Re: VMs: Virtual Voynich Museum

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Claudio,

At 12:50 20/07/2003 -0400, Claudio Antonini wrote:
> As an example of the complex structures that one can build, albeit with
> another program, I have found www.activeworlds.com, which seems to have
> constructed large worlds and buildings, with lots of interaction. They have
> their own programs, different from Adobe Atmosphere, but it gives an idea of
> the complexity that these worlds can attain. Related to our purposes, for an
> European health insurance company they had an avatar continuously giving a
> conference every 10 minutes, with slides simultaneously projected in the
> background, 24/7.

I'll check Adobe Atmosphere through carefully, but it seems similar to a 
number of other pre-prepared presentation packages I've seen (or seen 
described) - but the point about the kind of mini-conference I would like 
to run isn't to *present* ideas as to place people in an environment where 
they can *change* and *develop* their ideas... presenting is only half of 
the picture.

As a group, we collectively have lots of insights and opinions - but an 
email group is what I would term a "low-friction environment"... ie, it 
normally takes a lot of emails going past you for much of their content to 
rub off on you. By way of contrast, I want to run the conference we're 
talking about as a kind of "high-friction environment" - this really isn't 
related (contrary to what many virtual environment salespeople might tell 
you) to the render-quality of the avatars, but more to the structure of the 
discussions and debates... their level of interactivity.

I've spent the last 20+ years building interactive virtual worlds (in one 
way or another), and while they're great for heavily pre-planned stuff, 
they're still fairly impractical for improvised / ad hoc stuff. All I'm 
trying to say is: while there's lots of technology out there, very little 
of it appears suitable for the kind of interactive conference I have in mind.

Cheers, ..... Nick Pelling..... 


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