Last year I hosted a panel on creating a safe environment for people in VR with Tony Sheng and Darshan Shankar at OC3. I commented at the time that the discussion reminded me of the story of LambdaMOO becoming a self-governing community told by Julian Dibbell in My Tiny Life, so I was very happy to have the opportunity to compare the established and novel approaches to Building Safety in to Social VR at OC4 with Mike Howard.

While technology changes, people stay the same, so it’s important that we don’t lose the lessons learned by people like Julian, Richard Bartle, Raph Koster, Damion Schubert and the many others who have been wrestling with and thinking about these problems for decades.


Creating A Safe Environment For People In VR

Mon 31 October 2016 by Jim Purbrick

I was very happy that Oculus found time at OC3 to host a panel on creating a safe environment for people in VR. As social VR becomes more popular over the next few years it will quickly have to learn how to keep people safe together in shared environments. Some …

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Strange Tales From Other Worlds

Tue 10 May 2016 by Jim Purbrick

At the end of last year, Michael Brunton-Spall and Jon Topper asked me if I would like to give the opening keynote at Scale Summit as I had “lots of experience scaling weird things”, by which they meant Second Life and EVE Online. I immediately thought of The Corn Field …

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