Adam Greenfield’s new book, The City Is Here For You To Use, is coming soon (photo above by Pepe Makkonen is from Adam Greenfield’s Flickr stream). Adam told me:

“I’m aiming at a free v1.0 PDF release on 05 June 2009, with the book shipping as quickly thereafter as humanly possible. There will be a version zero or public alpha in about six weeks.”

I am not good at waiting for books I really want to read to arrive. But, on the upside, it brings out my already pretty highly developed investigative instinct. So when Adam very generously agreed to do an interview, impatience turned into delight in tasting what is to come. And Adam is encouraging this kind of engaged anticipation. He writes (see post) that The City Is Here For You To Use, is shaping up:

“as something of an unbook avant la lettre. It’s why we’ve [Nurri Kim and Adam Greenfield] always insisted on keeping you in the loop as to the book’s fitful progress, it’s why I take every opportunity to test its ideas here, it’s why I make explicit the fact that your response to those ideas is crucial to their evolution and expression. And it’s why, even though the process is inevitably going to result in a static, physical document as one of its manifestations – and hopefully a very nice one indeed – we’ve committed to offering a free and freely-downloadable Creative Commons-licensed PDF of every numbered version of The City, from zero onward.

You buy the book if you want the object. The ideas are free.”

I found the opportunity to ask Adam questions about some of his subtle renderings of technology, culture, and being in urban environments challenging and very illuminating.  Although I definitely get the feeling I am asleep at the wheel on some of the critical areas he is thinking and writing on.

Knowing the depth and range of Adam’s thought in his seminal book, Everyware, and his blog, Speedbird, before I began the conversation I asked Adam to point me to some of his posts that reflect key ideas he is working on at the moment (Adam has recently posted The City Is Here: Table of contents).  Adam directed me to these three posts.

Antisocial networking

More songs about context and mood

Messenger, space, messenger body, messenger mesh

I may ramble and diverge, as is my nature, but these posts inspired many of the questions I ask.

Adam is currently head of design direction for service and user-interface design at Nokia and living in Helsinki, so I did not have the opportunity to do the interview in person. But I have glimpsed Adam’s world through his Flickr stream and some of these images have found their way into this post. But I suggest you browse Adam’s photography for yourself. I cannot do justice to the thousands of nuanced perceptions of cities, networks and publics you will find there. In the meantime, here are three glyphs of Adam Greenfield that I liked a lot.

“My favorite shoes,” “My favorite chair” and photo by Adam Greenfield, “Favoriteplace”

A Conversation (in gdoc) with Adam Greenfield

Tish Shute: Could you explain a little about the evolution of your thoughts on urban environments, ubicomp and interaction design? What shifts in your thinking have taken place over the last few years re the dawning of the age of ubiquitous computing? It is a couple of years now since Everyware, what aspects of the uptake of Everyware have most surprised, disappointed or inspired you? Which of the many thesis you discuss in Everyware have become the most crucial for The City Is Here For You To Use?

Adam Greenfield: You know, there’s a little passage in the liner notes to the second Throbbing Gristle album that I always think of when I’m asked questions along these lines. As part of their stance, they’d adopted the dry tone of a corporate annual report, and the preamble began by saying, “Since our last report to you, many things have changed. Indeed, it would be foolish to assume that it could be otherwise.” And I think that’s just exactly right: the world keeps moving, and the positions we’d staked ourselves to not so long ago may no longer be correct, or even relevant, to the one we find ourselves inhabiting now.

So, first, I think it’s important to cop to all the places in Everyware where I just outright got things wrong. There’s a passage in Thesis 50, for example, where I unaccountably mock the idea that “the mobile phone…will do splendidly as a mediating artifact for the delivery of [ubiquitous] services.” OK, this was admittedly written in a pre-iPhone world – and was correct for that world – but you can really see my parochialism showing here. It took the iPhone to make the proposition as blazingly self-evident to me in North America as it had been for quite some time to folks in Europe and Asia.

Having said that, though, I think I’m justified in taking a little pride in what the book got right. The broader trends the book set out to discuss – the colonization of everyday life by information processing – well, take a good look around you. And so one of the points of departure for the new book is taking everything posited in Everyware as a given: the urban environment, and most everything in it as well, has been provisioned with the kind of abilities you mention. So what now?

How do you go about designing informatic systems so they don’t undermine the wonderful things about cities? How do you design cities so they can incorporate networked informatics to greatest advantage? How, especially, do you accomplish these things when the disciplinary communities involved barely speak the same language? And how do you keep everyone’s eyes on the prize, which is the ordinary human being asked to make sense of these new propositions? These are the questions The City Is Here For You To Use sets out to address.

Adam talking about the “Le Long Ici” in Paris (also see Adam’s post, “The long here and the big now”)

TS: You mention that the hardest parts of  producing The City Is Here For You To Use wasn’t “keeping on top of all the emergent manifestations of urban informatics, or even developing a satisfying spinal argument about their significance” but getting the voice right.  It seems that now is the perfect time for a book that would really speak to a wide audience.  But also it seems that the city that is here for you to use is manifesting quite differently in different parts of the world?  You seem to be somewhat of a nomad, Japan to NYC to Helsinki.  Can putting together different views of urban informatics give us more depth perception on the emergence of ubiquitous computing?

AG: There’s no question in my mind that the long-term experience of everyday life in Tokyo, New York, and now Helsinki has been an invaluable asset to me, as I imagine it would be to anybody interested in thinking or writing about the networked city. It’s given me a certain amount of parallax, you know? And that, in turn, throws a really interesting light onto how the selfsame technology can appear in substantially different guises in different social contexts.

But explaining those things – those complicated, delicate negotiations – getting them right, doing them justice, doing so in a way that doesn’t dumb anything down, and still remaining accessible? It’s a challenge, let me tell you. You want to remain approachable and humane, but you also want to explain things like different jurisprudential takes on property, or how advocates of RESTful architectures think that REST is the reason why Internet adoption spread as rapidly as it did. If you want to enjoy even one chance in a hundred of getting your message across, you’ve got to start with an understanding that those subjects are MEGO territory for most people – whether they hail from Shibuya, Shoreditch or San Pedro.

Everyware icons: Information processing dissolving into behavior (Icons inspired by Timo Arnall; design by Adam Greenfield and Nurri Kim).  [Adam notes on his Flickr page that he tweaked these icons as section headers for Everyware]

TS: Could you explain more about what you term “onto” and “ontome” and how this differs from spimes and spime wrangling?

AG: You know, I never did get to develop that idea as much as I would have liked. In my mind, at least, “ontome” referred to the totality – the global environment of addressable, queryable, scriptable objects. (An “onto,” then, would be any given such object.) I guess I was looking for words that would do two things: allow us to distinguish between the instantiation and the class, and leave us with a better word than “spime.”

TS: When you say better word than spime this is this because….

AG: Euphony, primarily. : . )

TS: When I first used the Android app,  Wikitude, on Broadway, NYC – a street I have traveled thousands and thousands of times, and it offered up new information about itself, it was definitely an “OMG this is big!” moment for me. Like the first time I clicked on a screen and Amazon sent out a book in the early nineties (something so ordinary now it seems impossible that it was exciting but I remember it was to me!). But if I understand your post here correctly, isn’t Android with compass the first easy-to-use context-aware mediator for wrangling onto, ontome and spimes?

AG: Wikitude sure looks pretty impressive, and maybe even useful. But I would never, ever call it “context-aware.”

To my mind, at least two more things would need to happen before we could comfortably think of it a “context-aware spime wrangler.” First, the buildings and other public objects around you would actually have to be spimy – they’d have to report something of their past and current state to the network. And then, some application running on your phone would somehow have to cross-reference that state information with some fact about your current state of being, and deliver you relevant information.

So, let’s take your Wikitude example. You’re walking down Broadway and you pass an unfamiliar building, and for whatever reason you want to know more about it. Your phone pings the building’s dynamic self-description, and it replies to the effect that Andy Warhol had his Factory there between 1973 and 1984. If Wikitude chooses to share this particular piece of information with you, and not some other potentially germane factoid from the building’s history, on the strength of the fact that “The Velvet Underground and Nico” was in your last.fm playlist? That would constitute some small measure of context-awareness.

But you see how hard we had to try just to come up with an example, how forced it is, how so-what. And I have to say that – short of some infinitely supple system that really could model your innermost desires ahead of real time, and present appropriate responses to them – most so-called “context-aware” applications and services are like this. They’re either trivial, or wildly overambitious.

Maybe we don’t need for things to be context-aware for them to be useful, anyway. Certainly a great many objects in the world are starting to report their own status, and many more will do so in the fullness of time. And for the most part, all you’ll need to avail yourself of them is a Web browser running on a device that knows where it is in the world. An iPhone or an Android device will work splendidly – I called the iPhone “the first real everyware device” the day it came out and I was able to play with it for the first time – and in that way, the answer to your question is “yes.” Not to be longwinded or anything. ; . )

This Object has imperceptible properties. [Adam notes on his Flickr page: “This is a custom RFID-enabled transit pass that Timo Arnall had made up for me here in Seoul. I’ve (clumsily) tagged it with the icon that Nurri and I developed to represent just such emergent situations as this in the everyware milieu – that there’s no way for anyone to understand that this object has puissance beyond the obvious simply by examining it.”]

TS: It seems that  we are just at the beginning of understanding how to create networks of spimes (e.g. Pachube). Gavin Starks of AMEE (”the world’s energy meter”) once suggested to me that AMEE could be described as a facilitator of networked spimes (everything will have an energy identity). I think you may be familiar with AMEE because you keynoted next to Gavin at Xtech 2007.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts on AMEE?

When you discussed onto and ontome in this post, you noted:

“The greater part of the places and things we find in the world will be provided with the ability to speak and account for themselves. That they’ll constitute a coherent environment, an ontome of self-describing networked objects, and that we’ll find having some means of handling the information flowing off of them very useful indeed.”

Is the idea of “energy identity” that AMEE proposes an ontome? 

AG: See below for a précis of my feelings regarding environmental/sustainability initiatives, AMEE included. Uh…is AMEE an ontome? No. There’s just one ontome, and it’s coextensive with what folks now call the Internet of Things. It sounds like individual AMEE sensors would be “ontos.”

But I think the difficulty we’re having is a pretty good indicator that the terminology is more trouble than it’s worth. Sometimes a coinage, as satisfying as it may be lexically, just doesn’t work for people. These days I’m trying to get out of the neologism trade.

TS: I know when Usman Haque talks about Pachube he talks about spimes and spime wrangling. I asked Usman for his thoughts on spimes and onto/ontome and he gave me some comments.

Usman Haque: I think I had somehow missed the conversation about onto and ontome but backtracked through blog posts to piece it together (unfortunately some posts at v-2 and Studies & Observations no longer exist!). There are a couple of things that have made me uncomfortable about the word ’spime’: (a) the fact that it might be too easy to confuse with an “object”. A ’spime’ should also encompass relationships between things, and not just the “thingness” itself. (b) the sound of it (as Adam noted above). But then I am reminded of that horrible gooey interface used to plug into people in eXistenZ – it somehow seems appropriate that it should be a horrible gooey word, and not something that can disappear politely… So I like onto/ontome because it speaks to my first concern about ’spime’; but my second concern, it turns out, is not the problem I thought it was, and so onto/ontome might be… ahem… too euphonic! On the question of this thing people are calling the “Internet of Things”, I’ve tried in lectures to reframe it as the “Ecosystem of Environments”. Further, Vlad Trifa makes a delicious point that just as ‘web’ is different from ‘internet’, so too should we consider the “Web of Things” rather than the “Internet of Things”, something I agree with.

TS: It seems like this point about the difference between “the web of things” and the “internet of things” is pretty important?

AG: The parallel distinction between Web and Internet sure is! They’re two completely different things, right? And http is far from the only protocol that runs over the Internet. Now, as to what Vlad means by extending this particular distinction to the domain of networked objects, I don’t yet know, I haven’t had time to check it out. But sure, in principle I’d totally be willing to go along with the idea that there’s a meaningful distinction between two environments named that way.

No information is collected here; network dead zone

TS: I was just going over Greenfield’s principles of ubiquitous computing.  I am not sure that I see any current manifestations of ubicomp that hold to these priniciples yet?

AG: Oh, sure there are. Look at the work Tom Coates has done on Yahoo!’s Fire Eagle; look at Dopplr. And look at some of the steps other, less compassionate developers (e.g. Facebook) have been forced to take by their own users.

Look, those principles are just codifications of common sense and basic neighborly virtues, expressed in language appropriate to the domain of application. The best, smartest and most ethical developers have never needed guidelines to do the right thing. But especially inside companies and other complex organizations, people who want to implement compassion in their design of a technical system may occasionally find it useful to have some color of authority to invoke in their struggles. That’s all those five principles are there for, and I’m well satisfied that people have been able to use them that way.

Boffi’s take on the smart home- photo by Adam Greenfield

TS: In your post, More Songs About Context And Mood, you suggest a direction for interaction design that you point out is not far from Yvonne Rogers’ ideas in “Moving on from Weiser” about a switch in goal of ubicomp from Weiser’s vision of calm living (”computers appearing when needed and disappearing when not”) to engaged living – ubicomp technologies not designed to to do things for people but to help people engage more actively in things that they do (ensembles, ecologies of resources).

You also suggest interaction designers should be:

“parsimonious about the interaction design challenges our organizations do take on, with an eye toward reducing the complications of context (and the attendant opportunities for default, misunderstanding, misfire, time-wasting, and humiliation) to some manageable minimum.”

As you have pointed out, “we don’t do “smart” very well yet.” But paradoxically smart grids, smart homes, smart products etc. etc. are ubiquitously coming to market right now.

Yvonne Rogers suggests interaction designers should be:

moving from a mindset that wants to make the environment smart and proactive to one that enables people, themselves, to be smarter and proactive in their everyday and working practices

What areas might interaction designers most productively direct their attention towards?

AG: You note that things called “smart homes” and “smart products” are coming onto the market, and that sure would seem to be the case. But as to whether or not these things are genuinely smart, we don’t have anything more to go on than the marketing department’s word. I think you can already see that I tend to take language very seriously, and I really don’t uses like the “smart” here, or the “aware” in “context-aware.” They overpromise, they cannot help to set us up for failure and disappointment.

You know what I’d really like to see interaction design wrestle with? I would love to see a rigorous, no-holds-barred examination of the complexities of the self and its performance in everyday life, and how these condition our use of public space (and personal media in public space). I would love to see the development of ostensibly “social” platforms informed by some kind of reckoning with issues like vulnerability, dishonesty, the fact of power dynamics. In other words, before we deign to go about “helping” people, wouldn’t it be lovely if we understood what they perceived themselves as needing help with, and why?

I’d also pay good money to see talented interaction designers turn their efforts toward tools for the support of deliberative democracy, for the navigation of complex multivariate decision spaces, and for conflict resolution.

Locative is a mood – photo by Adam Greenfield

TS: I know you said this would take too long to explain but I couldn’t help noticing that you seem to be, perhaps, skeptical about the role of everyware can play in sustainable living and yet, it seems at the moment, in the hacker and business communities at least, the role of everyware in reducing carbon footprint/energy management etc, is the great green hope?

Will everyware enable or hinder fundamental changes at the level of culture and identity necessary to support the urgent global need – “to consume less and redefine prosperity?”

AG: I’m not skeptical about the potential of ubiquitous systems to meter energy use, and maybe even incentivize some reduction in that use – not at all. I’m simply not convinced that anything we do will make any difference.

Look, I think we really, seriously screwed the pooch on this. We have fouled the nest so thoroughly and in so many ways that I would be absolutely shocked if humanity comes out the other end of this century with any level of organization above that of clans and villages. It’s not just carbon emissions and global warming, it’s depleted soil fertility, it’s synthetic estrogens bioaccumulating in the aquatic food chain, it’s our inability to stop using antibiotics in a way that gives rise to multi-drug-resistance in microbes.

Any one of these threats in isolation would pose a challenge to our ability to collectively identify and respond to it, as it’s clear anthropogenic global warming already does. Put all of these things together, assess the total threat they pose in the light of our societies’ willingness and/or capacity to reckon with them, and I think any moderately knowledgeable and intellectually honest person has to conclude that it’s more or less “game over, man” – that sometime in the next sixty years or so a convergence of Extremely Bad Circumstances is going to put an effective end to our ability to conduct highly ordered and highly energy-intensive civilization on this planet, for something on the order of thousands of years to come.

So (sorry again, Bruce) I just don’t buy the idea that we’re going to consume our way to Ecotopia. Nor is any symbolic act of abjection on my part going to postpone the inevitable by so much as a second, nor would such a sacrifice do anything meaningful to improve anybody else’s outcomes. I’d rather live comfortably – hopefully not obscenely so – in the years we have remaining to us, use my skills as they are most valuable to people, and cherish each moment for what it uniquely offers.

Maybe some people would find that prospect morbid, or nihilistic, but I find it kind of inspiring. It becomes even more crucial that we not waste the little time we do have on broken systems, broken ways of doing things. The primary question for the designers of urban informatics under such circumstances is to design systems that underwrite autonomy, that allow people to make the best and wisest and most resonant use of whatever time they have left on the planet. And who knows? That effort may bear fruit in ways we have no way of anticipating at the moment. As it says in the Qu’ran, gorgeously: “At the end of the world, plant a tree.”

Biowall! - photo by Adam Greenfield

TS: In your post “Antisocial Networking,” you make some telling comments on the sorry state of social networking systems.

But you do also state:

Which of your concerns is social networking more central to than you might wish and why?

AG: Well, you know I’m interested in social interaction, interpersonal behavior, and in how these things play out in networked environments. There’s virtually no way for me to avoid dealing with Facebook, as wretched as I think it is.

Facebook is pretty hegemonic, in that its reach and influence extend further than the universe of people who use it. I bump up against it constantly, in a few different ways. People send me links I can’t access, because I’m not on Facebook. People spend time and energy trying to convince me that I’m really missing out, because I’m not on Facebook. The last few months, there’s even been a few people who feel justified in expressing some kind of exasperation, that they’re really pissed off…because they can’t find me on Facebook. It’s become the sovereign interface to any kind of life in public, and as a result a great many people don’t question its modes, tropes and metaphors.

So when it comes time to build some kind of situated interpersonal mediation framework, some kind of intervention in the fabric of the city, those are the tropes they reach for: accounts, profiles, friend counts, friendings and unfriendings, nudges and pokes. And as a member of a team tasked with the design of such systems, as a potential user of them, and certainly as someone exposed to the social rhetoric flowing downstream from their use, you bet these tropes become central to my concerns.

But what if we admitted that Facebook and the whole paradigm it’s built on are broken? What would things look like if we started from a more sensitive understanding of the interaction between self and others? Say, the understanding Erving Goffman was offering us as far back as the late 1950s? Then you’d understand the need for provisions like a “backstage,” a place to swap out one mask for another, the ability to present oneself differently to different communities and networks. That’s what I’m interested in exploring.

TS: Social networking systems in their current form are crude and express a very narrow bandwidth of human relationship. But already people are connecting everyware’s networked social acts to existing social networking systems. At the ITP winter show there was kickbee – networked fetal communication (and tweetmobile which used twitter as an acctuator for an ambient display) and green everyware (energy monitoring) is showing up in a number forms on existing social networks. But rather than just hooking up everyware to these existing flawed social network systems, does everyware require a reimagining of networked social interactions and social networking systems?

AG: That’s a great question, and I think the answer is clearly “yes.” It’s one thing to confine the consequences of that brokenness to the Web, and entirely another to let it bleed out into the world.

Does that mean any such reimagining is going to happen, that people will somehow refrain from plugging real-world outputs into these terribly flawed frameworks? Not a chance in hell. It’s too late to put a fence on that particular cliff. But maybe there’s still time to park an ambulance in the valley below.

“A graphic representation of a portion of the Earth’s surface, as seen from above” – photo by Adam Greenfield

TS: I saw you tweet that you met Usman Haque from Pachube recently. What do you find most interesting about Pachube and EEML? Will you design a project for Pachube to push the conversation further?  Did Usman ask you to take a role in the future of Pachube. How does Pachube enable the vision of The City Is Here For You To Use? I could go on for ever with questions,  so please do tell!

AG: OK, I should probably reiterate that my fundamental interest is in people, and in what they choose to make and do with technology, not the technology itself. For the last few years, I’ve particularly been trying to understand how people interact with each other and with the urban environments around them when those environments have been provisioned with the ability to gather, process and take action on data. And this is how I come about my interest in what Usman is up to with Pachube, because those “gather,” “process” and “take action upon” functions are generally accomplished by different systems, designed by different groups of people, at different times and to different ends. What Pachube aims to do is make the difficult and not-particularly-glamorous work of connecting these pieces a whole lot easier.

Think of it as a step toward enabling the ontome, this so-called Internet of Things we’ve been talking about, the same way basic protocols like HTTP and HTML enabled the wildfire spread of the Internet we’re familiar with. What Pachube offers is a way – a relatively straightforward and self-explanatory way – to plug any given compatible input into a similarly compatible output. So if you’ve got an air-quality sensor or a soil-pH sensor or a personal biometric monitor, you can plug it into Pachube, and someone else can grab the data those things generate and use it to drive a visualization, or the state of a physical system like a window, or whatever else they can imagine. It’s as close as anyone’s yet come to providing a plug-and-play backbone for the creation of responsive environments.

And I think it’s absolutely brilliant that it’s designed to work with Arduino and Processing, two lightweight, open-source frameworks that hobbyists and researchers (and even one or two more serious developers) around the world are already using to build things. (Arduino’s a kit of parts for doing basic physical computing – using data to drive lights, motors, and other actuators that have effect out here in the world – while Processing is a very accessible language to do dynamic and interactive graphics for screen-based media). Given both its openness and modularity, and its willingness to build on top of the very popular frameworks that already exist, I’m very excited to see what people make of and with Pachube.

I have to be honest and admit that personally, I couldn’t really care less about the environmental angle, for reasons that I went into at embarrassing length above. What I’m engaged by in Usman’s work is the idea that Pachube is helping to create an open platform for people to share data more readily. And while, no, he hasn’t explicitly asked me to take any particular stake in things, I’m always happy to lend a hand in whatever way would be most useful. I think it’s a project worth supporting.

As to how Pachube enables some of the ideas in The City Is Here, the answer has to do with the book’s call for every “public object” – every lamppost, bus shelter, commercial façade, and so forth – to support an open API. Something’s got to string all those objects together, present them to people as resources to be taken up and used, and Usman’s offered us a critical first step in that direction.

TS: Usman suggested, it might be interesting to ask you about “the tension between ‘could’ and ’should.’

Usman Haque: There are a whole bunch of things that we “can” do, technologically speaking; how do we decide what we ’should’ do, as we find ourselves in an age where we can build almost anything we can imagine…? particularly with reference to technology/privacy/security triumvirate. e.g., leaving aside that the majority of the world is *not* in the technology ‘paradise’ that we’re in, here in the west, only a small fraction of people are currently producing the technology that the rest of us use; one aim is to get people more engaged in the productive process, but, in a sense that will also mean the whole wide ecosystem of technology will be even bigger, both “good” stuff and “bad” (that qualification firmly placed on how it’s used), as opposed to now when we can focus on quite specific things that government & industry are doing and saying “that shouldn’t be happening….”. part of this relates to something adam said on his blog  in the comments (see here).” 

AG: I think the first part of answering that question has to involve figuring out who “we” are in any given situation. A “we” composed of seven Helsinki-based Linux developers would most likely arrive at very different answers than the United States Air Force Materiel Command or Samsung’s board of directors, right? So clearly, a first challenge is getting to some kind of pragmatically useful alignment between those local and occasionally even painfully parochial perspectives with what’s best for the Big We. And this challenge is only going to become more vexing as the ability to imagine, design, build and deploy informatic componentry gets more and more widely distributed. In this respect the spread of simple, modular, low-barrier-to-entry tools only makes things worse!

The primary issue that I can see here is that the inherent clock speed of technical development is so very much faster than that of any meaningful deliberative process “we” might bring to bear on it. A concomitant concern is that the sources of technical innovation and production are now so widely distributed that you can be reasonably certain that somebody, somewhere will implement any given technically feasible idea, no matter how offensive, poorly thought-out, socially disruptive or frankly stupid. A public toilet you have to SMS to unlock and use? A “Friend Finder” visualization with high locational precision and no privacy features whatsoever? A first-person rape-simulation “game”? A clunky brown iPod knockoff? Somebody thought each one of these things was worth the time, expense and effort to actually go about making it. They exist.

But I’m pretty old-fashioned in some ways, in that I think the good old Habermasian idea of the public sphere still has some life left in it. And I think it should be self-evident by now that there’s no necessary contradiction between even the newest (cough) “social media” and the formation of such a sphere. So you’ve provided a forum, and in it I get to express my belief that these things are stupid and pointless and probably should not have been built. And if somebody gets all het up about that, they can argue right back at me in comments. And eventually one or another of these positions begins to tell, in terms of regulation, legislation, and other tools of the juridical order, in terms of protest campaigns or organized boycotts or litigation…in terms of nonexistent sales!

There’s nothing new in any of this, of course, though indubitably some of the dynamics are amplified or accelerated by e-mail, Twitter and YouTube. My main contention is that informatic technology now has such deeply pervasive implications, and for things like presentation of self that previous waves of technical development barely touched, that “we” as societies need to be very much more conscious of the consequences before committing to any one course of action.

I should also point out that I do not, at all, believe that we’re “in an age where we can build almost anything we can imagine,” though I might buy “…two or three of almost anything we can imagine.” On the contrary, as I implied above, I think the global constraints on our ability to operate freely are already becoming quite evident, and will continue to grow teeth over the next few decades.

TS: Also Usman  added …

Usman Haque: ..where Adam said: in this regard, I very much *do* have a problem with “just showing up.” — something I feel that as well. but i always wonder: What happens when one appears to be mandating participation…?

AG: Look, I happen to have a strong – maybe some would say obnoxious or hyperactive or overdeveloped – sense of personal responsibility and accountability. I think one is basically committed to some measure of responsibility for the commonweal simply by surviving to the age of majority. The choice of how, particularly, to discharge that responsibility can only be yours and yours alone, but it can’t be ducked or gotten around without severe and entirely predictable consequences. So to Usman I’d respectfully suggest that I’m not the one mandating participation. Life is.

TS: It seems we have grown accustomed to striking a Faustian bargain on the internet today -  in order to share and distribute parts of our identity we are expected to give up key information to one site to store and disperse our data. I took part in a discussion with David Levine, IBM and Eben Moglen on privacy last year.  And Eben Moglen gave a succinct description of the elements of privacy and how they have been treated in the American Constitution that is, I think, relevant to unpacking some of the challenges of ubiquitious computing. Here are some extracts from that conversation where, Eben notes:

there are three elements that are mixed up in privacy and we tend not to notice which one we are talking about at any given moment.

There is secrecy – that is the data should not be readable by or understandable by anybody except me or people I designate. There is anonymity which is the data can be seen by anybody but about whom it is should be knowable only by me or people that I designate. And there is autonomy which isn’t about either secrecy or anonymity but which is about my right to live under circumstances which reinforce my sense that I am in control of my own fate. And this form of privacy is actually the one we talk about in the constitutional structure when we talk about the right to get an abortion or use birth control.

“Anonymity” is a condition that is a deep structuring characteristic of the internet as you, Lessig and others have commented on.  And frequently we are promised (questionably) “secrecy” or anonymity as privacy protection by services handling our data on the internet.  But Eben (one of the US’s great constitutional lawyers) points out that “autonomy” is a key form of privacy in the  US constitutional structure that is often compromised in situations where our digital selves may constrain our non-digital selves.

The real issue here is about the forcing of choices on us…digital aspects of identity can quickly acquire an inflexibilty that constrains our non-digital selves.

I see again and again the ways in which people now find themselves unable to make certain life choices easily because there digital self has acquired an inflexibility that constrains their non-digital self.

As we go beyond the end to end internet and we lose the structuring characteristic that has privileged anonymity: How do you see these three elements of privacy, anonymity, secrecy and most importantly autonomy, being worked out in a networked world beyond the end to end internet?

Are there any new structuring characteristics that could privilege autonomy? (which Eben indicates is linked to having a flexible identity).

AG: If we accept for the moment a definition of autonomy as a feeling of being master of one’s own fate, then absolutely yes. One thing I talk about a good deal is using ambient situational awareness to lower decision costs – that is, to lower the information costs associated with arriving at a choice presented to you, and at the same time mitigate the opportunity costs of having committed yourself to a course of action. When given some kind of real-time overview of all of the options available to you in a given time, place and context – and especially if that comes wrapped up in some kind of visualization that makes anomaly detection and edge-case analysis instantaneous gestalts, to be grasped in a single glance – your personal autonomy is tremendously enhanced. Tremendously enhanced.

But as to how this local autonomy could be deployed in Moglen’s more general terms, I don’t know, and I’m not sure anyone does. Because he’s absolutely right: Bernard Stiegler reminds us that the network constitutes a global mnemotechnics, a persistent memory store for planet Earth, and yet we’ve structured our systems of jurisprudence and our life practices and even our psyches around the idea that information about us eventually expires and leaves the world. Its failure to do so in the context of Facebook and Flickr and Twitter is clearly one of the ways in which the elaboration of our digital selves constrains our real-world behavior. Let just one picture of you grabbing a cardboard cutout’s breast or taking a bong hit leak onto the network, and see how the career options available to you shift in response.

This is what’s behind Anne Galloway’s calls for a “forgetting machine.” An everyware that did that – that massively spoofed our traces in the world, that threw up enormous clouds of winnow and chaff to give us plausible deniability about our whereabouts and so on – might give us a fighting chance.

TS: The concept of autonomy is signaled clearly in the title you have chosen for your next book, The City Is Here For You To Use, and is a theme of all your writing!  While you talk about many of the possible constraints to presentation of self and potential threats to a flexible identity that ubicomp poses, your next book signals optimism. What are your key grounds for optimism?

AG: It’s not optimism so much as hope. Whether it’s well-founded or not is not for me to decide. I guess I just trust people to make reasonably good choices, when they’re both aware of the stakes and have been presented with sound, accurate decision-support material.

Putting a fine point on it: I believe that most people don’t actually want to be dicks. We may have differing conceptions of the good, our choices may impinge on one another’s autonomy. But I think most of us, if confronted with the humanity of the Other and offered the ability to do so, would want to find some arrangement that lets everyone find some satisfaction in the world. And in its ability to assist us in signalling our needs and desires, in its potential to mediate the mutual fulfillment of same, in its promise to reduce the fear people face when confronted with the immediate necessity to make a decision on radically imperfect information, a properly-designed networked informatics could underwrite the most transformative expansions of people’s ability to determine the circumstances of their own lives.

Now that’s epochal. If that isn’t cause for hope, then I don’t know what is.

Newson Obamanook – photo by Adam Greenfield, “The fact that it was one of the happiest days of my adult life may have colored my appreciation of this space. A bit, anyway.”

TS: In your writing you seem to imply that we will not find answers to our new relationship with Everyware by transposing the internet onto things for convenience’s sake but rather like the bike messengers -  we must explore the rich and complex terrain of the city that is ours to use in a give an take relationship.  Through our own exertions we find- how “anything reasonably smooth and approximately horizontal can become a thoroughfare,”  rather than be served up the city as something for us to consume.

You seem to be suggesting our city becomes ours to use because of the way we use it in our personal journeys -like “the messenger subconsciously maps the contours of an economic geography – known sources and sinks of courier assignments, or “tags” – and a threat landscape, this latter comprised of blind corners, cable-car and metro tracks, and traffic lanes.

But bike messengers are the lone ranger of our big cities. Others surf the city in tribes that ride the roiling tides of highly networked information together. How are the “natural” gestures of these tribes, e.g. day traders, who yoked to the tracings of a hive mind, part of the city that is here for us to use?  I thought the comment @ginsudo made shortly after joining Twitter and setting up TweetDeck particularly poignant:

“watching Tweetdeck is like watching stock market of your personality ebb and flow. needs analytics to maximize inherent self-involvement.”

But, for many of us our work has more in common with the day trader than the bike messenger, and are we pretty hooked on the ever growing possibilities for “contact” and identity sharing/construction, social media has produced  (with all the”Here Comes Everybody,” C. Shirky, benefits and risks).  Early theorizing of a “calm,” invisible” ubicomp seems out of synch with the excitable, active, engaged, contact driven, “users” that are watching stock market of their personality (or personal brand) ebb and flow.

How will these excitable/exciting processes of contact and identity sharing that have captured of a pretty large segment of popular imagination (not confined to the West -services like Gupshup does much of the same curating, linking and distributing of identity that web based social media does in SMS) be/ or not be part of The City Is Here For You To Use?

AG: Let’s remember that ubicomp itself, as a discipline, has largely moved on from the Weiserian discourse of “calm technology”; Yvonne Rogers, for example, now speaks of “proactive systems for proactive people.” You can look at this as a necessary accommodation with the reality principle, which it is, or as kind of a shame – which it also happens to be, at least in my opinion. Either way, though, I don’t think anybody can credibly argue any longer that just because informatic systems pervade our lives, designers will be compelled to craft encalming interfaces to them. That notion of Mark Weiser’s was never particularly convincing, and as far as I’m concerned it’s been thoroughly refuted by the unfolding actuality of post-PC informatics.

All the available evidence, on the contrary, supports the idea that we will have to actively fight for moments of calm and reflection, as individuals and as collectivities. And not only that, as it happens, but for spaces in which we’re able to engage with the Other on neutral turf, as it were, since the logic of “social media” seems to be producing Big Sort-like effects and echo chambers. We already “maximize inherent self-involvement,” analytics or no, and the result is that the tools allowing us to become involved with anything but the self, or selves that strongly resemble it, are atrophying.

So when people complain about K-Mart and Starbucks and American Eagle Outfitters coming to Manhattan, and how it means the suburbanization of the city, I have to laugh. Because the real suburbanization is the smoothening-out of our social interaction until it only encompasses the congenial. A gated community where everyone looks and acts the same? That’s the suburbs, wherever and however it instantiates, and I don’t care how precious and edgy your tastes may be. Richard Sennett argued that what makes urbanity is precisely the quality of necessary, daily, cheek-by-jowl confrontation with a panoply of the different, and as far as I can tell he’s spot on.

We have to devise platforms that accommodate and yet buffer that confrontation. We have to create the safe(r) spaces that allow us to negotiate that difference. The alternative to doing so is creating a world of ten million autistic, utterly atomic and mutually incomprehensible tribelets, each reinforced in the illusion of its own impeccable correctness: duller than dull, except at the flashpoints between. And those become murderous. Nope. Unacceptable outcome.

Uncanny Valleys - Adam comments,”Our apartment in NYC as rendered in Google Earth, with realtime traffic, weather, daylight and shadow as well as geodetic, street grid and service overlays. Camera view is South; that’s First Avenue just left of center-screen.”

TS: Smart phone’s are now drawing everyware data into the system and the net is reaching into who YOU are, WHERE you are, WHAT you are doing, WHAT is around you, etc..

Nathan Freitas says Android: “seems to be the platform most likely to socialize the idea that sensor data could be a piece of every application.” (Android APIs for a wide range of sensor data.)

What in your view will be the most likely platform, Android or what?, to socialize the idea that sensor data could be a piece of every application?

AG: An open platform. A platform with lots of hooks and ways to plug things into it, a strong developer community, a shallow learning curve and/or an easy-to-use, high-level development environment.

I don’t have a dog in this race, mind you. I couldn’t care less who gets there first.

TS: New location based services, e.g., Xtify and ViaPlace, are offering us ways to share location data across lots of different applications (eg Xtify and a dating application like MeetMoi ). In return for services that allow us to share information, we must give up key information up to one site to store and disperse (although there are many differences in approach to our data, from the Twitter stance “show but don’t own” as opposed to Facebook’s stance – “in order to show we must have rights to it”). But the basic model of Twitter – to provide a white noise platform for people to build service on top off seems to be being transposed to location based services. Obvious questions arise like what happens to our data in a start up like MeetMoi if they go belly up?  Apparently in the dot.com bust data was the first thing to go on the auction block in bankrupcy cases.

Also, I suppose it is hardly surprising (if disappointing to me) that some of the early location based services are trying to get mindshare by picking up on the glue celebrities give to mass culture. At the last New York Tech Meetup, OMGICU demoed a rather terrifying new pre-launch location based “participatory celebrity gossip application” which seems to combine all the worst features of social media with celebrity stalking, plus a narrative to change the notion of celebrity itself by “turning D listers into A listers.”

Hopefully location based applications  will not get stuck on “stalker, stalker, stalker” apps like OMGICU .

David Oliver, Oliver Coady gave me a good question: “How does timeliness and location-independence change our ideas of social media?

And how can we design new architectures that can reinforce the sense that I am in control of my own fate?

AG: But we’ve already come so far in terms of turning D-listers into A-listers! On a daily basis, I’m exposed to almost as many cues insisting I attend to nonentities and dullards like Robert Scoble as those insisting I attend to nonentities like Madonna or Thomas Friedman. It’s gotten ridiculous.

Now, how does timeliness and location change our ideas of social media? It makes them dangerous!

Look, even a proud Z-lister like myself – I’m a public person only in the most debased and degraded meaning of that word – I’ve had experiences that shook me up, like having someone approach me while I was quietly hanging out in the back of St. Mark’s Books, and wanting to strike up a conversation based on some talk they’d seen me give a year or so previously. Now part of learning to deal with this kind of thing is shrugging it off, being grateful and flattered that someone thinks you’re interesting enough to single out for that kind of attention, or chalking this up to Sennett’s observation about the constitution of urbanity. Or doing all three at once.

But let’s remember that at the end of the day, a “social network” is nothing but a group of arbitrarily distributed human beings joined by a communications channel, and those people have eyes and ears. The degree to which they recognize some shared interest gives them significance filters. If social capital accrues to those in the network who are able to claim some connection with a “celebrity,” no matter how fleeting, then such connections are going to be mobilized, made explicit. And now say the network has been provided with the tools allowing it to plot the appearances of those putative celebrities in space and time, and what do you get? You get a circumstance in which it is very, very difficult to maintain any membrane between the private self and the world, for anyone who’s even remotely a public figure, whether they particularly want to be a public figure or not. You get network effects that amplify those locational traces, and further undermine any possibility of anonymity, even anonymity-by-suspension-of-interrogative-awareness (which is a clumsy way of referring to that blasé matter-of-factness around famous people that most big-city folks eventually develop).

Am I letting myself off the hook? Not in the slightest. I passed Terence Stamp on the street not so long ago, and you bet I Twittered it. My only excuse was that I Twittered it to a closed loop of no more than a few dozen people. But then, who knows what those few dozen people will turn around and do with that fact, on the open networks to which they in turn belong? And that, too, is my responsibility.

I’m not sure there’s anything to be done about any of this but cultivate our own urbanity, learn to say “so what” when we happen to find ourselves next to Philip Seymour Hoffman in the line at Whole Foods.

TS: Zittrain in The Future of the Internet: And How To Stop It, foregrounds “generativity” and a generative devices (as opposed to appliances) as the most fortuitous starting point for: “tools to bring about social systems to match the power of the technical one.”

Are appliances a threat to the city that is here for you to use? How can generativity ensure The City Is Here For You To Use as Zittrain argues it has ensured, even if imperfectly, that the internet has been here for us to use?

AG: You know, I haven’t read the book, I’ve only heard him give the talk, so it’s certainly possible there’s a subtlety to the argument that I’m missing. But I’m not sure Jonathan isn’t simply wrong about this notion of generativity. Not that the concern is misplaced, but that he’s insufficiently trustful in human agency. Is a car “generative,” by his definition? Certainly not. And yet look at all the cultural production that goes on around “the car,” look at all the assemblages people make with cars, from Beach Boys songs to ghost riding the whip, from J.G. Ballard novels and Herbie the Love Bug to Tokyo Drift.

Or probably more to his point: look at the Japanese mobile-phone market – seemingly one of the most locked-down and unpropitious circumstances imaginable for the production of culture, in technical terms and Zittrain’s both. And yet fully 50% of the bestselling books in Japan last year were written on mobile phones. Not read, which would already be impressive enough (if “impressive” is indeed the word): written. What does that imply for his argument?

So, yes, I think there are grounds for concern in that we don’t allow technologies and frameworks to appear that unduly limit the scope of human creativity. Code is still law. But I also think people are quite amply able to reach into what would appear to be the least propitious technologies and tell their own stories with same.

TS: One aspect of Everyware that seems in need of some visionary yoga is the how we will relate to pixels anywhere.

In Urban Computing and its Discontents you mention how our technological trajectories often make it seem as if we seem to get fixated on particular scenes in movies, e.g., Minority Report. You point out that so many ambient informatics projects seem simply “to expand the reach of signage and advertising in dense urban spaces….as if we’ve become transfixed by the scene from Minority Report where heterosexual cop John Anderton is on the run from his colleagues.”

Ideas from the Minority Report continue to hold sway in designs as we saw in the recent MIT demo of SixthSense at TED.

But visions of augmented reality were pretty high profile in this years Super Bowl commercials this year (including a highly anthropomorphic imagining of ubicomp that was a kind of WoW mashup with a Pixar movie).

What recent movies/commercials have produced scenes mostly likely to be are new fixation fodder for ubicomp and why?

AG: I don’t think I’m qualified to answer that, actually. We don’t have a TV, so I don’t see much in the way of commercials, and most of the films I wind up seeing are the kind that play at Anthology Film Archives. What I can say is that science fiction is currently suffering in toto from an inability or disinclination to posit future scenarios that are any weirder or more visionary than those emerging from other sectors of the culture. And that would be fine, except sf has traditionally been the place where we wrestled with the imaginary.

We need that set of tools, badly. If for no other reason than something I glean from personal experience: essentially my entire professional career has simply been the leveraging of ideas and concepts I originally wrestled with in the encounter with William Gibson and Bruce Sterling when I was 16. Today’s visionary sf means tomorrow’s halfway-competent generalist.

Nurri Kim in the waiting zone – photo by Adam Greenfield

TS: My AR friend, Robert Rice, who is working on a markerless AR platform, notes that data visualization is one of the critical elements of AR in terms of “make or break.” Robert says, “even with the ultimate in ubiquitious data from everything, without good data vis it will all be useless”

Also something Cory Doctorow said to me last year has really stuck in my mind. When I asked him what happens when Cyberspace everts, he talked about a reverse surveillance society:

Cory: Well this is like Spook Country the new Gibson novel – What happens when cyber space everts – hmmm? I’m not sure I have anything very pithy to say on that EXCEPT………
Apart from all the traditional kind of overlay reality stuff, if there is one thing I am actually interested seeing from a virtual world migrating to the real world its instrumentation.
I think lot of things that are characteristic of very successful internet based business is that they are extremely finally instrumented so like Amazon knows in aggregate on a second by second basis how their site is being used by people and they can twiddle the dials in real time.

As users of the world we have very little access to that kind of instrumentation. We don’t even know how the tube is running. The tube knows how the tube is running and we kinda of don’t. I would be really interested in seeing that. You’ve seen Joi Ito’s WoW interface right. Have you seen it …

Joi Ito’s WoW interface seems a long way from the calm, invisible imaginings for ubicomp by early ubicomp visionaries?

AG: Well, he’s got a particular kind of neural wiring. And there’s not a thing that’s wrong with that, except that I’d never, ever want to assert that what’s appropriate for Joi Ito necessarily is or should be understood to be appropriate for anybody else. The point of calling for open systems and frameworks is to allow us maximum scope of diversity in the ways we choose to interface with the world’s richness and complexity.

TS: What new imaginings/possibilites do you see when pixels anywhere are linked to everyware?

AG: Product placement. Commercial insertions and injections, mostly.

Beyond that: one of the places where Mark Weiser logic breaks down is in thinking that the platforms we use now disappear from the world just because ubiquitous computing’s arrived. We’ve still got radio, for example – OK, now it’s satellite radio and streaming Internet feeds, but the interaction metaphor isn’t any different. By the same token, we’re still going to be using reasonably conventional-looking laptops and desktop keyboard/display combos for awhile yet. The form factor is pretty well optimized for the delivery of a certain class of services, it’s a convenient and well-assimilated interaction vocabulary, none of that’s going away just yet. And the same goes for billboards and “TV” screens.

But all of those things become entirely different propositions in everyware world: more open, more modular, ever more conceived of as network resources with particular input and output affordances. We already see some signs of this with Microsoft’s recent “Social Desktop” prototype – which, mind you, is a very bad idea as it currently stands, especially as implemented on something with the kind of security record that Windows enjoys – and we’ll be seeing many more.

If every display in the world has an IP address and a self-descriptor indicating what kind of protocols it’s capable of handling, then you begin to get into some really interesting and thorny territory. The first things to go away, off the top of my head, are screens for a certain class of mobile device – why power a screen off your battery when you can push the data to a nearby display that’s much bigger, much brighter, much more social? – and conventional projectors.

Then we get into some very interesting issues around large, public interactive displays – who “drives” the display, and so forth. But here again, we’ll have to fight to keep these things sane. It’s past time for a public debate around these issues, because they’re unquestionably going to condition the everyday experience of walking down the street in most of our cities. And that’s difficult to do when times are hard and people have more pressing concerns on their mind.

Citywarecrash – photo by Adam Greenfield, “An occupational hazard for urban screens.”

TS: I know in Everyware you mentioned that architects have play an important visionary role in imagining ubicomp and I know you work closely with your wife, artist Nurri Kim.  Robert Rice asked me the following question – which I will in turn ask you: “In terms of augmented reality do you think virtual worlds and virtual reality experts / leaders / are good pioneers for thought and guidance on AR? Or, should we look for new leaders, or where are new leaders emerging? Is the tech similar enough for the old crowd to be useful or is it different enough to be a disadvantage coming from the old models?.”

AG: I should make it clear that I have absolutely no interest in virtual worlds or virtual reality. The so-called virtual worlds I’ve experienced seem sad and really rather tatty – eversions of the most predictable adolescent fantasies of unlimited power, reinscriptions of all the usual politics – and completely lacking in just about everything that makes life resonant, meaningful and awe-inspiring. And anyway, to paraphrase J.G. Ballard, ordinary, everyday life is now far more vividly and fantastically weird than anything you’ll see in Second Life. I mean, Garry Kasparov was heckled by a radio-control dildocopter, Joe the Plumber’s off to Gaza as a war correspondent, a sea of dust-covered BMWs waits in the long-term parking lot at Dubai International for owners who are never, ever coming back.

Look to virtual worlds for insight into the hard work of negotiating the actual, with its physics, its entropy, its suffering, with all its constraints? Oh my goodness gracious, no.
And look to leaders? Never. Leaders are for followers, and who wants to be that? I don’t mean you can’t take inspiration and insight from the work of others – not at all – but use your own imagination, take some personal risk, do your own damn work.

Now, having said that. This opposition of virtual and physical worlds strikes me as increasingly a false one, as it does many people. The hard-and-fast distinction between “the real world” and virtual environments make less and less sense, as righteously satisfying as making it can sometimes seem. There may be attributes of this physical environment that are impossible to see or make use of without access to the networked overlay, and those attributes may in time come to constitute the primary wellsprings of a given place’s meaning. And if you’re offering me some insight that I think could be of utility in resolving the challenge of making this overlay accessible to all, equally, I’ll gladly accept it, no matter what domain or disciplinary background you claim as your own.

Am I aware of any such insight coming out of virtual worlds? No. As Bryan Boyer notes, “If you want to start talking about some serious cross-disciplinary pollination then you better take both sides of that disciplinary divide seriously. When your ubi- runs into my building with its boring HVAC, mundane load paths, typical finished floors, plain old foundations, etc., the transformative powers of comp are bracketed pretty seriously by the realities of the physical world.”

The Cloud Gate has landed – photo by Adam Greenfield, “Tell me this doesn’t look *just* like the descriptions of “stasis fields” in 70s SF. In fact, the picture looks practically CGId to me.”

TS: Some people thought the whole world would have been plastered with RFID by now.  But before that has happened markerless AR seems to be in our sights.

If I understand it correctly marker versus markerless AR has quite different implications for how the cyberspace of ubicomp evolves?  I asked Robert Rice (he is developing a markerless AR platform) to explain some of the differences.  He said:

Robert also pointed out to me that markerless AR may prove even more problematic for privacy:

Do you have any thoughts about the different roles that markerless versus marker techinologies will play in AR and Ubicomp?

AG: I need to admit that I’ve never until this moment heard the phrase “markerless AR,” although I’d think it’s more or less self-explanatory to anyone who’s been following this stuff. Let me make the distinction explicit, shall I, for anyone who hasn’t been? And you or Robert can correct me if I’ve gotten it wrong.

Augmented reality means that I have some mediating artifact that provides me with a visual overlay on the world. This could be a phone, it could be a windshield, it could be a pair of glasses or contact lenses, doesn’t matter. And you’re going to use that overlay to superimpose some order of information about the world and the objects in it onto the things that enter my field of vision – onto what I see. So far, so good: that’s AR 101.

Now where does that information come from?

What you’re calling marker-based AR implies that there’s some reasonably strong relationship between the information superimposed over a given object, and the object itself. That object is an onto, a spime, it’s been provided with a passive RFID tag or an active transmitter. And it’s radiating information about itself that I’m grabbing, perhaps cross-referencing against other sources of information, and superimposing over the field of vision. Fine and dandy.

But there’s another way of achieving the same end, right? Instead of looking at a suit jacket on a rack and having its onboard tag tell you directly that it’s a Helmut Lang, style number such-and-such from men’s Spring/Summer collection 2011, Size 42 Regular in Color Gunmetal, produced at Joint Venture Factory #4 in Cholon City, Vietnam, and packed for shipment on September 3, 2010, you’re going to run some kind of pattern-matching query on it. And without the necessity of that object being tagged physically in any way, you’re going to have access to information about it. But this set of information isn’t, necessarily, what the object itself, or its creators or merchandisers, want you to know about it; it could be derived from online discussion fora or review sites, or blog posts, or whatever. All there needs to be is a lookup table, essentially, that tells you where to find information about any object in the field of vision whose identity can be established.

Do I have that right? And if I do, then as I understand it, the distinction is primarily a pragmatic one: it’s just easier to get to an augmented world, by far, if we don’t actually have to go to all the trouble of tagging everything in the world with its own dedicated RF transponder. Easier, and cheaper, and quicker, and more environmentally sound besides, because the relevant traffic is in bits not atoms.

Unless I’ve missed something, you don’t, then, get the distinction between classes of objects and instances of same. Sometimes, when there’s a 1:1 correlation between the two, that’s not going to matter: I’m walking down the street in Madrid, and my glasses or whatever can easily recognize that this building is the Caixa Forum. There’s only one of it, and I can get a positive ID via pattern recognition. But for some edge cases – twins and lookalikes, mostly – the same thing is generally true of people.

But other times it will matter. Is this specific watch a real, $10,000 Panerai or a $50 Kowloon fakery? How has this black 1998 Honda Civic over here differ from this other one in terms of its use and maintenance history? Does this O-ring gasket need to be replaced? I don’t see how you extract data from specific instances of things without the necessary sensor instrumentation, transmitter, etc., being coextensive with the object in question or very closely colocated with it over time – in the terminology you’re using, a “marker.”

So using these terms, I’d say that “markerless” AR comes first, is relatively easy to deploy, and generates not-insignificant value. But – again, unless I’m missing something – there are some things that it won’t ever be able to do, and for those things you need some provision for self-identification and self-location.

Ultimately I think it’s a distinction without a difference, from the user’s point of view. People will care much more about the source of whatever information shows up on their overlay than the precise technical means used to get it there.

The surrender to cynicism – photo by Adam Greenfield

TS: Much early thinking around ubicomp seems to have come from visionary architects and engineers but recently I was at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference (publishing in the Digital Age) and I met several book futurists.  It struck me how ubicomp from the perspective of the book created some interesting questions for how particular material cultures will shape and be shaped by Ubicomp differently.

I noted, Google seemed well down the path to holy grail “converting images to original intent XML.” And Peter Brantley talked about machine parsed books.

At TOC there were many suggestions about how books might manifest as everyware. (Although it did not seem that many people felt books had a special relationship to time and history and would not vanish as one of the great metaphors of calm and solitary enjoyment in our culture soon).  Books as everyware will, it seems, include, amongst other things:

books that read books

books that read context

context that reads books

books that read me

books linked to mobility – timeliness and location independence

books that are not books

books becoming babble

books bubbling up from the babble

There is an Institute of the Future of the Book. Will all former material cultures require their own institutes of the future to guide their cultures into everyware?  Do you think books transition into everyware is especially significant and why?

AG: But all objects have a relationship to time and history, no?

TS: Yes! What I meant to convey really was the idea that many people expressed at TOC that books had a privileged relationship to knowledge in our culture that was valuable and related to some aspects of their current form, and that books as everyware, e.g. machine parsed books, and more sociallly generated forms would not replace that entirely.

AG: Gotcha. Well, I certainly agree that books constitute an interesting category unto themselves – I’ve held onto my physical books, and in fact still spend a fortune buying new ones, where I stopped buying music on discs a long, long time ago. But I don’t think this state of affairs can or should obtain forever.

Lately there’s been a good amount of thought around the notion of “unbooks,” which I regard as a container for long-form ideas appropriate to an internetworked age. By building on some of the tropes of software development, mostly having to do with version control, open-endedness and an explicit role for the “user” community, unbooks can usefully harness the dynamic and responsive nature of discourse on the Web. At the same time, you preserve the things books are really good at: coherence, authorial voice and intent.

The important part is in acknowledging two points which have usually been understood as contradictory, but which are actually nothing of the sort: firstly, that the expression of ideas in written form has something to learn from the practices that have evolved around the collaborative creation of dynamic, digital documents over the half-century-long history of software; and secondly, that certain ideas require elaboration in the reasonably strongly-bounded form we know as a “book,” and cannot meaningfully be shared otherwise. A third point, concomitant to the second, is that despite recent technical advances, screen-based media still cannot, and may not ever fully be able to, deliver the extratextual cues and phenomenological traces that support, inform and extend the meaning of written documents.

The unbook lets you have your cake and eat it too. So, for example, when we publish The City Is Here, one of its manifestations will be a static, physical document – and hopefully, if we do our jobs well, a very nice one indeed. But even before that, you’ll be able to download a Creative Commons-licensed PDF of every numbered version of the manuscript, from zero onward. Bottom line: you buy the book if, and only if, you want the object. The ideas are free.

TS: David Brin sees two futures:1) the government watches everybody, and 2) everybody watches everybody (the latter he calls “sousveillance”).  My friend Ben Goertzel says “hooking AI up to a massive datastore fed by ubicomp is the first step toward sousveillance?” What do you think the role of AI in ubicomp will be?  Is it worth thinking about what is the first important “AI meets AR” app is?

AG: I don’t believe that artificial intelligence as the term is generally understood – which is to say, a self-aware, general-purpose intelligence of human capacity or greater – is likely to appear within my lifetime, or for a comfortably long time thereafter.

Having said that, your friend Ben seems to be making the titanic (and enormously difficult to justify) assumption that a self-aware artificial intelligence would share any perspectives, goals, priorities or values whatsoever with the human species, let alone with that fraction of the human species that could use a little help in countering watchfulness from above. “Hooking [an] AI up to a massive datastore fed by ubicomp” sounds to me more like the first step toward enslavement…if not outright digestion.

Sousveillance - the term is Steve Mann’s, originally – doesn’t imply “everybody watching everybody” to me, anyway, so much as a consciously political act of turning infrastructures of observation and control back on those specific institutions most used to employing same toward their own prerogatives. Think Rodney King, think Oscar Grant.

TS: I have one last question from Usman Haque.

Usman Haque: insofar as a lot of what adam describes as desirable could be said to constitute pretty radical socio-political change (or perhaps… “adjustment”) i would be really interested to know how his current work @ nokia is or isn’t able to gel with the themes of his writing. in some senses there’s quite an undercurrent strongly challenging corporate practices, in other senses it could be seen as gentle nudges. how does adam see it? and how about the nokia behemoth? does he have success nudging nokia towards the kind of world he would like to see (i imagine the answer is ‘yes’ otherwise he wouldn’t be doing it…) but i’d love to know more about the limits/challenges.

AG: I am told that Henry Kissinger, on his first trip to China in 1971, asked Zhou Enlai whether he thought the French Revolution had or had not advanced the cause of human freedom.
Zhou thought for a moment, pursed his lips, and replied, “It is too soon to tell.”

Tim O’Reilly has outlined some of the world’s big problems in his talks, and urged technologists to “work on stuff that matters.” I was one of O’Reilly’s listeners at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC (see my post here).

But, I found out at the Head Conference in London, recently, that O’Reilly is doing more than just talking about solving the world’s problems. The O’Reilly VC company is investing in technologies that tackle these big problems, for example, a very interesting startup, AMEE.

AMEE is a new company with a VERY big, world changing idea – “to create  a neutral technology platform to aggregate all the energy consumption data in world ” – “to be the world’s energy meter.”

I was fortunate, when I was in London, to get an opportunity to chat with Tim O’Reilly about AMEE, Web 2.0, and the role of virtual worlds in positive global development. Also, I met the CEO of AMEE, Gavin Starks.

We are still, just, in the pre “Internet of Things” era.  But, soon, as Bruce Sterling puts it, we will be able to “Google our shoes” or find out which super market shelves are out of sandwiches at any particular point in time! But for now, it can still be very hard to find a sandwich, even in central London. So, I had plenty of time to talk to Tim O’Reilly whilst searching for a hand held bite to eat.

We journeyed past several sandwichless restaurants (Tim picked up the Financial Times under his arm in the picture above in one of them), and super markets with shelves stripped bare except for some end of the day sushi (it looked scary so we passed on that).

Finally, McDonalds came through for us with the sandwich in the top left corner of the photo above.  The full interview is later in this post.

First, more about AMEE.

Tim O’Reilly says he doesn’t like predicting the future. But the future comes to Tim O’Reilly in very powerful ways.  And AMEE asks us to play a new proactive role in our own future. AMEE’s call to action is:

“If all the energy data in the world were accessible, what would you build?”

AMEE, to me, is a quintessential example of an effort to harness the key paradigm shifts of Web 2.0 (see O’Reilly, “What is Web 2.0?“) to tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems.

AMEE’s mission is to be a neutral technology platform, using open source and standards, and an architecture of participation, to address the need to standardize measurement, encourage collaborative development, and create a market place for energy data.

AMEE’s goal is to enable us to understand energy consumption from the level of the individual to the scale of whole countries.

This would address the need O’Reilly notes here his son-in-law Saul Griffith argued at Emerging Technology Conference earlier this year:  “to pick a target CO2 concentration and work backwards to get to an energy policy, rather than guessing at an energy policy with fingers crossed, hoping for a climate outcome that is tolerable.” AMEE is also involved in Saul’s Wattzon initiative.

Gavin Starks, CEO, AMEE, (pictured above standing under the Head Conference banner – a recording of his talk is here), explained:

AMEE’s vision is to aggregate all the energy data on Earth. By energy I include electricity, gas and all types of fuel, water, waste, you name it: everything we do is energy consumption, which means really building towards our sustainability footprint rather than just our carbon footprint. The initial thing we’ve focused on is Carbon and CO2, because that’s the most pressing issue we have to face: but it’s quite a thin layer on top of the whole sustainability question.

AMEE is not building the front-end applications to harness this energy data. Gavin noted:

We’re aggregating all the standards. This is a massively complex area, so we’ve got a science team whose job is to harvest all the scientific research and methodologies. That’s not something developers tend to want to go anywhere near: it unpacks itself into enormous amounts of complexity very quickly (e.g. building methodologies that have 700 data points).  Our Chief Scientific Officer, Dr Andrew Conway, is ex-NASA and has worked on massive scientific data analysis.

We aggregate government standards and other international standards, so that you know when you’re integrating with us, that you’re working to those standards. But much more than that we actually publish those standards on an open Wiki (the Wiki and the API actually talk to each other). As these standards emerge and evolve, we’ll be tracking them, ensuring that we are up to date, and granularity is added as needed.

We were very fortunate that one of our first clients was Defra which UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Defra is currently restructuring into DEC – the Department for Energy and Climate Change. So in the UK they’re actually fusing Energy and Climate Change into a single government department. I think this is quite remarkable: a giant step forward.

We were contracted by them because they were building a national campaign to raise the awareness of every citizen’s personal and household footprint, and they were looking for an Open Source solution – which AMEE is. Defra/DEC now use AMEE for two purposes: they make their standards available through the AMEE platform, so that everybody else can use them, and as the back-end solution to their national campaign, “Act on CO2″.

AMEE is SaaS – a web-service API – we’re not trying to compete with anyone on the front-end development and delivery. Because we aggregate two moving targets: standards and consumption, we enable those integrated with us to be current at all times.

Who Owns the Data?

But, if AMEE hopes to harness global network effects as a neutral aggregator of energy consumption data from individuals, businesses, and governments, one of the key questions that AMEE must answer (also a key question for Web 2.0 in general) is: Who owns the data?  I have delved into this question before on Ugotrade. See David Levine’s conversation with Eben Moglen on privacy here.

Gavin told me that this is a question AMEE has given a lot of thought to.

How AMEE answers this question, Who owns the data?, will probably determine the success of their mission as an ethical endeavor,  and their ability to scale and leverage the network effects of the internet as a platform while still allowing ” a very granular level of energy activity to be tracked.”

Gavin explained where AMEE is going re their approach to this issue. And, how this relates to AMEE’s business model – software as a service (SaaS).

We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to approach this, from both a commercial perspective and an ethical perspective.

We’re in a position where we’re aggregating vast amounts of personal and business information, on an ongoing basis. If we were to integrate with your credit cards, your smart meter, your supermarket, and your vehicles: we actually know everything about your life. Aside from the Data Protection issues we felt, “How could we protect everybody around ‘excessive’ exploitation of that data and ensure the user has long-term control?”.

As the saying goes, “we don’t know what we don’t know”: when it comes to predicting what our privacy issues will be, and as the data around our physical lives becomes digitally available, we wanted to err on the side of caution. Danny O’Brien, the EFF and MySociety have certainly helped to shape our thinking in this respect.

So if you’re a Google user and you go into the Google and you kick off a calculation, all your answers to the questions are stored in AMEE – but we don’t know who you are. We’ve got an anonymous key, Google’s got the anonymous key. Google will have your user name and so on and so forth. In AMEE we’ve got the aggregate of the responses to the questions. It’s up to Google’s Privacy Policy to determine what they and their user’s can do.

However, this doesn’t preclude us from enabling data-portability on behalf of the user. The anonymous key is not dissimilar to an OpenID, but applied to a specific data set. We are heading towards allowing you to control your data’s portability, as an individual.

It’s a fragile space. We want to give you the opportunity to glue together your AMEE IDs with your OpenID, or whatever login you choose, so that you’re in control. We aim to enable this to be both cloud and edge-based, which while fragile, is in the interest of the user. The more value we can provide, we believe, the stronger the value of our proposition.

But, because were dealing with a range of different massive organizations … imagine credit card companies sharing data with energy companies sharing data with petrol companies, sharing data with airlines etc. That’s a massive challenge from a business and political perspective – almost impossible to navigate.

We can enable people to collaborate, by making it opt-in all the way through the chain. We don’t undermine peoples existing databases: we can actually add value to them, or we aim to add value to them. We think this has got a huge amount of potential to stimulate new business for our clients.

It’s very “web” in its execution: we are part of an ecosystem. Part of our imperative is to be commercially enabling to everybody else. If we’re not being commercially enabling to other people, we’re not going to get the kind of scale of change that we need.

This was another design feature. We felt, “how could we create something which other people could build businesses or platforms on top of”?  And, how could that scale incredibly quickly? If we’d gone beyond our boundaries as an API, we would have been competing with people we want to work with.

While many services have taken similar strategic approaches, most seem to start with a form of lock-in, or evolve quickly to the point of lock-in, which satisfies a current trend in their valuations. We believe this trend will change and adapt to a more “privacy-based” intelligence, which has substantial value.

Tim O’Reilly in The Magic Circle

The motto of The Magic Circle where the Head Conference was held, “Indocilis Privata Loqui,” can be roughly translated as “not apt to disclose secrets.”  One of the wonderful displays of memorabila there was Robert Houdin’s Mystery Clock (picture below).  Luckily, for me, I was was treated to a full explanation of the “Mystery Clock” by another attendee during the Head Conference cocktail party.

As Tim O’Reilly pointed out, in his interview with Aral Balkan, he felt it was a privilege to be talking in this theater and center of magic.  Capturing the magic, spreading the magic, and sharing the magic is at the heart of what he has spent his career doing.  He explained:

I guess this is kind of a root idea for O’Reilly…… When I look back on my career….What did we really do?  Find cool people who were doing cool shit. They didn’t really need any help from us. But then there were a bunch of people who were saying, “How did they do that”? Those are the people we help.

We find the people who are doing what appears to be magic. The Arthur C. Clarke kind of magic you know…. We document – we teach people how to do it.

It is such a great  privilege to be here in a theater devoted to magic – The Magic Circle. This is really what we try to do.  We try to capture the magic, spread the magic, share it with other people.

Interview With Tim O’Reilly

Tish Shute: I was interested in your comment on Chris Brogan’s blog post the other day.

Tim O’Reilly: Actually it wasn’t Chris Brogan’s post. Dennis Howlett was a guest blogger. I was reacting to him saying there is nothing new in Web 2.0. My reaction was: “Well gosh it’s very easy to make a straw man out of Web 2.0 and say, ‘What’s new?’”

Howlett was specifically reacting to the Web 2.0 start ups that are superficial and not really what the trend is all about.  For me, Web 2.0 is about the internet becoming a platform. Does he think that is over?

And, it is about understanding that the rules of business change when the internet is a platform. I think a lot of people do that with Web 2.0 [make it a straw man].

They don’t like the term Web 2.0 and they attach ideas to it that reflect the most superficial elements. And then, they say these aren’t interesting. And, what he was saying was that there is a lot of superficial social media stuff – consumer apps, and what really matters is what will bring ROI to business.

I just said that he is totally missing the point because learning how to use the network as a platform matters very much to business. The same rules that apply to everyone else apply to businesses.

So, for example, I have made the point in my talk in New York, just a few months ago, that in many ways you can think of Walmart as a Web 2.0 company. They are infused with IP – they are taking the data that the users give them by buying things and making themselves a more responsive organization by using that data.

That is the heart of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. Not, do they use social media or not, or the social media buzz words.

Tish Shute: I am going to do an interview with Gavin Starks, CEO of AMEE. Could you tell me about your role in this project?

Tim O’Reilly: My role is as an investor. Our venture firm, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, has just finished closing on investment in AMEE. We think global warming is a really important issue to come to grips with. And, a big part of it is actually keeping track of all the carbon we’re emitting. AMEE helps with that problem.

Tish Shute: What is the potential, now we are beginning to break virtual world technologies down into basic open source building blocks, to create useful mashups with sensor technology, Web 2.0 and Virtual Worlds? Could Virtual Worlds play a key role in this work of instrumenting the world?

Tim O’Reilly: First of all, I don’t think that Virtual Worlds in the Second Life style will have this role …while I like the concept of Second Life, in that we have a Second Life in a virtual world, I am not sure that 3D avatars are [the way to go]…. at least they are certainly not my Second Life.  My Second Life is in other types of media.

But, when I look at this idea of instrumenting the world, one of the things that is very, very clear is that we are turning all the millions of consumer cameras into sensors.

For example, Microsoft’s Photosynth demonstrates how these consumer sensors can be used to build 3D models. We are starting to build a 3D representation of the real world, not a separate virtual world. And, we are all going to be part of that world. So I think that the real Second Life will be ………..well I think the first layer is going to be….to get the 3D models of the world as it is, and then we will have doorways into additional rooms and additional spaces.

That’s when its going to take off because people are going to get used to it through navigating the real physical world with maps – with 3D imagery of buildings and spaces.

And, another piece of this… I talked recently with Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk……and he was talking about how much even the Autodesk workflow is shifting to scanning things first.

He was describing how they have built this new demo center in an old building.  The first thing they did was photographs and measure it exactly. Then they go and make stuff that fits in the exact space.

Also, he was talking about how in his own hobbyist work, he found this shark’s jaw and he loved the curve of it.  So he scanned it and made it into the arms of a chair.

Tish Shute: I think the two important pieces that might come out of virtual worlds technology are the real time interactions where people can view the same application or context as and when you do, and the rapid prototyping.

Tim O’Reilly: Yes rapid prototyping, no question. But, as I said, the idea of moving an avatar around isn’t very compelling to be quite honest.

Tish Shute: But the web doesn’t do real time interaction very well does it?

Tim O’Reilly: Well Twitter is doing a pretty good job!

Tish Shute: Yes I love Twitter. But, in terms of if you want to get a 10,000 foot view and gather around and interact with data with other people…..what about that?

Tim O’Reilly: Well that’s true. I am using that example of the Squeak based virtual world that Fidelity is using. And, that is exactly what they are using it for – business interaction.

Tish Shute: What about the role Virtual Worlds might play, for example, in instrumenting the world through facilities management?

Tim O’Reilly: Yes, SAP did a very interesting project on property management – and that is interesting.

Tish Shute: Yes, on my way back to New York City tomorrow, I am going to stop off in Zurich and visit Oliver Goh who worked with Denis Browne, SAP, on that project. In fact you showed a picture of Oliver’s Goh’s avatar demoing the virtual counterpart to his instrumented Playmobile house in Second Life in your post, “SAP as a Web 2.0 Company?” (see the picture below).

Tim O’Reilly: I make no attempt at predicting the future.  So you could well be right that Virtual Worlds will be a very powerful tool.  But, I think with the pace that other technologies are progressing, we will get there with photorealism and video, etc.  I think the fundamental problem in most virtual world stuff is the idea of the avatar.

Tish Shute: Why do you say that?

Tim O’Reilly: Well just imagine if when interacting with people in the real world you had to look at yourself interacting with someone else.  First person point of view is our fundamental experience.  And, you are being forced to see yourself in the third person.

Tish Shute: I have always been more interested in avataring the world than in my avatar identity.

Tim O’Reilly: There is something very interesting in having an avatar that you don’t ever see.

[At this point there were less than ten minutes before Tim's interview for the Head Conference, so it was time to concentrate on eating!]

Virtual Worlds: Where Web Meets World

As Ian Hughes, IBM, notes in a recent post on Eightbar:

The last few days have seen a plethora of virtual world pitches, reports, articles and blog posts around certain types of virtual world platform. The first was over at @monkchips a.k.a James Governor analyst blog around a visit to Microsoft to see about the ESP platform. This appears to be a high fidelity simulation platform and toolkit. The second was widely reported. But Wagner’s New World Notes is the one most of the metarati will have read on the matter. This centres around some statments by Craig Mundie that avatar based interaction was of limited interest and really it was photosynth that was the way forward, modelling the real world from photos…….

I agree with Ian when he says:

the interesting thing here is that all the discussion is not about why would anyone want a virtual world, but instead what sort is best.

Tim O’Reilly was not questioning, in my view, that we are moving towards new understandings of virtual spaces or virtual worlds but whether avatar based virtual worlds will be the most useful model.

I began my questions to Tim O’Reilly by bringing up his comment on Dennis Howlett’s post not only because he succinctly states there what is really important about Web 2.0, i.e., “internet as platform, and the rise of applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.”

But also, this comment caught my attention because Tim used virtual worlds as one of the examples of the value of Web 2.0 to enterprise.  He wrote:

Guess what : they [SAP] understand that harnessing users is good for their business. At O’Reilly, our InPractice division is working with them to actually turn their documentation into an open source, crowdsourced project. They are doing fascinating experiments at SAP Labs with how to integrate virtual worlds into property management. They have built a great internal social network for employees that has already affected their HR practices.

It is Oliver Goh’s instrumented virtual house in Second Life that Tim mentions in his post “SAP as a Web 2.0 Company?” to make the point that:

This prototype is also very on trend with one of the big ideas we have about where Web 2.0 is going, towards Web 2.0 applications that are fed directly by sensors, so that “participation” no longer just means typing on a keyboard, but the accidental information we create “merely in living as and where we live.”

I have been blogging Oliver’s work prototyping various use cases for virtual worlds in facilities management and energy optimization, e.g., virtual operations centers, in Second Life and OpenSim, since its inception (see here and here).

Now, Oliver has developed a complete solution for sustainabililty in the real estate industry that optimizes energy consumption through the entire life cycle of properties - see here for more.

Also, look out for some interesting intersections between AMEE’s mission – ” to create the world’s energy meter,” and Oliver’s mission to “optimize the world’s energy usage” in the future!

I visited Oliver in Zurich on my way back to NYC from the Head Conference.  In the picture below, Oliver is standing by the Playmobile house that is RL counterpart to the virtual control center house pictured above!

The ability of virtual worlds to play a role in solving the world’s pressing problems is, in my view, linked both to their ability to fully integrate in Web 2.0 and “real” world  data.

I have been blogging a lot on these issues!  Rob Smart, IBM, (see my recent interviews with Rob here and here – “Web 2.0 to OpenSim Made Easy”) has been doing some very interesting work recently integrating JSON support to OpenSim. This is one of the recent important steps forward in virtual world to real world communication.  See this cool video, “OpenSim Meets MQTT jedi mind numbers.”

The powerful value add that virtual worlds, even in a basic form, have shown in the realm of social media that “the people with you can view the changing states of that application or context as and when you do” can also play an important role in the front end applications for projects like AMEE and Oliver’s work.

This is not to discount the role of social media virtual worlds in the participatory work of instrumenting our planet. There is already  a nice integration of AMEE  with Second Life. See Jim Purbrick’s Carbon Goggle’s for Second Life here.

Carbon Goggles from Jim Purbrick on Vimeo

But, if virtual world technology is going be part of the evolving power of the internet to help us solve the big problems facing humanity, there must be an evolving vision for virtual worlds and their relationship with the “real” world.

Most likely, many of the dichotomies, e.g., the notion of avatar based or non avatar based, or simulation versus augmentation, and mirror worlds versus virtual worlds, will increasingly dissolve as all these aspects of virtual reality are woven together into the fabric of everday computing to form new digital/physical realities. And, while I’m not trying to predict the future, perhaps, this will happen sooner than we think!

I have just got back from attending two conferences in the UK, the Head Conference, and Virtual Worlds London.  I was on a mission at both the events to ask questions about how Virtual World technology will answer the call Tim O’Reilly made at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City to “create more value than you extract” and do something worthy and useful with the internet.

The Head Conference was an ambitious, timely, and much needed creative exploration of the potential for “green” conferencing using Adobe Connect Pro, Second Life and  local conference hubs in various cities. For more on the conference organization see this pre-conference interview with Aral Balkan.

Head will be the focus of my next post, so more on Head soon!  One of my main goals in attending the London Hub of Head was to interview the CEO and founder of AMEE, “Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine,” Gavin Starks. AMEE aims to be “the energy meter of the world.”

AMEE is a neutral aggregation platform designed to measure and track all the energy data on Earth.”

AMEE is a project with the kind of big goals that O’Reilly talked about in his keynote at Web 2.0 Expo, NYC.  Tim O’Reilly is an investor in AMEE. He announced, at Head, that the O’Reilly VC company has just closed a deal with AMEE.

I had an extraordinary opportunity to spend time some time talking with Tim O’Reilly while looking for a sandwich in Euston Square.  More on this sandwich adventure and my interview with Tim O’Reilly, and my long talk with Gavin Starks about AMEE, in my next post!

Tim kept saying in London that he doesn’t like predicting the future. But the future comes to Tim O’Reilly!

And, after talking with Tim and Gavin, I felt I had a very exciting glimpse of what is emerging from the tech’s burning issues. George F. Colony, Forrester, summarized these issues nicely in his post, “Why This Tech recession Will Be Different.” Colony noted, “Virtualization, social computing, mobile computing, Green IT, SOA, extended Internet (connecting the physical world to the digital world) are front and center on the agendas of large companies.”

And, yes, this is supposed to be a little bit of a teaser for my next post on AMEE!

Virtual Worlds Road Map.

The final keynote at the Virtual Worlds London was what Ian Hughes in his post on the conference for Eightbar, aptly described as a call to arms for the Virtual Worlds Roadmap. As Ian pointed out: “This needs a post in its own right as we all need to get on board with this across the industry and help.” Ian Hughes’ (IBM) own presentation on “Business Process Management” was one of the best I attended in conference.  Yes, amazingly, he made this topic very interesting and fresh!

The pictures opening this post are the Virtual Worlds Road Map presenters. Victoria Coleman (Samsung) -seated at center, Sibley Verbeck (Electric Sheep Company) – in trademark hat, Jeffrey Pope 3Di – far left, and  Bruce Damer – close up in the picture on the right.

I am delighted to join Bruce Damer, later today, for a FastCompany.com Technology Group Call-in: “Next Generation Interaction: Are Virtual Worlds Waiting in the Wings?” with Donald Schwartz (October 28th at 4:00 PM EST).

I will also be in Second Life at Train 4 Success (SLURL) on Thursday, October 30 (starting at 9AM PST) with Peter Quirk, EMC, and Jani Pirkola, realXtend talking about OpenSim and realXtend for an event organized by Eilif Trondsen of the Stanford Research Institute and the Gronstedt Group.

John Hengeveld (Intel) – was off screen for this group picture (above). But, Intel is doing some very interesting work in Virtual Worlds see my earlier post here.  And, John is  “helping NASA work out how to deflect extinction level event asteriods from Earth!).”

As Ian noted, the main aim of Virtual Worlds Road Map, “is to gather together and cut through use cases to understand and help people come to terms with which applications need to be built for which case.”

For more great coverage of Virtual Worlds London check out Ian’s post on Eightbar. And, check out Roo Reynolds’, live blogging here and here. Also see Roo’s post on his panel on “ARGs [Alternative Reality Games] and Virtual Worlds.” which includes slides and audio. Picture below is Roo in action live blogging. Roo is Portfolio Executive for Social Media at BBC Vision.

Tribal Media: A Teacher Training Intranet For The Swedish Government on OpenSim

One of the more interesting developments I saw at Virtual Worlds London was a highly customized training intranet for 50,000 teachers being developed for the Swedish Government by Tribal Media. The flexibility of OpenSim to provide cost effective custom intranet solutions was nicely demoed by Darren Guard, Tribal Media R&D (pictured above). Darren is one of the more reclusive founders and phenom developers of OpenSim.

Virtual Worlds and Web 2.0

In my earlier interviews with Rob Smart here, and Teravus Ousley here, we discussed the work to integrate OpenSim with Web 2.0.

To meet the O’Reilly challenge – to do something useful with the internet and help solve some of the world’s big problems, in my view, Virtual World technologies must engage more fully with the power of the internet-as-a-platform – “a system without an owner, tied together by a set of protocols, open standards and agreements for cooperation.” (see O’Reilly, “What Is Web 2.0?” ).

Unfortunately the worst presentation at Virtual Worlds London was purportedly on standards for virtual worlds.  I do not want to waste energy rehashing the misinformed and misguided presentation on the MPEG-V’s archaic blunderbuss approach to standards in this post.  I completely concur with Jim Purbrick of Linden Lab’s characterization of this talk as “the worst talk I’ve heard in a long time.” (Also, see Jim’s post for an astute commentary on other aspects of Virtual Worlds London.)  Luckily, there is much productive work from quarters aimed at leading to standards for Virtual Worlds. And, some of these efforts I have blogged here on Ugotrade.

Because there is confusion, sometimes, in Virtual World discussions about how business models work on a “system without an owner,” here is the concluding quote from, “What is Web 2.0.”

This is not to say that there are not opportunities for lock-in and competitive advantage, but we believe they are not to be found via control over software APIs and protocols. There is a new game afoot. The companies that succeed in the Web 2.0 era will be those that understand the rules of that game, rather than trying to go back to the rules of the PC software era.

What is the Killer App. for Virtual Worlds?

“The killer is that any app you do create is automatically presence enabled.
The people with you can view the changing states of that application or context as and  when you do.” Rob Smart, IBM.

The picture above are the presenters for the “Platform Integration Considerations for Enterprise Virtual Worlds” panel. From left to right: Jean Miller, German Market Development Manager, Linden Lab, Matt Furman, Software Engineer, Northrop Grumman, Rob Smart, Emerging Technology Specialist, IBM Hursley,

Interview with Rob Smart, IBM: Part 2.

Tish Shute: Up to now, Virtual Worlds have been relatively isolated from Web 2.0, living somewhere between the gaming world and the Web 2.0 world. How are the curtains lifting and virtual worlds becoming the linking the space between social media, and online gaming?

Rob Smart: Virtual Worlds that allow user created content and the association of behaviour to that content via scripting put themselves forward as the ideal platform to combine realtime social interaction with existing Web 2.0 tools. The data and function out there currently on Web sites can serve to augment the real-time social interactions. For example enhancing/enabling cross cultural communication with chat translation (example my translation HUD from wayback in 2006).

Another example is augmenting personal spaces with flickr images, video etc. In many flash room based Virtual Worlds this level of integration exists. However without the ability of the users to create their own gadgets and gizmos the pressure is on the development team to innovate and give users what they want, tough to do in the long term. A blended approach is to open APIs and content creation to registered developers.

Rob Smart: When you’re integrating any system with another it becomes so much simpler if the creators have provided,  services and APIs for external systems to interact with. It becomes even easier if those system entry accept/give inputs and outputs in a common way e.g. xml/json. The same goes for both data and media.

By using common existing standards we shorten the development time taken, because if a standard is widely adopted there will be a multitude of programming language libraries for it. The existence of which means the developer can get straight onto the important task of creating the logic for their application/gadget rather than messing around trying to understand some weird data encoding method you’ve invented.

Having an Open Source platform spreads the work load around, as long as the method under which the OS software is licenced isnt too prohibitive then developers from all walks of life will contribute. Spreading that workload also leads to an increase of innovative features as people always bring their experience and interests to bear, the features they create can be shared back and others build on top of them.

If a company chooses to implement a feature they specialize in or integrate with their existing products they can sell this as an add-on, this creates a market where the base product can improve through contributions from companies making a living of the OS product, it also introduces some competition and financial incentive to the platforms well being.

People keep talking about killer apps within Virtual Worlds, the killer is that any app you do create is automatically presence enabled. The people with you can view the changing states of that application or context as and  when you do.

Rob Smart: I still think Virtual Worlds is a good term, though it is very fuzzy. If we’re talking about VWs that can be extended and integrated with web 2.0 then maybe we need to talk about Immersive Application Platforms. Yep not very catchy but probably something more people in the enterprise world would say out loud in front of their boss In addition another term that could be used is 3D Internet it conjures more of a picture of integration between the different parts of what is a vast networked system.

Tish Shute: The  original metaverse roadmap had four distinct segments Augmented Reality, and Life Logging at the pole of augmentation, and Mirror worlds and Virtual worlds at opposite corners of the pole of simulation. How are these areas coming together?

Rob Smart: There’s no reason these need to be separated, its all down to the use of the VW platform these four segments are just applications of a virtual world platform. A platform like OpenSim can merge several of these together if neccessary. For example the Publish Subscribe messaging module written about on eightbar that I created lets me do things like bring in Realtime Flight data and show planes positions etc. across a region I could at the same time call an API that gives me more details on that flight. I could even search for blogs that mention that flight number and bring them into the same space. I could add additional script functions to the plane objects so that when a visitor clicks on a plane it thereafter sends them messages about its position.

Tish Shute: Virtual worlds are being broken down to open source basics building blocks and modules that can be mixed and matched and mashed up with Web 2.0 to create a new ecosystem that enriches both what has been know as virtual worlds and traditional web environments. What kind of innovation do you see coming out of these new opportunities to mashup virtual worlds with Web 2.0?

Rob Smart: I’m hoping to see as a number one priority an increase of accessibility, despite a number of people saying that browser based virtual worlds aren’t worth the effort they certainly are. The ability to just send a friend a URL or Instant Message etc.. and pull them in with you is an important step to adoption. As are simplified interfaces that don’t scare off those unfamiliar with gaming. An example of this is the Lotus Sametime 3D work with OpenSim that lets you invite a friend or colleague in via an instant message.

Virtual Worlds For Enterprise: A Coming of Age Party?

As Ian mentioned I did think that the London Conference was a coming of age party for enterprise virtual worlds. In the picture below there are just some of the Lindens who were there, many to promote the Linden Lab collaboration with Rivers Run Red on “Immersive Work Spaces” which was written up in Wall Street Journal. Also see this post yesterday on Silicon.com, “Virtual Worlds Set For Second Coming.”

Someone please help me with the all the names of the Lindens in the picture below!  Matt Furman from Northrop Grumman is center and Joey Seiler from Virtual World News is on the right.

Justin Bovington said to me that this conference was in his view: “the enterprise virtual worlds coming out party – an acceptance that this is a tangible solution- about selling relevant tools and relevant ROI – rather than talk about virtual worlds it is about relevant tool sets.”

And, while the conference was small, I think the engagement level of the enterprise attendees did back up this assertion of Justin’s. Matt Furman, Software Engineer, Northrop Grumman was asked by more than one attendee how he was dealing with scaling up the behind the firewall virtual world he is developing for Northrup Grumman with Linden Lab to meet a big demand internally to start using virtual worlds for collaboration.  Apparently some attendees were seeing so much interest in virtual world solutions for internal collaboration in their own companies, they were concerned about meeting the needs of thousands of employees in short order.

Immersive Work Spaces

I asked Justin a few questions about Immersive Work Spaces while waiting for an elevator!

Tish Shute: And what are the relevant tool sets from your point of you?

Justin Bovington: Collaboration, sharing, integration of existing backend systems and applications.  For example, we have developed seamless ways to share powerpoint or share screens. And, also going back down to the ROI models as well,  tangible ROI based on subscription based system where basically in four or five usages it has paid for itself. We have never had that with Virtual Worlds. It has always been in the bounds of experimentation or the bounds of isn’t it cool technology. Now we are seeing this become a serious collaboration tool.

And as I have said before that argueably the twentieth century ended two weeks ago and the twenty first century is now with us.  And that is about companies rengineering their thinking particularly in the financial sector they have to restart again. And that is going to be about  using additional tools and additional guide lines to do that. This is the change over and I have said this in the panel as well. This show in particularly is enterprise virtual worlds coming out party.

And again we see a massive change between the last three shows – there is a level of interest we have never seen before and also an acceptance that this is a tangible solution not just something that is cool…

We have hundreds of users in out product and it will go  to thousands and tens of thousands in the next year.

And we know where it is going – data visualization is going to be the next big thing and getting this 10,000 ft view of your company. We are using this term called snow globing which lets you pick up a snow globe and shake it and let you see exactly what a company is about and this is exactly what virtual worlds are about.

It’s about having a ten thousand foot view of your company because that’s when it becomes powerful because then it becomes a broadcast medium. And I think it will change people’s perception of data. And it is also moving to beyond just having the avatar as the main presence. The environment itself becomes an essence or a kind of dynamic level that is inside there. We are working on stuff at the moment that allows you have direct influence on data or the environment you are in which on a massive collaboration scale could actually give you a huge amount of input and ideas around company. And there is a genuine need to have this kind of collective intelligence.

Sine Wave Dinner!

The grand finale for me was the excellent Indian meal very generously hosted by Rohan Freeman of Sine Wave Company. Standing on the left is Chris Collins, Linden Lab, seated left front is, Steve Spangaro, bigpipemedia, and on the right Ren Reynolds of the Virtual Policy Network. Many other metarati were there including Bruce Joy, Vast Park, Corey Bridges, Multiverse, Dave Taylor, Imperial College, Gia Rossini, Sloodle, Peter Haik, Metaversality, Adam Frisby, OpenSim, Mal Burns, and many more – please help me out with the name tagging!

The curtains are lifting between Virtual Worlds, Web 2.0, and online gaming. There are many indications of this in the news including, the rebranding of the Virtual Worlds Conf. and Expo in New York City as “Engage! Expo – 3D Web, Virtual Worlds, and Virtual Goods,” and Google’s Lively opening up an API for game development.

And, If you have been reading Ugotrade recently, you will know I have been up late several nights trying to keep up with the pace of the  OpenSim, Architecture Working Group and OpenGrid Protocol teams that are proceeding at a fast clip with their work on Web 2.0 integration for immersive Virtual Worlds (and there is still much more to write on this!).

Also, this week, there was the preview launch (the full launch is scheduled for November) of a new collaboration, “SHASPA,” between EOLUS^® One and The Serious Games Institute.  SHASPA was unveiled to a select audience of business decision makers at the Globe Theater, London on Wednesday.

SHASPA- making a “smart” world with “shared spaces.”

Oliver Goh said, “SHASPA” is a unique cooperation to bring together Virtual Worlds (OpenSim, Second Life^®), Web 2.0 Applications and the world of mobile applications….”

The pictures above show Oliver speaking (far left) and David Wortley, Director of the Serious Games Institute (SGI) at Coventry (far right), and some of the audience (center). I recognize several very important virtual world pioneers and innovators in the midst of the frey – Rohan Freeman (CEO of the Sine Wave Company), Prof Jeremy Watson (Arup), Dr Anthony Dennis (infoterra),  and Dave Taylor, Programme Lead, Virtual Worlds and Medical Media at Imperial College London.

EOLUS^® One initially started as an innovation project with the focus to develop new service oriented offerings for the real estate industry. Oliver explained to me:

The focus is on sustainable real estate, enhancing the structural and technical performance of properties which will be the first use case for SHASPA. SHASPA uses the combined power of the work done by the SGI and EOLUS One to create Smart Shared Spaces for various industries. The first use case will be in the Real Estate industry to revolutionize approaches to facilities/property performance optimization and energy management.

RealXtend harnesses OpenSim as engine for their server side development

Adam Frisby sent me the picture opening this post today.  Adam pointed out It shows:

…Realxtend just running under OpenSim rather than the forked version of OpenSim realXtend did. It’s been converted to a set of OpenSim plugins – we’re still at a semi-preliminary stage, however, we’ve got Rex avatars and a few other features now working.

Realxtend is now able to leverage the OpenSim core, and OpenSim developers can work with realXtend innovation as plugins. For more details on this modular integration see my previous post.  This modular architecture will create many new opportunities for mashups.  And the Web 2.0 integration and interoperability work that is central to the OpenSim vision will be aligned with the advanced 3D Internet layer realXtend has been building on top of it.

On their diverse and multifaceted team, RealXtend has a number of world class game developers  who have in a very short time progressed rapidly towards the goals Tony Manninen, Ludocraft, described to me back in February, “making sure the realXtend development reaches the required quality and performance standards you would expect from MMOGs.”

And as Jani Pirkola, Project Manager for RealXtend, points out:

For realXtend it means that we can have all the OpenSim development directly benefit realXtend, whether it is Web 2.0 or other features.

Web Friendly Standards for Virtual Worlds

I am off to London next week to the Virtual Worlds Conf an Expo.  But, while I am very excited to meet old and new friends there, it is disappointing to note that the open source developer communities and the interoperability and open protocol efforts of OpenSim and Linden Lab are sadly unrepresented in London.

Making virtual worlds part of the fabric of the internet and everyday computing will not happen because some arbitrary standards body pontificates on elaborate requirements and then tries to get the backing of big business to implement their standards from top down. There are many white papers on why this old fashioned way of developing standards is not applicable to the fast moving internet environment.   As David Levine, IBM, so nicely put it a while back, interoperability and standards for virtual worlds:

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….

It is, in my view, unfortunate that Dr Yesha Y Sivian, Metaverse1, in his talk “Virtual Worlds State of Standards (SOS): MPEG-V, Metaverse1, Open-SIM and more” has put OpenSim in his title (and Architecture Working Group in the body of his abstract) when he does not seem to have (yet) invited anyone from OpenSim or Architecture Working Group or OGP to represent their own work.  Again, unfortunately, a panel including key industry leaders and representatives from OpenSim and Architecture Working Group did not get the opportunity to present in London because Dr Sivian’s proposal gave the conference organizers the impression there was already a “similar panel.”

MPEG-V and Metaverse 1 are Dr Yesha Sivian’s projects and they are at a very early stage of development (basically an effort to define a set of requirments and garner business support for the notion of creating so called MPEG-V standards). To have credibility, in my view, these projects need to engage with other groups that are working on standards and actually have working code, as  Architecture Working Group and OpenGrid Protocol (OGP) do.

There are some common misunderstandings about the approach of the Architecture Working Group that should be cleared up.

As key architects of OpenGrid Protocol (OGP), and the Architecture Working Group, frequently stress, OGP is a point of departure.  While its focused on the existing code of OpenSim and Second Life, the overall framework is as broad, or broader than the meteverse work.  The goal is to create a fully described set of web based protocols and formats which will do anything MPEG-V wants to do, but meshed far more fully into the web.

Metaverse1 needs to be in dialogue with the standards work that has already produced code, if they are serious about creating good standards.

Out of the Trough of Disillusionment onto the Slope of Enlightenment

It seems Virtual Worlds may have started onto the Slope of Enlightenment (see Gartner Hype Cycle).  Virtual Worlds, and immersive Virtual Worlds (in particular Second Life^® and OpenSim), continue to garner broad consumer interest. And, the ability of Virtual Worlds to deliver added value in key areas of collaboration and energy conservation is fueling a a lot of interest from education and enterprise.

While worries of depression and recession in the global economy abound, and the internet is abuzz with discussion of Joe The Plumber (as Mitch Kapor noted in Twitter: “Not since Nixon have we heard so much about plumbers”).

Nevertheless, there has been quite a steady flow of positive news from Virtual Worlds. See Caleb Booker’s roundup and  Virtual World News and check for yourself. And just in, Forbes.com post, “A ‘virtual’ Escape from Economic Pain,” After scanning my reader I checked my perception in Twitter and quickly got replies from Mitch Wagner of Information Week.

@MitchWagner – while you didn’t find any negative stories have you seen an increase in positive stories in mainstream media? about 13 hours ago from web in reply to MitchWagner

Recents News Events of Note

The coming of age of Open Source Virtual worlds is attracting some mainstream attention now.  One of the leading authorities on Open Source Software and Services,  OStactic has several recent posts on OpenSim and Open Source Virtual Worlds. And, of course, I was thrilled that Ugotrade got a mention in the most recent one, Open Source Virtual Reality Spreads Out.

This post, and my previous post about integration of OpenSim into Web 2.0, explore how immersive virtual worlds, through a full architectural integration into Web 2.0, will become part of the fabric of everyday computing.

The diagram above shows where OpenSim sits in Web 2.0 (click on the diagram to see a readable enlarged version!). The following interview with OpenSim developer, Teravus Ousley, describes some of the work being done to create documented protocols that will make OpenSim fit seamlessly into Web 2.0 architecture.

OpenSim is in the news a lot these days, explicitly as in the case of the announcement last week by 3Di of their “3Di OpenSim” Standard (for more see here and here), and implicitly with the launch of ChinaQ.  Adam Frisby, OpenSim, pointed out to me if you download the ChinaQ client that it is based on OpenSim, it connects nicely to OSGrid too. There is speculation the client is a rebranded version of the realXtend viewer (which is based on the open source Second Life viewer) as all the version numbers are the same.

So OpenSim is not only attracting the interest of business giants like IBM, Microsoft and Intel, it is becoming the architecture of choice for virtual world initiatives from Chinese and Japanese telecoms (see here and here for more). Also, see the press release about Nokia and the City of Oulu, Finland, joining as supporters of realXtend.

But, as Raph Koster in his post commenting on 3Di’s OpenSim announcement notes, the question how immersive virtual worlds can go from strong niche or enterprise markets to mass adoption in consumer markets must be answered.  As Raph points out, Lively, Whirled, SmallWorlds, Vivaty, and yes, Metaplace have a very different architecture that they hope will attract broad consumer markets.  (I did a long interview with Raph on this at The Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo in LA which I will post as soon as it is transcribed, so more on this soon!).

Architectural integration into the heart of Web 2.0, I would argue, is the key to mass adoption for immersive virtual worlds. While architecture alone will not guarantee the necessary breakthroughs in usability for widespread consumer adoption, it will create the ideal conditions for the innovation through which usability obstacles will be overcome, and the enormous potential for immersive, real time interaction over the internet will be realized.

Interview with Teravus Ousley

Tish: What has been  the most fundamental problem re virtual world architecture that has kept immersive virtual worlds isolated from web 2.0 to date? 

Teravus: a lack of standardization, licensing issues, and the difficulty of entry into the industry.

1) Standardization

Tish: In order of importance what in your view are the priorities for standardization?

Teravus: Probably the same order that OpenSimulator was tackled in, basic connect (current state of OGP – Open Grid Protocol).  Basic Service (interaction standards).  Advanced connect/mashup/aggregate extensions.   Preferably people will have working code in the various spaces there to use freely under various licenses..

Tish: Can you show me where OpenSim will fit in this drawing of Web 2.0 architecture? [Teravus makes some modifications on the drawing I send him from Dion Hinchcliffe’s presentation from his Web 2.0 Expo workshop, see original here]

Teravus: The modified diagram [now opening this post] is a great view of how it will look.

Tish: Why is the TCP stream left out of the original drawing? [For more about Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite see here.

Teravus: It is left out because the person who made this diagram had web pages in mind.  Static large files, or small changing files. In the the drawing the fact that TCP streams are smaller then HTTP is on purpose.

Tish: I have heard different opinions on the percentage of the communications for virtual worlds that can be done over HTTP?

Teravus: The fact is that the biggest usage of communications in virtual worlds is transmitting images that’s the number one bandwidth usage. So, if we’re counting by ‘usage’ I say 91%.   If we’re counting by services that use http.   I say probably 75%  I definitely think that http should be evaluated for use on new things ‘first’. But, there are a few places where HTTP doesn’t shine.

I am skeptical about replacing things in the UDP with HTTP  thinking that they’ll ‘perform better. [For more about User Datagram Protocol (UDP) another of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite see here.]

I think there’s been a huge test going on now and for the last 5 or six years with regards to the UDP protocol and it really has performed admirably.   In the last year and a half, I’ve seen attempts to convert several things to HTTP that have failed, and failed somewhat spectacularly sometimes.  In the end the items get reverted back to the UDP protocol. One such item that sticks out in my mind is CAPS(HTTP) based inventory retrieval. The capability to do that in the client has been available since before February. And, it’s been turned on and off on ‘Agni’ at least once in the process. Additionally, we (OpenSimulator) enabled http inventory, and, the  inventory failures rose pretty steeply.

I think some services are really just not ‘right’ for HTTP.. . particularly where a ‘poll’ methodology is used, or, the data is significantly dynamic enough that it makes caching useless.

Anyway, as far as the future is concerned, I do want to see some services over HTTP. Other services, it would be more appropriate to have a TCP stream. Stock market data, for example, uses a TCP stream. The Scalability of the stock market, is just one example of a scalable TCP stream.

Tish: So you see TCP  as the communications protocol that would do the work for the parts of virtual worlds not suitable for HTTP. At least that is how you have shown it in our Web 2.0 architecture drawing. But should there also be a UDP stream?

Teravus: For the virtual world of tomorrow? .. probably not.

Tish: Why not?

Teravus: You have less control over the quality of service when it’s delivered over UDP then TCP.

Tish: What is the exact relation between TCP and UDP.  My understanding is UDP a lower level protocol.

Teravus: TCP offers guaranteed delivery through flow control, while UDP does not.  One of the failures of UDP, is the ‘resend’ technology we’ve put on top of it to try and make it reliable.   TCP does this automatically and better then we could at a lower level but it does also cost up to twice the bandwidth depending on what is being sent. HTTP is a layer on top of TCP.

Tish: So just like the HTTP/TCP discussion there has to be a TCP/UDP boundary discussion …so it is HTTP then TCP then UDP and the boundaries have to be worked on.

Teravus: Those are the orderings in my mind…  probably if UDP uses any..  it should use less then 0.5%.

Tish: And the current Second Life architecture what does it use if it isn’t using HTTP? [to see the work of the Architecture Working Group on the future Second Life architecture here]

Teravus: UDP or HTTP

Tish: and TCP?

Teravus: Well, TCP is a layer under HTTP.  As far as I know, SL doesn’t use TCP streams directly

Teravus: Instead, it uses HTTP polling.  This is one of the places, that I’ve highlighted where it doesn’t shine.

Tish: Polling does sound slow?

Teravus: Polling is essentially..     (connect) Got any data for me? No?(disconnect), (connect) Got any data for me?  No?(disconnect).

Tish: So what is the path to standards for this then?

Teravus: Distilling what we know works and what we actually intend on supporting as far as adoption under these standards.

Tish: Where does MPEG-V fit in?  Have you read their document yet?

Tervavus: MPEG-V is interesting reading…     but is there any working example? I have just the overview. But I’ll read it over to have a better determination of how to ‘keep it in mind’ for the future. It looks like they’ve only really defined the requirements of the MPEG-V spec. The MPEG-V spec looks quite far reaching..  but  the documents so far are requirements and marketing talk aimed toward business people – obviously intended to get more people interested in working on them.

But I have a feeling that any format with MPEG before it will be onerous to support. ..for me it’s too early to tell. It’s quite far reaching…it isn’t anything like ’signal processing’ which the MPEG group is most famous for.

Tish: The whole top down approach of the MPEG-V initiative seems counter to Web 2.0 principles to me.

Teravus: Well, remember..  that even if there’s a virtual world format war (reference to DVD-HD vs BlueRay) we still need to win over the rest of the web.

Tish: Yes and don’t you think the way to win over the web is to use as many existing standards as possible?

Teravus: Well, it’s to use as many existing standards as ‘fit’ though.. KISS, as always (K)eep (I)t (S)imple (S)tupid if we have 30 different internet standards..     people looking at it will @.@

Tish: But it is just lack of documented protocols that has created isolation from Web 2.0?  And really doesn’t it boil down to standardizing that small percentage that is outside HTTP – the TCP and UDP stream that we talked about earlier where the real time stuff that virtual worlds bring to the web happens?

Teravus: no..  actually the HTTP standardization is just as important.

Tish: You mean even though SL used HTTP it isn’t standardized?

Teravus: Not documented specifically.

Tish: And OpenSim is that documented?

Teravus: Not well enough probably to define a standard.

Tish: Is AWG (Architecture Working Group) doing the documentation?

Teravus: working on it..

2) Licensing Issues

Tish: It sounds like some of this work has to go on across client and server.  Are we running into the issue of BSD for OpenSim and GPL for the Second Life viewer?

Tervaus: Well, some of the issue here is license choice.  One of the reasons that libOMV was able to achieve what they did was they did it /before/ the client was open sourced.

Tish: So open sourcing the client actually became an obstacle!!???

Teravus: I don’t think so in a whole.  I think it was great for the community.  I do, however think that C++ UDP stacks will be scrutinized more for GPL license violations because, of course, the client is GPL and C++ .

Tish: It is my understanding that Linden Lab is open to discussions on making the licensing more efficient for the open source community?

Teravus: Well, the client, in a whole, should not be changed as far as the license.   JUST the things that they expect people to adopt should be made more open. If they expect people to adopt PRIMs, then there should be an efficient implementation available for anyone to use..   at the very least, in LGPL format. Otherwise, the die hards are forced to re-implement them from scratch, and most people will just choose something more open.

Tish: Has anyone ever put together a list of the parts that need to be LGPLed?

Teravus: Well, I think it’s there in a few places.  There is at least one jira open on it.

Teravus: A few that come to mind for me..   is the UDP stack and the prim to mesh/UV code.   I think there are some things that can definitely be improved about the UDP Stack.  There are some things, (images come to mind), that would be better over HTTP

Tish: Do you think if the UDP stack were L GPLed that would be a significant help to integrating OpenSim better with the web?

Teravus: Well, it would certainly be adopted by more clients. GPL + (your own code) = GPL Licensed client. LGPL linked library + (your own code) = Your own license.
You still need to mention that you used LL’s UDP stack, and provide the source code for it at request.

The general client itself should remain GPL, it’s better for LL that way.  Just the items that they want people to ’standardize’ on. It would help..   if it was at least LGPL

Tish: And the value to  LL on LGPLing these parts is it helped spread their basic technology while protecting the rest of their viewer?

Teravus: It furthers their goal of standardization on their systems because it allows more people to adopt it for their own uses without worrying about GPL-ing their own client.

Tish: It is hard to standardize without access to the low level parts of the client right?

Teravus: The general population of Developers..     will want a libX that they can plug into their application for communicating.. .  libY to deal with object data..

Tish: Hence your requests for LGPL were  UDP stack and  the prim->mesh/UV

Teravus nods

Tish: and at the moment they only have openmv?

Teravus: That’s the only ‘truly’ open standard right now as far as the LL technology is concerned. OpenSimulator’s use of that data..   could also be seen as a standard..

Teravus: But we have not published anything beyond code..   neither have they  really..  technically..  but their organization of the way things work is very very clear

Tish: What are the most significant limitations of openmv?

Teravus: Probably..  just it not being in c++.   c++ has it’s benefits and it’s pitfalls.  Changes in c++ usually take longer then ones in C#.  But, of course c++ is always faster.  With libOMV It isn’t always clear about what packet is used when.  However, with some experimentation, you can figure it out in 30 minutes or less..

Usability

We didn’t spend much time discussing some of the innovation in usability that this architectural integration into Web 2.0 will enable (more to come on that!). But, Teravus mentioned one interesting use case he is working on.

Teravus: You might also stick a ‘cloud renderer’ into the graphic [Tervaus was looking at the diagram (from Dion Hinchcliffe) that opened my previous post on “Web 2.0 to OpenSim Made easy”  click on the thumbnail below].

Some people have discussed having a ‘video stream’ that’s rendered on the cloud and providing that to flash clients would be the best solution to it for them.

The cloud renderer is for organizations that have large pools of servers with GPUs so would allow for very powerful rendering. The servers can render the scenes and stream them to the low end browsers. It would allow extremely high quality rendering for really low end browsers..  such as ‘cell phones.’

Tish: Is that possible now on OpenSim?

Teravus: Nope.  But it’s something that in the future, I intend on working on. It would essentially be a video [streamed to low end browsers].

Tish: Is that different from what Vollee is doing? The mobile client for SL?

Teravus:  It appears that they are, indeed, pre-rendering the client’s view and streaming it to the mobile device

Web 2.0 surpasses all previous technologies in its ability to “explicitly leverage network effects” (a definition of Web 2.0 from Tim O’Reilly). But, while virtual worlds pass another classic litmus test of Web 2.0 – two way participation, they have been, up to this point, largely cut off from Web 2.0 power/network effects.

Persistent immersive virtual worlds, led by Second Life, have done well as niche markets but they remain relatively isolated from Web 2.0, even though they bring something  vital and new to the internet – real time interaction and dynamic melded states – in contrast to the current web’s large static files, or small changing files.

The slide opening this post is a modification of a slide from Dion Hinchcliffe’s presentation from his Web 2.0 Expo workshop – Building Successful Next Generation Web 2.0 Applications. Virtual worlds are not anywhere to be found on the original. So I asked Rob Smart, IBM, who has just added JSON support to OpenSim to draw OpenSimulator into this picture. In my interview with Rob, later in this post, he discusses the relationship between virtual worlds and Web 2.0 and how JSON is an important step towards virtual worlds taking up a place in Web 2.0 architecture.

When people think of the current architecture of Web 2.0 virtual worlds do not come to mind. But we are on the cusp of a big change in this regard.  Linden Lab and OpenSim, in the Architectural Working Group, AWG, have been working on trust negotiations and the standardization, documentation and use of http (REST enabling).  But more work remains on standardizing and documenting where TCP and UDP streams have to be used to create the immersive real time interactions that are the heart of what virtual worlds bring to today’s web (see my upcoming interview with Teravus Oursley, OpenSim, for more on this).

There is a complex network of connections through identity (1st and 2nd life) that have enabled virtual worlds to implicitly leverage the social networks of  Web 2.0 (see botgirl’s lovely illustration of this above)  The slide above is from W. James Au’s “The Post-Hype State of Virtual World Marketing: What Works, What Doesn’t and Why.”

Mryl (beta) is an application hoping to streamline these linkages with a social gateway for virtual worlds that will provide what  KZero terms “outeroperability”.  In this vein, Second Life developers have produced a number of interesting high level communications applications, including Chatbridge from Intersection Unlimited, to link Second Life better with the web. I will moderate a panel for Orange Island Innovation Week, Wednesday, Oct 1st, 12 noon PDT, Innovative Communications Devices, with Beyers Sellers, Chase Marellan (Chatbridge), Kevni Koolhaven (Learning Tree International).

But, it is the low level architectural integration of virtual worlds into Web 2.0 (along with improved usability and new User Interfaces) that will weave virtual worlds into the fabric of  Web 2.0 and  our everyday lives.  But unlike Eric Schonfeld of TechCrunch, I see interoperability work (see OpenGrid Beta), and the production of standard protocols (see Open Grid Protocol, OGP) that interoperability work helps negotiate, as an important part of the process.

Immersive virtual worlds are still a long way from mainstream.  I attended the Forrester Business and Technology Leadership Forum in Orlando last week to help Oliver Goh, business development executive at Implenia, talk about delivering results with virtual worlds. We found the audience, while familiar with many aspects of Web 2.0 and its business value,  had relatively little direct experience with virtual worlds. But, the interest and excitement with this technology was very apparent.

Architectural integration of  virtual worlds in Web 2.0 and the standardization of protocols (using existing web standards where possible) will change the picture, creating new opportunities to improve usability, create specific clients for particular needs, facilitate mashups, and leverage network effects, and more!  And, JSON support for OpenSim is an important step as it allows virtual worlds to explicitly begin talking the language of Web 2.0.

Rob Smart is an Emerging Technology Specialist located at IBM Hursley where he works as part of the IBM CIO office Metaverse Initiative. In Second Life he is known as Yossarian Seattle and became known to some as the inventor of the translation HUD, which was his second foray into integrating Virtual Worlds with Web applications. The first project was enabling some of IBM’s messaging products to publish events into Second Life, including creation of an RSS Viewer for Second Life.  Recently, Rob has been working with clients integrating their internal IT services with various virtual world platforms. His interests now extend to the OpenSim project, with a focus on integration of enterprise data and common web APIs into OpenSim.

Interview with Rob Smart, IBM

Tara5 Oh – on the right (me, Tish Shute)  interviewed Yoassarian Seattle (Rob Smart, IBM) in Second Life outside Andy Stanford-Clark’s remote control house on Hursley island  (for more see here)

Tara5 Oh: I am interviewing you from the media lounge at Web 2.0 Expo and coincidently it seems JSON is the hot standard here, in fact, the hottest it seems other than RSS for its ubiquity.

Yossarian Seattle: Yes, well the popularity of JSON stems from increase of AJAX enabled websites that need to frequently pass data between server and web browser and have the javascript in a web-page understand that data. It provides a simple, lightweight way of serialising your server-side objects and doesnt require lots of extra coding in the browser like XML data does.

Tara5 Oh: As virtual worlds are still isolated from many of the network effects of Web 2.0, at the moment could you explain how integrating JSON support to OpenSim is “Web 2.0 made easy for OpenSim?”

Yossarian Seattle: JSON was created to make data exchange from browser to server easy. We want that same exchange between VWs and web servers to be equally as simple. However JSON was written with javascript in mind as you can call a simple eval() function and that’s it, you’re done and you have a nice object to use in the browser. So as a result lots of these nice service APIs out there in Web 2.0 land talk JSON, e.g. Google Translation service, flickrs image querying etc. Also our internal IBM web 2.0 systems talk JSON.

But Second Life and OpenSim so far have poor string handling functions which meant that in LSL, in particualar, parsing anything more than a simple piece of JSON was just not an option.

Lots of coders and developers in Second Life have to run PHP and other scripts on external web servers to act as an intermediary stage in calling thse Web 2.0 APIs.

Thats a real pain, and means you need to have a server somewhere and up full time if others are to use your scripts. Whereas now, with this osParseJSON. function you can forget all that hassle and go straight to the source from OpenSim.

Its a simple but powerful enabler of Web 2.0 technology. I expect it will take people a while to find it and start using it, but it just widens the accessibility for those people who get into scripting in OpenSim.

I’m planning to do a similar thing for XML parsing, but its a bit lower on my priorities at the moment. JSON parsing gives a good quick win so to speak

Tara5 Oh: I just sent you a couple of slides ‘cos one thing I have noticed here at the Web 2.0 Expo is that the understanding of where OpenSim might fit into the architecture of Web 2.0 is vague to zero.

Can you sketch something that relates OpenSim into current understandings of Web 2.0 architecture?

Yossarian Seattle: Really in that first diagram with the APIs etc OpenSim just fits on the level of the web servers. And actually that diagram is a bit wrong as there should arrows between the web servers as sites should really be connected to each other.  I’ll stick in here

OpenSim is being REST enabled. At the moment its access to assets, clothes, objects, etc. from the asset servers. But there is no reason that REST interface cannot give access to people logged on, object positions sim layouts etc.

Tara5 Oh: Could you explain the difference between the power of REST for virtual world technology in relation to the power of JSON?

Yossarian Seattle: So REST is really just calling a web URL. You use the tree structure of the URL to indicate your asking for different data. Whereas JSON is an encoding for the actual data that’s returned to you. So they are complementary really. But there has already been some discussion within the OpenSim community about introducing new APIs to OpenSim that allow different clients to connect.

I personally think that VWs are too siloed currently. At the moment in VWs it’s pretty much one world one client. Providing REST or other interfaces to the world data opens up the possiblity of a wider range of clients accessing those worlds. And when i say clients i’m talking about flash interfaces, browser interfaces or other 3d interfaces such as Unity3d clients.

Tara5 Oh: Could you tell me more about Unity3d?

Yossarian Seattle: Unity3d is a game engine. It’s a very flexible engine and adheres to a lot of the 3d modeling standards etc. One of its most interesting features is the ability to deploy the games/applications you make as web brower plugins (as well as windows/mac stand alone). I’ve been messing around with it for a while now, I can show you some demos while you’re over at the VW conf in London.

Tara5 Oh: Another theme at this conference, raised by O’Reilly in his keynote, is that the future is “world to web,” e.g ., sensor projects etc.

Yossarian Seattle: Ah well that’s another favourite topic of mine with regards to VWs Hursley is the home of realtime messaging technology.

At the moment as I say there is pretty much one VW client to VW server and because the only library to acces SL and OpenSim is openmv( formerly libsl) that restricts new clients to being written in c#  There isn’t a java library, a flash library , a php library a ruby library etc.

So if in OpenSim we add new connectors, REST ones, talking JSON or XML then we enable lots of new client types and VWs become another mashable service in the Web 2.0 world.

Its about making it easy to get information in and information out. Web 2.0 sites don’t do realtime very well, whereas VWs do. VWs are the real time space that the web often tries to provide but kind of half fudges. Web Servers aren’t built to deal with realtime asynchronous data.

Its interesting how you mention Web 2.0 not really acknowledging Virtual Worlds as when I read the terms of service for a lot of the APIs they’re very specific about use from other web sites but they often dont cover the use of the API from other applications.

Tara5 Oh: Really?

Yossarian Seattle: Yes.

Tara5 Oh: What does this mean?

Yossarian Seattlee: It doesn’t necessarily have any significance for some services. But there is often specific text saying for example that you must use a particular piece of HTML on a page and show the API owners logo etc

I think as time goes on though and more people connect to Web 2.0 services from within VWs then they will be acknowledged as a valid service consumer, after all VWs are platforms that provide novel ways for people to display and interact with data.

Tara5 Oh: I know Hursley and other IBMers have done some nice use case of RL data integration in OpenSim and Second Life. What is your favorite for illustrating the power of Virtual Worlds to bring realtime world to web experiences to Web 2.0

Yossarian Seattle: Andy Stanford-Clark’s remote control house on Hursley island is still a favourite.

I did a hook up ages back with a messaging product MQTT and Second Life. I’d like to revisit that work and extend it. i’m interested in propagating events between platforms whether they be VWs or Web sites.

Tara5 Oh: I am amazed how little play virtual worlds have here at the Web 2.0 Expo.

Yossarian Seattle: Virtual Worlds live somewhere between the gaming world and the web 2.0 world. We see it with the flash social worlds too they edge more towards gaming.

Tara5 Oh: What do you think are the gains of virtual worlds getting more integrated with Web 2.0?

Yossarian Seattle: Virtual Worlds are a platform and and its often said by some that they’re not interested in taking part yet as they haven’t yet seen a killer app for Virtual Worlds. Some of that view stems from the fact that VWs are very isolated it’s hard to get content in and hard to get it back out again.

Virtual Worlds are the shared realtime spaces of the Internet, up until now this position has been filled by IRC chat rooms and instant messaging apps. Neither of these forms lend themselves particularly well to group interaction. VWs are streets ahead in terms of rich social interaction and sharing of content and experiences.

Tara5 Oh: You mentioned you just started working on OpenSim development and becoming part of this growing effort.

Yossarian Seattle: Yep thats right. There is a very vibrant community around OpenSim.

Tara5 Oh: Why did you decide to put your energy into OpenSim at this time?

Yossarian Seattle: I’m now working for IBMs CIO office Metaverse initiative and investigating all of the relevant VWs is one of our remits. OpenSim is my chosen focus.

Tara5 Oh: What is CIO?

Yossarian Seattle: One of the IBM CIO office responsibilities is to look at and provide technologies and tools that improve the productivity of IBMers world wide. But as you know IBM has several people working on the OpenSim project and there is an interested community internally. I’m looking at how we can hook up OpenSim to our existing web 2.0 services internally.

Tara5 Oh: What kind of internal Web Services?

Yossarian Seattle: We have a number of internal Web 2.0 based systems that provide APIs for data sharing, things like Blogcentral our internal blogging platform, Fringe which contains customizable profile information, Beehive is a social networking platform helps people share their interests, track and schedule events within IBM. We also have a platform called TAP (Technology Adoption Program) where people can share services and applications they have created with other IBMers. In addition we have Cattail, a file repository that allows easy sharing and tagging of all types of file. There are many more useful internal services than this even all of which could be integrated with OpenSim.

The nice thing is though that OpenSim affords that flexibility to integrate it with our products and with existing web systems, and provide value back to the community at the same time.

Tara5 Oh: So do you have any thoughts about the path to standards for virtual worlds?

Yossarian Seattle: In terms of standards I think it’s a case of look at whats out there and successful at the current time not just in terms of 3d models, but in terms of real time chat protocols like XMPP things like JSON, REST as well and pick those for the relevant components

The reason for this is every time you introduce a new standard, you have to wait for the communities to catch up and write language specific APIs for that standard.

[Better to use existing ones where possible and give the communities that will build the tools and the extensions a head start.

Tara5 Oh: This is also some of why top down standards like MPEG-V have issues?

Yossarian Seattle: Yep, standards often work best when they’re bottom up, like JSON.

As I mentioned before because the messaging structure currently for OpenSim and Second Life is proprietary (although open) and the only library is libsl (openmv) thats stopped a lot of potential innovation by restricting client/bot developemtn to the c# language.

Tara5 Oh: why is client/bot development restricted to c#?

Yossarian Seattle: Because currently the only library you can use to talk the Second Life libsl (openmv) is written in c#

Tara5 Oh: What do you see as the way through this obstacle?

Yossarian Seattle: If for example the messages that went between your SecondLife client and the OpenSim/SecondLife servers was a standard protocol which had a bunch of libraries for a variety of languages. Then you could start logging into VW servers from all kinds of clients

Tara5 Oh: Aren’t there plenty of standard messaging protocols to use?

Yossarian Seattle: Yep, but at the moment they’re not being used. There are some technical reasons for that. like reducing the amount of data to be downloaded etc. But there’s a balance to be had somewhere.

Tara5 Oh: But in a modular architecture like OpenSim what is to stop them being implemented?

Yossarian Seattle: There isn’t anything to stop them being implemented in OpenSim Which is why i like it

Tara5 Oh: I hear a lot about people wanting to change the physics in OpenSim/Second Life (the linking to the physics simulation in particular). Do you have thoughts on this or is it not on your agenda currently?

Yossarian Seattle: There are a few different physics modules already. Though to be honest i don’t think its the most important area to focus on, for me at least.

But obviously a high end physics engine is going to benefit anyone who wants to do any kind of simulation.

And that’s the beauty of Open Source, someone else will have that as their priority.

Yossarian Seattle: I think there’s a lot of work that needs to be done around ease of adoption still. i’d like it to be easy for people to write new clients for OpenSim.

When we get to that stage then people can produce simplified cut down clients to suit their precise need, so if you’re a retailer and just want to showcase products and let people shop you have a UI to reflect that.

Tara5 Oh: What about the OpenViewer project?

Yossarian Seattle: It’s a wider problem and piece of work. Well notice that openviewer is written in c# That’s because they’re limited again to using libsl (openmv). libsl recently changed it name by the way which is why i’m bracketing it.

Tara5 Oh: So it doesn’t address the underlying issue of messaging and open API’s for OpenSim.

Yossarian Seattle: Not really. But they have made the wise choice of releasing it under a free BSD license, which will enable more people to work on the project.

Tara5 Oh: Intel is working on breaking out openmv into smaller building blocks and basic types. How will this contribute to efforts to integrate OpenSim with Web 2.0?

Yossarian Seattle: Yes they recently hired John Hurliman who wrote a lot of it. i’m following what they do with interest.

Tara5 Oh: John wrote the original openmv?

Yossarian Seattle: He started the project back in 2006 .

Tara5 Oh: How will the work he is doing on openmv now help with the goal of making it easy to write new clients?

Yossarian Seattle: Well if they provide libraries in different languages that would be a good start and breaking it into chunks would allow anyone writing a client to pick and choose between the function they enable in their custom client.

However I’m not sure that’s tackling the root of the problem still.

Tara5 Oh: ‘cos the root of the problem is the messaging protocols which restrict you at the minute to C# for the client?

Yossarian Seattle: The standards need to be applied at the server end, to make it truly accessible.

Tara5 Oh: And these messaging standards need to allow for more than C# development?

Yossarian Seattle: exactly.

Tara5 Oh: well is seems like something quite doable, just time?

Yossarian Seattle: and careful thought

Yossarian Seattle: A lot of people are focusing on issues such as object portability in VWs but i’m not sure those are the ones to be concerned about right now, the games industry seems to have settled on collada as a standard for that. These VWs platforms are complex beasts and the games industry has already solved a certain amount of problems. However in terms of social interactions the VWs industry is ahead, a blend of games and social media.

Tara5 Oh: But games platforms have not solved either the web 2.0 effects or the web to world have they where things get most interesting now?

Yossarian Seattle: No and the games industry is playing catch up in that sense.

Yossarian Seattle: Little Big Planet will be the game that brings user created content into the mainstream for 3d worlds.

Yossarian Seattle: did you read this article? http://eightbar.co.uk/2008/09/10/moving-cubes-from-world-to-world/ that’s not a hack or anything in there.

That’s a full publish subscribe messaging client embedded in unity3d, realtime events across worlds.

Tara5 Oh: What do you think are the most interesting  world to web ideas that Andy’s house points too?

Yossarian Seattle: Well the fact that the communication is two way, both in and out of world and also that its real time. when something happens in Andy’s real house it happens here too.

Tara5 Oh: Yes I am very interested in the development of  the paraverse!

Yossarian Seattle: There is a personal project Peter Finn has been looking at in IBM, which is actually called Paraverse and is taking real world data including geospatial mapping information and applying it in OpenSim.

Unfortunately our interview ended here, at a very interesting point (I had to go to a panel at the Web 2.0 Expo, NYC). But  James Governor’s post/essay – a superlative ode to the paraverse - prompted by his first look at Microsoft ESP visual simulation platform produced an interesting debate on the potential of the Paraverse in the comments that includes a response by Rob. So check it out!

Metanomics host Robert Bloomfield interviewed Second Life founder and Chairman of the Board, Philip Rosedale, at the Second Life Community Convention in Tampa, Florida.  The Rosedale interview is available here (pictures above are Philip Rosedale and his avatar).

Rosedale talked about Linden Lab’s long standing commitment to open source and open protocols in one segment of this interview and Robert asked me to post a brief reaction. The full interview covers a wide range of topics and Robert has gotten responses on different parts of the interview from Wagner James Au, Christian Renaud, ‘Bettina Tizzy,’ Nic Mitham and ‘Dusan Writer,’ and Benjamin Duranske as well.

A System Without an Owner is A beautiful Thing

While Philip Rosedale’s comments may not, at first glance, appear to be saying anything new, they are in fact a very cogent summary of the important and crucial role Linden Lab has played, and continues to play, in moving virtual worlds out of their walled gardens and bringing them closer to that beautiful thing – a system without an owner.

Only a system without an owner can unleash, for virtual world technology, the kind of creative, world changing power that we have seen on the 2D web from http and html.  Anyone with even a vague idea of the history of the internet understands that it is only through openess, open source, open protocols, open standards, and open APIs, that we will get from here – the alpha days of virtual world technology, to their coming of age of age as a mainstream phenomena.

It is very much to the credit of Linden Lab that, as Rosedale says, they have never been afraid of openess: “I don’t think that the open grid will impact our revenues any more than open sourcing the client,”  he says. While there have been criticisms of licensing choices and ways Linden Lab handles contributions back to their viewer from the community, I think that overall Linden Lab has made very important and visionary moves, first to open source, and now to open protocols.

Open sourcing the viewer at a relatively early point in Second Life’s development created an enormous opportunity for the rapid development of an open source re-engineering of the server side, OpenSim.  OpenSim with the Second Life viewer is the most complete, open implementation of a persistent virtual world.  Without the head start from the open source Second Life viewer, and the connection to the thriving developer community of Second Life, the light speed progress of OpenSim would have been considerably more difficult.

Now OpenSim is getting closer to breaking free from the Second Life viewer. And, standard messaging protocols between client and server are, perhaps, the next step. Rob Smart, IBM, discussed this with me recently (see my upcoming interview with Rob Smart, “Web 2.0 Made Easy in OpenSim,” and see his post by this title for more).

As, Rob Smart, IBM, notes, “If, for example, the messages that went between your SecondLife client and the OpenSim/SecondLife servers was a standard protocol which had a bunch of libraries for a variety of languages, then you could start logging into VW servers from all kinds of clients.”  (for more see my upcoming post, “Interview with Rob Smart, IBM: Web 2.0 Made easy for OpenSim.”

Open Standards Will Emerge From Rough Consensus and Working Code

There are some that subscribe to the view that standards will arise in a virgin birth from an ivory tower, i.e., professors and captains of industry, removed from open source developer communities, will produce long documents that describe all of the fields, and every one of the messages, and all the APIs in detail prior to implementation.

But as, David Levine, IBM. Mike Mazur, 3Di, Mic Bowman, Intel, Justin Clark-Casey, and Adam Frisby, Deep Think/Sine Wave cogently argued, on the “Open Source and Interoperable Virtual Worlds” panel at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo in LA, this top down approach to standards, (or “vapor standards”), does not, typically, produce good results. For more on the the virtues of creating standards from “rough consensus and working code” as opposed to top down there is a full recording of the LA panel here.

Thus, in my view, Linden Lab’s current focus on open protocols, OpenGrid (for more see here), and interoperability is another key step towards the creation of open standards for virtual worlds. And Linden Lab are again leading the way in creating an environment that fosters innovation.

OpenGrid creates a testing ground where protocols can be worked out, and it enables the kind of heterogeneous ecosystem to develop that can nurture the creation of standards. I  agree with Rosedale when he says content makers will have an important role in driving interoperability and standards. The creation of standards is certainly a social as well as technical process. And as Rosedale notes content creators will have compelling reasons to move their content around in an open metaverse.

David Levine’s (IBM), described in detail in LA (again see recording here) the importance of interoperability and parallel innovation for the creation of standards. OpenSim has already produced an extraordinary amount of innovation, realXtend, Tribal Media and more. Also see my interview with Mic Bowman, Intel, for more on the role of open source/open standards in fostering innovation and in moving virtual worlds into “the fabric of everday computing.”

While Linden Lab only have a small team working on OpenGrid, it is a vital one.  And, with MarkLentczner (Zero Linden in Second Life) leading the Architectual Working Group for Linden Lab, and a collaboration with IBM led by David Levine (Zha Ewry in Second Life) driving the interoperability effort, plus the OpenGrid project, Linden lab has a high powered, agile, lean, machine working for an open future.

So with no more ado, here it is: Robert Bloomfield’s interview with Philip Rosedale!

Rosedale on Open Sim:  Pandora’s Box Was Already Open

Introduction from Robert Bloomfield

Naturally, a major topic of my interview with Philip Rosedale was on the implications of OpenSim and the Open Grid project, which both involve creating open source server-side implementations of virtual worlds that can replicate Second Life’s funcationality.  As a relative newcomer to this corner of the tech industry, I still find myself asking what a company would essentially create its own competitor.  Here is what Philip had to say; I have asked Tish Shute of UgoTrade to comment, as one of the people who has covered the OpenSim/OpenGrid movement with more detail and passion than just about anyone.

PHILIP ROSEDALE: I just really hold true to the strategic belief that there’s going to be a tremendous amount of consolidation and interconnection between these worlds because the content development process is so challenging that the content developers are going to push us all together. They’re going to say, “Give me a file format. Give me an interchange format. And let me move that chair from this grid to that grid. I’ve got to be able to do that because I’ve got a customer here who wants to buy it.” And so I think that that consolidation is going to happen, and it’s going to happen earlier than people would have thought.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD:  And this is looking at the success, the energy around OpenSim, open grid.

PHILIP ROSEDALE:  The energy, yeah. I think, at this point, we’ve got an appropriate level of energy – I think that’s exactly the right word – around exploring how quickly we can generalize all this stuff and open and interconnect everything together. I really think that’s going to continue.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD:  [D]o you feel like you might have opened Pandora’s box and that it’s not really under your control now?

PHILIP ROSEDALE:  I think that Second Life has, in many ways, not been under our control from the beginning and that it’s been a basic operating assumption that to create the kind of incredible place and business opportunity, and social opportunity more broadly, that Second Life would require a certain lack of control. And that was true with the content from day one.

So for us, oh, we open-sourced the client a while ago, and now we’re trying to do the same thing with respect to operating standards to interconnect grids. This is a pretty logical progression, using worlds that we’re pretty familiar with. I mean we’ve always felt that, if you have a compelling use proposition, which certainly Second Life does, in other words, if there’s real utility, real fun or real business or real whatever in what people are doing, then there should be a way, as a company, to be open, global and still make money on an hour-to-hour or a user-to-user basis or whatever on what we’re doing. And the economic aspects of the business have been fantastic from the very early days, and we don’t really even worry about them.

Our ability as a company to find a way to make a reasonable amount of money per hour that people spend in Second Life, it’s really never been that much of a problem. It’s actually been fascinating as we’ve changed pricing and as we’ve changed the ways that we make money. Introducing new ways of making money –  like selling currency on the LindeX – it’s been amazing how stable our revenues have been as a function of usage hours. It’s one of the things that we sometimes marvel at. It’s almost an emergent effect, if you will, that the company’s business, its operating revenues are really very stable.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD:  Even though they’re coming from different streams.

PHILIP ROSEDALE:  Even though they’re coming from different streams. And sometimes the requirements of the platform and decisions that we make will really substantially change the nature of those streams, but when you put them all together and you divide them by the number of usage hours, it’s like a constant. It’s almost a magic number. And it’s a magic number that allows us to be profitable, and therefore, is certainly adequate to make a business in the future. I don’t think that continuing to open Second Life up as we have been is going to impact that. Again, I just think there are so many opportunities to make money that we shouldn’t have to worry about that too much in the company. And, again, I think that’s a lot like the early internet. I mean if you step back and look holistically at the internet – you look at PayPal, the payment systems, auction systems, transaction systems, posting, naming – you look at all the businesses that comprise the internet, well, those are all the kinds of businesses that we as a company can be in, in this emerging market. There’s no business that’s denied us. We are in the hosting business. We can continue to be in the hosting business long term, putting servers up and providing access to them.

We can certainly be in the naming business. We’re in the currency and transaction support business. It’s funny, it’s something that’s often discussed. We worry much more about improving the scalability, stability and the usability of the system: reducing that initial user experience, reducing the time associated with it, making it easier. That’s got to be the lever that drives more growth in the overall industry, more revenues for us. So it’s really all we worry about. But I don’t think that the open grid will impact our revenues any more than open sourcing the client did.

Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media addressed the audience of the Web 2.0 Expo with a series of challenging questions. I felt happy that so many people I know are already answering this call “to do something worthy” with Web 2.0 and “to make technology that matters.”  However, many of these people were not at the Web 2.0 Expo.  This is, in part, because as O’Reilly pointed out:

if you look at the focus of a lot of what you call ‘Web 2.0,’ the relentless focus on advertising-based consumer models, lightweight applications, we may be living in somewhat of a bubble, and I’m not talking about an investment bubble. (It’s) a reality bubble.”

But as I explored the conference and expo, I did find friends, old and new, dedicated to figuring out how to use Web 2.0 to make a better world.

Caroline McCarthy has an excellent post, on CNET news on the message of Tim O’Reilly’s keynote address.

If you have read Ugotrade before you already know the threads I have been following re the potential for virtual worlds for positive global development and to reduce the carbon footprint of business, so some of McCarthy’s comments caught my attention:

There’s an inherent irony in what O’Reilly said, given the fact that massive conferences like the Web 2.0 Expo are packed with the trendspeak and hype that birthed SuperPoke-like entertainment, and certainly aren’t helping the environment by distributing tons of press kits and swag–not to mention flying in hundreds of attendees in a massive spurt of carbon emissions.

To be fair, O’Reilly Media has been printing fewer event programs and encouraging conference goers to recycle, and it has used carpeting made of post-consumer material.

There is clearly a lot that needs to change, and perhaps the tech industry trend of large-scale conferences is part of it. We’ll see whether Silicon Valley’s leaders and moguls are willing to do what they think is right, rather than what they think is profitable.

But, as Tim O’Reilly pointed out, the huge problems we face today create an enormous amount of opportunity for us to find creative solutions.

“We are going to figure out how to make a better world using the power of the web.” O’Reilly

Virtual World technology will soon, play a major role in re-imagining these tech industry large-scale conferences. There is an talented and dedicated community of open source developers working hard to take this nascent area of Web 2.0 technology mainstream through open source, open standards, and open API’s. I am so proud to be part of this global community!

Virtual Worlds were only a very small part of the Web 2.0 Expo. W. James Au’s “The Post-Hype State of Virtual World Marketing: What Works, What Doesn’t and Why” was the only panel I noticed focusing on Virtual Worlds in any of the main tracks. This reflects the relative lack of integration of virtual worlds into Web 2.0.

One of my passions is to make this isolation of virtual world technology from Web 2.0 a thing of the past (see my upcoming post on Rob Smart’s, IBM, integration of JSON support into OpenSim – which is a vital step towards Web 2.0 made easy for OpenSim).

But, as W. James Au pointed out very eloquently, this notion of isolation is really not accurate, even now. For example, Second Life communities interact in myriad and powerful ways with other social media communities on the web despite the current  lack of common protocols that have kept immersive virtual worlds architecturally cut off from some of the networking effects of Web 2.0.

But, for all of us living here in the US, O’Reilly’s most important message was simple and fundamental. So let’s reblog, retweet, plurk, friendfeed, facebook, send it out on notecards in SL, make machinima, and spread the word in every way available to us.

“Bad politicians are elected by good people who don’t vote.”

“There is no reason in 2008 to do shit you hate, ‘cos you can lose just as much money being happy as hell.”

Quote and pic above from Gary Vaynerchuk’s keynote, Web 2.0 Expo, 2008 (also see Execute on Being you).

“Do something you love,” Vaynerchuk

I personally can’t wait until the potent mix of real time interaction in immersive spaces is combined with the networking effects of Web 2.0. Not just because this will unleash an awesome new wave of innovation and creativity but the early adopters I have met in immersive virtual worlds, and the phenom developers in the rapidly growing open source communities of this emerging technology, have passion, do stuff they love, and do stuff that is worthy, w00t!

And further: “Do Something Worthy,” O’Reilly

While speakers and exhibitors from virtual worlds were scant in the main hall and panel tracks, Second Life had a strong showing in the  “Do Something You Love,” “Do something that need’s to be done” zone of the Not For profit strip. “Create more value than you capture” (from O’Reilly’s keynote) is the natural heart of their mission.

Below is the awesome Evonne Heyning ( InKenzo in Second Life) of Amoration.

What is Amoration?
AMO:  The root of love
~ation:  The state of being, practice and study
Amoration:  living in love, a practice of open engagement
Our Mission:  To Create a Culture of Conscious Compassion

Evonne addressed the problem of the Not For Profit’s being in an out of the way strip in the Expo hall with some very tasty peanut brittle.

In Contrast, the MS Surface crew, in a prime location, playing with super shiny things, did not have to do much to keep a crowd at their table!

I IMed my friend Kyle Gomboy (G2 Proto in SL) from the Microsoft Development Community in Second Life and in OpenSim to ask him if the Microsoft  .net, technet, and c#  developers in OpenSim had any plans to integrate Surface with OpenSim.  I saw the Surface/Virtual Earth integration  and realized Surface with OpenSim would be hotness for a small company looking to develop a vertical for hospitality, medicine, or education. At between 12 to 15K with SDK and two days training, Surface is priced in a range a small company can probably afford.

G2 also came up with a thought that would bring shiny together with worthy when he mentioned to me how great it would be to see Surface in every public school library in the country.

See Rik Riel’s blog for a nice video of the MS Surface demo in the expo hall.

“The Making of Second Life,” W. James Au’s book signing

From left to right, Rik Rik Panganiban from Global Kids (Rik Riel in SL), Joyce Bettencourt, Rhiannon Chatnoir, in SL, W. James Au, (Hamlet Au in SL),  Evonne Heyning ( InKenzo in Second Life), Jennifer Schlegel (Schlink Lardner in SL).

And further more: “Make technologies that matter,” O’Reilly

One of the highlights for me of w2e was getting an inside look at the Interop NOC and meeting Bill “WEJ” Jensen the Troubleshooting Lead of the InteropNETteam (WEJ center sitting at the Mac).

The Interop NOC is a “real” world work of art  – “the largest temporary network in the world” where voluteers have come together with industry leaders to take on the ultimate network challenge – “creating a completely interoperable network using the industry’s most cuting edge technology.”

If you have been reading Ugotrade you will know I have been following the work of Michael Osias, IBM,  (Illuminous Beltran in SL) who has been creating virtual network operation centers (VNOCs) in OpenSim (for more see  here).  I am looking forward to introducing “WEJ” to Michael’s work which I believe foreshadows a new era for software – along the lines Gelertner first envisioned in 1992. Michael follows the Gelertner vision pretty closely.

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.

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.

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 (Mirror Worlds, David Gelertner 1992).

More on VNOCs in an upcoming post.

Intel obviously benefits from broad adoption of applications that drive significant compute so it is hardly surprising that they had been paying attention to the early adopters of the Gaming & Visual Computing market.  But, in a recent post the Intel blog states, “going forward the bigger growth will be coming from the other two segments Metaverse and Paraverse (for more on the future of the paraverse see the recording of the Augmented reality panel in LA in my previous post.)

(Thanks Joshua Meadows (Joshua Nightshade in SL), Abstract Avatars, for the picture of the Linden Lab booth at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo, LA 2008.  Those giant avatars from Second Life (TM) are very cool. That is John Lester (Pathfinder Linden) in the striped shirt helping give us an idea of their scale.)

Intel is also in a powerful position to facilitate mass adoption of rich, immersive virtual worlds  where there is a direct connection between more compute and better user experience.  As Christian Renaud pointed out in, The Techology Intelligence Group’s Virtual Worlds Industry Outlook, 2008 -2009 (written with Sean F. Kane Esq.), the “ability for the computer’s graphics subsystems to render the data as quickly as required” has been an obstacle for mainstream adoption of virtual worlds. But, Renaud goes on to note, Intel’s new Larrabee architecture may be a game changer for virtual worlds.

Recent announcements may change the landscape.  At the SIGGRAPH trade show in August 2008, Intel announced their Larrabee architecture, slated for product release in the late 2009-2010 timeframe.  This would take what has typically been a separate Graphical Processing Unit (GPU)  function and relocate it into the processor architecture on the motherboard of a computer.
Although the early stages of this technology will undoubtably be prone to compatibility issues with legacy graphics drivers, the assimilation of this function on to the main motherboard should streamline the graphics performance and compatibility issues that virtual worlds have been susceptible to.

Jobi George, on the Intel blog explains how Intel sees three segments, gaming, metaverse, and paraverse as driving “the next logical evolution of web, where “connectedness” and “immersion” (not just richness) come together to bring us to an era of  “Connected Visual Computing” (see the press coverage of CVC here, here, and here).

Getting from here (gaming, metaverse, paraverse) to there (connected visual computing)

Mic Bowman, Intel, was on two panels at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo in LA last week. I wrote up and posted the recording of the panel I facilitated, “Open Source, Interoperable Virtual Worlds” in my previous post. On our panel, Mic explained in detail some of the work Intel is doing to help us get from here (gaming, metaverse, paraverse) to there (connected visual computing). Mic also spoke on the Virtual World Road Map session with keynote speaker, Sibley Verbeck, Electric Sheep Company, (see Sibley’s blog). This panel focused more on cross industry cooperation.

Mic’s message for our panel on “OpenSource and Interoperable Virtual Worlds,” in a nutshell was:

To achieve a thriving, growing, broadly adopted CVC ecosystem, we believe the industry must come to some agreement on common building block technologies. Open source technologies represent a critical element in the discovery and development of these technologies, and foster innovative usages that drive adoption.

To give you a taste of how deeply (err yes we were a panel of unbridled geekiness to some)  we discussed the work being done to research and create these common building blocks. Here is a short transcription of a portion of Mic’s contribution to our panel, lightly edited.

The creation of common building blocks for virtual worlds similar to what HTML and HTTP did for the internet is a vital step, in Mic’s view, for the transition to connected visual computing and for the experience of virtual worlds to become ubiquitous and transparent in the way that when we say “browse the web,” i.e., we take the “web” for granted it is the applications YouTube, Flickr etc that gets our attention

The Evolution of the Web Into Connected Visual Computing

In 1995 we talked about surfing the web, nobody uses that phrase any more. Today we talk about updating our blogs or adding something to twitter, or I want to go off and buy something from E-Bay or Amazon. The web has become essentially a fundamental part of the fabric. It’s the applications that it enables that are important. Right now we think about virtual world technologies generally as an application. Ultimately we would like to figure out how to get that kind of technology into the basic fabric. So that we think about collaboration as an application, we think about a conference, and attending the conference, as the thing we do, not as a platform on which we do that. And to accomplish that, what we envision at Intel is a set of building blocks that are created or emerge out of the various platforms, as being consistent technologies.

And so we looked at a variety of different approaches to understanding what those technologies could be, what those common technologies were, and how they are created and adopted. What we saw in OpenSim’s modular architecture, was an opportunity to start articulating boundaries between the various pieces of technology in a way that allowed us to disaggregate the architecture so that we could start thinking about how to pull the pieces apart and think about how the interfaces could be made consistent across those pieces. For example, there’s a set of types for the basic building blocks that exist across the Second Life and OpenSim protocols.

One of the people we just hired John Hurliman has been working libopenmv for awhile, and as one of the things we were having a discussion about is how to capture that consistency of types. And so John’s going off and pulling the set of modules out of the openmv project, in order to give us a basic set of types that can be applied across multiple applications, that can be re-used in many different ways.  And so it’s useful to the OpenSim community, and its useful for building out some new test servers and clients that can allow us to actually try out different types of load, and potentially allows us a way of extracting out the set of protocols that implement those types so that we can start looking at new ways of building more efficient protocols.

Another example of that would be the meshing code, the code that actually takes the basic conceptual level of object that is being represented in the world and turns it into something that can actually be sent to a GPU in order to be put on a screen. And so that basic meshing component that breaks it down seems to be something that we see as a consistent piece of technology that occurs in  several places that’s useful both in sort of mapping the representation into the physics engine and on the client mapping it into the graphics engine. And so that’s another example of the basic technology that seems to be appearing to consistently in many locations.

And so, what we like about OpenSim in particular, and again this is just a tool and framework for us for understanding what these basic building blocks are, but what we like about it is we can experiment with these new boundaries in the framework of a complete and functioning system. And so it gives us a framework for testing out what these interfaces should be and what the basic building blocks are.

Mic pointed out some of the key points of OpenSim architecture and ecosystem at the Intel Developer Forum. The slide below is from his presentation there.

(The Genkii team created the OpenSim N-Body demonstration with astrophysicists Piet Hut and Junichiro Makino, see here for more).

Interview with Mic Bowman:  “The Future of Connected Visual Computing.”

1) First could you define what you mean by, “Connected visual computing?”

Connected Visual Computing is the union of three application domains: mmog, metaverse, and paraverse (or augmented reality). These application domains are united through common technologies, especially 3D content creation, and common properties such as persistence, social interaction, rich presentation, and user-generated content with potentially complex behaviors.

2) One of the key aspects of fostering innovation in a new technology  is recognizing the important paradigm shifts that it fosters.  New forms of collaboration are one  potentially most disruptive contributions of  virtual worlds.  However, I know you have gone a little further than most on thinking how virtual worlds create new opportunities for non-linear, asynchronous collaboration.  Could you explain some of your thinking on this? And, why developing thinking about the applications of virtual worlds is something you and thus Intel has got involved with?

This slide is from Mic Bowman’s presentation “Non-Linear Presentation: or how to use virtual worlds for asynchronous collaboration.”

Although Intel’s research agenda focuses on the hard ware platform impact of CVC applications, it is necessary to understand the different usages that CVC enables. To that end, we built an experimental tool in OpenSim where we could explore new modes of collaboration designed exclusively for virtual worlds. That is, we didn’t want to look for ways to just translate our real world collaborative culture into the virtual world, we wanted to find out what unique forms of collaboration are enabled by virtual worlds. The first result is a tool we call non-linear presentations.

In addition, Intel actively collaborates with Qwaq/Croquet to integrate information space visualization into their enterprise collaboration tool “Qwaq Forums”.

3) Why did Intel choose to engage with OpenSim?

We like OpenSim because it has the best logo. Go Hippos!

Seriously… a year ago we started to look at open source platforms for virtual worlds. Open source platforms provide a completely functional framework that enables researchers to focus on specific innovations. My group wanted to look at scalability limitations in the distributed systems software architecture of CVC applications. We considered four candidate platforms (OpenSim, Croquet, Ogoglio, and Wonderland). We chose OpenSim because it was the most complete implementation of a persistent world. In addition, the development community was most active. Further, the modular architecture makes it easier to experiment with new functionality.

4) I know you have contributed code to OpenSim,  will Intel be putting more developers into OpenSim in the future?

Our focus is on investigating general technologies to support broad adoption of scalable CVC applications. That is, we want to understand the general problems that limit scalability across multiple CVC applications. However, it is important to validate general principles through specific implementations (even better, implementations with real end users). As a result, we expect to continue our collaboration with the OpenSim development community and with the emerging end-user community.

5) You mentioned you were doing some testing on OpenSim.  Have you found specific areas in Intel’s domain  that could be significantly improve OpenSim performance?

Our research is still very early stage. In one area, however, we have some very promising early results. Script execution in CVC applications creates unique stress on the platform with potentially thousands of concurrently executing scripts. One method we are investigating appears to improve performance and scales to the number of hardware threads on the CPU.

6) Everyone I think agrees that OpenSim and a next generation browser/viewer would be killer.  And when we talked last you mentioned interest in the OpenViewer project.  What do you see as being the best way forward on this very big task?

Clearly, experimentation with new communication protocols requires that we modify both the client and server. Licensing issues with existing viewers certainly complicate any effort to modify the viewer.

7) And, what about the user experience in virtual worlds?  What might be the contribution of browser-based views?  What are your thoughts on this?

Browser-based viewers are a reflection of deployment challenges. Broad adoption of CVC applications requires that the industry address the problem of simplified deployment, whether through stand-alone viewer (or viewer platform) consolidation or through browser-based viewers.

Software as a service is one approach that could address the deployment problem. Limitations in browser-based sandboxes must be addressed to deliver appropriate client performance and experience.

9) Intel has Havok and a software ray tracing engine that scales to cores.  The latter would really make for a completely new generation of  virtual world viewers.  Can you explain some of the innovations you see coming from this ray tracing engine?  And will there be a special license offered to bring Havok into reach of the open source community? What role / impact will Larrabee have?

Ray tracing is particularly helpful in making user-created content look good. Let me give you a concrete example… In a professionally authored 3D environment, objects can be placed with complete understanding of the lighting requirements. In any virtual world where users can create or customize content (including simple customizations like changing the placement of objects), lighting cannot be predicted (and as a result it is very difficult to create the appropriate shading for objects). Ray tracing (both as a runtime component and as an offline tool) can dynmically compute appropriate lighting, shadows and reflections.

Havok is a fully owned subsidiary of Intel with an independent business model. Questions of Havok’s license should be directed to Havok. (see the link to the Havok evaluation and developers licenses)

As a compute engine, Larrabee is designed for compute loads that frequently occur in CVC applications including physics (collision detection), spatialization of audio, and ray tracing. In usages where rich immersion, ie accurate physical simulation and photorealistic content, determines the quality of user experience, Larrabee can certainly improve the user’s experience.

10) How do you see the landscape for virtual worlds five years out?

Obviously any predictions on the future of an industry as immature as virtual worlds must be considered highly speculative. That being said, Intel’s vision is that the industry, as it matures, forms around a relatively small set of basic common building block technologies that are sufficiently general to enable many different usages. Examples we see emerging include identity, presence, text and voice communication, and asset/object management/storage. These basic building blocks can be put together with physics, game engines, and other tools to address the needs of a particular usage.

OpenSim was in the spotlight at Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo, LA 2008. OpenSim won a conference Innovation Award and the OpenSim booth was a hub of activity.

At one time I saw conference attendees from Microsoft, Intel, and IBM all in conversation at the OpenSim table. A video of the OpenSim integration with Lotus SameTime was a centerpiece to Colin Pariss’, IBM,  keynote interview with Erica Driver of Think Balm. And, just to back up what might seem my own seriously partisan opinion, I will note Wagner James Au made OpenSim the first of his top three picks from the conference for GigaOM

And, if you want to know why OpenSim is sizzling hot these days and you can manage some serious gearhead discussion here is an audio recording of our “Open Source, Interoperable Virtual Worlds” panel.

I was facilitator for a stellar group of  virtual world uber geeks/phenom developers from OpenSim: Adam Frisby, OpenSim/SineWave, Mic Bowman, Intel, Justin Clark-Casey, Fashion Research Institute, Mike Mazur, 3Di and David Levine, IBM.  See Dusan Writer’s blog for more on the heights of geekdom that were reached in the discussion, and for some interesting thoughts on the intersection of code, standards and social policy.

I open this post with a picture of Adam Frisby, Joshua Meadows, myself and Tess Linden enjoying some pre-conference Venice Beach time. Thanks Tess for showing us that you can be a phenom developer and get beach attire right!

But, the heart of our panel’s message was straightforward and powerful (yes I am obviously caught up in campaign season and on a message kick) . But in case you missed the LA Virtual Worlds conference here is the essence/message of our panel again, from my perspective, and in my words, and in short (relatively!!).

Open Source and Interoperability are the Basis for Innovation in Virtual Worlds.

This picture is from Adam Frisby’s blog of OpenSim “booth babes”  with the  Innovation Award.  They were dubbed “booth babes” by Dusan Writer in counterpoint to David Levine’s comment on seeing this photo, “What a bunch of nerds!”  David is in the center. And from the left Justin Clark-Casey (justincc), Adam Frisby (afrisby), Charles Krinke (ckrinke), David Levine (zha ewry), Adam Johnson (adjohn), Mike Mazur (mikem), Jeff Ames (chil1ken)

Basic building blocks and interoperability work will make Virtual Worlds part of the fabric of everyday computing

Big players like IBM and Intel are often asked why so much interest in OpenSim, in particular, when their goals obviously reach well beyond one platform. The answer to this, panelists explained, is that OpenSim is providing the best environment currently available to explore what will be the basic building blocks similar to http that will enable virtual worlds to emerge as a mainstream phenomena.

In conjunction with the open source Second Life viewer (despite the need for licensing changes and a new modular architecture which was discussed) OpenSim is the virtual world test kit supreme. The modular open source architecture allows for components to be disaggregated and reaggregated into new formations easily and rapidly. As I have mentioned before,  Stefan Andersson, Tribal Media AB,  has a catchy way of putting this,  “OpenSim is a rapid prototyping testbench for wannabe paradigm shifters.”  Stefan, one of OpenSim’s founders, notes this has been the heart of OpenSim from the start.

Interoperability work is the path to achieving virtual world standards

Achieving standards will take virtual world innovation mainstream.  The innovation emerging from open source to produce basic building blocks, and the standards emerging from interoperability efforts, panelists explained, will be the magic brew that transform virtual worlds into part of the fabric of everyday computing.  As Mic Bowman, Intel, describes it (interview upcoming in Ugotrade). The goal is that virtual worlds will ultimately be taken for granted much as when say “browse the web” – we take the “web” for granted (it is the applications YouTube, Flickr etc that gets our attention).

Our panel argued strongly that achieving virtual world standards will emerge from a combination of “rough consensus and working code” rather than “Vapor standards” – worked out by committees in the abstract. Both David Levine, IBM, and Adam Frisby noted “vapor standards” have been lost causes in the history of the internet.

Interoperability work allows for these basic building blocks of virtual worlds to be expressed across various computational fabrics which creates an environment for what David Levine describes as “parallel innovation.” David explains:

The point about parallel innovation is that there are several ways to evolve things. Open Source, tends to foster the addition of features, in common to the main trunk of development. Its very much about everyone building together. Sometimes, we need to or want to build stuff which works with that main trunk of development, but doesn’t share code, or has to fork. That’s where standards come into play.

While the OpenGrid beta has begun with Linden Lab and OpenSim, OpenGrid is just the beginning of much more extensive efforts to test and create protocols across different computational environments that will include increasingly different models of virtual worlds from OpenSim and LL’s model.

So another key message from our panel is: “Heterogenity fosters the creation of standards and more innovation.”

Metaplace and Second Life TM/OpenSim in Dialogue: Play Metaplace on a Prim!

One of the highlights of Virtual Worlds, 2008, LA, for me, was a forty minute conversation between Raph Koster, Tess Linden and myself about Metaplace (the pictures from the Metaplace blog are screenshots from worlds Metaplace testers have made.

I will have a more detailed post on this interesting dialogue soon.  I think Raph illuminates some of the subtleties of what, Dusan Writer noted, came across as somewhat of a Metaplace v Linden Lab debate on the Future of Virtual Worlds panel. As Raph explained, one of the the things they like to say at Metaplace is that, “virtual places are going to be first class citizens of the web next to tags, audio, video, images….that’s a very different kind of picture of where this kind of stuff is headed”  (see Raph’s comments on the panel here).  But as a little warm up to more on Metaplace soon, here are some of the remarks Raph made about integrating OpenSim with Metaplace hehe!

If somebody took an OpenSim server and made it speak the tag language out.  Then every Metaplace client would be able to talk to the OpenSim one. And visa versa, if OpenSim can open a  bog standard gpt socket, because we don’t even use a binary protocol. We use absolutely bare bones of the web. If you can connect by telnet you can connect to Metaplace. So that means an OpenSim client could become a Metaplace client, parse the tags, and play them on a prim.

RealXtend bring a cool new demo to LA

In the picture above Ryan McDougall now senior software developer with RealXtend, Tomi Kujanpää (LudoCraft/realXtend Art Director & Avatar Specialist), Hannu Hollström (ADMINO technologies) have a drink with Gene Yoon (Ginsu Linden), VP of Business Affairs, Linden Lab at The Metaverse Mixer Meetup at the Hotel Figueroa.  Cheers!

Kudos  to Linden Lab for their big picture thinking demonstrated in the work they did open sourcing their viewer at a time when few other companies would have made such a move.  And, more recently, for their efforts on interoperability with the OpenGrid initiative.

And, congratulations to RealXtend who have pushed the envelope on innovation with the open source Second Life TM viewer and OpenSim server this year. RealXtend showed up in LA with another awesome “undersea” demo that will be public on September 23rd (screenshot below from Ludocraft Ltd.)

Also more exciting news from RealXtend this week. Mac’s Virtual World reports:  “OpenLife will be the first grid based on the OpenSim technology to use RealXTend features as far as I am aware of.”

Augmented Reality will bring Virtual Worlds out to the mainstream.

For an important look at how instead of more people going into virtual worlds, virtual worlds will be coming out to meet the people soon, see the Augmented Reality Panel video above. For more see Roo Reynolds and David Orban’s blogs.