Category Archives: Metaverses

"Big Blue" rebuttal: No transhumanists here

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IBM researcher defends Second Life, World of Warcraft, against Parallelnormal blog posts.

from Mark:

High-profile virtual worlders are trying to correct what they see as misrepresentations by Parallelnormal of their recent meetings and events.

One of them, Second Lifer “Dale Innis,” writes a comment blasting my comparison of real and virtual versions of New England, and my description of a conference about the convergence of reality with virtual reality.

“(You) drastically misread your sources about the WoW conference and the Extropia sims, and you seem to do the same thing in many places where Second Life is involved,” Innis writes.

Innis in real life (RL) is IBM researcher David M. Chess.

IBM has built inworld stores for big box retailers.

Chess is working to develop autonomic technologies, which are self-aware and can fix themselves.

Chess, speaking for himself, and not IBM, denies that Extropia and the World of Warcraft conference “are in fact about transhumanism.”

Yet the WoW conference was organized by a transhumanist, and one who views the world’s major religions as an obstacle to the advancement of his own beliefs.

And extropians, by their own definition, are transhumanists, real or imagined.

Sci-Fi cover for a real-life agenda?

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A Second Life transhumanist, despite her sim’s ties to movement leaders and government agencies, insists it’s all “science fiction.”

Fishers of pre-posthumans? Second Lifers drop a line in the Extropia sim. (Image: From the Extropia Core website)

by Mark Baard

One of the founders of Extropia said this week denied she is propagating any ideology through the online sim.

Extropia founder and blogger “Galatea Gynoid,” as she’s known in Second Life, this week posted a rebuttal to “certain people” (see excerpt, below) who see more to the sim than an evolving work of pure fiction.

Extropia is an area within Second Life where people, via their 3D avatars, gather to discuss transhumanism, science and science fiction.

Gynoid says she started Extropia so that she and like-minded Second Lifers might enjoy an alternative to the depressing, dystopian sims they found elsewhere in the metaverse.

But Gynoid, by trying to have it both ways, may be trying to duck criticism from those who see the transhumanist agenda at work in Extropia.

By co-hosting events with real life (RL) transhumanists and U.S. government agencies, for example, it is clear that Extropia is more than fiction. It is also a meeting place for believers.

Extropia co-hosted a NASA “future forum” on May 14. And in two weeks, the sim will host a technology and religion conference meant to “re-cast our understanding of ‘humanity’ in the Third Millennium.”

Why “Extropia”? | Extropia Core
There are certain people out there who are insisting you need to subscribe to a particular ideology to be welcome here. The funny thing is, the majority of the Board of Directors wouldnt [sic] be allowed in Extropia if what they said is true. I myself, the founder and owner of the sims, would not be allowed in Extropia if what they said was true. Its utterly, patently ridiculous.

SL + 3D – hardware = total inworld immersion (TIA)

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Linden Lab chairman Mitch Kapor and developer Philippe Bossut today demonstrated a camera-based motion recog system that controls your avatar’s movements in Second Life. Looks good on the video, below…

With a 3D viewing headset (such as the augmented reality headset imagined here), you would have your own at-home 3DVR “cave” for exploring the metaverse.

Incredibly, we are just years, perhaps only months, away from very discreet (i.e., they won’t take over your livingroom), immersive experiences, at home.

And it will cost a fraction of what 3DVR caves, such as the one at Brown University (an elaborate mix of multiple projectors, hand and head tracking devices, and a stack of Linux servers).

Of course, the more seamless metaversal interfaces become, the more likely people will start forgetting where they really are.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t52gkAwJq8&eurl=http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2008/04/11/mitch-kapor-unveils-sl-navigation-via-3d-camera/]

[digg=http://digg.com/hardware/SL_3D_hardware_near_complete_immersion]

Second Life bubble bursts

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Virtual land values plummet more than 40 percent, to $1,000 even.

(Would you buy land from this leprechaun? Image: Markbaard Meredith)

In Second Life, there’s a sucker born every minute (give or take). Some virtual land barons, for example, are finding out that what they’ve got ain’t worth much–since the supply of their product took another step toward “unlimited.”

To-date, some landowners have gotten rich selling parcels at similarly inflated prices.

But hoping to reboot waning interest in its virtual world, Linden Lab this month will make more islands available, at a fraction of what users have been paying lately for the make believe property.

Of course, land is limitless when it exists only on a server somewhere. And there are going to be more than one virtual world to visit and park it in the near future. But you knew that already.

Reuters/Second Life » Linden to increase land supply, drop prices
Linden Lab announced on its blog yesterday it would be increasing the land supply in Second Life for the second quarter of 2008.

Linden has seen average prices for land drift from about L$6.3 per meter in Q1 to around L$11.5 per meter currently. Strong demand for virtual land — essentially dedicated CPU time on Linden Lab’s servers — is a bright spot for Second Life’s in-world economy amidst flagging overall growth.