Virtual World moguls meet across shared Surface in Metaverse Poker Room August 16th, 2007 (virtual news, aka fiction)

A story at http://blogs.cisco.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-c.cgi inspired me to write a fairly lengthy comment so I figured I’d repeat it here.
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Odd that I see a reference to http://blogs.cisco.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-c.cgi along with a reference to Cisco’s Telepresence technology just shortly after posting in my blog about my notion that it would be interesting to see Linden Lab link it’s San Francisco and Boston offices using Cisco’s Telepresence system.

What I had in mind in my idea was creation of a permanently linked area, a distributed place in the Linden Lab offices where for example Philip Rosedale might walk past in San Francisco and John Lester in the Boston Linden Lab metaverse room would see him walk by if Philip was in the shared location place in the Boston office.

Instead of a desk or table physically located in both Linden Lab offices serving as the shared, co-mingled focal point of the distributed location meeting area, a Microsoft Surface unit could be used instead, synchronized so that the San Francisco and Boston Surface units functioned as if there was one Surface simultaneously. Hence John Lester could sit in shared presence area in Boston and see Robin Harper, for example, displayed life sized on the Cisco Telepresence system’s monitor, apparently sitting across the way a few feet on the other side of the of the Microsoft Surface table unit.

By maintaining the telepresence link permanently, the nature of the shared location virtual place is changed from one that is created on demand in which to hold preplanned events to one that is more like just a normal part of the office, normal except that to a human it seems like one place but it has widely separated physical locations.

Why would Linden Lab have an interest in such a thing? Well, because it’s a metaverse idea and Linden Lab is a metaverse company.

I’d like to see this shared location space extended to other companies that are working on the creation of the metaverse, so maybe Hui Xu would sit down in front of the Beijing metaverse room’s Surface and see Nicole Yankelovich sitting in Sun Lab’s metaverse room in Menlo Park. Philip Rosedale would sit down at the San Francisco site, and John Lester in the Boston area.

Then the Friday night metaverse poker game would start.

Try the Hipihi beta!

In response to Newsweek's article on Hipihi at http://international.talk.newsweek.com/default.asp?item=654607 I'll just say I'm having a nice time in the Hipihi virtual world beta test. The main site at www.hipihi.com is understandably designed for Chinese speakers, but if you don't speak Chinese, don't despair, here are some links that might help:

Chinese language primary web site: www.hipihi.com

English language forum sponsored by IdeaShape Studios: http://www.ideashape.cn (third party, run by Second Life member Jolly Heron)

English language MSN Hipihi group: hipihi@msn.com (also started by Jolly Heron)

English registration: http://www.hipihi.com/application/application_en.jsp

English Help and Support pdf file: http://www.hipihi.com/download/HiPiHi_World's_Help_and_Support(2007.7.20).zip

Download client: www.hipihi.com/download_client.html

English interface guide:
http://221.11.104.147/bbs/Topic.aspx?BoardID=2&TopicID=7

Hipihi skin & clothing templates:
www.hipihi.com/download/avatar_templet.zip

Hipihi company email addresses:

For general info, email info@hipihi.com
For support with installation or operation, support@hipihi.com.

The SuezanneC Baskerville forum in the group forums at forums.secondlife.com, http://forums.secondlife.com/forumdisplay.php?f=280 has some posts about Hipihi, which you can access if you are able to use the Second Life forums, and my blog at http://suezannecbaskervillle.wordpress.com might be of interest or use to some re Hipihi.

The other Hipihi users and the Hipihi company's employees have all been quite pleasant. The program looks to me like it has every chance of succeeding, and I'm hoping that the Hipihi company and Linden Research, maker of Second Life, will work together to further the creation of the worldwide, global, 3D internet, aka the metaverse, by making portable avatars, portable currency, and portable objects to the extent possible and profitable.

A note to the open source community: please start now convincing the Hipihi company to open source the Hiphi viewer. Linden Lab's had good results with their open sourcing of the SL client, why not learn from each other's successes? Libsecondlife and opensl need their libhipihi and openhiphi complements.

Hipihi is a must see for any serious virtual world enthusiast, student, or creator.