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The excitement in the open source virtual world developer community has been bubbling over since realXtend brought many OpenSimulator developers over to Finland to reveal the extraordinary amount of work they have done “extending” the function of the OpenSimulator project in just 4 months.

See here for an account of this amazing meeting in Oulu, Finland, by one of the participants from the OpenLife grid. Pictured above is a screenshot of the new mesh avatars being conformed inworld. Adam Frisby explained to me:

Meshes behave just like another prim type - you can drag, scale, and rotate meshes around using the same method that you use on primitives and object groups. You can link meshes with other primitives, save them to inventory and use them in pretty much the same way you use primitives.

Second Life is built with prims, so I asked my friend, Zha Ewry, for a 101 on meshes versus prims. “A prim, is a solid, defined by an equation - a cube, and such with permutations, like twist and taper, and cut. Whereas a mesh, is a series of triangles in 3d which conform to the shape of the object.”

Meshes are groovy because “they can do arbitrary surfaces. You can lay a mesh over any shape, add more triangles, increase resolution. A prim you can’t make any shape, only what the math bends it to, so you blend them into shapes by composition.”

SL originally went with prims and not meshes “because they are more compact, lower cost to render and easier to map to the physics model.” But, “many 3d programs build meshes by default and nothing builds prims,” so the introduction of meshes facilitates one of the key new realXtend features - support for proper 3D models.

I asked Zha if meshes would have a negative effect on concurrency. Zha said the answer to that question is not entirely clear yet, “but its not as bad as it seems because its prim+texture vs mesh=texture.”

Zha explained that a lot of people think of meshes as much more expensive when its not prim vs. mesh but rather, prim+texture vs mesh+texture so the difference is smaller, “and even more to the point, for many things, its Prim+prim+prim+prm+textures vs mesh+texture set. Often, even for small objects, you can do several prims worth of detail in a mesh.”

I have heard from OpenSim developers that the expectation for OpenSim is for concurrencies of 100 at least in the next six months.

Two realXtend companies, Admino & Ludocraft, have been dedicating 20 personnel (programmers, designers and content creators)‘ to extending’ the function of the OpenSimulator Project, both server side and client side respectively. The project is backed by the vision and generosity of Juha Hulkko, who has another fascinating project Radio Arkala (also in Second Life on Arkala Island).

Click on the screenshot above for the realXtend video demo. There is a full list of realXtend features on their site here. RealXtend give a summary of some of the most important functionality they have added.

The most important realXtend-specific development areas were the media tools such as VoIP and document sharing, OGRE renderer support and, of course, the separate realXtend avatar storage / authentication infrastructure that enables seamless transition from one world to another.

Having support for proper 3d models as well as simpler primitive type objects is an asset in many different ways. Most importantly, just about all the professionals and advanced amateurs who create content suitable for virtual worlds like to work with proper 3d modeling software. There’s already a lot of existing material that can now be directly transferred to the virtual reality if for example a movie maker wants to create a virtual world based on an animated film and the same goes for computer game developers. Thanks to proper 3d model support, practically all of their material should be easy to transfer from games to realXtend based virtual worlds and vice versa.

Another central feature is the global avatar architecture. A network of interconnected virtual worlds simply doesn’t exist until users can take their virtual representatives with them wherever they choose to go. Architecturally this means separating the avatar and their asset storage functionality from the virtual world server. Avatar service will provide the users with identity and authentication independent of the world they happen to be in at any given time. In practice the role of the avatar service will be somewhat similar to what email is today. Security is naturally a major issue whenever someone’s identity or asset ownership is concerned and it has been an important consideration in the design of the avatar architecture.

The picture below is of the web page as a texture feature.

Under testing for the next release (29th of February 2008)

• Free-form non-humanoid avatars
• Global avatar mesh, skeleton, textures, attachments and animations
• Single sign-on to multiple worlds for teleporting
• Avatar generator
• Avatar attachment tool to help set 3D meshes to different bones
• Unlimited amount of attachments per bone
• Teleports between realXtend and Secondlife
• Avatar storage to move avatar appearance between realXtend grids/worlds
• Mesh tool to scale and set pivot of 3d models
• Server launcher and configuration application
• Home automation example using X10 technology
• Bot with Python scripting
• Media library for world builders
• Server status window

Pictured below is the the location of this historic meeting which was also attended by Chris Collins of Linden Lab. I did hear some very interesting anecdotes about the visitors introduction to Finnish culture - flaming drinks, saunas, and hot metarati rolling in snow!!! But, the focus of this post is the road map for an open standards virtual world’s future, so I will leave it to others to tell those tales.

What follows is an extract from realXtend press release, and then I move on to an interview I did with Adam Frisby who was in New York last weekend. He shared some of his thoughts on the future of the Open Simulator project with me on another snowy weekend of skiing and snowboarding in upstate New York (lots of snow again but no flaming drinks, just Ribena, Mario Galaxy, and snowball fights with Ugotrade Jr).

Oulu, Finland - even a blizzard couldn’t delay the meeting

Team up to make open source Virtual World standard

Open source virtual world developers OpenSim are building a global standard to power the 3D internet, now joined by Finnish developer’s realXtend, OpenSim gains many new key features and technologies.

OpenSim is a free and open standard virtual world server founded at the beginning of 2007 by a small group of developers. The OpenSim platform can be used for creating and deploying immersive 3D Virtual Interactive Environments. The realXtend project’s mission is to assist in bringing forth the next generation of virtual reality development by focusing on interoperability technologies, usability and real-life application support. realXtend brings to OpenSim professional experience and development in the realm of 3D engine programming, voice over IP and network support, and is contributing many new features such as improved 3D graphics and voice chat.

“I welcome the realXtend project to join us. It is my pleasure to see that the OpenSim gets a huge professional code contribution. The future of the OpenSim project looks bright as the developer base continues to grow with giant leaps like this”, says OpenSim project manager Darren Guard (aka core developer Michael Wright).

realXtend is contributing all the server side code for their developments to OpenSim and continues to do so from now on. This collaboration of two projects with a similar vision enables realXtend and OpenSim to focus on common issues, and solve them more quickly - leveraging experience and knowledge from each party. realXtend project manager Jani Pirkola comments on the joining as “I see this as a great possibility to quickly make OpenSim the global de facto standard and to significantly speed up the global technology development in this area. Our common goal is to create the best open source virtual world server platform, and to continue the rapid evolution of OpenSim”.

Interview with Adam Frisby of OpenSim

Snowball fight in the Catskills while “snowed in with Open Sim”

Me: Could you tell me more about the “avatar server?”

Adam: The “avatar server” improvement allows you to sign in remotely from another region and bring your avatar & attachments across with you. It allows you to sign onto a OpenSim with an address like: adam frisby@mygrid.com — and then bring across your avatar & appearance. Inventory/etc is going to come in with this sign on method as well.

Me: You also mentioned to me how this would really change the concept of griding and introduce a different model to the Second Life grid.

Adam: Right, that’s tied in with that [the avatar server] a little - you don’t need a big central grid in the way they are operating. Their philosophy has been more akin to the world wide web — lots of interdependent sites that can link to each other. The avatar server is the first step towards that, since it allows you to login to multiple independent installations with one account.

Me: Do these changes, potentially, signify more of a fork from Second Life or not?

Adam: Definitely. This is the first time we’ve broken compatibility with SL feature-wise and implemented things that go far beyond SL.

Me: Will the Rex viewer work with SL?

Adam: You can still connect to SL with the Rex viewer, but your missing lots of nifty functionality, like the new rendering engine.

Me: What do you think are the implications of that and do you think the fork will continue to get wider or not?

Adam: Well, the subtle irony of it is that Linden Lab can’t take the changes back because of their client being GPL’d and they still rely on non-GPL’d components, i.e., FMOD and other bits and pieces. They can take BSD [all the realXtend server side work is BSD, but the client source code is GPL’d at the moment.
If we released the patches as BSD licensed, which RealXtend intends to try to do, then yes they could take those ones back.

Me: So why the conflict exactly?

Adam: LL use a set of proprietary components in their official release, for example the Kakadu JPEG2000 library - which means their official release is actually GPL-incompatible. RealXtend have to extract out any bit of Linden IP or derivative work in order to be able to release it under a more permissive license. (The GPL is actually fairly restrictive). In copyright law, you can generally make a open source license more restrictive, but never the other way around - it’s one of the reasons that OpenSim is licensed under one of the least restrictive Open Source licenses. If LL took the GPL’d code RealXtend had done back, they would be under the terms of the GPL via RealXtends IP.

Me: So taking the client code back could cause problems?

Adam: Well, if they took it - yes. But unfortunately they really can’t. They could in their pure-open-source release, but not in their mainline release.

Me: What do you think is the best path forward re interoperability?

Adam: I think the best path forward for a standard is to release everything to either the public domain, or as close as you can get. It allows all parties to use the code for any purpose whatsoever.

Me: So you mean no GPL no BSD?

Adam: BSD is fairly close legally - it’s effectively public domain with a “Don’t sue us” clause. There’s a small group of licenses which are essentially public domain:
- New BSD (what OpenSim/libsl are under)
- MIT
- X11
and a few others.

Me: Can Linden Lab switch from GPL to BSD?

Adam: They can - as far as I know they have never accepted anything into their codebase which would prohibit it. They have been discussing lately switching a few key files to BSD, which would definitely be appreciated - but the whole client would be better. A lot of people do - I’m not going to go into names (you can if you want), but there’s a fairly large group of people who dislike the GPL. At least for this kind of standards setting thing.

Me: So what is the road map for OpenSim now? What do you see as the 3 month goals to be, and then 6 month and then one year?

Adam: 3 month goals - we’re going to try and align the two codebases we have now into one seamless codebase that works well both with the official SL client, and with the improved Realxtend one.

We’ve also got a few short term goals in terms of stability, getting features working properly, and maybe with a little luck, doing a bit of work on our client networking. Of course - anything I say has to be taken with a grain of salt, open source means people can work on what they like effectively.

In six months time, I’d like to have the majority of the features in the official client supported, and to be reasonably stable enough for large scale deployments.

I think that might take longer than 6 months, but you never know.

A years time, I’d like to be working towards next generation features - what sorts of things we think the standard virtual world must support, better support for linking environments has to happen over the next year - and we definitely need to be well on our way towards a really good standard infrastructure that can scale to the size of the web today.

Me: Re the discussion of standard features - what do you think is the best forum for this discussion? And, has realXtend committed to more development?

Adam: They have committed to working on this until their backing runs out, but it sounds like they might have found a way to continue working for a good while yet.

Me: And, the forum for the discussion of standards - what do you think is best for that?

Adam: I think that’s going to just happen on it’s own.

A lot of the standards bodies that have been setup seem to be moving no-where, and while we are all happy to participate in them - I think more is going to be achieved by doing things, testing them, seeing what works.

Me: And sorting out a more permissive licensing situation seems like it would help?

Adam: It would help - because it means we don’t need to spend so much time reinventing the wheel. We have to reinvent everything LL has done to be able to license it permissively.

Adam: The Rex serverside changes - those are all BSD, and we’re incorporating it back. Their viewer changes - those are GPL’d by necessity, and we’re not touching those. The RealXtend company has two different companies working on it to avoid any IP contamination. The serverside stuff was done by Admino, and the clientside by Ludocraft.

We’ve got two pieces of software here:
- OpenSim
- Rexviewer
and the server side changes to list them are the avatar server and….. and all the meshes etc. are on the client side with Ludocraft. The server side changes are things like the Python scripting, backend support for the meshes, avatar server, etc. The client side changes are the new rendering engine, client side mesh support, shadows, improved lighting, etc.

Me: Does Windlight goes out if Rex comes in?

Adam: Yes, Rex are looking at integrating Windlight properly into their viewer at the moment. But they can integrate that in without too much of a problem because that’s strictly a client side thing, and that’s already GPL’d.

Me: My friend Ben Goertzel of Novamente who is developing Artificial General Intelligence projects in VWs wanted to know if the skeletons allowed “the ability to script fine-grained control of skeletons controlling characters of different types.” He wants to control characters via inverse kinematics not just by launching pre-fab animations because without that you can’t have naturalistic or adaptable motor control. Will the mesh avatars allow that sort of thing?

Adam: IK is on RealXtend’s feature list - they haven’t implemented it yet, but they are working towards it. What your friend might appreciate is that you can have completely customised bones under the realxtend avatar.

The default skeleton has 220 bones in it, but you can make your own custom skeletons for things like anthropomorphic avatars.

One of the avatars we got shown was someone wandering around as a giant collection of mushrooms.

Me: Can you control the angles of motions of the joints?

Adam: Yeah, you can.

Me: Cool! Ben is going to be so happy. AI just moved a big step forward!

Adam: Shiny.

Me: Ben also said if I want to stress you are ask if you can implement realistic physics of fluids for him

Adam: We’ve got a physics engine that supports it, but client will take a lot of work!

Click on the screenshot below to download your own OpenSimulator and get started. I have. You can download the realXtend client at realXtend.

Adam Frisby, Admino, artificial general intelligence, BSD, GPL, GPL versus BSD, importing 3D models to Second Life, Juha Hulkko, Ludocraft, Meshes, meshes versus prims, Open Source, open source virtual world standard, open source virtual worlds, open sourcing Second Life, OpenLife, OpenSim, OpenSim and realXtend, OpenSimulator, Radio Arkala, realXtend, Second Life virtual world standards

Imagine an L-System forest, a herbivore simulation and a carnivore simulation all developed separately without each having its own graphical front end. Each object in the separate simulations would communicate locally or via the network using some agreed upon protocol. Next, picture one or more 3D front end “view portals” with all the bells & whistles that visualize what is going on in the engines and traffic, putting any local “area” together into a coherent scene.

If it existed, such an A-life system could be run as a true grid, an “Evolution Grid” or “EvoGrid” if you will, with the computation not limited to one processor or one 3D scenegraph’s rendering step clock. Developers could focus on their areas of strength while the quality of the collective simulation grid would improve much faster than any one individual effort. And perhaps best of all, new developers could connect their engines, protocols or view portals into the grid or take up development of existing engines and protocols so that no projects need stagnate or die. So with this vision in hand, is something like the EvoGrid possible, workable, desirable, and doable? (Bruce Damer, 2008)

When Bruce Damer told me he is working on evolution technologies (ETs) that will come “alive” towards the end of the 21st/beginning of the 22nd Century, I pricked up my ears!

A world renowned guru of our digital past and future (see of Bruce’s projects at his personal page Damer.com and his Digibarn Computer Museum), Bruce is in the advance guard of many emerging fields, including: social visual computing - avatars and virtual worlds (see his book Avatars, 1997 and compendium of Avatars events); NASA research - surface robotics, spacecraft and mission design, agent-based modeling, and real-time physics (see DigitalSpace for space projects from 2000-2008); and, artificial life - cellular automata, complex and emergent systems (see Biota.org and the Biota Podcast with Tom Barbalet).

Bruce Damer’s architectural notes for the EvoGrid router, a finite state machine that will consume XML

EvoGrid - an evolution technology grid

Bruce envisages a grid (EvoGrid.org) in which current work on artificial life research being done with teams at NASA, universities, and in the artificial life developer community, e.g., the work of Ventrella (see below), can interact in a common ecosystem.

Bruce plans to build EvoGrid on an open source framework, communication grid and protocol (Zhengyou & Yichuan 2004) allowing future developers to extend the EvoGrid and add their own objects or virtual creatures.

By running the simulations without visuals, the evolutionary algorithms of EvoGrid will be able to develop huge populations that can interact with other large populations evolving in real time. But, with their emergence into the social visual 3D space of a virtual world, they will hit the wall of physics.

The public 3D immersive portal into the EvoGrid will support the simulated evolution of biologically inspired forms. The portal will be a virtual space where they will interact with human users.

This window into the human world raises many interesting questions. Will the algorithms/artificial life forms themselves decide when to emerge into the public eye? Or, will they be pushed out by other life forms, or summoned forth by human voyeurs/god(s)?

But, regardless of how artificial life algorithms eventually emerge into cyberspace, this will be an important step in exploring the far reaching implications of the possible emergence of artificial life from algorithms into atom space.

From Algorithms to Atom Space

J. Doyne Farmer defined a living thing as a pattern in spacetime, able to reproduce itself using a stored information blueprint, employing an internal metabolism driving interdependent parts to interact with and deal with a chaotic environment. Above all, he put forth that a lineage of living things also possesses the ability to evolve through time (Farmer & Belin, “Artificial Life: The Coming Evolution,” 1991).

Our world and ourselves are products of this collective natural technology (whether one believes it is guided by an unseen God or not). Others have argued further that human culture, whether it is in the form of writings, music, ideas and the arts also employs some of the same underlying methods to spread and evolve (Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 1986). Therefore, beyond the physical laws of nature, the most powerful force shaping the universe is what we might call “evolution technology.” (Damer 2008)

The picture above is from Jeffrey Ventrella’s website.” JJ Ventrella is a programmer-artist doing virtual world design and artificial life research. He was Principle Inventor and second co-founder of There.com, and most recently, Senior Developer at Linden Lab. “Ventrella writes papers and chapters on topics centered around evolutionary computation and creativity.”

Ventrella is also the creator with Brian Dodd of Darwin Pond.

Darwin Pond is an imaginary gene pool, a primordial puddle of genetic surprises. More technically, Darwin Pond is an Artificial Life Simulation: a virtual world exhibiting the emergence of life-like behaviors. But it’s more than just a fun and informative thing to watch, you can participate in this artificial life simulation by building scenarios and setting up experiments.

What are the possibilities for artificial life?

Evolution technology is the use of the principles of evolution as seen in nature to rapidly develop new software, chemicals, genes or materials, devices or full robotic machine systems.

Bruce is developing EvoGrid to ask some big questions about our future: Can simulation be used to deduce how life came about? Can simulated biological environments be used to create powerful and transformative technologies? Can artificial life evolve into semi-living machines that can clean our atmosphere and heal our bodies?

“Evolution is a powerful tool,” Bruce notes. It can be used in constructive or destructive ways. “We should use it to make tools - the mechanisms by which we will survive and thrive.”

When our bodies are married to this kind of technology we may live for hundreds of years.

Bruce sees the next generation of space exploration emerging out of these artificial life forms born in cyberspace.

They should be able to work in actual hardware - intelligent manufacturing done at the lowest molecular level.

If we are truly going to travel and live beyond the earth’s biosphere we have to go beyond the 19th century technology that space exploration has depended on up to now. Our spacecraft would be recognizable to the great steamship engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, made of pressure vessels and other hard parts. These craft are fragile and subject to “single points of failure” (i.e, one seal goes and there goes the mission).

In order for longer term survivable spaceflight, especially for human crews, these craft will have to almost be alive, or at least be made up of billions of individual micro or nano-parts that are self monitoring and self healing. In this scenario, human crews are going to be like the brain organs in a larger biologically inspired vessel. I believe we are decades, maybe even centuries, from this kind of technology, but it will come.

In addition, evolved biologically-inspired robotic systems will mine outer space resources and prepare the solar system for Earth-life.

Picture trillions of flakes of solar collecting chemical nano-factories working something like an “ET lichen” coating the surface of a richly endowed asteroid, processing its stores of water ice, organic compounds, or metals. Human crews would stop by such asteroids to allow themselves (and their ships) to “feed” on the ET lichen. Indeed if the ET lichen manage to hollow out the asteroid and generate the correct mix of gases then the human crew could step inside for a break.

Other versions of “ET lichen” would have the potent capability of terraforming our own planet enabling us to cope with climate change and other effects of our civilization. As many science fiction writers and Hollywood directors has shown us, out of control ET lichen may also lead us to total annihilation.

The Artificial Life Programmer, the New Alchemist?

Like the medieval alchemists before them, programmers developing “Artificial Life” software (often shortened to “A-life”) are drawn to the elusive yet seductive proposition that they have the power to animate inanimate matter (Steen Rasumussen), except that in this modern incarnation of alchemy; the inanimate medium is a microscopic substrate of billions of transistors. (from “God, Science, and Intelligent Design,” chapter by Bruce Damer, upcoming in World Scientific, Singapore)

Bruce points out there is frequently confusion between the two fields of Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence. But this confusion, he notes, is a fertile field of inquiry.

A-life is a “bottom up” approach, wherein developers simulate “a large number of simple interacting components employing relatively simple rules from which complex behaviors of whole systems emerge (Chris Langton et al). AI on the other hand has tackled the ever receding goal of creating a “conscious” entity with which we would one day be able to communicate.”

God in the A-Life Universe

In his article for an upcoming book, “God, Science, and Intelligent Design,” Bruce undertakes a thought experiment in which he draws insights from the field of A-Life into a broader Intelligent Design/Creationism vs Evolution discussion.

The open question, “what is life?” underwrites the field of A-Life much as the question “what is consciousness?” does the field of Artificial Intelligence. And, these questions beg others on the role (or absence of role) of God(s).

Will Wright’s Spore: “God as the Intelligent Designer”

The screenshot above (see CNET for more) is from Spore the much anticipated new game from “Sims” creator Will Wright. Electronic Arts just announced that Spore, released through its Maxis Software brand, will go on sale on the weekend of Sept. 7, 2008. It is billed as “massively single-player” game, that “lets users create a universe, evolving from tiny organisms into civilizations capable of intergalactic travel.” (Canadian Press)

Bruce compares Spore with Karl Sim’s Evolved Virtual Creatures and argues they demonstrate two kinds of God in the A-Life universe:

Karl Sims’ - God the Mechanic setting up the initial conditions and then returning only occasionally to view the current state of the simulation; and the Will Wright, Intelligent Designer God, constantly providing opportunities to use and outside intelligence to steer the direction of the virtual universe.

The properties of A- Life software in its early phases can be represented along a continuum which at one end can be represented by Karl Sim’s evolving virtual creatures (see below) and on the other end Will Wright’s game Spore.

Karl Sim’s “Evolved Virtual Creatures” - “God the Mechanic”

Karl Sim’s creatures start life as a simple pair of hinged blocks in a virtual universe that simulates basic physical properties such as gravity, collisions and surface friction. From that point on the simulation was allowed to continue on its own without human intervention (although random mutations were introduced automatically into the “genome” of creatures between generations).

Bruce Damer’s: “God As the Intelligent Adapter”

Bruce analyzes “the copying rule,” as a fundamental principle of life in his article for the forthcoming book “God, Science, and Intelligent Design:”

A living organism differs from bare rock, gasses or a pool of liquid in ine very specific way: the living organism contains instructions that are copied, for the most part unaltered, from one version to the next.

Bruce argues, quite brilliantly, that the Copying Rule, along with the “Laws of Nature” and the element of uncertainty leads us to a notion of God not as an influencer of the future but as an “adept adapter” . And if you don’t see God in the picture the understanding of evolution by cumulative adaptation is even more remarkable for the fact no hand guides it.

Those who wish to celebrate the presence of a God in their lives and in all nature can believe that, God as the Brilliant Adapter, played a hand in the survival and glorious diversification of life on Earth as well as the blossoming richness of human culture and technology. Those who see no need to place an actor like God in the picture can celebrate and seek to better understand the process of evolution by cumulative adaptation, made even more astonishing by the very fact that no hand guided it.

“God who created all things in the beginning is himself created by all things in the end” Wrote Olaf Stapledon in 1937.

Performing the Future

The questions evolutionary technologies raise for human and planetary future are vast and far reaching. To explore the huge social and philosophical questions (Damer 2008) raised by the outputs of more advanced EvoGrids, as well as an enumeration of how evolution technologies will impact life on Earth and in space in the future, Bruce is planning a performance piece that will tour the world - “After the Evogrid.”

As a kind of cyber-hippie empresario (see Bruce above on right and his friend and Digibarn collaborator Al Lundell on the left) of nine virtual world conferences including one just three weeks ago featuring Virtual Worlds and Space for NASA, Bruce has always been deeply involved in firing the public’s imagination about the future. Now he intends to take his involvement with the public space to new heights with, “After the Evogrid,” - a “multimedia performance piece with a spoken word narrative, sound and music, and animated visuals.”

“After the Evogrid” will present both the promise and the perils of Humanity living in a symbiotic existence with the products of the new field of “evolution technology.”

The performance piece will bring together a unique combination of evolution technologies, personal and societal impacts, full biosphere implications and the expansion of life beyond the Earth. The EvoGrid itself will create the first open extensible grid protocol for evolution simulations.

So stand by for launch into an even weirder future, brought to you by “Doc Damer”?!

A Life, AI, artificial intelligence, Artificial Life, artificial life algorithms, artificial life programmers, artificial life research, artificial life simulation, biologically inspired robotic systems, Biota, Bruce Damer, cellular automata, Darwin Pond, Digibarn, emergent systems, EvoGrid, Evolution Grid, evolution technologies, evolutionary algorithms, evolutionary computation, evolved virtual creatures, Farmer and Belin, Genetic Algorithms, God in the A Life Universe, intelligent manufacturing, Jeffrey Ventrella, Karl Sims, L system simulation, nano factories, next generation space exploration, performing the future, semi living machines, simulated biological environments, Spore, virtual worlds and artificial life, virtual worlds and space, Will Wright will wrights spore

The emergence of many forms of virtual worlds will be a notable trend in 2008. But Second Life as the largest and most highly developed user generated, 3D immersive world will continue to blaze the trail for the most world changing potential for virtual worlds - collapsing geography.

How virtual worlds will change understandings of national power is detailed masterfully by Cory Ondrejka in his article, “Collapsing Geography: Second life, Innovation and the Future of National Power.” Cory writes:

Networked innovation and collaboration means quantity may have a quality of its own. As education systems around the world approach parity, nations will finally be able to maximize the skills and potentials of their populations… No nation state will be able to compete counting only the people within her borders. The most successful 21st century nations will be those that redefine what it means to be a citizen and build the largest network of innovators.

Cory’s new blog is also called Collapsing Geography. But to truly fulfill the dream of collapsing geography the challenges to the scaling and interoperability of virtual worlds must be met.

Scaling the Second Life grid is vital if it is to fulfill the expansive vision of its founders. But scaling must progress along with goals of interoperability. No-one has the hubris to suggest that one homogenous grid should service the globe! As Cory Ondejka has left Linden Lab the scaling of Second Life is no longer his concern. But it is interesting to note that Cory has already indicated that it is likely he will be working on the other critical aspect of Virtual Worlds ability to collapse geography - interoperability.

Interoperability may come up as part of general discussions in APOC [Anneberg Program on Online Communities]. I think it is quite likely that I will be working on projects related to interoperability separate from my time at USC.

Scaling, adding new features, ensuring grid stability and developing interoperability will often seem to be competing values that Linden Lab has to juggle in 2008. Whereas Second Life pundits and residents often demand stability at all costs. It is not going to be that simple. The only truly stable worlds in the fast emerging virtual landscape of 2008 will be a small, closed, dead worlds, or perhaps, 2D worlds.

I came to the conclusion that 2008 really could be the year of interoperability, or at the very least the beginning of interoperability starting with increasing levels of web services for the SL grid, after talking to many of the movers and shakers on Second Life including Zha Ewry, IBM representative to the Architectural Working Group, John Jainschigg Exec. Director of CMP Metaverse, Cube Inada creator of Starbase C3, Aleister Kronos, Illuminous Beltran IBM, Gwyneth Llewelyn and others. I also attended many of the Architectural Working Group meetings.

I spent some time reading some of the excellent predictive posts for 2008 from meta thinkers such as, Cory Ondrejka himself (also see Cory’s review of his 2007 predictions in Terra Nova, Hamlet Au of New World Notes, and the Virtual Worlds Management team that has put together a 36 page Industry Forecast for 2008 (see Virtual World News for more on this and how to order a free copy), also some interesting predictions on Second Thoughts, Virtually Blind, Caleb Booker, Not Possible IRL, and Second Tense (the last is a somewhat tongue in cheek look at what 2008 may have in store for us). But only Hamlet of New World Notes makes a specific prediction re interoperability suggesting that a Second Life port to Sony Xbox 360 will be created.

Some Second Life commentators are making the prediction Linden Lab will not open source the server side architecture of Second Life in 2008. And while they may be right on this one, 2008 maybe more of a preparatory year devoted to cleaning up code and protocols, this probably won’t be an obstacle to achieving at least some of the goals of interoperability.

The fast development of OpenSim makes the open sourcing of Second Life server code something of a moot point. See my interview with Adam Frisby of OpenSim for a look at recent progress and some of the strengths of OpenSim architecture. The picture of OpenSim below is from NixNerd (see OpenSim Wiki). It is taken using Windlight.

Interoperability between OpenSim and Second Life in 2008?

Full interoperability between Second Life and OpenSim in 2008 is unlikely. I would put my money on 2009 for this. But a leading member of the Architecture Working Group suggested the following:

Three Achievable Goals for 2008.

Demos for:

1) Cross login for authentification - meaning that Tara5 Oh and her password would be the same in Second Life and an OpenSim that shared authentication with Linden Labs’s authentication servers.

2) Fetching assets between domains. This would mean being able to fetch assets from one space to another. For example I would be able to take my AV and my clothes from Second Life to OpenSim and back. Right now LL will only do this if they have a legal agreement with you not to steal stuff. The problem with off grid back up is that it is instant copy bot so one of the non-technical challenges is setting up the rules for connecting grids. (This also probably needs extended permissions so people can flag if they wish assets allowed off the SL grid.)

3) A tp (teleport) between an OpenSim and a Second Life sim. 1) and 2) are needed to do 3).

Integrating SL with The Web: SL and RESTful principles

I frequently attend the Architectural Working Group meetings on Second Life where Linden Lab, IBM, OpenSim and others meet to discuss open sourcing Second Life, open standards and interoperability. I am a silent observer as such gearhead matters as RESTful principles are usually what’s on the agenda.

Zero Linden’s office hours and Architecture Working Groupies’ meetings are where the warriors/artists of interoperability are to found. And the Linden Lab protocols are the clay from which standards are being molded. If you are serious about interoperability rolling up your sleeves and working with other teams whose objectives may not be exactly the same as you own is the challenge. As one AWG member put it:

Interoperability will emerge battered byte by battered byte from the hands of grubbie techies each with an agenda. Except on Second Life some of us are blonde, with a pert smile but yeah….

The Architecture Working Group is the first virtual world coalition that I know of to dig in and begin some heavy lifting re interoperability. AWG Meeting 2 is tentatively scheduled for 2008 Jan 31. The first AWG outlined some basic concepts for a new Second Life grid architecture.

One area of interoperability that will probably make big advances in 2008 is the better integration of SL architecture with WWW architecture which explains the talk of RESTful principles at AWG meetings! But as I have learned, the core activity of Second Life state merging delivered by the web is odd in relation to current web concepts. For the most part, the web for the last 30 years has largely been about delivering static content i.e. most of what people see stays the same for minutes, hours even days on end. The essence of what Second Life is about is collaboration around dynamic content. A good chunk of REST is about exporting state on a per state basis some of which you can’t do on SL as it doesn’t fit the model. As an AWG architect put it:

What SL does for a living is take inputs from 10 - 40 AVs and 40 times a second spit out a new state.

So Second Life is a very different animal from WWW. It doesn’t really match the core REST models. You can build on top of REST but the last bits are going to have to be different.

As far as I know no-one has really licked the user generated content plus 3D, plus REST equation yet. REST is.. 90% about saying: “Here is how the web works, and why as a consequence, it scales and models well.”

Mashing the physical, the web and the online virtual

A different aspect of interoperability, mashing the physical, the web and the online virtual, is beginning to produce some interesting directions. And, what serendipity! The first link to my blog in 2008 came from Marta Lyall one of the prime movers behind a way cool project wrlds.com that is printing physical art objects representing big stock market moves, and creating a social network around this. The picture above is from the Wrlds web site.

Within the WRLDs System, participants can generate both virtual 3D and physical objects from their trading data. Translating trading data into these new forms creates a shareable social object from the symbolic language of trading

Artificial Intelligence Applications in 3D Virtual Worlds

While the development of distributed artificial intelligence in virtual worlds is certainly going to spawn a variety of killer apps one day soon, it is still early days for this. At the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo, 2007 in San Jose, Ben Goertzel’s startup company Novamente LLC announced their collaboration with Electric Sheep Company to bring artificial intelligence agents (virtual pets) to online virtual worlds (see BBC News Coverage). Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in the rapid prototyping environment of a user generated, 3D world like Second Life presents an extraordinary opportunity for the development of Artificial Intelligence applications (see my post here on Artificial General Intelligence in Second Life).

The development of OpenSim and creating interoperability between OpenSim and Second Life in 2008 will create many new opportunities to create artificial intelligence applications in virtual worlds that require a secure and public platform. Already use cases and prototypes for energy management, predictive maintenance, building automation and network operation centers that are being designed to be integrated with AI are being developed on OpenSim (see my post on Eolus One’s work on building automation and Illuminous Beltran’s Virtual Network Operations Center).

In the picture above Illuminous Beltran (Michael Osias, IBM) is discussing with Zarathustrapoalypse (Ben Goertzel of Novamente) the possibility of having a virtual Artificial Intelligence system administration operation center that could diagnose problems and be able to describe them in an abstracted, qualitative format and then having conversational AI avatars to describe the problems to sys-administrators (and indicate them gesturally in the 3D sim world).

As Ben Goertzel of Novamente also has considerable experience applying AI to financial trading and understands both the data and the psychology of traders pretty well I asked what he thought of the Wrlds project, and how it could be developed with AI. Ben came up with a very interesting, off the cuff, AI tie in.

There is an AI tie-in, since AI can be used to analyze and extrapolate data, and their stuff could then be used to visualize the results…

But that would be a different sort of product, I would say… and a great one … imagine a data-analysis toolkit whose interface was part of a virtual world…

You view your data in the virtual world, a la the wrlds.com methods

You choose methods to analyze your data, via a metaphor of choosing physical tools in the virtual world…

You apply the tools to the data and visualize the results

I note the “toolkit” metaphor is constantly used in the data-analysis world…

Finance would indeed be the first market to look at here, since there is a big and mature market existing for financial data analysis tools…

Melanie Swan is also doing some interesting work on the visualization and analysis of financial data in virtual worlds (also see Melanie’s post on virtual world killer apps). She is developing a 3-d dynamic display of stock market data in her virtual office in Second Life. Go here for the on-demand real-time 3d stock charts in Second Life.

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If the metaverse goes wrong it’s going to be a “dark world” with only a few points of light, Jamais Cascio said in his talk to Stanford University’s Metaverse Meetup that was also streamed in Second Life. The topic was: The Metaverse — what does it include, where is it going, and how will it change our lives? But, as Cascio notes on his blog here, during the meetup he “got into a discussion about what happens to control over one’s own information in a world of information saturation.”

But while Cascio pointed out many of the ways which the metaverse by “making visible the invisible” (Bruce Sterling) can enable us to make smart and hopefully wise choices about our world, his presentation had a cautionary note. He said he is a “clear eyed optimist.” He believes that the future is in our hands. And, we need to make the right choices and build the future we want.

We are living in an exciting moment as these technologies are emerging today.

But we live in a world of “asymetric transparency” where people who have economic, political, social and religious power have the ability to know what we are doing and we don’t have the reverse unless we go through a lot of trouble.

Questions about digital public space and control of you own persona are keys to whether the “metaverse goes wrong” or not.

Cascio showed the slide (opening this post) of the George Orwell Plaza in Barcelona which is surrounded by surveillance cameras. Brad Templeton has argued that widespread transparency technologies will inevitably be corrupted and co-opted by those in power. Templeton argues:

If you put in place the tools which would make a police state possible, they make the police state inevitable. Repressive states are real; near-panopticons are real; transparent utopias are hypothetical.

See here for Cascio’s look at the privacy debates from the Accelerating Change Conference 2004 with David Brin, author of The Transparent Society ,who argues “that surveillance technologies are here, and we should fight to make sure that they are two-way, and not just in the hands of elites” and, Brad Templeton, chairman of the board at the Electronic Frontier Foundation).

Jamais Cascio’s has put forward the notion of a participatory panopticon. This idea is exemplified in the Witness project which provides video cameras to human rights activists around the world in order to document violations and abuses. Cascio suggests a similar model might work for an “Earth Witness” project, “a second superpower” army of networked environmentalists:

imagine a web portal collecting recordings and evidence of ecological problems (human-caused or otherwise), environmental crimes, and significant sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

Cascio has suggested designs for an earth witness phone.

During his talk, Cascio gave several powerful examples of the potential for a participatory panopticon to benefit people and the planet. He mentioned the work of Dr. Larry Brilliant who is famous for his role in eradicating smallpox. Brilliant is now Executive Director of Google.org. One of Brilliant’s current projects is to skim info out of public databases and newspapers from all over the world and construct a map to aid in a prediction about where the next pandemic might come. But the question of privacy loomed large in Cascio’s talk.

“Privacy is what they take away when they want to torture you.” The Earl of Spencer

The above quote was side by side in Cascio’s slide of surveillance cameras in George Orwell Plaza, Barcelona. While privacy advocates are winning some battles, notably in the recent changes by Facebook to the Beacon advertising system (see New York Times, CNET and MSNBC for more):

[they] will allow users to “opt-in” to sharing information through the service, which broadcasts purchases made on outside websites to Facebook users’ friends.

MoveOn.org, the on-line advocacy group commented that this was a “big step in the right direction.” But, we are still a long way from a situation where surveillance technologies are not primarily in the hands of elites. Albumoftheday reveal serious “big brother” underpinnings to Facebook.

I visited Eben Moglen, founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center, recently (the interview is upcoming in next post). Moglen is deeply concerned that:

An entire generation of people are now fundamentally mis-reasoning about what it’s like to behave in surveillance spaces, who are being led to the slaughter in a very unpleasant fashion, in which they have agreed to move large parts of their private life into instrumented environments, big brother houses, built by people who want to use that data for the purpose of influencing their behavior economically and in other ways. And, they don’t have informed consent. And, they don’t have structures of regulatory intervention.

I attended Cascio’s talk as my avatar Tara5 Oh (above) in Second Life. Henrik Bennetsen was fielding questions from Second Life, so I asked Jamais Cascio two questions that have stuck in my mind since talking with Eben Moglen. The whole of Cascio’s talk will be posted to the web here soon. But, here is a transcription of Cascio’s reply to the questions I asked:

“Is store it yourself fundamental to freedom in the 20th Century?” and, “Who gets the logs?”

The question of who gets the logs is actually does summarize very nicely the fundamental dilemma of this kind of environment. Because who gets the logs is really a proxy for who gets control. Who ultimately has the final say in what we do with the information we create about ourselves. I think that it would be wonderful if we could have complete individual control over that information. That is however unlikely. So rather than rail against the unfairness of it all, and rather than simply lying back and accepting it, the choice here is to really fight for as much as we can, to try to be active, be vocal, be responsive, and push for whatever you can get, as much as you can get, knowing that ultimately the compromises that will emerge. And it will be a compromise as something that will be the best you could get as opposed to something that was just imposed upon you.

Jamais in his post meetup blog post continues to examine the question: “If privacy is effectively unattainable, or the institutions to protect privacy are too weak to withstand the relentless expansion of Internet observation, what recourse would those wishing to maintain some control over their external visibility have available?”

He makes a provocative suggestion:

One possible alternative: intentional misinformation about oneself, reducing the “signal to noise” ratio of networked transparency.

A Fine Balance - privacy and identity portability

On November 21st a workshop was held in Second Life to look at “How can you protect your privacy in virtual worlds?” This workshop was part of a “real” life event: “A Fine Balance 2007 - Privacy enhancing technologies: How to create a trusted information society” held in London. The keynote speaker, Paul Ledak (IBM, USA) and chairman: Jan Camenisch (IBM, Zurich), pointed out that a key area of “fine balance” is “maintaining privacy while enabling identity portability.” Protecting privacy poses some challenges to the goals of interoperability because large parts of the metaverse might end up to be shared reality only to a community of trusted peers.

Organised by three of the UK’s Knowledge Transfer Networks (KTN), and supported by the European Commission, A Fine Balance 2007 is an independent forum for discussing privacy in relation to the development of new technology (see Knowledge Transfer Innovations).

Building on last year’s event of the same name, this year’s conference discusses the development and integration of technologies which can build privacy into new devices and services at the design stage.

Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) will encourage industry to recognize that valuable emerging technologies can be designed with privacy and data security in-mind from the outset. Full details may be found here.

On May 2nd, the European Commission adopted a Communication “Promoting Data Protection by Privacy enhancing Technologies (PETs)” in which it calls for stepping up research in and development of PETs. In this context, the outcomes of this event will be taken under consideration by the European Commission in its formulation of upcoming work programmes for funding calls in this area of the FP7 - ICT programme and will influence the direction of future research in the fields of privacy and technology.

The original European Commission Communication can be found here:

There is an interesting argument by Kightlinger that the different approaches of the US and EU may not be as different as they appear. (The European Union (EU) adopted comprehensive privacy legislation in 1995 and special privacy legislation for electronic communications in 2002.) While the EU emphasis is more on the need for bureaucratic control to “protect” individual privacy the US emphasis more on the need to “protect” individual “freedom.” Kightlinger argues that debates about the relative merits of the two regimes, regardless of differences in detail, strengthen the hold of a the same post enlightenment paradigm where “we find ourselves living in the culture of bureaucratic individualism, and debates about public policy issues predictably become debates about which side of the dyad, individual or bureaucracy, to emphasize at any given time.” And the important point he makes is how very hard it is to see these issues from other viewpoints.

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Recently I participated indirectly in the The Foresight Insitute’s Vision Weekend. I joined Melanie Swan’s tour of Nanotechnology Island on Second Life which she conducted live as part of her virtual worlds presentation to the unconference.

I was delighted to meet Melanie, the principal of MS Futures Group, for breakfast in New York City a few days later. She is a futurist and hedge fund manager based in Silicon Valley. Melanie has a highly nuanced understanding of the intersection of technology with social, political, legal, regulatory and economic regimes (see her post here). Melanie is also one of the organizers of She’s Geeky. Unfortunately I couldn’t make the lunch last Saturday here in New York City to discuss She’s Geeky EAST this winter.

Melanie and I had a fascinating discussion over breakfast about many aspects of the metaverse including it’s potential use as a platform for Artificial General Intelligence. Ben Goertzel (see my post on Ben Goertzel’s work here) also presented on “AGI meets the Metaverse” at the Vision Weekend and Melanie mentioned the very interesting work of Monica Anderson who presented her Artificial Intuition approach.

Picture is of Melanie Swan in NYC and on Nanotechnology Island in Second Life.