The old debate, but with a new twist...

The argument for technology in sport, and in particular in football is one that has been raging for quite some time now.

Whether technology will improve the sport, lose the personal angle, make football closer to its American counter-part, (Note: When I say football I mean the version you play with your feet), is still very much part of the debate.

So last night when watching the England game it was quite refreshing to see the same debate alive once more, but this time 2 strikers debating who it was that scored. This was of course England's match against Andora, and while I won't dwell on the (awful) performance, the question mark over whether to award a goal to Nugent or to Defoe was quite a nice encapsulation of the debate for technology in society.

Now while after looking at the incident from a number of different angles it was reasonably clear that all of the ball had not crossed the line from Defoe's shot, the interesting point was that the "pub consensus" was that Nugent should get the goal regardless, and this was before seeing a conclusive replay. Why? It was his debut, and so would be a great boost for his confidence. But what if technology proved that it hadn't cleared the line?

You are now looking at a situation where 95% of the country would have wanted to do one thing, but the facts would mandate a different course of action. Now obviously in this case technology is simply a tool to establish a fact, but this gives a good example where maybe the insight that technology can give us is not something that we the public want.

A strong element is probably fear. Maybe we are going to get told some home truths based on data, and draw conclusions that before were not possible. For example, the current feedback rating system is very subjective. What if we instead were given facts on how quick people respond to email, how long it takes to dispatch their goods, etc. Wouldn't that be more useful? Probably. Would people want that kind of data logged about them? probably not.

One thing for sure though is that perceptions change, and with technology increasingly becoming pervasive in peoples lives so will the acceptance of it. As for the football debate? I'm all for goal line technology, as most cases decide matches rather than simply goal scorers. Of course, had this debate been going on 40 years ago, I can guarantee I would have said no, as England's world cup glory did hang in the balance of a linesman's decision. That's one fact I certainly don't want to know the truth about...even to this day.

There's no place like Home?

Sony's 'Home' is beginning to look very impressive.

Having initially saw a 10 second clip on the bbc news I was initially very dissmissive, however having watched a proper walkthrough demo from the GDC (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7pk0QMfN6s), I couldn't help but to be a little impressed.

So for starters, graphically this looks much more how you would expect a Virtual World to look. The motion is smooth, the colours are vivid and generally it's a much more appealing environment. Worth bearing in mind that this is obviously aided by having a standardised platform to run on (the PS3), and that the video is from a conference demo so the paths through the world may have been carefuly crafted, so no dodgy user created content that you may experience in SL. But, on the whole the experience seems very engaging.

But, the one thing I've not seen a decent demo of yet is how easy it is to create content. The GDC video shows some basic customizations of avatar and prefab buildings, but no demo (that I've found), yet for some serious content generation. The promise of SDKs and Maya tie-in certainly sounds very promising, but whether this will be as accessible to the average user as Second Life is at the moment remains to be seen Features such as sharing your media files easily between friends is a very cool idea, as is the ability to extend the game experience by having your personal hall of fame available. So maybe the ability to take a simply build and customize it yourself is the right model to reach the myspace / facebook generation, it seems like a good fit. But for business to start adopting we're going to need a whole lot more capability for bulding and customization. Beta starts next month, so lets see what happens.

The marketeers strike back!

I saw this yesterday, thanks to my wonderful girlfriend who works in marketing. It looks like the second life message is getting more and more into the minds and indeed homes of those outside of the technology industry. So the brand is getting out there, but is the message?

The inevitable backlash to metaverse has begun. Beechwood do make some valid points regarding the fidelity of the experiene, I.e. Slow, clunky etc, but like many skeptics focus on where technology is today, rather than thinking about enabling the business of the future. Like with those who benefited from the .com boom, the ones who will benefit are those who can extend their core business into this new arena to offer an enhanced experience, not simply having a presence for the sake of it. So maybe the skeptisism is justified for now, certainly businesses should work out what they hope to achieve before jumping in, but lets not dismiss second life purely as hype. Yes its slow, yes its difficult to find what you want, yes the sex industry is the quickest and biggest adopter, but then 12 years ago you could say the same thing about the web...and that has turned out to be quite useful.

2 days, 2 posts

So far so good then.

After much playing around I've manged to get my phone talking to my blog now, so my excused for not blogging are getting less and less. As its a pda/phone hybrid it also means that I should have the facility to be able to upload images on the move and with its GPS capability, maybe even store where I was at the time of transmission. Now why anyone (including me) would care about that at this stage I'm not entirely sure, but maybe it'll come in handy in the future...perhaps for travel blogs?

hmmm

Thats a thought. Would be useful to store my photos with gps co-ordinates so when someone else visits that location they could know how to get there. I'll stick that as anohter one on my list of things to do.

A new day, a new blog

So in an attempt to try and join the blogging generation (once again), I've now been enticed to blogger.com thanks to the automatic email update capability. If it works, and I'm hoping this will, maybe I'll actually start blogging a bit more.

Well, I'm an optimist, so lets see if this works!