UBM/CMP’s Life 2.0 Spring’08 conference was held last week, starting with Mitch Kapor’s keynote opener on Monday.
Weaving parts of the six days of the 3rd Life 2.0 conference into my free time, around attending group meetings for the three isles & orgs that I help manage (ISM Spaceport Alpha, NASA CoLab, and Spindrift, all in the SciLands), gave me a great week of peering into the near-future of mixed reality events and the now of virtual-only events and conferences.
During one of the last day’s presentations, the speaker was asked about the carbon footprint of the event; the organizer, John Zhaoying of UBM World2World, part of ThinkServices division of United Business Media (formerly CMP Metaverse), had the audited numbers he had commissioned for the Fall ’07 event available. He told the audience that CarbonNeutral.com’s figures showed that the estimated 1200 tons of carbon produced if it had been a realworld six day meeting was replaced by 4 tons of carbon – total. (This is roughly equivalent to six MWh, megawatt-hours of electricity, or to my personal yearly electric consumption of 500 KiloWatt hours a month).
We expand on this with SciEye’s upcoming exclusive interview with John Zhaoying, John Jainschigg in real life: carbon, future trends, and the advantages and disadvantages of running VR conferences.
“Exclusive interview!?!” “Yes, it’s the only one he gave at 4am, March 26th.”
Spindrift, in SciLands, Second Life 