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.

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.