Monday, June 30, 2008

Darklight Festival Panel - Future of the Web

Had a very nice time Friday at the Darklight film festival in Dublin. I was invited to sit on a panel discussing the future of the web, web 3.0, and whatever that means.

Axel Polleres, a colleague from here at DERI, came with me and sat on the panel as well. We had quite a lively discussion, including a digression with Chris Howard of IBM on virtual reality, the emerging 3D Internet, and my own notion that virtual reality and true reality will begin to merge in both perception and importance for our children or grand children.

The audience seemed to mostly be creatives who were either filmmakers, film aficionados, or film students. things began to get a bit lively when I mentioned that I thought one of the effects of ubiquitous, pervasive and highly realistic virtual worlds would be that gender would become fluid; people would choose their genders on both sides of the virtual divide based on whim and how they wanted to be perceived.

After our discussion, which ran about 30 minutes longer than it was supposed to, I was interviewed by intruders.tv ( http://ie.intruders.tv/ ). Don't know when it will appear on the web site but it should be soon. The interviewer had to do some editing because it took him four tries to get his intro recorded cleanly.

I think the one thing that came clear in the discussion is that the technology is not all that important. there is a certain inevitability about improved graphics, deeper immersion, easier access, and everywhere connectivity. The true challenge is in assessing the impact of such social connectivity on our culture and ultimately on our species. The changes that this level of real immersion into virtual realities can bring about are dramatic.

All in all a nice day

3 comments:

Conn said...

Hi Bill, it was great to meet you at this event.

Typically we operate with something around a 4-week pipeline to publish videos. It doesn't take that long to edit them. The reason we operate with that backlog has more to do with the frequency of events we attend. On average we go to one a month, and record several interviews at each event.

Yes I made a couple of approaches to the first fence but, if you recall, we had a free run around the course when we got going! The interview clocks in at around 11 minutes and will be published tomorrow. All Intruders TV videos are embeddable, so feel free to re-distribute as you see fit.

Hope to catch up with you again some day in Galway. All the best!

Conn

Conn said...

Hi Bill - thought I should let you know that interview won't publish today after all. Maybe later this week, Monday at the latest! :)

Regards,
Conn

Bill McDaniel said...

conn,
Thanks. i still haven't seen it on Intruders.tv, but i'll keep looking.

It was a good interview.