Wednesday AM Technical Visionaries

John Sorts (Director of Business, Electric Sheep), moderator
Panel:
Ven Gurzel (CEO of NoPomente...makes AI)
Christian Renauld
...
Can't hear in the back to hear who everyone else was

Group agreed it might be time to talk about VW 2.0. Last few years were 1.0. What characterizes the changes that are coming?

Are there better ways to interact as humans other than avatars and islands? Motion tracking? Does this constitute 2.0? And O'Reilly-esque conversation on what it might be?

There is a shift that will take place (~5 years) when VWs and tech behind them resemble more closely Web 2.0....more plug and play and easily combined. Do away with MMOG minus G and integrate with the rest of the web. Don't use general purpose social networking tools. More robust simulation modeling, education.

EXISTENT: that which has its own individual being. Generalize the notion of an avatar. Have its own individual controlability through scripts, AI. The world is no longer at the center of the VW, but the avatar is. It has its own state with its own knowledge. They are portable across different VWs. Interop goes beyond avs to machines. Things centered around identity. But this is a more general problem on how you tie identity across multiple domains. This will merge to a unified identity.

Ubiquity: not making email programs the place you go to do the work, but a generalized solution. Context is not important for the software agent.

In the consumer social space...for Facebook, do you want to see it in 2D or wander around it in 3D? Offer it as an option to the user. New things like SLim are not a step forward because it is just another thing that you have to deal with.

PERSISTENCE and PRESENCE and IDENTITY
VW interop like the broad internet. Transparent integration...no longer about polygon counts and avatars but software integration.

Redeeming values of VW 1.0 carried forward: it is about people. Being able to connect in an enterprise, education, or socially. It is about what they can do and create and express themselves. VWs give us a deeper degree of connectivity. Need to take this to the next step. What is next? Bring in the emotion (through video etc.?) and then bring it back out again. What is driving that? As interactions get more rich...this will not push it over the edge into the next phase of development. There are still apps that are missing that have to do with bringing people together to actually have the interactions. This is solved on the web through search engines to do discovery. This has not been done in VWs. In SL, you can see cool content if you know where it is. But it is hard to find if you are just dumped in.

SYNCHRONOUS, REAL TIME...WHAT HAPPENS WHEN IT ISN'T SYNCHRONOUS ACROSS THE RL?
Asynch tools will resemble those of the web. Ways to discover new info and form new connections with offline users. #1 use of email statistically to arrange face to face meetings.

doppler (can't find it online)...an engine to share your travel plans with your friends. Will the same serendipity happen in VWs?

Are we just teaching a virtual dog new tricks in AI? We need to go further than 3D worlds in terms of interactions with the real environment.

USING 3D WORLDS TO INTERACT WITH 2D CONTENT
Can you interact with software in 3D rather than a 2D document? For reasons of costs and time constraints, software is done in a restrictive way.

HOW WILL OPEN SOURCE PLAY A PART?
Answer was just a statement that it is important and why we all know it is. OS would have been looked on as a threat to the traditional software company, but are presently looking at it as an opportunity via OpenSim. OS is driven by people really waning something so bad that they are not paid for it. This will drive innovation. Several companies are waiting to adopt VW tech until there is a stable platform that will not be made obsolete during the development process. Open Standards exist but have not been given mass adoption because they did not consult the big users to see if the standards fit their needs.

IDENTITY AND AVATAR PORTABILITY: DOES IT MATTER?
Technically, it is not a big problem to do it. There are layers on top about data meaning and translation that need to be solved. The big thing is the social side and the acceptability of moving stuff. But when you pay money for your identity to belong to a particular VW (ex: WoW), they don't want you to do this. But who does your virtual identity really belong to? Identity port is a macro issue, but av port is a subset. What about asset port? If you paid for it in one world, you should not necessarily be able to take it into another world if that is the agreement. We should not dictate to companies with business models how this should go without understanding the difference of these things. But if something belongs in an environment, we should not think about asset stripping. There are way to stream things, existing in their original place and use it in some way in a different VW. This allows each environment to be appropriately hit (and billing). There is no reason that business models can't adapt to support interop.

THE FUTURE OF THE HARDWARE
Intel moving away from the GPU to a standard x86 core with like 32 cores. But there are some applications that more graphics power is not necessarily better (ex: a cartoon character smiling does not need to be high rez). Better physics engines, better AI. Use the physics engine to mediate interactions between avs and objects. Main problems are bandwidth and processing power.

GAME-CHANGING TECHNOLOGIES
-3D printers...see shapeways.com for a paid service of this.
-AI that goes out and gather information and report back.
-Virtual goods.