At VW Expo Wednesday

 Posted by (Visited 6029 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
Sep 022008
 

I’m driving up to LA tomorrow morning for the Virtual Worlds Expo. I’ll be on a panel. If you’re there, say hello!

1:00 – 2:00 pm Business Visionaries Panel: Where is the Business Headed Next?
Innovation is coming fast and furious on multiple fronts from multiple vendors. This one-of-a-kind session brings together the business visionaries of major virtual world companies for an interactive discussion on the future of the industry. Join us for a session you won’t want to miss.
Ginsu Yoon, VP of Business Affairs, Linden Lab
Corey Bridges, Executive Producer, Multiverse
Michael Wilson, CEO, Makena Technologies, Inc.
Raph Koster, President, Areae
Joey Seiler, Editor, VirtualWorldsNews.com & Virtual Worlds Weekly (moderator)

Aug 112008
 

Ben Medler has a decent summary of my keynote speech at Sandbox/Web 3d. I will see about getting the slides posted up, but honestly, I am holding out for video or audio because I suspect the slides won’t make much sense on their own — this was a highly verbal talk, with mostly static images and hardly any text on the slides.

Most attendees are probably still at SIGGRAPH proper, so more summaries might trickle out over time.

One question that came up at the cocktail party, and also in Ben’s summary is the issue of advancing technology. Isn’t it true that even the postage-stamp-sized screens are going to get more powerful? Yes, to a degree. But we shouldn’t forget that tech often gets powerful enough for a niche, then stops. Indeed, for many consumers, PCs are currently “powerful enough” and there isn’t a compelling reason to upgrade at the same rate as we have seen in the past. I don’t know where that line is for mobile devices, but I do know that the answer is typically less than techies want it to be.

There is also the question, I think, of Moore’s Wall, and whether people are empowered to use that tech in creative fashions.

Finally, there’s the question of whether powerful 3d tech on a postage-size screen actually looks and acts the same as the same tech on a large screen. I submit that the answer is no; there are affordances and restrictions provided by the cultural context in which the devices are used that must alter our design approaches, and there are plain old usability questions as well.

SIGGRAPH Web3d/Sandbox keynote

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Aug 082008
 

If you are attending SIGGRAPH in LA over the next few days, I am doing a “joint keynote” for the Sandbox games event and the Web3d Symposium tomorrow (I think that means you can get in regardless of which of those two you registered for). It was kind of challenging coming up with a topic that would fit both, until I realized that they’re kind of converging.

Putting the World in World Wide Web

It’s been predicted for a long time that the Web would go “3d.” But many of our predictions about the Internet have been wrong. As a class, the digerati predicted interactive libraries, not MySpace; 3d navigation of sites, not widgets. Users have a habit of taking the best-laid architectural plans and turning them inside out, developing different uses for our closely held technological dreams.

So what is actually happening? Games and social media are converging at a rapid rate, and our whole digital world is about to be reinvented via new technologies that are just now starting to be commercialized. Come take a glimpse into a possible future — one that is almost certainly wrong in many details, but is at least extrapolated from today’s events, rather than old dreams.