Impressions : Earthdance Global OM in Second Life

Today I attended the Earthdance Global Festival for Peace in Second Life. This is actually a first life organization and gathering that has taken on a virtual world component as well.

Main:

http://earthdance.org/

and the SL component:

http://www.earthdancenetwork.com/group/earthdancemysticalmastery

This was the third year in a row I attended. Today's events included a show with Cypress Rosewood performing with the Changhigh Trinity Sisters doing their fireshow. I've actually enjoyed Cypress' music since before he was Cypress -- he is Tony Gerber in first life, a member of Spacecraft as well as a solo artist:

http://cypressrosewood.com/Home.html

The Changhigh Trinity Sisters show is always a treat. If you want a good example of what can be done with building and graphical elements in Second Life integrated into a performing artist's show, check them out.






And here are myself and my friend Rain scoping it all out:




The event centers around the Global Peace Prayer that is played around the world at a synchronized time so that everyone taking part can pray and take in and send out positive energy in whatever way they wish. You can even download the track and play it at your leisure.

Even though it was only an hour (for Cypress' show) and 10 minutes (for the prayer) that I took part, it was the highlight of my day that I looked forward to all week, as well as a reminder that we are all interconnected and how I can be open to the world.

For a more thorough writeup, see this CNN iReport by any1 Gynoid:

http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-334376

ThinkBalm

I found a neat new company to research and keep a 3-D eye on. It's called ThinkBalm:

http://www.thinkbalm.com/

As stated on the website, the mission is:

"ThinkBalm offers independent IT industry analysis and strategy consulting services."

And specifically this is in the area of "work-related use of the Immersive Internet." This means that they are doing research and analysis and consulting in 3-D web technologies like virtual worlds and other like technologies. There's also a LinkedIn group, which is where I found out about them in the first place whilst browsing the profile of someone else who works at IBM. The group is a community for discussion and brainstorming around the aforementioned ideas.

http://www.thinkbalm.com/community/

Tonite I visited their island in Second Life, the ThinkBalm Data Garden.



They display some nifty 3-D data visualization examples, specifically around data regarding virtual world adoption in business. There's a neat activity regarding barriers to adoption that I can agree with, specifically in getting users interested in the technology and the problem of inadequate hardware.

I think the data visualization is what draws me in here. I've seen a few different data-viz technologies in Second Life. Being a programmer and having written a few intermediately complex scripts myself, I'm extremely curious at what the technologies and programming aspects are of the mechanisms. It's also really really cool to see a set of data represented in 3-D. It's not a new idea, of course, but the technologies are new enough that there are lots of companies doing research and development in this area. But it's really cool to see a company say, here's data on the research we did, in a 3D representation, which is totally appropriate for a virtual world company.

I found a report that they just published:

http://www.thinkbalm.com/2009/05/26/thinkbalm-publishes-business-value-study/

Check it out if you have time. There is an event coming in October for people new to the LinkedIn group to get to know each other. If I'm not on a real-work meeting at the time, I will attend and blog about it then!