Hot and Busy Week in the Silicon Valley (Part V)!
POST VON DANIEL (Daniel schreibt in unregelmässigen Abständen exklusiv für SwissStartups):
The Metaverse U conference at Stanford University has been an intensive weekend, with great people and very interesting conversations. After Henrik Bennetson from the Stanford Humanities Lab welcomed all conference participants, Jerry Paffendorf and Mike Liebhold summarized their major findings and perspectives of the second Metaverse Roadmap summit of the previous day.
Especially Lifelogging and Augmented Reality applications were discussed in this context, which I personally find very interesting. For more information about these potentials of the 3D web, the original Metaverse Roadmap can be found here and it is definitely worth to spend the time to read through. The Metaverse U conference has also been streamed into Second Life here and for further information on the conference, please visit Henrik’s blog.
I met Patrick Hogan in Mountain View in a conference room at the Nasa Ames Research Center. We primarily discussed the roles of companies and governmental organisations in terms of common standards of the 3D web on which really valuable applications can be built on. This is definitely an important issue, if we discuss whether a value-adding 3D web is possible for the future.
The big danger in this context for the 3D web is most probably a balkanisation of standards which could be caused by big companies opening different kinds of market positions. This danger sees Christian Renaud (Chief Architect of Networked Virtual Environments for the Cisco Technology Center) as the biggest issue of the 3D web overall, I had the pleasure to interview him at the Metaverse U conference in Stanford.
Furthermore I could meet Kari Pulli from Nokia (Research Fellow Visual Computing and User Interfaces team leader), Thomas Jakob (VP of Innovation Swisscom Outpost), Rob Trice (Partner of Nokia Growth Partners) or Emily Melton (Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson). Those people could give me further valuable inputs for my overview of the potential applications and challenges of the 3D web.
This week, I also had the pleasure to meet Randy Farmer (Community Strategic Analyst Yahoo! Inc. until last week), probably one of the most experienced guys in online communities. Randy was one of the creators of one of the first online MMOG called Habitat. He has a very critical view on what 3D can be used for in the internet, and it was a lot of fun and interesting to listen to his views, for example: “Do I need an avatar to walk into a bank, to speak with a bank avatar for processing my payments? No, this is just ridiculous!”. However, Randy sees an added value with 3D in a few applications, for example in training or of course in online gaming. But those are rare, in his view, and one needs to face the reality, that an immersive 3D environment doesn’t add value per se to existing applications.
Yesterday, my brother Stefan has arrived in SF as he is working for half an year at the NASA Ames Research Center, I wish him all the best for this great experience! There’s a picture of us two in Mountain View’s Neto Café (as usual, it was hard to find something different than a Starbucks – I just didn’t want my brother to suffer from the beginning of the so-called “Starbucks-culture-shock”…). Thanks also to Claudia, who showed me around in San Francisco these days 
I had a great time with her!
I am looking forward to my next week’s program which is unfortunately the last week during my research trip in the Silicon Valley: I’ll meet Reuben Steiger (CEO Millions of Us), Daniel Huebner (former Director of cummunity affairs at Linden Lab) or Chris Rust (General Partner U.S. Venture Partners). There will also be the Virtual Goes Mobile Forum in Santa Clara to which I look forward to reporting on.
Cheers, Daniel
