New World Notes embedded reporter Hamlet Au steps out-world to cover the Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose for GigaOM, and has written up a summarized list of his top 5 Conference highlights here. Among the 5: news on HiPiHi, the Sheep's new viewer, and the diversity of the attending crowd.

I was only there for Wednesday, and only got to see a few people, and I'm sorry I missed meeting Hamlet in RL. His work has been inspiring. He also asks of those who attended: What were your highlights? For me, it was just getting to meet my favorite SL residents face-to-face, including Adri Saarinen, Peter Newell, Haver Cole, and Colleen Desmoulins of Metaversatility; Spin Martin of Saijo City; Satchmo Prototype of the Electric Sheep; and even Philip Linden himself, chatting with Eureka Dejavu!

As always, it's the people who keep me coming back to SL.

(Via GigaOM)

Matthew Traum is an engineer with a blog called Design News. He writes in this article that he's spent some time covering SL and its potential for benefiting engineers, who will be able to tinker with complex systems without having to actually build those systems in RL, thus saving time and money.

While he's correct about that, a commenter on the site also reminds us that it's a complete pain to have to recreate existing CAD models using SL's closed prim creation system. Not being a content creator myself, and having only limited experience with the building tools, I can't speak to how quickly the average user can get up to speed in creating a model of any complexity. However, as Spin Martin has been talking about a lot recently, the other burgeoning virtual worlds, including whatever it is Google's up to, feature the killer app of being able to import 3D models from other programs, like the 3D Warehouse.

I don't know if it's possible at this point to add this functionality to SL, but it certainly seems like something LL should be concerned about. In a platform that touts user creation, it seems foolish to limit the creativity of its users to a proprietary set of tools. Open us up, LL!

The Life 2.0 Summit, produced by CMP Technology/Dr. Dobb's Journal, is a quarterly conference on metaverse technology and best-practice for software developers and business stakeholders seeking to understand and use Second Life and other metaverse environments for customer engagement, commerce, collaboration, education, simulation and research.

The summit is on now and running until Friday. Below the fold, you'll find a roundup of today's schedule.