Schedule:  Design and Development
Room 5
Full schedule - 18 page pdf (1.66mb)

What does it take to design top quality virtual worlds experience?  What are the leading technologies and best practices used today?  The Design and Development track answers these questions and more. 

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Wednesday, 11:00am - 12:00pm
Artificial Intelligence For Virtual Worlds
The field of artificial intelligence has advanced dramatically in recent years, including considerable progress in the area of "artificial general intelligence" or AGI -- software programs that learn for themselves in a flexible and autonomous way. Very little of this progress, however, has yet manifested itself in the virtual worlds or MMOG domain. This talk discusses ways in which virtual worlds developers can make use of what AI and AGI technology have to offer, in order to enable automated avatars, virtual pets, and other sorts of embodied virtual bots that display a variety of adaptive behaviors. Applications are extremely various, including virtual shopkeepers, virtual pets, virtual twins and hundreds of other possibilities. As an illustration, a specific "AI in virtual worlds" project currently under development by Novamente LLC and Electric Sheep Company [the details are not yet being made public] will be discussed and previewed as part of the session.
- Ben Goertzel, CEO, Novamente LLC
- Wendy Cornish, Electric Sheep Company

Wednesday, 2:30pm - 3:30pm
Technical Perspective: Designing Stickier Virtual Worlds Builds
What are the key elements of a truly engaging build that can attract and retain significant avatar traffic, and what level of technical complexity is involved in creating them? This presentation will explore how design and ongoing creative programming can keep digital tumbleweed from blowing across an island, and specifically describe some of the technical challenges and solutions associated with innovative programming. It is intended to help brand managers and developers get a behind-the-scenes sense of the work that goes into a virtual world campaign, along with costs and technical complexity associated with various activities. This presentation is for technically sophisticated brand managers, creative staff with technical experience, and developers. It will require an intermediate understanding of basic principles and technologies underlying virtual worlds. Attendees will gain perspective from the intersection of creative programming and technical logistics, learning: -the technical possibilities and limitations of virtual worlds platforms -how near- and long-term technical advancements will expand the possibilities for creative programming.
- Christian Lassonde, President, Millions of Us Inc.

Wednesday, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Designing for Cross-Platform Delivery and Long-Term Content Portability
Although Second Life is the dominant virtual world platform, a number of competing environments from There.Com and Kaneva to Croquet, Multiverse, and Areae are emerging as viable contenders. The quiet giants Microsoft and Google are also well prepared to move quickly into a dominant position within this space. This poses strategic challenges to organizations who wish to experiment with current platforms without having to start over from scratch eighteen months down the road. In this presentation, Aaron Delwiche discusses strategies for designing and conceptualizing projects with an eye toward long-term portability to other virtual environments. This talk covers some technical details, but it should be accessible to anyone with a basic understanding of virtual worlds. Aarons recommendations are targeted to designers, developers, marketing professionals, and project managers who are pursuing long-term strategies for doing business in the Metaverse.
- Aaron Delwiche, Co-founder, Metaversatility, Inc.

Wednesday, 5:15pm - 6:00pm
Fireside Chat in the Attendee Lounge in the Expo Hall. 
- Paul Yanover, Executive Vice President & Managing Director, Disney Online

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Thursday, 11:00am - 12:00pm
Three Laws of Avatarics - A systems theory perspective of "identity" and "persistence
A systems theory perspective of "identity" and "persistence" helps guide virtual world developer practice: customers do not live in virtual worlds, rather they project aspects of their persona. Three criteria can determine the "openness" of a virtual world: (1) it must provide external API for controlling avatars; (2) it must allow a third-party to include code plugin/module; (3) it must support use of remoting or external web services. This case study presents guidelines for third-party vendors to evaluate their technical strategies in virtual worlds (follow-up to an article published at http://ceteri.blogspot.com/2006/12/three-laws-of-avatarics.html).
- Paco Nathan, Technical Director, HeadCase Humanufacturing, Inc. 

Thursday, 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Case Study: TyGirlz.com - Building the First Virtual World for Girls
What does it take to develop a kids virtual world from the ground up?  From concept, to design to ongoing updates and user community issues: come find out how to develop a highly scaleable web-based virtual world. Animax Entertainment, the developers of the TyGirlz.com virtual world for toy company Ty, Inc.'s Ty Girlz brand will share best practices established during the development of the TyGirlz.com web site and virtual world.
- Michael Bellavia, Managing Director, Animax Entertainment
- speaker to be announced

Thursday, 3:00pm - 4:00pm
Web-based Virtual Worlds
This session of leading web-based virtual worlds experts will discuss the finer points of developing web-based virtual worlds. Attendees will gain valuable insight into best practices, techniques and technologies for implementing web-based virtual worlds. Find out why web-based virtual worlds are here to stay and how the technology roadmap will develop over time.
- Daniel James, CEO, Three Rings
- Nabeel Hyatt, Founder & CEO, Conduit Labs
- Motty Alon, CEO, Memex Technologies
- Toshitaka Jiku, EVP and CTO, 3Di Inc.
- speakers to be announced

Thursday, 4:30pm - 5:30pm
Building Open Source Standards-Based Virtual Worlds
A number of open source, standards-based virtual worlds initiatives are already underway around the world. Now, for the first time, industry leaders come together to discuss these opportunities, and share their insight.  In what is certainly expected to be the "cannot miss" session for developers, we invite you to join a group of technology leaders and open source proponents from around the world in any interactive discussion on the issues surrounding opens source and standards-based virtual worlds.
- Trevor F. Smith, Founder, Transmutable
- Yesha Sivan, EIR - Metaverse, JVP Studio Ventures
- Karl Haberl, Director, Sun Microsystems Laboratories
- Jeff Barr, Senior Web Services Evangelist, Amazon Web Services
- Bryan O'Sullivan, Hacker, Linden Lab