Tag Archives: Virtual Worlds

Current Affairs, Games, Memories & History, Science & Health, Times They Are A-Changing, Web & Technology

Who needs the Metaverse? Meet the people still living on Second Life

Mark Zuckerberg’s grand vision for an online existence has been laughed off as a corporate folly. Meanwhile, those still existing happily on a virtual world launched 20 years ago may be wondering what all the fuss is about …

By Simon Parkin, Sat 10 Jun 2023 08.00 EDT

Virtual worlds: Second Life and Metaverse. Illustration: Nicolás Ortega/The Guardian

On 14 November 2006, 5,000 IBM employees assembled in a digital recreation of the 15th-century Chinese imperial palace known as the Forbidden City. They had come to hear IBM’s CEO, Sam Palmisano, deliver a speech. Palmisano’s physical body was in Beijing at the time, but he addressed most of his audience inside Second Life, the online social world that had launched three years earlier.

Palmisano’s trim avatar wore tortoiseshell-frame glasses and a tailored pinstripe suit. He faced a crowd of digital, animated dolls dressed in the business attire of the day: black heels, pencil-line shirts, Windsor-knotted ties. Looming out of the throng at the back stood a 10ft IBM employee, his digital face plastered in Gene Simmons-style white makeup, with shoulder-length, Sonic-blue hair.

It was a historic moment, a journalist for Bloomberg reported at the time: Palmisano was “the first big-league CEO” to stage a company-wide meeting in Second Life – “the most popular of a handful of new-fangled 3D online virtual worlds”. IBM, just like any other denizen of Second Life, paid ground rent to own a “region” of the game, one region representing 6.5 hectares of digital turf, currently rented at $166 (£134) a month. Renters could build whatever they wanted on their turf.

Editor’s Note: Read more, see link below for original item…

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/10/who-needs-the-metaverse-meet-the-people-still-living-on-second-life

Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Politics, Science & Health, Times They Are A-Changing, Web & Technology

Neal Stephenson critical on metaverse – The Cryptonomist

By Alessia Pannone – 28 Feb 2023

from article…

Neal Stephenson, apparently the first to coin the term “metaverse,” has expressed his opinion about the future adoption of virtual worlds.

The science fiction writer and co-founder of Lamina1, a blockchain metaverse company, believes that building experiences that millions of people consider worthy in virtual worlds is quite difficult, hindering the process of technology adoption.

Summary

Books & Reading, Science & Health, Web & Technology

Of Course We’re Living in a Simulation | WIRED

The only people who absolutely disagree are, well, scientists. They need to get over themselves and join the fun.

By Jason Kehe, Mar 9, 2022 7:00 AM

Image Courtesy of W. W. Norton & Company

The best theory physicists have for the birth of the universe makes no sense.

It goes like this: In the beginning—the very, if not quite veriest, beginning—there’s something called quantum foam. It’s barely there, and can’t even be said to occupy space, because there’s no such thing as space yet.

Or time. So even though it’s seething, bubbling, fluctuating, as foam tends to do, it’s not doing so in any kind of this-before-that temporal order.

It just is, all at once, indeterminate and undisturbed. Until it isn’t.

Something goes pop in precisely the right way, and out of that infinitesimally small pocket of instability, the entire universe bangs bigly into being. Instantly. Like, at a whoosh far exceeding the speed of light.

Source: Of Course We’re Living in a Simulation | WIRED