Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2014 – SF. My flights and accommodation were paid for by myself, however VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.
This is a summary of my notes from Thursday’s general session. Firstly, a photo from the blogger’s table.
Robin Matlock was up first. She offered the following statistics on the week:
- 9300 HOLs, 87000+ VMs this week (that number will go up as the HOLs don’t close until 3pm)
- Destination giveback raised $248,460
She then introduced Jane McGonigal (@avantgame).
She shared research on how games change how we do stuff. Check out her book “Reality is Broken”. Here’re few stats:
- 1 billion people spend an hour a day playing games on some kind on a connected device (phones, consoles, tablets, etc)
- 300 million minutes a day playing Angry Birds
- Call ofDuty – 170hrs per year on average
- Gallup – 81% of people are not engaged with their jobs.
- 92% of 2yo children play games in the US
“It’s inevitable, soon we’ll all be gamers”
Use our skills as gamers to do good in the world. She has been studying this for 13 years and has a PhD in how games can change our life. Positive emotions can be had from gaming
She then got the crowd to engage in massively-multiplayer thumb wrestling. The first to pin someone’s thumb wins. Positive emotions are the neurological foundation of resilience – “the opposite of play isn’t work – it’s depression”. Self-suppression (escaping feelings) vs self-expansion (you want something from the game – to challenge yourself).
Robin then introduces the next speaker, James Patten.
James does a lot with how we interact with computers. He’s very interested in building new interfaces that take advantage of human abilities, rather than us having to do all of the work to get things out of machines. Check out some of the projects on his site, they’re pretty cool. Maybe the coffee table is the computer of the future? Turn the surface into an interactive space where the objects come alive to help you solve a complex problem.
The final speaker is Sean Gourley.
He covers a number of topics in clouding the concept of Man vs the Machine and an example using Kasporov’s Freestyle Chess. It’s not about artificial intelligence, it’s about augmented intelligence (humans and machines teaming up to solve problems). Go check out Quid – it’s a really awesome looking tool (based on the short demo I saw).
And that’s a wrap. 4 stars.