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Hybridized Digital/Physical Worlds:
Where Pop and Corporate Cultures Mingle

Tue, May 22, 2007

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These two pictures are from Nicolas Nova’s Media and Design Lab, Mediamatic Workshop, Amsterdam, May 2007 (see Pasta and Vinegar). The picture on the left is what hybridization is NOT about – rather think from a less utilitarian point of view as in picture on the right. (Nicolas Nova).

This IS What hybridization is about!

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Destroy Television (DTV)

If you live in New York City, or can get here, you have an amazing opportunity to participate in a full on hybridization experience, this Wednesday May 23rd:

Go to the Other Here to get:

some background and details (when, where, who, what, why/vision) on the Destroy Television art show at Fuse Gallery, GHava{SL}, dtv.sheeplabs.com, and in Second Life. Take a look, come hang out in New York or Second Life during this Wednesday’s opening, and plan your performance if you want to make a splash in Destroy Television The Movie. On this…..

Invitation To Attend And Participate In The Destroy Television 10-Day Second Life Avatar Lifelogging Art Show Movie…Thing

Destroy Television is the name of an avatar in Second Life who streams live video of her life and adventures to dtv.sheeplabs.com, where you see and chat and influence her movement and camera controls in SL from the web. But wait! There’s more! Destroy Television, or DTV for short, records and shares her life through a process called “lifelogging” or “lifecasting” (to define terms, logging is keeping the record and casting is sharing it live — a popular example of real life lifecasting is the 24/7 mobile camera at justin.tv).

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An avatar of Justin in Second Life

We wonder if lifelogging in virtual worlds, that is, taking advantage of virtual worlds having essentially baked-in wireless internet and communications, cameras, GPS, RFID, and meta data about people and locations, will help prototype a more transparent, searchable, and personally and socially and globally understandable real world — the reeeaaally flat world.

Data Blogging – an advanced form of blogging.

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Collecting the traces of new interaction partners is a trend in hybridization.

Question: Why would objects want to blog? Why would I be interested? (see Julian Bleeker’s blog on Techkwondo)

Answer: Traces (where you have been where you are going in a geospatial sense), history, (“turn a history on interactions into a continuous experience – object to learn from their histories”), content production (see The Aibo [the toy dog] That Blogs), and agency – e.g., having a voice in cultural circulation on public networks -streams, feeds, trackbacks, permalinks, wiki and blog posts.

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Critter Cams from Nicolas Nova

And, we cannot ignore, reality mining and lifelogging’s shadow “big brother” (Justin cop helmet cams are all the rage too now).

Hybridization at an “Unconference”

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Jose Marinez, at MobileCampNYC, presenting on, “The Poor man’s SMS Gateway.” There are instructions for setting up the SMS gateway on his blog

On Saturday (May 19th) our whole family went to MobileCampNYC. For a very generous description of our presentation, “Metaverse and The Mobile Space: Intersection or Inclusion,” see Marshall Sponder at WebMetricsGuru.

Nokia (who unveiled a beta mobile web server) lavishly sponsored the event and supplied an abundance of Nokia 95s, some of which were given away. A bit disappointed not to get one the Ugotrade family went shopping for their N 80 IE’s that evening with our co-presenter on “Metaverse and The mobile space, Rich LaBaca.

While as Dave Winer, Scripting News, commented:

People don’t seem ready yet to accept that knowledge is distributed through the room, we’re here to be taught.

I felt MobileCampNYC, an “unconference,” did maintain the feeling of a hybrid event. Presentations from corporate giants rubbed shoulders with more down to earth innovations such as “The Poor Man’s SMS Gateway,” Dave Harper, founder of Winksite, Cocoa UltraSMS, Paul Notzold – txtual healing ” (see Marshall Sponder for an excellent write up ), “Mashup your phone with GPS” – WHERE.com, Mexuar – who will soon be announcing a very interesting new app. for Second Life, and then there was the Ugotrade family road show!

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Akaalias uploaded this picture of Ugotrade junior to MobileCamp’s Flickr pool noted:

This DS contained a Revolution R4 card with a microSD memory card embedded in it. I wasn’t expecting to get out-teched by a someone under 10. (noted by Everyplace )

Many thanks to everyone who played with UJ while I participated. As Akaalias observed in the title to this picture, Ugotrade Junior was on a mission to “Remote Control the Camp.”

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Also, Timo Arnall flew in from Norway, just for this conference, and gave an inspiring presentation on Physical Hyperlinking.

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Timo covered a lot of ground. He outlined many technologies for physical hyperlinking, and their creative uses in intereactive marketing and community projects. Go to Timo’s blog to really get a feel for how creative and far reaching his thinking is.

Timo has put many of his wonderful slides up too – RFID, “smart posters,” Bluetooth marketing – “turn on bluetooth to receive something naughty,” building size QR codes, Semapedia’s hyperlinking, experimental and niche market projects such as one to tag the provenance of craft items and unusual interpretations of QR codes, and much more.

Metaverse Roadmap

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I have been quite absorbed with the Mirror World, Augmented Reality, and Lifelogging quadrants of the Metaverse Roadmap lately. This picture is from Jerry Paffendorf’s (futurist for The Electric Sheep Company) blog. See here for much more on the Metaverse Roadmap project and where lifelogging and reality mining all fit in a vision of the 3D Web.

Jerry Paffendorf points out that:

massively multi-user avatar environments in whatever form, are and will become even more of a driver of the other areas [in the picture above] because of their capacity to purely simulate things digitally and because they inherently have RFID, GPS, WiFi, and metadata out the kazoo baked right into them.

You can, for example, prototype any imaginable augmented reality application inside of a virtual world, which may also be a mirror world, before you put it out onto the street, or inside of a building, or wherever out in physical space.

He also explains the importance of lifelogging and indicates what might be the future of lifelogging.

recording your actions and experiences both in the digital world and/or in the real world to create a picture of yourself over time that you can revisit to learn from and share with other people.

Linking Real Worlds and Virtual Worlds

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My post on CJ Chowderhead’s virtualized lab on Second Life (in this picture with his duck that reports temperatures from Real Life locations) was picked up by several other blogs including Rob Smart’s blog, Disordered Cogitations, and Mark Wallace from 3pointD, who had this to say:

This is just one kind of application that could start to make Second Life a much more useful place. I’d love to see entities and conditions being tracked around SL in real time. Why? Because there’s a ton of information to be extracted from a digital environment, which can then be applied to real-world problems from logistics to marketing to sociology, you name it. That said, this won’t start to get really interesting until we have a nearly plug-n-play solution. Which is probably one of the things IBM is working on. Keep your sensors tuned.

All About Mobile Life also linked to the post and pointed me to the work of Mike Conway, Instanceof Idea, who has been working on “mashup info in the 3D world” in Second Life.

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Mike Conway uses the freely available tools, that you and I have access to – such as Ruby On Rail’s, to get data both into SL and out to RL. He has some pretty nifty ideas he’s working on too.

He seems to be working on a storm display map that is somewhat interactive. For example, you can point and click on a storm icon on the map to bring out more information presented in what he calls flyouts (very appropriate considering dropdowns and popups are in widespread use today). He also has at least one GPS app with 2-way data. Although, he admits that the data out side is a bit buggy. The weather map also appears to have 2 way gps functionality. That is he can get the real world location of a truck and show its 3d icon on a virtual map updated as it moves. Furthermore, he talks about sending some new GPS location to it and having it go there.

Mike Conway seems to have quite a lot going on considering he is working with text streams like, RSS feeds, rather than the data input/output that IBM’s MQtt manages.

IBM IMPACT 2007 SOA event in Second Life

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This picture is from the IBM Impact 2007 SOA conference that was streamed into Second Life.

SOA (service orientated architecture) is the bridge between IT and business that IBM has been pioneering. And, as far as I can tell it must be hot, hot, hot! I feel I have to mention this event, even though I need to wrap this post up. The event had the flavor of a kind of corporate Woodstock, not just because it was on an extraordinary scale for Second Life (see video on Youtube to get a sense of this), but because one got the feeling that something about this gathering was going to have a big effect on the wider culture.

And, in terms of being a global cultural mixer, it was an extraordinary event. There were multiple cultures and languages. And, aided by translator HUDs, Real Life and Second Life, and pop and corporate cultures, intermingled and exchanged ideas in kaleidosopic patterns hardly imaginable in Real Life. I am on my way back in-world as soon as this post is up!

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categories: Augmented Reality, Bar Camp, crossing digital divides, Mobile Technology, Second Life, social media, Virtual Worlds, Web 3D, Web3.D
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  1. UgoTrade » Blog Archive » The Mixed Reality Metarati at “Destroy TV”: Merging Art, Commerce, Politics and Play Says:

    [...] UgoTrade Crossing Digital Divides – tracking innovative uses of technology in new environments. home « Hybridized Digital/Physical Worlds: Where Pop and Corporate Cultures Mingle [...]

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    [...] the IBM sims on Second Life. The IBM Impact 2007 SOA (Service Oriented Architecure) conference (see my earlier post) was an extraordinary example of the convergence of enterprise culture, 2.o thinking, and virtual [...]