Identity, Migration and Critical Density

I love the last ten days before a big show, when final pieces of the program start falling into place. Sun's Nicole Yankelovich will be keynoting on Tuesday the 18th, discussing Wonderland: Sun's powerful 3D collaboration world for knowledge-workers. Yankelovich is Principal Investigator in Collaboration Environments for Sun Labs, and is a bonafide pioneer in user experience design -- an early innovator in IP telephony, speech UI, shared shells and similar technology. Following up at 2 PM PST/5 PM ET will be Sun's Chief Gaming Officer, Chris Melissinos, who'll give us Java-heads the latest and straightest on Darkstar, Sun's massively-scaleable "redshift" platform for multi-user game and virtual world building. Meanwhile, I've been on the email since the wee hours with Cisco's Christian Renaud, Chief Architect of Networked Virtual Environments, who's been (as usual) waxing insightful about how virtual worlds re-intermediate between people and economic actors who might otherwise be disenfranchised and driven apart by hyperconnectivity. We're looking forward to his keynote on Friday, March 21 at 9 AM PST/Noon ET.

The past couple of days have seen a total revamp of our islands in Second Life, in preparation both for Life 2.0 Summit and for our upcoming "rebranding" as part of ThinkServices a division of United Business Media that includes Dr. Dobb's, ICMI, and Game Developer Conference, among others.

Though the change will be a bit confusing for a while, it's fabulous for CMP Metaverse (or whatever our ultimate name turns out to be -- I won't bore you with that until we're decided). Under the new structure, we're gaining global corporate synergies under the UBM banner, while also drawing together with local siblings under a new, startup-like philosophy of community-building and community advocacy (which of course, is the virtual worlds sweet-spot). Meanwhile, we're not changing out the CMP name until AFTER the show, so all the SLURLs and links will keep working.

The build is being staged down in realtime by Xenius Revere: a formidable designer/modeler who's also emceeing our showcase of high-end modeling, sculptural and lighting design on Saturday, March 15, at 1 PM PST/4 PM ET. Watching Xenius build is a privilege -- his understanding of the constraints and liberties of virtual structures is profound. And we're extending the privilege, on and off, to our community on life20.net, via live video (go to the homepage and scroll down to check it out!)

The new amphitheatre is now installed and being fine-tuned. This may be the densest communal structure in Second Life -- a full 280 people, held comfortably within a 20-meter radius, enabling primary voice and text-chat without any dark spots. I had to write a programmatic seat-materializer to build out the space systematically (imagine hand-tweaking the position of 280 seats so close together), and I'm tentatively pleased with the results. We did an event, yesterday, with Sun's Dr. Richard Zippel, on RedShift technology, that went fine, and we're working remaining kinks out of the venue as we proceed through the weekend.

Posted by John Jainschigg at 12:48 PM  Permalink

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