Second Life Meet Up

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Tonight, I had the opportunity to experience my first virtual meet up via the Synapse3Di conference center in Second Life. From my comfy office chair at home.

Kirk Schreck (aka Kimo Sirbu), CEO of Synapse3Di was on location at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo in Los Angeles and presented us with an interesting and captivating briefing of the expo. Gina Schreck, Digital Immigration Officer for Synapse3Di, was at her home in Littleton, CO and helped us with excellent pointers for navigating the virtual terrain and afterwards gave us a grand tour of the Synapse3Di virtual facilities they created for ‘inworld’ training, meetings and workshops.

The most fascinating thing was that Kirk (Kimo) was actually in LA at the conference center where the expo took place, getting weird looks from the security folks, no doubt, while we were all in our respective homes kicking back enjoying the presentation. Kirk mentioned that he was the last person in the facility and I’m sure the cleaning crew cared less about the latest and greatest virtual technology and more about when they could vacuum the carpet under his chair. Everyone’s got their priorities.

Second Life and other virtual worlds have been taking off as a way for corporations to have meetings with employees who can’t always be in the same location. ‘Inworld’ meetings are making more sense to corporations as they see current technology as an alternative to putting empoyees on jets to attend a meetings they could just as easily get to virtually. Having 2000 employees in the air heading to real world locations used to be a badge of honor for big corporations, but now it’s becoming a hindrance and a resource hog. There’s always a better way.

Some highlights Kirk brought to our attention during the conference via Twitter:

John Lasiter, producer of Titanic, spoke about his upcoming project with James Cameron, “Avatar“. Here’s a brief synopsis and an FAQ describing the tech used in the movie.
A Dell spokesperson focused on “social shopping” as a new virtual world initiative. Shop virtually with a friend in another country. A virtual Wists, if you will.
Quote: “The future is here now, it’s just not equally distributed.”
Microsoft is using Second Life to connect with technical audiences and to lower the cost of events.
Dr. Colin Paris from IBM addressing virtual worlds conference. Using Twitter to send questions to the stage for him to answer.
IBM has 6000 internal virtual world focused employees working daily to come up with the best uses for the platform.
My favorite: At virtual worlds conference, still amazing that presenters use PowerPoint slides with 10 bullets per slide with 8 font- can’t read anything.