IBM are pushing forward on the metaverse front by unveiling a plan to host SL on theirservers as a stepping stone to greater adoption of virtual worlds across the enterprise. Introduced at an early stage April 3 at the Virtual Worlds conference in New York, the Second Life Grid lets companies create public or private virtual environments using Linden Lab’s 3-D virtual world technology. Read more more about this story here.
* WHERE: Annenberg Auditorium, Stanford University
* WHEN: Saturday the 16th and Sunday the 17th of February 2008
Stanford Humanities Lab (SHL) is thrilled to announce the Metaverse U conference at Stanford University. This two day conference will be held on February 16th and 17th 2008 and feature speakers from a range of disciplines spanning industry and academia. Our lab has worked in virtual worlds for some years now and have seen interest in the space grow exponentially in recent years. We believe that the time has come for an event to tell the interesting stories from the evolving metaverse. The current generation of spaces is part of a larger historical picture and many lessons have been learned over the years. Our ultimate goal with Metaverse U is to create a broad conversation about the pressing question of what the metaverse should be. Metaverse U’s growing list of speakers includes Raph Koster (Metaplace), Brewster Kahle (The Internet Archive), Jeremy Bailenson (Stanford University), TL Taylor (The IT University of Copenhagen), Tony Parisi (Media Machines & Web3D), Jon Brouchoud (Wikitecture), Wm. LeRoy Heinrichs (Stanford Medical Center), Rebecca Moore (Google Earth), Parvati Dev (Innovation in Learning), Kari Kraus (University of Maryland), Cory Ondrejka, Christain Renaud (Cisco), Mike Liebhold (Institute for the Future)
For more information please visit: http://metaverseu.stanford.edu
What do you get if you put Google Earth, Google Map and Google SketchUp-3d together? Perhaps a potentially good platform for Google’s MMORPG played on planet Earth with some 6billion concurrent users.
IFIP WG 9.5 International Working Conference on Virtuality and Society: Massive Virtual Communities
Scope & Theme
Prominently within the gaming community, but also within other communities on the internet, very huge virtual communities begin to evolve. In games, an average number of people that is comparable to a smaller city is online at the same time, thus forming a proper society. People share their pictures and videos, they meet and date in virtual communities. In Second Life, even big companies start virtual branches to enhance customer relations. It is likely that this phenomenon will become even more significant in the near future for gaming, for business and private purposes, maybe even for administrative and political functions.
It is already obvious that those massive virtual communities will have a substantial impact on society, economics, art, and -last but not least -technology. The workshop will bring together experts of that field to collect insights on a emerging major subject.
July 1st and 2nd, 2008, Leuphana University of Lueneburg, Germany
The Metaverse Summit 2007 will be held at the Estrel Convention Center in Berlin, Germany, on December 06 - 07, 2007, and will include
For more information please visit: http://www.metaversesummit.com/
There is a place that broadband has no meaning and Internet connectivity is still measured in Kbs. Try connecting to SL or use any other Internet services that are bandwidth intensive. You may be able to check emails and even browse a few pages (before getting frustrated), but it makes you wonder. Are metaverses enforcing the digital divide? One day perhaps this place and all places out there that have no connectivity whatsoever may have broadband connections (or whatever they will be called then). Until that day comes, users in these places will have only one life. Ironically, they don’t have to download a 20Mb executable… it would have taken an eternity!
The first Metaverse Roadmap (MVR) is now complete and available in both web and PDF formats at http://metaverseroadmap.org/overview/.