Key note session 4 from VW workshop, June 2010, Magleaas
Independent Consultant John Lester: Knowing When to Let Go: The Mind, the Metaverse, and Metaphor
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Big thanks to all the organizers for getting together an amazing group of people and putting on a wonderful event.
Thank you again for the opportunity to participate!
A big thank you to both organizers and participants for an extremely interesting and inspiring workshop! It has been a pleasure to meet so many wonderful people and I look forward to seeing you again at some point. (I might add that I received my suitcase back today. It had been handed in at Malmö Central Station.)
Great to hear that you have received your suitcase, Maria
. And thank you to everyone for making this event at wonderful experience. I found it inspirering to meet so many wonderfully engaged people working in various ways with virtual worlds. It has certainly widened my horizons, and like Maria, I truly hope to meet you all again.
Awesome John. So where is Juanita working these days?
Mahalos to you all for the opportunity to see this. Nice to hear from you John . . . Letting Go to Go Forth & Create Anew!! Always fun:)
I have two specific product concepts to be created in and used in Virtual Worlds. Both of these products or VW features are consistent with John Lester’s comments here. One is a “Dance Cam”. When I dancing with a partner, I care little to see us moving on the dance floor gracefully. I much prefer to be looking into the eyes of the partner I am facing. Even if that face makes no expression, it allows me to focus on the words we share. The other product I would love to have is the “Slow Walk”. I also call it the “Museum Walk”. This would afford the viewer the opportunity to move their avatar at a realistically scale ground velocity. A casual walk with a friend on the sand of a beach or down a path in the woods would be far more evocative if we could slow it down to kindle an emotional response equal to “lingering here is a desirable shared experience.” The current ground speed of 5mph is just too fast for anyone but the youth of today who are raised on video games and 5mph is not suited to those raised in the 3D terraverse. A slower ground speed is available in Open Sim as a region-wide feature and I feel it is effective. But it is not under the individual control of the user as it should be.
I really enjoyed this presentation and the conversation about metaphor particularly was thought-provoking. Sometimes metaphors from RL help us solve things. For example I was trying to connect musical performances in Second Life to CD sales and I realized that the metaphor of the lobby CD table would work fine with replicas of CD’s embedded with scripts to load websites with samples and sale options. Other times they are limiting. Why show a PowerPoint presentation when you can seat your learners on a prim and whirl them through a 3 D sim-wide presentation? For me the beautiful moments occur when we invent our own metaphors within SL as fully immersed residents of the Metaverse. Last year during our Perseids festival on Music Island we celebrated the August meteor shower with music, art, literature and lectures/presentations on the annual event. One of the most successful events was a meteor shower that rained smoking meteors filled with poetry, legends, stories and art about meteors. Participants went on an island wide hunt for falling stars learning about falling stars in story and art in the process. In my personal SL life, one time I was a little unhappy about my friend’s redesign of his island to a northern pinewoods environment from the tropical island that had existed. As he built, I erected a skating rink on the lawn outside and skated about, not entering the home under construction. When I logged on the next day, he had “melted” a warm brick path in the shape of a heart leading into the house and I could see a warm fire in the hearth within. There were no words for me but I read the message as, “Stop skating on thin ice out there. Follow the path of the heart. The fire is warm within.”
Great talk. I’m glad that someone else gets the Snow Crash/Juanita connection – one of my PhD supervisors is in computer vision research and I naturally _had_ to lend him my copy
John Lester is inspiring as always.
But SL is heading South; but the stuff will be still forwarded in other platforms