One anticipated visit was made even better by a surprise one today, well worth delaying gratification on the IU-Kentucky game (temporal control courtesy Tivo). Matt was joined by Apurva for a brief visit in town today, giving us a little reunion of 3/4 of the mPath team that went to Portland in 2005. Shveta, where are you? … The Bardzell’s drove us to a local Thai place, and the new working stiffs (Matt got his job just recently) paid. Bonus: Making fun of Jeff trying to parallel park.
Shaowen says that her sports informatics class — which features a nifty virtual space, built by Will (who needs to blog more) — is under studentfied. To all of you sports fans at the School of Informatics (including CS): take the class.
I softly pitched my idea for a virtual marathon in Second Life, and I quickly wished we had a white board and about 3 hours to design something. Matt threw down computer imagination, a term any IU HCI designer knows well, and said to use the controls of the medium (i.e. flying, teleporting) rather than just running. There are also problems to deal with, beyond the technical issues with scalability and hack attacks in SL, with limited space. 26.4 miles is a lot of server space in-world. No hurry. I’m still getting my sim-legs. The take-home: I miss our mPath team meetings.
Apurva says he’ll be back over the holidays, but who knows when I’ll see Matt again. Thanks for stopping by, guys.
1 reply on “The New Rich”
I agree that to make the marathon work, you’ve got to use the controls of the medium, but you can’t bike through one irl, or take short cuts, etc. Part of the marathon, for those of us who take as long as I do to complete it, is the determination to keep moving for several hours. I’m just saying.