Here are 3 articles for today:

Gaia Online tees up its massively multiplayer online game

The missing ‘links’: Looking towards an augmented reality

Three steps to encourage corporate investment in virtual worlds

Here it is, what we have discussed at the SIG before, a mixing of RL and SL and representation of both on screen of some kind. These folks at Georgia Institute of Technology (http://arsecondlife.gvu.gatech.edu/index.html) show how avatars and humans, both seated within a designated AR stage area mix in a video. They also discuss MMO’s in general. Looks slightly odd and hard to tell what’s going on but this is right on the edge of the augmented reality direction for sure.  You can even teleport to their location:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Augmented%20Reality/41/74/38

They also have a longer video at: http://arsecondlife.gvu.gatech.edu/defensearmmoref.mov.

Ouch, watch the mic in the first minutes of this video. The birds and crickets also have a really good time in the background.

Business week has an interesting article “The End Of Work As You Know It -
Increasing connectivity will change how and where we labor—even the very notion of an employer”

The article mentions upcoming Virtual World SIG presenter Seriosity and also touches on augmented reality, Mechanical Turk, telepresence, and distributed workforces. We have discussed it in virtual world circles before but it’s the first big publication mention I have seen of how work processes could be deconstructed, distributed, and completed by contractors working around the world.

I’ve also tossed around the idea that work processes themselves could be deconstructed. For example: the task of identifying a tumor on an x-ray could be represented as a map or other image and then “acted upon” or spotted by a player (contractor) for a digital currency reward. Couldn’t other data manipulation tasks be abstracted as well? I can imagine a future of monotonous data entry or auditing being accomplished by a workforce that only viewed the data as “a game” or as elements in a virtual world. The source data would be even be somewhat encrypted by virtue of this “virtualization”. Great things to consider as we continue to redefine “virtual worlds” as they emerge.

Let’s continue the discussion at the upcoming SIG and I’ll also be speaking on the topic at the Virtual Worlds 2007 conference enterprise track where SDForum will have a presence with a booth and a VC forum.

Book discussed in the article:

The Future of Work