"Hamlet Linden" in Hipihi

http://forums.hipihi.com/main-read-11-ff80808114739a1f01147783c2c7584a.html

Follow the link above for some shots of Wagner James Au, formerly known in these parts as embedded journalist Hamlet Linden, at the Beijing headquarters of the Hipihi virtual world.

Quote: Suzanne in Hiphi forum: "In addition to meeting in the real world, I like to see the metaversians set up some Cisco telepresence units , synchronized Microsoft Surfaces, and other related systems in their offices, establishing a permanent virtual place distributed across the Hipihi offices, Linden Lab offices, Sun's virtual world labs, IBM's virtual world department, etc. - they could get the visceral sense of being together in one shared place, and work together with a feeling of human connection on improving the nature of and extending the reach and range of the metaverse."

You are a visionary Suzanne. This is excellent. Thanks for keeping us posted.

Wagner James Au, the journalist who used to have a gig playing "Hamlet Linden, embedded journalist", writes:


For the rest of the story see Mr. Au's article at http://gigaom.com/2007/08/25/

I'll just add that if you're paying much for the cybersex you'll probably hope that it's better than just OK.

Quote: This is excellent.

Thanks. I believe places with tons of dough to spend, like say, M.I.T., have been doing stuff along these lines, since posting that I was told of places that had monitors set up in the company cafeterias for video conferencing.

Virtual worlds like SL aleady do an avatar based version of "hooking the world up so it's like it's all in the same place", but .... in general, each person involved is all alone, and there's not enough connection between a persons emotional state and the expression of that state in the avatar's appearance to make a really thorough and proper sense of "I'm in one place with all these people even though they're scattered about the globe".

So what I'm thinking would neat would be something along the lines of a dancehall and bar that is distributed around the world. Cisco Telepresence systems are extremely expensive, so to save money one would change from Telepresence systems to lower cost monitors, wall sized displays that show the interiors of the other VR dancehall bars, video cameras embedded in the walls, or intergrated directly into the monitors. Music would be synchronized to play the same music at the same time at all venues, to the extent that that is possible. There'd need to be people dancing, not just sitting around; video wants action, not head shots. Toss in some synchronized lights designed for the distributed display, serve some alcohol to blur ones focus, and have at least one VRbar per continent.

A possible name for the place would be Seven Continents Bar & Grill. Grill's for the folks that want to sit and watch. Slogan could be "World's Largest Saloon".

So folks in Beijing would be able to dance with people in Berlin. The tables and booths would have video conference systems for those who want to try their hands at trans-continental pickup lines. (Or just chatting) .

Monitor wall space would also be given to display of virtual worlds, large enough to make the avatars appear roughly life sized, for human avatars at least.

Live world wide karaoke competitions. Stand up comics with live human translators. One can dream.

Im laughing my ass of at your signature Suezanne.