Hey, we’ll be having a Christmas party on December 18. You’re invited.
December 14, 2021:
Actual party invitation
Now it’s a St. Nick’s Frosty Metaverse Party. I wonder if they served Metaverse cookies? š£
January 24, 2022:
Email:
Recently the concept of Education Metaverse is
sweeping the world. Lots of people are developing products and
researching on this topic. I have just co-published a concept paper on
Education Metaverse. If we can add Metaverse to our site, that would make it
more timely and trendy. Immersive Learning is the pedagogy underlying Education Metaverse. We just added Metaverse for Learning as a theme to (Anonymized Conference) 2022.
That’s an academic researcher advocating that an academic group should use a trendy word.
February 17, 2022:
Metaverse Conference (not it’s real name)
Opening day (ahem, one day, but still). Opening seconds after 30 second countdown.
Camera goes on. Live microphone.
First word broadcast: “Shit.”
Presenter leans back in chair, takes earphones off, and says to someone back off camera, “What?”
Sighs quickly. Strips off headphones, jumps up out of chair, and runs out of room and off camera.
Dead air.
This is 9 a.m. local and 11 a.m. Eastern US time zone on a Thursday in mid-February. I’m just reminding you of that because I’m stating the point, as a conference organizer myself, that these folks were right in the sweet spot of being able to handle an emergency no-show. They had a 30 second jazzy countdown graphic, with music! They could have had a “green room” concept. They could have published their one-day schedule earlier before the conference so that each presenter had plenty of time to know exactly when they were on schedule. Their admin staff could have expressed the presentations times to the presenters in their own home/local time zone (that’s only polite). There are many support steps to prevent what happened—it’s not like this presenter was woken up at 3 a.m. to suddenly go on camera. That’s what I’m saying…
Presenter comes back into room.
With no apologizes starts talking about the difference between Mountain time and a new made-up phrase ‘Metaverse time’ (which turns out to be an old allusion, I think to Second Life time which was Pacific, where Second Life was headquartered, because the other co-presenter was an hour off…late, which can only be construed as Pacific time with reference to Mountain time.)
The next 30-40 minutes are a bit of a jumble as the original presenter patch-presents a ~15 minute introduction and then the intended host shows up and also presents at a first compacted and then expanded set of concepts (which is recycled from other conferences). The intended host, to my chagrin because I like him, doesn’t even know who is coming next on the schedule and when.
The rest of the day has only one session that I found grounded in research and practice. The other sessions wildly pushed the “technology” button for the Metaverse. ‘Want to get started in the Metaverse? Build something!!’ I was actually surprised how much the host college pushed their own technology classes, but then again, what are you going to get for free…
It appears that many attendees were newbies to Metaverse because they kept saying that the concepts were “new” to them.
A definite low-lite was when a fight broke out in the chat about the WHO. Yes, that WHO, (not the band or the Doctor.) I took a break at that point. It’s clear that politics is coming into the Metaverse with us.
There was one high-lite but I can’t say what it is without saying which conference it, therefore, was so I’ll let that go.
But over and over, institutions wonder why women and minorities do not feel welcome.
Revisit that first few seconds of broadcast. You had your chance, after weeks of social media buzz, to make an impact.
I was recently asked if I have service design experience and I realized that I have more service design
experience than product design experience in VR. Truly, my focus has
been on bringing new clients into VR experiences, explaining the
benefits and challenges, and customizing a solution for their own needs.
I love doing this work!
So here is an example of service design experience that I did for the IEEE VR Conference in 2021.
First, as I stated my remarks at the Opening Ceremony
(held at 3:30 a.m. my time, 8:30 a.m. Lisbon, Portugal time), the
institution that I worked for pursued getting this particular client
because they were an ideal fit with similar mission and demographics.
Additionally, both organizations had switched on online conferences in
2020 (IEEE VR to Mozilla Hubs and iLRN to Virbela)
and so we shared the common ground of bringing large amounts of users
into new virtual spaces. We won the contract to host their posters,
doctoral consortium, demo, 3DUI contest, and video presentations on the iLRN Virtual Campus
powered by Virbela. (The rest of their program was handled on Zoom,
YouTube, and Twitch.) We had approximately 2 months prep time and worked
directly with organizers from Portugal, New Zealand, and the US –
drawing together meetings, tours, and set up times across multiple time
zones.
My support was being online to help with registrations,
account access with translation to virtual access, technical support
inside the virtual reality spaces, and providing options when the
organizers wanted to dream up something new on the spot.
And did they dream! Out of this one 7 day event, 3 brand new in-VR conference events started and I was part of all of them.
All
of these events had a theme to them: they used the basic affordances of
the platform and put those pieces together in a new way.
Said another way, these events were not pushing the VR boundary. They used the VR platform in ways it could perfectly perform and thus the execution was great! Think: using basic legos, not a kit, to build something like the Millennium Falcon.
Treasure Hunt Ready Player 21
Just
a few weeks before the conference opened, our island gained the ability
to passcode spaces. This meant that users needed to enter a code into a
pop-up box in order to teleport or arrive in a specific space (usually a
meeting room). One of the conference organizers, Rob Lindeman,
listened as we described the basic features of the passcode system and
he realized that he could create a treasure hunt game. He called it Ready Player 21.
http://www.lindeman.com/vr2021/live.shtml
(This landing page has 1,211 hits as of October 13, 2021. Rob documents
that it had over 900 hits just during the treasure hunt game.)
āIf you are seeing or reading this, it means I am deadā¦I mean I am an avatar, and so are you. My name is James HOLIDAY.
I
have created a set of puzzles for you to solve. Each puzzle results in a
key that you can use to unlock a secret room within the campus, where
you will find clues to finding the next key. There are four keys in all,
and the first person to find all four of them and reach the final room
will receive an extra special prize.
Half a billion…No, wait…I mean an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card!
There
are leader boards displayed around the campus, and each time someone
finds a key, their name will be added to the leaderboard, along with the
time of earning the key.
If you would like to take part in this adventure, please use the QR code that you find below.
Good luck!*ā
As
I was part of the support crew, I could not participate to win the
prize but I had fun visiting the first 2 rooms to check out their
function and I actually solved the puzzles! (Iām good at lateral
thinking.)
When the treasure hunt game opened, there were QR
codes placed around the Campus inside of images and participants ran
around collecting them– mistakenly thinking that just collecting QR
codes would win the game. The QR codes, however, were only the START of
the game. The actual puzzles were inside the passcoded rooms.
The hunt ran about 4 days.
I was proud to witness that a woman, Xioadan Hu,
won the game and this screenshot shows us in the winning puzzle room as
we were taking her celebrating photo, with a research colleague. I
asked her how she completed all of the puzzles and she said āyou just
have to be very detail-oriented!ā Iām sure sheās going on to great
things. There was great envy for the graphics card that she won because the COVID-19 pandemic had curtailed graphic card production.
Speed Networking
The next experience was dreamed up and put into action in just a few hours. One of the organizers, Francisco Simoes,
had realized that we could make for them a large office space of 36
offices that each had private sound (sound restricted to inside that
space). So with some added Portugal theming and a few ground rules, we
instituted āScientific Speed Datingā when networkers could just show up
and meet new people every few minutes. Everyone at the conference was
invited so this was a great time for students to meet potential
colleagues or new research contacts!
The VR affordances that we used were:
Sound isolated rooms connected by open office spaces.
āFlat soundā or sound all of the same volume transmitted through the entire space
The ability to send a āroom notificationā to every avatar in the space notifying them of time remaining or time to switch rooms.
So remember those spaces:
An office is a sound isolated space with walls, ceiling, floors, and a door. You could see into the office from outside.
A
team suite is a group of offices bound together by a common floor.
Sound is NOT spatial or isolated, sound is flat so therefore “traffic
control” could be done by voice by being in one spot and describing or
saying a number and you could be heard a hallway away.
The ground rules were very easy and I was drafted to be the Master of Ceremonies so I kept repeating these rules all through the hour.
Rule 1: Find an office.
Rule 2:
If there is no one in it, go in it!
If there is one person in it, go in it!
If there are 2 people in, donāt go in it! (Find another office.)
Networking was for 5 total minutes: 4 minutes to meet/greet, then a 1 minute warning to exchange contact info.
At
the 5 minute point, the person who was first into that office stayed
and the person who arrived 2nd stood up and walked to a new office.
Given that this was an international conference, instructions had to be as simple as possible.
We had āHall Monitorsā of sorts, really just roving volunteers, who would call out
if an office had only one person waiting to network. We discovered that
numbered offices, therefore, were better than named offices because
folks could navigate by looking for a increasing or decreasing number.
In all, the event was a great success!
We actually ran it twice with 36 available offices. That meant capacity
of 72 attendees and we pulled in ~50 for the first session and ~35 for
the second (including some repeat attendees!)
Kent Bye commented that it was āOne of the best virtual conf activities Iāve seenā
Flash Mob
The
final event took advantage of the VR affordance that Virbela empowers
every avatar to dance. From the F7 dance command to longer robot
dancing, it didnāt take long for the IEEE VR organizers to realize that
if everyone synchronized their dancing, it would look like a flash mob.
We put a flash mob on the agenda and LOTS of folks showed up! I took a video and Kent Bye led the instructions.
Working
with the volunteers and conference committee was great! We often worked
simultaneously in multiple systems: Discord, Virbela, etc. In a classy
maneuver, the conference chair, Joaquim Jorge, also made sure that he treated his volunteers with the utmost respect, dancing with them,
inviting them to virtual drinks at the rooftop bar, and trusting them
completely with projects like organizing volunteer coverage.
The combined effort led to the LARGEST IEEE VR conference ever!
In
summary, the design experience used the basic affordances of the
platform, passcoded rooms, sound-isolated rooms, and dancing avatars,
and created unique and successful VR events. It was not the case that we
imported unique objects or transported the users to phantasmagorical
locations. The entire Virbela platform is a software download that looks
very traditionally like conference and meeting rooms. But it was taking
the basic building blocks and imagining them in new ways that was the
key to this success.
A good design lesson for me and I hope, for you!
Check out IEEE VR 2022 set for Christchurch, New Zealand!
