tx Oh was at the Orange Island interoperability meeting. And he made an audio recording of the conference, I am hearing right now. Way interesting, the idea of merging 2D / Web2.0 with 3D / Web3.0: Instead of bringing the web to SL, take your avatar (and your friend’s ones) from SL to the two-dimensional Web and back.

Weblin (on the more flat side of the VW scene) seems to be an important part of it, because it exists with a good user base, has an open and transparent architecture, and it is really useful by itself.

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In a psychological test setup of the Penn State University, three groups of students had to solve a complicated mathematical text question, one of them over voice chat, one group met in meatspace, and the third group gathered in a Second Life environment.

The face-to-face teams felt most confident of their performance, yet the Second Life teams provided the most accurate answers in the task.

Source: techradar.com, via: Mal Burns

Bei einem psychologischen Versuchsaufbau der Penn State-Universität traten 3 Gruppen von Studenten gegeneinander an, um eine komplizierte mathematische Aufgabe in Gruppenarbeit zu lösen. Eine der Gruppen kommunizierte über Voice Chat, die zweite traf sich im RL, und die dritte in einer Second Life-Umgebung.

Nachdem die Forscher das Experiment zehn Mal wiederholt hatten, zeichnete sich deutlich ab, dass diejenige Gruppe die besten Ergebnisse lieferte, die über Second Life kommunizierte. Allerdings dauerte es bei ihnen auch relativ lang, weil die Bedienung des Avatars für die Studenten zunächst schwierig war.

Quelle: die-topnews.de

(Somehow I just hear my former boss say: OK, we take the fast solution. lol)

In teh blog, M Linden just announced the new Senior Vice President and Chief of Product (whatever that is), T Linden (Tom Hale). Tom is the second former Adobe employee, after Clare Rees, who was acclaimed European Marketing Director a few days ago.

Also, Dusan Writer has a detailed critique on the second big news, that Linden Lab are hiring an external company to build a new “user friendly” client. I really hope that this won’t turn into bad news for us bunch of Linux Furries.

Clare Rees is the new European Marketing Director of Linden Lab, the Makers of Second Life.
She has been working as Marketing Director and Senior Group Manager (Creative, Education & Mobile) at Macromedia/Adobe since 1998.

(source: http://www.pressebox.de/pressemeldungen/linden-lab/boxid-206692.html (not public yet))

Panorama made with Hugin from 8 SL Screenshots,

Javascript renders one 2000×300 image into a 360 degree scrolling view

Crossing borders between different Virtual Worlds is the next big thing. (I tell ya!^^) While there will probably never be an archetyp Avatar, that bears all possible features of any imaginable VW, taking your N identity into the M world is increasingly important.

In their Blog, Linden Lab announced one more kludge to make that happen: Now with every Slurl you create, there comes a button to create an avatar on the fly, if you don’t have one yet. So, the route from any medium with http links (Websites or a Skype chat as in Torley’s example video) to Second Life is a known passage now.

Taking a look into my calendar:

• 2008-09-18: Launch of ExitReality (internetz)
• 2008-09-24: Virtual Worlds Camp (Berlin)
• 2008-10-06: Virtual Worlds Forum Europe (London)
• 2008-10-09: Terry Pratchett (Second Life)
• 2008-10-10: Meet&Greet 4D (Berlin)

torrid@dina4 ~ $ leo sommerloch
2 search results      Direct Matches
silly season (Aust.; Brit.) i   das Sommerloch i
summer slump                i   das Sommerloch i

Hey, The Large Hadron Collider is running, and we are yet not eaten up by mini-black-holes!

(cartoon: User Friendly by Illiad)