Open Habitat Team's Blog Posts:

You can imagine that a low cost, low quality version of something like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiY45jALWjE
might create some interesting creative possibilities in a shared virtual environment.
I've found a few 3D scanning systems like this that use projected bands of light. The physical components of these systems tend to be off-the-shelf digital cameras and data projectors, with most of the clever stuff happening in the software. This suggests that the future price of similar systems will plummet as the home-brew crowd reverse engineer the software (Patents de-pending). If a low-cost device could be manufactured to project the correct pattern of light onto your face, your webcam could capture your face, and the virtual world client could perform the necessary processing required to beam you into a shared space.
This systems would allow users in multi-user virtual environment to present themselves in the form of a realtime 'hologram'.
It would be interesting to see how the eye-contact problem present in video conferencing systems, translates in such a holo-conferencing system.

In the future, the Augmentationist's avatars will look like this:
http://www.spiral-scratch.com/index.php?page=gamecam3d

Why does an avatar have to look like a Pre–Raphaelite painting? Cubist tries hard to look cubist, but Ian would prefer to look like an impressionist painting. Vibrancy and life at the expense of detail.

Imagine a shared space occupied by the live 'holograms' of real people like the one in the link. How would a virtual meeting be different if you could virtually shake hands at the start? Maybe people could learn dance moves together. (Dance distance learning?). The lack of authentic body language cues in conventional conferencing systems is a major problem. Slightly glitchy, but undeniably alive avatars might give off all the right signals to improve our chances of accurately judging mood.

The scary thing is, this could be actually quite straightforward, technically. We should play.

I've been messing about with full 360 x 180 degree panoramics. When you map one of these photographs onto a sphere and walk inside it, it gives a good sense of being in a real space. The image distorts a little as you move around in the sphere, but your brain seems to be able to make adjustments quite easily, so I can imagine that you could map other objects within this space and you would get a reasonable sense of their position in relation to the projected panoramic. If you had a bunch of avatars inside this space, and each avatar had a rectangular cone object which projected out in the direction they were facing (the cone would correspond to the field of view of their camera), then everyone would be able to see what they were looking at. This would be very useful in group discussion about the location of the panoramic image that everyone was inside. It would also indicate when someone was looking you in the face, providing another valuable visual cue in the 3D virtual space. Browsers and whiteboards could also be placed within the sphere to facilitate the discussion.
I reckon all of this is do-able with Wonderland.

Preparing to give a conference talk at 6am on a Monday morning is possibly not the most appetizing of thoughts. But when you are speaking to an audience in Kuala Lumpur and you are still in London then the delivery times become somewhat constrained.  The symposium on Second Life was a session scheduled as part of the LYICT conference held a couple of weeks ago and I admit if it hadn't been for the Elluminate video feed and my fashion reputation I would have been tempted to to remain in my dressing gown for the whole thing. There were four of us on the UK end of the panel (Helen Keegan, Graham Attwell and David White) with a jet lagged Steve Wheeler fronting the show in  Malaysia. Technically a risky venture but it worked, just.

With only had 10 minutes to fill I wanted to keep the presentation short and simple. After some last minute dithering I decided to tackle one of the recurring criticisms of Second Life - the perceived lack of innovation in many  in-world learning and teaching activities. The result was an identification of six barriers:

1. Technical - machine and human related [and standards related]
2. Identity - the tension between playfulness and professionalism
3. Culture - reading the codes and etiquette of SL
4. Collaboration - building trust
5. Time - even simple things take time
6. Economic - nothing is for free

These are expanded in the slideshare presentation (which has been updated since the original talk) and feel
comprehensive - there are probably more I agree but that depends on the
level of granularity one wants to go into:

One of the interesting points that came out of this whole exercise was choice of technology. Originally we had planned to deliver the session from Second Life but the advance testing revealed what a challenge it would be. Not only were we going to have to trust the technical robustness of the platform (gulp) but we were also forced to assess the question of added value from using Second Life? Fighting server lag, low bandwidth problems, variable audio quality and the sheer awkwardness of manipulating an in-world slide viewer were just too much to contemplate so we shifted to the Elluminate - an audiographic video conferencing tool. But what really tipped it for me was the lack of tools in SL for getting feedback from the audience. How do I know I am being heard - do I need to adjust volume, where is the back channel for people to participate, ask questions  ... and so on? Status indicators are key. I think using SL for conferencing requires caution ... think about the value-added, why make life difficult when it is not necessary? As a final thought, translated into pictures, here is a vision for SL that would help make it more usable - a whiteboard, an integrated IRC type chat client and a status indicator panel - perfect:

Some more quick thoughts on Wonderland.
Wonderland is basically a 3D conferencing tool, a bit like a 3D version of Elluminate. Rather than avatars, it would be more useful to see a live video stream of the people you are communicating with. Bandwidth restrictions would probably limit this to low-rez versions of each participant's webcam, but even this in the 3D space would be useful. As a participant watches you move around, they would get a sense of what you are looking at, as your video image would be orientated to face that thing. In group meetings, the direction that you are looking would make sense in the 3D space. If you look to someone on your left, your video image would seem to be looking at the same person in the 3D space. This would provide valuable cues to enhance social cohesion. If someone decided to wander off, you could follow them, see what they are drawing or browsing, and engage in a meaningful conversation with them about it.