Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Category: Second Life

  • Virtual Reality Cannot Yet Replace Real Life Presence

    Second Life

    Image via Wikipedia

    Virtual Reality Cannot Yet Replace Real Life Presence

    I’ve seen some discussions on various mailing lists about attempts to virtualize conferences as a way to save money for participants, given outrageous travel costs these days. Believe me, as an avid conference-goer, I and my wallet couldn’t agree more about travel costs. However, technology isn’t there quite yet, at least not for what makes conferences and other social meetings important.

    The talking head portion? That’s easy. You can, and in fact anyone can, record a talking head session, where the presenter gets up in front of a crowd and chats about whatever. In fact, for PodCamp Boston, we have an mDialog channel that does exactly that. You can watch pre-recorded talking heads in advance of the conference, get whatever you can from those presentations (if you have recorded sessions from other PodCamps, please post them to this channel!), and then show up at the actual event with a better idea of what questions you need answers to.

    Here’s why technology still fails at the most important parts of presence. First, there’s a technical limitation. Our human sensory systems are calibrated to three dimensional space, to perceive five different senses, and to do so all in parallel. Virtualizations like Second Life and Google Earth deliver more or less two of our five senses, and omit a tremendous amount of data.

    Second, there’s a contextual limitation. Have you ever been to a conference in which another participant catches your attention? How much of that was a verbal, obvious gesture and how much of that was non-verbal communication? Even with Qik, Seesmic, Utterz, and all the other forms of rich media communication, our devices and our use of the devices is still so poor that we miss most of that data.

    Second, there’s a metaphysical limitation. Think about it for a second. The technologies we use to represent sight and sound on computers are calibrated to a very narrow spectrum of visible light and audible sound. As a result, we automatically get a diminished experience. For example, no virtualization currently transmits infrared or ultraviolet wavelengths – thus, you never feel that sensation of body heat when you get closer to someone at a virtualized conference. Think that’s not important? Watch when a conference gets underway, and see how many times people touch – shake hands, hug, pat each other on the back, and so forth. Part of touch’s magic is the infrared spectrum.

    The computer can’t deliver ultraviolet, either. Classic example: you can put up a picture of the sun on your 34″ Apple Cinema Display and you will never get a sunburn. The virtualized experience can’t deliver because we’re not transmitting that data.

    How much other data don’t we transmit? How much else is lost? If you believe in the power of prayer and the ability for someone to spiritually heal another person, you can bet our technology does not transmit the extra data that the in-person experience undoubtedly contains. If you believe that chanting Sanskrit mantras has power, how much resonance do we create when we chant that’s outside our range of audible sound but is still very much a part of the experience?

    This is why conferences still matter. This is why even though MP3s are ubiquitous, the live musical performance is still irreplaceable. This is why human intimacy is still desperately sought after even with the most robust technology solutions we have available to us.

    It’s foolish to believe that technology can replace the full experiences of being there in person. Absolutely, there’s benefit and gain to be had by recording, podcasting, and streaming events for those who are there and those who can’t make it, but don’t think for a minute that current technology can replace the in-person experience.

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  • Dear Non-Profits and Political Campaigns

    Could you use an extra 45,000 per week?

    If so, you might want to consider having a subscription object written for you in Second Life.

    A “bonus” called an allowance is issued in Second Life every week to residents. It’s L50, or roughly US0.18 per avatar.

    18 cents doesn’t sound like much, but hire a developer to create a script for your cause and ask people to donate their L50 every week to your cause. A quarter million Second Life residents would be US$45,000 per week. Not too shabby!

  • Starry Night in Second Life

    Hat tip to Mitch Joel and CC Chapman for this wonder.

    [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxVDVggLqsA[/youtube]

  • Second Life, Superheroes, and The Greater Good

    Another fantastic seminar with master teacher Stephen K. Hayes has come to an end, and this one is even harder to put into words. Meditations, martial arts, and mind science all blended together for an eye-opening weekend. A few takeaways that I can put into words come to mind…

    Second Life. Was there Second Life at the seminar? No. Second Life is a technology that came along about 600 years after the period we were studying, but Second Life provides something to many people that has not been previously available – the ability to visualize and see visualized other people’s internal mind images on a grand scale. During the guided meditation, we were asked to construct some mental images in our heads about the topics at hand, and I found myself creating imagery with greater ease than ever before, and much of it looked like stuff you’d see in world. Second Life has given me more mental flexibility to do that kind of internal vision work than I thought possible, and that was really eye opening.

    Super powers. So many of the “deities” in Buddhism have ascribed attributes. This one on the mandala is the power of healing, this one over here is the power of compassion. In the Buddhist tradition, these things are archetypes – ideals, essences, distillations of the quality, as opposed to being an external entity. You wouldn’t ever go to a church to worship, say, Yoda or Superman, but you might in a time of crisis envision yourself having Yoda’s wisdom or Superman’s strength. The same is true of the Buddhist superheroes painted on these iconic images. One of the takeaways from the weekend for me was not just learning about a particular superhero power or quality, but making use of it, bringing it out of your head and into the world so you can generate results with it.

    Think about it this way – how selfish would it be, if you had X-Ray vision or could fly or bullets couldn’t harm you, to simply live a quiet life and not make use of those powers for good? We talked a lot this weekend about the state of the world, about how fast the world is changing, and not necessarily for the better. We in new media have super powers. We can talk to thousands, millions of people with the push of a button. We can gain “telephathic” insights into our friends’ inner thoughts with an RSS reader, know where they are via Twitter and other location-aware devices. We can see life through their eyes via Flickr, YouTube, Blip.tv, and more. In olden times, the ability to see from afar was called remote viewing, or clairvoyance. Now it’s called UStream.tv. The ability to foresee the future like a Jedi or Sith seemed magical 30 years ago when George Lucas put Star Wars on the big screen. Today, you only need aggregate multiple data sources, and patterns emerge that might as well be a map.

    YOU are the superhero, or have the potential to be and the tools to do it with, right now. You don’t have to become a black belt in a martial art, or spend decades meditating in a cave somewhere. Just turn on your computer, connect to the Internet, and you have tapped into your power source. You have activated your superpowers. You can save lives with your powers, you can make the world a better place, or you can advance its destruction. Choose wisely.

    Human technology. The Internet is the great leveler. It’s the great equalizer, if we let it be. The power of the Internet has made some careers and lives and broken others. Most importantly, it allows us to connect to each other, to organize, to share, to grow, and to be greater than the individual. The power of our network is spectacular when you step back, when you stop letting life’s mundane chores and daily grind blind you to your powers. The same technologies are available to everyone who connects (for the most part). Jewish? RSS works for you. Muslim? RSS works for you, too. American? A blog post by an American has the same technological foundation, broadly speaking, as a blog post by a Russian, Australian, or Kenyan. The Internet isn’t a group’s technology, it’s human technology. It’s all of ours.

    One thing that has always stood out to me was an experience I had in 1993, at a Billy Joel concert. The energy of that concert was unbelievable, at Nassau Colliseum, not far from where Joel grew up. At the end of the night, he sang his signature piece, Piano Man, for a crowd of 30,000, and nearly everyone in the audience sang along. 30,000 people unified their thoughts, words, and actions together to sing this one song and the energy and power of that moment was awe-inspiring. I thought to myself afterwards, imagine the potential that humanity has if we could unify like that for longer, on a bigger scale. What would we be capable of?

    The same thought repeats in my head now. What could we do together – what heights could we achieve, if we stop thinking of ourselves as small little individuals in a hostile world, and take charge of our experiences of life? What could we BE if we are all together working for good, fully awakened to our powers, fully able to tap into them?

  • Amazing builds in Second Life

    I was sailing around the SLuniverse this evening, and found myself in the midst of a HUGE build. Someone is constructing a Nova class starship inside of Second Life – complete with blueprints, floorplans, etc. The attention to detail is AMAZING. Take a look:

    Adventures in Second Life

    Adventures in Second Life

    Adventures in Second Life

    With builds this high quality, machinema inside of SL is a no-brainer.

  • Second Life Furnishings

    I had an interesting thought today while attending Coffee with Crayon. If you haven’t gotten it already, I strongly recommend picking up a copy of The Timeless Way of Building, by Christopher Alexander. It’s a fantastic book, nearly legendary in some circles. It is to architecture what Gavin de Becker’s Gift of Fear is to self defense books, a landmark piece of work. One of the central tenets of Timeless Way of Building is this: space is defined by how it’s used. The patterns of human behavior are remarkably consistent across cultures, across languages, across boundaries of every kind. A space is defined by how we use it, which is in turn driven by how it makes us feel. A sunny window evokes a different emotion than a featureless wall.

    Here’s the funny thing in Second Life. A lot of the conventions of design don’t necessarily apply, or are at least not optimized for the virtual world, but are still necessary. For example, couches and chairs aren’t necessarily required because avatars’ legs don’t get tired like our flesh and bone counterparts. Doors and walls actually impede flight.

    So here’s the thought of the moment. Why put these things in? Because they’re First Life cues to help us understand what the space we’re in is supposed to do. For example, in this morning’s chat, we were discussing different spaces in-world, and why some spaces were more conducive to conversation than others. One of the immediate takeaways, architecturally speaking, is that big, open spaces where people can not only fly in, but see from a distance a gathering crowd, makes a difference for sociability. Visual cues from First Life, like sofas, couches, and chairs arranged in a pattern that is representative of what you’d find in a similar First Life space almost hijack our minds into believing that a space is less or more conducive to conversation. Crayon has done this brilliantly in the lobby of their headquarters.

    If you’re in-world, what First Life cues combined with Second Life functionality have you created to maximize the familiarity and comfort of your space in-world?

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