Use group memberships to regulate the behavior of attendees — Suppose you wanted to invite thousands of people to a virtual town hall where there would be heated debate, and you wanted to protect privacy while maintaining civil behavior with appropriate moderation. Doing this right could be a win for democracy by creating a public forum that can extend beyond…

…and other thoughts on non-verbal communication in VR — The image above is a kind of optical illusion. It suggests that the four people having a meeting are successfully communication with each other through gestures and body language. It would be easy to look at this image and say to yourself “wow, when those VR headsets get lighter and…

Notes from my opening comments at a recent Metaverse working group meeting — Thoughts on minimal requirements for building a sustainable ecosystem of value creation in any prospective ‘Metaverse’, with examples from Second Life and other worlds: Creative Building Blocks The world must have some sort of building blocks that are sufficient to enable people to create interesting things that will be of value to others…

(in Virtual Worlds, and Beyond) — Overview In the coming years, we will build virtual worlds where we spend more and more time together. These worlds are — hopefully — not going to simply be escapist forms of passive entertainment. They are going to become public commons — places where we meet strangers, have disputes, and share…

Step-by-step instructions to enable free & fair trade for you and your neighbors. — Back Story You and 1,000 other people wake up to find yourselves relocated indefinitely to a large, empty, faraway island with tons of natural resources. There are plenty of people with both the skills and equipment you need to very comfortably survive: doctors, farmers, therapists, engineers, teachers, and so on. …

For those of us kept at home by the virus, some easy and fun ideas: Build a city in a week, learn a new language, and have a fun music workout. — Use Minecraft and Discord to build an ancient city Find a group of between 3 and 30 students/kids who will work together on a team. First, have one of them setup a Discord server, so that they can all put on headphones and talk to each other while they build. …

Slo-mo video on your smartphone will let you measure latency for things like your mouse pointer or a streaming game service to within a few milliseconds. — Many things in VR and Virtual worlds rely on latency being low to work well. For Oculus, measuring latency in headsets was so important that they built a special piece of hardware to do it. Latency is the delay from when some event happens to when it is perceived and/or…

Physics is what everyone agrees will happen next. — You’ve watched as an egg spun on a table, and you discovered something interesting: that there are two types of eggs. The ones that do it the right way, and the ones that don’t. You’ve spun things that way all your life — soccer balls, folded paper squares, coins on…

A digital ‘democurrency’ could be created, giving control of the monetary policy to everyone, as well as creating a basic income. — Democracy is best defined as a ‘system of government by the whole population’. If you are talking specifically about money, ‘government’ mostly means Monetary Policy: the way that you regulate the total amount of money that is in circulation. Traditionally, money is not managed directly by the whole population, but…