Thursday PM VW Roadmap

Moderator: ???
Panel:
Sibley Verbeck
Victoria Coleman
2 others (the intro was too quick)
Mic Bowman (the tech guy)

An intro of the obvious of why VWs are cool.

Proposing to drive an open source-like activity to develop and frame mainstream uses of VW tech, study them, publish their results, enumerate a timeline by which VW industry can succeed beyond a single generation. A platform-neutral roadmap.

A forum where people are invited to participate.VWRSIG is a project of the Contact Consortium (http://www.ccon.org).

What is the VW Roadmap?
-Executive summary of the future of deployment
-Case studies of example usages and potential best practices
-Vision of future of each usage area and a table of key performance benchmarks and technical characteristics

VWRM vision documents include a core anticipated value, foreseeable barriers to mass adoption, guidance as to how barriers can be overcome, predictions.

Investment landscape: $184M in 23 VW in 1Q 2008. $425M in 15 VWs in 4Q 2007. $1B in 35 VWs Oct. 2006-Oct. 2007. Club Penguin was the largest investment by Disney of $70M. SL was not on the list shown.

http://www.virtualworldsroadmap.org and ./visiondocs/LiveRWEventsVisionDocument.pdf .

Workshop to be held 10/14 in Northern CA (tentatively).

Showed video of interacting with VWs using an iPhone competitor device using the accelerometer to navigate.

Question: how is this difference from the Metaverse roadmap?
Answer: this IS that roadmap as the industry has moved along. That was a single session with view towards the 10 year horizon. It was a single exercise to produce a single document. Want to take that exercise to a much more rigorous level. What docs will be helpful for moving the industry forum? Make it an open effort. This is the mature version of what got started there.

Question: what is the right balance between interop and business models?
Answer: there needs to be a balance. There is the business and tech sides. This provides the business use cases to provide context and priorities. What does it mean to have av portability? This group will think through the use cases and make recommendations back to the tech organizations. This group will not solve those problems, but will create the requirements. Our presence protocols are designed with very few state changes, but presence in a VW is much more complex. Provide the business requirements for why we need this and the business case for why it should be done.

Not trying to tackle interop. Trying to define the feature sets that are needed and the business arguments for why to do it.

MASS ADOPTION has not yet occurred because there is the lack of a compelling need for most people to go there. Also, you need certain tech enablers to get people into them (ex: a SL client that doesn't always crash). People like browsers, but don't know what they are missing by using it over VWs. VWs are boring because there is no activity going on and no people there. Need to get the tech in the hands of many people.

Challenges: interop, mobility, scalability, AI.