They manage thoughts and ideas toward control attractors.
It is one part Electric Sheep (a content builder for SecondLife) plus the
usual New York VR cabal. SL needs an independent front organization to for
its effort to create a standards patina around their technology. Actually,
this sort of thing can become very serious very fast because it is fueled by
external sources feeding and paying for press. This was done with the W3C
in the early days and used to pirate the status of the legitimate standards
organizations. This works for the company sponsors just as it did for those
who footed the bills for STimBL and crew at MIT.
I call it "The Standards Game". Everyone knows how to play it now. The
thing to pay attention to is the participation agreements that determine by
membership contract what the conditions for contributing intellectual
property are if and when they actually do any real work beyond pontificating
and holding seminars. That is where the rubber meets the road. OTW, yet
another kaffeeklatch and that is fine. Every street corner has a Starbucks.
On the other hand, take a look at that participation list. That is a lot of
luminaries including Castronova and Dyson. These people get on board, raise
money and drain resources to their own pet projects without building too
much. The Venture Capitalists love these guys because they are Judas Goats
for other investors pulling a lot of money toward their interests. Note
the presence of Joi Ito ("content must be free; I must keep my Porsche").
This is a serious bunch though if you look, not a lot of them are building
worlds. They are getting mindshare for the few on that list that do
(Koster, ES, Metaverse, etc.). Castronova was given a MacArthur Genius
Grant to do a project done in VRML ten years ago and already working in JOI.
len
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Behalf Of Peter Amstutz
I've seen it. Honestly I think it's mostly self-serving promotional
fluff by people with vested interests in hyping their technology. I
suppose it's useful from a PR standpoint of promoting immersive 3D, but
it doesn't really offer anything concrete that anyone who might be
interested in building on "metaverse" technology could plan around.
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