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THE PROGRAMME for the recent Metameets conference at Dublin Institute of Technology -- flagged as Europe’s Premier 3D Internet and Developer Conference -- carried an strange little note after each speaker’s name: “live” or “virtual”.
For a conference about 3D and virtual worlds, perhaps it isn’t odd at all that about one third of the speaches were given not by someone standing before the audience, but by their avatars in some online virtual world like Second Life. That a great portion of the audience was scattered across cyberspace too is the norm for this worldwide event, now in its second year (it debuted in Amsterdam last year).
Add to that the unusualness of having the conference organisers listed by both their real life and their avatar handles, and you get the picture. These are people enthusiastic about the virtual, who do not consider it just an enertaining hobby, or a hobby, but a significant element of daily life and for many, their selceted area of entrepreneurship and business. The business panel at the event had virtual keynotes from two of the very largest fish in the virtual space: one by Philip Rosedale, the founder and chairman of Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, and one by Mark Kingdon, Linden Lab’s chief executive.
Second Life has been built and developed at the same speed as its parent company Linden Lab. “The company has been a parallel path of building Second Life and building the company that was building Second Life,” he noted. Currently, he is launching another company, LoveMachine, which -- if you thought Second Life was a bit off the wall -- is set to seriously trump it in the "out there" stakes. It has been hard for many people visiting the Lovemachine.com website to figure out what precisely LoveMachine is but, as Rosedale explains it, it is “a radical extension” of Second Life, “a kind of clean room chance to extend and play” with some of the ideas worked into Second Life.
In practice thus far, that has meant building a tool set for companies “for assisting people to work together” which includes a tool to allow workers thank each other (called LoveMachine), as well as tools for creating worklists, tracking what people are working on and awarding bonuses for hitting targets. But there’s more. The company is also trying to create the equivalent of the human brain online, a working, thinking piece of A.I... Second Life’s servers already process and store as much data as the brain, he says. Somehow, it might be possible to imbue that collective knowledge with intelligence.
“We’re at a tipping point. We have enough processing power and storage to build something akin to a human intelligence.” To do what? He wasn’t clear on that crucial point. It’s of course not a usual business model, nor is the way LoveMachine operates -- basically, anyone can apply to work “there” though there’s no “there”, there. On the contrary, the workforce, or those based in San Francisco, settle into any one of the city’s many coffee shops that might serve as that day’s “office”. Which is about as virtual as a virtual company can get. What happens next? Wait for next year’s Metameets and you might get an answer -- probably from an avatar.