Metaverse Working Group

[Chris Collins <>]

Hi all,

I believe I met some of you at the Internet2 Tech Expo in Cleveland this past fall, but for those of you I haven't met, my name is Chris Collins, and I founded and manage the Center for Simulations & Virtual Environments Research (UCSIM) at the University of Cincinnati (http://ucsim.uc.edu).  Ben Fineman has asked me to chair this working group and I'm really excited to kick things off for 2016! 

To begin, our initial charge from the Metaverse Working Group wiki is as follows:

Advances in immersive head mounted displays are driving us toward a liminal point in terms of adoption and utilization of virtual environments. These trends will have profound implications for the fundamental nature how we share information and collaborate. The research and education community is uniquely positioned to catalyze the creation of an open, interoperable, standards-based "Metaverse" of linked virtual environments that leverage these technologies. Standards exist today, but many unsolved problems remain in areas including security, identity, and distributed architecture. This working group has the specific goal of implementing standards-based, interoperable, interlinked virtual environments.  

https://spaces.internet2.edu/pages/editpage.action?pageId=87755858

With the imminent release of the Oculus Rift and other HMDs in the coming months, I expect that many of our institutions will be interested in exploring how these technologies will be useful for collaboration, research, and education, so I'm sure we'll have much to discuss.  

I've scheduled our first meeting of the year for next Tuesday, February 2, 2016 at 3:00 PM EST / 12:00 PM PST, with monthly meetings on the first Tuesday of the month through July, at which point we can revisit the schedule to see if changes are needed.  You may wish to reserve the following dates on your calendar for 3:00 PM EST / 12:00 PM PST:

February 2, 2016

March 1, 2016

April 5, 2016

May 3, 2016

June 7, 2016

July 5 2016

I believe Ben is going to host the February meeting on the Bluejeans platform, but I'm hoping we can discuss alternative platforms to meet virtually for future meetings, since I am a fan of "eating our own dogfood", as they say.

Many thanks to Ben for helping me get started, and I look forward to our discussion next week!

Sincerely,

- Chris

Chris M. Collins (Avatar: Fleep Tuque)

Center for Simulations & Virtual Environments Research (UCSIM)

Division of Innovation & Partnerships, Research & Development

UC Office of Information Technologies (UCIT)

University of Cincinnati

400 University Hall

PO Box 210658

Cincinnati, OH 45221-0658

(513) 556-3018

http://ucsim.uc.edu