NMC Campus Observer

The Future Was Unevenly Distributed… Here

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Mar 16, 2007 02:15pm

Second Life is just wonderful when (a) the technology works; (b) you can get a good sized crowd gathered; and (c) there is an excellent speaker like we had today on NMC Campus. Dr. Daniel Reed, Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, gave a live presentation today on Computing the Future: The 3-D Net. Our sensors recorded nearly 80 avatars came to NMC campus, and we estimate another 30-40 were on UNC’s sim.

The presentation covered a lot of ground, looking back at technology 10 years ago and then looking forward to what we may see with expanding storage, increasing computing power, and evolving computing technologies– sensor technology, on demand books”smart dust”, the ability to record almost every life activity, first life/second life convergence, etc. He touched issues of cultural transference, the power of networks (paper airplane channel!), shifting personal habits with tech use, and even drew a lesson from the history of PLATO and lessons from Ray Ozzie, closing with a discussion of the Turing test.

Computing the Future: The 3-D Net

We had some good questions on the democratization of technology, speculation of the convergence of real and virtual worlds, impact of open source technology, and a discussion of the international scope of technology.

For those who missed the session or may want to listen again, we have below am audio recording of the hour long presentation. In addition, we have Dr Reed’s slides available–
reed-3d-net.pdf [3.3 Mb PDF] and a set of photos.

Thanks again to Dr. Reed for providing this visionary perspective and to those who came to NMC to listen to this presentation.

This just in! We got some pictures taken from the presentation that was made available on the UNC’s island in Second Life — they listened to the same audio stream:

And the audience was even bigger as there were a few sites at UNC where RL audiences where watching both scenes:

Story filed under: People, Places, Things,What's Happening

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