Metaverse and Realism
Metaverse realism: enabling all users to feel fully immersed in an alternative realm; http://eicker.at/MetaverseResearch
Tagged: Virtual Reality Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Metaverse Research
Research in 3D virtual worlds and the Metaverse: current status and future possibilities; http://eicker.at/MetaverseResearch
Gerrit Eicker
Google Infinite Digital Bookcase
Google: We designed a digital bookcase that’s an infinite 3D helix; http://eicker.at/Google3DBookcase
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “As digital designers, we often think about how to translate traditional media into a virtual space. Recently, we thought about the bookcase. What would it look like if it was designed to hold digital books? – A digital interface needs to be familiar enough to be intuitive, while simultaneously taking advantage of the lack of constraints in a virtual space. In this case, we imagined something that looks like the shelves in your living room, but is also capable of showcasing the huge number of titles available online – many more than fit on a traditional shelf. With this in mind, we designed a digital bookcase that’s an infinite 3D helix. You can spin it side-to-side and up and down with your mouse. It holds 3D models of more than 10,000 titles from Google Books. – The books are organized into 28 subjects. To choose a subject, click the subject button near the top of your screen when viewing the bookcase. The camera then flies to that subject. Clicking on a book pulls it off the shelf and brings it to the front and center of the screen. Click on the high-resolution cover and the book will open to a page with title and author information as well as a short synopsis, provided by the Google Books API. All of the visuals are rendered with WebGL, a technology in Google Chrome and other modern browsers that enables fast, hardware-accelerated 3D graphics right in the browser, without the need for a plug-in.”
TC: “I wrote a while back about the eventual necessity for the internet to become beautiful. The trouble is that the things in the world we consider beautiful in an informational context – magazine and book layouts, typography, etc. – are necessarily limited in the information they have to present. It’s this limitation, the known quantity aspect, that lets designers work effectively. – How should you design something, then, that presents effectively limitless information (say, all the world’s books) through a fairly limited medium (say, a web browser)? Google has one idea. Put them on a gigantic helix. … But is this really something people will want to navigate? Probably not. People like analogs in their digital catalogs, and this one seems a little bit too off the wall. … Anyway, it’s a fun little experiment you can try out here. Note to Mac Laptop users: be careful how you swipe or you may accidentally navigate off the page or invoke some arcane gesture.”
VB: “With tablets and eReaders offering a number of new ways to experience books, the browser has been relatively ignored. However, not a lot of people consider getting into a bubble bath with their nice glass of wine and a laptop book to wind down the day, but you never know. To that end, the virtual bookcase may not be a competitor to the Kindle, but rather to the book discovery service overall. It could also simply be a way to funnel people toward purchasing Google Books, but it’s still pretty cool.“
Gerrit Eicker
Virtual Worlds Census
KZero: The virtual worlds sector has 1.4 billion cumulative registered accounts in Q2/2011; http://eicker.at/VWcensus
Gerrit Eicker
Kinect Hacks
Handsfree gaming accessory Kinect controls virtual worlds, robots, scans objects, goes science; http://eicker.at/KinectHacks
Gerrit Eicker
VWBPE 2011: You are Here.
The Virtual World Best Practices in Education 2011 (3/17-19): share knowledge and experience; http://eicker.at/VWBPE #VWBPE
Gerrit Eicker
Metaverse and Augmented Reality
Augmented reality will become the next big thing: popular, mainstream, mass culture, ubiquitous in 2011; http://eicker.at/1w
Gerrit Eicker
Faceted Identity
Being yourself online becomes a challenge when faceted identities and faceted lives collide; http://eicker.at/FacetedIdentity
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Gerrit Eicker
Farnham/Churchill [PDF]: “We found that for many people identity is faceted across areas of their lives, that some of these facets are incompatible, and that this incompatibility impacts levels of self-reported worry about sharing in social technologies, particularly in social networks. Family emerged as the most important facet of people’s lives, and younger, working men without children reported the highest levels of incompatibility across facets. Further research will be needed to explore the nature of these incompatibilities. People with higher levels of incompatibility were more likely to use email, and to a lesser extent Facebook, to support different areas of their lives, especially adult and media activities. – These results are consistent with the argument that identity and social context are tightly intertwined, and that tools that enable faceted identity and sharing across segmented areas of people’s lives will greatly improve user experiences of social media. Email, which enables more personal, private sharing had a much higher level on our measure of social intensity than did Facebook. Although users expressed appreciation for keeping in touch with their extended network in Facebook, they use email for their more private, bounded sharing. People with higher levels of faceted identity had higher levels of usage of social technologies overall, however they also expressed more worry about sharing, especially in social networks. Social networks in particular need better tools for intimate, private sharing – honoring the boundaries between different areas of people‟s faceted lives.”
Gerrit Eicker
Linden Lab
Korman: A tinfoil hat theory about Linden Lab, makers of Second Life. Part 1; http://eicker.at/LL Part 2; http://eicker.at/LL2
Gerrit Eicker
Real vs. Virtual Life?
Korolov: If we isolate ourselves completely we will be able to see what a truly real life feels like; http://j.mp/aElIAU
3D Virtual Worlds and the Metaverse – Current Status and Future Possibilities; Dionisio, Burns, Gilbert: “In the past three decades considerable progress has been made in moving from text-based multi-user virtual environments to the technical implementation of advanced virtual worlds that previously existed only in the literary imagination. …[P]rogressive capabilities enable them to serve as elaborate contexts for work, socialization, creativity, and play and to increasingly operate more like digital cultures than as games. Virtual world development now faces a major new challenge: how to move from a set of sophisticated, but completely independent, immersive environments to a massive, integrated network of 3D virtual worlds or Metaverse and establish a parallel context for human interaction and culture. …[C]entral elements of a fully-realized Metaverse: realism (enabling users to feel fully immersed in an alternative realm), ubiquity (establishing access to the system via all existing digital devices and maintaining the user’s virtual identity throughout all transitions within the system), interoperability (allowing 3D objects to be created and moved anywhere and users to have seamless, uninterrupted movement throughout the system) and scalability (permitting concurrent, efficient use of the system by massive numbers of users). … The first aspect of ubiquity – ubiquitous availability and access to virtual worlds – rides on the crest of developments in ubiquitous computing in general. As ubicomp has progressed, access to virtual worlds has begun to move beyond a stationary ‘desktop PC rig,’ expanding now into laptops, tablets, mobile devices, and augmented reality. … The second aspect – ubiquitous identity, or manifest persona – has emerged as multiple avenues of digital expression (blogs, social networks, photo/video hosting, etc.) have become increasingly widespread. … As long as virtual world developments move alongside general ubicomp developments, moving in and out of the Metaverse may become as convenient and fluid as browsing the Worldwide Web is today. … It is also possible that virtual worlds may take a leadership position in this regard, as virtual world artifacts may be more closely linked to one’s digital persona due to the immersive environment… Interoperability in virtual worlds currently exists as a loosely connected collection of information, format, and data standards, most of which focus on the transfer of 3D models/objects across virtual world environments. … [V]irtual world interoperability is not solely limited to 3D object transfer: true interoperability also involves communication protocol, locator, identity, and currency standards… The wide-ranging requirements and scope of digital assets involved in virtual worlds have the potential of making the Metaverse the ‘killer app’ that finally leads the charge toward seamless interoperability. … Scalability. Virtual world technologies are currently in an initial stage of departure from highly centralized system architectures… Going forward, an integrative phase is needed where the multiple independent research threads are brought together in complementary and cohesive ways to form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. … Progress in virtual world scalability implies progress in the scalability of many other types of multiuser, multitiered systems. … There are several factors that promote optimism that a fully developed Metaverse can be achieved, as well as a number of significant constraints to realizing this goal. … [A] new generation accustomed to graphically rich, 3D digital environments [both virtual worlds and immersive games offered online and through consoles such as PlayStation, Xbox360, and Wii] is rapidly coming of age and will likely fuel continued development in all immersive digital platforms including advanced virtual worlds. … Along with forces that are propelling the development of the Metaverse forward, there are two significant barriers that may inhibit the pace or extent of this progress. The first pertains to current limits in computational methods related to virtual worlds. … In addition to conceptual and computational challenges, the development of the Metaverse may be constrained by significant economic and political barriers. Currently virtual worlds are dominated by proprietary platforms such as Second Life, Cryworld, Utherverse, IMVU, and World of Warcraft, or government-controlled worlds such as the China-based Hipihi. …[J]ust as the old walled gardens of AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy were instrumental in expanding Internet usage early on, but ultimately became an inhibitory force in the development of the Worldwide Web, these proprietary and state-based virtual world platforms have sparked initial growth but now risk constraining innovation and advancement. … [T]he advancement of a fully-realized Metaverse would likely be maximized by harnessing the same process of collective effort and mass innovation that was instrumental in the creation and expansion of the Web.“