Mixed-Reality Party In DC and Second Life

Jerry23 writes "This Saturday The Happening will bring Second Life to first life. The Electric Sheep Company, a new metaverse developer, has virtually recreated R&B Coffee in Washington DC for use in a mixed-reality party and benefit for the DC art scene and several local nonprofits. Real people will mingle with avatars via realtime video projections in the real and virtual R&B spaces, and MAKE Magazine's Phillip Torrone will be on-hand showing off his homemade Virtual Reality headsets and gloves. The whole world is invited to attend in DC or Second Life, whichever's closer for you." This is just conceptually a weird idea to me.

Location location location...

[C10H14N2]

Too bad this "happening" is in a corner of town most people wouldn't set foot in at gunpoint...or if they did, likely would be. Sorry, twenty-five bucks to loiter around a coffee-house next to a shooting gallery to watch someone's laptop screen projected on the wall?

LAME.

maybe so

[revery]

This is just conceptually a wierd idea to me.

Maybe so, but your kids will love it.

The New Reality

[airship]

This may be weird now, but get used to it. The future is the virtual overlaid on the real, and vice-versa. The lines are blurring. In twenty years, maybe even ten, it will be considered quaint and old-fashioned to make a distinction between the two.

Re:Uhhh, What??

[jandrese]

Google is your friend: R&B Coffee [rnbcoffee.com].

Seriously, it's like people expect Slashdot articles to only cover what they already know. Heaven forbid the click on a link and be horribly exposed to new information.

Re:maybe so

[saltydogdesign]

I'd rather that they have a life, not a make-believe one.

What could be more real than what your senses tell you is real? To paraphrase Videodrome, the computer screen is the retina of the mind's eye.

Re:Location location location...

[Politburo]

While the overall message is correct, the post is most definitely flamebait.. unless you believe that everyone walking around in NE gets held up. Sadly, there are people who live both in the District and the metro area who believe this. When I told people at my workplace that I, a white male, was living in Southwest, their eyes widened with fright. On my first day, one woman joked, "Well, hopefully you'll make it back alive tomorrow." When we were looking for apartments, one couple told us they would not even travel outside NW.. and would not go any more east than 14th St. Ridiculous.

Re:Sheep Island

[Gwyneth_Llewelyn]

MattGWU, I've just checked with one of the guys from the Electric Sheep Company, the Sheep island is still "closed", and will be open only to the ones that join the group "The Happening", and available to visit during Saturday.

Mind you, this thread has been interesting -- it reminded me of the days people on BBSes were discussing why they should download a "graphic Web browser" for connecting to the Web, which had, at that time, only a tiny fraction of the content (and the interest!) of BBSes...

I still find it amusing to watch how difficult this concept is when explained to people who are at the forefront of the technology (slashdotters) and who have been reading Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, Tad Williams, and similar SF authors for the past decades, and most definitely have seen the Matrix and all its sequels.

Maybe it's hard to understand that all those concepts are now "true" -- people can live and work in virtual realities these days, they have companies for doing work with virtual realities, they do mixed meetings (half of the attendance is physically present on the conference room, the other half attends virtually from the comfort of their homes and with a computer in front of them). Ok, so, it sounds like science fiction. So what? In 1980, if you'd tell your friends that one day, the whole western population would have a cheap (US$ 25) cellular phone in their pockets to talk to anybody at any time, without wires, people would laugh at you or even try to get you into an asylum...

Current virtual realities are not photorealistic, neither do they require goggles or bodysuits, and the neural interface, while on the works (yes, really!) is still too clumsy to be taken seriously. So what? Things have to start somewhere. So the best you can do these days is 30-40 fps on a 2000x1500 screen, and not yet ray tracing for photorealism? Hooray! It's a first step! Tomorrow, it'll be bigger; in ten years, you'll have ray-tracing chips on your Pentium VII @ 1 THz and 20 TByte RAM, for perhaps US$1000 (complete with goggles). Or perhaps it'll be in twenty years -- who knows? The point is, current virtual realities still feel like the BBSes from the 1980s -- but they're here, they're working, they have hundreds of thousands users online who understand what you can do with them... you have to start somewhere!

Imagine Marc Andreesen in front of a 1980s BBS and dreaming about a graphical browser. Imagine that he had given up and said "it's hopeless, all we have now to chat is a text-based interface, computers/networks will never evolve fast enough to give us nice graphics on a browser". What would the world look like?

To go towards the ultimate goal -- virtual realities as commonplace as cellular phones -- you have to start somewhere. Events like "The Happening" are a stepping stone towards that goal. Yes, you can now attend conferences/meetings using virtual realities and two-way, in-world video. 10 years ago we cheered having people doing conferences on IRC! Look at how far we have gone -- now our "IRC" includes a 3D world, avatars, and video/audio streaming, all at the same time! Still, it looks and feels IRCish. But that's fine! We "accused" IRC to look BBSquish as well...

You're rich.

[2short]

"Not really. No one can afford to live in CA on $80k a year, even in a U-Stor-It."

I know you're just trying to be funny, but REALLY, 70% of California households live on less than $80K a year. Half of them live on less than $50K a year.