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The social consequences of the architectural decisions that will take us into a future of openness in immersive software are potentially vast. Open immersive software is poised to begin to play a disruptive role in the next generation of the internet, and decisions about its design may turn out to be very important ones for all of us.

EbenMoglen Euler the Second Life avatar of Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center), and Zero Linden (Mark Lentczner, Linden Lab), Neas Bade (Sean Dague, IBM, Linux Technology Center), and Zha Ewry (David Levine, IBM Research) met in Second Life last Sunday to discuss crucial issues of open architecture for immersive software in a discussion on Intellectual Property and Privacy/Identity in Open Virtual Worlds facilitated by John Jainschigg and I that kicked off Life 2.0 Summit Spring ‘08 (more details on the panelists here).

It was, I think, a landmark conversation. And, with the permission of United Business Media, here is an exclusive first chance to hear it, if you missed the live event Sunday.

Audio here, © United Business Media.

Picture below of the panel members from left to right, Tara5 Oh (moderator), Zero Linden, EbenMoglen Euler, Neas bade, Zha Ewry, and John Zhaoying.

Open Virtual World platforms are just beginning to get on the radar. But open software is clearly the path to the future and as Philip Rosedale (founder of Linden Lab) has said several times re the complete opening of Second Life software (the client is already open), “Only open will win!”

In two weeks, I will be part of a round table at Virtual Worlds 2008 in the new enterprise track. This round table aims to give people an opportunity to see a variety of implementations of open source virtual world platforms and to learn a bit more about the individual platforms presented, and what they are trying to achieve. Adam Frisby of OpenSim, Nicole Yankelovich of Sun’s Project Wonderland, Jani Pirkola of RealXtend, Remy Malan of Qwaq will be the co-facilitators

Avatar Rights!

At the heart of the discussion with Eben Moglen about freedom and openness in immersive software were some propositions about avatar rights. And, as Zero Linden explained, the new open architecture of the next generation of the Linden Lab grid crucially separates avatar identity from what constitutes their environment. Separating the production of identity from the material substrate is, Eben Moglen explained, at the core of avatar rights. (For a technical view of the next generation of architecture for Second Life see the first draft of Second Life Grid Open Grid Protocol a.k.a. SLGOGP, and for more on these protocols see Tao Takashi’s (Christian Scholz in RL) blog. where the stream for yesterday’s Architectural Working Group 2 meeting held in Second Life is posted.)

Pictures below of Zero Linden (left), Second Life avatar of Mark Lentczner (right), Linden Lab.

Eben Moglen put the fundemental issue of rights in immersive software very eloquently at the start of the discussion. I have transcribed the beginning of this discussion but to see how the thoughts developed through an in depth probing of the issues, you will need to listen to the audio here.

Eben:

I think we have an interesting and powerful problem to put our minds to with respect to want it means to think about freedom and openness in immersive software. The free software movement which I spent a lot of time trying to understand and in trying to assist took for granted that the person who needed to have rights in software was the person who got a copy of a binary, and that his rights in the binary should include the right to understand, and to study, which implied access to the source code, to modify, improve and share.

Now the reason for getting into OpenSim and open virtual worlds is to achieve some of the same kinds of social consequences that the free software movement was trying to achieve including innovation that can be shared by everybody that innovates and the value of technology in commons. But, because this software is immersive software we have another set of values to take into account which are closer to rights for users who don’t have a copy of the binary, or at any rate, whether they have a copy of the program on the client side and may posses some of the code derived from the server is sort of less important than the fact they are inside the software and if they are not free inside the software, they are substantially unfree.

That led me to ask some questions about what it means for an avatar to exist as a beneficiary of the freedom that the user is supposed to get in relation to software. It seemed to me that from there one could begin to try to deduce some rules about how the open virtual worlds have to operate. The most important one seemed to me to be that there is a right to continuity. To have the avatars existence and accumulated experience trapped inside one Terms of Services contract raises the the possibility of what lawyers call unconscionability. That after a while you have so much accumulated value in the avatar that the Terms of Service can be changed on you in a way that you can’t very well resist.

That implied, it seems to me, that if the spaces in the virtual worlds are to be regarded as open they have to be contractually open. It has to be possible to move between them without being artificially constrained by Terms of Service Agreement. That also seemed to me to imply something about the question of what it was one carried from place to place. And it seemed apparent to me that in the process of traveling from place to place an avatar has to carry some rule set as was true in many parts of the world before the modern era of the Nation State. The law that you obeyed traveled along with you. And it seemed to me that we were talking about a situation very much like that.

If you move an avatar in open virtual space from one part of the grid to another or from one grid to another governed by different servers one is not in a position to be asked to surrender ones’ sense of fairness or ones’ understanding about what can be done as a consequence of standing in a particular place. And so I reasoned my way to the conclusion that we had to provide an infrastructure for both declaring persistent preferences and expectations with respect to treatment.

Those were the lines of thought which led me to the propositions that Tara5 explained. And they seemed to me merely propositions in search of simplification. I feel as though I’m looking for some axioms, like Richard Stallman’s four freedoms in the free software movement’s genesis to explain what it is that we need to do as we open the space up.

Zha Ewry:

Reacting on that just a little bit, one of the things that came to mind when I heard Eben talk back in December is something Zero actually said when we did the kick-off, back in I guess September now, for the Architecture Working Group and some of the inter-op work which was, he used a phrase I liked a lot which is “an avatar bill of rights.” It’s what are the expectations an avatar should have in a virtual world. I thought that was a very compelling way of expressing it.

Zero Linden:

I believe at the initial Architecture Working Group which is Linden Lab’s sort of open forum for developing an open protocol set we used the term - looking for “an avatar’s bill of rights.”

I think I would respond to those two thoughts that are quite good. In one case I can give you a different approach for why we came there, and the other I can give you a simplification, which I think you’re looking for. In the first case, when I looked at viewing what would have to exist in an open virtual space, and the value of immersion. Strictly looking at it from the point of view of what made this space work. Granted here I’m a technologist not a lawyer so I’ve perhaps a different view, but surprisingly the same conclusion, is in fact the ability for you to identify and for you to to associate so closely with your avatar that led me to posit as a fundamental aspect of how we build this future open protocol that you must think of it as avatar portability.

It must be a fundamental right that users are in control of their identity not the services which help provide the existence and the immersion. That’s pretty radical thought actually, at least in terms of technology, because it is so much easier to architect, and so much more quote unquote natural to build systems which work another way. Witness every single web-site where you create your own account on every single web-site, it’s much easier for each web-site to do that than it is for web-sites to understand that they somehow agree to opt into a protocol in which you can control your identity.

In virtual world services, we have to have a world in which your avatar and your identity are in control of the user not matter what the service provide is. So what is going on in the AWG and the structure of the future protocol is the surprising separation at the server side, at the internet side, of those services that provide aspects of you identity. And by separating those out, and by building the entire protocol based on a mutual understanding between those two sets of servers, we enable users to choose servers to represent their identity that meet with their needs, trusts and ideals and to still interact with other servers that provide land with other things.

Right now when we are standing on this piece of land, the server we are standing on is both providing our identities as well as providing the land. And if you come to visit this piece land you basically have to trust what this server decides your avatar can do. In the future open that we are deciding we separate those notions. There is a server which represents your identity that you have chosen, and there is a server that represents the land that the landowner has chosen. And, we embed in those systems the negotiation between them.

Eben:

That is beautifully elegant, I have to say. That does indeed make an enormous difference………(to continue please go to the audio here).

Also see Sean Dague’s (IBM and OpenSim) interesting post on his blog that highlights one of the key freedoms Eben discussed - the freedom to leave.

“freedom to leave”, an open-standards based assurance that users can move their data easily between interoperable platforms and services.

Sean notes:

Today, if you decide to leave any virtual world platform (even OpenSim), you pretty much have to leave you data behind. I think that one of the features people will be looking for in the virtual worlds of tomorrow is the same freedom to leave that they get from any standard web or mail infrastructure provider today. Part of what has made Google successful in the application hosting space is by ensuring it’s easy to leave the platform.

One of the biggest reasons I left LiveJournal was that it was hard to leave, and the longer I built up content in that environment, the harder it was going to be for me to get it out.

Also see the coverage of the panel at SLNN.

Mitch Kapor - Second Life 2.0

In his keynote at Life 2.0 Summit Spring ‘08, Mitch Kapor predicted that virtual worlds will become a very important part of corporate strategies for adapting to a world defined by global warming. Kapor the recent board chair of Linden Lab (now a board member), chair and founder of the Open Source Applications Foundation; co-founder of the Electronic Frontier and Mozilla Foundations; and the creator of Lotus 1-2-3, the spreadsheet that revolutionized enterprise computing in the 80s spoke about his current work to enhance the user interface for virtual worlds, which he likened to being in the DOS stage now. His vision to make virtual worlds useful and accessible to all is backed by work on in his own lab. He noted that videos of some of these experiments will be available on You Tube in a couple of weeks. See Hiro’s epic post for more. Kapor also made some comments re the open sourcing of virtual worlds.

I am personally very encouraged at the progress being made with OpenSim and open source components of a virtual world eco-system- some people inside the company at Linden may feel threatened by this. But my personal view all along is the most important thing that can happen is to have the largest most vibrant innovative ecosystem for virtual worlds as possible. And that means something that is open and interoperable. One wants to have the biggest pie not a little slice of a small pie. And similarly I know that there are a lot of people interested in avatar portability or open avatar in the company.

This last remark I think is clearly supported by the number of Lindens that came to the annual open Architectural Working Group meeting. I attended and there were indeed a bunch of Lindens present. The picture below is from Tao Takashi’s (Christian Scholz in RL) blog.

Avatar Bill of Rights, avatar idenntity, Avatar Rights, Free Software Movement, Freedom and Openess in Immersive Software, Intellectual Property and Privacy/Idnetity in Open Virtual Worlds, next generation internet, open source virtual worlds, Open Virtual Worlds Software Freedom Law Center

Eben Moglen - Open Source, IPPI panel in Second Life

Life 2.0 Summit Spring ‘08 will kick off with the Open Source, IPPI (IP and Privacy/Identity) in Virtual Worlds On Sunday, March 16, at 1 PM PST, with special guest Eben Moglen (his avatar pictured above).

The event will be held in the CMP Amphitheater at CMP 1, 2, 3, 4 ( SLURL ). To attend the Second Life events or watch video you must register for Life 2.0 here.

Eben Moglen, is Director, Chair and Chief Counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. Moglen, professor of law and legal history at Columbia, is a pioneer of the opensource movement, former general counsel for the Free Software Foundation, and one of the architects of version 3 of the GNU GPL.

Zero Linden

Eben Moglen’s co-panelists on Sunday will include Zero Linden, a.k.a Mark Lentczner, Linden Lab. Zero is one of main the architects of Second Life’s evolving infrastructure. Zero recently published the first draft of Second Life Grid Open Grid Protocol a.k.a. SLGOGP a important step forward on the path to opening up the Second Life grid (see Tateru Nino’s post on Massively, Tao Takashi’s post at mrtopf.de, and mindblizzard).

The brilliant and very elegant Zha Ewry (a.k.a David Levine, IBM Research) will be joining the panel from JFK airport while he waits for his flight to San Francisco. David Levine and Eben Moglen had an interesting conversation back in December that you can find on Ugotrade here. They explore some of the problems of defining digital public space and issues of privacy on the internet, offering many suggestions on how to implement online privacy enhancing technologies and insights as to how we could design the next generation of these technologies in responsible ways.

Also Zha was a interviewed recently on Metanomics with Beyers Sellers (a.k.a Robert Bloomfield). This interview is highly recommended as some of the key issues facing Second Life’s Architecture Working Group (AWG) and a future Open Grid “that will ultimately allow the cohesive operation of both Linden-operated and non-Linden-operated Second-Life style simulators and grids.” (see Massively for more) are unpacked.

Download the video (Quicktime)
Download the audio (MP3)
Read the transcript
Metaversed video archive at SLCN

Also, OpenSim and Linux guru Sean Dague (IBM) will be a panelist. Sean Dague has been a member of IBM’s Linux Technology Center since it’s inception in 2001. He has worked on numerous Open Source technologies over the years including: Cluster Management (SystemImage and OSCAR projects), Hardware Control (OpenHPI), Virtualization (Xen), and now Virtual Worlds with OpenSim. Sean has been an active member of the OpenSim project since July 2007.

Sean’s avatar (picture below) is Neas Bade.

Tara5 Oh (below - that’s me!) will moderate with CMP’s John Jainschigg (John Zhaoying).

See you there! (SLURL)

We have built the technology for monitoring almost everything, almost everywhere and we are making 99% of it open-source. Thanx to Bruce Sterling who inspired us, we called our technology “OpenSpime.” This is a concrete opportunity to monitor the earth, and everyone on this planet will be able to contribute to this.

OpenSpime have prepared a concept video of CO2 monitoring (still from the video above) and Google maps mashup via their OpenSpime infrastructure. For more see, co-founder, David Orban’s post OpenSpime: What do you know about your planet?

Instrumentation versus Surveillance

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.
Cory Doctorow, Craphound.com, boingboing.net

OpenSpime and SL Data Viz project (a project in Second Life “where people can contribute, review and copy open-source data viz tools” which OpenSpime will participate in) are taking up the challenge that Bruce Sterling made at end of his visionary book, Shaping Things. Sterling gave an imperative to humankind to start to make “decent technology” - social software entities that can answer questions. Questions about our world. Questions about objects. Not the profit-centric questions - serious questions. (Shaping Things).

The protagonists of this new era of social software - the narrators of the instrumented world to come - are Spimes.

Sterling invented the term by compressing ’space’ and ‘time’. Spimes are aware of their environment, they know where they are, and when they are, and keep track of some parameter around them. Sensing, memory, and ubiquitous communication enable spimes to accurately map the physical world around them. The progressive saturation of the world with spimes is creating what is called the Internet of Things.

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.

OpenSpime is doing it! SL Data Viz project is doing it!

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. This is the third time I have posted this link but Spimes deserve all the air play they can get!

Our technology enables individuals and corporations to better understand their environment, through the use of a series of GPS-enabled sensors. We provide a set of open APIs and communication protocols to manage the data collected.

See an interview with the founders of OpenSpime here.

With free hardware, free software, open APIs and communication protocols, OpenSpime’s business model is about the provisioning of the SpimeID identification numbers for the trusted communication of validated data streams between spimes and the OpenSpime servers.

Here are David’s responses to questions about the revenue model:

The revenue model is based on the sale (in large quantities to the hardware makers) of the certified SpimeIDs. Anybody can build spimes that conform to our open specifications, but if you want us to validate the data that your spime collects, and aggregate it together with other trusted sources, than you have to pay €1 per device to get the ID. Ah, and we already have LOIs for several hundred thousand IDs to be built in devices. [smile]

The estimates are that there will be ten or more spimes per person in the developed countries within ten years. That is approximately 25 billion spimes, and counting, since by 2020 the number of people who live in countries we define developed will also increase. That’s a
market for you! And we want to define the way the data generated is managed.

What comes after humans twittering to each other? Spimetalk. And spimetalk is going to be several orders of magnitude more intense than any human2human or human2machine communication before that.

From Spimes to Mirror Worlds

Agents, avatars and spimes will eventually hang out together in Virtual Worlds, interacting in real time in networked virtual environments built of live data and 3D info machines.

Melanie Swan points out:

Virtual Worlds have been used for architectural builds and interaction and the next obvious step is making them alive with data, streaming in data and representing it visually. Data visualization in Second Life is starting to take off with an open-source movement to make open-source building-block tools available to the community and developers and end users creating specific-purpose enterprise and science applications. There is a community wiki and a “Data Visualization” group in Second Life.

The picture above is of a Bashiba Panorama - “a commercially available ambient data panorama that dynamically reflects the overall “mood” of a rich information environment. The so-called “data atmosphere” reacts in real-time multivariable changes (e.g. stock market data), that are then mapped to visual counterparts (e.g. ocean waves, sun strength, wind speed, rain). the resulting information display can be interpreted ‘without cognitive effort’.”

“once the stock market opens, our 3D simulation comes to life, & people start ‘breathing’ business information.”

The streaming Bashiba Panorama in Second Life is an experiment in collaboration with Melanie Swan (MS Futures Group) and powered by the Ohio University VITAL Laboratory streaming server (many thanks to Dr. Chang Liu + Stephen Carroll). Look for Bashiba to come to Second Life in full immersive 3D!

For videos of Bashiba in SL see here and here.

3D Command Centers the killer app of the 3D Internet

A Mobile Tactical Data Comm Unit built by Illuminous Beltran in OpenSim

Data visualization will develop increasingly into and become inextricable from operation/command centers - the 3D information machines that will reinvent the relationship between humans and the up to now invisible but most crucial layer of modern society - software. For more on Illuminous Beltran’s, (a.k.a Michael Osias, IBM) virtual operation centers/command centers in Second Life/OpenSim see here.

These 3D command centers are being used for energy management, virtual network operations centers, and for building automation (see the work of Eolus). But, as long as our society is wedded to war, the “killer app” of the 3D internet will also be a killer app in more ways than one. The instrumentation of society has grown up hand in hand with surveillance and military technology. But it is up to us, as a society, to grow the peaceful and people centered aspects of this technology.

The nascent spiming technology of RFID had its roots in military innovation.

In 1946 Léon Theremin invented an espionage tool for the Soviet Union which retransmitted incident radio waves with audio information. Sound waves vibrated a diaphragm which slightly altered the shape of the resonator, which modulated the reflected radio frequency. Even though this device was a passive covert listening device, not an identification tag, it has been attributed as a predecessor to RFID technology. The technology used in RFID has been around since the early 1920s according to one source (although the same source states that RFID systems have been around just since the late 1960s).^[2][3][4][5]

Similar technology, such as the IFF transponder invented by the United Kingdom in 1939, was routinely used by the allies in World War II to identify aircraft as friend or foe. Transponders are still used by military and commercial aircraft to this day. (for more see Wikipedia on RFID)

But, Gelertner’s vision in, Mirror Worlds 1991, is the transformation of computers into seeing machines that will empower people to understand and work with the machinery of their society. And with projects like OpenSpime everyone can contribute to the task of asking important questions about our world. And as these questions are increasingly incorporated in virtual operation centers, we will be able to interact with the previously invisible machinery of our modern world - tinker with it, hang out in it with other avatars, and agents, and command it in new ways.

Life2.0 Summit Spring ‘08

Life 2.0 is the leading event on virtual world application and business development. Produced three times yearly by CMP in Second Life, the six-day virtual event draws a fully-registered, global audience of over 1000 software architects, creatives, CMOs and key executives seeking to harness the power of virtual reality for marketing, application creation, commerce, education, and to connect with the Net’s fastest-growing, smartest, most-engaged communities.

Also check out CMP’s John Jainschigg’s (John Zhaoying in Second life) post, “Life 2.0 - As green as Five Brazilian Households,” which demonstrates “that importing certain kinds of real-world activities into virtual reality saves a bagload of carbon. Or put another way, that it enables us to enjoy the benefits of global human community at small cost to the planet.”

Eben Moglen to join IPPI panel at Life 2.0 in SecondLife

The Kickoff Symposium will Discuss Opensource, IP and Privacy/Identity in Virtual Worlds On Sunday, March 16, at 1 PM PST.

Life 2.0’s IPPI (Intellectual Property, Privacy and Identity) symposium will kick off with a rousing panel discussion on Opensource, IP and Privacy in Virtual Worlds — including special guest Eben Moglen, Director, Chair and Chief Counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. Moglen, professor of law and legal history at Columbia, is a pioneer of the opensource movement, former general counsel for the Free Software Foundation, and one of the architects of version 3 of the GNU GPL.

The panel (still growing!) will be moderated by Tish Shute (Tara5 Oh), who blogs on virtual worlds (hey that’s me!), and CMP’s John Jainschigg (John Zhaoying).

Also see, A Conversation with Eben Moglen on Second Life.

There will be a Data Viz panel at Life 2.0, Monday, March 17th, 2pm to 3pm PST, organized by Melanie Swan (more on this soon). See the impressive list of data visualization tools that SL Data Viz project has already gathered together below.

Directory of Data Visualization Tools in SL:

(excerpted from the sldataviz wiki)

Interactive Data Exhibits:

• Embodiment Island Data Visualization Exhibit Hall, SLurl, contact Mark Dubin/ThreeDee Shepherd to exhibit material
• NOAA real-time U.S. weather sim, SLurl
• Daden Prime real-time U.K. weather sim, SLurl
• Daden Prime real-time LAX Air Traffic Data, SLurl

Tools - scientific:

• CAIA - Cheminformatic Assisted Image Array visualization laboratory. Status: Available to view (Gus Rosania/Caia Alter), SLurl
• Hiro’s Molecule Rezzer - Rezzes molecules from a notecard. Status: OpenSLedware. (Andrew Lang/Hiro Sheridan) ONREZ SLurl
• Histogram (20 period, real-time, on-demand stock market data), SLurl. Status: Open-source download available (Melanie Swan/Xantha Oe and Eloise Pasteur)
• Orac - Takes smi, InChI, or inchikey as input, queries three web services and rezzes the returned minimized structure in SL. Status: Avaliable upon request. (Andrew Lang/Hiro Sheridan)
• StoryMachine - Generic visualization tool for dynamic interactions. Status: In development (Peter Miller/Graham Mills), SLurl
• StoryMachine - PubMed Search. Status: In development (Peter Miller/Graham Mills), SLurl
• Protein Rezzer Toolkit - In-world rezzing of 3D protein backbone structures based on specially parsed PDB files. Status: In development (Peter Miller/Graham Mills; based on scripts by Troy McLuhan).

Tools - enterprise:

• Airline flight booking - connecting Second Life to a SAP NetWeaver system to create a 3-D Business Process (Bjoernaeon). Also see Craig Cmehil’s blog.
  
• Green Phosphor, New Jersey, USA - enterprise data visualization applications (Ben Lindquist/Arkowitz Jonson, David Cooper/Coop Upshaw)

3D information machines, Bashiba, building automation in virtual worlds, energy monitoring in virtual worlds, instrumentation versus surveillance, intellectual property, internet of thins, killer app of the 3D internet, Life 2.0, Mirror Worlds, open source data visualization, open source data visualization tools, openspime. CO2 monitoring, privacy and identity, RFID, Shaping Things, software freedom, spime, spimes, spimetalk, virtual command centers virtual network operation centers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Future of Ubiquitous Game Design

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

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

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

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

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

Jane McGonigal: I’m not mad at game designers. Compared to the rest of the world, we have it all figured out. Our medium kicks all other media’s ass. We make more people happy than any other platform or content in the world. (If you don’t believe that, you’re not paying attention to what’s happening.) We’ve won. Games have won. As an industry we’ve spent the last 30 years learning how to optimize experience. Brains, bodies (recently), and hearts are all engaged. That’s the good news.

The bad news is we rule the virtual world only. Reality is broken, and we’re not fixing it, we’re offering alternatives to it. We offer better experiences, better socialization, in virtual experiences. That needs to start changing. If reality is broken, why aren’t game designers trying to fix it? It’s our responsibility to design systems that make us happy and successful and powerful in real life? We have the power and the responsibility.

Jane shows an image of her favorite “I’m not good at life.” graffiti (from Liz Lawley’s notes).

Tony Manninen is an innovator committed to bringing the power of games into arenas we are yet to dream of.

Jane McGonigal has some nice examples to stretch your mind in this direction. For example, the Sniflabs collar remembers other dogs you’ve encountered. “We can play games with our dogs. What if I could play an MMO with my dog?”

Why will it make our “real” and “virtual” lives better to take play into every nook and cranny of our experience? Because, as Kurzweil points out, “Play is how we principally learn and principally create.” Jane McGonigal goes further:

I have spent the last year doing research on happiness. Instead of trying to figure out what’s broken, these people are trying to figure out what makes us happy. Every positive psychologist has found the same thing. Happiness is 1) having satisfying work to do, 2) the experience of being good at something, 3) time spent with people we like, and 4) a chance to be part of something bigger than ourselves.

“If you are a game designer you are in the happiness business.”

Jani Pirkola, realXtend project manager, works on innovation in the offices of LudoCraft.

LudoCraft = The Art of Designing Games and Play

Ludo - Theories of game and play

Craft - Art of game design and development

Reinventing the technologies of expression and experience.

At the Metaverse Roadmap meetup, Mitch Kapor pointed out “3D cameras would make virtual worlds easier to use.” And Bob Moore (on left above, me on right) asks in this excellent post, Is “free gesticulation” for avatars here yet?

When I asked Tony this question he replied:

“Our avatar will have enough “bones” for full facial expressions, etc. When the actual base architecture of the avatar is fully functional, there’s a possibility to use webcam, voice, or other input devices to control your avatars facial expressions. It can be true 1:1 mapping, but of course it can be something else as well. You can be yourself, or, you can change your “output” to something else.”

Tony, through realXtend, is reinventing the technologies of expression and experience.

Man Upside Down from The Book Of Urizen, William Blake

Interview with Tony Manninen, LudoCraft

Me: Second Life as a platform has been pretty much ignored for game development up to this point. Do you imagine transforming OpenSim and Second Life into platforms suitable for MMOG?

Tony: I am running the company and also making sure the realXtend development reaches the required quality and performance standards you would expect from MMOGs.

We’d definitely love to make games for Second Life, but at the moment the end-user experience is not exactly what you would expect from a game system. Therefore, we’ll pay heavy attention to things like responsivity, graphics quality, frame rate, etc. If we manage to keep up the momentum of realXtend development, then I’m sure there will be some interesting games spawning up in the near future…

Developing a sophisticated game engine is not an easy - or cheap - task, so there’s a loads of challenges ahead. But I truly believe that is the only way forward. With game-like interfaces and features you’ll be able to get much more heightened experiences.

Me: Have you worked out anything with LL yet re keeping the realXtend viewer compatible with SL?

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

Me: But will you be able to work out a licensing deal under the GPL so that they can integrate your code into their browser?

Tony: The whole licensing scheme is still undergoing some serious thinking processes. We will try to find the best possible option in order to satisfy the needs of hungry virtual world adopters. GPL has its challenges. But, on the other hand, everything invented by a man can be re-invented by another. I am sure there will be a fruitful solution to the licensing issue. At the moment we are concentrating on releasing all the code to the general public, so that all the enthusiastic developers out there can join the forces and increase the momentum.

I’m pretty sure the pieces will eventually find their right places. I am really happy about the response we’ve got from Linden Labs - it’s great to think we might be able to give something back for them.

Me: Is it safe to say the licensing issues are on the table and being worked out?

Tony: There’s definitely some serious working-out being done, so I suppose it is safe to say that.

Me: I know Will Wright creator of Sims online and Spore has spoken a lot on the spiraling costs of content production and that diminishing returns for content development at these high costs. He has gone to procedural programming with Spore to take gaming on another path. But, it seems to me that you are taking another approach by trying to bring SL up to gaming standards - is this correct, or are you doing something different?

Tony: I guess that’s quite correct assumption - at least in relation to LudoCraft. This is not necessarily a conscious decision. It’s more like the costs of licensing a decent game engine are generally so high that they more often than not fall out of reach of start-up companies and small developers - let alone universities, communities, etc.

We have tried to find a suitable platform for our collaborative games, but since there were no perfect solutions, we decided to try and make one. Not alone, but by joining forces with our partner company Admino and several other keen developers.

The OpenSim merger will increase the development base even further, so there’s a great chance we’ll actually pull this off.

Like I said, there’s loads of challenges, huge amount of work and some design issues involved. But the Open Source communities have proven themselves earlier, so why not now.

Me: What do you think are the chief design issues to be addressed?

The realXtend project includes LudoCraft and Admino, plus we have several sub-contracting developers doing work with us.

The main issue is the divide between social 3D worlds (like SL for example) and MMOG. The gamers tend to avoid these social virtual worlds for obvious reasons [the quality of the experience from a gaming POV]. However, if we manage to develop a platform that can serve both purposes, then I’m sure things will change.

The main design issues, therefore, are the performance, audiovisual quality, rendering, frame rate stability, responsivity, interaction, etc.

Numerous issues that are not necessarily critical in purely social virtual world, but are absolutely essential in any multiplayer game environment.

Plus, if well taken care of, these issues will boost the whole end user experience in the non-gaming situations as well.

Me: You have gone a long way with the rendering and meshes what will be the next most important features and when do they arrive?

Tony: Inverse Kinematics and procedural animation are essential features if we want to have truly expressive and adaptive animations. We see avatars as main tools for self-expression. We’ve researched the issues since 2000 and we believe we are on the right track. With flexible and powerful expression potential and accurate controllability, the users will be able to communicate with their avatars so much more than is possible nowadays. The concept of Rich Interaction is something we will utilize here and it will be interesting to see the results when the system is actually usable by the general public.

Vehicles and projectiles are really important so they sit heavily on our roadmap.

Me: Are you going to do 3D face mapping etc - I know that this is getting close to doable now?

Tony: Oh, the required list of features is endless. There are several key features in terms of game development, but also some interesting stuff for more serious applications.

Our avatar will have enough “bones” for full facial expressions, etc. When the actual base architecture of the avatar is fully functional, there’s a possibility to use webcam, voice, or other input devices to control your avatars facial expressions. It can be true 1:1 mapping, but of course it can be something else as well. You can be yourself, or, you can change your “output” to something else.

Me: OpenSim is very attractive for a number of vertical applications - building automation is one you mention. How focused are you on getting the OpenSIm platform ready for the huge mirror world, 3d info machine/command center market?

Tony: In terms of the mirror world, we already have some interesting pilot projects that target those features. It may be less juicy than making cool games, but it provides some highly interesting scenarios.

Me: What are your pilot projects?

Tony: I don’t think I should go into details at the moment. We will include a list of initial projects and collaborations for our next announcement, which is due 3rd of March (latest). We want the third parties to have their saying first before making these public.

Me: The realXtend avatar server is a new way of connecting sims - could you tell be more about your vision there?

Tony: The main vision is: there should be only one. Only one avatar, one user account, one login, etc.

It is ridiculous that I need to have an avatar in SL, character in WOW, nickname in IRC, and whatnot. I mean, it’s ok if I want all these different identities, but what if I would be, eh, me in all these worlds, perhaps doing business, shopping, hobbying, and so on. There should be an option for me to jump from world to world without the hassle of logging in and logging out

Me: And how will the work you have done on the avatar server alleviate this problem unless SL, WoW and other cooperate on interoperability?

Tony: Think of it more like the 3d web. realXtend/OpenSim is like the Apache of virtual worlds, rexViewer is the Mozilla or Firefox of whatever. When “surfing” the web, you are not constantly required to prove and change your identity when loading different pages.

Me: But because there is no equivalent of http for virtual worlds yet, how will this work re the other worlds?

Tony: Ah, that’s the critical question: it won’t. There is some interoperability work going on in terms of creating the standards. The problem is, this work tends to be slow. We are not willing to wait that long. We want to see some action. That’s why we thought that we’ll start the wheel rolling and then see what happens.

Me: So at least now OpenSim worlds and hopefully Second Life will be able to connect this way?

Tony: The openess is the key to the lack of unified protocols. When the interfaces and APIs are open and transparent, people are free to develop applications, converters and bridges between different systems.

Right, at least OpenSim is now reachable, plus we want to get the teleport between SL and OpenSim/realXtend up and running, at least in the quick-and-dirty way so that people will have a chance to experience the feeling of world-to-world hopping.

Me: So in terms of this experience of avatars hopping between OpenSim worlds how do you think this will change the need /or not for large grids like SL or any of the new ones like OpenLife that are springing up?

Tony: I think there’s still need for various technical solutions like there is need for lighter and heavier websites. There are different applications, different scenarios and different user requirements. It is still really enjoyable feeling to be able to actually walk - ok, virtually at least, from one server to another. With hopping there may be some loading involved (like when surfing the web). So I guess the big grids won’t go anywhere. We’ll just have more modalities in terms of servers/worlds.

Me:So what are your expectations for concurrencies on OpenSim in the near future?

Tony: Hmmm… I’m not sure yet. OpenSim is an excellent initiative and there’s already a substantial user base. There are a lot of work to be done in terms of integrating realXtend codebase to the OpenSim, but since the visions and missions of the people involved are aligned, the hard work is a minor detail in the process.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But this week, as Piet explained:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exploring Qwaq

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adventures with The Qwaq Second Life Liason Group

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think it turns into the flavor of things like right now you go into Amazon, you go to book reviews. And there are 50 or 60 people who very carefully putting their opinions down and there are maybe ten other people who are curious about the author — who currently are thinking about buying their book. But you can’t see them on the web at all. But they’re there side by side pulling the pages reading the reviews commenting on them. But you have no chance of interacting with them at all. If in fact we can say now that you’re interested in talking about this author and this book, there are ten people happen to be in the internet context, interested in doing that.

Can we bring you together and have a conversation. You can ask a question rather than simply read someone’s written report. Why do you think the character is interesting? Was it because they do interesting things? Was it because their thought processes as described by the author interesting? What makes this a compelling book to you personally? And we can have a dialog rather than a static web.

Things like that, I think, are going to happen. Do they look like giant wolves wandering around freely through the Internet - which is half game space and half social a space, half social interaction spacee. Partially because in fact because Linden Lab didn’t set out to create that thing, people did, so I figure some of that meets human needs.

But the disruptive change is this weird blend between Wiki, comment pages, chat, talk, and 3D helps along with it. I’m deeply opposed to calling it 3D internet. I think you focus on avatars and visualization and you miss the fact that it’s a blend between what My Space does and classic internet chat that’s really exiting -which a lot of social community building.

What followed at this point was a wide- ranging discussion on whether Virtual Worlds may effect fundamental aspects of human neurology -“Is this an interface that grows the mind or shrinks the mind?” - and underlying issues and problems with privacy on the internet. Two key questions Moglen raises are: “Is store it yourself fundamental to freedom in the 20th Century?” and, “Who gets the logs?” I touched on these questions in an earlier post, “If The Metaverse Goes Wrong….” And there is an excellent podcast of Eben Moglen speaking on these issues at the MySQL conference. Also see David F. Flanders blog.

To focus this post on some very practical suggestions re privacy and avatar rights that came up in this particular discussion, I begin the transcription where the discussion began to dig down, both conceptually and technically, into the architecture of digital public space.