Innovation Week on Orange Island: day 4

Today’s discussions on Orange Island will focus on two innovation fields that can be crucial for Virtual World population growth and usability. Join us on this fourth day of Innovation Week to discuss emerging technologies that will make our immersion in 3D spaces easier: hands-free navigation and avatar expression, followed by the use of artificial intelligence in persistent spaces.

Thursday 2nd of October

12PM SLT – Hands Free Navigation & Avatar Expression

Come discover interfaces that will eventually replace our mouse & keyboard, and free our expressivity in virtual worlds.
Moderator: Dusan Writer
Speakers: Philippe Bossut (Handsfree3D), Alexander Casassovici (VR-Wear) and Gaspard Breton (Orange Labs).

Dusan Writer
Dusan Writer, CEO of Remedy Communications, recently set up a very timely User Interface Design Contest. He is also a member of the Metanomics team. He blogs about the metaverse and issues such as identity, education, visualization, and collaboration.

Philippe Bossut
Philippe Bossut (Roger Fullstop in Second Life) is a software engineer who made all of his career in Computer Graphics and Desktop applications development. He currently works as an “Entrepreneur in Residence” at Kapor Enterprises Inc (KEI) where he leads the Segalen project.
Segalen is an attempt to bring dramatic user experience improvement to Virtual Worlds in general and Second Life in particular. The project started in January 2008 with some camera prototypes and SDKs. In May, Segalen posted its first video demo to show that the camera and feature extraction were fast enough to completely replace the use of keyboard for in-world navigation. The second video focused on precision tracking, showing that precise click and drag as required in object editing for instance was achievable.
Those videos received a very wide coverage in the blogsphere and the traditional press.
You can read his personal blog here.

Alexander Casassovici
Ksso Yamauba (aka Alexander Casassovici in RL) is a French serial entrepreneur specialized in emerging web and communication technologies. He founded WaveStorm and Kamayo acquired by Streamezzo and started many personal projects such at SL-MESSENGER. He is now focusing on his latest venture, VR-WEAR, which aims at providing new tools to bring interactivity, immersion and engagement to the virtual worlds. Alexander also writes on his personal blog, Mobitrends about the evolution of the mobile, web and consumer electronics industry.
Finally, his latest venture, VR-WEAR,  just released a modified version of the SL Viewer (downloadable here) which uses the PC’s webcam to analyse and recognize facial attitudes and motions and apply them live on the user’s avatar bringing a whole new area of realism to virtual worlds like Second Life.

Gaspard Breton
Gaspard Breton graduated from “Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Sciences Appliquées et de Technologie” in 1998 with a specialization in digital architectures. He received a degree in Artificial Intelligence from University of Rennes in 1998. In 2002, he obtained a PhD in the field of 3D real time facial animation. He finally joined France Télécom in 2002 where he has since lead researches around Embodied Conversational Agents and 3D animation.

1.30 SLT – Bots: Uses, challenges, consequences

Artificial intelligence & virtual worlds applications
Moderator: Dirty McLean
Speakers: Baba Yamamoto (LibSL), Ima Ideator (GSD&M’s Idea City), Fairyverse Siamendes (MASA Group)

Dirty McLean
Dirty McLean is a 27-year-old software developer who has been working in cooperation with the efforts of the Open Metaverse team to expand the possibilities and understanding of virtual worlds for adaptation in practical environments. His work focuses mainly on creating simplified ways to administer and oversee networks including the Second Life platform and related systems.

Baba Yamamoto
Baba (aka James Neal in RL) is an open source advocate and head of R&D at Pleiades Consulting. Active in the Second Life open source community since 2006, Mr. Neal is President and co-founder of the Open Metaverse Foundation. The OMF is a non profit organization founded with the mandate of designing and supporting open technologies that advance the Metaverse. A major step toward a fully interconnected, interoperable Metaverse is the Meerkat Viewer Project.
The Meerkat project was designed around the creation of a fully GPL compatible, loosely coupled viewer. Meerkat embraces standard and lightweight open source practices to actively encourage community participation in the development, output, and maintenance of the project.

Ima Ideator
Ellen Kolsto (aka Ima Ideator in SL) is a Planning Director specializing in digital communities and collaboration at GSD&M Idea City, a national advertising agency (Austin, Texas).  She is making inworld research and has created with GSD&M’s Idea City, a panel of Second Life avatars for feedback. The goal of their panel is to gather opinions and insights from Second Life residents on a variety of topics. Those thoughts will be used to help guide companies entering Second Life and provide insight into what happens in-world across many active users. The panel is open to any avatar that has been in Second Life at least two months. Ima and the agency have also set up a referral program with money rewards. All the processes are automatized and operated by survey bots.

Fairyverse Siamendes
Alexis Tabary (aka Fairyverse Siamendes in SL) graduated in 2005 from Supélec, where he specialized in Artificial Intelligence. Being a technology enthusiast, he quickly stumbled across Second Life.

“I’m convinced that good stories need great characters, but in Second Life, or other Virtual Worlds, you can’t create any. In Virtual Worlds characters are called bots, in video games NPCs, but to me they truly are, or should be, characters playing their part in a story.”
He was sharing this line of thought with his university classmate, Henri Morlaye (aka Fairyverse Magicin SL), so they decided to start a company to make bots for virtual environments. In March 2008, with the support of MASA Group and their AI technology, Fairyverse was born.

Don’t miss the opportunity to interact with custom-made bots on Orange Island’s Main Plaza, courtesy of the Masa Group & Ima Ideator.

October 2, 2008 at 5:15 am | Uncategorized | No comment

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