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15 May 2007
XTech Day 1 - the Ubiquitous Web
Posted by Paul Miller at May 15, 2007 12:22 PM
I'm in Paris for the XTech conference, along with a good number of colleagues from Talis. Ian Davis speaks on Wednesday, and Rob and I are giving papers on Thursday. In unrelated news, we're sponsoring the conference too, and it's great to see people walking around with our new bags on their shoulders... I wonder how many will click through to the shiny new web site?
Continuing last week's theme of views from bedroom windows, I'm staying on the 31st floor of the conference hotel, with great views over La Défense, the Seine, and the prototype Statue of Liberty. I may have to invite Rob, his camera, and his Flickr account up to take a picture, with which to illustrate a later post!
Rather annoyingly, power and network are surprisingly scarce. I can see a (single) power socket, but would have to sit on the floor to use it. I can see two wireless networks with conference-related ssid's, but can't join them. A whispered explanation from Nad suggests that we're not allowed to use the network whilst speakers are presenting, to preserve limited bandwidth for their use. I really hope that's not true, and it's going to have an adverse effect upon my ability - and desire - to record the proceedings... and to read around the topics being presented in order to enrich my own understanding. When will conference organisers learn that technology conferences ought to provide attendees at their (expensive) events with power and bandwidth? Very disappointing.
That said, Timo Arnall's session on Physical Hyperlinks was very interesting, addressing some of the social obstacles to widespread deployment of various mobile device-readable links into the wild; it's technically feasible (presuming we don't run out of numbers), but people still feel uncomfortable using them in real-life environments such as the busy street. Nad has more detail, and Chris has a picture.
And just before lunch, Matt Biddulph took his audience down an interesting path, in which avatars sat atop 'real' molecules in Second Life in order to discuss their properties, and controllers in the physical world had an impact upon objects in virtual environments.
Image: “The small Statue of Liberty on the river Seine in Paris, France. The Statue of Liberty in New York is much larger. It faces west, towards its American sister.
Photographed by Adrian Pingstone in June 2002 and released to the public domain.”
Technorati Tags: Linked Data, open data, Talis, xtech, XTech2007
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