I drove to Atlanta on Sunday and attended the Digital Worlds Conference all day Monday. They did video tape the entire conference, and promised it would be up on the web before too long. They had a wireless internet feed for guests, but the band width was too low to do more than check email. No one except the hard-wired presenters could get into SL.
One of the speakers in the first panel was Dr. Edward Castronova, who gave recent updates on his research in MMORGS. They are still the biggest game in town.
This fed into the next panel, on economics and money, and how the linkage between the real world and virtual worlds will need to evolve before financial institutions can function effectively in virtual worlds.
A reoccurring theme in all the panels was identity and how it will work and evolve. The third panel talked about future man/machine interfaces that will make virtual worlds easier for noobs, and how identities will be expressed in the virtual arena in politics and business.
The final panel had the CFO on Linden Labs, and the CEO of a new social networking virtual world Kaneva, discussing the role of entertainment versus avatar-generated activities, and the impact of open-source, open-standards, and interoperable virtual worlds software. This session was done as a multi-platform event. It was a live feed to and from the SL weekly TV show Metanomics and the Linden Labs rep was in-world and on Skype. Audience members in-world and in Atlanta got to ask questions and make comments. Very shortly this panel should be available through the Metanomics webite, http://metanomics.net/
It was an interesting event where I also got to meet face to face some of the pioneering avatars of education in SL.
Doug
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