It’s my last day in the office today before I leave IBM, so it’s time to have a final cup of tea (and pint of something stronger) with my many friends at Hursley. To mark the occasion, I spent last night building Lego representations of the Emerging Technology Services team, with whom I’ve had such [...]

In case you missed this a couple of months ago, here’s Ren Reynolds (no relation) making sense of the metaverse. Henrik Bennetsen is making a time capsule, capturing people’s responses to some short questions. Henrik got the ball rolling by uploading some short video interviews he conducted at Metaverse U in Stanford earlier this year, [...]

Remember two years ago, when BBC Radio 1 came to Second Life for One Big Weekend? This year they explored augmented reality with a Band In Your Hand. Here’s Scott Mills showing Chappers how it works. Unfortunately the (Windows-only) download has already been taken down. Why? Because… Due to music rights restrictions this download was [...]

Jason Ellis works in IBM Research and maintains a brilliant blog about art and games. In a recent post, he links to this demo video for Melodyne’s new Direct Note Access technology, which looks frankly astonishing. As the video shows, exploding a sampled chord allows the kind of editing we’re already used to with MIDI [...]

I moderated a panel on virtual worlds, games and social networks at the Virtual Worlds 2008 conference today. I recently put out a request for questions here on Eightbar, and got a great response. Here are my (very poor and woefully incomplete) recollections of the event. I’m hoping to get a copy of the audio [...]

I’ll be moderating a panel at Virtual Worlds 2008 on Friday, entitled ‘The Evolution of Games and Social Networks’. To give you an idea of what we’ll be talking about, the abstract for the panel describes it thus: “With the planned introduction of Sony’s Home for the PlayStation3 and multiple virtual worlds providers now creating [...]

A brief summary of what’s been happening with IBM in virtual worlds in the first quarter of this year. It’s an impressive list. Mike Rhodin, General Manager of IBM Lotus software, recently made five predictions about the future of collaborative working. They included open standards, increase in IM and other real-time tools. The number one [...]

Does your avatar know how to make actual money? Bernadette Duponchel’s does. She was recently at the National Retail Federation conference with the rest of her team, presenting IBM’s take on virtual worlds for the fashion design industry. This is the second consecutive year IBM has demonstrated the use of virtual worlds at the NRF. [...]

If you live in the US, you may have seen an IBM advert recently which has been raising a few eyebrows. People are saying things like “the company implies that virtual worlds are a fad and, as a result, a waste of both time and money” and even “The ad is an obvious dig at [...]

Someone recently showed me this BT advert from 2002: “The more connections we make, the more possibilities we have”. It’s interesting for many reasons. It nicely sums up the internet of course, but it increasingly reminds me of a popular misconception about virtual worlds. Yes, the internet is a bit like an auditorium which seats [...]