After attending and speaking at the Virtual Worlds, Real People Conference this past week, I must say my interest level in virtual worlds has risen. First of all, IDC Herzeliya managed to organize excellent agenda, that really covered, or tried to cover, every aspect of VW. The speakers are active users, either academic of business, including Moshik Miller, a very passionate Ph.D student, doing his Doctorate on the economy of virtual worlds at the Technion. I also met Dr. Yesha Sivan, a metaverse researcher, who spoke about the Full 3D3C (3D, Collaboration, Creation and Commerce) – an interesting way of measuring a virtual world. For instance, World of Warcraft is superb at 3D (amazing graphics) and Collaboration, but lacks in Creation (everything is created by the game) and Commerce (no real economy). Secondlife is good at Collaboration, Creation and Commerce, but lacks in 3D (very low graphical quality). During the break-outs I had some discussions with participants who were intrigued on IBM’s activities and keen to find out how we can work together. There are 2 on-going projects right now, that obviously I can’t comment on, but will do so in the coming weeks.
Here are the slides I showed. You can download them [PDF format, 6MB] here.
More presentations are available at slideshare.net/dvirreznik.
