Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Metaverse Infrastructure Emerging, and Blended Reality Ethnographies
The Virtual Worlds 2008 conference is going on in New York this week, and Technology Review is reporting on the announcement of the first of a wave of tools we'll see for inter-operability of virtual worlds like Second Life or Club Penguin.
In this instance, the demo is being used to show how virtual worlds that require fancy 3-d clients can be re-rendered in browsers as Flash content. As TR reports:
The demonstration will take place in a virtual Times Square. Bridges says that the company will showcase the photo-realistic 3-D version of the environment, spotlighting two users interacting there through 3-D virtual representations of themselves, called avatars. Then, Multiverse will show the other side of the conversation: a cartoonish Flash animation running through a browser.
But this seems to be a step towards more universal data exchange in and out of metaverse apps.
On the topic, there is a debate raging after the debut of a new documentary on multi-player online gaming and addiction, Second Skin at the recent South by Southwest festival. Good Morning Silicon Valley has a good post about other recent public comments on gaming:<p/>
Meanwhile, at The Escapist, veteran game designer and professor Brenda Brathwaite taps her many contacts to try to understand the source of all the antipathy that pours out when she mentions her work in a social gathering. The active anger, she finds, seems not so much influenced by the media’s portrayal of gaming (though the disproportionate coverage given to exceptionally violent games doesn’t help) but from a deep, underlying resentment of gaming as a distraction from social interaction and an addictive threat.
Here's the trailer for Second Skin:<p/>
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