On February 16-17 2008 SHL hosted the Metaverse U Conference at Stanford University. Over two days attendees from across industry and academia interacted with leading thinkers on virtual worlds. A portion of the contributions from our sponsoring partners was spent to enable anyone to attend the full conference for free via Second Life. We were delighted to see the community get behind this mixed reality approach when participants from 5 different continents showed up. Virtual attendees were given equal footing in the Q&As with us alternating questions from the room and Second Life.

After the conference we shared all the videos from two full days of Metaverse U under Creative Commons licenses. To further see what the event looked like you can also check out pictures on Flickr tagged: metaverseu or go see Mark Terrano's 9 pages worth of great shots. We also gathered a list of blog posts in our conference wiki. As a side experiment we had volunteers interview all the participants about their views of the current state of the metaverse. We ended up with 58 profoundly interesting time capsule videos.

A second iteration of Metaverse U has now been announced: Save the Dates: Metaverse U conference on May 29th and 30th