Wednesday PM Mobile VWs

Moderator: Wagner James Au (Author, The Making of Second Life)
Panel:
Martin Dunsby (CEO,Vollee...launched Second Life Mobile last week)
Victoria Coleman (VP, Samsung Electronics)
Tom Churchil (CEO, Earthscape...virtual globe app for the iPhone)

See www.vollee.com for free download. The frame rate is pretty good relative to SL on the computer.

Their privacy policy says that they don't watch what people are doing.

"Haptic" phones...touch screen-based technology like the iPhone. "The interaction with this phone is very different." Showed a means of shaking the phone to simulate rolling dice. You can't take the PC experience and shoe-horn it into a phone. Why do people in SL not do IM? We have to learn from both the VW side as well as the media group (phone) side. VW currency that goes across the VW to the mobile phone.

Earthscape: like Google Earth for the iPhone. Does geo-tagging for photos to make a mirror world. Lets you see other photos people have taken there as well. End goal is an "immersive Twitter" where people could see real time photos of events like parades. The business model for virtual globes is different than for VWs. This mirror world attempts to model the RW. The "locate me" button provides your location to any user. You are getting the ability to real-time wiki the world.

There is a move to ease the restrictions that customers have on the end devices.

Your world will be more extensive if more people spend time in it.

One audience member asked the panelists to explain their optimism. Handset OS's are all broken in different ways. Accelerometers are not being fully taken advantage of. We are still years away from seeing any of this as a true possibility.
RESPONSE: there are a few things that are ubiquitous: web browsing, text SMS, video. So the VW apps are being dumbed down to pass by the OS to act as a dumb terminal. There are ways around it, although it is the holy grail. It is difficult to get apps deployed on them in any meaningful way.

Technology limits by the companies to prevent unlocking phones. The operator is subsidizing the price of iPhones, so the investor wants a return on this. This is a chronic problem with cell phone companies. So the operator is a channel for the apps. These are strictly for business reasons and not technical ones.