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SAGTA presentation: The metaverse, gaming and the metabolism of cities; Building connection across boundaries

IN DRAFT

This talk was given at the South African Geography Teachers Conference (SAGTA) in Pretoria on 21 June 2019. The talk was well received and I found useful resources related to GIS. I hope to pilot a version of the game, or at least the data gathering and interpretation in a school project which would help update the geography curriculum too.

The presentation is in html and can be found here (link to follow) or downloaded in pdf here (link to follow).

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Braindump: Metaverse, gaming and metabolism of cities talk

As soon as my talk appointments solidified I froze up with writer’s block, and the, to me, massive challenge of learning all the stuff just to tell the story of what I want to do, nevermind doing it! For a start, I would like to give the talk in Javascript to make it interactive and allow better transfer between platforms (I think … html and all that??), which is enough of a challenge already. So, to help myself unclog, a dump of the rough notes I’ve been accumulating. This post will probably change often, but stay messy, and each talk will get its own dedicated post as the focus will be unique for each.

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Magicverse and urban resilience

The Fortnite, Water and the Metaverse post was barely cold when a friend sent me this article about Magic Leap, under the leadership of Rony Abovitz, and their Magicverse. 

From the Magic Leap blog: “The Magicverse is an Emergent System of Systems bridging the physical with the digital, in a large scale, persistent manner within a community of people. “

“Essentially, Magic Leap envisions a future in which any location — ranging from a room to a whole country — has not only a physical presence, but also a digital one that takes the form of various layers. One layer might focus on health and wellness, for example, and another on entertainment, and still another on mobility.”

magicverse layers
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Bio-economy, Green Economy and the Circular Economy – same same?

It’s confusing, isn’t it? They are mostly political terms, so the exact definitions are probably non-existent, but let’s settle for vague. I do think they’re different and important to distinguish, so here’s my stab at explaining what the differences are between bio-, green and the circular economy, and then I throw in water sensitive design as a bonus. Oh, and distributed. That’s what all of these have in common. This is just my opinion, of course.

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Engineers: we need to talk.

Something happened today which made me think about how we deal with ‘respect’, and the ‘old guard’ and ‘engineers’. I’m still processing what happened and many of the people I am discussing this with requests confidentiality, so maybe I’ll update this later once we agree on it all and have their permission. It did remind me of a few things, most notably a workshop on complexity we had in March 2018.

Sometimes when people ask me why Future Water exists, before I go into the transdisciplinary blah blah company line, I say that we’re trying to teach engineers to talk to other people. It started as a joke, because it was launched by a team who consisted mostly of engineers, and is currently hosted in the Engineering Faculty, but I am more and more convinced that is what our true purpose is.

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