Just think: Somewhere in the bowels of Intel, there’s a marketing executive who said something like this in a meeting: “Hey, you know what people really need to get excited about virtual reality? A big old jam session of ‘Walkin’ On The Sun’!” Like, they didn’t even think to use “All Star,” and yet that person probably got high-fives and bonuses for such a genius brainstorm. From Wired:
Second Life is so last year. Intel CEO Paul Otellini’s keynote address Monday at the International CES conference in Las Vegas will focus on the theme of “Third Life.”
Otellini’s presentation, in which photorealistic 3-D avatars of Smash Mouth band members will jam in a virtual garage, is designed to show how the convergence of multicore processing power, streaming media, virtual worlds and social networking could change the way we will all work and play.
“Having your 2-D picture on Facebook.com just scratches the surface of what’s possible now with online socialization,” said Jerry Heneghan, CEO of “serious game” developer Virtual Heroes, which partnered with several other companies to put together the virtual jam session for Otellini’s keynote.
“In the very near future, consumers will be able to easily create a photorealistic 3-D avatar of themselves with their own head using digital pictures and infuse these digital humans with their own personality,” said Heneghan, whose company develops games used to teach doctors, soldiers and others how to handle real-life situations. “This capability will facilitate communication, collaboration, play and dynamic interaction with others in virtual worlds and MMO games.”…
The physically separated Smash Mouth rockers — some onstage, some backstage — will use peer-to-peer technology developed by music-collaboration company eJamming to play their song “Walkin’ on the Sun” within a virtual garage created using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3.
The company had to be called eJamming, didn’t it? Who wants to bet that everyone wore matching polos to “celebrate” the occasion?
Virtual Smash Mouth Jam Planned For Intel Keynote [Wired via Crickets]
Wow! Virtual Reality has just become even lamer than reality Reality….
Hey Paul Otellini, look at that giant shit I just took in the middle of your office floor. It’s virtual! Go ahead, touch it!
Just kidding. I shit on your floor.
I guess iJamming and jamming 2.0 and jamming.com and virtual jamming and compu-jamming and electro-jamming and collaborative teleradiophonics were all taken.
How does this figure in to the next Shrek movie?
I hope Lawnmower Man kills everyone in here, especially Smashmouth.
@qyntellspitbull: of course he will; why else would Jobe be so angry?
I’m fairly certain if we showed this “jam session” to William Gibson back in the mid 80s the whole cyberpunk think would have never happened.
We are at the point where Rock Band is becoming Serious Business.
This is the perfect promotional cross over for when I introduce my schematics to integrate pre-purchased 3-D digital avatars into the ending of Jerry Zucker’s “Rat Race”. The future is Breckin Meyer-licious.