Tweakfest07: metaverses, multitouch screens and virtual fashion from the 1940s

-- by guest blogger Susan Kish

(Kish is the VP of Network and Community Practice at  Xing and the CEO of First Tuesday Zurich)

Running notes from the second day, Friday 25 May, of Tweakfest in Zurich (see this post for Steve Wozniak's opening keynote).

Ian Hughes, "metaverse evangelist" from IBM's lab in Hursley, talked about Second Life and metaverses. In Ian's words: “I live my life online -- I either write a blog, do IM, Flickr, visiting Youtube. But I am a different person online. These virtual worlds are so visual that you will use a different person when you are online, and you are essentially forced into it.” Ian showed up on stage wearing his favorite leather jacket that he had his avatar dressed in, and a t-shirt that he created for his avatar. During the talk, he showed a 3D model of his avatar, epredator, created by a 3d printer by Fabjectory (picture left). Talk about a virtual and real life mash-ups. 

Ian's view is that Second Life is a social changer - not just a technology phenomenon. SL is distinguished by the fact that you can go up to people and talk to them, and give non-verbal cues like coming close to talk, or walking away to show a conversation has ended.

IBM has made a significant commitment to Second Life and virtual worlds, announced at a press conference held in Second Life last fall as one of the results of their global open Innovation Jam. There are currently over 40,000 IBMers active within Second Life and they have meetings, do client demonstrations, and “just build stuff - boats, houses, etc.”. 

Ian's most interesting points were about corporate life - specifically about that well-known phenomenon: conference calls. On a large call, you wait for all the people to join, you get down to business, then you finish the call and we all hang up. However, in real life there's much better flow of conversations, especially before and after. If each of IBM's 330,000 employees have an average of 3 teleconferences a week, with an average 5 minutes of dead time at the start of each call, Ian figured that that would sum up to about 9.5 years of dead time per week. He contrasted that with meetings and events held in Second Life, where the time before and after meetings could be spent by the avatars in those small conversations and serendipitous encounters that are often the way real business is done.

Ian closed with quoting the growth numbers for Second Life - currently at 6.5 million members vs. 60,000 last year (Consider however Clay Shirky's analysis of the real meaning of these numbers). This amazing growth has impacted other virtual worlds - Habbo Hotel, There.com, and Active Worlds, which has been around for at least 10 years, and “everyone ignored it until SL”. Kaneva is another virtual world, where people have recently been invited to the Beta.

During the afternoon, there were exhibits and talks inside and outside the Technopark space. The coolest for me was a big grey, anonymous box up on a small stage, surrounded by people. When I climbed the steps up to the box, I saw that they all had their hands on a large screen embedded in the box, all moving and resizing a series of squares on the screen. Daniel Lüthi, who did this project with Christian Iten for their diploma at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst last year, describes it formally as an Interactive Multitouch Surface (image right). After playing with the boxes, Daniel brought up a virtual game sort of like billiards, where you could shoot the balls at each other, and they would be carried by momentum and bump into other balls. Very neat -- similar to what Jeff Han has been showing at TED.

Later in the afternoon, Ugo Bonanni of the MIRALAB at the University of Geneva showed some of their past  research with virtual humans, motions, and mass. Ugo talked about past projects starting in 1995, through the first distance tennis match at the Telecom 1997 between players in Lausanne and Geneva, dance performances, and the creation of a virtual Hagia Sophia, Pompei, and Xian Terra Cotta  projects in virtual archaeology. The Pompei project, part of the Lifeplus EU initiative, targeted to create real scenes and place virtual humans within them, creating problems of effective natural light and shadow. Ugo also showed recent work from Miralab in fabrics and fashion. There are now several fashion designers working on virtual clothes, such as the studio of  Yves Saint Laurent, working with how cloth stretches and forms. The software which Miralab created, Fashionizer, is being used in the industry for modelling and developing fabrics and designs.

Miralab also used the program to recreate fashion sketches from the 1940s and 1950s of dresses which never made it into production. Ugo showed these great gowns (picture left), which survived only in the form of a sketch. The textures are fabulous, and it is wonderful to see the fabric drape on the models and sway as they walk. This type of modelling is possible today because of new accelerated graphics tech. Ugo responded to a question from the audience, and estimated that it would be still five more years before these creations can be done in real time.

"Smart mobs" author Howard Rheingold joins then Tweakfest in Second Life, hosted by IBM on one of their islands (so: he is at home in California, and talks to us through a teleconference in the virtual world). He speaks of a new vernacular emerging with the explosion of Youtube and similar sites, allowing hundreds of thousands of people to upload videos. Video has shifted away from being the exclusive province of professionals with expensive equipment and training. He talks about how he still spends a great deal of time with text, but nowadays he consumes and uses video as well. He wanted to show two recent videos in Second Life, echos of an article he wrote for The Well in 1993 which became a classic, A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community . Unfortunately, we could not watch the videos that evening due to the inevitable technical problems that still arise with emerging technologies. However, both can be seen on YouTube: A (Re-)Slice of Life, Part I and A (Re-)Slice of Life, Part II.