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Reflections and Thoughts – Part 1 of Many - Metaverse U at Stanford

What can I say? This two-day conference had some pretty amazing presentations. Some were inspiring, others thought provoking. I’ve a few comments on some of the presentations I’d like to share with you today and over the next few days as it's far too much for one blog post. Before I do, one of the statements made at the beginning of the conference was that this was the first conference to stream “to” SL, live, and take questions from the audience.

A few of us put our heads together (and yes I remember the slap about the “first” thing!) and figured this was probably about the 110th time a mixed-reality program occurred using the Second Life platform. Now, for my comments:

First, presented were: the Metaverse Roadmap-Jerry Paffendorf, Wello Horld; Augmented Reality- Mike Liebhold, Institute of the Future; sort of a “State of Virtual Worlds” address - Ginsu Yoon, VP of Business Affairs, Linden Lab; Panel Discussion with Christian Renaud (Cisco), Byron Reeves (Stanford), Reuben Steiger (Millions of Us); Metaverse 2.0 - Tony Parisi, Media Machines– VRML founder; Digital Archiving-Issues (my title) - Vladen Koltun, Stanford Virtual Worlds Group; How We Add “Social” to Tools - Jon Brouchoud, Architect, Studio Wikitecture; Panel Discussion with Raph Koster, Cory Ondrejka, Howard Rheingold; “Molotov Alva and His Search for the Creator: A Second Life Odyssey” (a must see!) Douglas Gayeton.

In regard to the Metaverse Roadmap—what an amazing project! Jerry graciously presented this at our Life 2.0 Spring Summit about a year ago in Second Life and its come a long way since that time. This collaborative project spans the use of virtual worlds in all their forms and explores implementation of future technologies and practices. One point of interest is how information about it spread, with little publicity. The 4 quadrant model is now being used by governments and organizations around the world.

At one point, it seemed as though Paffendorf was stating that no metrics exist for virtual worlds environments. If that's what he meant, it's clearly untrue. To quote John Jainschigg “Metrics exist, from many sources. It's their interpretation that's disputed -- mostly by people who have a vested interest in looking at metrics in a 'weblike' way (i.e., big numbers, the unit of 'impression is the 'pageview' or the 'visit' -- an abstraction that comes down to meaning: 'several pages viewed by the same IP address.')”

Jainschigg states, “Classic web metrics are about substantiating mere exposure of content to a large number of anonymous and unqualified readers, referred to en masse as 'traffic'. Virtual world metrics (at least those that are likely to produce ROI in the current timeframe) are about just the opposite: recording both the behavior and the identity of audiences, usually with respect to live content presented in realtime by real people, and executing action-plans (e.g., for sales) based on that what that information can tell you about user interests, preferences, and factors like "readiness to buy."

This past year I’ve been selling event packages and sponsorships for programs we develop or customize for our clients, as well as for Life 2.0 Summits, and have frequently been asked questions such as, “How many impressions will we receive?” “What’s the web traffic?” “Where do they go?” “Who comes?” “How long do they stay?” “What’s the advantage of this over the flat-web “virtual trade show?”

We have, in fact, addressed these questions and many others, with metrics developed for our programs. Now, having said that, this is an ongoing and “living” metrics program in its infancy, and, as better solutions are developed, we continually improve it. I suspect that I’m not addressing the full scope of metrics herein, but that’s not my intent in a blog.

You can check out the Metaverse Roadmap at www.metaverseroadmap.org and I encourage everyone to participate!

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