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Future Technologies Advisory Group

News blog

Articles on VR worlds

Metaverse Messenger, August 22, 2006: Mitch Kapor, Chairman of Linden Lab and a longtime visionary in the world of computers, addressed the 2006 Second Life Community Convention Saturday in San Francisco. Kapor predicted that in five to ten years, SL "or its technological successor" will be as ubiquitous as the World Wide Web is today. Metaverse-style virtual worlds will become integrated with our lives and transform them: "We will need to redefine our definition of reality".

Corante - Second Life Targets Existing Branded Web Communities: Second Life, the apparent runaway winner in the emerging niche of online virtual worlds that are not (according to their publishers) games, passed a major milestone last week with a successful second annual developer and user conference . Much of this conference focused on how consultants and companies are leveraging the commercial and intellectual property regimes of Second Life to build successful businesses around Second Life as a platform... Next up: full-fledged web communities augmenting their online experience with a virtual world. A white paper by Linden Labs distributed at the conference (not posted online yet unfortunately) lays out some early ideas about how this might occur.

The New York Inquirer, How Many Transhumanists Does it Take . . . ? - "I was pleasantly surprised at how interconnected the Second Life conference was with the real world. In the virtual conference room, there were dozens of seats. What began with only a few people ballooned, at times, with almost twenty virtual attendees... I'm not sure how many other conferences worldwide have implemented this real/virtual synergy in the way that the technically-adept folks in Helsinki did... I walked away from the whole experience happy with the way that transhumanists today are taking full advantage of available technology while discussing future technologies that will give us even more options for freedom and interconnectedness".

8/27/2006 Permalink/comments

TransVision06 in Second Life report

The TransVision 2006 annual conference of the World Transhumanist Association, Helsinki 17-19 August 2006, organized by the WTA and the Finnish Transhumanist Association, was open to remote visitors in the virtual reality world of Second Life. This year the theme of the conference was Emerging Technologies of Human Enhancement. We looked at recent and ongoing technological developments and discussing associated ethical and philosophical questions. We held a mixed reality event between the Helsinki conference hall and Second Life.

The event was successful, with more than 40 participants in Second Life able to watch the real time video stream from Helsinki, ask questions to the speakers via the IRC to Second Life chat gateway and discuss the presentations. On the one hand, the virtual TransVision 2006 conference gave the possibility to "attend" the conference in virtual reality to many people who were not able to attend the conference in brickspace and, on the other hand, it demonstrated the potential of virtual reality and Second Life for major conferences and events. The lessons learned will be used to design other, even more ambitious, mixed-reality and VR-only events.

Please see the full report with pictures at:
http://uvvy.com/index.php/TransVision06_in_SL_Report

8/22/2006 Permalink/comments

3 new articles on VR worlds

Forbes - Making Real Money In Virtual Worlds: As the popularity and sophistication of MMORPGs has skyrocketed, enterprising gamers have found ways to make real money playing them--to the point where experts say that it has become common to run across gamers who make their entire income with virtual jobs. "It's eminently doable," says Edward Castronova, an associate professor at Indiana University and author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games.

There is a great Miami New Times article about Entropia Universe, Club Neverdie, VR world economy&business, and the personal history of CND's owner. Jacobs - known as "NeverDie" in the game - is doing more than getting hitched inside a computer landscape. He's getting married inside his own virtual nightclub, Club NeverDie, which is located on an asteroid in Entropia Universe for which Jacobs paid a reported $100,000 in October. Yes, that's real U.S. currency for a space rock that exists only in a videogame... He's averaging 100,000 PED, or about $10,000, in monthly revenue. In a year, he says, his investment will have paid for itself. It's conceivable, Jacobs claims, that he could one day be virtual reality's first millionaire.

El Pais Semanal, August 6, 2006 - Mi otra vida virtual - Article on Second Life on the weekly magazine of the leading Spanish daily newspaper El Pais.

8/10/2006 Permalink/comments

II Congress on Technological Sovereignty of Europe

I am participating in the organization of the II Congress on Technological Sovereignty of Europe, which will be held in Madrid on 3, 4 and 5 of October, 2006. See also the conference website. During three intense days of lectures and round tables, the conference will debate the main issues that Europe will have to face if it wants to become a real world-wide scientific and technological power. Organized by the "Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aerospacial" (INTA), the electronic magazine Tendencias 21 and Kap Experiencial Marketing, as well as by the Institute of the Engineering of Spain, the Nebrija University and the "Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas", the conference will count on the presence of important Spanish and international scientific personalities, including Nobel laureates. We are often interviewed by the press - the last article (in Spanish) is here: http://soberaniatecnologica.com/eleconomista3806.pdf . For those who do not read Spanish, the main concepts are Europe must create a more dynamic innovation environment and that doing things in *Europe* is made very difficult by the fact that individual nations want to retain power and control.

8/05/2006 Permalink/comments

KurzweilAI: Transhumanists stage 'mixed reality' event

KurzweilAI.net, August 4, 2006 - Transhumanists stage 'mixed reality' event - Virtual-world users of Second Life will be able to participate in the TransVision 2006 annual conference of the World Transhumanist Association in Helsinki on August 17-19, 2006. The theme of the conference will be Emerging Technologies of Human Enhancement.

8/04/2006 Permalink/comments

TransVision06 in Second Life

Please refer to this page for updated information, help etc.

TransVision 2006 website

TransVision06, August 17-19: University of Helsinki, Finland, Europe

This year the theme of the conference will be Emerging Technologies of Human Enhancement. We'll be looking at recent and ongoing technological developments and discussing associated ethical and philosophical questions.

Program

We will hold a mixed reality event between the Helsinki conference hall and Second Life:

The Second Life event will take place in the uvvy island in SL. To attend, use the Second Life map in the client, look for region uvvy and teleport.

The real time video stream from Helsinki will be displayed in SL.

Some presentations will also be displayed in SL in Power Point -like format.

Some PCs running the SL client will be available in the conference hall in Helsinki for SL users (at least 3 plus myself (gp)).

Some SL users will be simultaneously present in both worlds who can relay questions from the remote SL audience to speakers.

The SL event will be projected on a screen in Helsinki.

There will be a single text chat space for Second Life users and IRC chat users. So those whose computers are too slow or for some other reason don't want to use Second Life can use a combination of IRC and the video feed to interact with the conference participants in both Helsinki and Second Life.