A couple of weeks ago I went to a damp Coventry to talk at the Serious Virtual Worlds conference at the Serious Games Institute.

Christian Renaud gave the opening keynote on the first day and started with the observation that traveling to conferences sucks, predicting that virtual worlds conferencing will see a huge expansion in the near future due to concerns over climate change, the economic downturn, fuel prices and the inconvenience of real travel when virtual worlds can provide the same serendipitous meeting and networking. The Serious Virtual Worlds conference itself is a great example of mixed reality conferencing, with every session streamed in to Second Life, questions taken from Second Life after every session and a number of sessions given from a variety of virtual worlds. It’s also great to hear people besides epredator, the Dopplr crew and myself talking about serendipity in social software. It’s a huge, but not obvious benefit.

A large part of the conference was given over to demonstrating serious uses of virtual worlds. Dave Taylor gave a great demonstration of Second Health, but the most amazing technical demo was by Henrik Ekeus from Edinburgh University who showed his mixed reality dancing with avatars work. It was good to see this come out of the VUE project which I’d first heard about at Eduserv a couple of years ago. At the time they didn’t seem very clear on what they were going to do in SL, it’s good to see that they’ve allowed Henrik’s experimentation to take place.

The theme for this years conference was interoperability and it became much more apparent on day 2. Analyst Rob Edmonds gave a great enumeration of the possibilities for interoperability ranging from the grand unified interoperable virtual worlds, through islands of interoperability to incompatible virtual worlds connected to a common bus like the web which he judged as more important, wondering whether talk of the grand unified vision was supply lead rather than demand driven. John Burwell from Forterra wrote off the grand unified vision of virtual worlds and open source being important in virtual worlds, focussing on the terrain, collada 3d model and SCORM interoperability that Olive provides. Rohan Freeman provided the counterpoint to John’s views, highlighting the successes of the OpenSim open source platform and it’s use to business. Bernard Horan also presented Wonderland, another open source virtual world platform built on Java.

It was great to see a number of promising virtual world platforms on display at Serious Virtual Worlds, but a quick walk around the exhibition showed that Second Life is that platform that people are building successful serious virtual world applications on right now. The exhibition also highlighted the most valuable aspect of the conference: the meetings between virtual world solution providers and those interested in building and commissioning the next wave of serious virtual worlds that we’ll be seeing in the years to come.