The slides for my talk at DebConf22: https://indiebio.co.za/interoperability-metaverse-debian.html
Video recording: https://debconf22.debconf.org/talks/14-interoperability-and-the-metaverse-positioning-debian-in-the-emerging-ecosystem/
Pdf of slides (18MB) : https://indiebio.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/14-interoperability-and-the-metaverse-positioning-debian-in-the-emerging-ecosystem.pdf
And source code (link may change once conference is concluded): https://salsa.debian.org/debconf-team/public/share/debconf22/-/tree/main/indiebio-metaverse-Debian
still building, a good draft should be available here around 20 July 2022. For now it’s just random ramblings.
Why?
I am trained as a bioprocess engineer, then did water-related research which spills over into urban metabolism, which I want to visualise in an interactive 3D sort of way (what I mean with the metaverse). Through my work in water sensitive city research I learnt about landscape architecture which I think is beautiful! and crucial with regards to our relationship with the urban environment and cities … and I would like to communicate that with the general public. For that I need a topographical digital twin earth simulation that is accessible to the everyday person and beautiful and fun to play with. And then my current business partner contacted me to do some writing for him and then he decided to fund my day-to-day while I develop this, with the requirement that it needs to have relevance to e-commerce. So very random but I’m having a lot of fun!
My original idea was a game, but I think a platform is better: https://debconf19.debconf.org/talks/111-the-metaverse-gaming-and-the-metabolism-of-cities/
I am now trying to prepare a talk about the standards and things that makes this efficient and interoperable for this year’s Debian conference: https://debconf22.debconf.org/talks/14-interoperability-and-the-metaverse-positioning-debian-in-the-emerging-ecosystem/ I don’t really know what I’m doing but this is so new that it doesn’t matter.
Side quest: Before I went down all sorts of rabbitholes, I was tasked to commission a building/headoffice “in the metaverse” which basically meant Decentraland. I was horrified because of the speculation and high price of land parcels there and the place is ugly, in my opinion. Then I thought to launch an architecture competition to improve this, but when I spoke to architects and designers and the polygon limitations came up and this frustrated me even more. So then I lost my temper and decided I’ll build a FOSS metaverse that has an e-commerce component. Then I found Vircadia but then I got distracted with low poly twin earth with topography and now I’m just all over the place. I still want to do the architecture competition but there’s lots of things that need to be in place for that to work properly – and that’s where the interoperability rabbithole started. This competition discussion has a discord: https://discord.gg/xmpNSs8t If there are similar initiatives out there please let me know?