opportunity to present at NEXT2010 located in Arhus, Denmark. Now you wouldn't know by looking at the site, but I promise I was there. Started by the Innovation Lab Denmark six years ago, this annual event covers the latest and greatest in a variety of disciplines. The Lab brings inspiring international speakers and incredible technology to an event that is partly conference, exhibition, cultural, and social event. This year was the first year NEXT ran concurrently with the Arhus Festuge (festival). The week long festival, which was a blast, had engaging, futuristic NEXT exhibits around the town. I saw big cockroaches that drove robots, a Heineken beerbot, clothes that illuminated from CO2, movable toilets for seniors, a few hundred dollar cup of coffee, and a vest that provided force feedback when playing a first person shooter. Of course this was not all of the exhibits, but those that seemed to stand out the most to me. For more info...

On the heels of an 'augmented' good time at the ARE2010, I headed to Denmark as a guest of Roskilde University to participate in the Making Sense of Virtual Worlds and User Driven Innovation workshop. Held at the lovely venue of Magleaas, just north of Copenhagen, this three day (June 7th - 9th) workshop, funded by the Danish Strategic Research Council KINO, brought together academics and a few industry players from all around to share with each other the research they have been doing in virtual worlds. 'SENSE-MAKING STRATEGIES AND USER-DRIVEN INNOVATION IN VIRTUAL WORLDS is a collaborative project, running from 2008-2011, that joins university researchers at two Danish universities, Roskilde University and Copenhagen Business School, and a range of different partners who work practically with virtual worlds in different organizational contexts (encompassing both public organizations and private business). The project has a practice-orientation both in the sense that the a...