Archive for July, 2008

Ken off on the conference trail…

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

This is just a quick hello to talk about some of my upcoming appearances.

Digital Day – August 2, I’ll be speaking to the Directors Guild of America, in Hollywood, demonstrating the use of virtual worlds for the film-making process. We’ll focus on logistics and real-time production meetings.

Virtual Worlds Expo – September 3-4, I’ll be leading a panel in the Enterprise Track at the Los Angeles Convention Center called "Using Virtual Worlds to Streamline and Augment the Film-Making Process." Guess what that one’s about?

XML Seoul – September 25 to 26, I’ll be helping with the X|Media|Lab’s "Digital, Social, Mobile" workshop in Seoul. More details on the conference connected with that soon.

If you’re going to be at any of these, let me know!

-Ken

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Of Tokugawa Japan and Virtual Worlds

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

There’s an interesting paper by Dr. Eiko Ikegami and Dr. Piet Hut, both of Princeton, in The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research . Dr. Hut is also with MICA , one of Genkii’s partners.

The article examines artistic circles in Second Life via comparison to those existing in Tokugawa Japan . I very much support the argument that virtual worlds create something of a neutral, shared space that allows people to experiment in ways they might not normally do in their everyday lives, across society and geographical boundaries. What a fantastic opportunity for society as a whole.

From the article: "Such alternative spheres of sociability have been often coupled with people’s search for the possibility of creating a new social order built on the horizontal association of free individuals rather than on structures of vertical integration."

A very interesting and accessible read on a topic that I believe will get much more attention in the future.

Here’s the abstract for "Avatars Are For Real: Virtual Communities and Public Spheres," with a link to the full PDF download.

-Ken

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China, Astrophysics, Informatics, and Virtual Worlds

Friday, July 4th, 2008

We’ve been crazy busy here in the Genkiiverse, so sorry for the silence. Adam and I took a trip to Shanghai and Beijing, meeting up with our partners at Fix8 , the crew at HiPiHi , and one of our new partners, iLemon .

iLemon provides solutions for custom 2D and 2.5D virtual worlds. Based in Shanghai, they’ll help us extend our options for creating virtual world presences for clients. Check out their site.

We’ve also partnered with two exciting academic institutions working in virtual worlds.

The National Institute of Informatics (NII) is located in Tokyo, and is doing a wide range of research in virtual worlds. Led by Dr. Helmut Prendinger , their projects include the development of a Multimodal Presentation Markup Language 3D (MPML3D) , allowing improved scripting for interactions between virtual world bots and users. Genkii will help NII distribute their ideas to a wider group of users.

The Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA) is using virtual worlds for large-scale simulations and visualization of astronomical data. Astronomers and researchers from a number of universities and institutions including Dr. Piet Hut from Princeton and Dr. Jun Makino from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan . Genkii will help MICA with explorations and development in OpenSim, and assist in facilitating support for this research from interested companies.

So, yeah. Lots and varied news. But there’s more to come!

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