What’s cooler than robots?
Giant robots, of course.
For today’s meeting, we visited FrancoGrid to explore a junkyard complete with a derelict giant robot, a toxic lake, and a submarine.
On January 23rd 2011, I was an invited guest on Paisley Beebe’s “Tonight Live” show in Second Life. Thank you again to everyone on the Tonight Live and Treet.tv team for working so hard to put on such a professional show and the opportunity for me to participate. I had a fun time, and thank you to everyone who attended as well.
I shared some of my thoughts about my time working at Linden Lab, some simple advice for Linden Lab’s new CEO, my new gig with Reaction Grid, the state of education in virtual worlds, and the future of interconnected virtual worlds in general.
I hope I was entertaining. If anyone would like me to expand on anything I said in the interview, please leave a blog comment and I’ll happily reply.
Here’s a recording of my interview.
-John “Pathfinder” Lester
At this meeting visited the region Wizzy on ReactionGrid. At this location, Wizard Gynoid has created a giant model of the E8 Polytope, one of the most complex and elegantly beautiful geometric objects known to mathematicians.
Read on for a full transcript and photos of our adventure.
Dusan Writer thinks a lot about the business of virtual worlds and, specifically, Second Life.
He recently wrote a very thoughtful and interesting blog post titled “SECOND LIFE NEXT: 2011.”
In my comment on his post, I said the following:
You also talked about how “user generated content is not a business model.” I’m not sure I fully agree with you on that. The bottom line is, if you’re using a service and not paying for it, you’re not a customer. You’re part of the product. At least that’s how all successful businesses see it.
I’d like to expand a bit on what I said in bold. Because, if done right, I think it’s a very good thing both for businesses and customers.
Our Hypergrid Adventurers Club continues to grow. At our last meeting we set a new record by having people from 5 completely different grids attending our club via Hypergrid connections. We typically have about 20 people attending our big Sunday meetings. And we’re even expanding our collaborative efforts to other grids.
In addition to our weekly inworld meetings, we stay in touch with each other via this blog, our #HGAC hashtag on Twitter, and our IRC channel.
It’s always good to have different options for communicating. And it’s especially important to use the right tool for the right job.
With that in mind, I’ve decided to create a Google Groups mailing list for the Club. This will allow us to have more detailed ongoing discussions. I also hope this new list will allow us to talk about broader topics such as education and the exploration of all kinds of different virtual worlds.
I’ve had very good success with mailing lists in the past. They’re a great way to help a growing community evolve.
And boy, we are growing!
Take care,
-John “Pathfinder” Lester
This past Sunday we made two excursions to the region Physics on NewWorldGrid, where we discovered and explored a giant-sized physics lab as well as a planetarium.
In our second meeting of the day we met with the creator Aime Socrates, who also built the amazing CERN nuclear physics area we explored in a previous visit.
Read on for a full transcript and many photos from our two meetings on Sunday.
For today’s meeting, we visited VWERGrid, the new home of the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable community.
On November 11th, 2010, the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable announced the opening of their second virtual home on their own Opensim grid called VWERGrid. Today we traveled to VWERGrid and had a chance to speak with AJ Kelton, the founder of the VWER.
Read on for a full transcript and many photos of our adventure.
At the end of each calendar year, it’s common for people to offer up their predictions for the new year ahead.
Such predictions are fun to make and fun to read. Since I mostly swim in the waters of online communities and virtual worlds, most of the predictions I come across have to do with the future of technology.
I have a prediction for the coming year. And while my prediction involves the technology landscape of virtual worlds, what I predict will happen actually has nothing to do with technology.
For today’s meeting, we explored the region CERN on New World Grid.
In real life, CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) is one of the world’s largest and most respected centres for scientific research. The instruments used at CERN are particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before they are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions.
The region CERN on New World Grid features detailed recreations of real life architecture at CERN as well self-guided tours of models of particle accelerators.
Read on for a full transcript and many photos of our adventure.
I’ve just established an Outpost for the Hypergrid Adventurers Club on the German grid of Metropolis.
It’s located in the large train station at the Metropolis arrival point *CenterWorld*. Inside you’ll find freebies and more!
Read on for more details.
Be Cunning and Full of Tricks 