Virtual Greg

Tonight I took part in a lecture in the new University of Melbourne breadth subject  “Internet Meets Society”. Pete Benda is coordinating this subject, it’s running for the first time this year and they’re trying out lots of interesting delivery formats. The lecture was about virtual worlds. We ran it as a panel consisting of Pete, Adam Nash (RMIT) and I, with Pete and Adam in the UM lecture room and me appearing via Second Life. We discussed some pre-defined topics and took questions from students. At one point we went for a walk to one of SL’s rough neighbourhoods, with interesting results. To illustrate identity issues I logged in simultaneously as two avatars and pretended they were two different people for half the lecture. We’ll write up a lectures notes handout soon and I’ll put it here.

It was a big day – in the morning I trained up to the Mission to see the Rock Make Street Festival – several bands and lots of arts and crafts. I put a few snaps on Flickr.

On 23 Aug I went to a street festival in the Mission called the Rock Make festival. They blocked off Treat street for about 100m. They had a stack of indie bands playing on two stages at either end, and a bunch of arts and crafts by local makers on sale in tents. It’s logistically hard for me to see bands late at night in the city so this was a good oppotunity to sample Frisco’s indie wares.
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Here is my draft for the PARC poster day …

Postscript: the poster went ok, but these things should have stood our more clearly:

* Second Life

* it’s a usability study (not a software development etc)

* groups

Today I hired a car and learned how to drive on the right hand side of the road. I’d booked a cheap small sedan but when I arrived they were out of stock and gave me a bright blue convertible at no extra cost. I’m not sure if I’ve even ridden in a convertible before. I suspect the manufacturer intended it be driven faster than I did.

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With the help of the rest of the PlayOn group, Nic and Don, I’m fine-tuning the project I’ll conduct at PARC. It’s a study of how people collaborate around complex 3D objects in virtual worlds. I’m getting groups of people to build things together in Second Life, to find out how they handle things like coordination and reference.

For taskideas I’m looking at previous research into shared-video environments, where researchers did things like time pairs of users doing virtual jigsaw puzzles and the like.

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On Saturday I went to Berkeley to see the famous campus and take a look round the East Bay. Berkeley is across the water from San Francisco, which means an extra train trip, so I got up early for the 830am Caltrain from Palo Alto. At SF I biked from 4th st to Embarcadero and got the BART to Berkeley via Oakland. Oakland is a port town, with giant cranes on four legs for getting stuff out of ships. A train passenger was photographing them, claiming they were the inspiration for the giant robots in The Empires Strikes Back. LucasFilm is headquartered in SF: maybe this story is true.
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Some of the Silicon Valley research labs jointly run an exchange program so that their interns visit each others’ labs. These “SIRS” events run for an afternoon, every few weeks. The companies use it for PR and to entice high quality recruits. So it’s win-win. Only in Silicon Valley is there enough leading research in the one area for a program like this to be easily doable.
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Today I went for a bike ride around San Francisco. When I was there two weeks ago I only went on public transport, which is good in this town, but restricts your exploration. A bike is good for touristing round town: not fast enough to miss things, not slow enough to be boring. The Caltrain service from San Jose through Silicon Valley to SF lets you take a bike on board. There is a special carriage where people stack their bikes on the bottom deck and try to find seats above.
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Friday 11th July

Thanks to jetlag I’m sleepy in the afternoons and evenings – nearly nodded off during a talk at work yesterday – then from midnight to 4am I’m wide awake. I woke at 10am today and had to do some errands before work. First I needed a US phone number, which turned out to be easy, I just went into the first phone shop I could find and bought a three-month prepaid simcard, put it in my Nokia in place of the Telstra simcard, and I have a local phone number, total cost $60.

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Today I started work at PARC on Coyote Hill Road. It was a good day. PARC is just far enough off the beaten track to feel like you’re riding through the country to get there. They have one,  large, complex building. It has three floors, and large atria divide the floors into sections. Roughly speaking, hardware have the bottom floor, computing the middle, and management the top.

Everyone is in an office but there are a lot of open spaces, and a focus on collaboration. Having been heavily involved with teaching at UniMelb, it’s interesting to see a research-only workplace, and spend a whole day only doing research.

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