Virtual Reality
I have been involved with Virtual Reality (VR) for more than two decades.
In the mid nineties I started a project (1, 2) to build and navigate VR scenes from satellite observation data.
In 2006 I founded metafuturing SL (2006–2010), a company registered in Spain and and specialized in Second Life, Metaverse consulting and development, Game Engines and Virtual Reality. The company had 4 partners, 5 staff and a network of freelance collaborators, partners and subcontractors. One of the first European Second Life solution providers, metafuturing SL had a worldwide portfolio of clients including very high profile firms and organizations.
In 2008 metafuturing SL diversified with other consulting, design and development projects in other 3D / VR platforms such as OpenSimulator, Unity3D, and CryEngine.
The company ceased operations in 2010, a few months after I left Spain.
Then I became involved with the awesome OpenQwaq VR technology, based on the Squeak open source implementation of Smalltalk and the Croquet Project. The main OpenQwaq implementation at the time was Teleplace. The current main implementation is 3D ICC‘s Virtend.
My teleXLR8 online talk program based on OpenQwaq has been covered by Hypergrid Business as “an online open TED, using modern telepresence technology for ideas worth spreading, and as a next generation, fully interactive TV network with a participative audience.“
The first phase of teleXLR8 project, produced many online talks by well-known emerging technologies experts and futurists, and online extensions to conferences such as the ASIM 2010 Conference, satellite to the Singularity Summit 2010.
The ASIM 2010 Conference and other teleXLR8 highlight are covered in the interview MIND and MAN: Getting Mental with Giulio Prisco, by Natasha Vita More.
In the TransVision 2010 Conference, streamed interactively as a full 2-way “mixed-reality” event with both local and remote speakers, the participants in Milan were joined by remote participants from all over the world.
What I want to do is something like this. In “Virtual reality a new frontier for religions,” I argue that massively popular virtual churches, place of worship and spiritual communities in Virtual Reality (VR) will be developed with next-generation VR systems.
In the meantime I run occasional Turing Church meetings in Second Life, in a Stonehenge-themed garden in the Terasem sim.
I also run teleXLR8 conversations with small groups. In this picture I am with Frank J. Tipler and Micah Redding, discussing Omega Point cosmology and theology.
Cover image from UggBoy/Flickr.
