So, I’ll be back at the fine SXSW Interactive conference/festival in Austin this year. Last year I spewed forth on convergence (skeptically). This year I get to orchestrate the spewage as I am leading a panel on virtual worlds, one of a handful on the topic in the Gaming/Screenburn category.

The panel’s called “Terraforming the Internet: When 3D Models Meet Business Models.” Saturday, March 10, 10am. Panelists are being finalized, but they’re all brilliant, articulate, laureates-in-waiting.

SXSW is simply an exceptional event and I’m happy to be a part of it. See you there?

See also: South by

Tuesday in Beijing I was part of a team that did something truly bizarre and unique. We helped the CEO of IBM, Sam Palmisano, deliver the results of IBM’s Innovation Jam to an audience inside of Second Life. The virtual venue complemented the 8,000 IBM’ers in China he was speaking directly to as well as the hundreds of thousands of colleagues watching the event via internal webcast.

The reason Palmisano did this was to highlight IBM’s commitment to virtual world technology, one of ten new focus areas coming out of the Innovation Jam. (Roo’s got a bit more detail on the other Jam ideas over at Eightbar.) So, rather than just say we’re committed to the space, we figured we’d have Sam show it. Sam carried on a conversation with Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who was at a supercomputing convention in Tampa, via Second Life and phone line while a few dozen IBM’ers from around the world milled about smartly.

It was truly challenging to pull off, though not for the reasons you might expect. The execs were very positive and open-minded about showing a live interaction in Second Life. Trouble was, preparing for doing so in China was a nightmare of failover and logistical planning. Basically every shred of what we hoped to do live had to be filmed machinima-style as a backup in case we lost the connection. Thankfully, it stayed stable at showtime, but the virtual filming easily consumed 95% of our prep time. You just try corralling talented, curious, script-wielding colleagues in Second Life to serve as virtual extras. It is like arranging toddlers for a photo shoot. Everyone wants to show off their latest set of wings or ability to make it rain. It took forever. Still, we had to have the video. So much easier than trying to explain to 8,000 people that the grid’s down.

For the actual event, I was in Beijing with small group of colleagues to anchor the Sam-side interaction. We too were organized for failover. One colleague served as the vitual camera person, another was her backup and video triggerer. Others maintained contact with the IBM crowd, directing them and prepping them for the moment when Sam would “enter” the virtual world being displayed to the real audience in Beijing. Virtual webcasting.

The setting for all this was Thinkland, a private IBM island in Second Life that serves as a testbed for the Forbidden City project mentioned here previously. While the project itself will not ultimately live in SL and only launches in 2008, having a ready virtual environment so clearly China-themed was too good to pass up. Thinkland became the “stage” for the virtual event.

The press response has been strong. BusinessWeek had the exclusive (I believe) with ZDNet, Reuters (and their SL bureau), and a slew of others following closely behind.

Can’t wait to see what happens now. IBM’s ad hoc Virtual Universe Community accomplished a stunning amount of work as a non-organization. Let’s hope the new funding and focus doesn’t squelch any of the passion that has fueled the group to date.

UPDATE: Irving blogs this in much greater detail.

The phrase “Hey, wanna see my vacation photos?” has stricken fear into the hearts of co-workers and family members since photography was invented. But the combined mass of pics could help build virtual worlds of, well, of the whole photographed world. The University of Washington and Microsoft (believe it or not) have created a jawdropping demo of stitching together disparate photos of the same place into a textured navigable world.

The site is called Photo Tourism, but that doesn’t do justice to what these people have done. Only the videos convey the concept.

Soon enough this will be integrated with Google Earth and its ilk. A virtually navigable earth at all levels of detail can’t be that far off.

Of course, most tourist photos contain people in them. But that appears not to be such a problem either. Witness Tourist Remover. (Oh, to have this in real life.)

This past Sunday Chicagoans emerged from their winter bunkers to embrace the first Spring-like weather we’ve had. They did it enthusiastically. Perhaps too much so: it really wasn’t that warm. But goodness what a difference it made. The city was seething with happiness. Everyone was outside, walking, running, playing, being seen, having brunch with friends, perched on stoops, meeting neighbors. If the city is a living organism and sidewalks are the circulatory system then this specimen was near the peak of its cardiovasicular capacity.

I have said it before and I will say it again: there is no city on Earth that does summer as well as Chicago does. The most deliberately savored 90 days anywhere. This past weekend was but a warmup.

Another world came alive this weekend, to me at least. I’ve mentioned my interest in the virtual world known as Second Life. Now, you’re probably thinking, this guy has two kids with a third on the way — of course he needs a second life. Har. Actually I find it fascinating, like I’ve just discovered the web or something (which I remember vividly, thank you Mosaic!) Some colleagues of mine in the UK actually use Second Life for team meetings, an idea that makes a ton of sense since it merges the textual immediacy of chat with the gestural and multimedia capacity of videoconferencing.

My sister and father and I have a bookclub. We rotate selection of the book and it gives us a great excuse to to take a break from our own families and have a lunch together. We usually select a place to eat that has some relationship to the book. (For instance, for one of my Dad’s selections about the Manhattan Project we met near the site of the first successful fission of an atom at the University of Chicago.) The book we read this time was Cast of Shadows, a story about a doctor working at a human cloning clinic (like a reproduction clinic) whose daughter is raped and killed and whose murderer is never caught. The doctor, using semen from the crime scene, clones his daughter’s killer and arranges for him to be raised by a couple out of fertility options. He follows the boy as he grows in hopes of getting a clue to the man — the boy’s genetic clone, of course — who killed his daughter. A significant portion of the book occurs in a virtual environment called Shadow World, furthering the notion of cloning. Well, Second Life is a lot like Shadow World. So we had our bookclub in there, virtually, as avatars in Second Life.

What made this experiment more interesting is that my dad, sis, and I were all physically together in my basement on different computers interacting more or less interchangeably inside and outside of the world. Once we got past the normal new-user issues with my father (forgotten password, all thumbs on the keyboard, etc.) we were off and running — or flying, the mode of transport most useful in SL. It was probably the most enjoyable bookclub we’ve had. I was the tour guide, showing my family around my favorite parts of Second Life like a museum docent. Most of the club meeting was spent looking for somewhere out of earshot of others where we could quietly discuss the book. This was probably a mistake since all we’d really have to do is IM each other in-world, but I found it interesting that we desperately wanted to find some real-world analog (like a coffee shop) to have our conversation.

My father, true to real life, kept getting lost. Luckily I could always offer to teleport him to where my sister and I were. If only we had this ability in real life. Body modification also occupied much of my father’s and sister’s time. My sister — a petite, conservative lawyer in real life — was obsessed with being, well, slutty. She gave herself the biggest boobs allowable, pants that literally were painted on, and lips that were comically oversized. I could hardly look at her for fear of the disturbing possibility of being turned on by a virtual depiction of my own sister. My father, on the other hand, looked like a lifelong beer drinker who focused exclusively on upper-chest muscle toning. We were a motley crew. My sister was deathly afraid of interaction with the other residents of Second Life. (Well, she should have been, dressed like that!) In her mind she had a specific reason for being in SL whereas all these other people were clearly miscreant do-nothings simply prowling about. (This is definitely not the case. In fact it is probably the opposite right now, akin to the early days of the Internet when it was populated only with a certain intelligent stratum of tech-savvy adventurers. Give it time, though. I predict we’ll see the same diversified spamification of Second Life as we’ve seen in e-mail and on the web.)

The session ended, rather poetically, with us all astride a statue of a hippopotamus in a park we stumbled into somewhere. That’s the beauty of SL. Like a second box of chocolates, you still never know what you’re going to get.

I’ve recently become part of the Second Life universe. Second Life is a true alternate reality where 3D avatars of real people do nearly all the things you’d expect in a real world community. It isn’t a game per se, unless you consider life itself a kind of game. Live, communicate, buy, sell, interact, build, be. You can pretty much do whatever you want. As with any reality, the happenings are being blogged. There’s even an online architecture review of buildings inside Second Life and a police blotter detailing in-world malfeasance.

Look for me as Immerito Foley. My bald spot flickers as I move around. Presumably this is due to some problem with the graphic texture but I rather like it. Might try that in the real world.

More on Second Life soon, I’d wager.