Synthetic Environments and the Enterprise: Highlights

As I noted yesterday, the mixed reality event Synthetic Environments and the Enterprise was held within SecondLife yesterday. I attended, and overall it was a great experience. I took plenty of pictures which you can see here

Helen Cheng started things off with a demo of and dissertation on World of Warcraft as related to social interactions and group cohesion (though I do not recall her saying the latter). It was odd to see another virtual world from within SecondLife, and even stranger to see real people poking and prodding it like a specimen of anatomy. Seeing real people from within SecondLife made me think up the phrase 'reverse muppetism'. To see the reverse muppetism twisted again seemed... strange. I suppose I could get used to it. In the future I may have to.

Geoffrey West then made some opening remarks - I missed bits and pieces of this as the video stream was fought with on my end as well as on the server side. I wish I had heard if he mentioned allometric law or power law in relation to synthetic worlds. That would have been pretty cool, though I expect it would bore the snot out of those less mathematically inclined.

Leighton Read followed up, and again - I missed significant parts of this aspect. These slumps weren't a complete loss - some instant messenging between others kept me busy, and I made at least 3 significant connections yesterday, though one male avatar was discussing the shaving of legs with this lowly penguin. I'm not sure where that was going, but the other parts of the conversation were fun and insightful.

Ruben Steiger then gave a tour of SecondLife. This seemed pretty old hat to me, I suppose, though there were some interesting facts in there. I really did wish that this MillionsOfUs fellow quit tossing around '3.7 million people'. We all know that this number doesn't really represent the people in SecondLife. Perhaps Ruben felt it was necessary to fluff the numbers to compare better to World of Warcraft, I don't know. The truth is that the growth of concurrent usage in the last few months says more about SecondLife than a static count of the number of people who simply started one or more accounts to create 3.7 million people. I don't want to beat Ruben up on this, but I do want to press the point home. Peak concurrent usage deltas say more than static account number growth. This is not proprietary software license counting, especially with an open source client.

The fact that Ruben did point out that I would like to hammer home is that game technology supercedes enterprise application by 4-5 years fairly consistently. We're already seeing this within virtual worlds; in fact, Ruben Steiger partly exemplifies this.

The coffee break saw me run off quickly to handle a few real estate transactions after some cool discussion within SecondLife about language translation. The real estate transactions were oddly on topic for the next part of the event.

The speaker I was most interested in, Edward Castronova, was up next to discuss the economics of synthetic worlds - which he placed on the map with a 'fun' paper some time ago. If you've read Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (which I reviewed), you'll be familiar with what he spoke of. His points on what other virtual commodities exist - such as stock - pressed the 'virtual is not valueless' point home. I hadn't considered that the EU was also of only virtual value at one point, but then... isn't money as a concept about virtual value? And credit cards? Thought provoking.

I made a comment about him being shorter than I expected which somehow leaked into the real world to him. His response was that he was an intellectual giant - something I won't argue - and also something which had a penguin staring at his flippers a bit. It was a cool bit of interaction with a speaker.

Byron Reeves of Stanford University was up next, and he discussed the psychology of fun. The 'popcorn' experiment was interesting; 4-5 year olds were asked about an image of popcorn on a television. If the television is inverted, what will happen? Many children of that age thought the popcorn would fall out of the bucket. Older children thought it was a somewhat silly question. He went over further experiments which substantiated that our 'older' brains are adjusting to 'new' technology. I think that it is possible that these experiments focus more on age instead of technology literacy - and I wonder what someone who was 60 years old and had never seen such technology would say when asked about the popcorn. I have a feeling that they would say something similar to the 4-5 year old age group of the test case; I have a feeling that technology literacy has a greater impact than age - and that technology exposure (and the digital divide) are important aspects of this work which may be diminished for lack of granularity. But what do I know?

Lunch saw me head back into 'work' and juggle requirements on a project. Don't ask.

Thomas Malone of Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed up in an avatar after lunch and dicussed the prediction and the future of work. This wasn't what I expected but was very interesting nonetheless; it had more to do with markets than I expected.

Alpheus Bingham of InnoCentive discussed Collective Intelligence and Decision Markets, which was an interesting look at how decision markets (prediction markets) have been affected by collective intelligence.

'Enterprise Applications of Game Technology I' was presented by Chuck House of Media X, Stanford University. I was having problems with my player at this point, so I missed parts of this. Fortunately, the ethersnot (network congestion) eased up during the 3 pm break.

Of course, the 3 p.m. break was noteworthy. moo Money did some dancing and some puppetry for the audience. A few of us indicated she could make money at halftime events doing such things.

After the break, 'Enterprise Applications of Game Technology II' was covered by Christian Renaud of Cisco Systems - the most notable thing that he said in the entire thing for me was: "If you create the canvas, the audience will create the art!"

Ilan Frank covered 'Enterprise Applications of Game Technology III', which - unfortunately - I missed because my audio stream was being punked.

David Ackley, of the University of New Mexico, did a great job of tying it all together towards the end - though I was still having some problems with audio at this point.

Overall, I consider the event was a great success... I learned a lot, and appreciated what the speakers had to say (though I don't necessarily agree with some of it). The audio/video issues are par for the course on the bleeding edge - the bleeding edge doesn't exist without blood. In retrospect, the only things which I think could have improved the event may not be that practical. Having speakers presentations available within SecondLife on a prim would have been useful - this was done within the context of the event, and Banana Stein managed it - but for individuals to get copies... Well, I think that this would have been worthwhile. Still, many speakers don't turn in their powerpoints in a timely manner (I'm always guilty of that - I'm a 'fly by seat of the pants' speaker). Perhaps holding the entire event within SecondLife would have been good too, since then we may have chat transcripts which are a lot more valuable to me than memories of voices in my head.

I suppose the value of the event to me could be determined by the fact that 200 yards away, Trinidad and Tobago Carnival was in full swing. But I've seen many Carnivals. I had not seen this before, and I think that this was a better use of my time. My employer may even think so. ;-)

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