PA Consulting Metaverse Roadmap discussion: PA Consulting has just hosted an interesting discussion and presentation event (at their SL office) for the Metaverse Roadmap Initiative. Here’s their website. The initiative is basically a think-tank to explore the possibilities presented by metaverses. The main speaker was Jerry Paffendorf, a Futurist who was actually streaming his audio presentation live from New York.
The talk was attended by about 30 people – a lot of PA people as well as some developers and people like me.
Some interesting points were raised and explained such as augmented reality, the convergence and evolution of applications like Google Earth and Life Logging: having a persistent digital identity which carries you through from one website to another. I company which springs to mind when I think about digital identity management is Midentity.
Virtual world platforms was another interesting topic. This explains the idea of using standard technology (such as SL) and allowing third-party apps to access/improve/augment the core service.
On the whole, a lot of the discussion was based around convergence, and, all in all, an interesting event. Probably the best concept under convergence discussed was the idea of watching a live sporting event on TV and having the opportunity to shift directly into a virtual environment to either watch it being simulcasted or even participate in a virtual version of the game/event.
I asked a question to Jerry about the future of simulcasting sporting events into SL and the opportunities for media owners and convergent device manufacturers. His view was the device companies such as Microsoft are best placed to exploit the upsides in this niche. Jerry was actually involved in the MLB.com Yankee Stadium project. My personal view is that the ability to re-create sporting events and/or watch from different angles is a great feature here.