Day 254: My so-called (second) life

We left the conference a bit early in the end due to a combination of exhaustion (mental and physical), decreasing interest in content, rush-hour traffic avoidance and (in my case) a sudden desire to see my children before they went to bed.

We made it back fine - here was one of my last views of...Boston - congratulations to A, credit is also due to lloyd - who actually knew where I was - for making an Exile-friendly pop reference.

The final event we went to at the conference was a keynote session given in Second Life. I'm afraid this left me a bit cold for a number of reasons - firstly fatigue as mentioned above, secondly the content didn't seem to be especially ground-breaking, thirdly, although it was certainly novel, what was the point? We watched a tiny 3D animation of a man standing at a podium while low-quality bitmap images appeared on large 'screens' behind and we listened to him on what sounded like a bad old-fashioned phone line.

Why bother with a 3D virtual world to have a meeting or on-line conference? Surely the internet provides many more efficient ways of sharing live information and allowing 2-way and many-way communication. A face-to-face meeting with an avatar does not really aid communication over audio or text-only discussion as far as I can tell.

I should not be so quick to judge based on a very small experience - clearly some people are very excited by the possibilities and I can distinctly remember being annoyed by web-pages with pictures on them because they took so long to load - times will change and sooner or later the overhead of rendering 3D avatars will be a case of 'why not?' In any case, for now I don't seem to have enough time in the day for one life never mind two.

Talking of 3D virtual worlds, here is a visual explanation for the slight wrongness of the picture above courtesy of Google Earth.