I'll be speaking tomorrow at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 in Burlingame, California, a conference devoted to mapping the real world in the Web 2.0 era. My topic, of course: "Mirror World: Using MMOs for Real World Mapping". Afterward I'll be signing books. Hope to see you there!
Chances are you'll catch a glimpse of Iron Man adventuring in Second Life, nowadays-- fighting evil doers, cutting through the sky, and acting generally heroic.
If you're lucky, you'll also spot him flirting with bar floozies and exotic dancing, or even hooking up with Wonder Woman.
All this wackiness was made possible by Silver Screen, the Second Life division of Picture Production Company, a movie marketing firm that's promoting Paramount/Marvel Studios' hit movie in-world. To help do that, Silver Screen recently launched an SL screenshot/ machinima contest that challenged Residents to make Iron Man-related videos and images in Second Life. And to do that, they created and distributed an official, modifiable version of an Iron Man avatar, to let Residents play with as they wish. Since it can be freely copied and customized, it's spread far and wide through SL.
“We've had reports of it being given away and sold all over the grid," Silverscreen general manger Dannyboy Lightfoot tells me. "As such, it's impossible for us to know exactly how many avatars there are in circulation, but I can tell you that from our own records alone we know that the total runs into five figures."
Which brings us back to all those sightings of Iron Man acting decidedly un-superheroic. When metaverse marketers consider advertising clients in Second Life, a common concern is how the user-created community might put their brand in embarrassing situations. How did Silverscreen allay those worries?
The front page of last weekend's Los Angeles Times included a very interesting story on corporate use of Second Life, and it's even more intriguing if you know a bit about the writer's background. The article itself is about how companies like Sun Microsystems and Intel are embracing SL to hold company meetings and training sessions for their far-flung employees-- not news to readers of this blog, I suspect, but it's rich with enough details to make it clear the author, Alana Semuels, has done her homework. One choice tidbit: Sun employees are not allowed to show up to SL meetings as non-human avatars.
Three Skeptics Become Three Advocates
But here's the backstory that's just as interesting to me: In 2007, Alana Semuels was also the author of two widely-cited LA Times stories that depicted Second Life as a disaster for corporations. The first dubiously suggested companies were under attack by anti-globalization vigilantes; the second was an equally questionable report arguing that real world advertising in SL had utterly failed. The latter piece was, in my opinion, among the top three articles which drove last year's media backlash. (The other two from Wired Magazine and Forbes.) Now from the same journalist comes a glowing story touting the cost-effectiveness and morale building power of working in the metaverse:
For a rough guess, how's somewhere in the range of $40-50 million this year sound? During a recent broadcast of the Metanomics show, company CFO Zee Linden (John Zdanowski) made an impromptu appearance (part one here, part two here) to refute downbeat analyzes of Linden Lab's financial prospects by insisting that the situation "is far from dire", describing the Lindens as profitable. (A claim often made by outgoing CEO Philip Rosedale and many of his staff.)
But how profitable? The company is privately held, and thus under no obligation to publish its earnings. But the thing is, Linden is transparent enough with its core revenue sources on its Economic Stats page, its usage stats, and its pricing guidelines to make an educated guess. (And I stress this is just a guess based on known variables.) I welcome corrections and amendments, but here's where that very broad $40-50 mill calculation comes from:
Continue reading "How Much Is Linden Lab Making From Second Life, Anyway?" »
When Mitch Kapor unveiled the hands-free 3D camera-driven user-interface, the blogosphere buzzed. Now Tara5 Oh of UgoTrade has a long follow-up interview with Mitch covering that topic and all it relates to (the future of the 3D worlds, the Internet at large, etc.) Among the highlights: Kapor intends to open source the code featured in the demo, and expects the technology to be available to consumers by Christmas 2009. Read it all here.
I'm endlessly fascinated by the way Second Life Residents extend their in-world communities out and into Web 2.0 sites. There are so many fans and promulgators of SL-based music, for example, they recently took over a popular music social network. There are also roughly 200-650 blogs devoted to SL, depending on how you count them. Inspired by a post from Jean Ricard, I recently looked up the number of sites devoted to Second Life screenshots on Flickr. Jean found 1,749, but using a more stringent search, I found less, but still quite a lot: 965. For comparison's sake, searching for "World of Warcraft" groups in Flickr, I came up with just 140. How can an MMO with 10 million subscribers possibly be creating and sharing less screenshots than 550,000 active SL users?
But are all the Flickr Second Life groups actually devoted to the virtual world? (As opposed to, say, "second life antiques" or whatever.) I browsed through the list, and came up with SL-based sub-groups of every possible variety:
Continue reading "Web 2.0 Rules: Almost 1000 "Second Life" Flickr Groups" »
This video demos a pretty unexpected application of Second Life: a mixed reality simulation of border crossing encounters for students of the Canada Border Services Agency. In other words, training in the virtual world for the guarding of real world national borders.
(Which come to think of it, are largely virtual too.) It's the brainchild of Loyalist College's Virtual World Design Centre, based in Ontario. The alternative to this SL-based, VOIP-enabled simulation of the US-Canadian border, I suppose, is a costly real world simulation (booth, working gate, actors, cars, etc.) Cost-saving, surely, but will the SL version train Canada's future border guards as effectively? I'm curious
to see the success metrics.
Keiko and Melanie headline in both realities (Mel's photo by Daniel Giberson)
If you're in the Bay Area Wednesday after next, mark your calendar: On May 14th, there's a huge mixed reality live music fest starting at 7:30pm. The RL portion is onstage at the Rock-It Room in San Francisco, on Clement and Fifth in
the Inner Richmond. (Details on the Second Life stream to come.) The event brings together seven musicians who use SL as a performance/promotion venue, headlined by Keiko Takamura and Melanie Keller. I interviewed Keiko about her great BioShock-inspired song here; here's a lovely and ethereal video of Melanie last performing at Rock-It. They're joined by Haley Bailey, Jacopo de Nicola, Pato Milo, and BabbleGrabble Swindlehurst. (ZeroOne Paz accompanies Keiko on percussion.) I continue to be impressed by the growing variety and talent of the metaverse music scene. Just hope I can make the show myself.
And since I used to live in the Richmond district, here's some pre and post-show suggestions a few blocks away: consider Vietnamese at Minh's Garden, dessert at Toy Boat, and book browsing at Green Apple, you won't be disappointed.
Henry Jenkins as Dumbledore (mash-up from Henry's blog and holymeatballs.org)
I got your convergence culture-- right here. This is the avatar of Professor Henry Jenkins, head of MIT's Comparative Studies department, and the man who literally wrote the book on the collision between old and new media. He recently entered Teen Second Life as a guest of Global Kids, speaking about fan culture, specifically that based around the Harry Potter universe. Here's a video of his insightful, wide-ranging talk. At one point, he talks about J.K. Rowling's recent efforts to control her story and her characters, arguing that at a certain level, they should belong to her readers. Appropriate to that topic, Henry's avatar was made up to resemble Professor
Dumbledore, and his lecture was interspersed with Potter fan music,
which he gamely danced to, along with teens made up to resemble other
Potter characters (joined by a robot, and, of course, a Big Daddy from
BioShock.) It's not often that an intellectual of his caliber gets to see his ideas turned into such an immersive, tangible form-- or for that matter, do the twist with them.
Image mash-up credits: Henryjenkins.org and holymeatballs.org.
The virtual copies of L'Oreal products which appeared last year in Rezzable's popular giant living room/kitchen play space were actually part of a larger advertising campaign in Second Life for the cosmetics giant orchestrated by UK-based metaverse agency KZero. Last week, Nic Miltham published the firm's final results, in Rezzable's Greenies (above), and four SL fashion boutiques. (There, KZero distributed several L’Oréal-branded "skins" which simulated make-up styles associated with the company's products.) Over the campaign's three months, 34,000 of the four branded items were picked up by Residents; as a percentage of the 550,000 monthly active user base, that's a 1.6-6.2% virtual item clickthrough rate. (The spread based on how many of the four L’Oréal skins each Resident took.) Quite impressive, compared to traditional web ads, which are lucky to get even half of one percent. (Even as a percentage of the 1.1 million 60 day user base, that's somewhere on either side of 3%.)
Those are top numbers for Second Life-based advertising, but The Electric Sheep's Giff Constable wonders how good they are, when compared to other virtual worlds:
In recent months, the company behind Second Life has gone through several epochal changes-- the defenestration of their CTO, the managerial retirement of its founding CEO, the selection of his replacement. But none of those moves, in my opinion, are as immediately crucial to the world's development as the news being announced today: within the next two months, the Lindens will supplant its increasingly ill-named "Popular Places" tab with a "Showcase" listing of SL sites recommended by Residents and editorially approved by Linden staff. (See above for an early version.) The official announcement should be up on the official blog this afternoon; earlier, Jeska Linden (the company's Community and Product Development lead, and a pal) gave me an advance look at what they planned, and the thinking behind it. This comes after years of camping chairs, bots, and other dubious means of artificially boosting the avatar foot traffic by which Popular Places are listed.
Longtime Residents will remember a time in 2004 when the Lindens did offer editorial recommendations in their SL search listings; they were quickly ended amid accusations of favoritism and concerns over scalability. ("You could say we're moving backwards," says Jeska, "but not really.")
Hamlet and Iris: on left, in Manhattan, on right, dancing with babe and death 'bot
So here's a new rule of thumb for mixed reality parties: figure out how to be a good host in both realms, or someone's going to stick a lamp shade on your head.
Last Thursday, we had a book party in a Manhattan penthouse and its SL incarnation, and I spent a lot of time running from the dining room (where our laptops were running Second Life) and the terrace (where just as important, the bartender was serving drinks.) In the interim, Kit Meredith found me AFK, and duly covered my avatar in garbage, roaches, and said lamp shade. Next time I'll make sure the projector's near the bar. The original idea was to upload images of the real party into SL, but that didn't go as planned; instead, I'm putting screenshots and photos here. In both realms, the night indisputably belonged to Flea Bussy of Grendel's Children, who dazzled Residents and New York glitterati alike by transforming into her astounding bestiary of avatars.
See much more after the break. My deepest thanks again to Lyra Millionsofus and Millions Of Us for supplying the SL penthouse, Steve and Bob of Kiss My Face for providing the material penthouse, Falk Bergman for the autographable virtual edition, and all who came in either form.
Continue reading "The Mixed Success of Mixed Reality Parties" »
In between sessions of last February's Metaverse U, Henrik "Augmentationist versus Immersionist" Bennetsen and his team of Stanford grads descended on the panelists and speakers, getting their thoughts on the state of virtual worlds. The archive of videos is available here, and it's bursting with established luminaries like Randy Farmer, Mitch Kapor, Raph Koster, and rising stars like MIT's Beth Coleman, Wello Horld's Jerry Paffendorf, and NASA's Jessy Cowan Sharp. I pop up amid them and offer some babble, too. Go here to rummage through it all.
The unlikeliest resource for fighting poverty in Africa is a floating island with an ancient tree and a gleaming ballroom, drifting in space amid a sheet of falling rain. Someone sent me there the other night, and at first I didn't know what it was for. I had to learn that from the woman with the purple wings who was there on the dance floor, because as it turned out, she also happened to be an NGO director logging in from Cape Town, South Africa.
African Rain, Alanagh Recreant explained as as we took an obligatory twirl, is the social space for Virtual Africa, in turn a project of Uthango Social Investments. (It's the work of acclaimed metaverse artist and designer Eshi Otawara, who donated her talent to create the space. Her goal, Eshi explains in a note, was to translate her emotional sense of Uthango's goals in a place that felt protected, and nourished by constant rain.) An extension of their headquarters in Sunset Commerce (direct SLURL teleport at this link), African Rain officially opens this week, on the 24th, when Uthango hosts an "Africa Day" in Second Life. It's on Robben Island (direct SLURL teleport at this link), and though it may seem strange, Alanagh sees it as an integral part of their outreach to Africa's poor and marginalized communities.
"We start with addressing information poverty, access to relevant communities about opportunities to better their lives," she tells me, "Using mobile, Internet, radio, social networks on the ground and then look at buildings, training, enterprise development..." Second Life is part of that mesh, she argues, a channel "to bring in African content" to those who would otherwise not know about it, let alone see it in person. "Africa has A LOT to offer," she says. "But the positive is not seen." They're opening up Robben Island to landowners with an interest in Africa, and "embassies" of pro-Africa communities. With luck, they'll bring live music from the continent into African Rain, so Residents around the world can attend the concert. (Possible performers would include the Buyambo Marimba Band, pictured here; Uthango helped finance the group's first CD.)
But establishing an African outpost in the metaverse has its skeptics-- beginning with a branch of the South African Reserve Bank.
Continue reading "Streaming Africa: Cape Town NGO Opens SL Outreach Club" »
A big-breasted dolphin mocks... a flying breast-less dolphin appears for the rebuttal. Residents with Nonprofit Commons (an SL community which includes numerous folks close to me) just posted a fun video response to The Daily Show's recent spin on Congress' virtual world hearing, which included several riffs on the avatar name of Commons' spokesperson Susan Tenby, one of the DC witnesses. In Second Life, Susan's known as Glitteractica Cookie, a point both Stewart (and Daily Show guest Nathan Lane, who came out and introduced himself as "Glitteractica Three") pounced on. In reply, the video gently points out the many real world social benefit projects hosted at the Commons.
Since the Daily Show segment aired, I've heard the argument that mentioning odd avatar names in the House of Congress isn't the best idea, since it'll only engender mockery, but there I'm not so sure. It's understandable that the uninitiated are going to perceive whimsical avatar names as silly; in truth, they are. The only difference is they haven't embraced the whimsy. Our confidence is that they eventually will. I can remember a time in recent memory when Internet emoticons also seemed silly to most people, for example. Now you're liable to spot them in e-mails written by Fortune 500 executives, politicians... and comedy writers.
Are metaverse development agencies leaving SL en masse? You may think that were you to glance at the headline of a recent Reuters story, "Frustrated virtual agencies look beyond Second Life". It's been roughly two years since a May 2006 cover story on BusinessWeek attracted a swarm of interest in Second Life by real world companies, and studios specializing in SL content creation to service them.
Over the last several months, it is true that the "Big Three" of metaverse development companies-- The Electric Sheep Company, NWN partner Millions of Us, and the UK studio Rivers Run Red-- are moving their primary focus away from Second Life for marketing projects in other virtual worlds. However, I think a fuller summary of the current situation is this:
The largest metaverse companies are expanding their portfolio of virtual worlds, while an explosion of smaller boutique agencies remain focused on Second Life.
By smaller, I mean studios with a handful of employees; sometimes just one and two full-timers. In the last six months alone, I've written about the SL-based marketing/publicity campaigns and projects of at least twelve: Rezzable (last seen here hosting a L'Oreal marketing campaign), Aimee Weber (producer of the Scott Adams/Dilbert in SL event), Dancing Ink (producer of a US-Muslim relations metaverse project for The Brookings Institute), AI Design Studio (creator of this Autocad import/exporter), Brazil's Agência Click (last seen here with their SL site for Fiat), Involve 3D (creator of the Tech Museum site), Clever Zebra (recently blogged here), South Africa NGO Uthango (briefly blogged here), Second Marketing (whose SL campaing for Nestle was featured here), Daden Limited (last seen making a Google Maps-in-SL mash-up), Green Grotto (with a Playboy campaign that was blogged last month), and Japan's Metabirds (island resort project noted here). There's many more I didn't get a chance to mention, of course. Off the top of my head: Avatrian, Portugal's Beta Technologies, The Metaverse Modsquad , The Illusion Factory, The Magicians, Japan's Melting Dots, France's Extralab, and Clear Ink. I'm certain I've missed many other metaverse companies in this list; I hadn't even heard of a company called Advanced Virtual Inc., for example, until Dizzy Banjo told me the Mexican government was one of their clients.
So what does this mean? Several things, I think:
This video features me on a stroll through Ruta Maya, a multi-sim recreation of Mexico's many lovely sights and wonders, created by Advanced Virtual Inc. on a commission by the Mexican Tourist Board. (Direct SLURL teleport to the site at this link.) Turn the volume up, because you'll want to hear all the ambient sounds and cinematic music, all of which were recorded live and on location. The composition is by musician Dizzy Banjo, and it's nine different tracks; as you walk through the Mexican locations, the music changes in mood and tempo to suit the location you're in. In other words, Dizzy has composed location-centric music for the metaverse, roughly in the same way Brian Eno once composed music for airports.
At thirty rich and varied minutes, it's a veritable soundtrack designed specifically for a Second Life space, and as such, probably the first of its kind. "The music is property of Mexico now," Dizzy tells me by e-mail, which makes his composition even more unique: music for a virtual world, commissioned by a government body.
Read more about it on Bettina Tizzy's blog, where she has an extended profile on Banjo's music. Dizzy, by the way, was last seen on this blog orchestrating the VOIP-powered music project Parsec.
Last week, a programmer known in Second Life as Nicholaz "The Mad Patcher" Beresford announced he was no longer contributing fixes to Linden Lab's viewer code. As an open source project, it's not uncommon for volunteer coders to come and go, but Nicholaz's declaration sent turmoil (as here or here) through SL's community. Many Residents use the "Nicholaz Edition" of the Second Life viewer, and consider it less crash-prone than the official version. Citing frustration with the Lindens' delays to implement fixes "even if they are addressing the most basic and obvious problems like crashes", and a general malaise (his blog's constant and ironic use of "™" suggesting annoyance with the company's confusing new trademark policy), he withdrew altogether.
Since then, however, at least one Linden staffer has been trying to bring him back into the fold.
"A group of us at Linden Lab realize we've done a poor job here," senior developer Qarl Linden wrote on my blog last Friday, "and are beginning a new initiative next quarter to provide much improved support for our open source community."
This tech demo of Handsfree 3D, narrated by Linden Lab board member/computing pioneer Mitch Kapor and engineer Philippe Bossut has been titillating the blogosphere since it went up late last week, and that's no surprise: it casually introduces a revolution in virtual world interactivity, potentially as profound as the Wii's motion controller has been to gaming. The computer-mounted 3D camera from 3DV Systems detects body geometry and motion; the Handsfree software uses that data to generate intuitively causal avatar behavior (lean forward to walk, lift hands to fly, and so on.)
Duly impressed, I asked Mitch for more background. As fun as this looks, I wondered, wouldn't all this full body pantomime get exhausting after 15 minutes?
Continue reading "Metaverse, Wii-Style: Mitch Kapor Explains More About Handsfree 3D" »
Who's working and creating in Second Life? This is by no means a complete list, but off the top of my head, these are just a few:
An adult entertainment entrepreneur interested in bringing a top porn star into Second Life; a longtime Resident who fondly remembers attending the world's first Christian church; a defense contractor developing a virtual world who asked me to sign my book for his colleague, a Lieutenant Colonel; a well-regarded hiphop producer interested in bringing spoken word rap performances into Second Life; metaverse developers with offices in France, Germany, Italy, Brazil, the UK, the US, Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines, two of whom just returned from a virtual worlds project in the Middle East; execs from several Fortune 500 companies; academics; artists.
The thing is, I'm sure this list misses many, many more.
After Virtual Worlds 2008, I got in a cab to catch the final days of my friend Cao Fei/China Tracy's RMB City project at Lombard-Fried in Manhattan's Chelsea District. Dominating the gallery's front room, Fei's virtual visualizations of her Beijing fantasia are displayed in several mediums-- in beautiful, framed screenshots on the wall, in a foam sculpture in a display case, and on a LCD screen underneath a misty pool of water on the floor. You can also access the RMB construction site in Kula from a Mac running Second Life with one of Tracy's alt avatars. After getting permission from the actress/model-looking receptionist and the young hipster Williamsburg-esque couple got up from the laptop, my partner Schlink Lardner took these pics. While we did that, an older gentlemen with a wizard's beard came up to see what we were doing; he explained he was a Resident himself, and wanted to write down the coordinates for the RMB site, so his avatar could visit it himself.
Continue reading "RMB City: Second Life In An Avant Garde Art Gallery" »
Here's a much better video of the SoftBank-sponsored Giant Robot, 3-Axis Accelerometer Game I blogged about last week. Girl tips the controller to and fro; giant robot tilts the box; avatars inside go flying. This video shows the game's extra excellent mixed reality kicker: the robot's tummy displays a video feed of its human controller, so Residents in the box get to view their tormentor. Here's a SLURL teleport link to the site, though who knows if you'll find a player in Japan waiting for you there. Should offer pure mixed reality delight when Havok 4 finally goes live. (Via Bettina via Komuso Tokugawa via Tori Teatime.)
This mixed reality music video features an excellent song from renowned Second Life musician Keiko Takamura that's a geek's mash-up delight: The machinima part of the video was created in Second Life, for one thing, but it's entirely referencing Bioshock, last year's acclaimed RPG/shooter hybrid. On another level, it's sung from the point of view of BioShock's hero and his, well, complicated friendship with Atlas, the embattled rebel of Rapture city who guides him over the radio. (You only catch all the song's references if you've finished the game before listening.) At still another level, Keiko is actually singing about all the friends you're not sure you should trust.
That's intentional, as it turns out. She wrote "Same Sad Tune" while watching her boyfriend play BioShock, Keiko tells me, while also thinking of "[a] guy who kept on offering to help me out at a time when I really needed it, but flaked out on me and disappeared off the face of the earth whenever I thought he was serious about keeping his word." Her brilliant move is connecting these two totally unrelated elements, and it's testament to why Keiko Takamura's music has such a passionate following in Second Life. Her success in the metaverse, she says, is also why she recently moved to San Francisco, to build her music career in both realities.
Continue reading "BioShock Rock: Keiko's Witty Spin On The Classic Videogame" »
Bunny Kerowynn Lubitsch strikes a pose in KO Designs' Playboy bustier
With regular events and a staff of gregarious, frequently dancing Bunnies, Playboy's official Second Life presence, a tropical island club developed by Boston's Green Grotto Studios, is one of the few real world company sites boasting steady visitor traffic. (Direct SLURL teleport at this link.) And unless I missed a previous announcement, it can now claim another title: the first major company to link its brand with Second Life-only brands. In this case, Playboy-branded fashion sold on the official island, but created and promoted by SL designers who are an integral part of the label; among them, KO Designs, Alpha Male, Sharkture, and Simply Spoiled.
"Initially we approached retail by creating replica versions of real clothing that is sold at playboystore.com," Green Grotto's MSGiro Grosso tells me. "Over time we decided that we would make that a smaller portion of the retail experience and engage some of the top designers in SL to create exclusive SL-only Playboy collections as well as provide them with the opportunity to re-sell some of their existing clothing line and expand their brand." It's a bold move, considering how sensitive and protective corporations are with their labels and trademarks (even Linden Lab themselves)-- especially Playboy, one of the most well-known brands on the planet.
According to Grosso, however, it wasn't hard to convince executives in Hefner's empire to experiment.
This from Japanese-based metaverse musician Komuso Tokugawa, who recently attended a Tokyo Second Life party, where a development team with the media/telecom giant were showing off an open source version of the SL viewer they've engineered to run with a motion-sensing accelerometer interface. There's been variations of this hack, of course, such as iD Media's Wii/treadmill interface, but this one comes with its own form of wacky:
The accelerometer control is hooked up to a giant Second Life robot holding a big glass crate. Residents get inside it, and try to stay inside, while in the real world, you shake the crate like crazy. A brilliant mixed reality video game that looks like tremendous fun. Read Komuso's blog for more details, including SLURL to the robot's crate.
Photo credit: Komuso Tokugawa from sonicviz.com.
Last week when I posted news of an international union protest on IBM's Second Life campus, IBM staffer (and blogger) Jaymin Carthage evinced extreme skepticism about its efficacy. "There is no evidence that the Union's activities [last September -ed] in Second Life were
anything other than a cheap attempt to grab some publicity," he argued in Comments, notwithstanding a labor organizer who claimed that it was more. Mr. Carthage may be a right on a certain level, though here's an interesting phenomenon: recently, I started noticing traffic coming to my blog from an unlikely site: AOL's stock market resource. That's where shareholders and potential investors can research important company data, such as performance, market cap. And last Wednesday, at least, that also included word on a convergence of avatars waving anti-outsourcing signs in the metaverse.
This Tuesday, according to a Linden Lab media alert, the company's exiting CEO/future Chairman of the Board will speak on the topic of “Online Virtual Worlds: Applications and Avatars in a User-Generated Medium” before the House Telecommunications and the Internet Subcommittee. The purpose of the hearing, an official invitation from the Committee reads, "is to obtain testimony on the nature and growth of online virtual worlds; the types of applications and services, both commercial and non-commercial, supported and offered in such worlds; and any policy issues raised by virtual worlds that may need to be addressed or monitored." (Emphasis mine.)
And no, despite the April 1st date, this is no fooling: it's even on the Committee's schedule, and the video will be streamed live from the site starting at 9am EST, 6am Noon Second Life time. Billed as the first Congressional hearing to directly address the
topic of virtual worlds, it'll be led by Chairman Ed Markey (D-MA), who
happens to have an avatar of his own. (Last December, rather than jet
to Bali for the UN's conference on climate change, Rep. Markey addressed the topic from within Second Life.)
Philip is not the only virtual world expert being called: Susan Tenby
(Glitteractica Cookie in SL), director of Techsoup.org's Non-Profit Commons in Second Life, will also appear.
Image mash-up credits: Tao Takashi, Frank Capra.
Update, 10:05am: Adam Reuters has more details on the event-- namely, the House will also call Dr. Larry Johnson of The New Media Consortium and Colin J. Parris, Ph.D., Vice President of Digital Convergence at IBM Research.
