Last winter Stanford University hosted the Metaverse U Conference to “bring together industry leaders, artists, and academics to discuss a range of topics surrounding virtual worlds.” For some reason that seemed important at the time I couldn’t attend, but as the July 4th holiday nears I’ve taken time away from a social media-cum-virtual world-cum MMOG project for <<redacted>> to catch up on what I missed at this and other conferences.
Today’s installment is a video of virtual world pioneers Raph Koster, Howard Rhinegold and Cory Ondrejka in a conversation about the emerging 3D web and the state of the metaverse.
I wish I’d been able to be there — and could be at
GLS 4 next week in Madison for that matter — but videos of all the Metaverse U sessions
can be found on Blip.tv. So get green, reduce your carbon footprint and tune in. See you in-world!
Published July 2nd, 2008
in Uncategorized and User Experience.
Designing software that could be used by people with differing abilities was a big part of building software for Pearson Education. Working there taught me a lot about Universal Design for Learning and making products accessible, so it’s refreshing to see this meme make its way into a game for the Wii — in this case a design that welcomes the visually impaired.
The game, called AudiOdyssey, simulates a deejay trying to build up a catchy tune and get people dancing. By swinging the remote-control device used by the Nintendo Wii, which senses motion, the player can set the rhythm and lay down one musical track after another, gradually building up a richer musical track. It was developed by MIT and Singaporean students to make it possible for visually impaired people to play the game on a level field with their sighted friends. Very cool. More info here..
The SIIA just released a transcript of our panel discussion at the Ed Tech Industry Summit last month in San Francisco which you can download here (pdf). Transcripts or videos of all the presentations and panels at the conference are listed here. Check it out!
Grockit, a San Francisco startup which raised $2.7m several years ago to seed their game project has taken down an $8m B-round according to Ed Tech Design’s Sari Follansbee, who brought this to my attention today, and the company’s own press release:
Integral Capital Partners lead the $8M round with Benchmark Capital, who lead their Series A, participating as well. Grockit is creating a MMOLG (Massively Multi Player Online Learning Game) where people can connect to learn from each other. The company was founded by Farbood Nivi, a long time teacher, and Michael Buffington, a well known Rails developer. Grockit will use the latest financing to expand their development team and they plan to launch their first product this fall.
Though they’re playing their cards very close to the vest they have disclosed an intention to build a virtual world learning community — what they call as MMOLG or Massive Multiplayer Online Learning Game — and obviously have their investors vote of confidence.
While conceptually this may not be far from Chris Dede’s River City (Harvard) or Sasha Barab’s Quest Atlantis (Indiana University), I suspect that as a commercial enterprise the tech will offer much more robust playability. And unlike these academic efforts, or Nt Etuk’s immersive Dimension, the investors and level of funding suggests Grockit intention is to be a full-on commercial MMOG for the educational market. If they launch in the fall as announced it’ll be a benchmark worth watching.
For more news — though not solid product information — there are posts on Tech Crunch as well as the company’s blog and Twitter feed that you may want to peruse. And if nothing else, they’ve clearly taken a clue from Steve Jobs’ play book whose lock-down in advance of Apple’s product releases is legend.
Social networking used to be so simple, a forum to say or discuss what’s on your mind and meet others who are on the same page. 
However as more people get on the bandwagon — students, moms, bosses, clients, recruiters, HR departments — the rules are changing and like most rules you ignore them at your peril.
Should you Super Poke a colleague on Facebook or write a blow-by-blow account of Friday night’s pub crawl on their wall? What’s the right way to respond to unkind comments on your blog? Do virtual cards for birthdays and other personal events count or do you have suck up and make a trip the card store and — gasp! — the post office for the occasion?
Even Debretts, Great Britain’s venerable “authority on all matters etiquette, taste and achievement,” has weighed in on etiquette for the social media generation:
- You don’t have to make friends with people you don’t know. Think before you poke.
- Wait 24 hours before accepting or removing someone as a friend. The delay will help you gather your thoughts.
- Birthdays, engagements and weddings are not “virtual” events. Always send cards or phone friends when there is an important event.
- Think before posting a friend’s photo what you would feel like if it was you.
- Think carefully about your profile picture. Would you want it to be appearing in your local newspaper?
Blogher.com’s recent post on social media manners polled their readers and came up with more:
- Be Nice.
- Be open & honest.
- Be respectful of the writer and the community.
- Respect the relationship.
- Don’t rant -> always be respectful.
- Social media implies and requires civility.
- If you wouldn’t say it to someone in person, don’t say it online.
- Courtesy matters.
- Remember what your mama taught you: Don’t lie. Don’t cheat. Don’t bully. Play nicely together.
And LifeHack.com has posted a few tips too:
- Give attention if you want attention.
- Don’t overwhelm your connections.
- Be as clear as possible.
- Keep private information private.
- Don’t contribute to information overload.
- Avoid anonymity.
But they’re all seemingly common sense so what’s the big deal? Simple: the Web has a long memory and a lot of people seem to forget that.
So if you’re using a blog or Twitter or Facebook or MySpace or Mebo or countless other sites/services for social, professional or business networking — and who isn’t these days — paying attention to what you say/write/post and how you say or illustrate it can make or break your next deal, contract, job or relationship. Remember: the gig you save may be your own.
A shout out to Lee Wilson at the Education Business Blog who wrote A Contrarian View of Social Media, adding another perspective to my recent panel and posts about social networking.
Lee quotes Bob Hoffman over at Copyblogger whose post A Cranky, Skeptical Loudmouth Looks at Social Media Marketing bottom lines the distaff view:
You and I are web geeks. We spend way more time than we should looking at computer screens. We are not normal. Especially you. The biggest mistake any marketer can make is marketing to himself, i.e. assuming his customer is just like him. They’re not and they never will be.
No disagreements there, any more than saying all my readers and clients know to walk right and ride left when crossing the Brooklyn Bridge going east, and walk left ride right going west to Manhattan. So social media has taken off, immersive environments are sticky, games can teach and inspire, but neither are any of these necessarily the answer or solution. That takes analysis, and that’s something we can help you with.
Artist Paul St. George’s steampunk sculpture wryly suggests that using technology to create social networks predates the web, wiki and blog by at least a century.
When it opened to the public two weeks ago, the London Telegraph described St. George’s Telectroscope as “looking like something from the Victorian era” or “a device from 1950s science fiction.”
Indeed, St. George claims to have “happened upon a packet of dusty papers in a trunk in his grandmother’s attic” discovering “a veritable treasure trove: diaries, diagrams, correspondence, scribbled calculations” that were the work of his great-grandfather, “an eccentric Victorian engineer named Alexander Stanhope St. George.” The drawings and writing described “a Telectroscope… allowing people to see through a tunnel… stretching from one side of the world to the other.”
Science fiction or science fact? If you’re in New York or London you have until June 15th to see the Telectroscope in person and decide for yourself — and be sure to invite friends from the other side meet you and wave. Here’s what you’ll find at Brooklyn’s Fulton Ferry Landing:
OK, the video’s been out for a while but here’s another reason social networks are important. Can’t everybody just get along?
From the number of inquiries we receive and the projects we’re managing lately — blogs, forums, wikis, user content sites, multi-player games and sims — it’s clear there’s tremendous demand for social networking. Out of curiosity I pinged Indeed.com and found this trajectory for social networking jobs:
Considering the dates (1/05 to 4/08) some of the curve must represent the growth of Indeed itself, but still. Yet it’s hardly surprising. We humans are a highly social species (ever count the number of names we have for social groups?) so it was only a matter of time before the web caught up. Now that we have open source platforms like Wordpress and Joomla! and so many commercial services — MySpace, Facebook, Ning, Orkut and Twitter among many others — the possibilities are nearly endless to enhance brands, engage consumers, enhance learning, deepen understanding and build community.
Does what you experience and learn in virtual environments like MMOGs and videogames have any relevance to real life?
Thought leaders like Jim Gee and researchers like Jeremy Bailenson, director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), assert that it does. Bailenson has been studying ways that online behavior affects daily life (.pdf) and in The Skills of Digital Avatars (.pdf) he makes a convincing argument that virtual representations of professors can be more effective than the real thing (doubtless a cause to celebrate for anyone looking at a tuition bill lately).
For more on Jeremy Bailenson’s work read Time Magazine’s coverage of Bailenson’s work in How Second Life Affects Real Life, listen to NPR’s nterview with Bailenson, or watch a video of his lecture on Transformed Social Interaction in Virtual Reality.
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