Don’s Conference Notes — The 2022 NISO Plus Conference Column Editor: Donald T. Hawkins (Freelance Editor and Conference Blogger) <dthawkins@verizon.net> Column Editor’s Note: The full text of all my conference notes are available online on the Charleston Hub at https://www. charleston-hub.com. — DTH
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he virtual 2022 NISO Plus Conference, organized by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), convened on February 15-17 and attracted about 650 attendees. In his opening remarks, Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive Director, said that the goals of the conference were to generate ideas and practical solutions to problems. He noted that this approach has been successful; three projects were launched based on suggestions from last year’s conference. This article contains full descriptions of the plenary presentations and brief summaries of the other sessions.
Virtual reality (VR) seems to be where most of the action is today. It has many potential applications in education, medicine, training, engineering, and other fields. According to a consulting study, sales of VR headsets are increasing, as this graph shows. Virtual Reality (VR) Headset Unit Sales Worldwide from 2019 to 2024 (In million units)
Opening Keynote: Welcome to the Metaverse In his opening keynote address entitled “Welcome to the Metaverse: The Profound Consequences of a Science-Fiction Vision,” Dr. Siva Vaidhyanathan, Robertson Professor of Media Studies, director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia, and author of The Googlization of Everything (University of California Press, 2011), noted that when Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, recently announced a change of the company’s name to Meta, he did not describe his Dr. Siva Vaidhyanathan vision of a metaverse. Vaidhyanathan characterizes a metaverse as “the operating system of our lives.” A knowledge of the the operating system of a computer used to be crucial because it is its “central nervous system.” Now, however, many of the companies of Silicon Valley are striving to manage, monitor, and monetize everything in our lives, which will be a driving force to growth and is imperative to many companies — even more than profit. The metaverse is implicit in the ideology of our lives: see Neal Stephenson’s novel, Snow Crash (Bantam Books, 1992).
Against the Grain / April 2022
“Metaverse” is probably more than just really good VR. Augmented reality (AR) with VR is a very powerful combination; AR requires a lens (such as a smartphone) on which information can be overlaid; it is already being applied to displays in automobiles. We are tagging and monitoring the human body and seem to be enthusiastic about allowing the monitors into our lives. Tracking and wearables are becoming increasingly popular. For example, smart clothing that can monitor bodily functions has begun to be used by athletes practicing for a sporting event. We are not only monitoring the performance of the human body but also environments in which the body exists, such as our homes to monitor the performance of our appliances, alarm systems, etc. Cryptocurrencies are becoming a big part of our vision of the metaverse because economies to facilitate exchanges are developing, and they need a currency that is easily managed globally. We are considering all types of human interaction and data flows. In the 1990s, we had the concept of logging on to a distant place such as a chat room or a server, interacting, and then moving away. Such activities were a different part of our daily activities, but since 2007, we have been carrying devices that are always on so VR activities seem outmoded because they are separate spaces. Therefore, there is no longer a distinction between “online” and “offline,” and we have had to make a new start, get beyond the VR picture of metaverse, and look at a fully connected collection of human bodies. Over the next few years, Vaidhyanathan will be investigating the implications of efforts to enhance, embed, and fuse VR, AR, haptics, wearable technology, self-tracking, “smart” devices and appliances and applications, automobiles, “smart” cities, and cryptographic assets. For people with limited abilities, many of these applications will be tremendous enhancements to the quality of their lives.
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