Hosted by the Stanford Humanities Lab (http://shl.stanford.edu/), the second Metavers Meetup, which occured both in Real Life (RL) and in Second Life (SL) last night, featured Jamais Cascio, a futurist of the first degree. Attending this meeting did a few things for me: 1) deepened my involvement in the Metaverse community concerned with the future direction of the Metaverse; 2) further refined my vision of where Virtually Real needs to go; 3) made me see that my role is that of a futurist — I’m just not getting paid for it yet, and have never taken the time to really do the hard work needed to make this a substantial part of my life (http://bentspoon.net/content/view/114/26/).
Virtually Real has been steadily chugging along — one of the reasons that I have been unable to post since the Virtual World Conference. A few of the people I have interviewed since then: Danah Boyd (USC/UC Berkeley); Julian Dibbell (Play Money); Christian Renauld (Cisco); Sibley Verbeek (Electric Sheep); Reuben Steiger (Millions of Us).
All of these people have such great insight from their perspectives of this field. What really changed my perspective on this project, however, was my in-world (SecondLife) interview with Christian Renauld, and then introduction to the Metaverse Roadmap Project.
After all, as I had realized a while ago, Virtually Real is not about the technology. I knew that, but I hadn’t really realized what it WAS about. But now I see how it is about how people are going to relate to this new technology.
So what’s coming up? An interview with Damon Hernandez. Attending a Metaverse Meetup. Another meeting with Christian Renauld. More investigation of the Metaverse Roadmap Project.
Stay tuned!