An interesting take on the use of blockchain in the mass consumer markets by Adam Frisby, CEO and lead developer of Sinespace, a Unity-based MMO and social VR platform: on VentureBeat he explains “why blockchain isn’t ready for primetime“. “As it stands, blockchain is caught between three competing objectives: fast,… Continue reading
Howard Rheingold’s online course about Cooperation started last week, using BigBlueButton and not in some fancy Virtual Reality environment. BigBlueButton is our synchronous communication system (let’s say ‘videoconferencing’), but a lot of work happens asynchronously using a wiki, blogs, social bookmarks, and – very important – forums. These asynchronous systems… Continue reading
What does philosophy tell us about virtual reality and virtual worlds? I’d like to start with some people who do not belong to the typical college overview of classical philosphers, people who started thinking about the augmentation of human intellect and human emotions such as Vannevar Bush (As Ae May… Continue reading
It’s the book Neuromancer by William Gibson that really made the word “cyberspace” popular. He describes it as thus: A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of… Continue reading
Sansar, the virtual reality worlds platform of Linden Lab (the company behind Second Life) will be in open beta this Spring. Keywords are “social” and “collaborative creation”. The video shows fascinating worlds – Sansar seems to be not one virtual world, but a platform where one can create interconnected worlds… Continue reading
I vividly remember how fascinated I was by Julian Dibbell‘s book “Play Money: or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot” (2006). The subject was gold farming, a practice described by Wikipedia as such: In the 1990s and 2000s, gold farming was the practice of… Continue reading
The Financial Times runs an intriguing portrait of Philip Rosedale, the founding father of Linden Lab and Second Life and these days building a VR-compatible virtual world called High Fidelity. The article not only focuses on the virtual world ambitions of Rosedale but also on his renovation and building projects… Continue reading
Even though I’m sceptical about the appeal of open-ended, user-created virtual worlds for a mainstream audience, I still follow people who are very active in that field because they tend to be highly creative out of the box thinkers. One of them is Philip Rosedale, the founding father of Linden… Continue reading
This blog remained silent for more than a year. I continued writing my column Legrand Inconnu for my newspaper De Tijd – about the impact of technology on society and the economy. Part of my writing is about Virtual Reality, Virtual Worlds and Augmented Reality. I’m still fascinated by VR and… Continue reading
You’re a new media expert, specializing in video, social media, liveblogging or infograhics? Get ready for the final breakthrough in virtual reality, which is starting to impact sectors such as education and even the newspaper industry. As a columnist about new media for the business newspaper De Tijd in Belgium,… Continue reading