metaverse – indiebio

15 July 202615 July 2026

Build your own floating island

More playing with Claude. The idea is to create a “home” to play and build on, ala sim game (ideally, Godus like) that is based on topography of the physical world.

The pipeline now goes: draw a box over your chosen area – the starting point at the moment is São Miguel island, Azores → fetch real elevation → click a contour ring to set the coastline (doesn’t have to be the actual coastline… rediscover Atlantis 🙂 ) → carve.

An important point is the idea is to be inspired by physical reality, not tied to it. Part of this is the “sculpted, not surveyed” nature of the renders, so it sometimes has artefacts. That’s intentional.

It’s still very buggy, of course, but check it out!

27 January 202627 January 2026

The use of disruptive technologies towards improving the functions of the World Network of Biosphere Reserves (WNBR).

This is a draft Notice of Intent to Apply (NOI)² for the New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) 2026 International Joint Initiative for Research Harnessing Disruptive Technologies to Address Global Challenges¹

20 January 202620 January 2026

Building an eco-feminist metaverse

This is chewing through the philosophy of the biosphere metaverse project. It’s still messy, and trigger warning, it involves mention of patriarchy and ecofeminism. In more developed framing it won’t mention these to avoid the hangups around the words. Probably won’t mention metaverse either for the same reason.

outline:

Background: why does patriarchy persist
Pathological defences against loss applied to our relationship with nature
Repairing relationship through association, ways of listening
A globally accessible ecosystem of integrated data
Case study: UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves (WNBR)
Funding

13 January 202613 January 2026

Care-giving, care-taking, and the feminist metaverse

In the past week, friends have had intertwining conversations that I want to try weave together here. The overarching theme is the power of information to make care, visible. To make the connections and relationships between everything visible. If this in turn has the power to change anything, well, that is another thing and where the post unravels towards the end.

15 December 20258 January 2026

Building the ecology of the Metaverse

We are a collective, using digital technologies to address the challenge of interacting with complex knowledge ecosystems. We use people-centric technology development to empower informed, accountable action from the bottom up. Using digital hyper-connected, integrated technologies – what we understand as the Metaverse – potentially gives grassroots initiatives the ability to contribute to the growing integrated knowledge ecosystem – the Metaverse as an ecosystem – and thereby scale their efforts and networks globally. We are looking for consortium members to pursue research funding, or strategic partnerships with companies interested in the commercial potential of these approaches. Please find some use cases below with more information. We also welcome anyone to join the journey; find us on Discord – the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group (OMI) (website: omigroup.org/) or email me at bernellev@gmail.com.

7 December 202525 December 2025

OSCC2025 talk: MetaCulture = Metagaming + Integrated knowledge infrastructures

The Open Simulator Community Conference is my first virtual conference!
OSCC2025 schedule: https://conference.opensimulator.org/schedule/
my talk: https://conference.opensimulator.org/events/metaculture-metagaming-integrated-knowledge-infrastructures/
Watch it on Youtube : www.youtube.com/AvaconOrg/
Join the conversation:
The conference Discord is at AvaCon
The conversation in OMI Discord (long term): Inclusive Communities Research

21 August 202521 August 2025

MetaPlay: Biosphere reserves, glass cliffs and the project in a sentence

The sentence, drumroll, is:

Any approaches that embrace a feminist ethic of care need to balance that with scientific rigour and accountability.

(OK, it doesn’t talk about how to project addresses that, and what the aim and objectives are. So not really the project in a sentence. But it’s the crux of it.)

6 August 20256 August 2025

What we play is life, version v5.2 – methodology development, causing yet another total rewrite

The previous post – version 5.1 was a mess and I found it really hard to work through all that stuff. Part of my frustration is the feeling that I am doing this to get academic research funds, but I don’t really care about this aspect of the academic rigour, and that doesn’t do wonders for the motivation. That changed this week. I’m really starting to see the value in it, for designing an actual game, for example, and I’m having fun! My brain hurts, but hey.

I’m currently looking at building something like a participation curiosity scale or something like that, inspired by Kahan’s article. I’m a bit embarrassed to say I’ve been quoting Tim Harford left and right since 2017, but only actually read the article that he quotes this week, spurred on by Ricardo’s mention of causal approaches and me having a panic about how one measures ‘replacing judgement with curiosity’.

Scientifically literate people, remember, were more likely to be polarised in their answers to politically charged scientific questions. But scientifically curious people were not.

Curiosity brought people together in a way that mere facts did not.
Continue reading “What we play is life, version v5.2 – methodology development, causing yet another total rewrite”

17 July 202517 July 2025

What we play is life

This is the fifth iteration of my project idea. Wow. Previous version: The potential for emergent games to foster curiosity

The quote “What we play is life” is attributed to Louis Armstrong, and suggests that the way we approach and engage with activities, whether they are games, hobbies, or even daily tasks, reflects our attitude towards life itself.

15 February 202515 February 2025

Notes from the book For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution by Christopher Tozzi

I enjoyed reading this book; a lot of nuances I didn’t quite get before is explained – like the ongoing grumbles between the “Free” and “Open” camps, what KDE and Gnome is, why there’s a Wayland and why despite it being better I have to keep going back to X11 instead. I also read this book to try and gaze into the crystal ball to see if we could perhaps learn from the mistakes of the earlier FOSS developments as we build the Metaverse. I add some questions regarding that after some of the highlights below.