A Walk in the PARC

Had the delightful opportunity to speak at PARC last week. Thanks to Ty Jagerson, Bob Moore, and Nicolas Ducheneaut for the invitation and the opportunity. The talk was quite well attended, and once the snafu of having tested my in-world presentation on a different graphics card was corrected, everything went quite well. The purpose of the talk was twofold, allowing both an introduction of Second Life to PARC and the opportunity to talk about some of the challenges facing generalized digital worlds. The 5 missing pieces — in multiple parts — that I spoke to are continued after the link:

Missing Piece #1: Player-to-player communications

Want easy, natural p2p communication
Would like to mask gender
Should deal with international users gracefully

Detect conversations in ad hoc, spatialized group chat settings Better
camera positioning/framing Add more appropriate avatar animation
Threading of text?

Speech-to-text -> translation -> text-to-speech?

Missing Piece #2: Player-to-player communications, redux

What do you need to know when you meet someone?
Or want to do business with someone?
Game-resistant reputation system
Building useful social networks

Missing Piece #3: Projecting state

Webcams and other non-traditional input devices Avatar puppeteering
Avatar creation/face mapping Avatar control and motion UI manipulation

Missing Piece #4: Collaborative creation

Building in 3D via a 2D interface
Placement and manipulation
What additional communication strains does this create?
Other building aids, like model kits
Natural language processing?

Missing Piece #5: Connections

Economic linkages to the real world
Arbitrary objects to CSG
Ways of importing reality
Exporting creations to the real world
Security in a peer-to-peer world

Obviously, many of these play directly into Bob and Nicolas' work, so I am excited to see what they come up with. I suspect that there will be more posted here about them in the future.

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Comments

Cory, take a look at http://www.rhetorical.com/ - they have a demo online for their text-to-speech solutions. Perhaps you'd like so send that URL to the friendly PARC researchers as well.

Since Rhetorical doesn't post the pricelist of their amazing technology, I must assume it's overly expensive :) But the results are utterly convincing!

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