I only attended the second day of this two day conference - due to a mixture of other commitments, the relatively high cost of the event and the strong commercial focus (in contrast I will be going to a SL event run by CETIS and Eduserve next week in London which is completely educationally focussed and is FREE!). Although there were some excellent and extremely interesting presentations, I don't regret only attending one of the days as I don't think that I would have got the additional value needed to reflect the increased cost.Once at the event, I found out that it was being streamed, free of charge, into SL - had I known this beforehand I would have tried to attend at least some of the presentations on the first day 'in world' - if not both days! However, there was a downside to this for SL delegates, in that they could only see the speakers, not their presentations, which was a shame. Andy Powell blogged about this and compiled a video of the experience which is worth a look (I even have a cameo at one point as I did visit the conference in-world as well as being present in RL).
Some of the presentations that I did get to see on the second day were not quite what I expected - but were interesting never-the-less. The keynote, Digital Earth and Virtual Worlds, looked at how serious games and virtual worlds can be exploited to have a positive impact on global issues especially climate (in terms of reducing our combined carbon footprint etc.). Well worth a look. Prof Lizbeth Goodman then gave another thought provoking presentation on what she and her team had been able to do with games and virtual worlds that are having real and positive impacts on the children and parents of children with terminal illnesses. Some amazing stuff.
The other presentations Serious Medical Uses of VW, Virtual Disaster Management, were much more the kind of thing that I was expecting and provided examples of the current and cutting edge developments in terms of photo-realism and how serious games were being used as educating tools within medicine and disaster management - in fact there seems to be quite a lot about modelling terrorist attacks and how different agencies (medical, military) react to them and getting them to improve what they do by immersing the students in what were (in some cases) extremely realistic virtual simulations.
Conference url: http://www.seriousvirtualworlds.net/index.php
Venue: Coventry TechnoCentre
Wireless: Excellent
Power access: Very poor (unfortunately)
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