Gametech orlandothefutureofvirtualworlds

METANOMICS: GAMETECH ORLANDO:

THE FUTURE OF VIRTUAL WORLDS - MARCH 24, 2011

ANNOUNCER: Metanomics is owned and operated by Remedy and Dusan Writer's

Metaverse.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Hi. I'm Robert Bloomfield, professor at Cornell University's

Johnson Graduate School of Management. Today we continue exploring Virtual Worlds in

the larger sphere of social media, culture, enterprise and policy. Naturally, our discussion

about Virtual Worlds takes place in a Virtual World. So join us. This is Metanomics.

METANOMICS ANNOUNCER: Metanomics is filmed today in front of a live audience at

our studios in Second Life. We are pleased to broadcast weekly to our event partners and

to welcome discussion. We use ChatBridge technology to allow viewers to comment

during the show. Metanomics is sponsored by the Johnson Graduate School of

Management at Cornell University. Welcome. This is Metanomics.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Welcome, everyone, to a special Thursday morning edition of

Metanomics. I am coming to you live from our studios on the Metanomics Sim in Second

Life, but we are joining the Gametech 2011 Conference this morning, to hear a panel

discussion featuring Metanomics' own Dusan Writer, Doug Thompson of Remedy

Communications, as well as two other experts who have been mapping out the future of

virtual technology and particularly the future of technology with military applications. So

we're joined by Richard Boyd, of Lockheed Martin, and Dr. Mic Bowman, of Intel.

Before we talk much about our panelists, I thought I would just give a little bit of context

surrounding the conference itself. First, although everyone refers to the conference as

Gametech, it is actually the Defense Gametech Users Conference, and it does have very

specifically a focus on defense applications. Now the location of the conference is in

Orlando, Florida, and I thought it would be useful to go back to a transcript from--it seems

like a long, long time ago, January of 2008, when I had the opportunity to interview

Robert Gehorsam, who was then the president of Forterra, that was a Virtual World

platform very focused on serious uses and particularly defense-oriented uses of Virtual

Worlds.

Robert Gehorsam introduced me to a phrase I had never heard before, that is the Military

entertainment complex. So let me put this in some context. I'm going to quote

Robert Gehorsam talking about University of Central Florida, which is in Atlanta [MEANT

ORLANDO], and here's what Gehorsam had to say, so this is a quote, "So UCF is one of

the biggest sort of unknown universities in the country certainly, and it really is for various

reasons probably the simulation capital of the United States, something I didn't know until

a few years ago. As some people have sort of drolly put it, it's at the center of the Military

entertainment complex.

"All the Services, and that's Services with a capital S--Armed Forces--have their simulation

commands based in Orlando, and you also have all the theme parks. And when you look

at the birth of simulation, which, really, someone noticed earlier related to flight simulators

which led to motion simulators. The difference between a ride, a motion simulation ride at

Universal, and a flight simulator is kind of minimal. So there's an enormous amount of

talent in the digital film and media departments, in the computer science departments and

all throughout that area. So for those of you who are students or interested in looking at or

studying in these areas, UCF would be an interesting place to look at."

I bring this up because the conference is in Orlando, the center of the Military

entertainment complex, and I suspect that what we'll be hearing today from our panelists

is to give us an indication of where Virtual World technology is going, by the people who

have the money and the incentive, really more than any other groups, to push this

technology forward. So here, let me read from the Gametech 2011 website the objectives

of the conference. The Defense Gametech Users Conference goals are to advance game

technology and its use within the Department of Defense; provide a forum for Department

of Defense game technology users to exchange ideas and experience new technologies;

to inform, educate and train Department of Defense personnel on the use of game

technology for military training.

The objectives, and I love the Military and the government in general because they

distinguish between goals and objectives, something I'm trying to teach my accounting

students to do. The objectives are to provide tutorials for Department of Defense

personnel, that maximize their ability to use game technology [fielded within?] Department

of Defense; to provide Department of Defense personnel an update on industry and

academia gaming, Virtual World and mobile application trends; to provide community at

large an update on Department of Defense gaming, Virtual World and mobile application

projects.

I feel like I've spent so much time this semester teaching my managerial accounting

students here at Cornell Johnson School, let me just--an aside on goals versus objectives,

I think it's useful to think of goals as being much more general and objectives as being

specific, definite, concrete outcomes that you are hoping that you will achieve.

So anyway, let's turn. I see we just have a couple minutes before the conference begins

so we can talk a little bit about our panelists here. Let me just quickly find our run sheet.

As I mentioned, Douglas Maxwell is providing some introductory remarks. We will then be

hearing from Mic Bowman, of Intel, Richard Boyd, of Lockheed Martin, and

Doug Thompson, of Remedy Communications. I think the audience is quite familiar with

Doug Thompson who is the owner of Remedy Communications and the owner of

Metanomics as well. Richard Boyd, from Lockheed Martin, has been working closely with

a colleague David Smith, and I think are worth a moment of our time. Both Richard Boyd

and David Smith are Lockheed Martin employees, and they believe that they are on the

verge of what they're calling the holy grail of virtual reality. Upon joining Lockheed Martin a

few years ago, Boyd created what they're calling--and here I'm quoting from some PR

material, "an informal, internal Lockheed Martin organization called Virtual World Labs,

which draws from creative expertise across the corporation." Essentially forming what

Boyd calls a [no-o-sphere?], or a sphere of human thought that they can use in the Virtual

World.

Let me check here. I see that it is, according to my clock, 9:45. I'm not sure. I will be

getting a heads-up when we're about to get started.

Mic Bowman, the remaining speaker in the conference, is someone who came to my

attention through the wonderful blogging at UgoTrade. And there is here--let me actually

paste in--I'm just going to paste in this chat here. In the chats are a link to UgoTrade and

an interview with Mic Bowman. Mic is emphasizing in this--now this is admittedly from

2008, but a fascinating article on connected visual computing, which is the union of three

different domains for applications: the MMOG, Massively Multiplayer Online Game; the

Metaverse, which is the traditional universe of Virtual Worlds, like Second Life, which may

or may not be game-oriented. And then a word that despite the fact that this is from 2008

may be new to many of you: the Paraverse, P A R A, that's the Paraverse, which is

augmented reality. Right? So not in a Virtual World but adding virtual elements to our

world.

It's interesting, since 2008, there have been so many changes in technology. Really the

biggest one, in my view, the biggest one is the rise of the mobile device and, again, my

own personal view, I think that the rise of the mobile device has caused traditional

immersion in Virtual Worlds a lot of difficulty. It's hard to get immersed in a screen that's

three inches by four inches in size. But by the same token, I believe that it has raised the

promise of the Paraverse, of bringing virtual elements into the Real World. And, if you

haven't seen it, I had a chance to interview Jesse Schell. He's a former Disney imagineer,

now associated with Carnegie Mellon University, and he's talked extensively about what is

now more broadly being called gamification, bringing game elements into life, whether

through advanced technology or not.

I think that he has a wonderful, wonderful video that's on G4, if you look for Jesse Schell,

S C H E L L, and he will talk about the gamification of real life, things as simple as for

example having a wireless chip in your toothbrush, along with a tiny, little gyroscope, and

the toothbrush is going to record how you moved it. Do you brush up and down and side to

side and do you do it for as many minutes as you're supposed to. And, if you did, all this

will be recorded and sent to a family leaderboard, where everyone can see, you get points

for brushing well, and might get awards with the family for being the best, most detailed

up-and-down and side-to-side brusher you could imagine. I'll be very interested to hear

what the panelists have to say today, but I suspect it's going to be less of the traditional

type of Virtual World application that I talked with over two years ago with

Robert Gehorsam, which was really creating a Virtual World at the time.

They were focusing on things like urban environments in Middle Eastern countries, as if

we would ever expect to have military actions there, and having soldiers go door to door

with their avatar in an urban setting and do the stuff that they need to do to get familiar

with the threats around them and distinguishing threats, non-threats and so on. I suspect

that, given the events of the mobile technology that we've seen, even just since then, we'll

see more Paraverse applications where, for example, you might give people either just cell

phones that would gamify a real environment or, if we want to spend the additional money,

providing some sort of heads-up display goggles at people.

I am getting the word that we are going live. This is Rob Bloomfield handing you over to

Orlando.

CONFERENCE ANNOUNCER: Good morning. Welcome to day three of Gametech. Has

it been fun so far? We hope it's fun for you guys because it's a lot of work for us. Thank

you for participating. I have the pleasure of introducing our expert panel on Virtual World

today. Mr. Doug Thompson, CEO of Remedy Limited, a pioneer in immersive media

technology, on your right over there; Mr. Richard Boyd, a chief architect of a Virtual World

at Lockheed Martin; and Dr. Mic Bowman, who leads virtual research at Intel. We have a

moderator today, our very own Doug Maxwell. He's our resident expert at _____. It's all

yours, Doug. Let's give our panel a quick applause. Thank you.

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: Thank you, Dr. Wynne for the introduction. My name is

Douglas Maxwell. I'm with the [AUDIO GLITCH] STDC based in Orlando. I'd like to thank

all of you for coming today at day [AUDIO GLITCH] Gametech. We would like to do things,

like create a virtual training environment that is actually tutable, which means that it's

reusable. And it's a rich area for R&D, and I really enjoy working with folks who are like the

ones that are on our panel because they can help us solve some very difficult problems.

Some problems that we're talking about would be realistic numbers of participants.

So currently, realistically, you can get maybe platoon-level participation in a virtual

environment, and we would like to go all the way up to a village or city level, which means

that you need orders of magnitude of more objects and avatars in the scene. We would

also like a realistic operational area, which means that, instead of just a few city blocks or

very small area of country, we would like multiple kilometers represented in the same

place at the same time. And then all of it needs to be tied together with realistic physics.

So I've got five areas of research that I would like to see evolve over the next, say, couple

of years and address these specific issues.

The first one, like I said before, is high numbers of avatars. We would like to create higher

scene fidelity and complexity, to replicate the operational environment. AI: AI is a huge

headache for us because there's really no one AI that does everything we need so we're

talking about contact switching in your AI so you want an AI to behave differently

depending on what the situation is. We would also like to address usability. We're still

using a keyboard and mouse today, and we'll talk about that a little bit later. And then

lastly physics. Game physics: using game engines for physics are really only appropriate

depending on what kind of scenario that you're playing out. And a higher level, higher

fidelity, a higher accuracy in your physics is really needed in the next generation of virtual

trainers.

So with the opening remarks off to the side, I'd like to further introduce our panel. Last

year when we were talking about putting panels together, we were brainstorming on what

to do, and I popped off and said, "Why don't we do a futures panel," and almost

immediately regretted it. [AUDIO GLITCH] technology that, even I'd put together a panel

on the spot right there in the conference room, by the time we got here in March things

had already evolved. So what we're going to do today is have a discussion about future

directions of Virtual Worlds, Virtual World technology and how we can see what we're

observing in current trends to be applicable in our current needs.

I'd like to introduce first, Mr. Mic Bowman. He is a principal engineer at Intel Labs, and he

leads the Virtual World infrastructure research project. Those of you who are watching in

Second Life may know him as the guy who did the thousand avatar in a Sim project. He

received his bachelor's degree from the University of Montana, and his master's and Ph.D.

in computer science at the University of Arizona. I'd like to turn it over to you, Mic, for

some remarks.

MIC BOWMAN: It's cool in _____, but it was warmer in Arizona than it is in [Portland?].

So first of all, thank you for coming. I guess, as Doug pointed out, the group that I run in

Intel is responsible for kind of technologies that advance the cutting edge of Virtual Worlds

applications and environments. The specific research projects that we work on are

scalability related. It's how we can bring to bear computing resources to enable their

usages so we focus on order of magnitude improvements in scene complexity, in avatar

interactions, total numbers of avatars in a scene as well. In addition, Intel funds through

academic research projects a large number of sort of funder-future applications in

technologies as well, things that we can bring in to these environments over time, as the

technologies mature through the ISTC, the Intel Technology Center for Visual Computing

and the Intel Visual Computing Institute, both of which are focused on North American and

European researchers. We're really excited about the opportunities we have to advance

this technology and enable the usages.

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: Next, we have Mr. Richard Boyd, of Lockheed Martin. I always

enjoy meeting authors, and I didn't put two and two together until it was too late, but

actually have your VRML book. I used it.

RICHARD BOYD: Wow!

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: Yes. Yes. So we've got someone who's been around Virtual

Worlds for quite a while and has a pretty deep understand of our problem-set. Richard is

one of the creators of the Lockheed Martin Virtual Worlds Labs, and you joined what,

Martin, in 2007, when they purchased your company? Is that correct?

RICHARD BOYD: That's correct.

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: And, I'd like to turn it over to you.

RICHARD BOYD: All right. Thanks. So as I look around the room, I see a lot of folks, the

sort of list of usual suspects who have been admiring the problem of how do we take this

medium--whether you want to call it Virtual Worlds or computer gaming--and apply it to

some of the more pressing, I think, even existential problems that we have as humans

trying to survive and thrive in the information age. Those of you who know me know that,

as Doug mentioned, I've been working with gaming technology as a medium for

essentially 20, 21 years.

I won't steal any of David's thunder from the keynote today, but I first met him when he

was working on the movie The Abyss, with James Cameron, trying to solve some very

basic challenges that all humans face actually when it comes to trying to understand from

two-dimensional blueprints and designs and that sort of thing, what an ultimate sort of

design is going to look like. Turns out that about 75 percent of us cannot look at 2D

information, like a blueprint or an image and extrapolate in our head, like what is that 3D

environment going to look like. So we solved that problem together by addressing the, I

think, four areas where this gaming medium is really powerful.

The four areas that we focused on are design. Chances are if you bought one of those

kind of do-it-yourself 3D home-design tools in the mid '90s, that was technology we

licensed to the Learning Company back then, and, of course, I think we all know today

that, if you're going to build a 747 or design the chairs that you guys are sitting in, chances

are you'd be doing your effort a disservice if you didn't start by doing some design in a

3D CAD. Entertainment: I think we all know at this point that it's a very powerful medium

for entertainment. I think computer gaming exceeding movie box-office receipts may be,

was it 1997, and has been sort of outstripping it ever since.

The last two is where we're really focused with Virtual World Labs at Lockheed Martin, and

I know the community here is really focused on it, and that is how do we solve these two

major, pressing existential issues that we have in this century, which is, we've got this

increasing complexity we're having to deal with. How do we prepare humans to operate in

more complex environments. Now something we know from flight simulation is that

[AUDIO GLITCH] earlier and maybe getting access to the equipment or the environment is

difficult. If you can put them in a simulated environment and let them practice safely, you

get a shorter path to mastery. I think we all know that today.

RICHARD BOYD: It turns out that, if you apply that medium to a whole host of issues, like

running a McDonald's restaurant or long-haul trucking or anesthesiology--I've got some

folks visiting from Cornell Medical this week, that I brought down to see the stuff at

Gametech--that we have the same or similar results. Right? And I hope we're not still

having that debate. We were having it as recently as three or four years ago at other

conferences about should we really be using gaming as a medium, or should we be using

simulation in general to try to improve human performance. I think we all should know

today that there's a mountain of evidence. The evidence is in now that, if you're not using

gaming, you're costing yourself money and time and performance. And, if we get to the

question phase and there's still some of you out there, who haven't received that gospel,

then I think we're all really excited about having that discussion with you.

The last one is interface. I think, in this [XO-flood?] of information that we're all having to

face today daily and these systems that humans are creating today, that are increasingly

complex, I mean I think it's fair to say, as Joshua Cooper Ramo says in his book, The Age

of the Unthinkable--anybody read that book? Please go out and check that book out. I

mean when you see stuff, like what's happening in the Middle East right now, and in Japan

you see that we humans are creating systems that are tens of thousands of times more

complex than our conception of them, and somehow we think that we ought to be able to

control them. Whether it's financial systems or energy systems or the internet, we're

dealing with this increasing complexity. I believe firmly, although I haven't yet, I think the

jury's still out on this--I think we're going to talk some about interface--I think there's a way

to harness this really powerful medium, to help humans make better sense of this

bewildering world that we're creating for ourselves: How do you separate signal from

noise? How do you learn what to pay attention to or what can be safely ignored? I think we

ought to be teaching this in K through 12 education. Right? That's going to be a critical

skill for humans in this age.

And again, the things I really admire about the medium is that basically, just to put it in a

nutshell, you've got every media type ever used before in human communication, right,

available to you. So whether it's video or audio or images, text or even animated 3D

characters and objects, we have that in this really powerful medium that we're harnessing.

So I'm really looking forward to see how we harness it for simulation learning, as well as

new interfaces.

Now, one of the issues, and I still remember the first time I went into Second Life, and I

think that was maybe four years ago. As someone who's been working in gaming--David

will talk about this later--but David and I and our partners created Red Storm

Entertainment with Tom Clancy. We did Timeline with Michael Crichton. We did this

Amazing Trainwreck Company called [Irock?], with Ozzie Osborn, and have focused on all

these applications of the game technology over the years, but the issue is how do we take

that technology and apply it to some of these more fundamental issues that we have

today. I'm sorry. So when I went into Second Life the first time, I found this environment

where I met some really interesting people, some pretty kooky people. I played around

with the tools and realized that I could create in there and make these interesting worlds,

but I quickly ran out of things to do, and it didn't meet my expectations as a gamer, right,

so I didn't have the complex interactions with non-player characters. I didn't have Quest. I

didn't have physics.

I know a lot of those issues are being overcome, but my first reaction, when I tried to figure

out how could we harness it for doing training and that sort of thing was, hey, I really want

that superset of capability that I see in MMOG engines, like the HeroEngine and others

that I know the DOD were beginning to look at. So that was about three or four years ago

when I was talking to General Lessel and other folks about, "Hey, Second Life is great,

and I see how we can have really interesting meetings in these environments and have

some interesting collaboration, but if I wanted to do mission rehearsal and have thousands

of participants and that sort of thing, I really want this sort of superset of capabilities that I

see in an MMOG."

And then my thinking has evolved from there to say what is wrong with even using an

MMOG today and the problem with Second Life. And, again, I think these environments

and these platforms are really good for a variety of things like collaboration and

socialization and that sort of thing, and I've really enjoyed seeing the development of

them. But, as I'm looking at how do you actually get this used in a government

environment that requires today too many unnatural acts. And you guys know what I'm

talking about, right? So it's go and get this very large proprietary platform client, download

it, install it on your system inside of a firewall. Call your sys admin and say, "Hey, we need

the following ports opened so that I can be able to interact with other people." And these

things are just [AUDIO GLITCH] approved and all that, and these things are just, they're

unnatural acts, and not just for government. I think it's a lot to ask for consumers.

Now we do it on the game side because the payoff is, you know, I have this entertaining

experience that I can have. But that's when we really started thinking about how do we

remove all this friction that is keeping us from taking advantage of the medium. That's

really what I wanted to talk about today is, I believe in the medium. I believe it's a powerful

way for us to engage with each other and with information. I'd like to do it in a way that has

less friction, that has better interfaces that has a better, more smooth pipeline for how I

create content. And the ideal model, once you go through that sort of thought experiment,

is, I'd like it to be the way the internet is, which is, if I want to go to the Metanomics

website, even though I couldn't get the Flash to work on my iPad to see this streaming

thing here, I go to that website, and I'm pretty quickly in that experience. I don't have to

usually think about going out and getting proprietary plug-ins or opening up ports or that

sort of thing. And, if I want to create content for a website today, well, that's really the

energy that made the internet take off.

If you wanted to learn html, what did you do? How many of you know html out there? And

how did you learn initially? You went to a web page. You probably right-mouse clicked it,

and you said, "View source." You said, "Oh, that's really cool how they did that," or, "That's

a really nice cascading style sheet," and you reused other people's work, and that's what

kind of helped--everybody became a publisher because the barrier to publishing really

dropped dramatically. Now the barrier to creating a triple A game title today is pretty darn

high. Now the barrier to making an iTunes or an iPad or iPhone sort of title is dropping

precipitously, thanks to better tools, a nice little ecosystem that Apple has set up. And

what you'll hear--and I don't want to steal all of David's thunder from this afternoon--but

what you'll hear him talk about is all of those elements, removing all of that friction on both

the content-creation side, we like to use the word democratize and commoditize that whole

part of it, as well as the distribution of the players, make it very easy for people to get into

the worlds and then develop a business ecosystem such that everybody gets to play.

There are no more walled gardens or proprietary platforms that prevent people from

participating in the environment. I think if we can finally make that happen, the barrier

lowers. We'll all be able to take more advantage of this medium that we all agree is

powerful. And I know I'm taking more time than I expected.

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: That's quite all right.

RICHARD BOYD: But I'm looking forward to the discussion.

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: Thank you, Richard. The next panelist is Mr. Doug Thompson,

and I'm having a really surreal experience right now because we're having a complete role

reversal. The first time I met Doug was in San Francisco, at the Enterprise 2.0

Conference, where he moderated a panel, and I sat down on the end. So you might

notice, out in the crowd, that we're also streaming into Second Life. Doug is CEO of

Remedy Communications, but he also owns a show called Metanomics, and we're

participating there as well. Those of you out in the Metanomics crowd, please feel free to

jump in with questions in chat, and I'll try to get to them.

Also, Mr. Doug Thompson is known as Dusan Writer in Second Life, and he also has a

little company called Startled Cat, which does storytelling. And one component that I think

is really missing in some of our virtual trainers is actually a good story to tell, to engage

people so that they really get into what we're trying to teach them. So, Doug, I'll turn it over

to you.

DOUG THOMPSON: Thank you. I don't want to get into a big modology versus

narratology debate, but we started Startled Cat because, just picking up a little bit what

you were talking about with James Cameron is, you can have really great technology, but

why are you going and what is the reason that you're there. And while there are

simulations and there are game mechanics that help drive our participation in Virtual

Worlds, we also have a belief that this is a tool for storytelling, that it's incredibly

compelling and that storytelling can really bring you to an aha moment in a way sometimes

that game mechanics can't. Game mechanics allow us to kind of look under the hood of

the way that reality is constructed. It can give us incentives. It can give us pathways

through content, and, in conjunction with storytelling or storytelling as a separate element,

Virtual Worlds, I think, have an incredibly powerful ability to communicate empathy, walk in

somebody else's shoes, communicate emotion, and allow us to think about higher

concept, higher-level concepts.

And, when you're immersed, the quality of Virtual Worlds that provides that immersion,

whether it's high-fidelity immersion or not, it tricks the brain. You think that you're there.

You think that you're participating in a Real World. There's no difference. The mind doesn't

see difference between virtuality and what's real. Which is another interesting aside

because I think that you talk about the future of Virtual Worlds, and I love the phrase "The

future is here, it's just not widely distributed."

RICHARD BOYD: William Gibbs.

DOUG THOMPSON: And I always say what I've learned about the world, I learned

because of Virtual Worlds, where the future is headed. And you think about a lot of the

work that we're doing is in public face in Virtual Worlds. And you think about issues around

identity, how we express ourselves through avatars. You think about the ability to

collaborate globally, across time zones, across geographies in real time. You think about

issues that have come up around privacy. Virtual Worlds have become a kind of test bed

for thinking about how we, as humans, work with technology and work with the tools of

technology. So I think there's some tensions that I think about in the work that we do.

We're doing work, for example, in developing a virtual environment for military amputees.

Military amputee goes back home after they've been in a military treatment facility. They

lose the support network, the face-to-face support network that they got while they were at

a place like Walter Reed. So by providing them with a virtual environment, they can stay

connected to their peers, provide each other support and, through an avatar, work out

issues, for example, about body identity and maybe, through a virtual environment, set up

a sort of mentoring peer-to-peer support network that maybe is not as easily facilitated

through things like Facebook.

So those are the types of projects that we're working on, where it's not just what happens

in the virtual environment, but it's the implications of the virtual environment to the physical

or actual world. And these create, I think, some tensions, and you touched on some of

these tensions, one of those tensions being around fidelity because I think that there's a

spectrum between extremely high-fidelity virtual environments and environments that don't

need to necessarily have that level of fidelity. And I think it's a false dichotomy to say that

we need to have increasing levels of fidelity because I'm not sure that's true. We were

doing a project over the last couple of weeks where we're actually prototyping a retail

experience for a Fortune 500 company. We brought some people in, and we did some

storytelling in a virtual environment, and we had a very high-fidelity environment, but

really, at the end of the day, all they needed was a table. That's all they really needed was

a virtual table because they got into a story outside of their normal way of thinking, and

what we discovered from that or the reminder for us was that it doesn't always take--I'm

going to be a little bit of a, what's the term for it--

RICHARD BOYD: Devil's advocate?

DOUG THOMPSON: --devil's advocate or take another side of this, which is that fidelity

isn't always a necessary end goal. I think that other tension between narratology and

modology or game mechanics and social/storytelling experiences, I think there's some

interesting tensions to explore there. Finally, I think one of the things--the future is here,

but we haven't quite grappled with what it means, and that's around avatar expression. I

think we're starting to see technology such as facial recognition, where your avatar can

respond based on your physical face, but also other ways of expressing yourself through

the identity of an avatar.

I think it's interesting to think about our avatars as starting to embed intelligence of their

own and that when we think about artificial intelligence, we often think of NPCs and bots. I

think there's a really interesting work that we could do if we think about what type of

intelligence we could embed in our avatars so that our avatars could be sort of partially on,

that we could be expressing ourselves in digital spaces, even when we're not necessarily

there. I think this happens on its own right now, and we don't acknowledge that this

happens. You're logged into Second Life. And I see a little IM there from somebody. Your

avatar is there, and people are chatting with your avatar, even though your level of

presence isn't necessarily fully there. I think this idea that we can start to embed

intelligence and procedures and protocols into our avatars becomes a very interesting

place for AI development. And I'll leave it at that for now.

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: The fidelity question is coming up over and over again during the

conference, and I believe tutable fidelity in our Sims is important. I think the mission in the

scenario should define what level of fidelity that you should have in it. And also the kinds

of fidelity should be clearly defined as well. Fidelity is expensive and, if you did high fidelity

for everything all the time, it probably wouldn't be viable.

I want to switch gears a second and ask the panel a set of questions, and, once we're

finished, I would like to invite both in-world participants and the audience to jump in and

give us some questions.

So the first question that I have for you guys has to deal with decreased budgets. So we're

anticipating a drawdown in spending in the Military and pretty much across the board in

the government. My first question is: How do you see the reduction in budgets having an

impact on how Virtual Worlds are used specifically as a collaboration medium? And, Mic,

I'll turn that over to you first.

MIC BOWMAN: [AUDIO GLITCH] clearly in a meeting that's held in some kind of virtual

environment's going to cost an awful lot less than holding them in the corresponding

physical space, for travel costs, for physical space issues as well. So there are two parts

of my thinking about this. One is changing of budgets, change the acceptable level of

expense to value ratio for virtual environments. So as we have lower and lower budgets,

our willingness to get the very deeply interactive environment that we get when we're

physically co-located is less important, and we found this on other kinds of interactions.

The second part of that though is--and this goes back to a degree to the fidelity

question--is what does it take to make these applications more useful, that is, what can we

do in order to get the benefits out of it. One obvious observation, and Doug and I have had

this conversation a number of times, is that if you want to host a thousand people in a

conference, you better have a virtual space to get those thousand people in the

conference. There's certain levels of basic scalability that we need in order to be able to

translate things from one place to another place.

On things like fidelity, what do we have from our existing conferencing applications? We

have a certain amount of interaction that we can get out of NetMeeting. It's a really _____

interaction. But there are pieces of the expression of social interactions in those meetings

that's completely lost when you use something like NetMeeting. You can go into an

environment, like Second Life, and it becomes more expressive. There's the notion of

presence and engagement and immersion into it. But, again, the number of dimensions

that we can express, the amount of control that we can express in those is relatively low.

So what we accept is in those environments is essentially a translation of our NetMeeting

experience with the avatar presence. Right? There's very little else that goes into it.

There's a little bit of sort of pre-meeting and post-meeting that you don't get out of

NetMeeting, but your ability to express things is very small. It's I can't--when I'm in a

physical meeting, I'm notorious for this. It's the mean time to whiteboard what they talk

about, for me, that I have to have a whiteboard marker in my hand, scribbling on a board

at a meeting. And I can't do that in any of these virtual environments. Until I can get the

fidelity of my expressiveness up to a level for this particular application, where I can

spontaneously start writing on the whiteboard and have the same kinds of sort of deeply

expressive interactions that I would get in a physical environment, it can't fully take the

place of our physical meetings. And so we go back to what's the level of acceptable

expression? What's the level of acceptable behavior?

One other observation that I'll make on this, Richard talks a lot about games, and that's his

way of capturing the world on this thing, and that is by far the most mature and effective

application of these technologies right now. Games, [as turning in?] games of simulation,

are the most successful use of these as serious applications. The way we talk about it

inside Intel is very much about applications. It's not my goal to create a virtual space. My

goal is to solve the collaboration problem. And the virtual space needs to be able to

express the things I need to be able to express in order to achieve that application. So the

application is share or communicate information, I think we're going to see more trends

trending to that. If the application is collaborate and create and design, I think we've got a

ways to go on the technology, to be able to get to the point where we can express that.

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: Nice. Richard, your comments?

RICHARD BOYD: Sure. I mean obviously affordability is on all of our minds, not just

within the DOD, but in society to a larger extent. And that is one of the primary drivers

behind when you heard [D9?] yesterday talk about the virtual framework and trying to sort

of break down all the walled garden sorts of siloed efforts that we see across the DOD and

around the world, that's one piece of it. And that's precisely why we're trying to again

create an ecosystem approach where we get rid of the walled gardens, proprietary

platforms, allow everybody to participate and allow that sort of, finally, the share ability and

portability of content so that we're not creating content for one platform and then have it

not be portable to others.

The company that I had, 3Dsolve, that was acquired by Lockheed Martin, was one of the, I

think, six or seven software companies that were contributing to the America's Army game

project. I think that some fabulous work was done there. The one regret that I had from

that whole process was that a lot of that great content that we created there is sort of tied

up in that platform, and there's a lot of people that are really interested in trying to take

some of that content in the fabulous training that was created in there and move it over to

more portable environments or to other platforms, bring it maybe, "Could you bring it into

Second Life? Could you bring it into Teleplace? Could you bring it into VBS2?" And the

answer has been a resounding no, for a variety of reasons, some of them based on policy

and people and some of them really just based on the technology.

So those are the kinds of things we want to break down, that we believe will reduce costs

in just the content creation and sharing, finally, [AUDIO GLITCH] work with BP on using

Virtual Worlds and advise them on using a bunch of different platforms. And naturally they

replaced a couple of their meetings where they've got folks in Azerbaijan and in South

America and everywhere, and every year they were bringing them all to London. And, of

course, the individuals were really happy about that annual meeting, right, to get out of

Azerbaijan or the 'stans or wherever they happened to be and get to London for these

face-to-face meetings, with a lot of going to dinner and social interaction. So they did this

test where they replaced it with a meeting, I believe it was in ProtoSphere, and the savings

were dramatic, as you pointed out.

Now, one of the things we learned from that though, and this is something that I feel, I also

agree that we have a ways to go, in terms of really recreating the social aspects that we're

all enjoying here in Virtual Worlds because I believe that there is an incremental benefit to

going into these environments. Now if you have a lot of experience, of course, and you've

played World of Warcraft, and you've been in games, and you have Second Life

experience, you're going to get a lot more out of the meetings in these environments, like

Teleplace or Second Life, than people that are showing up for the first time, simply

because you're more adept at how do you share content, how do I collaborate with others.

I'm not running around jumping up on the table and learning how to use my avatar for the

first time.

Within Lockheed Martin, we've been, again, exploring this technology for quite some time,

and we've had a study of I think we had a thousand Teleplace seats. Is that right, Remy?

REMY: Yes, you did.

RICHARD BOYD: And I've used it for program management and just general meetings

and that sort of thing. We've watched people go up that initial learning curve, where they're

again not really aware of the etiquette and protocol that we all have here. You guys aren't

running around jumping on the tables. It would be fun, kind of, if you did, but--we'll do that

experiment later. But you're sitting in your seats, and I'm speaking, and everybody is

listening, to some extent. Right?

In these Virtual Worlds, sometimes you got people just running around everywhere, not

paying attention to the speaker, and I noticed yesterday in Remy's thing in Teleplace, he

had this great little tool--because that's one great thing about the medium is, we do have

godlike control of everything in these worlds. We've created them. We've summoned them

into existence. And Remy was able to grab all of us--there were 15 of us, right--and slam

us down in our seats and then make us follow him around as he showed us stuff. And

we'd lost control of our avatars. I wish I could do that in Real World meetings so that's one

benefit. But I think, in terms of collaboration right now, the benefit is incremental over

things like NetMeeting and others, and I'm still really interested in seeing us get rid of

some of that interface friction. And, again, I know we're going to talk about that shortly,

and that sort of thing.

Now, when it comes to training though, as I said earlier, the improvements and

effectiveness and efficiency that you get from being able to have people collaborate in

these environments, whether you're training on the Littoral combat ship where there's folks

on a real ship out somewhere training right now, and the rest of us can be at our stations

in a virtual sort of analog of that ship and participate in those live exercises with them, that

is really powerful stuff. And it's got a demonstrable effect on creating a shorter path to

mastery. And, after all, that is what, as you pointed out, that's what we want.

I don't want to learn how to use my iPad better. I've never learned how to type. I'm really

glad that I never did because soon I'm not going to have to. I'm not going to even need it

because we're removing all of those barriers, and soon it's going to be this frictionless way

for us to, again, do our jobs, which is collaborate with each other and information and

accomplish our task and, hopefully, with a shorter path to mastery, which is, again, there's

still organizations that are not taking advantage of this, and I believe that very soon those

organizations that don't will be completely outstripped by those who do. And individuals

who take advantage of this in the next ten to fifteen years will appear super-human to

those who are not taking advantage of it. So it's all about easier interfaces, more

commoditized and democratized sorts of ways to develop the contents, and then taking

advantage of this medium. Game mechanics are just one piece of it.

The point I made earlier is, it's the fact that we have all these media at our disposal, and,

to me, it's actually--this is what I saw on the set of Avatar with James Cameron is this

godlike power over a medium where you can do a lot more even than you can possibly

with the movies, with a passive linear medium. Essentially, this is a nonlinear interactive

medium where you can get emergent behavior and be surprised and that sort of thing, and

I think it's incredibly powerful, and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes. There are

ways to save money, certainly on meetings. Then on training. I think that's going to be a

big game-changer in the next decade if D9's vision is realized.

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: Doug, what do you think?

DOUG THOMPSON: I mean I guess just a couple things. I mean I like it when times are

when you're scrambling around for budget because it makes you think that it's not Virtual

World budgets that [AUDIO GLITCH] just budgets in general. So people are saying, "I've

got to figure out ways to do more with less." And I actually think these guys have pointed

out some great use cases for Virtual Worlds, where you can do more with less. But also

kind of make two other points. One is that we don't typically talk about Virtual Worlds in

isolation. They're part of a larger project so there might be a social media component.

There might be a web component. You might be taking machinima in order to create a

training video, and that that machinima gets posted to an internet or out to YouTube.

You look at this Metanomics event, we're investing an avatar presence in Second Life, but

there are also people watching from the web so you are in a Virtual World, and then we

may probably have a couple of hundred people watching on our stream. And, if you can't

watch on our stream, you're probably participating in Twitter. And so when we look at

investments in virtual technology, we look at that investment as part of a larger set. And

back to what Mic was saying, it's a solution. If somebody has a problem and you can give

them a solution and one of the technologies happens to be Virtual Worlds, they'll pay for

the solution.

The other thing I think that this encourages is interesting collaborations and looking at

unique ways to bring partners together that might not have been brought together before. I

think about the work we're doing with military amputees, just as an example. There's all

kinds of funding models that could work with that, including funding models through, for

example, the VA where you're looking at actual rehabilitation, and you're looking at

medical outcomes. But, you can think about other types of partnerships that you can bring

together into an environment like that. If there was one thing I would encourage and one

thing that we've learned in Virtual Worlds is that these abilities to collaborate across

disciplines and with partners that you might not have thought about collaborating with can

unleash value that maybe you hadn't anticipated.

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: I agree. Thank you. Let's talk about security for a moment. One of

the largest barriers to adoption in the Military, in particular, and across the federal

government is security. We currently have a zero-risk tolerance policy, if you will.

Steven Aguilar, up here in the front, and I lived that for a couple years, just trying to get the

basics in place at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center for us to do demonstration and

prototype work. I want to ask you guys what you think about new approaches to security

and how we can possibly either drive new policy that D9 talked about acceptable risk

yesterday? What are your thoughts? Richard, let's start with you.

RICHARD BOYD: Sure. Obviously since the Virtual World framework tasking came from

D9's office, I think Security, with a capital S, was right behind affordability or sometimes

they swap places, in terms of how important they are in our tasks. So that's something that

I think obviously is a must-happen, and it's something that, of course, has held up the

adoption of some of these technologies in the DOD and in the government at large. So our

goal with this effort to democratize and commoditize and reduce friction with the

framework is to make sure that anything that someone creates in this new framework or

deploys can be made as secure as any website today or any web deployment today. And

that, again, is one of the things we're going to be harnessing from what we've learned from

the internet is making sure that that is the case.

Obviously, saying that it's as secure as any other internet deployment means that it is

insecure, but we routinely deploy content today within firewalls, within secure networks.

And, again the way we're trying to approach this platform is to say it's just like any other

medium. It's like any other media type. That's all it is. I think the public and the media

really talk about gaming and Virtual Worlds, and we play it up quite a bit, but I really think

of it again as just another medium that happens to contain all other media types and,

therefore, allows new forms of storytelling, new forms of expression, new forms of

collaboration, both with other people and with information. New ways of looking at

information that we're only beginning to harness. But the idea is, by using secure socket

layers and everything we've learned from the internet, anything we deploy on this

environment should be as secure as any other web deployment.

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: Doug, what are your thoughts?

DOUG THOMPSON: Yeah. Two things. I think there's two pressures. One is that

enterprise and military are driving an agenda for security so I think you're seeing hacks,

and I think the kind of work that you guys are doing to push that agenda will continue so

we've seen hacks. But on the other side of it, I think that the push for more ubiquitous

access, whether it's through a browser, whether it's using things, the Unity plug-in is still a

plug-in. But, you're sort of seeing two pressures that are leading us to a place where you

will be able to say that you could start firewalling things, and those two pressure are, one,

we want [AUDIO GLITCH] storytelling, [AUDIO GLITCH] you do need secure

environments.

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: Mic, you guys are looking at it at a completely different angle.

MIC BOWMAN: Yeah.

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: So I'm not going to steal your thunder. Go for it.

MIC BOWMAN: Okay. The question of security in a Virtual World is by itself the question

is a really interesting problem and trying to understand what we mean by that. It happens

on many different levels. There's the basic level. This is a network application, and we can

treat it like a network application and try to secure it like a network application. But, even

when we do that, it's not quite the same. Right? There are a number of different fairly

unique kinds of attacks that you can have in these environments. And a web application, a

user that comes to that http server brings very little context, and the context that that they

bring tends to be very static. Whereas, an avatar that comes into a simulation, into a

Virtual World that's being simulated by a space, brings a significant amount of context with

them. They bring their avatar, and they bring all of their inventory, call it whatever you

want, with them. And that inventory frequently includes things that require computational

resources on the server. And so every avatar that comes into your server brings with them

this context, and the context is potentially destructive to the server.

And, just to give you a very creative example: There's some wonderful DDoS attacks

about people with very complex avatars walking by a room outside. You can't even see

them, but the simulation engine, unless the simulation engine is fairly smart, it's still

sending updates down the network for all of the changes that are happening to that avatar.

And so network research is being consumed on my connection to the server, by

somebody else who's on the server. That doesn't exist in our web applications today. We

need to rethink that.

But it gets even more interesting, right? That, in order to do the optimization, we do things

like Dead Reckoning and animations and other things, where we take sort of server-size

simulation concepts and push them off onto the client, in order to get better behavior and

better application and use of the resources. Well, what that really means is that when I'm

visiting a site, somebody who walks through is actually consuming not just resources on

the server where the simulation's occurring, where the virtual environment or game

happens, but also on my client because they're consuming the resources as I render their

avatar and as I do more and more of these optimizations where I'm moving my

computations to the client, they're using more and more of my resources. And, if they're

not starting to execute things on my client, now that opens up a whole 'nother spectrum of

kinds of attacks that can occur.

There are a variety of levels that Intel's working on: different features and capabilities that

allow us to provide layers of security, secure execution environments, all the way up

through support of programming languages allow us to firewall applications for every

[bot?]. So there's a whole stack of solutions that have to come in there. There's a second

part of the security problem. So the first part is just how do we take this network

application and make it secure.

The second part is the information [on conflict?] that's in there. So this whole notion of

persistence and shared state that makes this such a powerful media is also something that

introduces a set of complexities into the problem. That is, the information that's in that

shared state may not be consumable by everyone who has access to it. And so now we

have a problem of presenting the shared state in a way that different perspectives and

different viewpoints can take advantage of the sharing, but also see only the stuff that

they're supposed to see in those environments. That kind of very compartmentalized

sharing of information is very much a military kind of application. There are certainly

applications in enterprise, but they're less open.

But we see similar kinds of things in just general applications for consumers. Content

creation and places like Second Life goes through a number of these problems of piracy,

picking things up and moving it around, and that whole problem of ownership and moving

content is yet another dimension to this. And, again, there are solutions that can be

brought to bear on it. The question is how much weight do you want in the security system

versus how much freedom to you want in order to act and the cost of it as well.

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: We have about ten minutes, and I'd like to open up questions to

the audience before I move on to the other questions. Mic, you brought up a great point

though. Back in 2008, when we were filling out the Security paperwork to allow Second

Life in our networks, it was all about web pages, and they wanted to know, "What web

page would you like us to view?" And so you know the policy is lagging, and we need to

educate our policymakers to help us with that. Yes, ma'am?

AUDIENCE: Thank you. Can you hear me okay?

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: We can.

AUDIENCE: Richard, you opened up with something I really, truly believe in, that today

we have really complex system and problems that really require collaboration to be able to

solve. Mic, you mentioned the goal to collaborate in design around those problems

[AUDIO GLITCH] have for you is: Why not take the approach of creating contextual

environments that better showcase what the system problem is? For example, are you

looking at the world of games? All the games that help explain complex systems the best,

the Sim City, Civilization, Starcraft, they explain supply-chain optimization problems.

These aren't in the style of FPS, they're more real-time strategy, the god view. So why

avatars? Why not instead, for example, Foldit, the protein-folding game out of

Washington? A corroborative, contextual environment that showcases better the problem

versus avatars. I'm just curious. I'm pushing back a bit.

MIC BOWMAN: Okay. I'll go.

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: Okay, go ahead.

MIC BOWMAN: [First one's easy to do?] I have two responses. The question of whether

an avatar's a part of it or not is an independent question from what kind of problem am I

solving. Am I looking at the right set of problems? So there's a social application, a social

need that Second Life solves, that's different from a protein-folding visualization. So we

created sites and largely as in collaboration with the IEEE and ACP around the Super

Computing Conference, largely as a way to explore what we call collaborative

visualization, a way of looking at very complex--looking at and interacting with very

complex datasets. And so we have a guy, for example, Aaron Duffy at Utah State, who

uses OpenSim essentially as an interface to configure and interact with his biological

evolution systems. So he can do these very complex simulations on the backend, and he's

using this as simply a front end for seeing the evolution of the populations in a very nice,

graphical way. It also happens to be the case that we can join him and provide feedback,

and so it becomes a very collaborative environment.

A second example of that is, we're doing some collaboration with Sandia National Labs,

around this thing we call water wars. And Sandia has a very rich set of simulations for

hydrology in the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico. They have a very difficult time

communicating the results of that to their constituencies. And so we're using essentially a

game front end that's being backed by a very rich, complex simulation environment, in

order to communicate the long-term results of decisions. And so you play it as a game, but

you're really configuring and interacting with a very rich simulation on the backend.

And it's those kinds of applications, it's that conversion from sort of thinking about it as a

game to thinking about as an application that has game properties to it, that we're trying to

explore in those applications. So yes, the apps that I think more about are protein-folding

and serious games and less about sort of social interactions.

RICHARD BOYD: Yeah. Among my collective of misfits and who have been looking at

these problems, we've been talking a lot recently about things like Katrina-like disasters or,

of course, what's happening in Japan and looking at social media. Reid Hoffman invested

in my last company and was on the advisory board, and he'd explained social media to us,

going all the way back to 2003, and, frankly, I saw the Moore's Law and Metcalfe's Law

trends, but didn't know that we'd want to use it just as a mirror, once we had all that great

technology. I think there's another step that I think we're about ready to take, which is,

again, think about everything we just talked about with the medium, think about the power

of social media, and what if we could have an analog model of the world that where, with

the right filters, I could coordinate NGO response to what's happening in Japan or what

happened in Haiti or elsewhere. And we're seeing a lot of examples of that.

I just saw recently that Harrison Ford has a new effort with Facebook, called Ecotopia. And

going back to what you said, it is a massively multiplayer sort of game environment, but it

is going to be a very simple interface, just like Farmville and some of these other efforts.

But it's about coordinating people and energy and collaborating on a problem and taking

advantage of this medium to get people to work together. When we first started working on

VRML in the early '90s, with Mark Pesce and Tony Parisi, and when David and I wrote the

book on that in '96, the idea that we had originally was an analog model of the world, the

idea--and Michael Jones was involved in those discussions as well. The guy is now CTO

at Google Earth, of course. But the idea is, make an analog version of the world, that's

synthetic, that we can play with, and I know, Feydra(?), you talk about this a lot, about

using the medium to map the future. And it turns out to be really, really good at that

because you can do what-ifs, and you can say, "What if this changed or that changed,

how would we deal with that problem? Let's run through a simulation of it before it actually

happens and see how we would coordinate and respond to it." But I think that's a perfect

application of the medium.

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: Very good. Doug, would you like to weigh in?

DOUG THOMPSON: Well, just to say I think it's interesting you asked the question, and

the responses, because I think it's showing that the boundaries between, for example,

serious games and Virtual Worlds are blurring. And so we come back to our main point,

which is, what's the problem and then find the right solution for the problem. But I think

you're bringing up an interesting question, which is a couple things. One is that I'm not

sure yet that [AUDIO GLITCH] as firmly worked out as they will be a couple of years from

now. I also think that we'll start to see more interest in work around 3D environments

themselves, destructibility, entropy, environments which change on their own without

management. And so as 3D environments become intelligent, they can actually become

kind of like data landscapes. And then this question about how much presence--do you

need an avatar, so you end up with a spectrum of potential solutions depending what your

problem is.

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: I have one last rapid-fire question for you. We only have a couple

of minutes. But when are we going to ditch the keyboard and the mouse? Doug, you go

first.

DOUG THOMPSON: Well, as I said, the future is here, it's just not widely distributed. I

think we're [staying with?] Microsoft can act the first because it's a consumer application

and because people are hacking it and using it as an interface for things like Second Life.

We're on the road. Whether people always want to be moving around as they're accessing

data, we'll see.

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: Thank you. Mic?

MIC BOWMAN: You want rapid-fire answers.

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: Oh, yeah.

MIC BOWMAN: Very tough. I guess I'll focus on one part of it, and it's just the observation

that, when we look at system architecture today, the amount of computation of power that

goes into output is grossly out of balance with the amount of computation that goes to

processing input. And until those line up, until we think as much about how we throw

computation at the input problem, activity inferencing, managing the very, very rich set of

sensors that we now have in our devices, how we interact with mobile devices and the

many devices we have available to us. Until we throw the computation and understand

how to throw the computation at managing that large amount of input that's largely ignored

right now, we're going to have a hard time getting away from the keyboard and mouse.

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: Thirty second, Richard.

RICHARD BOYD: Well, I think the best interfaces are invisible interfaces, and that's the

trend that we're heading towards right now, which is ambient, fully ambient interfaces.

When we first heard about Microsoft Natal, David and I went out to meet with

Alex Kipman, the inventor, and it turned out Jaron Lanier was there as well. And Jaron, of

course, is the guy who invented the Data Glove years ago, and we spent a pretty rich day

talking about how the interface is going to disappear. But this whole connect thing is really

about a sensor revolution that's happening. Of course, at Lockheed, we know a little

something about sensors. They're getting incredibly cheap, and this era of us learning how

to adapt to the devices, I think, is rapidly coming to a close, and it's going to be all

about--and I think the companies are going to win, like the Intel's and whoever, are those

who are going to figure out how to make this stuff adapt to us and make it a lot more

natural. We're using natural-language processing and gesture. Another one of my

colleagues, Frank Bozeman, coined the term--you guys have heard of digital immigrants

and digital natives and all that stuff from Art Prensky--he coined the term gestural natives.

And that's like my five-year-old today, I often tell the story of when she was three, from the

time she was three, she already had a year or more of experience working with an iPod

Touch and that interface. I caught her one day out swiping her hand across the front of my

television. I asked her what she's doing, and she said--she speaks Italian--so she said,

"Daddy, [e rota?]." It's broken. It's like, "Oh, you're trying to change the channel." And I

explained to her here's the three or four things that I had in my den, that I use this one for

that device. And she just looked at me, puzzled. And I said, "Of course, you're right." Why

don't these things just do what we ask them to do? Why do I have to figure out the

interfaces? And I think that age is ending soon.

DOUGLAS MAXWELL: That's a fantastic close. Thank you. Thank you to the panel. I

appreciate your participation, and I'm going to turn it back over to Dr. Wynne.

DR. WYNNE: Thank you. On behalf of Gametech _____, I'd like to present the panel with

the Team Orlando coin for your presentation here.

RICHARD BOYD: Do we have to share it?

DR. WYNNE: It's good for I think a beer somewhere around here. I'm not sure.

Could you please fill out the survey and drop it at the door. And do we have a way for the

Virtual World to fill out the survey? We'll capture the chats. Okay. Thank you for coming.

Document: cor1100.doc
Transcribed by: http://www.hiredhand.com

Gametech orlandothefutureofvirtualworlds

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