Panel Session

Does the Metaverse start now?

Michael Zyda (Moderator) Robert Gehorsam Philip Rosedale Mark Mine & Mike Goslin JC Herz

Statement: Michael Zyda

Will you take the blue pill or will you take the red pill? Waiting for the Metaverse or something like it ... Michael Zyda - Director, The MOVES Institute (Moderator)

“The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He’s got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armogel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.

When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun...”

Snowcrash, Neal Stephenson

For the last twenty years, science fiction authors have envisioned a dystopic networked future where we are all jacked in and where we all have a gun. With science fiction authors having accurately predicted the advent of the first-person shooter online videogame, the question then about the Metaverse is, is that all there is? In this panel, we bring together speakers and demos on new technologies and entertainments for our online future. Will Web-3D become pervasive or die like VRML? Is it the time to turn the Internet to a fully 3D and interactive communications medium? With this panel, we explore these and other issues and see some pretty cool demos as well!

Biographical Sketch: Michael Zyda

Michael Zyda is Director of the MOVES Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey. He is also a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at NPS and an Adjunct Professor at the University of , Santa Cruz. Professor Zyda’s research interests include computer graphics, large-scale, networked 3D virtual environments, agent-based simula- tion, modeling human and organizational behavior, interactive computer-generated story, computer-generated characters, video production, entertainment/defense collaboration, and modeling and simulation. He is the principal investigator of the America’s Army PC game funded by the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs.

Statement: Robert Gehorsam

The New Millennium: Dystopias and Utopias in Virtual Worlds Robert Gehorsam - Vice President, Strategic Initiatives, There Inc.

The metaverse torch has been carried over the past few decades by a decidedly visionary — and inspiring — group of tech- nologists, designers, artists and writers. And the vision has been profound, dark and often disturbing. In the 1990’s, efforts at open-ended metaverses floundered, while Everquest, Ultima Online and Lineage at least established the commercial via- bility of genre-driven online games. Now, a convergence of cultural and technological trends suggests that a certain critical mass has finally formed. The next generation of MMP games and metaverses all attempt to go beyond niche markets, and the one profound thing they all have in common is a commitment to providing the inhabitants of these worlds with the power to build their own realities and self-organize their societies. Does this empowerment suggest that the weather forecast on The Street is sunny and warm? Or is every metaverse a mirror of human behavior as it was, is and will be? In this talk and demo, we’ll look at how There has approached the challenges of nurturing an online society.

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Biographical Sketch: Robert Gehorsam

Robert Gehorsam, VP, Strategic Initiatives, There Inc., where he oversees There’s initiatives with government, industry and educational partners. He has seventeen years of management experience in the online games and entertainment world. Most recently he served as Senior Vice President, Programming and Production at Viacom’s CBS Internet Group, where he was responsible for content, creative, production and operations for CBS.com, CBSnews.com and related wholly-owned CBS internet properties. Prior to joining Viacom, he was Senior Vice President for Programming and Production at Sony Online Entertainment, the leading online entertainment and games company. In addition to being part of the team that creat- ed the business plan forming SOE, he was directly responsible for all operations, product acquisition and development, and technology for The [email protected], one of the world’s most popular game destinations on the Internet. He oversaw the creation of a robust, highly scalable game platform that supports millions of customers of dozens of online games, including the online phenomenon, Everquest, along with Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! Online. In addition to acquiring Verant, the development team that produced Everquest, he also participated in the acquisition of the rights of Star Wars Galaxies, the upcoming persistent-world game SOE is developing with Lucasarts. From 1985-1992 he founded and led Prodigy’s games and educational divisions, launching the first large-scale subscription based sports simulations and nearly two dozen other online titles. He has also held management positions at Scholastic Inc. and consulted on entertainment and broadband strat- egy to Microsoft, America Online, CNET, Ziff-Davis and Children’s Television Workshop. Earlier in his career he was an editor at Simon & Schuster, where he helped found its Electronic Publishing Division and published some of the first con- sumer applications for Macintosh. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Literature and Religious Studies from Grinnell College.

Statement: Philip Rosedale

Leave Your Body at the Door … and Enter Your Philip Rosedale - Founder & CEO,

The Metaverse, the Matrix, Cyberspace. For years we have read about wonderful and fantastical online spaces which co- existed alongside “real life”. But until very recently these spaces remained the stuff of science fiction, and attempts to bring them to life were either uninteresting or aimed at a very narrow audience. Now, however, the age of low-latency broadband, the availability of inexpensive CPU power, and the advent of graphics acceleration has brought us to the point where it’s no longer such a remote possibility to dream of living a second life in a .

Enter Second Life and discover a totally dynamic, 3D world whose residents are engaged in the addictive, creative, and entertaining ‘game’ of building a shared reality. We’ll explore what it means to create a new identity in a deeply self-expres- sive world, and debunk some of the myths about why something like this hasn’t happened before. Is it a game? You decide.

Biographical Sketch: Philip Rosedale

Philip Rosedale has an extensive background in the development and pioneering of streaming technology, having built his first computer in 4th grade, and started his first computer software company while still in high school. In 1995 he developed FreeVue, a low-bit rate video conferencing system for Internet-connected PC’s, resulting in the acquisition of his company in early 1996 by RealNetworks. For 3 1/2 years, Rosedale served at RealNetworks as Vice President and CTO, where he was responsible for the development and launch of RealVideo, RealSystem 5.0, and RealSystem G2. In 1999 Rosedale returned to , joined Accel Partners as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence, and began the basic research that would become the technology behind Linden Lab. Rosedale holds a BS degree in Physics from the University of California at .

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Statement: Mark R. Mine & Mike Goslin

Building a Massively Multi-Player Game for the Masses: Disney’s Toontown Online Mark R. Mine & Mike Goslin - Walt Disney Internet Group

Disney’s Toontown Online is the first massively multi-player online game designed for children ages seven and older. Filled with safe, friendly, and colorful environments, Toontown has a clean interface and simplified game mechanics that are per- fect for younger children. Toontown, however, is not just for kids; adults enjoy Toontown’s many humorous and nostalgic elements and addictive game play. In this talk we will discuss some of the challenges of building an MMP for kids and will present an overview of some of the lessons learned. In particular we will focus on ways of incorporating kid-friendly social- ization into an MMP. Toontown Online was designed and created by Disney’s VR Studio, formerly part of Walt Disney Imagineering Research and Development, now part of the Walt Disney Internet Group.

Biographical Sketches: Mark R. Mine & Mike Goslin

Mark R. Mine, Ph.D., Technical Staff Principal - Director, Walt Disney Internet Group

Mark Mine joined Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development, Inc. in 1997. As a member of the VR Studio, Dr. Mine’s research has focused on developing tools for the creation and manipulation of virtual spaces. The VR Studio’s areas of expertise include: location-based entertainment (building several award winning attractions for DisneyQuest in Orlando Florida), simulation and visualization for theme park design, and most recently, massively-multiplayer online games for kids (www.toontown.com).

Mark has a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California, and an M.S. & Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina. His Ph.D. dissertation, “Exploiting Proprioception in Virtual-Environment Interaction” (written under the direction of Dr. Frederick P. Brooks Jr.) explores the benefits and limitations of working in a virtual world.

Mike Goslin, Senior Director – Disney’s VR Studio

Mike Goslin has done a bit of everything in his seven years at the VR Studio, from programming and game design to pitch- ing big ideas and pure research. Mike has worked on a variety of projects including theme park attractions, location based entertainment, and most recently Toontown Online, an MMP designed for kids of all ages.

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Statement: JC Herz

3D and A Buck Will Buy You a Cup of Coffee JC Herz - Author (Joystick Nation)

The metaverse was a literary parlor trick that technologists all over the world fell for. Like any good magician, Neal Stephenson directed your attention one place (“Ladies and Gentlemen! Witness, the amazing technology! The photo/hapti- cially realistic fully rendered 3D world! ) while the real action was somewhere else. Techologists believed that the magic was in the rendering of the world, and spent years and millions of dollars getting the world to look right. And when the cur- tain was pulled off fully roamable 3D “avatar worlds,” there was no magic. It was, in fact, more tedious and less interesting than Instant Messenger. Why? Because what technologists failed to realized, while constructing these pixel palaces, was that what made Snow Crash interesting was not the fully 3D world rendered by the most amazing computational device in the world (the reader’s brain), it was the fact that everything that happened in that world was dramatic, and the characters were all interesting - because there was a skilled novelist pulling the strings, making the events dramatic, and the characters inter- esting. In “avatar worlds,” there is no underlying dynamic that makes events dramatic and people, well, people, particularly strangers, can be pretty boring if their interaction is limited to chat in a social void.

Massively multiplayer games, on the other hand, are compelling. Why? Because they are designed to a) furnish some intrin- sic drama, via the conflict that is inherent in game play and b) they build enough social imperative into the experience so that characters have to bond (whether that bond is cooperative or competitive), in the interest of survival and in-game suc- cess, and therefore become interesting to each other. The experience has bones and muscle, not just a pretty skin.

Ultimately, the broad cultural success or failure of alternative realities is determined by their capacity to deliver on a social and narrative level. Am I part of a larger story in a more dramatic world where I get to do things I couldn’t do in the real life (computer chat, we can do on our desktops)? And, do I get to matter in that world, to other people? If there are no com- pelling affordances for that, then no amount of visual stimulation will hold a large number of people in place for any signif- icant length of time. Social architecture and interaction design trump eye candy. Web logs are, for millions of people, in every respect, a more satisfying experience than “the metaverse,” because blogs are an order of magnitude more *socially* realistic and robust than the current crop of 3D romper rooms (and I say this as an ardent fan of said romper rooms). Blogger is brilliant piece of social software - 3D worlds need to be as well, if they’re going to be interesting to more than a handful of dedicated geeks.

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