I was curious to attend this session, especially as I have attended hardly any. I guess this session showed me I did not miss anything. However the session is pretty packed and I am getting bits of useful information.

2 1/2D - this term refers to ease of accessibility of the content. Immersion might occur inside us, not in the games.

I noted Keith McCurdy from Vivaty.com, the company that developed application for Facebook recently, and I wrote about it recently.

In fact, Social Networks came up as a point of overlap. However , as a counterpoint, some members of social networks do not want reality, they want fantasy. And Facebook and virtual worlds dont sync up too well and the asyncronous nature of Facebook is harder to interface with the syncronous nature of most Virtual World.

A useful metric is visits per month (up) while time spent per session (down) for virtual worlds.

Another idea is Empty Bar, only turn on a URL or experience after an event (commercial or show, etc).

Which reminds me, I spoke to Dr. Heiner Wolf of www.weblin.com today (see second photo); weblin.com has a pretty interesting avatar product with Co Browsing. I saw a few places where it could be used for a real time 2 way communication between content owner and visitors.

Questions?
1. Does utility like functions work for Virtual worlds? Not well, downloads cause 50% to 90%. However, retrendion increases for those downloading.

2. Does engagement mean imersion in 3d? The speakers argued about this one, especially about 3D vs 2D. It is not clear 3D = engagement.

3. Where is innovation, the next big thing going to come from? Could be a combo of UGC and Virtual Worlds creating a mass audience.

4. I asked a question on how to measure engagement - it was agreed more visits a month by engaged users spending longer per visit could be a valid metric.

That was pretty much the whole session. CoWatching videos is one area of future developments.