UgoTrade

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

Mirror Worlds will transform the meaning of “computer.” Our dominant metaphor since 1950 or thereabouts, “the electronic brain,” will go by the boards. Instead people will talk about crystal balls, telescopes, stained glass windows, wine, poetry, or whatever - things that make you see vividly. (Mirror Worlds, David Gelertner 1992)

As the meaning of “computer” transforms so will software. Gelertner talks about software as an embodied information machine. And, as virtual worlds come of age so will this notion of software as 3d info machines that we can walk around, tinker with, and hang out in with other avatars and agents in real time. But, exactly how the most complex, crucial, and up to now invisible, parts of our society become embodied in all their glory is not clear yet.

The photo above is used with the permission of Dan Slater. It is taken with an experimental camera Dan built, called the Spherecam. It is a one of a kind ultra wide angle camera that records a scene in all possible viewing directions (4pi steradians). The camera uses a pair of hyperhemispherical fisheye lens to record the scene in all directions.

In Gelertner’s vision the transformation of computers into seeing machines will empower people to understand and work with the machinery of their society. Edward Tufte describes, “Beautiful Evidence,” as “how seeing turns into showing.” But for this to happen, new metaphors for representing complex information will have to emerge. We will have to imagine new ways to deal with the multiple views that are already part of complex modern software (e.g., the four plus one mode view pictured below - see Grady Booch, Turing Lecture, 2007).

And, we will have to imagine radically new ways to view software.

Software today offers assistance to the specialist (in everybody) not to the citizen. The mere citizen deals with the increasingly perilous complexity of his government, business, transportation, health, school, university and legal systems unaided. Mirror Worlds represent one attempt to change this state of affairs (Gelertner, Mirror Worlds, 1992).

Design Patterns:The soul of software architecture

I contacted Grady Booch to ask him about the role virtual worlds may have in the next generation of software design. He is one of the giants of software design and methodology (known for developing the Unified Modeling Language with Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh, and the Booch method of software development). But also he is undertaking an archeology of the essential piece of software architecture - software design patterns - in a project called The Handbook of Software Architecture. The website is under construction and “this is a work in progress, and the chapters of the Handbook will be exposed as each archeologic dig for each system is finished and vetted by the original development team.”

But, I was fortunate to get a sneak preview. The Handbook, while illuminating the brilliance and short comings of software’s past is, in my understanding, about software’s future - discovering the raw materials of software’s future through a meticulous excavation of the design patterns of the past.

“Some people collect stamps, Grady collects software architectures”

The picture above, from The Handbook of Software Architecture, is of an early design drawing for Google. Google are notoriously secretive about their architecture. The “family jewels” of page rank are not elucidated! Grady pointed out the importance of the “barrels” which are the individual servers.

Contradictions of Software-Intensive Mechanisms

The cartoon/design pattern above is from xkcd, A Webcomic of Romance, Sarcasm, Math and Language - hat tip to Cory Ondrejka for this link. The next generation of software design is pushing up whole new classes of applications. The semantic web is not the last word. But, we are confronted by a set of complex challenges and contradictions. Grady points out several of these (see them in full in Turing Lecture,, Grady Booch, 2007).

1) The internet has changed the way individuals communicate and collaborate but it also creates new opportunities for griefers (for a thoughtful look at some of the issues see Identity in a new era, and for a critique of the way griefers get glorified in the media see here). Mitch Wagner of Information Week, (Ziggy Figaro in Second Life) said to me recently:

I certainly despise griefers — they seem to like to spoil things for other people through no other motivation than mean- spiritedness. A devout Christian friend says that spammers and phishers are just plain thieves, but griefers prove the existence of Original Sin.

2) The web provides unprecedented mechanisms for social networking but also new opportunities for theft, fraud and the exploitation of the vulnerable, especially children.

3) Software-intensive systems permit real time and distributed access to information but this can erode privacy and other basic human rights.

4) Email and other software-intensive mechanisms increase the velocity of communication but email and the aging of digital archives threatens the preservation of history.

5) Software-intensive systems create new forms of artistic expression but piracy can dilute the intellectual property of artists.

6) Software-intensive systems enable and accelerate scientific research but they are also at the center of a new generation of offensive and defensive weapons.

7) Software is part of the very fabric of civilization, living in its interstitial spaces but its complexity continues to grow impacting the users as well as the stakeholders in its development, operation and deployment.

“What is software?” and “What are its limits?”

Through the dedication of Grady Booch (Alem Theas in Second Life) - his archeology and anthropology of software’s past, the past is beginning to speak. The archive not only reveals a valuable history: “What worked and what didn’t?” “What was brilliant and what was a failure?” But by creating this unprecedented access to history, Grady gives us a unique opportunity to chew on the big questions and discover the cross cutting zones from which the future will emerge.

There is a grand vision in David Gelertner’s book Mirror Worlds. A vision of a software revolution in which the underpinnings of our global society, the invisible machinery of software, “becomes visible and is transformed into a beautiful, poetic experience that empowers people to understand and work with the machinery of their society.”

In Mirror Worlds, Gelertner points out, ordinary people will be able to poke around in the workings of society, business and government. You will meet software agents and other Mirror World visitors and you will be able to enter a Mirror World through any household computer.

But as Gelertner pointed out this is not “hazy science fiction” - “the tools and materials for Mirror World building are in hand, and the job is underway.” And the challenges are more social than technical. They are at their root challenges of human imagination.

Last week Grady made a presentation on Software Architecture from Second Life to a group of Canadian developers. Grady’s Second Life avatar was streamed into an IMax Theater for a live audience who watched both the stream from Second Life and a PowerPoint presentation side by side. Through a fascinating set of slides of different software architectures, I saw the process of how successful systems grow and emerge. How software architectures manage to change. How the ability to change allows them to endure over time.

Grady argued that natural forces lead to optimal developments. And, for a given domain there is a reasonably optimum architecture for that domain. Also, how domains have tendencies to grow in particular directions, e.g., How Amazon’s investment in hardware and software was applicable to some domains, e.g. Cloud computing.

Grady illuminated the characteristics of the design patterns that animate the software architecture that invisibly guides our society, the mobile phone - “wickedly complex” yet very resistant to change because customers are fickle. Mars Pathfinder - a classic example of “subsumption architecture as Pathfinder works in a semi-autonomous way, Google, E-bay, Amazon - the titans of the web centric development and web centric retail, Citibank, Visa, and air traffic control, MMOGs, and many more.

How software architectures learn

One of the insights of Grady’s archeology is that architecture that can change is architecture that endures over time. And key to this ability to be flexible and to scale, is componentization. Grady pointed out how game architecture and virtual worlds are increasingly discovering componentization. Grady links increasing maturation of architecture to increasing componentization. A quick look at these two design drawings of the Second Life architecture - one of the architecture today, and the other the new design Zero Linden (Mark Lentczner in Real Life) presented, in September, 2007, show this trend (see more of the new structural design drawings here).

Zha Ewry (David Levine, IBM research) explained to me some of the challenges of introducing an increased separation of concerns and componentization to Second Life architecture while maintaining the essence of Second Life, collaboration and dynamic content.

To a point yes, we’ll see more and more componentization. But.. there are some deep limits, driven off of the need to do state melding.

State melding is the dynamic state updating - what makes Second Life the amazing creative, social space it is. The old web works by exporting state on a per state basis. But Second Life takes inputs from 10 - 40 AVs, and 40 times a second spits out a new state. I asked Zha what are the key ways the new architecture design is different from the old?

Separating out a bunch of non state melding activity from the state melding to start. That’s the agent domain

Some examples of non melding activity are Inventory, IM , Estate management, Profiles, Search and Map. As Zha pointed out:

Anything that doesn’t involve generating the next frame of the sim’s state, or has stand alone capabilities based utilities, e.g, buying Linden. The agent domain can fetch you a capabilities (a short term secure access to a web service) to the lindex . Right now, they all route via the sim.

Many Second Lifer’s favorite design drawings from the next generation architecture for Second Life displayed on the Architectural Working Group wiki are the ones showing the designs for running your own region from a home computer.

3D Information Machines

The tools of modern software such as Rational and Eclipse with complex UML models are currently deeply lodged in the 2D realm of the user desktop. But, the third dimension is crucial to Gelertner’s vision for the future of software:

You set up a software mirror wherever you like, then allow some complex real-world system to unfold before it. The software faithfully reflects what it going on out front. But this is a three dimensional kind of reflection: The program reaches out and engulfs some chunk of reality. Like a child- sized play village modeled precisely on a real town and tracking reality’s every move, the Mirror World supplies a software object to match and track every real one.

When I wrote to Grady requesting an interview I asked him the following question:

Do you think one day we can dispense with all those 2D docs and replace them with living 3D software that we can collaborate on in real time?

Grady replied:

and why do you suppose we are not already living in such a world but don’t have the ability to see it! (hehe..one of my fav books is “Better Than Life” by Grant Naylor; it’s the sequel to the book “Red Dwarf”)

The topic of the virtualness of what we call “reality” has been coming up a lot in the WoK forums, led by Piet Hut and Steven Tainer, that I have been attending in Qwaq. And, as the worlds we call virtual become increasingly “real” in ways we have not yet imagined, what we call “real” will be experienced as increasingly virtual. So things are definitely getting very interesting.

In a few years there will be enough computation cycles for ray tracing and avatars will be more of a “real” person tied to bodily movements. Already the riddle of multi threading is the theme of much discussion and talk in Second Life (see this series of Second Life presentations by Intel’s multi threading gurus.)

These mirror worlds will become increasingly rich and, in Gelertner’s vision, they will mark a new era in humankind’s relationship to the human made world. And, “They change that relationship, for good.”

While some would argue that 2D repositories can be transformed usefully into 3D architectures there is a disruptive discontinuity in the phase shift from 2D programs to 3D as 2D respositories do not have a 3rd or a fourth dimension.

Another approach is to root the design process in 3D from the start. From this perspective the sim itself acts as the OS or middleware. Mirror Worlds are native to the 3D environment. And, prototypes for Mirror Worlds, small scale examples for the moment, are already appearing in Second Life and OpenSim.

“Beyond wickedly cool” - A VNOC (Virtual Network Operations Center) in SL

“Beyond wickedly cool,” was Grady’s Booch’s assessment of the 3D info machines of Illuminous Beltran (Second Life avatar), a.k.a Michael Osias, IBM. These are not merely visualizations they are assemblies driven by “live” or simulated data. “When real business logic is in these machines they become more than “visualizations” and models. The become 3D information processing machines.” I asked Illuminous to describe his work for me:

Nearly every technical engineer has used a program like RAD and Visio to structure and describe the architectures they are building. These drawings may be static or updated from an underlying metadata repository, and render information at different levels of abstraction based on the phase of the project. These 2D, semi-static artifacts are shared among members of the team working on the project. Via collaboration tools such as email or content management systems, wikis, etc, these models are refined, new revisions created, and the cycle starts again. Ultimately, these artifacts need to end up in a deployed system, which involves yet another set of tools, skills, and people.

There is a thought that, using Virtual World technologies, the collaboration cycle time between design, refinement, development, and deployment can be drastically reduced. The idea is that, 3D elements of what we may consider 2D software, are built in the virtual world. What does software ‘look’ like? With the phrase ‘function drives form’, they look like what they are. Components such as sockets, servers, subsystems, and applications all have well defined structural aspects that can be represented in 3D. That is not to say, every line of java code becomes a 3D object, but rather atomic elements - be they objects or collections of objects, subsystems, or other ‘normalized’ elements that represent structure and function, but also make sense.

You could stop there, and say we have a static ‘3D software sculpture’, and gain some value by having multiple avatars collaborate on the structure of the system, making changes in realtime. This provides great deal of value by allowing everyone involved in the collaboration to understand and see in realtime, the structure of the system. Taking it a step further, why not give these ’sculptures’ behavior that mirrors the ‘real’ components? Such as data flows in and out, animations, color changes, even adding in tiny screens, consoles, buttons, network connections, gauges, meters, and even sounds. These elements can be programmed to respond as the ‘real’ component responds. Therefore turning our 3D sculpture into a ‘3D machine’. Now we can determine, collaboratively, how the system evolves over time given various stimulus and behavior. Connecting these components together, like connecting wires to electrical equipment, allows composite systems to be built.

You could also stop there, with significant value in not only understanding the structure, but how the state of all components evolve over time given specific stimulus. Or, you could feed key data elements from the APIs of the ‘real’ systems to create an operational mirror image of the system. Finally, to take it a step further, you could begin to move function into the 3D machine, and begin to turn off the functions of the ‘real’ system…after all data is data, and logic is logic, no matter if the runtime is in java or the Virtual World. The data and algorithms, and the behavior of the machine, come to represent not just the ‘living’ architecture, but it becomes the ‘operational’ architecture as well. Of course not all algorithms and data volumes are appropriate for the Virtual World 3D Machines. In these cases, a hybrid of real processing versus manipulation of high performance systems via APIs is an option. This final phase, is where the design, development, and deployment, could become a single entity.

New Forms of Collaboration

The biggest problem in computational science, which is quickly becoming all of science, is to find ways to let scientists write software together. (Piet Hut)

There is much research going on in many different virtual world platforms on how virtual worlds can best be used for collaborative software design. Piet Hut is working with astrophysicists in Qwaq and Second life in a project called MICA, (Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics), to explore the possibilities for scientists.

The IBM Project Bluegrass from Li-Te Cheng, Steven Rohall, and John Patterson, The T.J. Watson, Collaborative User Experience group, is looking at virtual worlds for developer collaboration and to support distributed work. They are focusing on some of the complex aspects of visualization of work flow processes that are part and parcel of modern software design, and the critical social aspects of working across culture and geography.

Collaborative applications such as Rational Jazz for software development and Lotus Notes for business processes, provide team support for “heads down” work. However, as teams become more distributed, it is important to support “heads up” work–the kind of social interaction that is achieved by seeing people in the hallways when they are collocated.

A video demonstration of Project Bluegrass can be downloaded in Second Life at IBM Codestation. Bluegrass is a research project. They are considering the strengths of various platforms. But, their basic approach is the creation of a virtual world client installation, a VW plug in for the 2D collaborative environments of Lotus Notes and Jazz. At the moment, they have a research prototype using Torque which is currently available for use by IBM teams.

New Collaborative Tools Evolving From 3D Environments

Bluegrass uses virtual spaces to find ways to enhance the 2D environments in which developers work today - modern developers are dealing with a level of complexity that has already usurped the real estate of their screens. But there are some interesting experiments on design and collaboration native to the 3D environment emerging in Second Life.

These experiments, currently, may seem mere toys in relation to the needs of enterprise software development. But because they are evolving directly in the 3D environment - these under-featured solutions may contain the seeds of innovation that will kill todays giants. (see Innovators Dilemma).

The following pictures show Vision Raymaker (Marco Vanadia in RL), and JonnyBee Cioc’s, Spatial Mind Map project. Their source code is freely downloadable here and the latest version is here. It’s released under the Creative Commons license. They developed Spatial Map using this LSL editor - an off-world IDE integrated Developer Environment developed by Alphons Jano (SL Avatar), Alphons van der Heijden in RL. Vision told me he considers this the best off-world IDE for LSL. “This editor allows you to edit/compile & debug one or more Linden Scripting Language sources in its simulation environment (when you press a F key you can test almost all functionality as if you were in SL). It can update itself every time you open it via internet and offers help from an extensive help file, or the LSL wiki. “Vision (Marco Vanadia is becoming the first (perhaps!) Italian scripting mentor in Second Life.

Spatial mind map to public brainstorm about SL land joint venture

Talking about Singularity through a mind map

The spatial map mind mapping project was born on Vulcano, “an open community, where experimentation is encouraged to flourish, and the consequences of applying common sense and bottom-up self regulation, enable creativity to mature.” David Orban the founder of Vulcano told me: ”

I am very proud of this concrete example of its fertility. An idea is just a humble starting point, as we know, and before we can measure its validity, in the physical world there are enormous hurdles to clear, many of which don’t relate to the idea itself, but are inherent to the rules we are accustomed to obey. In online worlds on the other hand, many of these barriers do not exist, and ideas can evolve very quickly, as they are more easily tested in their utility. I fully expect Vulcano to give birth to many other excellent ideas as well, and my best wishes to Spatial Map and all the others is to succeed, and progress!”

Malachi Mulligan is working on another mind map project on Vulcano. And, see also the opening of the Pyramid Cafe, another awesome manifestation of Vulcano creativity (read more here in Italian and here in English).

Spatial Map Creators JonnyBee Cioc and Vision Raymaker

Software Architects Meet to Play Go in Second Life

Last Thursday, a group of software architects including Saijanai Kuhn (Lawson English in RL), from the AWG, and Zha Ewry, the IBM representative to AWG gathered on the Second Life Go sim created by Zarf Vantongerloo and BamBam Sachertorte for a great match between Zero Linden (as his alt Zarf) and astrophysicist Piet Hut. It was a brilliant and wonderful match to watch. Zero is a 9K player and Piet is Shodan level. The conversation during the match was fascinating too, and touched on the aesthetics of game patterns and the best way to improve one’s skills by replaying the games of the great masters until the patterns become internalized. Thanks Zha for these great pictures! Click here visit Go in Second Life (and see the newsblog and the website for a schedule of events).

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Astrophysicist Piet Hut (Pema Pera in Second Life) has come into virtual worlds to explore questions about reality. Piet’s interest in reality is the question of what reality really is. His exploration starts with scientific insights and moves into the reaches of contemplative traditions and other ways of knowing to ask: “What else is true?”

Simulating stars and galaxies and putting them in the palm of your hand computationally speaking is interestingly complementary to much of the ancient imagery of India, Tibet, etc.

Tibetans/Indians used “waking up” as a metaphor for seeing more directly into reality, but we now have many more examples we can use, besides waking up from a dream: realizing that a movie is a movie, getting out of and into virtual realities, so many metaphors that all can serve to help us talk about radically different ways of seeing in a new light what what is already right here.

Piets experiments in virtual worlds began with Videoranch (founded by Michael Nesmith, one of the original Monkees, and his wife), and now Qwaq Forums and Second Life. Piet is planning to write a book with the tentative title “Exploring Reality in Virtual Worlds.” He is a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, but is currently logging in from Kyoto Japan where he is involved in joint research with Japanese astrophysicists.

In the picture opening this post, by Noelani Lightfoot the proprietor of Quixotic Photography in Second Life (see more of her great work here), Piet and I are at a Go table in Second Life (see the newsblog and  the website for a schedule of events). Piet is a Go player (shodan rank in Japan) and at the time of the interview he had just discovered this place, to his delight.

Piet explained to me how the trajectory of his research into the notion of “the lab” and his journey as an astrophysicist in virtual worlds relates to the history of astrophysics:

Science goes back to astronomy, studying the regularity of the heavens, and moderns science started with Galileo. Yet, though astrophysics is the oldest science, it is the youngest laboratory science. Until half a century ago it had no lab, while all other sciences did. You couldn’t put a star in a lab, or a galaxy. But with the advent of computers, you can, virtually! So experimental astrophysics equals virtual worlds, in fact a virtual cosmos.

Piet takes the notion of “the lab” into new terrain.

Piet began with two experiments in Qwaq. The first is a Qwaq forum called MICA (Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics). Aimed at his astrophysics colleagues, MICA explores what happens when astrophysicists enter their virtual labs themselves, in virtual form as avatars. The second Qwaq organization, WoK (Ways of Knowing), is aimed at a widely interdisciplinary group of scholars interested in thinking deeply about reality and asking the question, “what do you find if you really delve into contemplation, doing it and reflecting on it, both, i.e. using your life as a lab.”

In astro I am putting galaxies and stars in a lab and in WoK we are treating our own life as a lab and virtual words are great labs!

Piet’s recent article, “Virtual Laboratories and Virtual Worlds,” reports on his experiences with these Qwaq forums and offers many fascinating and intriguing insights. Piet was initially surprised at which group made the transition first, as he put it from tourists to neighbors and then to collaborators. Apparently the task of getting astrophysicists into virtual worlds was a lot like herding cats. An interesting point Piet makes is how:

The main attraction for coming into Qwaq Forums was presence. Presence in a persistent space, a watering hole that quickly became a familiar meeting ground, this is what was felt to be the single most important aspect of the whole enterprise. Everything else was clearly secondary.”

But this week, as Piet explained:

We will start putting our N-body simulations in Qwaq and we will also start playing with interfaces to their in-world applications. Now from here on, Qwaq will prove to be useful for integrating simulations and avatars, i.e. no more screen dividing scientists and their science.

This may be a considerable draw for astrophysicists who will now be able to enter virtual laboratories running real time simulations, produced by a supercomputer, of galaxies “or molecules interacting for that matter” to inspect the results of the simulation, and “even change the way the simulation are run in real time” together with their colleagues in a shared virtual space.

Another potential of virtual worlds that Piet is interested in exploring is “for researchers who are geographically remote to start writing code together in a virtual space.”

The biggest problem in computational science, which is quickly becoming all of science, is to find ways to let scientists write software together.

He notes in “Virtual Laboratories and Virtual Worlds,” that keeping full digital records of coding sessions can be part of a process in which we move “from open source to open knowledge.”

The idea is that if someone uses a legacy code, twenty years from now, and wants to modify a particular function, she can click on a pointer next to the old lines of code and see a replay of the session that produced that code. This will give full disclosure of the original motivation for writing the code, the way in which is was debugged, what considerations came up and were tried out, anything you could possibly have wanted to ask the original writers (except that they by then will have forgotten most of it!).

Breaking out of walled gardens (intellectual disciplines and proprietary virtual worlds)

Piet’s commitment to exploring different ways of knowing extends now beyond breaking down the boundaries between science and contemplative traditions. He is also forming groups that bridge virtual worlds. Piet has invited me to join two groups: one is the Qwaq Second Life Liason group, QSL, (more about this later in this post), and the other The WoK Qwaq forum .

I will have some first hand accounts of my own experiences bridging worlds soon. My first WoK forum featured a presentation by Dr. Karen Sobel Lojeski, founder of Virtual Distance International, and a discussion of the New York Times article on virtual worlds for children - what the implications of the widespread adoption of virtual worlds by children may be for mind and society, and whether these burgeoning children’s worlds were benefiting children or merely opportunist business ventures.

Karen’s book with Dr. Richard Reilly, “Uniting the Virtual Workforce: Transforming Leadership and Innovation in the Globally Integrated Enterprise,” is scheduled for publication in April, 2008, and you can order now on bn.com, amazon.com, or wiley.com.

I am interested in the endeavor of working across the disciplines of science and contemplative traditions. But I wonder how the emphasis of many contemplative traditions to go beyond conceptual reality meshes with science.

For example, in Buddhism there is a distinction between certainty about the nature of reality and the experience of what reality really is - which is beyond conceptual fabrication. To go beyond conceptual fabrication is to go beyond the language of science, indeed beyond any language. If science made its endeavor the experience of the true nature of reality beyond concept would it still be science? Piet told me that while current science cannot play such a role, he fully expects a future science to be able to do so (see his one-page summary, Beyond Methods and Goals).

I am equally interested to see how Second Lifer’s and Qwaqers will find new ways to relate. As Piet put it:

Let’s build bridges. The human part is always the most difficult, so why not start there scaling the walls. And Qwaq and SL communities have a lot to offer each other. They are totally complementary.

Exploring Qwaq

Here are some pictures of my first day in Qwaq. I had a bit of culture shock when I checked in and found myself not the rather lovely Tara5 Oh, my Second Life avatar, but a block person. Luckily being able to drag Powerpoint presentations from my desktop onto a wall in a virtual room in one second with one mouse motion saved the day, so I was a happy blockhead.

Then I learned how to become a sphere (see picture below) which for me actually felt a whole lot better. There is no rich culture to support avatar identity construction in Qwaq, as there is in Second Life, and without this I preferred to retreat into a non figurative abstraction.

In Qwaq people frequently use a real life still image of their face to give more of an identity to their blockheads. Piet explained how they had experimented with using streaming video. But, he noted, the effect was a bit disappointing because the disjuncture between the moving image, which had no connection to what the avatar was actually saying or doing, was worse than when a still picture was used. Yet the richness of facial expression added to the communication, so the jury is still out, he said, as to what might work best: “time and further testing and tinkering will tell.”

Piet came into Qwaq and showed me this nice mirror in the space of Dr. Robert Magrisso, Doctor of Internal Medicine, an avid Qwaqer. In the picture below the mirror with images of our qwaq avatars in it has Dr Magrisso’s paintings to the right and left. There is a reflection of my happy blue sphere. And, Piet and his alt are the orange spheres (you can run multiple Qwaq sessions on the same computer, making it easy to log in with two avatars, or to be present in two Qwaq organizations simultaneously).

The mirror is very nice and I have not seen one in Second Life. Apparently there are a few according to my friend Zha Ewry. But they are not easy to make because of rendering issues, “You need a primitive that ‘acts like a mirror’ in the graphics system.” Apparently there has been some discussion about adding “mirror” to prim surfaces in Second Life but it’s graphically expensive and would use too much rendering resources as it would need to be calculated every frame. But Zha notes, “They are pretty. And, there are some tricks you can do on higher end graphics cards to make them less costly for clients.”

Second Life the great virtual lab of fairy tale, dream, technology, community and more….

In the last few weeks Piet has expanded his explorations of reality in virtual worlds into Second Life. Though as Pema Pera he was born ten months ago, he was so busy with Qwaq that he had to wait for the Xmas holidays to get acculturated into SL, which has a learning curve steeper than for Qwaq by two orders of magnitude, he said. But now that he’s in, he shows all the signs of being hooked.

Second Life as the largest and most popular virtual world, whose rich social structure of networks built around user generated content, is the supreme realm or “lab” to explore, “fairy tale, dream, technology, community, etc., etc, …” and the infinite possibilities of networked human intelligence.

Piet has started a Qwaq Second Life Liason group with Kat Lemieux, a Director and Founder of The International Space Museum in Second Life. “Kat has been a wonderful mentor for me here in SL,” Piet told me. Henrik Bennetsen (formerly Henrik Linden), from Stanford, was instrumental in getting Piet involved with Second Life. Piet explained, “I met Henrik in RL at a conference in Stanford about using virtual worlds as collaboration tools in August. Henrik pointed me to Kat and the rest is history.”

Because Kat’s last name is in French, I came up with the name liaison, Qwaq-SL Liaision. Then, with an incredible stroke of good luck, it turned out that QSL, the abbreviation of the group , had a deep meaning in early radio broadcasting, which I did not even know.

So then QSL grew very fast. Emileigh Starbrook showed her simulation of an asteroid impact on Mars, an amazing performance. And I got astronaut Ed Lu in at the space station. Kat showed some Qwaqers how to build things in SL. And I got Troy Mcluhan and Kat into Qwaq, in my MICA organization, and now you too, in my WoK organization.

Adventures with The Qwaq Second Life Liason Group

The Qwaq Second Life Liason Group, QSL, has grown rapidly and is now holding three meetings a week, each next one roughly six hours later than the previous one, since members span Europe, Asia and North America. I joined them on Wednesday, January 9th for a tour of a replica of Chernobyl in Second Life given by Maxwolf Goodliffe. This Second Life build is part of an effort to raise money for Chernobyl charities. For more about this effort see this YouTube video.

Zazen Manbi, who introduced me to Piet, was there for the tour in his yellow protective suit. Piet is in an earlier incarnation of his avatar here - the bearded avatar in a maroon shirt (just before he learned how to shed his noobe image ;>). Zazen, who is Jeffrey Corbin in RL, recently obtained funding for teaching an environmental impact course in Second Life. Zazen is building a virtual Nuclear Power Station in Second Life to help explain and demystify nuclear power and its vital role in controlling global warming.

A couple of days earlier, Piet brought his friend, astronaut Ed Lu, into Second Life to visit the replica of the International Space Station that he lived in for a half a year in 2003. Ed Lu and Piet were joined by a number of members of the Qwaq Second Life Liason group. The picture above is from Troy McLuhan’s Snapzilla. Ed Lu is the avatar in the white shirt. For more on Ed Lu’s visit to Second Life see Kat Lemieux’s post on the International Space Museum blog.

Piet and Ed Lu, together with Rusty Schweickart and Clark Chapman, founded The B612 Foundation named after the asteroid that was the home of Le Petit Prince. The goal of B612 is to significantly alter the orbit in a controlled manner by 2015. After the tour of Chernobyl in Second Life, Piet and I talked for a while on the solar panels of the SL International Space Station.

Piet described to me how Ed Lu came into Second Life.

He had called me on my cell phone from the space station, when he lived there for half a year in 2003 and two days ago I called him on his cell phone from the SL space station. He was so intrigued, he was willing to come over the next day. We had quite a party! After ten minutes in SL he could talk, walk, fly, and have a text based conversation with his admirers while inspecting the space station. These astronauts are really incredible!

Ed Lu’s visit gave a very auspicious start to the year for QSL which has taken off at rocket speed - good to have some guidance from an RL astronaut! I am very excited to be part of it. Piet has launched some ground breaking communities in virtual worlds in the last year. I can’t wait to see what happens as they develop and expand in 2008.

I think QSL will be visiting the, “The Rhodospin Membrane Protein,” soon. This build on the IBM Research Shared Work Island resulted from a simulation done on the Blue Gene supercomputer. In the picture below, Zha Ewry, Pema Pera and I are sitting in the molecule discussing the meta implications of a visualization of a visual molecule in a virtual world (for more on this build see this post on eightbar, SLNN, and the molecule tour on Destroy TV’s Flickr photostream).

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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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Recently I met with Eben Moglen, the founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, and David W. Levine, a researcher at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center and IBM representative to the Architectural Working Group, for an informal conversation that looked at many of the fundamental social, technological and legal questions of building 3D immersive online spaces like Second Life.

I live only a couple of blocks from the Software Freedom Law Center. And, as the opening sourcing of the Second Life Architecture is pressing forward, I decided I must at least try to get the thoughts of my neighbor who is the great advocate for the role of free software as a fundamental requirement for a democratic and free society.

I was delighted when Eben Moglen said that I could stop by and ask some questions. But he made clear, from the outset, that he wasn’t the optimistic advocate for immersive virtual worlds that I am. But the stage was set for what I felt could be a very important debate, so at the next Architectural Working Group meeting in Second Life I asked David W. Levine (a.k.a Zha Ewry in Second Life) if he was willing to come along and take part in this discussion. The photo of Zha below is by Noelani Lightfoot the proprietor of Quixotic Photography in Second Life (see her great Flickr stream here).

David is one of the most experienced architects, not from Linden Lab, involved in the Architectural Working Group’s efforts to open source the server side architecture of Second Life and develop open standards for virtual worlds. What followed was a fascinating and wide ranging conversation in which Moglen and Levine discussed how the choices we make about the design of virtual spaces and avatar interfaces in general can affect the whole path of human society.

Moglen and Levine explore, in depth, the problem of defining digital public space and issues of privacy on the internet, offering many suggestions on how to implement online privacy enhancing technologies and insights as to how we could design the next generation of these technologies in responsible ways.

A Conversation Between Eben Moglen and David W. Levine. (instigated and transcribed by Tish Shute, Ugotrade)

In this interview David Levine is speaking personally, not representing IBM’s official position on any of the issues under discussion. Also, neither Eben Moglen nor I (Tish Shute) represent or have any affiliation with IBM. We are all speaking from our own perspectives. And I apologize in advance for any errors I may have inadvertently introduced through faulty transcription and/or editing to the speech of Eben Moglen and David Levine.

David: This is entirely Tish’s idea, I’m tagging along to ask interesting questions and hear your insights.

Tish: Yes I roped David in because in terms of the Architectural Working Group in Second Life and the open sourcing of the server side architecture as he is one of the most experienced architects not from LL.

David: Yes IBM has an interest in promoting virtual worlds as standards based environments.

Eben: On the theory that avatar based interfaces have some broader purpose?
David: Right. Something akin to Second Life or variations of it in five or ten years is going to be deeply disruptive. Exactly which piece of it, I’m not making predictions actually, or exactly how it becomes disruptive.

I think it turns into the flavor of things like right now you go into Amazon, you go to book reviews. And there are 50 or 60 people who very carefully putting their opinions down and there are maybe ten other people who are curious about the author — who currently are thinking about buying their book. But you can’t see them on the web at all. But they’re there side by side pulling the pages reading the reviews commenting on them. But you have no chance o