Social Networks, Fast Food and Evolution.
Humanity has been subject to the laws of physics and the dictates of Mother Nature since the birth of the species. Evolution shaped humankind over hundreds of thousands of years to operate within the natural world. Human psychology is still embedded within brain structures that were optimized for the pre-technological past. So it makes sense [...]
A Simple Plan to Solve The Second Life Retention Problem
“Build it and they will come” seems to be true in relation to Second Life. The problem is that 90% of people who register don’t stay. They leave within the first three months. It seems obvious to me that the one primary reason for the astronomic departure rate is that most people don’t find something [...]
Virtual Property Rights Manifesto: Consumers, Copybots and Common Sense
The only way for consumers to protect virtual property acquired in Second Life and gain full control of legally acquired resources is to copy digital assets to their own hard drives. For most inventory items, this requires logging into Second Life with one of the copybot clients that circumvent Digital Rights Management (DRM) limitations. There are two compelling [...]
Virtual World as Mandala
The image on the left depicts how a business person might view virtual worlds. The one on the right is my interpretation of virtual worlds as seen by post-humanists.
Our perception of the world is the reflection of our own state of mind. That is why different people can view the same external events and come [...]
Transworlders of the Worlds Unite!
I sketched this image last year to visualize a trend I was seeing in the movement of identities between worlds.
Today, avatar identities created initially in Second Life are even more widely travelled and have large, established communities on human-centric social networking and sharing sites like Ning, Facebook, Flickr and Plurk, and Virtual Worlds such as [...]
“Naturalized” Photo and Video Depict Integration of Virtual and Physical Worlds
The photo above is the latest in a series of images and videos shot with an iPhone. These naturalized images take me into a physical world setting without any green screen tricks to fake my placement in a physical world environment. Outside of clean-up to fix color balance and some minor air-brushing, what was there [...]
