Jeff Barr Amazon Web Evangelist does his thing in Second Life
Jeff Barr has had a nice blog report written up over at the click heard around the world
He also mentions that he drove the event at the NMC campus, in his virtual Toyota Scion as created by millions of us
I have to admit, being in the UK I have no idea what a Scion is.
It is of interest though as I cut my web teeth back in 1997-2000 on the Vauxhall website, where we did lots of interesting firsts as IBM, including trying to do what Second Life is doing with a small start up from iceland called Smartvr. Just a few years too early. I also remember at Hursley a Ford Galaxy demo with an old style VR helmet.
Aagin this goes to show that the ideas have been around but now the technology is maturing to teh point that Jeff can drive an accurate model of his car to an event and also pitch his companies web services to an audience he can see.
September 7th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
I need to spend more time in SL. I was completely unaware and would have like to attend.
As an aside, the Scion brand is especially interesting. It’s heavily targeted at a particular demographic and frequently associates with the “graffiti” crowd… which includes the “urban vinyl” toy niche market. Oddly enough, though the brand seems ripe for online games, they’ve been extraordinarily careful about licensing their brand. So while one will now find Porsche and Lamborghini in an online racing game, I’m not sure any videogame developer has licensed the Scion brand (last I read they’d not licensed the brand to any game dev, but that was a year ago and things change fast).
So Scion moving into SL is actually a very consistent move. If they license to a typical videogame they potentially lose some of the street cred they have and which they seem to be very keen to cultivate. There’s a DIY aspect to SL that must be very appealing to them. For me it’s interesting because the brand is unique in this way and it happens to turn up in many of the areas I’ve been following.
September 7th, 2006 at 7:01 pm
It is an odd looking vehicle though. Not your typical “tunerz” ride?
Thansk for the info though. I know I will keep bumping into it too now.
September 13th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
[...] Jeff Barr is Amazon’s Web Services Evangelist, and all round good guy. Just last week, Ian wrote about a presentation Jeff recently gave in Second Life. We were lucky enough to secure some time in Hursley with the man himself this week, where Andy and I were delighted to be able to get to know him a little better. It sounds like Jeff has been enjoying a very busy few weeks, so it was great that he could spare an hour to meet up in Hursley for a chat. [...]