Virtual Stuff

According to the New York Times, Stuff Matters in Virtual Worlds:
When people have the opportunity to create a fantasy world, they can and do defy the laws of gravity (you can fly, and walk under water in Second Life), but not of economics or human nature.

Second Life residents often take virtual jobs, even poorly-paid ones. They are evidently discovering what inheritors have struggled with for generations: It’s not as much fun to spend money you haven’t earned.

Robert J. Bloomfield, a behavioral economist at Cornell University, studies investor behavior in the real world and recently became interested in how investors behave similarly in Second Life. Reporter Daniel Terdiman's book “Entrepreneur’s Guide to Second Life” will be published soon. Not only does stuff matter to residents of SL, it provides rich opportunities for research, analysis and publication.

SLCC07 Reports

The Second Life real-life convention (SLCC 07) in Chicago over the weekend was sold out awhile ago, but Caroline McCarthy of c|net news has two reports on the event: Chicago, the Metaverse's Metropolis and on Philip Rosedale's talk.

The poster for the event is on Flickr. Pacific Rim points to SLCC07 presentations posted on Slideshare and to other media coverage of the event.

Daneel Ariantho's Second Life has a pointer to the Salamander project presentation by Jonathan Richter (avatar Wainbrave).

Is a Virtual Business Life Worth Living?

Entrepreneur Magazine had a recent piece, Virtual Life Worth Living? about the experiences of businesses who tackled a presence in SL.

According to their experts, especially Steve King, lead author of the recent Intuit Future of Small Business Report: Technology Trends (pdf), there aren't enough users, it's not attracting the mainstream, businesses haven't figured out how to translate the physical into virtual worlds, and businesses haven't figured out how to successfully market in virtual worlds.

There's a rather different perspective in ComputerWorlds's What Second Life Business Exodus?, the Business Communicators of Second Life, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute's The Coming Second Life Business Cycle. There's also a collection of articles about SL and virtual worlds at Business Week.

State of Play V Update

Thomas Malaby's notes on the panel discussion at the State of Play V conference, Building Businesses in Virtual Worlds are available now. He especially notes the tension faced by real world organizations operating in virtual worlds: how to maintain control over their brands while tapping into the innovation that virtual world users can provide.

Workshops today, the final day of the conference, include Educational Applications, Law and Regulation, Managing Identities in Virtual Worlds, Commercial Applications, and Online Poker.

Podcasts and videos from the event should be available here.

Royal Liverpool Philharmonic in SL

According to C|net news, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra is preparing for SL concerts in a replica of its real life concert hall. They plan to perform works by Rachmaninov, Ravel and two contemporary composers from Liverpool. The concert is scheduled for September 14 at 7:30 PM. Tickets are free, but limited - register here.

Fall Conferences, 2007

Fairfax County, VA, is sponsoring the inaugural Conference on the Creative Economy to be held October 24 and 25. Speakers include Richard Florida, Thomas Friedman, Frank Sesno, David DeLong, Anne Fisher, and Alvin Toffler. Registration is now open.

The next SEBIO Investor Forum will take place November 7 and 8 in North Carolina. Winners of the year-long SE Bio/Plan competition will be selected during the event, and will awarded unrestricted, non-dilutive venture funds to launch the enterprise and implement their business plan.

The 17th annual Pegasus Conference will be held in Seattle, November 5 - 7. This year's theme is Amplifying Our Impact: Strategies for Unleashing the Power of Relationship. Speakers include Peter Senge, Debra Myerson, Van Jones, Peter Weertman, and C. Otto Scharmer.

LA is host to the Internet Telephony Conference and Expo conference September 10 - 12. Billed as The World's Ultimate IP Communications Conference!, an event blog and speakers list are available.

The next Trends in Nanotechnology conference will be held September 3 -7 in Spain. Speakers include several researchers from American universities.

The Third Annual Podcast and New Media Expo will be held in California, September 28 - 30.

The next Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo will be held Oct 10 and 11 in San Jose. Speakers include Edward Castronova, Beth Coleman and Susan Wu.

One can still request an invitation to the Fourth Annual Web 2.0 Summit, Discovering the Web's Edge, to be held in San Francisco October 17 - 19. Speakers include John Battelle, Steve Ballmer and Tim O'Reilly.

Finally, the engineers of the IEEE have scheduled their 11th Annual International Conference on Computer Vision for Oct 14 through 20 in Rio de Janeiro.

Library of Congress Preserves New Media

According to Gamasutra, the Library of Congress has announced a $2.5 m initiative, Preserving Creative America, which targets preservation issues across a broad range of creative media, including movies, digital photography, and video games. This project comes from the Library's National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program.

The Library of Congress announcement notes that the Second Life community will play a vital role in the project, with online groups such as Life to the Second Power, Democracy Island and the International Spaceflight Museum tapped to participate in the project. The University of Maryland, Stanford University and the Rochester Institute of Technology are partners in this effort.

The initiative will also include historical games such as those in the Digital Game Cannon, and electronic literature. For the record, the first ten games included in the Canon are:

Spacewar! (MIT, 1962); Star Raiders (Atari, 1979)
Zork I: The Great Underground Empire (Infocom, 1980; PDP-11 version)
Tetris (Alexey Pajitnov, 1985), Sim City (Maxis, 1989)
Super Mario Brothers 3 (Nintendo, 1990), Civilization I/II (MicroProse, 1991-1996)
DOOM (id, 1993), Sensible World of Soccer (Sensible, 1994), Warcraft I/II/III (Blizzard, 1994-2003)

Theory and Practice Online

According to Francesca Di Meglio of Business Week, researchers and academics are looking at virtual worlds to better understand real world economic questions. A recent SL conference was put on by the Cornell Business School professor Robert Bloomfield, whose real-world specialty is using lab experiments and mathematical models to study the effects of financial market regulation on investor welfare and how psychological forces affect financial market. Bloomfield points out that today's virtual economies are very much like the U.S. economy about 100 years ago, when there was no regulation whatsoever. Snippets from Business Week

Probably the best place to follow academic discussions about the business and legal issues of virtual worlds is Terra Nova. Their next State of Play conference is scheduled for August in Singapore. The original sponsor for this annual event was the New York Law School; current sponsors include the Berkman Center (Harvard), Yale Law School, Trinity University and Nanyang University. Speakers include John Seely Brown (University of Southern California), Cory Ondrejka (Linden Lab), Guntram Graef (co-founder of Anshe Chung Studios)and Judge Unggi Yoon of the Suwon District Court (Korea).

Real Business in SL

PA Consulting and The Sunday Times are hosting an online seminar “Getting real about business in Second Life” on July 24 at 2pm UK time. According to the The Sunday Times, corporations like IBM, CISCO and Reuters all have a presence on Second Life but SL commercial life is dominated by virtual small business owners, some of whom are making real money. In June, 132 residents earned more than $5,000 a month in SL, up from 97 in January. A further 1,340 earned $500-$4,999 a month, up from 837 in January.

However, The LA Times opines that "a three-dimensional online society where publicity is cheap and the demographic is edgy and certainly computer-savvy — should be a marketer's paradise. Four years after Second Life debuted, some marketers are second-guessing the money and time they've put into it."
According to The Escapist, A main difficulty for advertisers is the fantasyland nature of Second Life, with no need for food, clothing or other mundane staples of real life.

Maybe the question isn't whether brands are bored with SL, but whether Second Lifers are bored with brands... from Tech Digest.

MIT TR on SL

Second Earth, the long MIT Technology Review story (registration required) opens with the weather map created by Jeffrey Corbin of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Denver. "The map I am standing on belongs to NOAA, and it covers a 12-by-20-meter square of lawn on a large virtual island in Second Life." In the end, author Wade Roush says

In the course of my research for this story, I bought land in Second Life, built a house, filled it with furniture, bought and razed the adjoining land, lifted my house a hundred meters into the sky to get it out of the way, and began work on a bigger house. I was also befriended by dozens of Second Life residents, several of whom I now know better than my real neighbors. Most were delighted to hear about my story, to tell me how they're spending their second lives, and to show me their own creations, including a hot-dog-shaped airplane and an animated Tibetan prayer wheel.

Yesterday's TR interview with Peter Norvig, Google's Director of Research, on the Future of Search, also points to how people interact with Google and interact with each other on the Web.

Even if you are not especially interested in Second Life, the article is a great example of using the full capacity of the web to convey information. While the print version of the article is certainly available online for registered users, the web version is rich with related videos, SLURLs, SL images, comments and links to dozens of institutions, projects and individuals.

Meetings in SL

Technology Review has a new article on the design of meeting spaces in Second Life. Drew Harry, of the MIT Media Lab designs spaces to take advantage of the unique features of virtual worlds. Nick Yee's research on virtual worlds includes work on how self-representations, such as avatars, change behavior. In recent studies, he explored the hypothesis that an individual’s behavior conforms to their self-representation independent of how others perceive them - a process he terms the Proteus Effect. The paper, The Proteus Effect(pdf file) paper is in publication.

Business Communicators of Second Life has a detailed description of the Crowne Plaza launch of their SL meeting spaces. Art Fossett of ArtsPlace SL generously described his own mistakes in designing meeting facilitation tools.
Since most meetings are followed by records or minutes, the Space CoLab blog is a good place to follow the meeting summaries of a well-organized SL group, the community of space scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs.

5 Outsourcing Trends

From c|net news comes a report on 5 outsourcing trends to watch, compiled by Natasha Lomas for Silicon.com:

Consolidation; Globalisation; Person-to-person Offshoring; Greensourcing; and Virtual Worlds.

Also according to Silicon.com, Sweden-based Entropia Universe has been chosen to create a cash-based virtual economy for China in collaboration with Chinese online entertainment company Cyber Recreation Development (CRD). CRD predicts it will generate more than $1bn annually, and estimates the creation of 10,000 jobs in China, with staff working from home inside the Entropia Universe.

Irving and the Monsters of the Id

Irving Wladawsky-Berger has a fascinating piece on Dealing with the (Virtual) World in our Minds, introducing his reflections on the recent IBM - MIT Media Lab Conference on Virtual Worlds with the Monsters of the Id and the movie, Forbidden Planet.

He concludes

Some may find it ironic that an all day conference on virtual worlds is taking place with flesh and blood people at the Media Lab auditorium in Cambridge. But in the end, it is all about balance and harmony. We all live in two worlds - the physical world and the world in our minds. Perhaps what we are now seeing is the emergence of a hybrid world that attempts to close the gap and make it easier for us humans to deal with these two very different worlds, helping us better integrate them into our lives and into our work. Needless to say, each has its pros and cons. Creating such appealing, powerful and simple hybrid worlds may very well be one of the most important aspects of the Knowledge Age on which we are embarking.

Events, In-world and in SL

Beth Kanter's reflections on Mixed Reality Events provides insight into last year's TechSoup NetSquared Conference, which took place in San Francisco and Second Life. Last October, she described the MacArthur Foundation's multi-site Digital Learning Briefing.

Also active in SL, and developing mixed reality events in the business sector, PA Consulting is profiled in a recent Financial Times article.

Virtual Stuff at Stanford

Today's Virtual Goods Summit at Stanford University is focused on the emerging market opportunity for virtual goods and economies. Produced by Charles River Ventures, Susan Wu's article introducing the event on TechCrunch elicited a long string of comments in support of, and critical of, emerging business models for virtual goods.

The forum intends to address such issues as

• How will virtual goods and virtual currencies impact social networking?

• Are virtual goods the next big business model?

• What does it take to successfully launch a virtual goods offering?

• Are virtual goods poised to go mainstream?

• What does it take to nurture and develop a successful virtual economy?

• Why are users embracing virtual goods?

Virtual World Credentials

Robert Bloomfield asked an intriguing question on Terra Nova recently:

What would a virtual world need to be like to make such a resume snippet attractive to a major commercial bank?

• Cornell University, 2010, Bachelor of Science, Computer Science

• University of Michigan, 2012, Masters of Engineering, Software Architecture

• World of Bizquest, 35th level commercial banker, with certificates of achievement in credit analysis (Gold), interest rate risk management (Gold), financial instruments (Silver), and fixed income investing (Platinum).

Scales of SL

From UK ZDnet comes this assessment of Second Life:

The media loves its darlings, and Second Life is very darling indeed. No surprise, coming as it does in the overlap between three of the hottest topics of the moment

• video gaming, now bigger than Hollywood,
  
• online communities, now bigger than countries, and
  
• e-commerce, now bigger than a jumble sale.

Wagner James Au, of New World Notes has a different take on the Linden user stats for May, focusing on the countries of origin of active SL residents.
Au also comments that corporations are themselves a kind of avatar, a fictitious entity authorized by governments to conduct business as if they were a person.

According to 3PointD, Anshe Chung Studio (ACS) intends to launch a virtual inter-world financial market in June, no doubt to deal with the economy that is now bigger than a jumble sale.

Rome Reborn, Virtually

c|net news has a new piece on a virtual historical world, the Rome Reborn 1.0 project at the University of Virginia Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities under the leadership of Dr. Bernard Frischer, who founded the UCLA CVR Lab. On June 11, Mayor Walter Veltroni of Rome unveiled a public viewing. Photo Copyright University of Virginia

The project began at the University of California, nearly 10 years ago, and has involved collaboration among UVA, the UCLA Experimental Technologies Center, the UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Lab, and the Reverse Engineering Lab at the Politecnico de Milan.

The project shows almost the entire city of Rome within the 13-mile-long Aurelian Walls in 320 A.D., when Rome was the multicultural capital of the Western world.
According to the CVR site, the material will be available from the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University.

Ludium II

The Indiana University Ludium II Conference promises to be interesting, as folks will be participating on behalf of one of the four regions described below in an event designed as a 19th century political convention.


Thalo: A society of hunters and woodsmen that value individual freedoms over all other things. They feel most at home arguing for policy that involves issues of individual rights, freedoms, or powers.

Sysland: A sturdy and industrious people, Syslanders are concerned most with the hard issues of science and design. They prefer talking about policy involving technology, engineering, and design.

Aroland: The merchants of Aroland have a motto, “Barges float on money, not water.” True to their motto, Arolanders will find it easier to float policy that concerns itself with business, industry, markets, profits, or the economy.

Palvi: Ever practical, the citizens of don’t want to hear about the wonders of tomorrow, they want to make the best out of what they have today. Palvi citizens want to hear statements that can be implemented immediately, involve no controversy, or are obviously feasible.

The sponsoring organization, the Synthetic Worlds initiative, is also building Arden, a virtual Shakespearean world.

A Ludium blurs the lines between work and play by embedding an academic conference within the context of a live-action game. The objective is to stoke intellectual enthusiasm (and hence productivity) using known game techniques. Snippet from SWI

Litigation, Virtual Style

Roger Parloff has a new article on recent real world litigation arising from disputes within virtual worlds. He summarizes the recent ruling concerning SL property from the U.S. District Court of Philadelphia in which Judge Robreno wrote: “While the property and the world where it is found are ‘virtual, the dispute is real.” The plaintiff was an attorney expelled by Linden Lab for violating the SL Terms of Use. He also summarizes the ruling on the World of Warcraft suit in which a gamer sued a company engaged in employing gamers based in third world countries, which he claimed devalued the in-world currency and the gaming experience.

There are several SL efforts underway to establish in-world dispute resolution mechanisms for issues among residents. However, both of these cases involved the real world value of virtual assets, and the policies and practices of the owners of the virtual worlds.

Other perspectives on legal issues emerging from virtual worlds are available on the Terra Nova blogs and Communities 2.0. Related public policy issues will be addressed at the Ludium II conference at Indiana University in June.