UgoTrade

One of the dreams Adam Frisby, a key core developer of OpenSim and CTO of Sine Wave Company, is that OpenSim will be the platform to make virtual concerts a mass phenomena.

Sine Wave Company is already deeply involved in developing the creative relationship between rock and virtual worlds by developing sophisticated dance animations (click to see video) using motion capture. They are working with Bravado, the merchandising division of Universal Music Group and 12 rock giants:

Slipknot, The Ramones, Trivium, Iron Maiden, Bullet for my Valentine, Trivium and Cradle of Filth are among the bands to launch their official merchandising range in Second Life at Rock Vault;

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Rock Vault/88/64/48

Already Sine Wave has developed sharding software to produce large scale events in Second Life. But this is, perhaps, just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the size potential of future audiences when the full power of OpenSim for hosting large scale events is unleashed.

There will be an invitation only concert for 100-400 during Virtual Worlds 2008 featuring Antigone - a taste of what is to come.

Open Source Virtual Worlds at VW 2008

Adam Frisby of OpenSim will present on the state of play in OpenSim as one of the facilitators of the “Open Source Virtual Worlds” round table, 2.30pm on Friday, April 4th that is part of the new Enterprise track at VW 2008. Round table facilitators from RealXtend, Sun’s Project Wonderland, and Qwaq will discuss their open source virtual world platforms, with each facilitator focusing on a particular topic in relation to their platform. This will be an excellent opportunity to learn more about the diversity of open source virtual world platforms.

Adam will talk about ease of licensing and business adoption in OpenSim. Jani Pirkola of RealXtend will present their ground breaking work on Avatar 2.0 - click on the screen shot below to see the video demo.

Remy Malan from Qwaq will introduce Qwaq and facilitate a discussion on collaboration. And, Nicole Yankelovich of Sun Microsystems will present Project Wonderland and facilitate a discussion on audio and telephone integration.

Enterprise Applications in Open Source Virtual Worlds

Remy Malan will be on two other round tables on Sunday also. And there is also an opportunity to see enterprise applications in Sun’s Project Wonderland and OpenSim at VW 2008 on Thursday, April 3rd, 2.30pm in, “Enterprise Applications for Virtual Worlds: 3D Command and Data Centers for Network Operations (”Green Data Centers”), Energy & Facility Management, Building Automation, and Data Visualization.”

“Enterprise Applications for Virtual Worlds,” will discuss the Eolus project of Oliver Goh (Implenia Global Solutions), and Oliver’s work on facility management, and “green data centers” with Michael Osias, and the 3D data visualization by Ben Lindquist of GreenPhosphor in Sun’s Project Wonderland (sceenshot below) and Second Life. It will be an opportunity learn more about how 3D command and control centers and 3D data visualization may be some of the “killer apps” of the next generation internet.

Virtual Network Operation Center now operational in OpenSim

Michael Osias’s Virtual Network Operation center is now fully operational on OpenSim.

Network Operation Centers are at the heart of all large enterprises and the 3D experience brings much to the table in the exacting task of running complex systems for operations that can tolerate zero down time. Something as simple a being able to remotely collaborate with other systems engineers to say this server here, *point at physical machine* is having problems, and needs physical replacement is invaluable.

It’s easier to explain and show visually than it is to give a reference number, look it up, and then replace it with another machine from over ‘there’

There is a big advantage to doing it in a web page because you can see the layout of the data center in realtime.

Below is a little scenario to illustrate this compiled from screen shots of Michael Osias of IBM’s already operational VNOC in OpenSim.

A typical event in the life of a systems administrator begins with an alert occasionally received at 2AM.

Now, imagine this. You VPN in to your VNOC 3D world and fly to the control tower -

- where you quickly determine which data center the alert is coming from. Following the data stream as you fly to the Data Center.

You land and approach the local admin and inquire about the status. The local admin points out the area of trouble -

- and you check the alert screen which informs you as to the exact problem.

You outline the remedial action to your local admin -

- and designate another server to rebuild as a replacement -

until broken hardware can be replaced. Total time for you: 2.3 minutes -

as you return to the control tower -

and close out the alert.

Time for more sleep!

Shengri La breaks the 15,000 Prim Limit

Other developments to watch on OpenSim come from Shenlei Flasheart (Shenlei Winkler in RL), CEO of the Fashion Research Institute and visionary of Shengri La a utopian micronation in Second Life. Shenlei writes on March 8th:

We did it. Tonight we broke the 15,000 prim limit that is artificially imposed on Second Life sims, and we did it, if I may say so, with quite a degree of aplomb and more than a bit of beauty and only a few screams & cries on my part.

Shenlei explained to me that FRI is a business partner and customer of IBM, plus, we have a research agreement with them to develop new technologies for the apparel industry, a $1.7 trillion industry:

Our Team Leader is Zha Ewry (David Levine); my PI on the research side is Rez Tone (Dr. Mike Pitman); our script wizard is Dale Innis; and of course, for the IBM OpenSim effort is Neas Bade. We’re working with IBM to harden Opensim as an enterprise-ready solution for a number of different reasons not the least of which is the fact that IBM can handle issues of scalability, interoperability, and data security. Right now, we’re testing the IBM OpenSim installation ShengriLa Spirit so that we can really stress the platform in a controlled environment. This offers feedback to our development team in a codified way. The fact that I insist that it be beautiful just aligns with the Fashion Research Institute’s overall vision.

Linden Lab Release the Capabilities Server Open Source

For a technical explanation of the role the “Capabilities” server is designed to take in the Linden Lab vision of an open grid read Christian Scholz’s (Tao Takashi’s blog). I will write more in another post as I have already heard a variety of opinions on the implications of the “capabilities” approach which will be a key to the new Second Life Grid Architecture which as Tao Takashi points out:

is all about interoperability you might also want to mix parts implemented by different people inside your installation. Like the asset server could come from person X, the IM server from party Y and so on. All these parts would need to handle authorization themselves and somehow connect to the session host which knows about permissions. Or to some database. So in this case capabilities are probably easier for plugging a system together.

UgoSim

While I have spent most of this post focusing on large scale applications in OpenSim, I would like to add that I now have a UgoSim (total cost $100 per month) and, for the moment at least, it is a source of great delight for Ugotrade junior (eight yrs old). He has been testing out the new terrain tools that Adam has been posting on. Ugotrade Jr. has also built a tree house at the top of this strange mountain in the center of Ugosim that he wants me to keep under wraps for the moment. But, he is very happy he doesn’t have to wait to be allowed on teen grid to become an expert terraformer and builder. Club Penguin got the thumbs down from him a long while ago!

3D data visualization in virtual worlds, Antigone, avatar2.0, breaking the 1500 prim limit, Bullet for my Valentine, business adoption in open source virtual worlds, command and control centers in virtual worlds, Cradle of Filth, enterprise applications for virtual worlds, enterprise applications in open source virtual worlds, Iron Maiden, killer apps for virtual worlds, large scale events in OpenSim, large scale events in Second Life, licensing open source virtual worlds, Linden Lab Capabilities server, merchandising rock in virtual worlds, motion capture animations in virtual worlds, open source virtual worlds, OpenSim, rock and virtual worlds, Slipknot, systems admin in virtual worlds, The Ramones, Trivium virtual network operations centers

The social consequences of the architectural decisions that will take us into a future of openness in immersive software are potentially vast. Open immersive software is poised to begin to play a disruptive role in the next generation of the internet, and decisions about its design may turn out to be very important ones for all of us.

EbenMoglen Euler the Second Life avatar of Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center), and Zero Linden (Mark Lentczner, Linden Lab), Neas Bade (Sean Dague, IBM, Linux Technology Center), and Zha Ewry (David Levine, IBM Research) met in Second Life last Sunday to discuss crucial issues of open architecture for immersive software in a discussion on Intellectual Property and Privacy/Identity in Open Virtual Worlds facilitated by John Jainschigg and I that kicked off Life 2.0 Summit Spring ‘08 (more details on the panelists here).

It was, I think, a landmark conversation. And, with the permission of United Business Media, here is an exclusive first chance to hear it, if you missed the live event Sunday.

Audio here, © United Business Media.

Picture below of the panel members from left to right, Tara5 Oh (moderator), Zero Linden, EbenMoglen Euler, Neas bade, Zha Ewry, and John Zhaoying.

Open Virtual World platforms are just beginning to get on the radar. But open software is clearly the path to the future and as Philip Rosedale (founder of Linden Lab) has said several times re the complete opening of Second Life software (the client is already open), “Only open will win!”

In two weeks, I will be part of a round table at Virtual Worlds 2008 in the new enterprise track. This round table aims to give people an opportunity to see a variety of implementations of open source virtual world platforms and to learn a bit more about the individual platforms presented, and what they are trying to achieve. Adam Frisby of OpenSim, Nicole Yankelovich of Sun’s Project Wonderland, Jani Pirkola of RealXtend, Remy Malan of Qwaq will be the co-facilitators

Avatar Rights!

At the heart of the discussion with Eben Moglen about freedom and openness in immersive software were some propositions about avatar rights. And, as Zero Linden explained, the new open architecture of the next generation of the Linden Lab grid crucially separates avatar identity from what constitutes their environment. Separating the production of identity from the material substrate is, Eben Moglen explained, at the core of avatar rights. (For a technical view of the next generation of architecture for Second Life see the first draft of Second Life Grid Open Grid Protocol a.k.a. SLGOGP, and for more on these protocols see Tao Takashi’s (Christian Scholz in RL) blog. where the stream for yesterday’s Architectural Working Group 2 meeting held in Second Life is posted.)

Pictures below of Zero Linden (left), Second Life avatar of Mark Lentczner (right), Linden Lab.

Eben Moglen put the fundemental issue of rights in immersive software very eloquently at the start of the discussion. I have transcribed the beginning of this discussion but to see how the thoughts developed through an in depth probing of the issues, you will need to listen to the audio here.

Eben:

I think we have an interesting and powerful problem to put our minds to with respect to want it means to think about freedom and openness in immersive software. The free software movement which I spent a lot of time trying to understand and in trying to assist took for granted that the person who needed to have rights in software was the person who got a copy of a binary, and that his rights in the binary should include the right to understand, and to study, which implied access to the source code, to modify, improve and share.

Now the reason for getting into OpenSim and open virtual worlds is to achieve some of the same kinds of social consequences that the free software movement was trying to achieve including innovation that can be shared by everybody that innovates and the value of technology in commons. But, because this software is immersive software we have another set of values to take into account which are closer to rights for users who don’t have a copy of the binary, or at any rate, whether they have a copy of the program on the client side and may posses some of the code derived from the server is sort of less important than the fact they are inside the software and if they are not free inside the software, they are substantially unfree.

That led me to ask some questions about what it means for an avatar to exist as a beneficiary of the freedom that the user is supposed to get in relation to software. It seemed to me that from there one could begin to try to deduce some rules about how the open virtual worlds have to operate. The most important one seemed to me to be that there is a right to continuity. To have the avatars existence and accumulated experience trapped inside one Terms of Services contract raises the the possibility of what lawyers call unconscionability. That after a while you have so much accumulated value in the avatar that the Terms of Service can be changed on you in a way that you can’t very well resist.

That implied, it seems to me, that if the spaces in the virtual worlds are to be regarded as open they have to be contractually open. It has to be possible to move between them without being artificially constrained by Terms of Service Agreement. That also seemed to me to imply something about the question of what it was one carried from place to place. And it seemed apparent to me that in the process of traveling from place to place an avatar has to carry some rule set as was true in many parts of the world before the modern era of the Nation State. The law that you obeyed traveled along with you. And it seemed to me that we were talking about a situation very much like that.

If you move an avatar in open virtual space from one part of the grid to another or from one grid to another governed by different servers one is not in a position to be asked to surrender ones’ sense of fairness or ones’ understanding about what can be done as a consequence of standing in a particular place. And so I reasoned my way to the conclusion that we had to provide an infrastructure for both declaring persistent preferences and expectations with respect to treatment.

Those were the lines of thought which led me to the propositions that Tara5 explained. And they seemed to me merely propositions in search of simplification. I feel as though I’m looking for some axioms, like Richard Stallman’s four freedoms in the free software movement’s genesis to explain what it is that we need to do as we open the space up.

Zha Ewry:

Reacting on that just a little bit, one of the things that came to mind when I heard Eben talk back in December is something Zero actually said when we did the kick-off, back in I guess September now, for the Architecture Working Group and some of the inter-op work which was, he used a phrase I liked a lot which is “an avatar bill of rights.” It’s what are the expectations an avatar should have in a virtual world. I thought that was a very compelling way of expressing it.

Zero Linden:

I believe at the initial Architecture Working Group which is Linden Lab’s sort of open forum for developing an open protocol set we used the term - looking for “an avatar’s bill of rights.”

I think I would respond to those two thoughts that are quite good. In one case I can give you a different approach for why we came there, and the other I can give you a simplification, which I think you’re looking for. In the first case, when I looked at viewing what would have to exist in an open virtual space, and the value of immersion. Strictly looking at it from the point of view of what made this space work. Granted here I’m a technologist not a lawyer so I’ve perhaps a different view, but surprisingly the same conclusion, is in fact the ability for you to identify and for you to to associate so closely with your avatar that led me to posit as a fundamental aspect of how we build this future open protocol that you must think of it as avatar portability.

It must be a fundamental right that users are in control of their identity not the services which help provide the existence and the immersion. That’s pretty radical thought actually, at least in terms of technology, because it is so much easier to architect, and so much more quote unquote natural to build systems which work another way. Witness every single web-site where you create your own account on every single web-site, it’s much easier for each web-site to do that than it is for web-sites to understand that they somehow agree to opt into a protocol in which you can control your identity.

In virtual world services, we have to have a world in which your avatar and your identity are in control of the user not matter what the service provide is. So what is going on in the AWG and the structure of the future protocol is the surprising separation at the server side, at the internet side, of those services that provide aspects of you identity. And by separating those out, and by building the entire protocol based on a mutual understanding between those two sets of servers, we enable users to choose servers to represent their identity that meet with their needs, trusts and ideals and to still interact with other servers that provide land with other things.

Right now when we are standing on this piece of land, the server we are standing on is both providing our identities as well as providing the land. And if you come to visit this piece land you basically have to trust what this server decides your avatar can do. In the future open that we are deciding we separate those notions. There is a server which represents your identity that you have chosen, and there is a server that represents the land that the landowner has chosen. And, we embed in those systems the negotiation between them.

Eben:

That is beautifully elegant, I have to say. That does indeed make an enormous difference………(to continue please go to the audio here).

Also see Sean Dague’s (IBM and OpenSim) interesting post on his blog that highlights one of the key freedoms Eben discussed - the freedom to leave.

“freedom to leave”, an open-standards based assurance that users can move their data easily between interoperable platforms and services.

Sean notes:

Today, if you decide to leave any virtual world platform (even OpenSim), you pretty much have to leave you data behind. I think that one of the features people will be looking for in the virtual worlds of tomorrow is the same freedom to leave that they get from any standard web or mail infrastructure provider today. Part of what has made Google successful in the application hosting space is by ensuring it’s easy to leave the platform.

One of the biggest reasons I left LiveJournal was that it was hard to leave, and the longer I built up content in that environment, the harder it was going to be for me to get it out.

Also see the coverage of the panel at SLNN.

Mitch Kapor - Second Life 2.0

In his keynote at Life 2.0 Summit Spring ‘08, Mitch Kapor predicted that virtual worlds will become a very important part of corporate strategies for adapting to a world defined by global warming. Kapor the recent board chair of Linden Lab (now a board member), chair and founder of the Open Source Applications Foundation; co-founder of the Electronic Frontier and Mozilla Foundations; and the creator of Lotus 1-2-3, the spreadsheet that revolutionized enterprise computing in the 80s spoke about his current work to enhance the user interface for virtual worlds, which he likened to being in the DOS stage now. His vision to make virtual worlds useful and accessible to all is backed by work on in his own lab. He noted that videos of some of these experiments will be available on You Tube in a couple of weeks. See Hiro’s epic post for more. Kapor also made some comments re the open sourcing of virtual worlds.

I am personally very encouraged at the progress being made with OpenSim and open source components of a virtual world eco-system- some people inside the company at Linden may feel threatened by this. But my personal view all along is the most important thing that can happen is to have the largest most vibrant innovative ecosystem for virtual worlds as possible. And that means something that is open and interoperable. One wants to have the biggest pie not a little slice of a small pie. And similarly I know that there are a lot of people interested in avatar portability or open avatar in the company.

This last remark I think is clearly supported by the number of Lindens that came to the annual open Architectural Working Group meeting. I attended and there were indeed a bunch of Lindens present. The picture below is from Tao Takashi’s (Christian Scholz in RL) blog.

Avatar Bill of Rights, avatar idenntity, Avatar Rights, Free Software Movement, Freedom and Openess in Immersive Software, Intellectual Property and Privacy/Idnetity in Open Virtual Worlds, next generation internet, open source virtual worlds, Open Virtual Worlds Software Freedom Law Center

Eben Moglen - Open Source, IPPI panel in Second Life

Life 2.0 Summit Spring ‘08 will kick off with the Open Source, IPPI (IP and Privacy/Identity) in Virtual Worlds On Sunday, March 16, at 1 PM PST, with special guest Eben Moglen (his avatar pictured above).

The event will be held in the CMP Amphitheater at CMP 1, 2, 3, 4 ( SLURL ). To attend the Second Life events or watch video you must register for Life 2.0 here.

Eben Moglen, is Director, Chair and Chief Counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. Moglen, professor of law and legal history at Columbia, is a pioneer of the opensource movement, former general counsel for the Free Software Foundation, and one of the architects of version 3 of the GNU GPL.

Zero Linden

Eben Moglen’s co-panelists on Sunday will include Zero Linden, a.k.a Mark Lentczner, Linden Lab. Zero is one of main the architects of Second Life’s evolving infrastructure. Zero recently published the first draft of Second Life Grid Open Grid Protocol a.k.a. SLGOGP a important step forward on the path to opening up the Second Life grid (see Tateru Nino’s post on Massively, Tao Takashi’s post at mrtopf.de, and mindblizzard).

The brilliant and very elegant Zha Ewry (a.k.a David Levine, IBM Research) will be joining the panel from JFK airport while he waits for his flight to San Francisco. David Levine and Eben Moglen had an interesting conversation back in December that you can find on Ugotrade here. They explore some of the problems of defining digital public space and issues of privacy on the internet, offering many suggestions on how to implement online privacy enhancing technologies and insights as to how we could design the next generation of these technologies in responsible ways.

Also Zha was a interviewed recently on Metanomics with Beyers Sellers (a.k.a Robert Bloomfield). This interview is highly recommended as some of the key issues facing Second Life’s Architecture Working Group (AWG) and a future Open Grid “that will ultimately allow the cohesive operation of both Linden-operated and non-Linden-operated Second-Life style simulators and grids.” (see Massively for more) are unpacked.

Download the video (Quicktime)
Download the audio (MP3)
Read the transcript
Metaversed video archive at SLCN

Also, OpenSim and Linux guru Sean Dague (IBM) will be a panelist. Sean Dague has been a member of IBM’s Linux Technology Center since it’s inception in 2001. He has worked on numerous Open Source technologies over the years including: Cluster Management (SystemImage and OSCAR projects), Hardware Control (OpenHPI), Virtualization (Xen), and now Virtual Worlds with OpenSim. Sean has been an active member of the OpenSim project since July 2007.

Sean’s avatar (picture below) is Neas Bade.

Tara5 Oh (below - that’s me!) will moderate with CMP’s John Jainschigg (John Zhaoying).

See you there! (SLURL)

We have built the technology for monitoring almost everything, almost everywhere and we are making 99% of it open-source. Thanx to Bruce Sterling who inspired us, we called our technology “OpenSpime.” This is a concrete opportunity to monitor the earth, and everyone on this planet will be able to contribute to this.

OpenSpime have prepared a concept video of CO2 monitoring (still from the video above) and Google maps mashup via their OpenSpime infrastructure. For more see, co-founder, David Orban’s post OpenSpime: What do you know about your planet?

Instrumentation versus Surveillance

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.
Cory Doctorow, Craphound.com, boingboing.net

OpenSpime and SL Data Viz project (a project in Second Life “where people can contribute, review and copy open-source data viz tools” which OpenSpime will participate in) are taking up the challenge that Bruce Sterling made at end of his visionary book, Shaping Things. Sterling gave an imperative to humankind to start to make “decent technology” - social software entities that can answer questions. Questions about our world. Questions about objects. Not the profit-centric questions - serious questions. (Shaping Things).

The protagonists of this new era of social software - the narrators of the instrumented world to come - are Spimes.

Sterling invented the term by compressing ’space’ and ‘time’. Spimes are aware of their environment, they know where they are, and when they are, and keep track of some parameter around them. Sensing, memory, and ubiquitous communication enable spimes to accurately map the physical world around them. The progressive saturation of the world with spimes is creating what is called the Internet of Things.

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.

OpenSpime is doing it! SL Data Viz project is doing it!

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. This is the third time I have posted this link but Spimes deserve all the air play they can get!

Our technology enables individuals and corporations to better understand their environment, through the use of a series of GPS-enabled sensors. We provide a set of open APIs and communication protocols to manage the data collected.

See an interview with the founders of OpenSpime here.

With free hardware, free software, open APIs and communication protocols, OpenSpime’s business model is about the provisioning of the SpimeID identification numbers for the trusted communication of validated data streams between spimes and the OpenSpime servers.

Here are David’s responses to questions about the revenue model:

The revenue model is based on the sale (in large quantities to the hardware makers) of the certified SpimeIDs. Anybody can build spimes that conform to our open specifications, but if you want us to validate the data that your spime collects, and aggregate it together with other trusted sources, than you have to pay €1 per device to get the ID. Ah, and we already have LOIs for several hundred thousand IDs to be built in devices. [smile]

The estimates are that there will be ten or more spimes per person in the developed countries within ten years. That is approximately 25 billion spimes, and counting, since by 2020 the number of people who live in countries we define developed will also increase. That’s a
market for you! And we want to define the way the data generated is managed.

What comes after humans twittering to each other? Spimetalk. And spimetalk is going to be several orders of magnitude more intense than any human2human or human2machine communication before that.

From Spimes to Mirror Worlds

Agents, avatars and spimes will eventually hang out together in Virtual Worlds, interacting in real time in networked virtual environments built of live data and 3D info machines.

Melanie Swan points out:

Virtual Worlds have been used for architectural builds and interaction and the next obvious step is making them alive with data, streaming in data and representing it visually. Data visualization in Second Life is starting to take off with an open-source movement to make open-source building-block tools available to the community and developers and end users creating specific-purpose enterprise and science applications. There is a community wiki and a “Data Visualization” group in Second Life.

The picture above is of a Bashiba Panorama - “a commercially available ambient data panorama that dynamically reflects the overall “mood” of a rich information environment. The so-called “data atmosphere” reacts in real-time multivariable changes (e.g. stock market data), that are then mapped to visual counterparts (e.g. ocean waves, sun strength, wind speed, rain). the resulting information display can be interpreted ‘without cognitive effort’.”

“once the stock market opens, our 3D simulation comes to life, & people start ‘breathing’ business information.”

The streaming Bashiba Panorama in Second Life is an experiment in collaboration with Melanie Swan (MS Futures Group) and powered by the Ohio University VITAL Laboratory streaming server (many thanks to Dr. Chang Liu + Stephen Carroll). Look for Bashiba to come to Second Life in full immersive 3D!

For videos of Bashiba in SL see here and here.

3D Command Centers the killer app of the 3D Internet

A Mobile Tactical Data Comm Unit built by Illuminous Beltran in OpenSim

Data visualization will develop increasingly into and become inextricable from operation/command centers - the 3D information machines that will reinvent the relationship between humans and the up to now invisible but most crucial layer of modern society - software. For more on Illuminous Beltran’s, (a.k.a Michael Osias, IBM) virtual operation centers/command centers in Second Life/OpenSim see here.

These 3D command centers are being used for energy management, virtual network operations centers, and for building automation (see the work of Eolus). But, as long as our society is wedded to war, the “killer app” of the 3D internet will also be a killer app in more ways than one. The instrumentation of society has grown up hand in hand with surveillance and military technology. But it is up to us, as a society, to grow the peaceful and people centered aspects of this technology.

The nascent spiming technology of RFID had its roots in military innovation.

In 1946 Léon Theremin invented an espionage tool for the Soviet Union which retransmitted incident radio waves with audio information. Sound waves vibrated a diaphragm which slightly altered the shape of the resonator, which modulated the reflected radio frequency. Even though this device was a passive covert listening device, not an identification tag, it has been attributed as a predecessor to RFID technology. The technology used in RFID has been around since the early 1920s according to one source (although the same source states that RFID systems have been around just since the late 1960s).^[2][3][4][5]

Similar technology, such as the IFF transponder invented by the United Kingdom in 1939, was routinely used by the allies in World War II to identify aircraft as friend or foe. Transponders are still used by military and commercial aircraft to this day. (for more see Wikipedia on RFID)

But, Gelertner’s vision in, Mirror Worlds 1991, is the transformation of computers into seeing machines that will empower people to understand and work with the machinery of their society. And with projects like OpenSpime everyone can contribute to the task of asking important questions about our world. And as these questions are increasingly incorporated in virtual operation centers, we will be able to interact with the previously invisible machinery of our modern world - tinker with it, hang out in it with other avatars, and agents, and command it in new ways.

Life2.0 Summit Spring ‘08

Life 2.0 is the leading event on virtual world application and business development. Produced three times yearly by CMP in Second Life, the six-day virtual event draws a fully-registered, global audience of over 1000 software architects, creatives, CMOs and key executives seeking to harness the power of virtual reality for marketing, application creation, commerce, education, and to connect with the Net’s fastest-growing, smartest, most-engaged communities.

Also check out CMP’s John Jainschigg’s (John Zhaoying in Second life) post, “Life 2.0 - As green as Five Brazilian Households,” which demonstrates “that importing certain kinds of real-world activities into virtual reality saves a bagload of carbon. Or put another way, that it enables us to enjoy the benefits of global human community at small cost to the planet.”

Eben Moglen to join IPPI panel at Life 2.0 in SecondLife

The Kickoff Symposium will Discuss Opensource, IP and Privacy/Identity in Virtual Worlds On Sunday, March 16, at 1 PM PST.

Life 2.0’s IPPI (Intellectual Property, Privacy and Identity) symposium will kick off with a rousing panel discussion on Opensource, IP and Privacy in Virtual Worlds — including special guest Eben Moglen, Director, Chair and Chief Counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. Moglen, professor of law and legal history at Columbia, is a pioneer of the opensource movement, former general counsel for the Free Software Foundation, and one of the architects of version 3 of the GNU GPL.

The panel (still growing!) will be moderated by Tish Shute (Tara5 Oh), who blogs on virtual worlds (hey that’s me!), and CMP’s John Jainschigg (John Zhaoying).

Also see, A Conversation with Eben Moglen on Second Life.

There will be a Data Viz panel at Life 2.0, Monday, March 17th, 2pm to 3pm PST, organized by Melanie Swan (more on this soon). See the impressive list of data visualization tools that SL Data Viz project has already gathered together below.

Directory of Data Visualization Tools in SL:

(excerpted from the sldataviz wiki)

Interactive Data Exhibits:

• Embodiment Island Data Visualization Exhibit Hall, SLurl, contact Mark Dubin/ThreeDee Shepherd to exhibit material
• NOAA real-time U.S. weather sim, SLurl
• Daden Prime real-time U.K. weather sim, SLurl
• Daden Prime real-time LAX Air Traffic Data, SLurl

Tools - scientific:

• CAIA - Cheminformatic Assisted Image Array visualization laboratory. Status: Available to view (Gus Rosania/Caia Alter), SLurl
• Hiro’s Molecule Rezzer - Rezzes molecules from a notecard. Status: OpenSLedware. (Andrew Lang/Hiro Sheridan) ONREZ SLurl
• Histogram (20 period, real-time, on-demand stock market data), SLurl. Status: Open-source download available (Melanie Swan/Xantha Oe and Eloise Pasteur)
• Orac - Takes smi, InChI, or inchikey as input, queries three web services and rezzes the returned minimized structure in SL. Status: Avaliable upon request. (Andrew Lang/Hiro Sheridan)
• StoryMachine - Generic visualization tool for dynamic interactions. Status: In development (Peter Miller/Graham Mills), SLurl
• StoryMachine - PubMed Search. Status: In development (Peter Miller/Graham Mills), SLurl
• Protein Rezzer Toolkit - In-world rezzing of 3D protein backbone structures based on specially parsed PDB files. Status: In development (Peter Miller/Graham Mills; based on scripts by Troy McLuhan).

Tools - enterprise:

• Airline flight booking - connecting Second Life to a SAP NetWeaver system to create a 3-D Business Process (Bjoernaeon). Also see Craig Cmehil’s blog.
  
• Green Phosphor, New Jersey, USA - enterprise data visualization applications (Ben Lindquist/Arkowitz Jonson, David Cooper/Coop Upshaw)

3D information machines, Bashiba, building automation in virtual worlds, energy monitoring in virtual worlds, instrumentation versus surveillance, intellectual property, internet of thins, killer app of the 3D internet, Life 2.0, Mirror Worlds, open source data visualization, open source data visualization tools, openspime. CO2 monitoring, privacy and identity, RFID, Shaping Things, software freedom, spime, spimes, spimetalk, virtual command centers virtual network operation centers