Metaverse One

Second Life creator Linden Lab has announced that it has begun inviting creative people to test its new virtual reality world, code-named Project Sansar . Project Sansar is scheduled to open to the public in 2016, and its aim is to democratize virtual reality. Much like Second Life, the platform aims to empower people to easily create, share, and monetize their own multi-user, interactive virtual experiences, without requiring engineering resources. Linden Lab said the platform will enable professional-level quality and performance with “exceptional visual fidelity, 3D audio, and physics simulation.” Project Sansar will be optimized for VR headsets, but also accessible via PCs and mobile devices. “We want to lower the barrier of entry for VR experience creation,” said Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg in a statement. “Project Sansar will do for virtual experiences what WordPress has done for the web: empower a broad range of people to create with professional quality and reach globa...

So a few days ago I posted the following about an online hands free home configurator developed from a partnership between IDEAbuilder Homes and SpiralConcepts. Here is the original post  and the repost  by sci-fi author Bruce Sterling on the Wired Blog. When out in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley tech scene it is not the AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) industry I hear about leading the charge in technical innovation. It is the chatter of the millions given and insane evaluations of those either in the cloud, selling user data, social, gaming, or insert buzz word here. Yet more and more construction companies are incorporating technology to improve various areas of the building process. I observe all around SOMA how construction companies like Swinerton  and  Webcor  are using data from the BIM (Building Information Modeling) process to build better. I applaud Skanska 's  use of tablets  and  experiments with augmen...

This is a cool project I came across from MIT's Media Lab. T(ether) is an experimental app that combines gestural interfaces, computer vision, and collaboration into an experience straight our of a sci-fi movie.  Creators Matthew Blackshaw, Dávid Lakatos, Hiroshi Ishii, and Ken Perlin call T(ether) "a tool for spatial expression" that "acts as a window affording users a perspective view of three-dimensional data through tracking of head position and orientation." So what this means is you can use the iPad to view a shared virtual space where you can manipulate objects with the other hand using a special glove. You can draw 3D shapes, rotate, pinch, zoom, and examine them in a multi-user environment. Two people looking through their iPads at a grid of virtual cubes can both reach in independently and manipulate them at the same time.    A cool concept that illustrates another way to do collaborative design in a virtual space.

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!

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...

I have embarked on a tech journey to a series of events worth sharing: - Digital Kung-Fu 2 - 2010 Workshop at the Centre for Digital Media (Canada) Bringing together experts and leaders from an array of sectors in digital media, this workshop offers a full day of interactive sessions to help inspire new ideas and develop them into realizable goals. Participants will be treated to insider techniques for the conceptualizing, visualizing, prototyping and pitching of ideas, as well as insights into current industry trends and technologies. This is your opportunity to get a crash course in digital martial arts! Part of Vancouver Interactive Digital Week, Digital Kung Fu 2 is a one-day intensive professional development seminar delivered by industry experts. Kick-start, augment and accelerate your digital ideas into realizable apps, services (or products) and start-ups. Proceeds of this workshop will be put towards scholarships for students in the Masters of Digital Media program. Click here...

Anyone that has been following the virtual worlds industry has noticed the growing number of virtual world platforms that have closed recently. Now this is to be expected given the amount of virtual world platforms that popped up over night during the 2007-2008 virtual worlds gold rush, but it still saddens me to see these players leave the stage. I have witnessed that the closing of a virtual world platform is more than a company shutting down, people getting laid off, and investors losing on their return. It is the Apocalypse of a digital eco-system. Worlds are demolished, user creations are destroyed, relationships with digital family and friends are lost, and all at the literal flip of a switch. So I am taking a moment on my birthday to salute those virtual world platforms that have recently fallen: Metaplace - Raph Koster's virtual world open platform announced it was closing earlier this year. This really surprises me as I found Metaplace's world creation tools to be su...

So this week is full of back to back virtual world events, catching up with friends in the industry, and making new ones. Mid-week kicked off the Engage! Expo 2009. Engage! Expo strives to be where companies learn how to combine their existing business with the unparalleled engagement opportunities and new revenue streams of user engagement online. The expo had session throughout the day that were broken into the categories of: *Virtual Goods Conference - the leading event for businesses seeking to understand and maximize business strategies using virtual goods, items and gifts; *Digital Law Conference - provides a detailed examination of the legal issues raised by these technologies and offers key insight into where the industry is headed and what the associated legal implications are; *Social Media Strategies - the social media track seeks to help business understand the best practices, current trends, and effective strategies of social media and user engagement ...

So right now is the 14th annual international Web3D Symposium . This is the Web3D Consortium 's annual event sponsored by ACM SIGGRAPH (in cooperation with EuroGraphics ) held this year in Darmstadt, Germany at Fraunhofer IGD on June 15-17. This symposium celebrates a decade of innovation and interoperability through the 3D Web open standards. The Symposium will showcase Web3D Consortium’s standard X3D, the only open, royalty-free and ISO-certified technology available today for interactive 3D graphics on the World Wide Web. Use of X3D systems has increased steadily throughout the world, delivering durable applications in industry, science, medicine, culture, entertainment and education. Indeed, worlds and scenarios authored over ten years ago still run today and are faster than ever. X3D systems have a proven track record of protecting content and have the process in place to support projects that require their content lifetime to exceed 50 years. Because X3D is a direct...

The Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds ( FCVW ) consists of members from government (federal, state & local, & international), academia, and corporate sectors. The Consortium supports individuals and organizations to improve government collaboration through the use of virtual worlds to enrich collaborative online experiences. Although not heavily involved, I have enjoyed the interaction so far with this group. Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds from Eric Hackathorn . Although a good chunk of their work so far is presented in Second Life (as one can see in this video), there are a growing number from this group and other federal agencies that are looking at the current 3D web open standards for use. From those I talk to with federal agencies, open and standards are a must when dealing with serious government applications and funding sources. Uncle Sam isn't going to spend millions on developing training tools in SL or any other company owned platform. The GSA is a p...

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...

Learning about the 3D web open standard has never really been an easy thing in the past. Tutorials were scattered over the web, the Web3D Consortium website didn't offer much help to those new to programming, there were few books that covered the open standard such as Core Web3D, the VRML 2.0 Handbook (great books), and no books that covered the new standard X3D. If you were a 3D modeler looking to author web3D content there were few tools out there to help you do it and none of these had in depth tutorials. As someone wanting to learn X3D, this is what drove me to get active with the Consortium eight years ago. I found there were students everywhere that wanted to learn web3D technologies for credit but where and how? So in the past it was difficult for newbies, but now this is no longer the case. In 2007 X3D: 3D Graphics for Web Authors by Don Brutzman and Leonard Daly was published. This book is highly recommended resource for programmers that makes learning X3D undauntin...