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Hey, all!
Time for another impromptu Metaverse meetup! I know this is very last minute, but a friend of mine from Amsterdam is in town and he's into some cool gaming & augmented reality stuff: Ronald Lenz from the Waag Society http://waag.org/ - He's one of the creators of the Fort Amsterdam game, which is a GPS-based urban game discovering NY's dutch history: http://fortamsterdam.org/
and also Augmented City, a series of presentations & workshops focusing on near-future scenarios for mobile location-aware services in city space: http://www.augmentedcity.org/

I thought Metaverse peeps might be into meeting up, exchanging ideas, and having some nice Thai food. :)

Pongsri Thai at 165 W 23rd St (btwn 6th/7th Aves)
http://www.yelp.com/biz/pongsri-thai-restaurant-new-york
7:30pm

Please let me know if you can make it so I can reserve enough tables for us. Ping me off-list at josephine@funksoup.com or @funksoup on twitter.
Hope to see you there! - oh and if you can't make it to dinner but want to join later - we'll most likely go somewhere around the hood, possibly Elmo's on 7th Ave btwn 19th/20th St - I'll tweet our whereabouts.

cheers,
~Josephine

Hi all! Greetings from Detroit!

I've been invited to a give a keynote type of talk at the Brooklyn Is Watching: 1 Year Festival at the Jack The Pelican art gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on Sunday, August 16th and I'd love it if you came. Here's the BiW site where you can read more about the mixed reality art project they've been running for over a year and the series of events they're doing as part of the festival: http://brooklyniswatching.com .

For my part, I couldn't be more excited. Not only is Jack The Pelican immediately around the corner from my place in Brooklyn (:p) but BiW is a little bit related to the Destroy Television show some of you went to back in the day, so I feel a strong connection to it. And most importantly, I've got an awful lot I want to talk about. Imagine that??

You can expect to hear a fun mix of reflections and experiences from the last few years as well as current and future plans that have me so excited about this Crazy Company thing I've been working on that wants to better blend art and business, online and offline (read: real and virtual), and company and customer and crowds in some crazy ways that just might be crazy enough to work.

I'll be talking quite a bit about LOVELAND, the first Crazy Company project I'm working on which has a starter site and a way to "inchformally" "inchvest" in it at http://makeloveland.com and some updates and thinking at http://7billionfriends.com . In a nutshell, the goal of LOVELAND is to facilitate the creation of a tiny city on a grid of 1 million square inches in the city of Detroit, Michigan. The rabbit hole goes deeper, but doesn't it always.

I'm not sure exactly how long the talk will go and I hope to get into good conversation afterwards, especially since I'm inviting you all to be a part of its planning process and creation. It turns out there's quite a bit you can do with inches, especially when they're linked to or overlaid with virtual things and spaces...

Hope to see you on the 16th! Be good,

Jerry Paffendorf

Hey hey! Saturday the 20th from 8 PM until 11-ish come hang out and rock out at our old stomping grounds, Lit! This comes hot on the heels of the State of Play conference at the New York Law School http://www.nyls.edu/stateofplay which ends just beforehand, so hopefully we'll have a good number of that crew down to network, imbibe, mingle, and wiggle.

History lesson: The Metaverse Meetup is for people interested in the entire broad expanse of internety, virtual worldy, mappy, simulationy, video gamey, lifeloggy, mixed/augmented reality-y topics and projects and opportunities, but it was at the first State of Play conference in 2003 that Second Life announced its residents would be able to retain ownership of the things they create inworld, as well as exchange the virtual currency for real world bucks. I was there, my mind was blown, and the course of my life changed to get deeper into this stuff, so it has a special place in my heart. /tear

I'll also be flapping my lips on a panel there, which I haven't done in a while, and on which I'll be sure to pimp the meetup, so I'm double excited.

The moral of the story: Come out and bring your artist, techy, worldy, webby, or whatever kind of friends you have.

Awesome,

Jerry Paffendorf

Hello Avatars,

Jerry Paffendorf, our venerably awesome founder, is back in town and we're overdue for a purely social event so we want to invite you to a Metaverse Meetup Holiday Hangout! Basically just an excuse to see everyone really. :)

So if you are in NYC on Saturday, December 27, please join us for casual happy hour drinks at Lit, 6-9PM.

Lit
93 2nd Ave (btwn E 5th & E 6th St)
East Village
New York, NY 10003

Looking forward to seeing you soon. Happy holidays!

Best,
Annie Ok
Co-Organizer of Metaverse Meetup

http://www.meetup.com/metaversemeetup

Hello avatars,

We are very excited to announce our next Metaverse Meetup!

As many of you may already know, IBM and Linden Labs recently announced a historic breakthrough in virtual worlds: "...research teams from the two companies successfully teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid into a virtual world running on an OpenSim server, marking the first time an avatar has moved from one virtual world to another".

The topic for this Metaverse Meetup will be OpenSim and virtual worlds interoperability and we are very fortunate to be featuring leading pioneers of OpenSim as presenters: David Levine of IBM Research (Zha Ewry in SL) and Adam Frisby of DeepThink Labs (Adam Zaius in SL). Other members of OpenSim have also been invited to take part and Tish Shute, who writes about OpenSim on her blog Ugotrade, will serve as a guest moderator.

More info about OpenSim and the interoperability announcement:

http://opensimulator.org
http://zhaewry.wordpress.com/2008/07/09/interop-teleports-along/
http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/07/08/ibm-linden-lab-launch-protocols-for-virtual-world-interoperability/

This Metaverse Meetup will be an excellent not-to-be-missed opportunity to learn more about OpenSim directly from its most influential developers and discuss with fellow Metaverse Meetuppers how all this may affect the future of virtual worlds. We invite you to come and participate.

Special thanks to to Tish Shute who has been kindly assisting in organizing the speakers and to Global Kids for so generously hosting us in their space. Global Kids' RezEd.org is a new hub for learning and virtual worlds so be sure to check them out.

Hope to see you all next Wednesday!

Best,
Annie Ok
Co-Organizer of Metaverse Meetup

P.S. Global Kids have graciously offered to allow our members to bring snacks and beverages with them if they wish. Please respect our lovely hosts and keep the mess to a minimum.

Also, a reminder that this Saturday, July 19th, is the final day of the "Tourists and Travelers" exhibition at Eyebeam, featuring Taeyoon Choi's "Camerautomata Charlie: Image Digesting Robotic Duck" that travels around NYC, shooting and printing pictures of tourists; and Joseph DeLappe's "The Salt Satyagraha Online— Gandhi’s Salt March in Second Life", work derived from his 240 mile walk on a treadmill and in cyberspace.