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“Surveillance is all about when people in authority know a lot about you. Instrumentation is when you know a lot about the world,” Cory Doctorow, Craphound.com, boingboing.net

When we spoke at the Virtual Worlds Forum in London last week, Cory Doctorow outlined a vision of how ways individuals tap into data and metadata to create instrumentation in “virtual” worlds might be thrown out into the “real” world to give people more agency there.

Cory D. turned my initial question inside out and gave a brilliant glimpse of something a little like Bruce Sterling’s idea for an Amazon.org. Amazon.org is a social software entity that can answer questions. Questions about our world. Questions about objects. “What questions? Not the profit-centric questions that obsess Amazon. The serious questions.” (Shaping Things)

“The Inverse of the Surveillance Society”

Me: What happens when Virtual Worlds become flooded with data from “real life” objects, geo- positioning, etc., and extreme life–logging enters virtual worlds?

Cory: Well this is like Spook Country the new Gibson novel – What happens when cyber space everts – hmmm? I’m not sure I have anything very pithy to say on that EXCEPT………

Apart from all the traditional kind of overlay reality stuff, if there is one thing I am actually interested seeing from a virtual world migrating to the real world its instrumentation.

I think lot of things that are characteristic of very successful internet based business is that they are extremely finally instrumented so like Amazon knows in aggregate on a second by second basis how their site is being used by people and they can twiddle the dials in real time.

As users of the world we have very little access to that kind of instrumentation. We don’t even know how the tube is running. The tube knows how the tube is running and we kinda of don’t. I would be really interested in seeing that. You’ve seen Joi Ito’s WoW interface right. Have you seen it …

Me: Ummm no! [But I have now. Joi Ito sent me a Flickr link to his photo. Thanks!]

Cory: When they are doing a raid at a certain point the number of instrument panels on his screen actually eclipses all of the vision of the raid you no longer actually see the raid. You are experiencing WoW through a purely numerical and data visualization system.

There are different abstraction layers at which you can experience the world and one of them is through the instrumentation of it. It is in some ways the inverse of the surveillance society.

Surveillance is all about when people in authority know a lot about you. Instrumentation is when you know a lot about the world. And it allows you have more agency. When people know a lot about you it takes away your agency.

Me: So is that on the lines of personalized virtual operation centers – like MySpace’s with instrumentation….?

I don’t have this fleshed out into a nice solid like a non abstract thing. But the thing that I have been noodling with is what if all the kinds of data visualization and aggregate statistical information about the world that big companies use in order to realize their enormous profit and control over us as individuals was in our hands.

This is a little like Bruce Sterling’s idea of an Amazon.org [see page 111 Shaping of Things] where all the data from the positional and temporal characteristics of all the objects that we own were in aggregate visible and available so that we can mix and match them remix them understand them and have more agency in the world.

I think that empiricism, measurement, understanding more about the world is the thing that the Enlightenment is grounded in. Like being able to write down how the world works using objective measurements being able to compare them with other people in terms of peer review and experimentation that is the core of what makes us contemporary human beings – post enlightenment, non alchemic, non superstitious, empiricism grounded people.

Being able to understand what is going on the world – How much RFI is there right now where I am standing? What frequencies is it running on? What are the aggregate histograms? Tell me about it. Are people looking at the web around here, or talking on their phones, or sending SMS? Am I in a spot where the thermal signature of lots of people is high or low? What was it like ten minutes ago? Is this typical or atypical of the characteristic histogram of thermal and electromagnetic energy in this space for this time, year on year, day on day, and hour on hour?

Just knowing that and knowing it on some liminal way where your clothes feel different based on whether the room is typical or atypical. That is a really interesting thing to know.

Games do this all the time. You know a lot about the way the game is performing by things like audio cues, like coloring cues, Also by cues that have to do with network jitter. You hop onto a shard with like a zillion people on it that shard performs differently. You don’t know when you walk into a room necessarily what the activity level in that room is, especially if it is a room subdivided by a lot of physical baffles and things that hide what is going on from you. But you know when you walk onto shard whether it is an active or inactive shard.

So can we grab all that stuff that lets us know a lot about the virtual world and exert agency over and influence over it and throw it into the “real” world.

That what be very cool.

A Global Virtual Worlds Open Source Community

Open Standards are frequently cited as a key part of what will make virtual worlds “fit for business.” But for a reverse surveillance society where virtual operations centers could be universal information resources for all of us open sourcing and open standards are also the key to tapping into the myriad data streams currently only available to business and government.

At the Virtual Worlds Forum in London the virtual worlds open source community was not on one panel together. But they were a small but noticeable cohort that caught my attention.

Of particular note was the presence of Adam Frisby of OpenSim, Adam Johnson of 3Di and Bjorn Lee of HiPiHi. HiPiHi and 3Di are both funded by the ngi group, Inc. And 3Di are developing a virtual worlds platform Jin-sei based on OpenSim. 3Di is now in a partnership with Mixi (the largest social networking site in Japan with over ten million users) developing virtual worlds on the Jin-sei platform. OpenSim is the BSD Licensed Open Source Initiative that has evolved from Second Life.

Some 3Di employees using Jin-sei

“3Di, Inc. believes its innovations will be the key to developing the new 3D Internet.”

The picture above shows the location of the 3Di offices in Tokyo - a location that may turn out to be significant.

3Di, Inc., a Tokyo based subsidiary of the Japanese holding company ngi group, Inc., aims to revolutionize the way virtual worlds and the web work together. 3Di, Inc., as an international company based in Japan, is uniquely positioned in the underdeveloped Japanese and Chinese markets to deliver language and culture sensitive solutions, while still maintaining a global perspective. 3Di, Inc. believes its innovations will be the key to developing the new 3D Internet.

Drivers of the 3D Internet:

Every time I saw Ian Hughes of IBM (far left) and Adam Frisby of OpenSim (next to Ian), Adam Johnson of 3Di, and Bjorn Lee of HiPiHi talking together. I couldn’t help thinking wow: “I am witnessing the team that will pioneer the 3D internet.”

So I decided to interview these four to who seemed to me to be already well on the way to being a global virtual worlds interoperability team.

While there were many interesting stories to tell at the Virtual Worlds Forum, I focused my attention on players who seemed to be weaving the following five virtual world threads together.

1) social networks 2) user generation 3) open source/standards 4) 3D immersive 5) social gaming

I also spoke to Ginsu Yoon, from Linden Lab. Linden Lab has been making interoperability and the movement to create open standards for virtual worlds a priority. But as Ginsu Yoon spoke from the podium on Linden Lab’s expansive vision for a 3D internet and podcasts will be available on the VWF site, I did not do an individual interview with him. But we spoke a couple of times. And I ran by Ginsu the direction of my thinking.

The essence of these chats was that the interoperability of virtual worlds would not come from top down from a “standards committee.” Rather standards of interoperability would be worked out from the bottom up by people coming together to actually work on the architecture, e.g. in groups like the Architecture Working Group that is attended by OpenSim, IBM, and many others.

In the picture above David Orban shows a delighted Ginsu Yoon his new Second Life viewer an: “Immersive stereoscopic projection of a life size screen covering 180 degrees of vision, connected to the live grid, tracking the avatar with ultrawideband emitters, created by the University of Milan and Eximia, in Italy.” David has posted a video gives a full explanation of “Real 2nd Life” on his blog, so check it out!

Interview With Adam Johnson: Movable Life & 3Di

The picture above shows Steve Prentice of Gartner Research (famous for his quote earlier this year that “80% of active internet users will have a “second life” in the virtual world by the end of 2011″) talking with Adam Johnson of 3Di and Bjorn Lee of HiPiHi.

Me: Could you introduce yourself please Adam?

Adam: I’m Adam Johnson. I’m working for a 3Di a company based out of Japan. We have our own virtual world platform and web services between virtual worlds connecting them. The Capital company is called ngi Group. It’s the number one incubator company out of Japan. We started about four months ago and now we have a virtual worlds platform, Jin- Sei, which is based off the open source software OpenSim. We’re marketing that towards B-to-B right now. On the services side we have Movable Life, which is a web-based Ajax client for logging into Second Life through a browser or iPhone. We’re working on other mobile interfaces as well.

Me: Why did you think Movable Life and this OpenSim application got launched in Japan as opposed to here?

Adam: That’s a good question, I’m not really sure. I think because in Japan a lot companies are really starting to look at virtual worlds. Because in Japan everyone has the same notion that virtual worlds are just going to explode and probably in the near future be more popular than in other countries. Japan will be like a hub for Virtual Worlds, I guess.

Me: And how did you get involved because you’re obviously American.

Adam: I was working at ngi Group before actually. So I had been living in Japan for 2 years.

Me: ngi is the investment company?

Adam: Right. We’re fully owned by ngi Group - the incubator company.

Me: So you were working for the venture capitalist company?

Adam: I was working for another startup and then I just transferred when they started this company.

Me: So what’s your job title?

Adam: I’m Project Leader for Movable Life.

Me: Why did you choose OpenSim?

Adam: we were just looking for ideas on what open source tools there are already to get our own virtual world platform off the ground. The best one out there at that time was OpenSim so we decided to go full on with Open Sim and LibSL and get involved. So Movable Life is based on LibSL as well so we’re very involved with open source community.

Me: Is Movable Life open source?

Adam: Movable Life code is proprietary at the moment, but we’re looking at open sourcing that in the future.

Me: So what physics engine are you using for OpenSim?

Adam: For our platform Jin-sei, we’re currently using the open source ODE at the moment. But we’re looking at maybe going to Havoc in the future.

Me: I know in the Open Sim that we’re using only about half the scripting is implemented. Is that still the same with you?

Adam: Yes, but the core of the scripting engine is based on C-Sharp, it has a C-Sharp engine. For user scripting it’s about half implemented. But server side we can do C-Sharp full on.

Me: What can Movable Life run on?

Adam: It runs on the iPhone. So it’ll run on Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Opera, anything.

Me: How how far have you got in terms of making OpenSim a grid or making it interoperable with Second Life?

Adam: We’re doing a lot of performance testing now. And for Jin-sei we just have a partnership with Mixi where they’re going to be running private virtual worlds using our platform. They have more than ten million users. Mixi is Japan’s number one social networking site. My Space tried to go in there and they totally failed.

Me: That’s interesting!

Adam: The Mixi deal will at first be a limited private test for a certain group of Mixi users, just to get good data on how everything is performing. We have a lot of large companies that are really interested in using Jin-sei for several different things, private and public.

Adam: Right now I’m focusing on creating a virtual hub for all of the virtual worlds. This is my project. We have two different sides, we have our platform and then we have our Movable Life Hub.

Adam: Movable Life comes from LibSecondLife and right now that’ll connect you to Second Life, and soon to an OpenSim grid and Jin-sei.

Adam: The goal is in a few months we’ll have a new version coming out which will kind of merge all of them together. So you log into Movable Life and you’ll have a central portal to each virtual world. Movable Life is not a virtual world. It’ll be like a web service to combine them all. It’ll combine anything using OpenSim or Second Life, probably HiPiHi later on. We’re working with some Japanese companies as well for their virtual worlds. We want to connect all of them if possible.

Cory Doctorow and Bjorn Lee of HiPiHi

I recorded part of the conversation between Cory Doctorow, Bjorn Lee from HiPiHi and Adam Johnson of 3Di (with their permission of course!) about social networking in immersive virtual worlds versus social networking in less immersive spaces.

Raph Koster of Metaplace was not able to fly out of Southern California because of the wild fires so I couldn’t follow up on what had been an interesting debate on 2D versus 3D social networked spaces at the San Jose Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo. If Raph had been there I would have loved to ask him some questions about interoperability and Metaplace also. Ian Hughes of IBM talked with me about how Metaplace’s use of RESTful APIs will create many interesting possibilities. And I had a long conversation with Bruce Joy CEO of the newly launched Vast Park which potentially will be interoperable with Metaplace.

Cory D. on the place of social networking sites in an increasingly immersive 3D future?

In response to questions from Bjorn (HiPiHi) and Adam (3Di), Cory Doctorow argued persuasively why from a social networking point of view less immersive 2D spaces might hold their place alongside immersive virtual worlds. I turned on my iPod recorder mid-stream in the dialogue.

Cory: ………[re how to drop] a whole bunch of people you don’t like very much who’ve recruited you into their social circle. The best way to do it is to say oh you know I am just tired of Facebook. Not like you people all bother me. Its like I just not using Facebook anymore. You just stop logging in. That’s the reason not like deleting you account in a huff. Just kind of slowly disengage from Facebook. They can see you haven’t updated your Facebook in 6 months. You are just kinda not there anymore. Then you just delete your account and no-one cares anymore. That’s like a socially neutral way of disengaging from a group of people who you had to friend and who friended you.

The cost of blowing off your social network is pretty low because the value of your social assets which is the articulated social network of people you like is offset by the negative value of the articulated network that is wrong where you have named all these people as your friend.

In a virtual world the problem is confounded by the acquiring of assets that actually have real world monetary value whether that be a currency or objects that can be bartered for a currency. So blowing off you WoW account actually costs something. It has a monetary expense as well. Its not that people don’t do it. But they often do it on mass as the game gets less fun for some reason.

Like when SWG re-factored and it got less fun and everyone left. One of the things that contributed to that was WoW lit up and a whole bunch of SWG players said I’ll go and play WoW for a week and SWG was just kind of empty so the value of those assets blew up. So it cost less to leave SWG after SWG crashed and so people were willing to leave.

But if you have to wait until the game crashes before you can blow it off that means you have this complicated relationship where you have to remain friends with people you don’t like or abandon your virtual goals. That is a terrible conundrum to be in. I think there will be elements of this. But I don’t think that is going to take it all over.

Bjorn: My question was more about the fact that in a virtual world’s social networking site the main difference is a sense of place. Your have friends and you want to hang out in the Mall, for example, you can’t do that in a [2.D] social networking site. But a virtual world is like going to a Mall you can go there see who is there, hang out with people, you can use hand gestures, and communicate through text and sound…

So now that now technology has advanced to a stage whereby text based social networks on which you can just send pictures and videos are pretty primitive. Do you think this kind of social networking site will still be prevalent in the future?

Cory: So its a really interesting question. I think that we are typically pretty bad at evaluating the long term costs of our actions. This is one the big privacy problems. We sell our privacy very cheaply and subsequently regret it because it costs us a lot when we’ve sold our privacy. But we don’t find that out until one year or two years later. Or we buy DRM media and we don’t realize how much that cost us until it is time to throw out your iPod and buy a competing device right.

So I think people will be willing to migrate into social networks that are on games because I think it will be on crack. I mean all the monkey pleasure of laying out the pictures of all your friends and all the grinding pleasure of doing all that game stuff and all the cyber sex and all the rest of it. Its going to be like on crack.

But how many times will you going to be willing to do that. Cuz you are going to have to blow it off eventually. And are you eventually going to say to your self, “oh shit this sucks. I am bankrupting myself every eighteen months in order to escape the people I don’t like very much.” And that’s really tricky. I don’t know. I think that might leave a place intact for social networking sites.

Adam 3Di: What if you had different levels of privacy in virtual worlds where you could throw them into this group where they don’t get to see as much information on you.

Cory: Its very hard to prospectively evaluate the cost of adding someone to a friend list. That’s the problem. You have to know a priori to know what level of trust to assign to that friend to. Then you get into this thing, where people are like, “Am I on your A list, your B list, or your C list.” And you become one of these self obsessed terrible, obnoxious … you become one of these people who in 8th grade who had the list of good people, medium people, bad people, sub bad people. That’s not reflective of a natural social dynamic. Now it may in fact push back - its kind of a nightmare scenario - what if it does push back? What if that actually does become the organizing principle by which we establish our social relations in the “real” world. Are you an A person or B person for me? But I just kinda hope we don’t get that.

Interview with Adam Frisby about OpenSim

Adam Frisby discussing architecture? with Ian Hughes of IBM

Me: Please could you introduce yourself Adam.

Adam Frisbee: I’m the executive director of a company called DeepThink Labs. We’re an international company with people in the UK, US and Australia. I started off last year working on the LibSecondLife project which just basically built a protocol description of the Second Life protocol.

We’ve built a programming library from that which allows you to connect in third party applications into the Second Life grid. In early January, just after the Second Life Client source code was released, another developer called Michael Wright developed a piece of software called OpenSim, and I got involved in that pretty much as soon as I saw the announcement of it. And since then I’ve been working as one of the developers of the Open Sim project.

Me: What Physics Engines does OpenSim support?

Adam: Right now we support four. But we’ve got our own one called Basic Physics which is just a very very simple engine, it doesn’t do physics solving really. We’ve got a second one called ODE which is the Open Dynamics Engine that ngi is using right now. That one’s a fairly mature open source physics engine.

We also support Bullet. Bullet is a new type of open source physics engine designed by Erwin Coumans, who was a major developer on the Havok Physics engine, it’s new – but it has a lot of potential.

We also support something called PhysX. PhysX is a commercial physics engine like Havoc. Its about on the same scale. But it supports optional hardware acceleration so you can actually get an accelerator card, put it in your computer, and then you get the ability to use that to accelerate the physics that’s going on in that server.

Me: How do people get involved developing code for OpenSim?

It’s essentially a meritocracy. We look for good developers, who are submitting good patches, to the project and we invite them in to be permanent contributers. Right now the way the OpenSim project works is strictly by consensus. There’s about 9 people right now who’ve got a voice in the consensus. And whenever a decision needs to be made such as whether we add another person into the development team it has to be done exclusively through consensus. It can be a very interesting process when people disagree, but nonetheless that’s how we’re operating.

Me: Where do you meet?

We don’t meet inworld in Second Life anymore, we’ve moved to an opensim …..
The majority of the discussion happens pretty much in two places. The first place is our mailing list, that an email list the developers are welcome to subscribe to and then people send out long emails and get long winded replies back.

The other way we communicate is over IRC which is Internet Relay Chat. We’ve got a channel on EFnet, and a lot of people hang around there. There’s about 60 people there all the time. Then there’s a secondary channel which is #opensim-dev which is all the developers and everybody interested in the development side of things. So it’s sort of broken up into the two groups, users in the one channel, and the developers in the other channel.

If you need help with getting it running then that’s the users channel. We split them up basically because we were trying to discuss technical topics and at the same time there was a collision with the people trying to get basic help.

So in the development channel we are discussing things like future architecture. If there’s a big decision that needs to be made and it’s brought up in the IRC channel then someone will go off and write that up to a mailing list as a post so those who weren’t there at the time, can go off and read what’s happening.

Me: Do you attend the Linden Lab Architecture Working Group?

We made an effort to actually attend those. That’s because Zero’s been discussing allowing the interconnects between the Second Life Grid and potentially third party servers like OpenSim. So of course being there is valuable if we want to make sure we are compatible with what the plan is.

He goes into very technical topics which is fantastic. And he’s willing to go into good depth on them. They are well worth attending if you’ve got any interest at all in things like protocol design. We had a great discussion once on the merits of parallel programming.

We have had a lot of benefits from Linden Labs experience by watching what has worked and what hasn’t. At the same time, what we’re working on is of course fundamentally very similar to what Linden Labs working on. In fact the architecture working group will probably produce something that’s going to be used by both Linden Labs and everyone else who wants to host a virtual worlds grid.

Right now we’ve got an opportunity to re-engineer and add scale to things. Second Life’s biggest flaw is that you can’t have an event with 5000 people in it. The grid just collapses and you can’t get all those people into a reasonable contiguous area. Whereas for OpenSim we can actually write a customized server that will actually support that by degrading certain things like physics. You degrade that down to a very low quality of physics. You turn off scripting, that kind of thing. You can customize a server to do something like that and Open Sim’s got the potential that hey Linden Lab can use it too and take advantage of these things.

Making more lightweight situations, removing central dependencies, that kind of thing.

We’re working with everything from a simple engine like Basic Physics to some of the most complex proprietary engines you can get, e.g., the PhysX one. It’s a very powerful engine.

It’s the opportunity to pick and choose what you want to use. Our key aspect is that everything is modular. You can take out any module and replace it with any other compatible module or even have no module at all. You can do that for scripting, for physics, everything down to instant messaging and chat are all modules, so you can chop them out.

Me: Will there be any problems of interoperability with the Second Life physics engine?

I think it will fine. It’s not such a big deal. We can always write a module to implement the Second Life physics engine. The Havoc caveat. They’re talking about implementing Havoc 4. We’d just implement that as another module. And suddenly we’d suddenly support 5 different engines.

Me: And what about assets and interoperability?

Assets aren’t too bad either, the interoperability issue is protocols. Simply speaking the same language. We’ve got the protocols from the client to the simulator. What we don’t have is from the simulator to the grid. That’s the language we’ve got to learn to be able to connect to the Linden Lab infrastructure.

It’s on the plan. The Architecture Working Group is actually devising a new language. But we don’t have the current language. That’s why you can’t connect to an Open Sim to the existing grid.

Our grid infrastructure is running on our own one. But that’s going to disappear and be replaced as soon as we’ve got something better which is what the Architecture Working Group will produce.

We will use the best new protocol thinking from every idea everywhere.

Interview with Ian Hughes, IBM (a.k.a Epredator Potato)

Picture above shows Epredator getting involved with a CSI: NY in Second Life at csiny orientation west95

Ian Hughes was one of the early pioneers for IBM in Second Life, particularly in the area of “virtual” and “real” integration, including the IBM Wimbledon project in Second Life. I asked Ian to talk about the early days linking First Life and Second Life.

In all the virtual world stuff there’s initially a feeling that it’s somewhere you go, and the emotional attachment is that it’s somewhere else. And even with Second Life, it’s called Second Life, it’s somewhere else.

From day one for me I wanted to know whether I could do the same things in the same way as we do on the web, where we’ve gone with mashups and in terms of SOA (Service Orientated Architecture) is to say I’m over here at the moment but all my stuff’s over there, can I get it there? That works both personally and at a business level.

And just knowing that there’s any channel to go from one place to another is no matter how small as long as it’s bi-directional even if it’s only a few bits flowing you know that that channel’s going to get bigger, it’s going to get faster, and it’s going to get more standardized.

So from day one it was, “great can I control a second life object from outside?” And that was before the http stuff in Second Life. It was just yes of course I can. But you have to actually do it. So I made a light switch. No big deal a light switch. That was just sending a message in. That was just one line of code. and its one line of code any techie would do and many techies has done the same. But I also wanted to know if could demonstrate messaging and flow within the environment in a publish/subscribe way. [Ian did explain how he accomplished this].

This was 18 months ago or it might be 19 months ago, March - April time. [This early work on messaging and message brokering in Second Life Ian explained was very helpful in introducing Second Life to other IBMers. ]. We had this thing which was turning a light on which was now responding to an external message. Roo augmented that so that a message from Roo’s laptop when it gets tilted was being injected into Second Life. Roo built a laptop on a gimble so that when you tilted his laptop in Real Life it would tilt the Second Life one.

Now in any demonstration where you say “here’s this quirky virtual world and isn’t it funny” now let me just pick my laptop up - you’ve caught them out - you’d pick the laptop up and the one on the screen would tilt. Controlling a virtual object like that is no big deal now. But it’s got a whole lot of messaging stuff underneath. And it was our core technology concept from Hursley that was being used.

Behind the scenes at Wimbledon in Second Life

That became sort of an iconic moment for us that we’d achieved that. We’d got all the bits so that we then knew that we could get further with Wimbledon having more data and more stuff and more instrumentation coming from the real world. So that’s when they [Linden Lab] opened up their http request APIs which they did just before Wimbledon luckily. I knew that I was going to be able to start to represent things in the virtual world in a way that we’d never got around to before. And I knew we could get buy-in from customers. And, I could get buy-in from other IBMers because it was Wimbledon.

My own Hursley Island rapidly went from a small plot of land to multiple IBM islands. Some of this [rapid growth] was just telling everyone that we were doing it. We were writing internally on blogs to our fellow early adopter people. I was reaching an audience particularly with Wimbledon.

Jessica Qin, IBM, builder/scripter/evangelist

In sharing that meant other people started to come to us. So thats when we met people like Jessica Qin. She had been in Second Life for years, living there and having an existence there but not in a work context originally. We kind of found them [IBMers around the world]. We realized we’re trying this stuff at the same time and that was good so we immediately had gone across the pond and further.

An Early Meeting At Hursley

Then again lots of people suddenly started to turn up and the core people, a lot of the people who are here at VWFE, are the ones who were there at the start. And that formed this little community and it started off with 2 people and then 10 people and by November 2006 it turned into 3,000 people. It was a bottom up process. Now it is over 5000.

Virtual Control Centers as a Mass Phenomena?

At the Virtual Worlds Forum in London last week putting the kinds of data visualization and aggregate statistical information about the world that big companies use in our hands didn’t seem too far off when you listened in on some of the “off stage” discussions

I blogged in my previous post that Eolus One is developing what I thought might be the first major business application using OpenSim. Eolus I wrote is developing secure virtual control centers for facilities management with sites on OpenSim. And, next on the table for development are plug and play modules based on the Eolus VWCI that will bring the kind of facility management now only possible in large scale facilities into every home.

In the picture below Oliver Goh (on right) is showing the Eolus Virtual World Communication Interface to Sara de Freitas the Serious Games Institute (center and holding the Eolus VCWI), Adam Johnson of 3Di (on the left) and Bjorn Lee of HiPiHi (standing under the chandalier).

Old Media & Big Business Enter “The People Age.”

At the Virtual Worlds Forum, “old” industry/media was often indistinguishable from the new user generated, socially networked/gaming, 3D immersive, open standards, interoperable generation as we stood and chatted under the lights of the gilded chandeliers in the bar, or sat in alcoves on comfy couches streaked by color from disco lights.

In the picture below from left to right Dolf Wittkamper, Senior Director, Philips Design, Chris Carella Chief Creative Officer, Electric Sheep Company, Oliver Goh, Paradigm Engineer for Implenia Global Solutions, and Giff Constable, VP of Electric Sheep Company’s software practices. They were logging on to the CSI:NY sims that had just opened to the public.

The VWF venue was an old night club/roller disco near Kings Cross that London cabbies seemed to call The Potato Market. It seemed an awful lot like Second Life at times. And Delé Atanda, Global Digital Marketing Business Partner, Diageo, pointed out the virtualness of this space that is soon to be demolished to make way for some Eurotowers? I interviewed both Delé Atanda and Dolf Wittkamper at the VWF. I will cover these interviews and the very interesting approaches to Second Life that both these companies have taken in conjunction with Rivers Run Red in an upcoming post.

The Rivers Run Red exhibition at VWF.

One of the highlights for me during VWF was chatting with Louise Jorden of Rivers Run Red (center in pic above) and Delé Atanda, Diageo in “real life” at The Hospital Club - one of RRR’s partners.

Delé and Dolf exemplify to me to corporate executives that understand that the future will not only blur the lines between the “virtual” and the “real” but also the distinctions between corporations and individuals. Traditional hierarchies are disintegrating leading to what Josephine Green, Director of Trends and Strategies for Philips, calls the “people age,” and Delé Atanda, Diageo, calls the “age of imagination.”

This age is characterized, as Joesphine Green points out, by “the decline in trust in institutions and leadership; people becoming increasingly empowered and creative about their own lives; a desire to co-create and produce their own experiences; the search for greater customization, personalization and autonomy.”

Delé Atanda presenting the Diageo Digital Workspace in Second Life - developed in conjunction with Rivers Run Red and IBM.

3D Internet, 3Di, amazon.org, Architecture Working Group, Bullet, Cory Doctorow, craphound, data visualization in virtual worlds, David Orban, Deep Think Labs, EOLUS One, epredator potato, Ginsu Yoon, Havoc, HiPiHi, immersive spaces, immersive virtual worlds, instrumentation in virtual worlds, instrumentation in WoW, interoperability of virtual worlds, Jessica Qin, Jin Sei, Joi Ito, Joi Itos WoW interface, libsecondlife, Linden Lab, Linden Lab Architecture Working Group, Metaplace, metaverse, Mixi, Movable Life, ngi Group, Open Source, open source/openstandards, open standards, open standards for virtual worlds, OpenSim, physics engines, PhysX, Real 2nd Life, RESTful APIs, reverse surveillance society, Rivers Run Red, Second Life, Shaping Things, social networks, The inverse of surveillance society, using virtual worlds to exert agency, Vast Park, Virtual Worlds Forum, virtual worlds open source community, Wimbledon in Second Life, World of Warcraft WoW

Eolus One is developing what I think might be the first major business application using OpenSim. OpenSim is the BSD Licensed Open Source Initiative that has evolved from Second Life. Eolus has several client projects that will utilize the secure virtual control centers to improve and document facilities management with sites on OpenSim.

The picture shows the architecture of the system with the OpenSim, SAP and Building Automation Server (VWCI) part of the Eolus One facility management project.

Bruce Sterling at the end of Shaping Things” asks for humankind to start to make “decent technology:”

This whirring, ultra-buzzy technology can keep track of all its moving parts and when its time inevitably comes, it would have the grace and power to turn itself in at the gates of the junkyard and suffer itself to be mindfully pulled apart. It is a toy box for inventive meddlesome humankind that can put its own toys neatly and safely away.

If you are not yet in tune with “the internet of things” here is a music video Royksopp’s “Remind Me” that Sterling suggests is some kind of “spime” theme song.

The closing words of Sterling’s great visionary book on “spimes” and “the internet of things” are:

Its not enough to think about that, or even write about. If it is to be any use to humankind, it will have to get done.

This post is about some people who are doing it!

See the exclusive interview with Oliver Goh and Michael Osias later in this post!

This giant step in the integration of “real” and virtual worlds on OpenSim comes out of a meeting of two minds and the integration of the two virtual world interfaces.

Oliver Goh (avatar Eolus Mcmillan on Second Life) is a paradigm engineer for the large Swiss civil engineering and construction company Implenia Global Solutions pioneered the Eolus Virtual Worlds Communications Interface that communicates between Second Life and most common building protocols (see my earlier post). And Michael J. Osias, Chief 3D Architect for the IBM IT Optimization Business Unit (avatar Illuminous Beltran) Michael (see my earlier post) is the architect of a virtual worlds integration middleware - The Holographic Enterprise Interface.

By integrating the capabilities of their two virtual world interfaces - the Eolus’ VWCI solution with the IBM middleware (HEI) - they are creating a virtual cockpit on OpenSim with extensive capabilities. Michael gave the analogy to Nasa’s mission control.

We’ve got the facilities data (from the Eolus VWCI) and IT data using the shared infrastructure (HEI) and rendered together. To use an example, like mission control for NASA, They’ve got rockets, they’ve got computers, they’ve got people on the ground, but they build this control center, because the want to know whats going on with any of that stuff. So its all integrated into a single operational picture.

Eolus One is creating on OpenSim one of the first (always risky to say the first) Platforms for the Facilities Management Industry (see my earlier post on “The Operating System for Planet Earth”). But before continuing this story here is a quick primer on Eolus One.

Eolus One – the Future of Facilities Management.

I blogged the Eolus One’s launch of their public sims and Virtual Worlds Control Interface in Second Life at the beginning of July (see here). At that time, Eolus One in Second Life had already an exhibition hall showing the early development of the VWCI, a demonstration of a virtual operations center and several protoype/use cases showing the cabilities of VWCI, a better planet initiative including Uthango Social Investments and SODIS, and regular music programs led by the amazing Jaynine Scarborough. But since then Eolus has been expanding fast behind the scenes.

Oliver Goh has led the the charge on Eolus One putting together several collaborations that range from “future retail center” (an initiative with Migros, SAP Research, HP) to a control center for an international hotel chain, and a project with the University of St. Gallen to produce a prototype for a “smart” apartment for an elderly person called “Independent Living.”

“Independent Living”

“Independent Living” is an innovative home health care solution using sensor technology, medical monitoring devices and a modern communication infrastructure to help seniors live safely and independently at home.

The virtualisation of an elderly person’s daily movements, sleep, medication routines, and vital signs through a PCM - personal condition monitor - worn on the wrist (see picture below) will allow a health care worker to see easily if something is wrong, or out of the ordinary, and to make the appropriate intervention.

PCM – Personal Condition Monitor

The PCM (device detail above) reports to the Eolus VWCI at all times during the elderly persons sleeping and waking activites.

- The PCM is the size of a wrist watch, it monitors the vital stats (Temp, pulse, motion) of the person
- it is gps enabled
- has a button to manually activate an alarm
- automatic danger detection (posture, motion, body temp)
- automatic or manual delivery of alert

Nokia n810 and VWCI

Eolus is working on a project to use the Nokia N810 to enhance the possibilities of the VWCI. The enhancements made will be in the area of Parts Management, Plant Maintenance and Field Service.

- reduce time to invoice by 55%

- compliance to service level agreements

- faster service delivery (increase in service revenue)

- improve customer satisfaction

- increase field productivity by 25%

- using maEmo and OS2008 to bring new services to the service teams

“Smart” buildings - making a visionary idea happen

Eolus One is not just bringing the facility management processes into virtual worlds to increase energy efficiency, CO2 reduction and transparency of energy consumption which are now global necessities. Eolus is taking the vision of “smart” buildings into new territory by exploring many ways to bring the previously “dead” systems that we live and work in (dead in the sense that up until now these structures and the appliances in them have been unable to communicate to us) into an online virtual environment where we can have a dynamic relationship with all the objects and infrastructure we depend on. So the world of objects can contribute relevant information and content to our lives.

The pictures on the left are the Implenia Global Solutions Office building, in the center the hotel, and on the right Adaxsys a the production facility for electronic components (where the Eolus VWCI is manufactured). All three facilities are used as reference sites for the Eolus VWCI.

Next on the table for development Oliver has suggested may be plug and play modules based on the Eolus VWCI that will bring the kind of facility management now only possible in large scale facilities into every home. Will this mean a a new routine? Perhaps you will get online check your IMs and see what your friends are up to, join them for some social gaming or virtual entertainment somewhere on the grid while you keep you house is in order from your virtual cockpit. How are your most significant appliances doing? Are any of them squandering energy ? Is the refrigerator in need of a defrost? Is there bread in the bread box? Did you remember to take a life saving medication on time? Does an important medication need a refill? Is the fish tank getting acidic. Does the heating need to go on? Has an expected delivery arrived? And, of course, there will be no more inconvenient visits from the meter man/woman as meters will be monitored remotely.

A “Meta-verse” Story: Connecting Second Life and Open Sim

The vision of Eolus One is far reaching. It will take building automation and facility management into realms as ambitious as city planning and as intimate as caring for the sick and elderly.

By engaging both in Second Life and Open Sim, Eolus draws on the strengths and resources of the public, open, socially networked, user generated environment of Second Life with its vibrant community of creative thinkers and virtual world developers while utilizing the open source platform of OpenSim to develop secure virtual operation centers.

Second Life is fast becoming the global town hall for scientists, engineers, policymakers and regulators to meet in a global setting that provides an opportunity for public debate and engagement. But secured applications eventually need to be integrated into the public grid if cockpits for spaceship earth are to be widely available to help us take control of the complex and energy hungry infrastructure of our lives.

The long term vision, one that Eolus shares with its partners, is to knit OpenSim and SL together as part of a “meta-verse” story that will benefit the global community - a hetergeneous grid in which avatars can move in and out of secured spaces.

Creating Open Standards: Linden Lab’s Architectural Working Group

If the early momentum of the newly formed Architectural Working Group is maintained it is quite possible that OpenSim will become inter-operable with Second Life sooner than we think. I have been attending the AWG meetings in Zero Linden’s office hours. A good sign that they are getting down to the nitty gritty work of discussing architecture and protocols is that these are fast becoming very technical discussions.

The picture above is of Goldie Katsu’s collection of Linden Bears. There were at least fifteen Lindens that I counted in attendance at the meeting focused on web authorization last week. At the end some Linden bears came out and I discovered that Goldie Katsu is a collector. Goldie is attending the AWG meetings “hoping I can contribute from my security architecture experience and also my ability to help with communication, as in integrating diverse view points and clarifying ideas.”

Goldie kindly let me photograph her bear collection for this post. Giving out their unique, custom designed Linden Bears is a Linden tradition and a way that Linden’s break the ice with residents and express goodwill. Meta Linden’s bear in the center is only given out to those who can solve its riddle.

Open Sim, LibSL, lots of Lindens as well as IBMers, and many people from Second Life’s very engaged open source community attend the meetings and are contributing to the AWG. Tao Takashi recently hosted a meeting for community input on the more technosocial questions of open architecture.

Interview with Oliver Goh and Michael Osias

I spoke to Oliver Goh and Michael Osias on a conference call on Skype Thursday night to get the inside story. I talked to these two innovators in the field of “real” and virtual integrations decided to work together on Open Sim to create a new generation of virtual world control center.

The Holographic Enterprise Interface

IBM’s Virtual World integration middleware - The Holographic Enterprise Interface (HEI) - has been powering the IBM Virtual Network Operation Center (see here) for some time now. Michael explained there is some artistic license on the term holograph because it is not really a 3D image generated in space by lasers. But it is designed to provide a 3D digital representation of real world information.

We have been using it with a number of different data sources already. IBM provides a number of different interfaces to enterprise systems such as IBM Director, MQ Series, Tivoli OmegaMon, and Enterprise Workload Manager.

While these standard interfaces are available, the advantage of the HEI is that it is capable of integrating easily with the EOLUS VWCI solution, so from that perspective it would be a shared infrastructure component.

Then once the data is in-world we have communications gear actually in-world that provide in-world messaging services such as decryption, routing along network links to different machines or equipment, so that’s also kind of a shared infrastructure. The way that the HEI middleware component works is we have a special protocol that’s used so that we don’t have any specific reliance on one protocol or another but it’s meant specifically for virtual world integration.

The protocol can be thought of as an inter-dimensional protocol, if you will, between 2d and 3d. But it can also be used exclusively in the 3d environment. We have machines in there that will generate these protocol messages whose recipients are other machines in-world. So we get some very rich interaction patterns there.

We have a few different reference architectures, not necessarily IT architectures, but virtual world architectures, for our virtual world applications. As part of our offerings right now we’ve got the standard data center, which looks just like any other data center, we’ve got a control room which looks like Olivers control room, and then we’ve go the Virtual Network Operations Center which is kind of a futuristic type of command center, and then we’ve got something called a services mega-center, which is designed to host a large virtual world implementation. It’s just a really big operations center. It has components up to the sky, observation towers and things like that.

I think what will happen is we’ll see these things continue to evolve as we build them. And we’ll try to adhere to some pattern because it’s very easy to replicate patterns that will work well and then to customize them according to customers needs. We don’t want each one to be an individual piece of work from the ground up, but rather utilize a standard set of assets that we know work and then be able to customize the solution.

I asked Oliver how the collaboration between he and Michael came about:

Well we are strong in different areas. The partners at EOLUS One have an in-depth know how of the requirements and processes of the Real Estate/Facilities Management Industry, we know how a building is supposed to function, how to get the values out of it, and how to interpret them. There could be an issue with the HVAC or the security system, by having all relevant data and process information available in our virtual control center we are able to resolve the issue more efficient and at the same time have it documented in an ideal environment. Using the best practises from the industry and combining it with the relevant information we have avail. The model of this could be made available to other companies from the industry.

What Michael has been doing is more on the IT side of things an area we have completely left out so far. We’ve done something similar work [IBM's Green Data Center is very focused on energy management and monitoring particularly concerning the power crunch of servers] but EOLUS One focus was mainly on building automation and facility management.

The idea that we had together was that it would really make sense for these two to be one, because when you, for example, look at the data center there are pieces which are information pieces which come from equipment like servers and certain pieces that come from the building and you need both ideally to manage that data center.

We didn’t tie into the physical equipment, or rather we didn’t know the state of the server and information that was readily available through the interface that Michael has made. And we think that by combining this information we can, from a building management standpoint, control the data center much better.

We have the cockpit but it’s the staffing cockpit. We know exactly what we need. But there were a few issues with HTML rendering.

Michael brought up some interesting features of OpenSim at this point in the discussion:

There’s some features coming up with OpenSim, that are extensions to SL in a way, in the form of dynamic texture loaders. This feature will on a pre-defined interval, download a new texture off of the network and update the face of a prim. I’m actually working on this right now, you can have a program out on the network that’s generating jpeg charts or something and then every ten seconds or so it goes and grabs another chart. We have other more dynamic ways to do this in our Torque based offering.

It’s not exactly HTML on a prim but its close. I plan to use it on the screens, I have a lot of screens,. Some of the other virtual world platforms we have something even better which is the ability to dynamically generate a bitmap buffer in memory and basically throw that out on the prim, so we can write on it, we can draw on it, we can do all kinds of neat stuff with it. We might do something with that with open sim but that would require modification of the Second Life Client which would use open SL for .. but that’s a ways off.

Why Did You Choose Open Sim for Eolus?

It’s come a long way since I started following it. It began as a post in LibSL project which somebody posted on the forum there one day, about a year ago I guess, maybe a little less, “Hey I built a little server, and I can connect the client to it and OpenSim was born.

So its been very primitive until recently, I mean you couldn’t fly, you could barely walk, but its come quite a way and is moving forward rapidly. I’ve been following it since then. And I said when I think its ready enough then I’m going to add it to my portfolio of infrastructure capabilities. We have other virtual world capabilities based on Torque, and its nice to be able to give customers a choice on their internal 3D infrastructure.

Open Sim currently has limitations in terms of its maturity, like any alpha software. Things such as you can’t really build a grid with it at the moment, permissions, inventory, and other features need more development. I always knew it would be a good candidate if it would be mature enough and the right timing. Everybody’s got the client, they know how to use Second Life, even though some of the other platforms have better graphics it’s really a trade off I think in feature function versus graphics. We can always do things with shaders down the road on the client. So using it, testing it out, building quite a bit in it and actually I built several of the commands that are now in there that enable the data integration so I was like well I hate asking people to build something just because I need it so I’ll just go build it myself.

We have added OpenSim to our portfolio because it is ‘operational enough’ at this stage, and it has a lot of advantages. It was a good choice for Eolus because the community SL skills transfer over, has the promise of grid mode, and is likely to play a key role in standards.

How does it compare to some of the other virtual worlds IBM uses?

Giving you an example of alternative worlds such as Torque for example. Torque has outstanding graphics and performance for virtual worlds. The development of the virtual world however is quite different than in SL. In order to develop content you need some pretty sophisticated and sometimes expensive modeling tools graphics tools and then it is completely different model to get the content into the world and then it is a little bit different how you operate the world. SL builders whose only exposure to 3D building is SL, would face some steep learning curves on the content development pipeline and tools.

So there are a lot more moving parts and longer cycle time to get something operational in that environment than it is for an OpenSim environment where everything is built in world just like in Second Life. That is one of the key advantages and the other is of course that goes along with that is skills.

We have customers using Torque (see pictures above) and they are happy with it. The tradeoff of a general purpose, self-contained virtual world versus a very specifc application with very high fidelity are some of the decision points customers need to weigh when they buy a 3D Virtual Command Center.

One area where Torque is currently lacking (but not for long hopefully) is ability to operate a large parallel processing world hosted on a grid. OpenSim is strong here because it was designed to be a large distributed world from the ground up as opposed to having to retrofit this capability and make some design choices that could have some significant impact down the road.

How are you managing? I thought there was little available re scripting language or physics engine in SL?

I actually implemented several LSL functions. Well the physics engine is at least partially true. But there is scripting. You can either script in LSL or C# which is the native OpenSim platform. That is kind of nice. Maybe little more or less than 50% of the LSL functions are implemented. There is a huge list out there – I haven’t counted them.

So you have managed to do the data integration then?

Yes I am able to get the data in just like I am with the VNOC or Oliver’s control center. And it works pretty good. everything need improvement of course because it is still alpha software or even earlier. But it works enough that we can actually do something with it and be confident we can go forward..

Is the OpenSim secure?

Well it is secure in the sense that you can out operate it behind the firewall. You can create an internal grid that is secure. There are security features in OpenSim that still need to be implemented.

The picture below is from OpenSim.

3D Internet, Bruce Sterling, buidling automation, Eolus McMillan, EOLUS One, Eolus VCWI, facilities management, HEI, Holographic Enterprise Interface, IBM metaverses, Illuminous Beltran, Implenia Global Solutions, internet of things, LibSL, Linden Bears, Linden Lab, LSL, metaverse, Michael Osias, Nokia n810, Oliver Goh, open architecture, Open Architecture Working Group, Open Source, open standards for virtual worlds, OpenSim, operating system for spaceship earth, personal condition monitor, plug ins for building automation, Ryksopps Remind me, Second Life, Second Life Open Source, Shaping iThings, smart apartments, smart buildings, spimes, the future of facilities management, Torque, Uthango Social Investements, Virtual Networks Operations Center, Virtual Operation Center, Virtual Operations Centers, Virtual World Control Interface, Virtual Worlds, VNOC, VWCI, Web 3D world 2.0

When Anthony E. Zuiker Creator, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, (in picture above with Philip Rosedale, CEO Linden Lab), CSI: Miami, CSI: NY delivered his keynote at Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo in San Jose last week, I felt I was listening to the world class player who would be the first big winner of the virtual world’s e-jackpot.

As a finale Zuiker dressed as Santa Claus and threw Snickers bars out to the audience to remind us that this is a time to celebrate and think about a sweet future - the convergence of virtual worlds, television, gaming, mobile and the web in delicious mash-ups like chocolate and nuts. But even without this jolly and tasty reminder, I doubt if anyone had missed the point.

It is clear that Zuiker has drilled deep into what it means to accomplish this convergence. This is no testing the waters of virtual worlds by a naive and timid giant from old media. Zuiker’s intimacy with everything it will take to accomplish this revolution from story telling, to gaming, to television, to social networking, to user generated content in virtual worlds is apparent.

In my exclusive interview with Anthony Zuiker (later in this post) you will hear a precise articulation of his vision.

The body of this post is interviews with four key players in the convergence of CSI and Second Life - Anthony Zuiker, creator of the CSI franchise, Sibley Verbeck the CEO of The Electric Sheep Company, Philip Rosedale CEO of Linden Lab and Chris Carella, Chief Creative Officer, The Electric Sheep Company.

On October 24th the CSI: New York story line will be taken into Second Life (check this promo out - definitely revved up but very true to the experience of Second Life). The Electric Sheep Company have gone to great lengths to prepare Second Life for the mainstream including the launch of a new viewer that will premier with CSI.

I asked Philip Rosedale for his thoughts on the CSI adventure.

I think it is a great project. We don’t look for traffic for Second Life in general we more look for opportunities to present Second Life to people in a more obvious way to people who don’t understand it, or haven’t experienced it.

And when I heard about the CSI plan roughly in terms of what they wanted to do with the show I really thought that it was something we should support. It felt like a fair and appealing presentation of Second Life and something that would get a lot of people intrigued in a way that it was difficult to do on the web site. I’m looking forward to it. I think it will probably overload all the systems associated with it but that will be a test.

The Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo 2007 has been blogged by Eightbar, Crave, Mercury News, Metaversed, Mindblizzard here, here, here, and here, Out To Pasture, Raph Koster (on interoperability) SLNN, here, here, Virtual Worlds News, Vintfalken, Virtually Blind, Games On Deck (on mobile virtual worlds), ClickZ (picture of the mocap here), Joipodgorny, FT Tech Blog, The Entrepreneurs Guide to Second Life, The Hollywood Reporter, theage.com.au, Smart Economy, PC World (nice picture here from CSI Second Life spoiler of Sinise standing in front of his Second Life avatar), CNET news.com, A Media Circus, so you have an opportunity to see some of the many strands of the conference as well as more on the show stopper start from a variety of view points. This amazing collection of links is thanks to Malburns Twitter stream.

The conference was so rich and mutli-stranded it is impossible to cover all aspects of it. Fortunately the top notch team of Virtual World’s Management, headed up by Christopher Sherman, is making MP3s of the whole event available.

Vision For a Better Planet from HiPiHi

I will be posting an exclusive Ugotrade interview with HiPiHi Founder and CEO Xu Hui in my next post. With the great visionary speaker for the role of virtual worlds in a creating a better planet Philip Rosedale in the audience (a role Philip really seemed to enjoy!), it was Xu Hui who notably stepped up to the plate and spoke out for virtual worlds as the highway to positive global development. There is an excellent report on Xu Hui’s presentation on the Virtual Worlds in China panel on the Virtual Worlds News blog.

Blake Lewin, VP Product Development, Turner Broadcasting Inc., stopped by to chat with members of the HiPiHi team after the Visionary Panel. Raph Koster on the right shakes hands with someone off screen.

Things did get a little snippy on the Visionary Panel. Kaneva, Areae, Makena, HiPiHi, Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, and The Multiverse Network were all represented and in fine form. But disagreement erupted (a polite war of the worlds) around the role of 3D in the future of online social networking/gaming environments. Raph Koster creator of Metaplace gamely and very convincingly challenged the absolute preeminence of 3D. But, in my view, at this conference at least, the potential of the open and rich immersive 3D environments exemplified by Second Life and HiPiHi stole the show.

Will HiPiHi and Second Life come together in the future?

I asked Xu Hui founder and CEO of HiPiHi what he saw for the future for HiPiHi and Second Life together (more of this interview in an upcoming post):

Yes, maybe a partner. We have a lot of similarity with Second Life and especially when we talked with Philip. We think that in the future that we are working together for the growth of virtual worlds.

Virtual Worlds and Television - A Revolutionary Convergence.

I wish I had a more immersive way than this blog to share some of the excitement of the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo in San Jose last week. The billion dollar questions at the heart of the conference were the hows, whats and whys of the transition of virtual worlds from a “boutique” phenomena to the mainstream. Christian Renaud gave an excellent overview of this in his keynote. There are several posts commenting on his presentation including worldsinmotion, virtualworldsnews, mindblizzard, gamasutra, and a Keynote Shorthand on the Cisco Virtual Worlds blog.

While the message that “Chrismas is a coming and …….” was clear in Zuiker’s keynote. There was also a bit of spring fever in the air. Match making was going on everywhere. Omnicom has acquired a stake in Millions of Us and HiPiHi is partnering with MoU. The Electric Sheep are taking an equity stake in a new children’s virtual world, Star In Me. These are just a few of the notable examples. Like Electric Sheep, Millions of Us has a deep portfolio of partnerships now including some very interesting new faces like SceneCaster. And while Rivers Run Red did not come to San Jose I am expecting them to roll out some interesting news at The Virtual Worlds Forum in London next week.

Reuben Steiger, CEO of Millions of Us showed some awesome films made in Second Life that take Scion City into new territory.

Reuben very eloquently explained why the evolution of television into virtual worlds would not only be the killer app for Second Life but a revolution for television. Reuben presented a wonderful image of the connection between Philip Rosedale’s pioneering genius and that of the brilliant young inventor of television Philo Farnsworth.

The picture above shows the door to Linden Lab reflecting an image of the building that now stands on the site of Farnsworth’s original 202 Green Street laboratory.

Above is inventor Philo T. Farnsworth with his invention, the first electronic television, in Sept. 10, 1928 in San Francisco

The San Francisco Chronicle made the following announcement on September 3rd, 1928 (The SF Museum )

Two major advances in television were announced yesterday by a young inventor who has been quietly working away in his laboratory in San Francisco and has evolved a system of television basically different from any system yet in operation.

It wouldn’t take much editing to use the same words to describe the recent innovations of Second Life.

After listening to Anthony Zuiker’s great convergence plan and watching the intriguing spoilers for CSI in Second Life produced by the Electric Sheep Company and the fabulous clips from Millions of Us. It was hard not to start thinking that the convergence of film and television with virtual worlds will be the game changer.

Interview with Anthony Zuiker

Me: I was impressed that you were ready for the adventure of integrating mainstream TV into an open user-generated virtual world like Second Life. Could you tell me about that?

Anthony Zuiker: Yes sure. I think I understand the future of television is going to be highly interactive and going to utilize multiple platforms. And in doing that when the opportunity arose to be able to tell a narrative story in first life meaning on air and to continue that narrative into Second Life meaning on-line and a 3D experience it was just perfectly made for CSI: New York. The future of television, in my opinion, really is television, on-line, mobile and gaming.

The days of sitting in front of your television at a specific time to watch really have come and gone. And I believe that the viewer wants a deeper experience in other platforms we are very device driven at this juncture and if we can continue the story line and give entertainment that is specific to the devices, specific to TV, specific to the web, specific to mobile, specific to gaming.

I believe that you will live in a world where you can win this fight two ways. One you can do a great TV show and deepen the experience across platforms and when the TV show continues drive people back to television and never ever miss a beat. So if you actually are watching and you only watching TV you won’t be behind but if you go for the deeper cross platform experience it will be a deeper experience but you are also not ahead. And that is how you win this war.

Me: Yes I am actually one of those people who threw their TV out and the only way I think it might come back is if there was some kind of integration.

Anthony Zuiker: I understand. The second line of thought in that discourse is as follows. The television set is going to need to get with the program. It is going to need to be highly interactive, touch screen, have voice applications, encompass e-mails, encompass the phone, encompass all on-line interactivity, and really be the one stop shop for the living room. if that does not happen then we are going to have to try to make TV the primary device and then go into other ancillary devices and hopefully drive people back to television. It is one of two things.

Me: The other question I had is that you really are pioneers, I think as far as I know, in bringing a mainstream broadcast narrative - well there is the L Word and a few others - but what I mean is you didn’t take the VLES (Virtual Lower East Side) route going for a closed world.

Anthony Zuiker: Correct. It is very important you said that. Because the L Word - and of course it is part of our family so we want to talk to positively - but there is not a continuous story line in L Word. It really is a one stop shop - a community has taken over that world. It is highly successful for the Electric Sheep and we applaud that.

But for CSI: New York we are definitely continuing narrative not only on Oct 24th into world but on February 6th paying it off on the air. And continuing the story line in Second Life beyond February 6th and the sky’s the limit. I believe that at some point it will go so deep that I will start creating original programming inside Second Life - literally like a South Park in Second Life that is original with characters that I create that continues the storyline also.

And the possibilities in Second Life are endless much more than First Life. My best example is I can’t sink the Titantic in First Life it is just too much money but I can sink it all day long in Second Life.

Me: Yes, I have a background in special effects film and animation and I have been wondering when successful creators from mainstream media like you would look at Second Life and start playing with it. Second Life brings things to the table that have not been there before - a new palette of possibility.

Anthony Zuiker: Hopefully in my presentation I was clear that since my background is Las Vegas, since my background is gaming, since I was an only child and I was bored ….what I didn’t say was that I used to role dice and play cards and when I was kid and I was always pretty much a gamer.

So when it comes to addressing some of the problems in Second Life in terms of having companies come and write checks to have their products incorporated inside Second Life you now have the narrative creator of the biggest TV show in the world that understands gaming.

Me: I have noticed that there are very few professional game developers in Second Life. I think there are a number of reasons for this including a preference for high production values.

Anthony Zuiker: Halo 3 is one experience Second Life is another. I understand that. But I believe that all of these devices and all of this content can co-exist. I believe that you can bring top notch gamers into Second Life and make that experience grand. Like I said I’ve launched through the Second Life in the CSI: New York virtual simulation casual games on different levels to make sure the confidence of mass is there.

I was very clear to the Electric Sheep I have no interest in dazzling the Second Life veteran. That is not what I am doing. I am trying to get mass here and really create a community that is a lot deeper than 38 to 40, ooo [concurrency] and 9 million membership.

Me: That seems to me to be a good analogy when you say South Park in Second Park because that is great entertainment that isn’t based on hi def.

Anthony Zuiker: Well unless you were being pelted in the head by Snickers bars you had to have thought to yourself during my speech especially during the 90 second machinima that when I was running after the killer that feels like it could be a show in some way, shape or form.

Me: Yes Second Life seems a natural environment for CSI stories!

Anthony Zuiker: Here is what is true. Everyone likes a great story. And everyone loves great great characters. And in my business it is character over concept. And in Second Life character and concept have equal footing.

Interview With Sibley Verbeck:
CEO, The Electric Sheep Company

Me: How did it all happen? - the connection between the Electric Sheep and Anthony Zuiker that is?

Sibley Verbeck: So Anthony Zuiker works at Jerry Bruckheimer Productions - they make the shows and networks pick them up and show them. So in our case we talk to a lot of the networks and work with some of them and someone at CBS said who you should really talk to is Anthony. He is not at our network but he would really understand this and write stories and is always interested in cross platform - not just the promotion of shows but taking the story to cross platform.

So it is not just that if you miss the show you can see it on your phone or your ipod - the same show - its lets do something different that’s appropriate for that medium that extends the story that makes sense on an ipod or in this case a virtual worlds. He is passionate about that so then we made that connection.

Then we were up an running with the CSI franchise saying: What can we do? How can we make this a great experience? It will be a great experience for the current users of Virtual Worlds including Second Life of course and that is important to us. But more importantly there is even more die-hard fans of CSI. And those people are not currently using virtual worlds so we better have them in mind as well as we design this.

So you have done an orientation in Second Life for CSI fans?

Yes we have done an orientation, a registration process, we are actually launching an entirely new viewer. So on Oct 24th when this goes on television on CSI we will also be launching a new viewer for Second Life.

In this case for CSI, but eventually it will be for lots of other things. Whenever anything is mentioned in CSI people Google it. They go to the CSI website because there are often connections there. So they will go to the CSI website. There they can register for this virtual experience, download the software, come right in and yes immediately they are in an orientation where they are greeted by Anthony’s avatar and they can start getting into Crime Scene related content right away.

So they become a Crime Scene Investigator. And they go around the virtual experience and there is a crime and they have help to solve it, look for evidence take it back to the crime lab just like happens in the show. So all these fans will be very familiar with that but here they can interact with it. Most importantly the story continues so there is a story arc that starts with the TV show that continues in the virtual world.

It is not just if you like CSI here is the CSI game. Its connected and that story continues then comes back on to TV on February 6th. So you want to be part of that so you know what is going on and then it comes back on TV again.

How many people have you got running these avatars to greet people?

As works with virtual worlds most of the content is the other people - its the other people coming in. So yes we will have to have a lot of greeters. Because one the things we find in virtual worlds in general and this is not Second Life specific - one of the metrics on whether people are retained and come back is the time between when they log in and when they start talking with someone - of course it is also who they meet. But the shorter that time the more likely they are to stick around.

We want to have that great social experience. But it is in large part it is also automated and scaled so that people can come in and hang out with each other then go collaboratively through that experience.

What are the obstacles to doing this. It sounds so great. Why hasn’t it been done before?

We still look at the obstacles every day! There will be things that work well and things that don’t. This is a first of a kind project for us. We’ll learn and keep on improving this project as it goes on and others after it.

And