The Alphaville Herald

Uri Chills with the Salonistas!

by Alphaville Herald on 01/07/05 at 2:02 pm

A Future Salonista shows us what we will all look like in 2020.

Last night’s Future Salon had its usual share of technical snags, but it was interesting – more interesting for me perhaps, because I had an opportunity to be on the other side of the discussion. It certainly gave me lots to think about in terms of using SL or any other 3D graphical environment for holding meetings. Obviously there is a lot of potential here – one can imagine far flung business execs holding meetings in these spaces, not to mention classes and, well, discussions of emerging technologies. But from where I sit we are a loooooong way from this being a viable format for exchanging complex ideas in a rich and meaningful way.

update: Zero Grace/Tony Walsh has his take on the event here.

Apart from the audio issues – I was on a cell phone and had no sense at all if anyone could hear a word I was saying — there was the issue of the 1-2 minute lag between when I said something and when the audience heard it. This meant that any typed feedback I received from the peanut gallery was very late, and also out of context when I received it which put a heavy processing load on me while I was talking. It amounted to a kind of weird double tasking in which I had to keep up my own thread of conversation, while remembering what I said 1.5 minutes ago and then reading and processing the comments relative to time t-1.5. It was like joining a conference call from the moon.

Zero Grace (aka Tony Walsh from Clickable Culture) makes a statement.

This magnified another problem that I found with the format, which is that there is no way to read the audience. I don’t know how many thousands of hours I’ve logged in classrooms and in talks in places ranging from Bulgaria to Princeton, and I’ve always been able to read the body language of the audience pretty well. Oh sure, in Bulgaria a nod of the head means no, and a smile in Princeton means “I hate you”, but you can at least tell if the audience is paying attention, tired, distracted etc. Here there is really nothing.

Pathfinder Linen targets Prokofy Neva with his deathray eyes.

This problem requires reflection. I know that several friends of mine in psycholinguistics are currently doing eye tracking experiments and they are finding that being able to track the gaze of your discourse partner is extremely important in many forms of communication. I don’t know what the remedy is, but that is a problem that haunted this meeting for sure.

Robin Linen in a reflective moment, in which she asks herself: “Why oh why did I take this job???”

At a certain point I gave up on the voice altogether and dropped into chat, and from my perspective this was much much better. I don’t know how it was from the audience side, but I at least *felt* like I was engaged in a conversation rather than barking into my phone (“Is anybody out there?”). I know people are tired of Prok, but I felt that even the chat convo didn’t get rolling until I goaded Prok into peppering me with some questions. It was more fun for me anyway, and it got some other people to press questions as well.

Maybe an idea to try would be to have two or three designated interrogators – a meet the press format – and let other people chime in if they want to. We have discussed doing this before in the game, but like all things of the pixel the idea perished of bit rot.

The depressing news of the evening was that Amanda is all hooked up already.

I thought the other two presentations were great, by the way, and I enjoyed listening to them, but I’m not sure that anything was added to them by placing them in SL, except perhaps that we got to witness them as a community, and that ain’t nothing I suppose.

Indeed there was a fun sense of community about the whole event – having the Herald Editors, Zero Grace, Prok, several FICs, as well as Pathfinder, Robin, and Jessie Linden in the room was fun. But then as you all know, I am so easily amused…