Philip Rosedale opening keynotes today has now been recorded and you can watch it here. Special thanks to Geo. I posted live updates from the keynotes below and uploaded snapshots on my SL Flickr stream here.
Philip Rosedale Keynotes in real-time
- 12:45pm SLT – The VWBPE Main Auditorium is packed with avatars (166 avs)
- 12:50pm SLT – Live stream here > http://www.livestream.com/metaworld2
- 12:54pm SLT – ATTENTION: VWBPE.org is being worked on and will be back up shortly
- 12:57pm SLT – It’s almost time – Phelan is at the podium
- 1pm SLT – Phelan kicks off the opening keynotes
- 1:01pm SLT – Philip Rosedale arrives on stage and introduction

- 1:07pm SLT – Philip talks about history in virtual worlds and his passion for virtual worlds
- 1:10pm SLT – “SL has a huge population and economy”
- “SL is inspiring”
- “It has challenged people since 2003”
- 1:13pm SLT – “They said to make the UI good, work for everyone.”
- “I think the problem is the mouse.”
- “We can build new virtual worlds like High Fidelity.”
- 1:18pm SLT – Philip talks about the oculus and he thinks it’s unbelievable
- “Oculus allows visual immersion.”
- “Oculus allows you to turn your head, move your head when you are talking to someone.”
- “Oculus is the tip of the iceberg”
- “We need motion controllers”
- “The hydra system has 12 degrees of freedom without the head.”
- “Oculus can follow the head, but you may not want that in education.”
- 1:22pm SLT – Philip talks about online course work and education in Second Life
- “Online courses have don’t have a high success rate.”
- “You feel like you are there with someone, and that is important in human interactions, in education.”
- 1:25pm SLT – Philip goes back to talking about the oculus and High Fidelity
- “Beyond the hardware, the Oculus and motion controller, 3D cameras… what else do we need?”
- “You have 10 milliseconds to put the graphics up to be believable”
- “This is a focus at High Fidelity”
- “We are looking at one on one presence”
- 1:28pm SLT – Philip talks about how latency is important
- “How much latency can there be in face to face talking?”
- “100 milliseconds”
- “ITU did a study on VoIP”
- “they found 150 milliseconds.”
- “100 milliseconds is necessary in establishing emotional connections”
- 1:30pm SLT – Philip mentions the stats
- “Your cell phone is 500 milliseconds”
- “Skype is 250 with video”
- “VoIP is 800 or worse”
- “If you can watch someone’s face at less than 100 MilliSecond Delay, you will be amazed.”
- “100 milliseconds is half the ping time to Hong Kong”
- “You can have a live session half way round the world.
- “The world is only 100 milliseconds around by light.”
- 1:34pm SLT – Philip talks about his recent blog post
- “Beyond hardware and latency… I made a blog post about identity the other day.”
- “Identify is evolving to be more like virtual worlds.”
- “Putting up a unique name, we don’t do that in RL, and I don’t think we will do that in VWs in the future.”
- “Having a fixed identity system, to get to someone with a shared hash tag, will be used in all virtual worlds.”
- “When we want to declare who we are, we will have ways to identify ourselves.”
- 1:35pm SLT – Philip talks about the future of virtual worlds
- “I think the future of virtual worlds is an inter-network.”
- “I believe that for VWs to become a tool we all use, they have to be more like the internet.”
- “We are looking at what comes next, at High Fidelity.”
- “The next leap for VWs will be an inter-network of virtual worlds.”
- “Code needs to be open source like the web”
- “You need open documentation, visibility, it is a best practice.”
- “It is a lot of small servers loosely joined.”
- 1:40pm SLT – Philip talks about the venue about scale
- “A great event like this attracts a big percentage.”
- “We are at 4 corners of 4 sims”
- “But we can only interact with a few hundred folks here.”
- “The capacity here is several thousand here in the stadium”
- “But we can’t get thousands together in a virtual world yet.”
- “astounded we have not crashed yet, even though on 4 corners”
- “So we have to design for scale.”
- “We are working on scaling.”
- “We all have to help in creating new Virtual Worlds.”
- 1:41pm SLT – Philip talks about servers
- “A typical server, when you step up the bandwidth, and you need to do that for high quality audio and video, the amount of data sent is megabits.”
- “That means 1 internet server, 1 fast desktop machine, can only serve 10-100 people.
- “SL Has 40000 servers each serving dozens”
- “There are 1/2 to 1 million physical servers.”
- “SL uses a significant percentage of them.”
- 1:45pm SLT – Philip talks about S.E.T.I. at home
- “We can get access to everyone’s machines and use them as servers, like SETI or protein folding.”
- “Can we write software to allow you to share, a system that uses an economy to do that?
- “We can borrow machines when we need them.”
- “We think the next generation of VWs can be built of a cloud of shared/borrowed machines.”
- “Educators can pull the machines together at low cost.”
- “The implication is that to get access to all those machines that is several orders of magnitude higher than we have now…”
- “On a tech side note, like the Oh Wow of Oculus, we have to see more stuff in the world.”
- 1:47pm SLT – Philip talks about distance and size
- “Write an offline routine to see all that has been built.”
- “We are the size of Los Angeles now.”
- “We need a technology even better than SL that allows us to see 10 miles in the distance.”
- 1:49pm SLT – Final summary notes
- “In summary (before questions) the new hardware, led by Oculus, will open the doors to higher and easier ways to interface with virtual environments.”
- “Without the learning curve, the population will grow. Architecture needs to be open.”
- “The future for education will be incredible.”
- “We need to use orders of magnitude more servers.”
- 1:50pm SLT – Philip opens the floor up to Q&As
- “When can we expect high fidelity to be available?”
- “doesn’t know yet”
- Phelan asks about privacy issues. As people want to share info, how is that impacted?
- “When people have their own VW servers, we make decisions of trust as avatars coming into servers.”
- Will these devices require users to invest in new/expensive hardware?
- “With SL, we saw that educators could find funding. Tech is becoming cheaper.”
- Drax asks if High Fidelity will make SL obslolete?
- “Linden Lab invests in High Fidelity.”
- “We are more aggressive and experimental.”
“The research will come into SL over time.” - “There is an SL for the Oculus.”
- “We will see some High Fidelity innovations in SL eventually.”
- “The SL team understands that to do crazy new things, you want to do that as a new company with a small team.”
2pm SLT – Ebbe Linden arrives at the main stage and there are more than 200 people here!
- How will the learning curve be impacted
- “But the new hardware will make the learning curve easier for basic functioning.”
- “will better ways to build identity affect us on a cultural level?
- “In a word, no.”
2:05pm SLT – Celene asks about accessibility.
- “I think it’s what has made SL so compelling is how it is accessible fundamentally.”
- “SL by its nature is accessible.”
- “There are features more accommodating for people with different disabilities.”
- “Second Life itself isn’t accessible to those who uss screen readers.”
- “SL has a good track record, it has been a concern for a long time.”
- “I can speak for High Fidelity. We build systems open source. pluggable”
- “The people that make use of accessibility features will be impactful.”
2:07pm SLT – The keynotes ends by Philip Rosedale
- Due to the amount of traffic the VWBPE 2014 site broke and should be online later on today!