UgoTrade

Only a two weeks after debuting their first Hands Free 3D video showing the possibilities for navigating Second Life “hands free” without a mouse or keyboard, Mitch Kapor (MitchK Linden in Second Life) and Philippe Bossut have a new demo out - Hands Free Object Editing in Second Life.

Philippe points out on the Hands Free 3D blog that they have already seen a lot of interest in their “hands free” project even from the main press (see this article from the NYT). Hands Free 3D, a project of Kapor Enterprises, is creating a prototypical interface using the 3D Camera designed by 3DV Systems to control virtual worlds like Second Life.

Mitch Kapor told me, they are now working “so that avatars can directly mirror body language and facial expression.”

Mitch very generously gave me an interview in which he not only describes his project to explore how:

the camera could be a central device to a whole new kind of interface the way the mouse became the central piece of hardware that enabled the whole graphical user interface and it enabled the transition from character based computing DOS to the GUI.

But also, Mitch shares some of his thoughts on the future of Second Life. A full transcription follows in this post.

“Moving From Science Fiction to Science”

Mitch explained to me he began to get excited with the idea of Hands Free 3D when he realized:

we had a shot at moving from science fiction to science as it were actually making some of this stuff work that people have been talking about for a long time

As Gwyneth Llewelyn points out much of the so called virtual worlds industry has backed off the bigger vision of a unified metaverse and is retreating into a more limited vision of a multitude of closed and controlled virtual worlds (see Digado’s post Raising Kids in Virtual Worlds and this video from fastcompany.tv to see how this controlled/controlling vision for virtual worlds plays from Disney’s point of view).

But while a bigger vision for virtual environments with a revolutionary role in adult life may not not be interesting to marketeers at the moment, it has a momentum that cannot be stopped. Mitch Kapor made a prediction during the interview that I wholeheartedly agree with:

the big vision of 3D is in the process of happening. It will be very transformative and anybody who is not counting on that happening, is likely to be run over by it.

I got very excited when I heard about the Hands Free 3D project because developing a natural interaction between people and virtual environments to me is one of the “it” projects for immersive 3D.

The dialogue between science fiction and science is of course the ongoing story of the metaverse. And seeing Iron Man which is alive with new possibilities for “seamless interfaces between people bits and atoms” made me think of how very exciting this new chapter in metaverse development is.

The Tangible Media Group, MIT, founded by Hiroshi Ishii has pioneered new couplings of the physical and the virtual. And, alumni John Underkoffler’s vision is definitely in play in Iron Man. Underkoffler’s exact credit flew by me too quickly - but he was clearly a futurist for Iron Man. Matt McGann points out that there is a very cool article about his work on Minority Report here.

Oh I cannot mention Iron Man without noting Iron Man in Second Life (see Massively) and Annie Ok’s latest great machinima!

And, Click on the screen shot below or here to watch the “Hands Free 3D: Second Life Object Editing Demo”

Interview with Mitch Kapor

Tish Shute: How did you get the idea to focus on Hands Free 3D out of all the possible areas you could have begun R&D in?

Mitch Kapor: You were asking me where did the idea come from? It originated in the fact that this kind of difficulty - of creating a natural, easier user interface - that we’ve had is characteristic of virtual world interactions.

There are things to be done about that at every conceivable level. From fixing all the little bugs to a bigger initiative. I was doing a thought experiment about what would really make a virtual world fundamentally easier to use.

I didn’t have an answer, but somebody had mentioned to me - one of the other investors in Second Life - that there are two Israeli companies working on 3D cameras. I had read about and heard about lots of things but this caught my attention. And I started to ask some questions about it. I had seen the video that Johnny Lee shot with the Wii on YouTube.

That had begun to prepare my mind to think about how you could use new types of input devices to control virtual worlds. So when I heard about the cameras I said this is really interesting and I started to make some phone calls and inquire. The Idea came to me that you could use the camera … the camera could be a central device to a whole new kind of interface the way the mouse became the central piece of hardware that enabled the whole graphical user interface and it enabled the transition from character based computing DOS to the GUI.

One of the other things is that I’ve now been around long enough, 30 years - active and professional - that I’ve seen many things come and go and I have a feeling for patterns. So I was fortunate in actually being able to get hold of a prototype of one of the cameras to do some experiments with it.

Tish Shute:
They’re not yet released generally are they, later this Summer, right?

Mitch Kapor:
Well .. it’s unclear. Sometime in 2008 or 2009. There will be multiple manufacturers. They have somewhat different approaches as to how they’re going to go to market. I’d say it’s all being sorted out soon. Everybody I’ve talked to is quite certain that by Christmas season of 2009 at the latest, they’ll be available in high volume at low cost.

Tish Shute:
I just got so excited when I saw you doing this because I think, basically, in terms of free form 3D programmable space which is how I’ve come to see Second Life now, it’s the future. Everyone’s been complaining that the problem with free form 3d programmable space for a mass audience is the difficulty of the interface. So there seems to have been this big retreat back into 2.5D, 3D chat rooms - plugins to Facebook etc. It seems like a step backward to me.

Mitch Kapor:
I think it’s inevitable that we’re going to get fully interactive 3D. It’s all a question of how we’re going to get there and how long it takes. It’s understandable why, for commercial reasons, people do more incremental things, but those are only going to get you so far.

Tish Shute:
Well it seems to me ideas about the evolution of 3D are to some degree being driven by marketing on the web forces at the minute. I suppose the thinking is that you can get these 3D chatrooms up easily and they are more amenable to marketing than a freeform 3D space like Second Life.

But my question is why you didn’t decide to go to game controllers? I suppose this is where a lot of thinking goes because all the kids have already a high level of skill with these?

Mitch Kapor:
Well, I’m not a gamer. It seemed to me that the possibilities with a camera to do the imaging and to be able in real time, to extract out a 3D model of the scene and the objects in it, is fundamentally just incredibly powerful. It feels like the right direction if you can develop it. What I was pleasantly surprised by was actually creating the first demo was pretty straightforward.

Tish Shute:
How did you prevent every random motion being sucked into the program?

Mitch Kapor:
It turns out that the cameras are pretty sensitive. They can detect relatively small motions like the resolution at a distance of 5 to 10 feet is a half a centimeter. That would be one part in several hundreds. maybe one part in a thousand. So it can detect slight motions. I don’t know the details of the software that the camera came with and that Philippe wrote. One of the other advantages is that Philippe, who is the engineer that did the work, has a PhD in computer graphics. And, he has been around the block quite a few times, and had a whole bag of tricks. I know that he spent some of the time writing filtering code to filter out noise in the signal and so on.

Tish Shute:
Do you have to be particular about where you stand at the minute? Can you smoothly go back and forth between when you have to type and things like that?

Mitch Kapor:
No, I’m not anticipating problems. We have another video coming up very shortly where we show object editing. The object editing isn’t as sexy as we would like it because it has to use the existing interface. They’re having to emulate keyboard and mouse. The point is that we have the concept of a control plane, a vertical plane, in front of you, that if you put your hand out so it crosses that imaginary plane, then it interprets what you do as controlling the mouse.

If you push through to the far side than pull it back it doesn’t. That actually works quite well as a gesture. And you get visual feedback when you’re in the control plane, it lights something up, so you can see - OK. It’s sort of like when you’re using the mouse to target an object you can tell tell when a mouse is inside a clickable button. Similarly there’ll be some kind of control zones. When your hand or other body part is in that you’ll get some feedback in the same way that a button highlights to indicate I’m clickable, or you’re over me. It’ll be a similar kind of thing.

Tish Shute:
But you have to avoid ending up with a mapping that’s more difficult to learn than the original one, don’t you?

Mitch Kapor:
I agree with you, but on the navigation and flying, we’ve had people learn to use this in less than 30 seconds. We just stand them up and say lean forward, lean back, stand up, lean to the side, raise your arms, and they’re moving, they’re flying, they’re walking.

Tish Shute:
And you don’t get a problem with the casual motion?

Mitch Kapor:
No. And this was just our first shot at this.

Tish Shute:
I know! I was really impressed that you could actually have done that in 3 weeks.

Mitch Kapor:
I think the start to finish time was a couple of months including the fact that Philippe had never seen the Second Life viewer code. So, he started like any other developer, just downloading and building the Second Life client. And, we never had a camera before! Ha!

Tish Shute:
But this is the great beauty of Second Life - the power that people have to do so many amazing things so rapidly.

Mitch Kapor:
He’s already re-written the code once. We’re totally prepared to give the code to Linden. It’s a little premature because the cameras’ aren’t available, but if the cameras’ were available, we would just donate the code. The nice thing is it’s actually pretty clean. It interfaces to the client at just a couple of points. We’ve isolated the dependencies.

Tish Shute:
But that’s my other question. If you donate the code will it be open source so that other developers could get involved? I know lots of people …

Mitch Kapor:
This stuff, the demonstration stuff, absolutely. That’s the intent. The purpose of this whole phase was just to test what we could do and to promote or evangelize the use of the camera. Get people excited. We’re thinking about what we might do with it.

I’m actually incredibly excited about the thing Philippe is working on now which is to use the camera so that avatars can directly mirror body language and facial expression. So that if I’m sitting in my chair and I have my arms crossed, my avatar will cross it’s arms. If I tilt my head to the side or smile or frown, the avatar will do the same thing. We’re quite optimistic that we can do something compelling in pretty short order, like less than a month.

Tish Shute:
Wow! That is really, really exciting. I think that has just been something people have been talking about a lot recently - to have gesturing and expressions transmitted to the avatar ..

Mitch Kapor:
The reason I get so excited is cause when I started believing we had a shot at moving from science fiction to science as it were actually making some of this stuff work that people have been talking about for a long time.

Tish Shute:
So the plan is to make your work part of the open source community and …

Mitch Kapor:
I don’t have a plan yet. I would say anything we’re doing in this phase we’re happy to give away. At some point I think things are going to become clearer as to the availability of the cameras, what Linden is going to build in, and then businesses that might be built off of what we’re doing.

But I’m very confident that the kinds of things we’re doing now and in the short term are just going to become part of the standard repertoire of things you can do in Second Life in code that’s available to developers.

I don’t have the exact road map.

Tish Shute:
I heard your recent talks in Second Life and how you were very interested in seeing how Second Life could become more of a business tool. I’ve talked about what Second Life and its “cousins” offers in comparison to other open source platforms like SUN’s Project Wonderland and the Croquet platform Quaq. For example, Second Life is a free form 3D programmable space that’s really accessible and easy to develop in.

But in Qwaq you can drag and drop documents in from 2D applications easily, and Wonderland has some great telephony/audio development. I’m totally psyched by what you’re doing because it has the potential to make the free form programmable space of Second Life more widely useful, and it could be bring much innovation to business communications.

I see a future in interactive data visualization, for example, the idea that Ben Lindquist of Green Phosphor has been developing, i.e., that you can actually model business processes dynamically in a collaborative environment. What are your thoughts on Second Life’s potential in business applications?

Mitch Kapor:
One thought is that a more general platform, more general purpose, more open, in the long run, all other things being equal, will be superior to more limited, less capable, more closed platforms, for building any kind of application.

And at the moment, Second Life is the most general and most open platform. So all other things being equal, which usually they’re not, Second Life should be viewed as superior by people who are building a variety of applications.

But there are clearly some things that need to happen. Well let me put it this way some of the other platforms have temporarily at least moved further ahead in enterprise related applications by developing collaboration capabilities.

So the imperative is for Second Life to provide comparable capabilities. It has to do that, in terms of fundamental stability, reliability, in all respects. If it does that then it’s actually going to win on it’s own merits.

Tish Shute:
I absolutely agree with you because in terms of ease of use, it’s the only dynamic networked general simulation platform around. There’s no one else close.

Mitch Kapor:
It’s also I think highly scalable in ways that some other things aren’t. Even though it doesn’t have as many 9’s in uptime as it needs to have, there have been recent signs of more progress. I guess the HTML on the prim stuff is rolling out finally or at least the first version of it.

I think it’s ended in beta now.

It’s not the full thing. But it’s a huge step. That’s going to help a lot.

Tish Shute:
Plus the fact it seems Linden Labs moving towards a more heterogeneous idea of a grid where there’ll be the potential to connect behind the firewall worlds with the main grid .

Mitch Kapor:
I also know that there are some third parties that have done that. They’ve sworn me temporarily to confidentiality. But they have done some very impressive stuff with integrating the web with Second Life in ways that you can for instance in a web interface just go and grab a PowerPoint. In your Second Life window. The power point will just show up. So there is a kind of work around to using the familiar web to get your intercollaboration stuff working. There’s progress. It’s going to be some time before it all sorts itself out.

But to come back to the camera as a more natural interface, I think for personal interaction, is important. It’s going to be a breakthrough.

Tish Shute:
It’s a huge breakthrough also to have the avatar related to your real life gestures. It’s a huge leap forward. When you introduced it at metaverse meetup that really got people’s attention. I have a question. Have you thought about going even further with the thought driven game controllers?

Mitch Kapor:
At some point I intend to take another look at that. I have the feeling that your not doing anything highly profound. Kind of a cute hack.

Tish Shute:
Again they’re not available, I would guess they would give some to you though.

Mitch Kapor:
From looking at earlier incarnations of this stuff I think what they can pick up on is very superficial. So I’m not sure that they’re going to be that interesting cause we really don’t know how to do, without some invasive type of surgery,

Tish Shute:
You can do it with very very complicated brain scanning you can do a lot more, but I agree. Although I did see the Japanese University was using them for severely disabled people. Looked like they were doing some interesting things.

My question is, this is something you mentioned in one of your talks in Second Life, you thought some of the steps forward to make Second Life truly a player in the business world, would be changes on the server level. Were you thinking more about the moves that are going on towards open source and making a heterogeneous grid?

Mitch Kapor:
Yes. I was thinking about letting people run it behind the firewall, and also it’s not just putting it behind the firewall, anytime you’re talking about an enterprise application, the enterprises want to integrate all of their existing IT systems. They already have these very sophisticated systems for managing say identity, and having easy integration of those thing with Second Life identity management is not glamorous but very important.

Tish Shute:
This brings to mind another question. I know I have some ideas about what Second Life really brings to the table for business. No one else has taken on working with dynamic melded states on the internet in 3D to the degree Second Life has. That’s sort of, to me, the essence of it - having groups of people working around 3D objects that can be updated on the fly and modeled on the fly.

Mitch Kapor:

If we do things well there will be a good level of interoperability and all of the open source work and the reverse engineered clones will actually be a good thing.

Second Life is, and I’ve probably used this line, faced with insurmountable opportunities on all sides.

Let me ask you a question. I’ve read your blog, or some of it, but what do you actually do?

Tish Shute:
I spend a lot of time on my blog at the minute!!! You can tell I have kids and dogs driving me crazy [dog is barking in the background], which is exactly why I took this up a year ago. I worked in film and special effects for the early part of my career.

When I had my kids and dogs and all of that it got to be just too much to do 24/7 film production. My son’s nearly 9 now. I tried academia for a while, then I just said forget it..too hard to be in a medieval guild as a second career!

And I actually a year ago when I started looking at this (Second Life) I thought my goodness this is what we sat around and talked about every night when we were doing multiple pass motion control photography in the eighties. And so I started writing about it and that took a life of it’s own. And now it’s become a little ridiculous because it’s an excessively time consuming hobby!

Mitch Kapor:
Are you in New York or the UK?

Tish Shute:
Yes. I’m in Manhattan.

Mitch Kapor:
The reason Second Life has gotten as far as it’s gotten is because of people like you who have become inspired and become obsessed and feel the possibilities and feel them to be so utterly compelling to cause some rearrangement of life priorities.

Tish Shute:
It’s interesting cause it’s like every week I say “Oh I really can’t spend all this time writing!” Then I see something, like this week I saw all the new wave of 3D chat rooms coming out. And it just got me going again! I just can’t bear to not to have a voice because when you see the big picture you want the really innovative stuff to move forward. That’s why when I saw your work on hands free 3D, I said: “Oh my goodness, someone’s taking it the next step. And as you say there isn’t a path that’s clear. There’s no guarantees. But its a path worth traveling, in my view!

Mitch Kapor:
I firmly believe, I have complete conviction, that all of the 3D, the big vision of 3D is in the process of happening. It will be very transformative and anybody who is not counting on that happening, is likely to be run over by it.

Tish Shute:
Right. Of course you’re much more knowledgeable of this aspect of it but in terms of business applications, has anything interesting happened in a long long while?

Mitch Kapor:
There are some interesting things that are happening, I just learned this by accident, that are being kept under very close wraps. There’s at least one consultancy that is doing extremely well with very large prestigious global corporations. They have done a lot of development of this integration of web with Second Life. Their clients are shy. They do not want public exposure at the moment because of the backlash against the overhyping of Second Life that happened last year. I was very heartened to hear about this. I think it’s going to start coming out in the next few months what some of these companies are doing.

Tish Shute:
I agree. Many of the interesting things I know about I can’t write about either because there’s no interest for people developing business applications to have a lot of web publicity about it in the early stages.

Mitch Kapor:
Right. I think we’ll be in this phase for a while. But then we’ll get out of it.

Tish Shute:
In terms of specifics about business application, do you have any dreams for Second Life?

Mitch Kapor:
I would like to just personally have a really good meeting application. Just simple like when you and I want to get together and meet in world, I would like that to be easy, bullet proof, convenient, natural. I’m imagining that we both have cameras, so that we can see each other and you get body language and you get a sense something like what you would get in a face to face meeting. And I want people to have the ability to easily get more realistic avatars, if that’s what they want. And actually there’s a lot of good technology around that now. Where you can just basically take a picture or two with an ordinary digital camera, upload it and get back something that pretty much looks like you.

Tish Shute:
What do you think are the biggest obstacles to this kind of free form 3D programmable space?

Mitch Kapor:
There’s a lot of software that has to be written to bring out its full potential. And not just by Linden or any one company. It’s really a collective effort that is the work of a whole generation.

It’s comparable to all of the work that went into making the ecosystem of the personal computer. Or for that matter the ecosystem of the internet. It requires having the right architecture, it has to stay open. If that can happen I think it’s mostly just a matter of time and some patience.

It is going to happen. There are lots of individual challenges. Tons of problems to solve. I’m not a technological determinist, but at this point I don’t think anything can hold it back.

In a way though having lived through the onset of the internet, while it has changed things a lot, and in certain ways it would be very difficult to imagine life without it, it also has left things the same. I mean people bring all of themselves and their issues into every technological medium. The drama gets played out in a different ways, but it’s neither going to be a good thing or a bad thing. It’s going to be some of both. And so the question is, to me, how people of good will who want to make the world a better place are going to use whatever new things get created in a positive way.

Tish Shute:
I know Mark (Zero Linden) heads up a lot of interoperability work in his office hours and other meetings. But I got a couple of emails this week saying that all these groups that are working off of either clones or reverse engineered, and there are so many of them, and some are under wraps too, need to actually meet on an even more regular basis?

Mitch Kapor:
That’s true. I guess it’s much more desirable for people to meet and talk, and if they don’t for awhile, you get more noise in the system. It just will take longer to put things back together.

Tish Shute:
That’s what I was thinking, that it’s become pretty clear to me that cooperation, if it is going to happen, has to happen around the clones and the reverse engineered versions of Second Life because other platforms are not prioritizing interoperability at the moment, that I know of.

Mitch Kapor:
People will call - this and that should be happening but my view is that the ecosystem is still sufficiently underdeveloped that there is a risk of attempted premature standardization.

If you look at the history of things, It’s very important for there to be working instances before anybody attempts to standardize anything.

There’s a lot to be learned in the early history of the internet. pre-history, from the 60’s up through the 80’s — when the basic protocols were being developed. There’s some very smart people working on that and a certain amount of looseness is actually quite important now.

There’ll be people who want to prematurely standardize and get everybody together and all you’ll wind up with is a massive crud.

I thinks that the power of the open systems is so much greater than the walled gardens Also the open source ethic is so deeply established in large parts of the development community, even in enterprises, that overall I’m not too worried about it.

When the functionality of whatever it is, is that well known and well understood, that’s the period in which the open source alternatives can really flourish. When there’s still a lot of evolution in functionality, and design in the user experience, open source techniques can become too slow.

So it’s going to be somewhat chaotic. I think we have to embrace or at least make peace with a certain amount of chaos right now and the understanding that it’s likely to settle down. The chaos is not the last word.

This week I received several requests to write a post reviewing the recent upsurge of OpenSim based projects. I am in England for a week, so there is no way I can do this before I leave. However there is a good opportunity to learn more about realXtend and meet the realxtend team this week on Wednesday April 23rd, in Second Life. I have reprinted the notice from the realXtend website at the end of this post.

And, as LifeRain points out, “one way to get to know more about OpenSim is to visit a public grid.” There is a complete list of these grids here. OSGrid, OpenlifeGrid and DeepGrid are goods ones to try to start with. The picture above is from Wright Plaza the orientation area for OSGrid below is OpenlifeGrid.

Or You Can “Do it yourself” - I did!

You can also download OpenSim directly from opensimulator.org. I did! And I set it up on a CariNet on a dedicated server for only $100 per month. In the picture above my eight year old son was excited to meet Adam Frisby, one of the core developers on the UgoSim, just minutes after logging in for the first time. Ugotrade Jr. is now enjoying (and so am I) learning to build in a “cost free” environment - no file upload charges! Also, you can get a Ready-To-Run version of OpenSim from OpenlifeGrid.

OpenSim Blogs

There is a OpenSimulator group blog which some of the developers contribute to, and also a Planet OpenSim which agreggates feeds from opensim-related blogs and developers

• Daltonic Gin
• Darb Dabney’s SIMGIS Blog » OpenSim
• Dave’s Educational Blog
• OpenSimulator Project
• Sean’s Mental Walkabout » opensim
• Shengri La: Utopian Micronation
• Tedd Maa
• The Word of Chaos » OpenSim
• VintFalken.com » OpenSim
• artiphys
• justincc’s opensim blog
• nebadon2025.com
• xyzzy xyzzy… » opensi

Meet the realXtenders!

Juha Hulkko’s Second Life avatar, Jussi Hudson relaxing in his “mirror house” in Second Life - photo by Noelani Lightfoot.

The story of Juha Hulkko’s vision for realXtend, the future of virtual worlds and the next generation of the internet, is fascinating and several conversations are combined in the following interview. You can read more about realXtend’s road map and accomplishments to date on their web site. But to introduce the interview here are some of the key points about realXtend first.

Juha emphasized to me that realxtend is a joint effort with many talented people all over the world. He stressed that his personal role is to help and support these people and that it is their talent and skill that is making this vision happen. Juha especially wanted to emphasize the importance of Linden Lab and the OpenSim project. Their innovations and innovative work are the basis for realXtend too.

They are role models to all who are building the future web and they have already made history in computer science. RealXtend is one important spin-off from their great work.

Overview of realXtend

Click the screen shot or here to play the realXtend avatar technology demo also see the realXtend technology video here.

The emphasis of realXtend is real life applications: enterprises, public sector - e.g. environmental management and protection, interactive and community based (socially networked) communication, extended web, integrated communications - multimedia and 3d.

Open Source: basic servers and clients are platform and open source, platforms have no long term business value. Rex sees the value is in content, application development and support, hosting and better customer access/service.Value change innovations: e.g., content directly from content creators to end users (no middlemen needed).

Rex sees a new roles for telecomm, music, movies, advertisement creating huge possibilities that will change web. Social innovation, public and enterprises should inform the direction of the next generation of the internet. Rex takes a pragmatic approach, i.e. that is looking for real needs and keeping eyes open for better solutions: “We try to avoid “not invented here” syndrome all the time in our own doings.” The vision is for a smooth transition from traditional web to extended web (no revolutions are possible, nothing changes over night).

The Vision from realXtend is a robust OpenSim server (quality of service core issues, branches from OpenSim are maybe needed).

Separate avatar servers with identification servers (to enable same avatar usage in different applications), multi platform clients (from light, browser based to heavy duty 3d+), customizability of clients. This Rex points out is very important as clients have to be modified from servers in real time too, (as in Rex). In the realXtend vision serious applications will coexist with social applications (like SL), connected worlds, neither alone is enough.

Funding: Funding for realXtend is through a private, nonprofit foundation, 3 year program is under preparation.

Interview with Juha Hulkko

Picture of Jussi Hudson (Juha’s SL avatar) by Noelani Lightfoot the proprietor of Quixotic Photography in Second Life (see more of her great work here).

Tish Shute: Could you tell me about the vision behind realXtend and how you got involved with virtual worlds and with developing the next generation of the internet?

Juha Hulkko: My fathers fathers and his brother were the first radio amateurs in late 1920s, as schoolboys they built small transmitters / recovers and started to make contacts all over the world first with Morse code (cw). My father and brother started as school boys. I started actively after returning from army 1975 and been more or less active since that.

Ham radio operators were the first new era global community. The first ones started in beginning of 1900 century. Normal people with a technical background built simple radios with antennas and were able to make friends around the world. They were pioneers of modern wireless communications. And social aspect was there already since the beginning. In North Finland schoolboys could make friends from USA to NeXeland and keep contact with them on regular basis.

That was the first internet to me, and that has inspired me a lot to be a part of helping people to build these global platforms to enable people to be better connected, and to enable real global friendships and understanding between people. Without communication, there will not be deep understanding and respect of other cultures and people. This is almost totally missing from my generation (except radio amateur operators ). We just assume we understand global things by listening to the news or other people’s stories. That has very little to do of understanding global things. Our new generation have real friendships around the globe and that is far beyond what my generation ever had possibility to create.

Juha Hulkko’s home in Oulu, Finland in realXtend and Juha at home in “real” life

I’ve been in the communications area all of my life and I’m still involved in that, but not actively anymore at the corporate level. I’m board member of a couple of companies, yes. But, when I stepped out from my position in my company one and a half years ago, I decided to explore my life long interest in the internet. I’ve been using the internet in my work, of course, but I’ve never had time really to explore the possibilities for innovation. I was just ordinary internet user. But, I was exploring and researching things and then I ran into Second Life.

I got quite interested very suddenly because I realized that this is something which is really important. I realized very soon that it is, and I still think it is, one of the greatest social innovations in decades. I could compare it to the internet when the internet started or when this wireless communication mobile phone boom started. It’s kind of same kind of revolution which will happen with virtual worlds. This is not technological innovation, it’s social innovation. This will make the World Wide Web interactive, social, so you can create your own interest groups there, and then combined with 3D and all the media things, it’s all this combination, it’s a huge thing.

But very soon I realized that Second Life was kind of hopeless for integrating real world applications. It was a closed world which means that 90% of the people I met, they wanted to isolate real life from Second Life. That was something I was thinking about quite a lot. I understand the motivation behind that, but somehow I realized that this is not really something with a big interest for me. I started to think very fast how this virtual world, in this case Second Life, really could be a kind of extension of real life.

Juha and Jussi outside their homes in RL and SL. Second Life picture by Noelani Lightfoot.

I understand completely why some people want to isolate their experience from real life. But I was thinking more of how I could utilize these virtual worlds for real life needs. I started to speak with people and when I meet new people I ask them one very simple question: What is your dream? Why are you in second life? And over 90% of the people answered me that their motivation is to explore and have fun. Look around, see different things and have fun.

And I said to those people, that’s great, you should do that. But, I also located some people who I saw that they had things they wanted to do connected to real life. They can be really simple things. For example, you are designing clothes in real life and you want to create them in Second Life and sell them to people and see what goods are good to sell there in Second Life, and in a real life shop. This is a very simple example. This is the way I started to find very eager active people and I made friends with them.

I also realized that one problem which I don’t personally like very much. In Second Life they are selling land to young people with very, very high prices. So I bought some islands there and I started to invite these young people to the island and said to them here is free land, do whatever you want. Of course there were some people who weren’t willing to do something useful. But I said OK but I hope that you would be part of our thing but regardless, if you get some sale wherever in real life or second life still I’m not asking any rent or any revenue.

I wanted people to do what they want but I wanted at the same time those people to be part of our Arkala community. Still things started to develop and we created a community of virtual friends called Third Eye. The idea behind Third Eye was we wanted to break the barrier between Second Life and Real Life. We started to think of different kinds of technical solution, e.g., sending sms between Second Life and “real” life. We can even control a huge radio station in real life from there (see picture below ). That’s the magic motivation for me. I have been in telecommunications, I have been an entrepreneur for 25 years so I have no business interest for myself. I just wanted to see can you really break these barriers.

We had these communication concepts we made a project for vanishing species. These animals are vanished from Real Life, e.g. The Chinese River Dolphin which is extinct. You can see it on our island and communicate with it. We wanted to show people what it means when we are killing animals, whole species, in Real Life. By seeing them here in Second Life we hope people will appreciate more what is being lost and start thinking.

When we called the Chinese River Dolphins made by Nicolas Sordello a student of Ecole Nationale Supérieur des Arts Décoratifs de Paris came to us. Picture by Noelani Lightfoot.

“Save the planet” sounds a naive approach, but behind it is a growing worry about the state of our planet. That is why my dream is to use Virtual Worlds as tools to enable worldwide open communication on environmental issues. Not communication dictated by any governments, big companies or any single environmental institute. All people and organizations have equal opportunity to create change and right to contribute and offer their opinions and share their solutions with other people who are interested on these issues. It is a very powerful tool, I believe. We simply should leave this planet behind in better condition to future generations, better than the conditions we were born into. We need to start the wheel turning in a good direction. It is our generations responsibility and legacy to future generations.

Kilpisjarvi - place of great beauty where Juha tries to spend as much time as possible

I have been in global business for many years but I like the people I have met in Second Life this is something completely different they do this for love and not just for money. But pretty soon I realized we need an open platform and it has to be scalable so that you can create your own virtual world on your laptop or desktop.

I found a group of young talented people. As you know we have much technical talent as you have met some of them from Admino and Ludocraft (see my interview with Tony Manninen of Ludocraft here). We have many people from wireless telecommunications, a big base of computer scientists, engineering. I approached these people as said that in 6 months time I wanted to have these things happen. And now we have done this server concept which is scalable up from one pc all the way up to a big ISP hosted platform, so it is following very much the basic structure of the WWW not the Linden model of the closed world.

I understand why they did this and they have done a lot with this model of micropayments. But for real life applications it is not so much how much people are selling virtual goods to each other but how companies are selling content and services from virtual world to real life people. That is more realXtend’s focus - real life applications. We don’t want to compete with Linden we want to coexist with Linden. RealXtend is a free platform so of course anyone can do what they want with it, but it was originally designed to serve real life needs.

Kilpisjarvi Reindeer

A tour of Arkala Island

Over the last few weeks I have been fortunate to meet many of the talented people who are part of the realXtend team (see my post here about Tony Maninnen of Ludocraft). It was a great delight to be show round by Prof Lunasea the Second Life avatar of Professor François Garnier of Ecole Nationale Supérieur des Arts Décoratifs de Paris who is doing some extradordinary work with his students on Arkala - check it out both on Arkala Island and see their awesome films here.

A screenshot from a short film by de Grégoire PIERRE.

Spade Dagger the Second Life avatar of Tommi Hollström of Admino showed me some of the work Admino has been doing as the part of the research and development for the reaXtend project. Admino Ltd is a company established by two brothers, Hannu and Tommi Hollström. Company started in June 2003. In the beginning Admino was concentrating in ERP systems and Microsoft products. Admino Ltd was actually third business that the brothers were working together. Tommi show me the Second Life control center for Radio Arkala.

This is 3d user interface for a real ham radio in arkala radio station. The user can use real radio, change frequency, hear radio, and talk. This is an easy way give anyone chance to try it out. This was first project where we did to extend reality :-). But there are other talented people involved too. Arkala Island is an island of innovations.

Radio Arkala in Second Life and Real Life

Spade also showed me a project to sell mobile content using L$.

When the user buys content and types in a phone number he gets content directly to mobile phone. The benefit of this from a business point of view benefit is we don’t use visa or sms payment so we save about 30% mobile operator payment in Finland. Usually the operator takes about 30%. We also are also researching selling videos or renting videos.

With OpenSim server we can male better integration examples for mobile content selling systems. So we can use those databases directly and maintain preview pictures prices, product codes there. Now we have import all preview pictures to SL objects and maintain those here. Its a big problem when we have for example 10000 products.
But the good part about SL is that here is a global currency and it is good for micro payments.

Our biggest problem now in SL is we cannot offer extranet or intranet solutions (we have lot ideas in that area), but
but most big companies won’t put their intranet to SL servers. So we need overall security and a global avatar server, DRM, payment integrations, paypal, itunet, ovi etc. We don’t need make own currency or payment. For example, if we make “3d interface” to itunes, we just need api to use itunes payment.

The Key Issue is the Avatar

Juha Hulkko: One important thing we saw was - not only did everything have to be open, but that the key issue for this was the avatar. You always have to generate a new avatar for a specific game/virtual world.

The rational behind our avatar server which we are going to publish tomorrow is that for human life for hundreds of thousands of years the interface for how people communicate with each other has evolved in a certain way. We speak to people a certain way, we have body language which we use when we communicate with each other. But during the last 30 years, thanks to Mr. Microsoft and some big companies, they have taught us to sit in front of screens and use computers in a very very certain way. You have to use menus and you have to have to try to figure out what is the reasoning behind this web page before you can buy something, or how you can find information. But we simply saw that why we should not try to reinvent the wheel because Mother Nature has already developed a human interface which we use in real life. And that’s why we decided that it’s time to create completely new avatar concepts.

So if you want to be in the World Wide Web in the future you have to be there and communicate with surroundings as much as possible in the same way you do in real life, because that’s something everybody knows, you don’t have to learn. Of course, children have to learn to speak. But to get back to the natural human interface is why we wanted to make this global avatar project.

We started from very basics. For example, we started to design the avatar for 220 bones. But this physical part is only very small fraction of human life. It’s like in human life you can see people but that is not everything. So we are adding a lot of new features like mimicry. It means if I’m sitting with my laptop I have a small camera here if I smile, my other person smiles. If I cry the avatar cries.

This is very simple example. But you know from artificial intelligence research there are many people in the world who are now looking at these kind of things and looking at how people really interact in real life. We try and make everything open technically so everybody can add new kinds of features to our avatar. For us really the basic idea is to make this kind of avatar platform that enables everybody, who wants to, to embed different kinds of things in this avatar. We are doing this to create a defacto standard for virtual worlds which is based on open interfaces so that people can do what they want with it.

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

Tony Manninen, the CEO of LudoCraft games studio (the client side development division of realXtend) who has being doing all this amazing recent development on OpenSim, has a vision for Avatar 2.0 that he is bringing to OpenSim. The possibilities for the future integration of realXtend features (that include meshes and the ability to import proper 3D models) with Second Life is currently under discussion - more on this soon.

We have tried to keep the rexviewer as compatible as possible. We totally appreciate what Linden Lab has done and we are trying to do our best to co-exist with their beautiful social innovation.

When I interviewed Tony (see interview later in this post), I was very excited not only by the scope of his vision and his devotion to enhancing the user experience and possibilities of virtual worlds, but also by his absolute determination to manifest this vision in code with the the utmost speed

The next release of realXtend server and client will be published on 29th of February, 2008 at 4pm (Helsinki time). The features that will be in this release and a roadmap for the future are here.

Virtual Worlds that make our “real” and “virtual” lives better

What do I mean by an exciting vision for virtual worlds? There are many visions for virtual worlds floating around and some of them are not so appealing to me, like the notion of a virtual world as a walled garden/company town put forward by the CEO of There.com, Michael Wilson.

When Michael Wilson was interviewed in Second Life by Beyers Sellers (Robert Bloomfield, Cornell University) for Metanomics this week, he gave the impression that creating a controlled environment for marketing is the number one priority of There.com.

In my view, which seemed to be shared by many of the Second Life audience participating in the group chat, this notion of designing virtual worlds as “big brother houses” is the epitomy of “the metaverse gone wrong.” You can see the full interview here on SLCN. Also see here for Christian Scholz’s (Tao Takashi in Second Life) excellent summary and analysis of a virtual world according to There.

I hope there are some more positive aspects to There.com than this interview conveyed.

Despite ups and downs and growing pains, Philip Rosedale’s vision for Second Life has always, in my view, had at its heart the motivation to make people’s “real” and “virtual” lives better. See The Making of Second Life by Wagner James Au for a fascinating look at the early days.

While Linden Lab is still working hard to break free of the “walled garden” model, with OpenSim and realXtend, the expansive vision that they have pioneered has been open sourced even before they have finished their own open sourcing project. And now, an open source development community of genius and depth (including Linden Lab) is rising to the challenge of taking this vision of making our “real” and “virtual” lives better to the next step.

There are several Open Source virtual world platforms available now, including Ogoglio, Croquet and Sun’s Wonderland. In the news today is the Open Virtual Worlds Project from The New Media Consortium (NMC) and Sun Microsystems which as VWN points out is similar to efforts announced by the Immersive Education Initiative to create an Education Grid across Second Life, Wonderland, and Croquet.

But OpenSim stands out from the pack because it inherits from Second Life an awesome set of tools to facilitate user generated content. This emphasis on user generated content is, of course, key to how Second Life has become the largest and most highly developed 3D immersive world to date. The fact that OpenSim is a platform built for people to build in was of one of the reasons that realXtend chose to work with OpenSim after they investigated all the available open source options. Also important, Tony noted, was the depth of the development community in OpenSim and Second Life.

Philip Rosedale speaking in Second Life at the MacArthur Foundation event on The Future of Philanthropy in Virtual Worlds

The Future of Ubiquitous Game Design

There are many inspiring alternative visions for virtual worlds emanating from Game Developers Conference 2008 which have been percolating through the blogosphere. Particularly interesting, to me, are the new possibilities for avatar expressiveness and some interesting ideas on the future of ubiquitous game design.

I was thrilled to discover that Tony Manninen has been doing research on avatar expressiveness since 2000 (see his papers here). Rich Interaction in networked virtual environments, avatar expressiveness, and the future of ubiquitous game design are his forte. How very cool!

Tony’s vision is to take social gaming to the next level and to produce games that are so heavily collaborative that they reach deep into our experience of the pleasures doing things together, our enthusiasm for team sports, and childhood memories of the enjoyment of playing together. He has been exploring these ideas of team play and community in earlier LudoCraft games like AirBuccaneers.

Ray Kerzweil’s keynote GDC 2008 laid it on the line: “Games are the harbinger of everything.”

But some of my favorite GDC 2008 quotes are from Jane McGonigal (see her blog post “Reality is Broken” - My GDC Rant) and in Liz Lawley’s copious notes on “Pouring Fuel on the Fire: Game Designers’ Rant.”

Jane McGonigal: