Virtual Thoughts

Setting Up! Getting stuff prepared for tomorrows panel discussion on the Emerald Viewer. Visit Rezzed TV Island (18, 204, 25)

Tweet Party! At the Twitter Party hosted by Skate Foss and Toxic Menges. Excellent DJing by Electric Monday Visit Matanzas (196, 134, 23)

I took a look back at some past backups and found some old pictures from 2006.

So It Begins...

WELL you could tell I was excited to go to this conference. I NEVER. EVER. get up early. Never 6AM early. But this day I did. I forgot to set an alarm and everything. So I guess yeah, I was excited.

So the day begins and begins in a big way with Jonathan Hoffman, the CEO of Rezzable who are probably best known for their Greenies sim. So one of the things that Jonathan spoke about during the talk is the progress that Heritage Key was making with their development and how far it has come since it began. If you haven't checked it out then you really should just take a look as it is a fascinating place to explore and its one of the best use cases i can think of for OpenSim. Then we got a demo of the RezViewer that they have been working on, which is based on Unity3D, and it amazed me. I can not think of a time when I saw something like this being done. A way to get OpenSim objects loaded on from what I can tell, a different architecture from Second Life and even better is that it was embedded on a web page. Looking at the news afterwards, I realise that there is something to this whole Unity3D thing. I’ll cover that in a future podcast or blog post I'm sure.

One of the more interesting speeches that happened during day one was one given by the Metaverse Evangelist, Ian Hughes aka. epredator. I think the thing that excited me most about his speech was the possibility of “printing food”. That certainly could make up for the lack of culinary skills I have.

So then we head into the next discussion with Phillip Linden having a discussion with Dousa Dragonash about the new company, if you can call it that, I am still not sure what it really is. As Dousa tried to coax information out of him and as more people tried to figure out what on earth this LoveMachine is...I had a sudden realisation about what Phillip really is. I feel like Phillip is the Virtual Worlds Steve Jobs. They are both amazingly passionate about what they do, Both are captivating speakers and  both are visionaries.

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in again...

So last Friday I headed to a place that, even though it was relatively close in proximity to where I live, I’d never actually been to before. That place is known as London, the capital city of England. I won’t go into why I've never been because that's relatively boring. But the reason I went was because I heard that there was a meet up being held by Rezzable and I figured I'd go along to it.

For one it was actually cheaper than going to MetaMeets for this event (Dublin is quite expensive when you’re a student…). All in all I think I probably spent a maximum of £40 INCLUDING Travel, which was rather nice for a day out to meet the Metarati (as Ian Hughes calls it).

One thing that I noticed was that in some ways, it kind of felt a little like a MetaMeets reunion, despite there only being a few of us who went to MetaMeets being there. But it was still fun to check out. I also got to meet some new faces and one face who I've seen for years but never actually met in reality until then (that person being Mal Burns).

Highlights of the meet up include being streamed onto the web via Rezzable TV (not sure on the name, sounds a little too similar to Rezzed.TV), Visiting the Rezzable Offices and of course the “networking” which I still insist is code for getting drunk, at least it is in Slim Warrior’s case (joke).

Despite the 3 hours of travelling each way, it was a great day out and I think I will head to London again in the future for these meetups, they are indeed a lot of fun.

This post will probably be one of the shortest, simply because there are parts I cannot remember...blame alcohol? So for those who followed Nika on Plurk or heard about my travelling story. I'm gonna keep this brief. I was set to arrive in the town where I got onto a ferry at about 4am so I could have plenty of time to A) Find the Ferry Port and B) Perhaps find some places to transfer the remainder of my British Pounds into Euros. However I arrived in the town 6 hours earlier than I expected because I got onto a train that was supposed to have a break in between but didn't. So I am in a strange town I've NEVER been in and don't know how to navigate and I am like...where the hell am I? Needless to say I got lost and for 2 hours I was trying to figure out where I was supposed to be going. Luckily I finally found a taxi number and got myself back to where I needed to be, but then I decided i needed to get somewhere to sleep. I managed to get somewhere, despite paying really quite a lot of money for what it was. Anyway, to cut this part short, I was able to get to the ferry and after a 7 hour journey with some blogging in between I arrive in Dublin, check into my Hotel and unpack and all that fun stuff. So then it came to the fun part of the day, The Evening Networking...That being, get drunk with the other Metaverse Citizens who are coming along. The hard part, finding them. Luckily, i did check my tweets the day before and figured out that we were meeting up at a place called Oliver St. John Gogarty's. Now I heard that it looked pretty familiar to a pub in the Virtual Dublin called The Blarney Stone. A pub which I pretty much knew of since my first month in Second Life. Ever tried finding a Second Life building in Real Life before? It's definitley intresting. So I go there and figure out, this must be where it is. Now I managed to find some wifi and sent a tweet to Joja (who i had been tweeting with in the running up to MetaMeets)...Figuring, hey if I give a description of myself, they can figure out who I am...didn't really work, you can't get any internet there... Now the one disadvantage to Real Life is there isn't a real easy way to point out who you are, you don't have a tag floating above your head. So, its intresting to say "Hey I am Stuart Warf in Second Life" and having to say it probably 5 times to each person due to the music being pretty loud there...another thing RL doesn't have, a slider for the music and media. So when I get to Gogarty's i'm obviously taking a look around the room at first and I am thinking, who do I know here, DO I KNOW ANYONE here...Luckily there is ONE person I knew. Joja Dhara, thank you Mal for doing Metaverse Week in Review and therefore helping me figure out who somebody is. So as I start meeting people I am thinking in my head, this is pretty cool but also just relieved that I finally made it. As the night progressed, I started to chat with various people as they all entered one by one, Bevan Whitfield (who finally made it after a 3 day delay due to that bloody volcano with it's ashclouds that certainly impacted part of the conference), who like I said is as awesome in Real Life as she is in Second Life. Then there's people like Slim Warrior, who I know best for being a great musician and being a regular guest on Metaverse Week in Review. Chantal Harvey is someone else who I was wanting to meet, simply because I enjoy alot of the work that she has done to produce the machinima that she has 9. Overall great icebreaker event to have and it was sort of fitting in my eyes to start it all off at the place that The Blarney Stone was based on. I can remember going there in my early days with Gomem Desoto. I'm pretty sure in my recollection that Dublin was probably the first non-mainland sim I went to in Second Life. So as the night comes to a close after probably 5 hours of "networking" I decided to head back to the hotel...the fun had just begun

OK, So I am now writing a blog post as I head back from MetaMeets 2010 which took place in Dublin on May 7th and 8th of 2010. It took me Four Years and Four Days to finally meet Second Lifers (and Metaversians) in the Real World and now after thinking about it. I wonder why it took me so long to do so. I swear I don't think I have ever felt such an atmosphere or had such a good time. It's just surreal to think that, wow this is someone I know of from the Internet and then finally seeing them in-world. It's just kind of weird to me at first. Now I wasn't looking at it from a whole, OMFG I CAN'T BELIEVE I SAW THIS SLebrity (because, the whole notion of a SLebrity is a fantasy, and a big one at that, but more of a it's pretty cool and intresting to here this and see this all. All the people I met during the conference were amazing to listen to and kind of reinstilled alot of passion for Virtual Worlds as a whole for me. So many different worlds and projects that really intruiged me and make me want to check them all out to see how cool they are and to experience it. Various worlds that have so much potential are going to be very intresting to follow. Speaking of the people, When I was coming to the conference, there was quite a few people who I knew of who I knew was going to be at the conference, but the only person out of the list who I can think of that I really have spoken and worked with was Bevan Whitfield (that said, who DOESN'T know Bevan). By the way she is as awesome in Real Life as she is in Second Life. Other people who I was intrested in meeting while I was there were Joja Dhara (the organiser of MetaMeets and regular guest on Malburns Writer and Tara Yeats show, Metaverse Week in Review), Slim Warrior (fabulous musician) and Jonathan Hoffman (runs Rezzable). There are others who I knew of such as Ham Rambler, Sitearm Madonna and of course, the amazing machinima artist, Chantal Harvey. One person who I didn't know was coming but met was JustinCC who is a awesome blogger and Core Developer for OpenSim and back when I did MetaNews Daily, I pretty much followed his blog to keep up to date with various OpenSim developments such as HyperGrid and Megaregions (like Megaprims but for Regions). Another person who I didn't really know but had heard of him before is Ian Hughes aka. epredator on Twitter. Very intresting to chat to him over the course of the event. There obviously is alot more I want to talk about, and I think at least for this post, I will save it for now and carry on this attempt to remember as much as I can about the event, which may be a little hard since there was a hell of a lot to take in over the course of the event, so if it seems very scattered and jumpy, that is why.