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“Surveillance is all about when people in authority know a lot about you. Instrumentation is when you know a lot about the world,” Cory Doctorow, Craphound.com, boingboing.net

When we spoke at the Virtual Worlds Forum in London last week, Cory Doctorow outlined a vision of how ways individuals tap into data and metadata to create instrumentation in “virtual” worlds might be thrown out into the “real” world to give people more agency there.

Cory D. turned my initial question inside out and gave a brilliant glimpse of something a little like Bruce Sterling’s idea for an Amazon.org. Amazon.org is a social software entity that can answer questions. Questions about our world. Questions about objects. “What questions? Not the profit-centric questions that obsess Amazon. The serious questions.” (Shaping Things)

“The Inverse of the Surveillance Society”

Me: What happens when Virtual Worlds become flooded with data from “real life” objects, geo- positioning, etc., and extreme life–logging enters virtual worlds?

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 …

Me: Ummm no! [But I have now. Joi Ito sent me a Flickr link to his photo. Thanks!]

Cory: When they are doing a raid at a certain point the number of instrument panels on his screen actually eclipses all of the vision of the raid you no longer actually see the raid. You are experiencing WoW through a purely numerical and data visualization system.

There are different abstraction layers at which you can experience the world and one of them is through the instrumentation of it. It is in some ways the inverse of the surveillance society.

Surveillance is all about when people in authority know a lot about you. Instrumentation is when you know a lot about the world. And it allows you have more agency. When people know a lot about you it takes away your agency.

Me: So is that on the lines of personalized virtual operation centers – like MySpace’s with instrumentation….?

I don’t have this fleshed out into a nice solid like a non abstract thing. But the thing that I have been noodling with is what if all the kinds of data visualization and aggregate statistical information about the world that big companies use in order to realize their enormous profit and control over us as individuals was in our hands.

This is a little like Bruce Sterling’s idea of an Amazon.org [see page 111 Shaping of Things] where all the data from the positional and temporal characteristics of all the objects that we own were in aggregate visible and available so that we can mix and match them remix them understand them and have more agency in the world.

I think that empiricism, measurement, understanding more about the world is the thing that the Enlightenment is grounded in. Like being able to write down how the world works using objective measurements being able to compare them with other people in terms of peer review and experimentation that is the core of what makes us contemporary human beings – post enlightenment, non alchemic, non superstitious, empiricism grounded people.

Being able to understand what is going on the world – How much RFI is there right now where I am standing? What frequencies is it running on? What are the aggregate histograms? Tell me about it. Are people looking at the web around here, or talking on their phones, or sending SMS? Am I in a spot where the thermal signature of lots of people is high or low? What was it like ten minutes ago? Is this typical or atypical of the characteristic histogram of thermal and electromagnetic energy in this space for this time, year on year, day on day, and hour on hour?

Just knowing that and knowing it on some liminal way where your clothes feel different based on whether the room is typical or atypical. That is a really interesting thing to know.

Games do this all the time. You know a lot about the way the game is performing by things like audio cues, like coloring cues, Also by cues that have to do with network jitter. You hop onto a shard with like a zillion people on it that shard performs differently. You don’t know when you walk into a room necessarily what the activity level in that room is, especially if it is a room subdivided by a lot of physical baffles and things that hide what is going on from you. But you know when you walk onto shard whether it is an active or inactive shard.

So can we grab all that stuff that lets us know a lot about the virtual world and exert agency over and influence over it and throw it into the “real” world.

That what be very cool.

A Global Virtual Worlds Open Source Community

Open Standards are frequently cited as a key part of what will make virtual worlds “fit for business.” But for a reverse surveillance society where virtual operations centers could be universal information resources for all of us open sourcing and open standards are also the key to tapping into the myriad data streams currently only available to business and government.

At the Virtual Worlds Forum in London the virtual worlds open source community was not on one panel together. But they were a small but noticeable cohort that caught my attention.

Of particular note was the presence of Adam Frisby of OpenSim, Adam Johnson of 3Di and Bjorn Lee of HiPiHi. HiPiHi and 3Di are both funded by the ngi group, Inc. And 3Di are developing a virtual worlds platform Jin-sei based on OpenSim. 3Di is now in a partnership with Mixi (the largest social networking site in Japan with over ten million users) developing virtual worlds on the Jin-sei platform. OpenSim is the BSD Licensed Open Source Initiative that has evolved from Second Life.

Some 3Di employees using Jin-sei

“3Di, Inc. believes its innovations will be the key to developing the new 3D Internet.”

The picture above shows the location of the 3Di offices in Tokyo - a location that may turn out to be significant.

3Di, Inc., a Tokyo based subsidiary of the Japanese holding company ngi group, Inc., aims to revolutionize the way virtual worlds and the web work together. 3Di, Inc., as an international company based in Japan, is uniquely positioned in the underdeveloped Japanese and Chinese markets to deliver language and culture sensitive solutions, while still maintaining a global perspective. 3Di, Inc. believes its innovations will be the key to developing the new 3D Internet.

Drivers of the 3D Internet:

Every time I saw Ian Hughes of IBM (far left) and Adam Frisby of OpenSim (next to Ian), Adam Johnson of 3Di, and Bjorn Lee of HiPiHi talking together. I couldn’t help thinking wow: “I am witnessing the team that will pioneer the 3D internet.”

So I decided to interview these four to who seemed to me to be already well on the way to being a global virtual worlds interoperability team.

While there were many interesting stories to tell at the Virtual Worlds Forum, I focused my attention on players who seemed to be weaving the following five virtual world threads together.

1) social networks 2) user generation 3) open source/standards 4) 3D immersive 5) social gaming

I also spoke to Ginsu Yoon, from Linden Lab. Linden Lab has been making interoperability and the movement to create open standards for virtual worlds a priority. But as Ginsu Yoon spoke from the podium on Linden Lab’s expansive vision for a 3D internet and podcasts will be available on the VWF site, I did not do an individual interview with him. But we spoke a couple of times. And I ran by Ginsu the direction of my thinking.

The essence of these chats was that the interoperability of virtual worlds would not come from top down from a “standards committee.” Rather standards of interoperability would be worked out from the bottom up by people coming together to actually work on the architecture, e.g. in groups like the Architecture Working Group that is attended by OpenSim, IBM, and many others.

In the picture above David Orban shows a delighted Ginsu Yoon his new Second Life viewer an: “Immersive stereoscopic projection of a life size screen covering 180 degrees of vision, connected to the live grid, tracking the avatar with ultrawideband emitters, created by the University of Milan and Eximia, in Italy.” David has posted a video gives a full explanation of “Real 2nd Life” on his blog, so check it out!

Interview With Adam Johnson: Movable Life & 3Di

The picture above shows Steve Prentice of Gartner Research (famous for his quote earlier this year that “80% of active internet users will have a “second life” in the virtual world by the end of 2011″) talking with Adam Johnson of 3Di and Bjorn Lee of HiPiHi.

Me: Could you introduce yourself please Adam?

Adam: I’m Adam Johnson. I’m working for a 3Di a company based out of Japan. We have our own virtual world platform and web services between virtual worlds connecting them. The Capital company is called ngi Group. It’s the number one incubator company out of Japan. We started about four months ago and now we have a virtual worlds platform, Jin- Sei, which is based off the open source software OpenSim. We’re marketing that towards B-to-B right now. On the services side we have Movable Life, which is a web-based Ajax client for logging into Second Life through a browser or iPhone. We’re working on other mobile interfaces as well.

Me: Why did you think Movable Life and this OpenSim application got launched in Japan as opposed to here?

Adam: That’s a good question, I’m not really sure. I think because in Japan a lot companies are really starting to look at virtual worlds. Because in Japan everyone has the same notion that virtual worlds are just going to explode and probably in the near future be more popular than in other countries. Japan will be like a hub for Virtual Worlds, I guess.

Me: And how did you get involved because you’re obviously American.

Adam: I was working at ngi Group before actually. So I had been living in Japan for 2 years.

Me: ngi is the investment company?

Adam: Right. We’re fully owned by ngi Group - the incubator company.

Me: So you were working for the venture capitalist company?

Adam: I was working for another startup and then I just transferred when they started this company.

Me: So what’s your job title?

Adam: I’m Project Leader for Movable Life.

Me: Why did you choose OpenSim?

Adam: we were just looking for ideas on what open source tools there are already to get our own virtual world platform off the ground. The best one out there at that time was OpenSim so we decided to go full on with Open Sim and LibSL and get involved. So Movable Life is based on LibSL as well so we’re very involved with open source community.

Me: Is Movable Life open source?

Adam: Movable Life code is proprietary at the moment, but we’re looking at open sourcing that in the future.

Me: So what physics engine are you using for OpenSim?

Adam: For our platform Jin-sei, we’re currently using the open source ODE at the moment. But we’re looking at maybe going to Havoc in the future.

Me: I know in the Open Sim that we’re using only about half the scripting is implemented. Is that still the same with you?

Adam: Yes, but the core of the scripting engine is based on C-Sharp, it has a C-Sharp engine. For user scripting it’s about half implemented. But server side we can do C-Sharp full on.

Me: What can Movable Life run on?

Adam: It runs on the iPhone. So it’ll run on Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Opera, anything.

Me: How how far have you got in terms of making OpenSim a grid or making it interoperable with Second Life?

Adam: We’re doing a lot of performance testing now. And for Jin-sei we just have a partnership with Mixi where they’re going to be running private virtual worlds using our platform. They have more than ten million users. Mixi is Japan’s number one social networking site. My Space tried to go in there and they totally failed.

Me: That’s interesting!

Adam: The Mixi deal will at first be a limited private test for a certain group of Mixi users, just to get good data on how everything is performing. We have a lot of large companies that are really interested in using Jin-sei for several different things, private and public.

Adam: Right now I’m focusing on creating a virtual hub for all of the virtual worlds. This is my project. We have two different sides, we have our platform and then we have our Movable Life Hub.

Adam: Movable Life comes from LibSecondLife and right now that’ll connect you to Second Life, and soon to an OpenSim grid and Jin-sei.

Adam: The goal is in a few months we’ll have a new version coming out which will kind of merge all of them together. So you log into Movable Life and you’ll have a central portal to each virtual world. Movable Life is not a virtual world. It’ll be like a web service to combine them all. It’ll combine anything using OpenSim or Second Life, probably HiPiHi later on. We’re working with some Japanese companies as well for their virtual worlds. We want to connect all of them if possible.

Cory Doctorow and Bjorn Lee of HiPiHi

I recorded part of the conversation between Cory Doctorow, Bjorn Lee from HiPiHi and Adam Johnson of 3Di (with their permission of course!) about social networking in immersive virtual worlds versus social networking in less immersive spaces.

Raph Koster of Metaplace was not able to fly out of Southern California because of the wild fires so I couldn’t follow up on what had been an interesting debate on 2D versus 3D social networked spaces at the San Jose Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo. If Raph had been there I would have loved to ask him some questions about interoperability and Metaplace also. Ian Hughes of IBM talked with me about how Metaplace’s use of RESTful APIs will create many interesting possibilities. And I had a long conversation with Bruce Joy CEO of the newly launched Vast Park which potentially will be interoperable with Metaplace.

Cory D. on the place of social networking sites in an increasingly immersive 3D future?

In response to questions from Bjorn (HiPiHi) and Adam (3Di), Cory Doctorow argued persuasively why from a social networking point of view less immersive 2D spaces might hold their place alongside immersive virtual worlds. I turned on my iPod recorder mid-stream in the dialogue.

Cory: ………[re how to drop] a whole bunch of people you don’t like very much who’ve recruited you into their social circle. The best way to do it is to say oh you know I am just tired of Facebook. Not like you people all bother me. Its like I just not using Facebook anymore. You just stop logging in. That’s the reason not like deleting you account in a huff. Just kind of slowly disengage from Facebook. They can see you haven’t updated your Facebook in 6 months. You are just kinda not there anymore. Then you just delete your account and no-one cares anymore. That’s like a socially neutral way of disengaging from a group of people who you had to friend and who friended you.

The cost of blowing off your social network is pretty low because the value of your social assets which is the articulated social network of people you like is offset by the negative value of the articulated network that is wrong where you have named all these people as your friend.

In a virtual world the problem is confounded by the acquiring of assets that actually have real world monetary value whether that be a currency or objects that can be bartered for a currency. So blowing off you WoW account actually costs something. It has a monetary expense as well. Its not that people don’t do it. But they often do it on mass as the game gets less fun for some reason.

Like when SWG re-factored and it got less fun and everyone left. One of the things that contributed to that was WoW lit up and a whole bunch of SWG players said I’ll go and play WoW for a week and SWG was just kind of empty so the value of those assets blew up. So it cost less to leave SWG after SWG crashed and so people were willing to leave.

But if you have to wait until the game crashes before you can blow it off that means you have this complicated relationship where you have to remain friends with people you don’t like or abandon your virtual goals. That is a terrible conundrum to be in. I think there will be elements of this. But I don’t think that is going to take it all over.

Bjorn: My question was more about the fact that in a virtual world’s social networking site the main difference is a sense of place. Your have friends and you want to hang out in the Mall, for example, you can’t do that in a [2.D] social networking site. But a virtual world is like going to a Mall you can go there see who is there, hang out with people, you can use hand gestures, and communicate through text and sound…

So now that now technology has advanced to a stage whereby text based social networks on which you can just send pictures and videos are pretty primitive. Do you think this kind of social networking site will still be prevalent in the future?

Cory: So its a really interesting question. I think that we are typically pretty bad at evaluating the long term costs of our actions. This is one the big privacy problems. We sell our privacy very cheaply and subsequently regret it because it costs us a lot when we’ve sold our privacy. But we don’t find that out until one year or two years later. Or we buy DRM media and we don’t realize how much that cost us until it is time to throw out your iPod and buy a competing device right.

So I think people will be willing to migrate into social networks that are on games because I think it will be on crack. I mean all the monkey pleasure of laying out the pictures of all your friends and all the grinding pleasure of doing all that game stuff and all the cyber sex and all the rest of it. Its going to be like on crack.

But how many times will you going to be willing to do that. Cuz you are going to have to blow it off eventually. And are you eventually going to say to your self, “oh shit this sucks. I am bankrupting myself every eighteen months in order to escape the people I don’t like very much.” And that’s really tricky. I don’t know. I think that might leave a place intact for social networking sites.

Adam 3Di: What if you had different levels of privacy in virtual worlds where you could throw them into this group where they don’t get to see as much information on you.

Cory: Its very hard to prospectively evaluate the cost of adding someone to a friend list. That’s the problem. You have to know a priori to know what level of trust to assign to that friend to. Then you get into this thing, where people are like, “Am I on your A list, your B list, or your C list.” And you become one of these self obsessed terrible, obnoxious … you become one of these people who in 8th grade who had the list of good people, medium people, bad people, sub bad people. That’s not reflective of a natural social dynamic. Now it may in fact push back - its kind of a nightmare scenario - what if it does push back? What if that actually does become the organizing principle by which we establish our social relations in the “real” world. Are you an A person or B person for me? But I just kinda hope we don’t get that.

Interview with Adam Frisby about OpenSim

Adam Frisby discussing architecture? with Ian Hughes of IBM

Me: Please could you introduce yourself Adam.

Adam Frisbee: I’m the executive director of a company called DeepThink Labs. We’re an international company with people in the UK, US and Australia. I started off last year working on the LibSecondLife project which just basically built a protocol description of the Second Life protocol.

We’ve built a programming library from that which allows you to connect in third party applications into the Second Life grid. In early January, just after the Second Life Client source code was released, another developer called Michael Wright developed a piece of software called OpenSim, and I got involved in that pretty much as soon as I saw the announcement of it. And since then I’ve been working as one of the developers of the Open Sim project.

Me: What Physics Engines does OpenSim support?

Adam: Right now we support four. But we’ve got our own one called Basic Physics which is just a very very simple engine, it doesn’t do physics solving really. We’ve got a second one called ODE which is the Open Dynamics Engine that ngi is using right now. That one’s a fairly mature open source physics engine.

We also support Bullet. Bullet is a new type of open source physics engine designed by Erwin Coumans, who was a major developer on the Havok Physics engine, it’s new – but it has a lot of potential.

We also support something called PhysX. PhysX is a commercial physics engine like Havoc. Its about on the same scale. But it supports optional hardware acceleration so you can actually get an accelerator card, put it in your computer, and then you get the ability to use that to accelerate the physics that’s going on in that server.

Me: How do people get involved developing code for OpenSim?

It’s essentially a meritocracy. We look for good developers, who are submitting good patches, to the project and we invite them in to be permanent contributers. Right now the way the OpenSim project works is strictly by consensus. There’s about 9 people right now who’ve got a voice in the consensus. And whenever a decision needs to be made such as whether we add another person into the development team it has to be done exclusively through consensus. It can be a very interesting process when people disagree, but nonetheless that’s how we’re operating.

Me: Where do you meet?

We don’t meet inworld in Second Life anymore, we’ve moved to an opensim …..
The majority of the discussion happens pretty much in two places. The first place is our mailing list, that an email list the developers are welcome to subscribe to and then people send out long emails and get long winded replies back.

The other way we communicate is over IRC which is Internet Relay Chat. We’ve got a channel on EFnet, and a lot of people hang around there. There’s about 60 people there all the time. Then there’s a secondary channel which is #opensim-dev which is all the developers and everybody interested in the development side of things. So it’s sort of broken up into the two groups, users in the one channel, and the developers in the other channel.

If you need help with getting it running then that’s the users channel. We split them up basically because we were trying to discuss technical topics and at the same time there was a collision with the people trying to get basic help.

So in the development channel we are discussing things like future architecture. If there’s a big decision that needs to be made and it’s brought up in the IRC channel then someone will go off and write that up to a mailing list as a post so those who weren’t there at the time, can go off and read what’s happening.

Me: Do you attend the Linden Lab Architecture Working Group?

We made an effort to actually attend those. That’s because Zero’s been discussing allowing the interconnects between the Second Life Grid and potentially third party servers like OpenSim. So of course being there is valuable if we want to make sure we are compatible with what the plan is.

He goes into very technical topics which is fantastic. And he’s willing to go into good depth on them. They are well worth attending if you’ve got any interest at all in things like protocol design. We had a great discussion once on the merits of parallel programming.

We have had a lot of benefits from Linden Labs experience by watching what has worked and what hasn’t. At the same time, what we’re working on is of course fundamentally very similar to what Linden Labs working on. In fact the architecture working group will probably produce something that’s going to be used by both Linden Labs and everyone else who wants to host a virtual worlds grid.

Right now we’ve got an opportunity to re-engineer and add scale to things. Second Life’s biggest flaw is that you can’t have an event with 5000 people in it. The grid just collapses and you can’t get all those people into a reasonable contiguous area. Whereas for OpenSim we can actually write a customized server that will actually support that by degrading certain things like physics. You degrade that down to a very low quality of physics. You turn off scripting, that kind of thing. You can customize a server to do something like that and Open Sim’s got the potential that hey Linden Lab can use it too and take advantage of these things.

Making more lightweight situations, removing central dependencies, that kind of thing.

We’re working with everything from a simple engine like Basic Physics to some of the most complex proprietary engines you can get, e.g., the PhysX one. It’s a very powerful engine.

It’s the opportunity to pick and choose what you want to use. Our key aspect is that everything is modular. You can take out any module and replace it with any other compatible module or even have no module at all. You can do that for scripting, for physics, everything down to instant messaging and chat are all modules, so you can chop them out.

Me: Will there be any problems of interoperability with the Second Life physics engine?

I think it will fine. It’s not such a big deal. We can always write a module to implement the Second Life physics engine. The Havoc caveat. They’re talking about implementing Havoc 4. We’d just implement that as another module. And suddenly we’d suddenly support 5 different engines.

Me: And what about assets and interoperability?

Assets aren’t too bad either, the interoperability issue is protocols. Simply speaking the same language. We’ve got the protocols from the client to the simulator. What we don’t have is from the simulator to the grid. That’s the language we’ve got to learn to be able to connect to the Linden Lab infrastructure.

It’s on the plan. The Architecture Working Group is actually devising a new language. But we don’t have the current language. That’s why you can’t connect to an Open Sim to the existing grid.

Our grid infrastructure is running on our own one. But that’s going to disappear and be replaced as soon as we’ve got something better which is what the Architecture Working Group will produce.

We will use the best new protocol thinking from every idea everywhere.

Interview with Ian Hughes, IBM (a.k.a Epredator Potato)

Picture above shows Epredator getting involved with a CSI: NY in Second Life at csiny orientation west95

Ian Hughes was one of the early pioneers for IBM in Second Life, particularly in the area of “virtual” and “real” integration, including the IBM Wimbledon project in Second Life. I asked Ian to talk about the early days linking First Life and Second Life.

In all the virtual world stuff there’s initially a feeling that it’s somewhere you go, and the emotional attachment is that it’s somewhere else. And even with Second Life, it’s called Second Life, it’s somewhere else.

From day one for me I wanted to know whether I could do the same things in the same way as we do on the web, where we’ve gone with mashups and in terms of SOA (Service Orientated Architecture) is to say I’m over here at the moment but all my stuff’s over there, can I get it there? That works both personally and at a business level.

And just knowing that there’s any channel to go from one place to another is no matter how small as long as it’s bi-directional even if it’s only a few bits flowing you know that that channel’s going to get bigger, it’s going to get faster, and it’s going to get more standardized.

So from day one it was, “great can I control a second life object from outside?” And that was before the http stuff in Second Life. It was just yes of course I can. But you have to actually do it. So I made a light switch. No big deal a light switch. That was just sending a message in. That was just one line of code. and its one line of code any techie would do and many techies has done the same. But I also wanted to know if could demonstrate messaging and flow within the environment in a publish/subscribe way. [Ian did explain how he accomplished this].

This was 18 months ago or it might be 19 months ago, March - April time. [This early work on messaging and message brokering in Second Life Ian explained was very helpful in introducing Second Life to other IBMers. ]. We had this thing which was turning a light on which was now responding to an external message. Roo augmented that so that a message from Roo’s laptop when it gets tilted was being injected into Second Life. Roo built a laptop on a gimble so that when you tilted his laptop in Real Life it would tilt the Second Life one.

Now in any demonstration where you say “here’s this quirky virtual world and isn’t it funny” now let me just pick my laptop up - you’ve caught them out - you’d pick the laptop up and the one on the screen would tilt. Controlling a virtual object like that is no big deal now. But it’s got a whole lot of messaging stuff underneath. And it was our core technology concept from Hursley that was being used.

Behind the scenes at Wimbledon in Second Life

That became sort of an iconic moment for us that we’d achieved that. We’d got all the bits so that we then knew that we could get further with Wimbledon having more data and more stuff and more instrumentation coming from the real world. So that’s when they [Linden Lab] opened up their http request APIs which they did just before Wimbledon luckily. I knew that I was going to be able to start to represent things in the virtual world in a way that we’d never got around to before. And I knew we could get buy-in from customers. And, I could get buy-in from other IBMers because it was Wimbledon.

My own Hursley Island rapidly went from a small plot of land to multiple IBM islands. Some of this [rapid growth] was just telling everyone that we were doing it. We were writing internally on blogs to our fellow early adopter people. I was reaching an audience particularly with Wimbledon.

Jessica Qin, IBM, builder/scripter/evangelist

In sharing that meant other people started to come to us. So thats when we met people like Jessica Qin. She had been in Second Life for years, living there and having an existence there but not in a work context originally. We kind of found them [IBMers around the world]. We realized we’re trying this stuff at the same time and that was good so we immediately had gone across the pond and further.

An Early Meeting At Hursley

Then again lots of people suddenly started to turn up and the core people, a lot of the people who are here at VWFE, are the ones who were there at the start. And that formed this little community and it started off with 2 people and then 10 people and by November 2006 it turned into 3,000 people. It was a bottom up process. Now it is over 5000.

Virtual Control Centers as a Mass Phenomena?

At the Virtual Worlds Forum in London last week putting the kinds of data visualization and aggregate statistical information about the world that big companies use in our hands didn’t seem too far off when you listened in on some of the “off stage” discussions

I blogged in my previous post that Eolus One is developing what I thought might be the first major business application using OpenSim. Eolus I wrote is developing secure virtual control centers for facilities management with sites on OpenSim. And, next on the table for development are plug and play modules based on the Eolus VWCI that will bring the kind of facility management now only possible in large scale facilities into every home.

In the picture below Oliver Goh (on right) is showing the Eolus Virtual World Communication Interface to Sara de Freitas the Serious Games Institute (center and holding the Eolus VCWI), Adam Johnson of 3Di (on the left) and Bjorn Lee of HiPiHi (standing under the chandalier).

Old Media & Big Business Enter “The People Age.”

At the Virtual Worlds Forum, “old” industry/media was often indistinguishable from the new user generated, socially networked/gaming, 3D immersive, open standards, interoperable generation as we stood and chatted under the lights of the gilded chandeliers in the bar, or sat in alcoves on comfy couches streaked by color from disco lights.

In the picture below from left to right Dolf Wittkamper, Senior Director, Philips Design, Chris Carella Chief Creative Officer, Electric Sheep Company, Oliver Goh, Paradigm Engineer for Implenia Global Solutions, and Giff Constable, VP of Electric Sheep Company’s software practices. They were logging on to the CSI:NY sims that had just opened to the public.

The VWF venue was an old night club/roller disco near Kings Cross that London cabbies seemed to call The Potato Market. It seemed an awful lot like Second Life at times. And Delé Atanda, Global Digital Marketing Business Partner, Diageo, pointed out the virtualness of this space that is soon to be demolished to make way for some Eurotowers? I interviewed both Delé Atanda and Dolf Wittkamper at the VWF. I will cover these interviews and the very interesting approaches to Second Life that both these companies have taken in conjunction with Rivers Run Red in an upcoming post.

The Rivers Run Red exhibition at VWF.

One of the highlights for me during VWF was chatting with Louise Jorden of Rivers Run Red (center in pic above) and Delé Atanda, Diageo in “real life” at The Hospital Club - one of RRR’s partners.

Delé and Dolf exemplify to me to corporate executives that understand that the future will not only blur the lines between the “virtual” and the “real” but also the distinctions between corporations and individuals. Traditional hierarchies are disintegrating leading to what Josephine Green, Director of Trends and Strategies for Philips, calls the “people age,” and Delé Atanda, Diageo, calls the “age of imagination.”

This age is characterized, as Joesphine Green points out, by “the decline in trust in institutions and leadership; people becoming increasingly empowered and creative about their own lives; a desire to co-create and produce their own experiences; the search for greater customization, personalization and autonomy.”

Delé Atanda presenting the Diageo Digital Workspace in Second Life - developed in conjunction with Rivers Run Red and IBM.

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Eolus One is developing what I think might be the first major business application using OpenSim. OpenSim is the BSD Licensed Open Source Initiative that has evolved from Second Life. Eolus has several client projects that will utilize the secure virtual control centers to improve and document facilities management with sites on OpenSim.

The picture shows the architecture of the system with the OpenSim, SAP and Building Automation Server (VWCI) part of the Eolus One facility management project.

Bruce Sterling at the end of Shaping Things” asks for humankind to start to make “decent technology:”

This whirring, ultra-buzzy technology can keep track of all its moving parts and when its time inevitably comes, it would have the grace and power to turn itself in at the gates of the junkyard and suffer itself to be mindfully pulled apart. It is a toy box for inventive meddlesome humankind that can put its own toys neatly and safely away.

If you are not yet in tune with “the internet of things” here is a music video Royksopp’s “Remind Me” that Sterling suggests is some kind of “spime” theme song.

The closing words of Sterling’s great visionary book on “spimes” and “the internet of things” are:

Its not enough to think about that, or even write about. If it is to be any use to humankind, it will have to get done.

This post is about some people who are doing it!

See the exclusive interview with Oliver Goh and Michael Osias later in this post!

This giant step in the integration of “real” and virtual worlds on OpenSim comes out of a meeting of two minds and the integration of the two virtual world interfaces.

Oliver Goh (avatar Eolus Mcmillan on Second Life) is a paradigm engineer for the large Swiss civil engineering and construction company Implenia Global Solutions pioneered the Eolus Virtual Worlds Communications Interface that communicates between Second Life and most common building protocols (see my earlier post). And Michael J. Osias, Chief 3D Architect for the IBM IT Optimization Business Unit (avatar Illuminous Beltran) Michael (see my earlier post) is the architect of a virtual worlds integration middleware - The Holographic Enterprise Interface.

By integrating the capabilities of their two virtual world interfaces - the Eolus’ VWCI solution with the IBM middleware (HEI) - they are creating a virtual cockpit on OpenSim with extensive capabilities. Michael gave the analogy to Nasa’s mission control.

We’ve got the facilities data (from the Eolus VWCI) and IT data using the shared infrastructure (HEI) and rendered together. To use an example, like mission control for NASA, They’ve got rockets, they’ve got computers, they’ve got people on the ground, but they build this control center, because the want to know whats going on with any of that stuff. So its all integrated into a single operational picture.

Eolus One is creating on OpenSim one of the first (always risky to say the first) Platforms for the Facilities Management Industry (see my earlier post on “The Operating System for Planet Earth”). But before continuing this story here is a quick primer on Eolus One.

Eolus One – the Future of Facilities Management.

I blogged the Eolus One’s launch of their public sims and Virtual Worlds Control Interface in Second Life at the beginning of July (see here). At that time, Eolus One in Second Life had already an exhibition hall showing the early development of the VWCI, a demonstration of a virtual operations center and several protoype/use cases showing the cabilities of VWCI, a better planet initiative including Uthango Social Investments and SODIS, and regular music programs led by the amazing Jaynine Scarborough. But since then Eolus has been expanding fast behind the scenes.

Oliver Goh has led the the charge on Eolus One putting together several collaborations that range from “future retail center” (an initiative with Migros, SAP Research, HP) to a control center for an international hotel chain, and a project with the University of St. Gallen to produce a prototype for a “smart” apartment for an elderly person called “Independent Living.”

“Independent Living”

“Independent Living” is an innovative home health care solution using sensor technology, medical monitoring devices and a modern communication infrastructure to help seniors live safely and independently at home.

The virtualisation of an elderly person’s daily movements, sleep, medication routines, and vital signs through a PCM - personal condition monitor - worn on the wrist (see picture below) will allow a health care worker to see easily if something is wrong, or out of the ordinary, and to make the appropriate intervention.

PCM – Personal Condition Monitor

The PCM (device detail above) reports to the Eolus VWCI at all times during the elderly persons sleeping and waking activites.

- The PCM is the size of a wrist watch, it monitors the vital stats (Temp, pulse, motion) of the person
- it is gps enabled
- has a button to manually activate an alarm
- automatic danger detection (posture, motion, body temp)
- automatic or manual delivery of alert

Nokia n810 and VWCI

Eolus is working on a project to use the Nokia N810 to enhance the possibilities of the VWCI. The enhancements made will be in the area of Parts Management, Plant Maintenance and Field Service.

- reduce time to invoice by 55%

- compliance to service level agreements

- faster service delivery (increase in service revenue)

- improve customer satisfaction

- increase field productivity by 25%

- using maEmo and OS2008 to bring new services to the service teams

“Smart” buildings - making a visionary idea happen

Eolus One is not just bringing the facility management processes into virtual worlds to increase energy efficiency, CO2 reduction and transparency of energy consumption which are now global necessities. Eolus is taking the vision of “smart” buildings into new territory by exploring many ways to bring the previously “dead” systems that we live and work in (dead in the sense that up until now these structures and the appliances in them have been unable to communicate to us) into an online virtual environment where we can have a dynamic relationship with all the objects and infrastructure we depend on. So the world of objects can contribute relevant information and content to our lives.

The pictures on the left are the Implenia Global Solutions Office building, in the center the hotel, and on the right Adaxsys a the production facility for electronic components (where the Eolus VWCI is manufactured). All three facilities are used as reference sites for the Eolus VWCI.

Next on the table for development Oliver has suggested may be plug and play modules based on the Eolus VWCI that will bring the kind of facility management now only possible in large scale facilities into every home. Will this mean a a new routine? Perhaps you will get online check your IMs and see what your friends are up to, join them for some social gaming or virtual entertainment somewhere on the grid while you keep you house is in order from your virtual cockpit. How are your most significant appliances doing? Are any of them squandering energy ? Is the refrigerator in need of a defrost? Is there bread in the bread box? Did you remember to take a life saving medication on time? Does an important medication need a refill? Is the fish tank getting acidic. Does the heating need to go on? Has an expected delivery arrived? And, of course, there will be no more inconvenient visits from the meter man/woman as meters will be monitored remotely.

A “Meta-verse” Story: Connecting Second Life and Open Sim

The vision of Eolus One is far reaching. It will take building automation and facility management into realms as ambitious as city planning and as intimate as caring for the sick and elderly.

By engaging both in Second Life and Open Sim, Eolus draws on the strengths and resources of the public, open, socially networked, user generated environment of Second Life with its vibrant community of creative thinkers and virtual world developers while utilizing the open source platform of OpenSim to develop secure virtual operation centers.

Second Life is fast becoming the global town hall for scientists, engineers, policymakers and regulators to meet in a global setting that provides an opportunity for public debate and engagement. But secured applications eventually need to be integrated into the public grid if cockpits for spaceship earth are to be widely available to help us take control of the complex and energy hungry infrastructure of our lives.

The long term vision, one that Eolus shares with its partners, is to knit OpenSim and SL together as part of a “meta-verse” story that will benefit the global community - a hetergeneous grid in which avatars can move in and out of secured spaces.

Creating Open Standards: Linden Lab’s Architectural Working Group

If the early momentum of the newly formed Architectural Working Group is maintained it is quite possible that OpenSim will become inter-operable with Second Life sooner than we think. I have been attending the AWG meetings in Zero Linden’s office hours. A good sign that they are getting down to the nitty gritty work of discussing architecture and protocols is that these are fast becoming very technical discussions.

The picture above is of Goldie Katsu’s collection of Linden Bears. There were at least fifteen Lindens that I counted in attendance at the meeting focused on web authorization last week. At the end some Linden bears came out and I discovered that Goldie Katsu is a collector. Goldie is attending the AWG meetings “hoping I can contribute from my security architecture experience and also my ability to help with communication, as in integrating diverse view points and clarifying ideas.”

Goldie kindly let me photograph her bear collection for this post. Giving out their unique, custom designed Linden Bears is a Linden tradition and a way that Linden’s break the ice with residents and express goodwill. Meta Linden’s bear in the center is only given out to those who can solve its riddle.

Open Sim, LibSL, lots of Lindens as well as IBMers, and many people from Second Life’s very engaged open source community attend the meetings and are contributing to the AWG. Tao Takashi recently hosted a meeting for community input on the more technosocial questions of open architecture.

Interview with Oliver Goh and Michael Osias

I spoke to Oliver Goh and Michael Osias on a conference call on Skype Thursday night to get the inside story. I talked to these two innovators in the field of “real” and virtual integrations decided to work together on Open Sim to create a new generation of virtual world control center.

The Holographic Enterprise Interface

IBM’s Virtual World integration middleware - The Holographic Enterprise Interface (HEI) - has been powering the IBM Virtual Network Operation Center (see here) for some time now. Michael explained there is some artistic license on the term holograph because it is not really a 3D image generated in space by lasers. But it is designed to provide a 3D digital representation of real world information.

We have been using it with a number of different data sources already. IBM provides a number of different interfaces to enterprise systems such as IBM Director, MQ Series, Tivoli OmegaMon, and Enterprise Workload Manager.

While these standard interfaces are available, the advantage of the HEI is that it is capable of integrating easily with the EOLUS VWCI solution, so from that perspective it would be a shared infrastructure component.

Then once the data is in-world we have communications gear actually in-world that provide in-world messaging services such as decryption, routing along network links to different machines or equipment, so that’s also kind of a shared infrastructure. The way that the HEI middleware component works is we have a special protocol that’s used so that we don’t have any specific reliance on one protocol or another but it’s meant specifically for virtual world integration.

The protocol can be thought of as an inter-dimensional protocol, if you will, between 2d and 3d. But it can also be used exclusively in the 3d environment. We have machines in there that will generate these protocol messages whose recipients are other machines in-world. So we get some very rich interaction patterns there.

We have a few different reference architectures, not necessarily IT architectures, but virtual world architectures, for our virtual world applications. As part of our offerings right now we’ve got the standard data center, which looks just like any other data center, we’ve got a control room which looks like Olivers control room, and then we’ve go the Virtual Network Operations Center which is kind of a futuristic type of command center, and then we’ve got something called a services mega-center, which is designed to host a large virtual world implementation. It’s just a really big operations center. It has components up to the sky, observation towers and things like that.

I think what will happen is we’ll see these things continue to evolve as we build them. And we’ll try to adhere to some pattern because it’s very easy to replicate patterns that will work well and then to customize them according to customers needs. We don’t want each one to be an individual piece of work from the ground up, but rather utilize a standard set of assets that we know work and then be able to customize the solution.

I asked Oliver how the collaboration between he and Michael came about:

Well we are strong in different areas. The partners at EOLUS One have an in-depth know how of the requirements and processes of the Real Estate/Facilities Management Industry, we know how a building is supposed to function, how to get the values out of it, and how to interpret them. There could be an issue with the HVAC or the security system, by having all relevant data and process information available in our virtual control center we are able to resolve the issue more efficient and at the same time have it documented in an ideal environment. Using the best practises from the industry and combining it with the relevant information we have avail. The model of this could be made available to other companies from the industry.

What Michael has been doing is more on the IT side of things an area we have completely left out so far. We’ve done something similar work [IBM's Green Data Center is very focused on energy management and monitoring particularly concerning the power crunch of servers] but EOLUS One focus was mainly on building automation and facility management.

The idea that we had together was that it would really make sense for these two to be one, because when you, for example, look at the data center there are pieces which are information pieces which come from equipment like servers and certain pieces that come from the building and you need both ideally to manage that data center.

We didn’t tie into the physical equipment, or rather we didn’t know the state of the server and information that was readily available through the interface that Michael has made. And we think that by combining this information we can, from a building management standpoint, control the data center much better.

We have the cockpit but it’s the staffing cockpit. We know exactly what we need. But there were a few issues with HTML rendering.

Michael brought up some interesting features of OpenSim at this point in the discussion:

There’s some features coming up with OpenSim, that are extensions to SL in a way, in the form of dynamic texture loaders. This feature will on a pre-defined interval, download a new texture off of the network and update the face of a prim. I’m actually working on this right now, you can have a program out on the network that’s generating jpeg charts or something and then every ten seconds or so it goes and grabs another chart. We have other more dynamic ways to do this in our Torque based offering.

It’s not exactly HTML on a prim but its close. I plan to use it on the screens, I have a lot of screens,. Some of the other virtual world platforms we have something even better which is the ability to dynamically generate a bitmap buffer in memory and basically throw that out on the prim, so we can write on it, we can draw on it, we can do all kinds of neat stuff with it. We might do something with that with open sim but that would require modification of the Second Life Client which would use open SL for .. but that’s a ways off.

Why Did You Choose Open Sim for Eolus?

It’s come a long way since I started following it. It began as a post in LibSL project which somebody posted on the forum there one day, about a year ago I guess, maybe a little less, “Hey I built a little server, and I can connect the client to it and OpenSim was born.

So its been very primitive until recently, I mean you couldn’t fly, you could barely walk, but its come quite a way and is moving forward rapidly. I’ve been following it since then. And I said when I think its ready enough then I’m going to add it to my portfolio of infrastructure capabilities. We have other virtual world capabilities based on Torque, and its nice to be able to give customers a choice on their internal 3D infrastructure.

Open Sim currently has limitations in terms of its maturity, like any alpha software. Things such as you can’t really build a grid with it at the moment, permissions, inventory, and other features need more development. I always knew it would be a good candidate if it would be mature enough and the right timing. Everybody’s got the client, they know how to use Second Life, even though some of the other platforms have better graphics it’s really a trade off I think in feature function versus graphics. We can always do things with shaders down the road on the client. So using it, testing it out, building quite a bit in it and actually I built several of the commands that are now in there that enable the data integration so I was like well I hate asking people to build something just because I need it so I’ll just go build it myself.

We have added OpenSim to our portfolio because it is ‘operational enough’ at this stage, and it has a lot of advantages. It was a good choice for Eolus because the community SL skills transfer over, has the promise of grid mode, and is likely to play a key role in standards.

How does it compare to some of the other virtual worlds IBM uses?

Giving you an example of alternative worlds such as Torque for example. Torque has outstanding graphics and performance for virtual worlds. The development of the virtual world however is quite different than in SL. In order to develop content you need some pretty sophisticated and sometimes expensive modeling tools graphics tools and then it is completely different model to get the content into the world and then it is a little bit different how you operate the world. SL builders whose only exposure to 3D building is SL, would face some steep learning curves on the content development pipeline and tools.

So there are a lot more moving parts and longer cycle time to get something operational in that environment than it is for an OpenSim environment where everything is built in world just like in Second Life. That is one of the key advantages and the other is of course that goes along with that is skills.

We have customers using Torque (see pictures above) and they are happy with it. The tradeoff of a general purpose, self-contained virtual world versus a very specifc application with very high fidelity are some of the decision points customers need to weigh when they buy a 3D Virtual Command Center.

One area where Torque is currently lacking (but not for long hopefully) is ability to operate a large parallel processing world hosted on a grid. OpenSim is strong here because it was designed to be a large distributed world from the ground up as opposed to having to retrofit this capability and make some design choices that could have some significant impact down the road.

How are you managing? I thought there was little available re scripting language or physics engine in SL?

I actually implemented several LSL functions. Well the physics engine is at least partially true. But there is scripting. You can either script in LSL or C# which is the native OpenSim platform. That is kind of nice. Maybe little more or less than 50% of the LSL functions are implemented. There is a huge list out there – I haven’t counted them.

So you have managed to do the data integration then?

Yes I am able to get the data in just like I am with the VNOC or Oliver’s control center. And it works pretty good. everything need improvement of course because it is still alpha software or even earlier. But it works enough that we can actually do something with it and be confident we can go forward..

Is the OpenSim secure?

Well it is secure in the sense that you can out operate it behind the firewall. You can create an internal grid that is secure. There are security features in OpenSim that still need to be implemented.

The picture below is from OpenSim.

3D Internet, Bruce Sterling, buidling automation, Eolus McMillan, EOLUS One, Eolus VCWI, facilities management, HEI, Holographic Enterprise Interface, IBM metaverses, Illuminous Beltran, Implenia Global Solutions, internet of things, LibSL, Linden Bears, Linden Lab, LSL, metaverse, Michael Osias, Nokia n810, Oliver Goh, open architecture, Open Architecture Working Group, Open Source, open standards for virtual worlds, OpenSim, operating system for spaceship earth, personal condition monitor, plug ins for building automation, Ryksopps Remind me, Second Life, Second Life Open Source, Shaping iThings, smart apartments, smart buildings, spimes, the future of facilities management, Torque, Uthango Social Investements, Virtual Networks Operations Center, Virtual Operation Center, Virtual Operations Centers, Virtual World Control Interface, Virtual Worlds, VNOC, VWCI, Web 3D world 2.0

Nanotechnology Island has launched in Second Life with the goal to establish a place for the Nano Science and Technology communities to come together and to bring key ideas and research into public discussion.

Nanoscience and technology like virtual worlds are frequently cited as “disruptive” technologies. These fields should evolve in relationships between scientists, engineers, policymakers and regulators in a global setting with the opportunity for public debate and engagement.

Nanotechnology is a term used to describe the manipulation of materials at a nanometer of scale - a nanometer is a billionth of a meter. Chris Ewels explains: “This is the scale of large molecules; molecular chains (like plastics), proteins (from biology), nano-crystals (for example nanocrystalline diamond) and new large molecules like fullerenes and nanotubes.” See his site for more info and many wonderful pictures including the picture above from his gallery fantastic.

While nanoscience is rooted in the physics and chemistry of objects at the nanoscale, it involves a broad collection of technologies and scientific research — from diverse fields such as physics, materials science, engineering, chemistry, biochemistry, bio-engineering, medicine, optics and more.

Shifts in thinking and technology emerging from nanotechnology have big implications for our future and may lead to the end of the age of industrial design, production and consumption (see the seminal book on nanotechnology Engines Of Creation by K. Eric Drexler).

Creating a community of communities in SL

The communities of nanotechnology and science are dispersed across disciplines and geography. This Second Life project aims to “create an exemplar for using SL as a community aggregator (community of communities).”

Nanotechnology Island is based in the multidisciplinary SciLands in Second Life. SciLands is an international cross-disciplinary community, currently numbering 34 islands, with its own orientation island and regular events. This is an ideal location for Nanotechnology Island to begin to encourage inter and intra-community dialogue and give an opportunity for many people to play a role in envisioning and defining the future.

Dave Taylor, of the National Physical Laboratory (in the UK), explains that some of the key objectives are to:

provide resources to nanotechnology-related individuals and organizations to help them get started in SL: mentoring, technical help, access to shared land and facilities, and subsidised SL development. This last part means that NPL will help cover the costs of developers for SL projects that are approved for display on Nanotechnology island.

Dave then added more specifics about the services that would be made available:

1) Free assistance with Second Life basics for Nanotechnology subject specialists new to Second Life. Nanotechnology Subject Specialists attending meetings can use the SciLands orientation zone and meet with our representatives in Second Life to learn about the basics (e.g. how to move around, how to communicate and give presentations, how to change your appearance, how to search, how to find more help).

2) Free assistance with preparing, promoting and supporting suitable events on Nanotechnology Island.

3) Free space (land) on Nanotechnology Island to host displays or exhibits relating to nanotechnology.

4) Funding to help build (develop) an exhibit or display to be shown on Nanotechnology Island. Note: some simple exhibits (e.g. posters or simple molecular models) can be made for free.

Nanotechnology and the OS for Spaceship Earth

In an earlier post, I discussed the role that online, immersive, collaborative 3D virtual environments like Second Life will play in creating the operating systems for planet earth. Buckminster Fuller, whose visions reemerge in nanotechnology, makes a call for human cooperation in creating a future in the final words of his book, “Operating System for Spaceship Earth,” 1963.

The phrase Spaceship Earth brilliantly suggests the relationships on a galactic scale that nanotechnology both emerged from and can be extrapolated to. And Buckminster Fullers’s operating system for spaceship earth foreshadows not only ideas of “self-assembly” that emerge from nanotechnology but the notion of virtual operations centers emerging from the collaborative networked intelligence of virtual worlds. See my earlier posts, here, here and here to learn more about Eolus One and other projects that are beginning to develop Virtual Operations Centers in Second Life for energy monitoring, environmental management, health care and more.

I was kindly given permission to use this picture and the picture opening this post by Dr Chris Ewel, Research Fellow at the Institute of Materials, Nantes where he models impurities and defects in nanostructures, and EELS microscopy of new nanomaterials. They are from his gallery fantastic. Ewels calls the one above “Dreams of Buckminster Fuller.”

Buckminster Fuller structures are reappearing in the chemistry of the nanoscale. And, as Ewels points out, Buckminster Fuller once designed a geodesic dome large enough to cover mid-town Manhattan. . “So why not extrapolate a little?!”

C₆₀, the carbon molecule [known as the “bucky ball"] arguably started the whole nanoscience revolution in the eighties, was originally discovered by accident - by a group of scientists trying to understand the formation and behaviour of carbon molecules in interstellar gas clouds.

Extrapolation on an unprecendented scale is intrinsic to the nano revolution. For as much as nanotechnology is rooted in a precise notion of measurement at a very small scale, the implications of the discoveries are far reaching. The famous and controversial heart of nanoscience thinking is the possibility of “self- assembly.” “Self-assembly” is the fundamental principle which generates structural organization on many scales, from molecules to galaxies.

Nanotechnology presents the opportunity to go beyond what natural mechanisms currently allow by creating assembly systems that can build complex devices from elemental atoms or molecules.

The manipulation of matter on an atom-by-atom basis to create specific configurations for molecules, or “molecular manufacturing”, is probably at least a decade away from being used at commercial levels, but self-assembly systems are widely used in nature and have already been harnessed in scientific experiments.

As Nanotechnology matures, it will likely prove to be revolutionary in reversing a fundamental basis of human-based manufacturing.

To date, human manufacturing has been a top-down process taking larger materials and cutting and shaping them down into parts of products. Molecular manufacturing, on the other hand, starts with the building blocks of atoms and molecules and combines them to form objects from the bottom up. This is how nature has worked for billions of years. Eventually this approach may replace many of today’s production processes and find applications throughout society. (UCLA Journal of Law and Technology).

Chris Ewels noted when I asked him to comment:

nanotechnology works with both bottom-up and top-down and there’s lots of cool stuff being done with top-down.

Chris also pointed out that many of the ideas In Drexler’s book in his view are more science fiction than science fact:

(scientifically they just don’t work – if you’ve seen pictures of molecular cogs made from individual molecules, these ignore the fact that molecules tend to stick together, for example). For me the thing that nanotechnology does and will do well, is it allows us to do stuff that happens now, but better! So solar cells that are much more efficient, catalysts that work better, etc etc – not quite so glamorous but if you can make a solar cell 4 times more efficient then you can change the world!

One of the most exciting things about nanotechnology communities coming to Second Life will be that the ideas in nanotechnology that are about exploring the fundamental limits of human ingenuity - provocations to possible futures on the one hand; and on ground innovations from nano science and technology that are changing our world now on the other - will be integrated into the networked human intelligence of the virtual frontier. And this virtual frontier, exemplified by Second Life, is itself a new adventure in human imagination and possibility

A Tour of Nanotechnology Island on Second Life.

Two avatars operated simultaneously by Dave Taylor from the National Physical Laboratory showed me around Nanotechnology Island. ‘Davee Commerce’ is the avatar on the right and on the left is ‘Innovation Projects’ an official NPL avatar.

While the prime objective is to help others make exhibits there are some very interesting exhibits that have already been developed by NPL. The first one (pictured below) Davee Commerce showed me is a SIMS instrument. SIMS stands for Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry - and is used to analyse complex structures.

Nearby are giant animated models with an explanatory display to explain SIMS - a process in which “you basically fire charged molecules or atoms at stuff and see what comes out.”

I watched both an animation of a charged red bismuth ion and one of a “Buckyball,” striking a sample, developed for NPL by Troy McLuhan. Troy pointed out the red and yellow things that go flying are ions and they get pulled away for analysis. “It’s sort of like figuring out what the surface of a watch is made of by shooting it with a narrow-beam sandblaster and seeing what the sand knocks of.”

Also in the exhibit is an AFM - Atomic Force Microscope that works by dragging a very narrow point (atomic sized) across a surface and watching the point go up and down (with a laser beam bounced off a reflector attached to the point). “Sort of like blind people reading braille,” Troy noted.

See the NPL website for more on AFM. DNA structural change and single molecule detections are key areas of AFM research. Carbon nanotubes are ideal tips for AFM because they can have diameters as small as one nanometer.

Davee Commerce took me on a flying tour of a carbon nanotube.

Single-walled carbon nanotubes are being used for investigating surface-protein and protein-protein binding and developing highly specific electronic biomolecule detectors.

Dave took me on a tour inside a single walled carbon nanotube and also explained the structure of DNA to me (image behind the nano tube above and detail below).

Nanotechnology Island includes several interesting buildings produced for NPL by NMC Virtual Worlds and an auditorium that will host regular nano-related events.

The center piece, The Tower of Ten, will house a series of exhibits that change scale by a factor of ten at each level all the way down to the nanolevel. The AFM and SIMS exhibits are housed in an a reproduction based on the architecture of the NPL building in the UK. The laboratories inside were modelled on some of those at NPL, but are typical of specialist nanotechnology centres around the world. Outside there is an animated reproduction of “Newtons Apple Tree.”

A tree grown from a graft from an old tree in Newton’s family garden in Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire still drops apples outside the “real” life NPL building.

According to popular accounts, it was the fall of an apple from this tree that suggested to Newton that the force of gravity that caused the apple to drop to Earth was the same force that kept the moon on its path. The original tree was cared for until it was blown down in 1820 (”Notes and records of the Royal Society Vol 9″).

Playing With The Havoc 4 Physics Engine To Explore Nano Ideas in SL

Seeing Newton’s revered apple tree gave me an idea to ask some nano thinkers the question:

Can ideas of self assembly at least as concepts be explored on SL by playing with the physics engine - and could that be of value in communicating and understanding these concepts better and bringing the rapid prototyping and collaborative potential of the SL environment into nano thinking.

I gave this question to David Orban whose company Questar is in SL consulting, “but with our twists… No architectural building, but community creation, etc. ” David Orban is an entrepreneur interested in the Technological Singularity (see my earlier post) and Memetic Engineering. He is a member of the Singularity Institute, and is on the Advisory Board of the Lifeboat Foundation.

We know how the world works in the macro-scale. That is why building real-scale stuff in SL in rather unexciting, at least to me. But we do not know well enough how stuff behaves on the nano-scale.

And in SL, or other online worlds, we have the chance to simulate the world as we would perceive it if we were able to directly participate in them.

We have to change the physics. For example: to us water is fluid but on the nanoscale it is not.

The bipolar nature of the water molecule manifests itself, with the Van der Waals forces becoming very, very important. The surface of water becomes an almost impenetrable barrier.

In my opinion, once again, it will be with the open-sourcing of the server that makes this kind of experiment.

You have to change just a few parameters, and see the consequences. Let me give you an example:

In the good old days of Virtual Reality 1.0 in the end of the eighties with VPL Research, Jaron Lanier, etc. the immersive RL was not fun to me as it was emulating reality.

What I wanted to do is emulate irreality so for example change gravity, and learn to juggle then turn the gravity knob up little by little, and once I got to Earth gravity take off the goggles and juggle for real!

I want to change just a few parameters as well, and learn from them. Right now the changes have to be programmed into each individual object, instead of being a feature of the background.

They way to do it is to tweak the underlying Havoc engine which is the basis of the simulation calculating the collisions and what happens to objects as they clash at given speeds, at given characteristics, etc.

For example, making stuff sticky: that is chemistry!

Or making stuff blow up: that is nuclear reactions…

Or model how the changing nature of mechanical resistance can help or hinder the building of self assembling structures.

I asked David Orban if he was willing to give me a cartoon to illustrate our conversation in skype. And he very gamely posted these two drawings to Flickr for me.

Start juggling with a low-gravity setting, and follow the balls with your conscious brain. Turn up…

Sticky objects simulate chemistry, and materials’ science.

But you can’t……..

But you can’t just tweak some parameters in the physics engine to simulate physics at the nanoscale. [this was Troy McLuhan's initial response to my question]. That’s fundamentally wrong. Quantum mechanics is NOT classical mechanics with some tweaked parameters. It’s qualitatively different?

I am sure that Troy is not alone in the scepticism he expressed to me on playing with the SL physics engine to explore nano ideas.

Early in my career I spent some time working on ways to represent time travel in film and for this we were constantly playing with ideas of light and motion through algorithms, lenses, and film printing technologies. Obviously this did not further the technology of time travel per se. But constantly pushing at the possibilities of time travel’s representation I believe enhances its possibility in human imagination and endeavor. So to me tweaking the physics engine of Second Life to explore the possibilities of nano thinking seems a logical next step. I asked David Orban if he could clarify further his ideas. He responded:

Quantum Mechanics is fundamentally different. But it is so much so that we have probably just no way of perceiving it in the ‘right’ way in any simulation just as we can’t in reality. We don’t even know what Quantum Mechanics means!

Playing with the havoc engine is just another way to play with an idea with cannot and never can see right!

Anyway: the realm of reality we perceive is one, that of the quantum is an other. Making that one visible is likely to be impossible.

But we can work around that. I think

We’ll see…if we don’t start from somewhere, and “tweak some parameters” we won’t get anywhere.

Picture from Chris Ewels’ Image Gallery

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