Questions are still being asked, what should a virtual world be? Stanford University is asking that very question and holding a conference in real life to understand more about virtual worlds.

 Announcement From Stanford University:

WHERE: Annenberg Auditorium, Stanford University
WHEN: Saturday the 16th and Sunday the 17th of February 2008

Stanford Humanities Lab (SHL) is thrilled to announce the Metaverse U conference at Stanford University. This two day conference will be held on February 16th and 17th 2008 and feature speakers from a range of disciplines spanning industry and academia. Our lab has worked in virtual worlds for some years now and have seen interest in the space grow exponentially in recent years. We believe that the time has come for an event to tell the interesting stories from the evolving metaverse. The current generation of spaces is part of a larger historical picture and many lessons have been learned over the years. Our ultimate goal with Metaverse U is to create a broad conversation about the pressing question of what the metaverse should be.

Metaverse U's list of speakers includes Raph Koster (Metaplace), Brewster Kahle (The Internet Archive), Jeremy Bailenson (Stanford University), TL Taylor (The IT University of Copenhagen), Cory Ondrejka, Tony Parisi (Media Machines & Web3D), Jon Brouchoud (Wikitecture), Wm. LeRoy Heinrichs (Stanford Medical Center), Rebecca Moore (Google Earth), Parvati Dev (Innovation in Learning), Byron Reeves (Stanford University & Seriosity), Kari Kraus (University of Maryland), Christain Renaud (Cisco), Mike Liebhold (Institute for the future), Daniel Huebner (Doppelganger), Vladlen Koltun (Stanford Virtual Worlds Group), Howard Rheingold, Henry Lowood (Stanford University)

For more information please visit: http://metaverseu.stanford.edu

Registration is open at: http://metaverse.stanford.edu/registration/register-now

Robert Bloomfield an accounting professor at Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y. who researches virtual worlds. Virtual worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft are attracting massive populations and some bigger than real life countries. Scientists are now playing these online games to enable them to learn more about real life.

It is estimated that 73 million gamers play online. Professor Bloomfield and others claim that researching behaviours in virtual worlds sheds some light on the effects of public policy, and with an added ease, thanks to these tools at hand. The research is not perfected, but the potential is too strong to ignore, says Bloomfield. The size of the population is the attraction, compared to national polls - 1,000 respondents; Second Life offers 11.7 million avatars that can be scanned for data.

"I got into this because I was talking to the Financial Accounting Standards Board," which develops standards for publicly traded companies in the US, Bloomfield says. "They have a lot of questions about the effect of legislation, and it's very difficult for them to see before the fact what the policy effects will be."

Researchers and economists would ideally like to create two virtual worlds, to compare against each other, but relying on grants, they are not able to complete against existing Virtual Worlds with teams of programmers and multi-million budgets. These ‘experiments’ that have been undertaken in commercially successful virtual worlds have generated some big reports, even though the environment is not ideal.

Bloomfield is currently analysing is data from a virtual stock exchange within Second Life. The analysis will show how unregulated markets behave. So far the study has shown that small investors do not do as well as the CEOs of the companies in which they invest in, especially companies with only one avatar running it. The more distributed the control of a company, the better the returns for investors.

There are still sceptics that say virtual worlds offer no comparison and it is just a game.
 

Source: CSMonitor

by Elizabeth Weiss McGolerick

New Media Consortium (NMC) is SL's largest educational presence and is fostering a growing in-world community that supports events, classes, exhibitions, and more. While on the NMC campus, Jason Ford, who teaches game design and simulation for Kingwood College, was approached by a female avatar. Anticipating conversation, Ford was stunned by what followed her greeting. "She whipped out a shotgun and fired at me! The next thing I know my character is being heralded off the island toward the water. Some gun," he jokes. But it wasn't funny anymore when he realized the experience had only just begun. "She came looking for me, shooting the gun into the water. I teleported out of there," Ford says.

Looking at griefers with humor is one way to deal with an attack such as this. After all, Ford says, "[Griefers are] virtual and have a solution. Luckily, no one gets hurt, just frustrated." But some people are wondering whether education in the virtual realm merits this kind of trouble. Ford attests, "We don't let the paranoia of violence in the real world distract us from our job of teaching, reaching, and changing the lives of our students. That holds true for a virtual campus as well."