VWBPE 2014: Philip Rosedale Keynotes – Live Updates

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

Philip Rosedale at VWBPE 2014

• 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!