Junichiro Makino, University of Tokyo, leads the way into the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) in Tokyo. Piet Hut, Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton, is right behind with the Genkii team. Jun Makino has offered the use of a server at the observatory to set up an OpenSim environment. History is about to be made.

Thanks Genkii for the photos! Genkii is a Tokyo-based strategic consultancy focusing on social media and virtual worlds (see here for my interview with CEO of Genkii, Ken Brady and COO, Adam Johnson).

Next day Piet Hut announced to the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics MICA:

Adam Johnson and Jeff Ames, developers of OpenSim, and members of the Tokyo Genkii team, have succeeded today in tweaking their physics engine in OpenSim to let stars dance according to Newtonian Gravity.

On a Mac laptop, they let hundreds of stars move in real time, as a gravitational N-body problem (yes, a few hundred!). This is a historic watershed.

A video was soon up on YouTube here. But as Adam Johnson noted:

I don’t think the video can capture the pure fun of this thing, it makes computational astrophysics approachable to a 3 year old… like legos for astronomy. And it really puts OpenSim in a new light! This same method can be applied to other areas too.. think protein folding visualizations.

Computational Astrophysics is a field that has long been associated with some serious number crunching. Jun Makino is holding up a piece of the new GRAPE (an acronym for “gravity pipeline” and an intended pun on the Apple line of computers) – a super computer that will become one of the fastest super computers in the world (again).

Later in this post there is an in depth interview I did in Second Life with Jun. His Second Life avatar is Makino Magic. Jun discusses the future of computational astrophysics, and how this may be tied in with virtual worlds

The photo above was taken by Adam Johnson of Genkii. Adam noted:

We want to use super computers like this (the Cray and GRAPE) to offset the simulations and push the results to OpenSim. That way it can simulate thousands, or millions of stars/planets

The picture below shows the Cray at the National Observatory of japan on the right, and on the left Jeff Ames is shown working on the N-Body simulation in OpenSim. I heard Jeff implemented most of the code for Newtonian Gravity in OpenSim on the train ride to the observatory!

Genkii, in addition to their work on OpenSim are developing, with 3Di and other open source virtual world developers, an OpenViewer a “from scratch” that should allow people like scientific researchers, game developers, educators, etc to make fully customized viewers more easily than they could before. Adam explained:

Open Viewer is (BSD Licensed) using, at the moment, OgreDotNet for rendering and LibSL for the protocol.

But you can use any protocol you want actually and any rendering engine – ideally we want to allow it to support numerous virtual worlds with one viewer. We have been talking to HiPiHi guys about getting their protocol working with it as well, and soon will talk to some IBM guys in China to see if they want to take part in that action.

MICA – Pioneering Astrophysics in Virtual Worlds

Piet Hut has been evangelizing the potential of virtual worlds for astrophysics, and bringing astrophysicists into virtual worlds through the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA) for quite a while now (see my previous post). And, Piet and Eiko Ikegami have just published a fascinating paper about Japanese History and Second Life.

MICA, begun in 2007, is a virtual astronomy institute featuring many MODEST-related activities. Aimed at harnessing the capabilities of virtual worlds and 3D collaborative environments (such as Second Life, Qwaq, Sun Wonderland), it fosters interaction among astrophysicists with interest in large-scale simulations, including dense stellar systems. Outreach and educational activities are also major MICA goals. MICA weekly events include popular talks, computational astrophysics lectures and Journal Club discussions of recent astro-ph papers. The MICA wiki, containing more information, schedules of events, and links to related pages, can be found here.

Also, there is an excellent video of Piet’s talk on the “Scientists and Science Outreach in Second Life,” that was part of the SL5BD events posted on YouTube here.

In the picture above, MICA members Prospero Frobozz (Prospero Linden a.k.a. Robert Knop in RL), Tara5 Oh (me, Tish Shute in RL), Pema Pera (Piet Hut in RL), Peter28 shostakovich (Peter Teuben in RL), Paradox Olbers (Spike MacPhee in RL) see also Paradox’s Spindrift in Scilands blog, Pan Numanox (Alfred Whitehead in RL), Jazz90meteotl Loon, Eamu Godenot (Will Farr in RL), and Lagrange Euler (Steven McMilland in RL). Thank you MICA member and SL photographer Kirk Smythe (Tom Deluca III in “real” life) for this picture, and for the portrait of Piet’s avatar Pema Pera below.

I have been attending MICA meetings as an observer since spring when their activities were mostly focused in Qwaq. Now the focus of MICA is Second Life and OpenSim. There is a regular schedule of events. In fact, I was invited to speak about Open Source virtual worlds at one of the daily “coffee” meetings. I later heard that my talk was in fact the trigger for the collaboration between Piet and the Genkii team!

I invited Adam Johnson to come to the discussion after my talk when the conversation focused on OpenSim. After I introduced Adam to Piet, they realized they were both in Tokyo in RL, they met for lunch and the rest is history.

I have blogged and attended a number of MICA’s events including Dr. Rob Knop’s (a.k.a Prospero Linden a.k.a Prospero Frobozz) talk, “The Power of the Dark Side: How Dark Matter and Dark Energy dominate our Universe.” Dr. Knop was on the team that discovered the accelerating expansion of the universe.

Why does MICA want to do simulations within Virtual Worlds?

I asked Piet (Pema Pera in Second Life, picture below) why MICA wants to do simulations in virtual worlds and, why N-body simulation is so important to astrophysics?

Pema Pera: For two reasons:

1) Traditionally simulations were where scientists spent years and visualization was an afterthought, a few pictures in a journal, never the right tools to really mine the data, not enough time, money, tools. So we can use VWs to start with visualization and then have the simulations follow. Another example of inverting a traditional priority, like going to what-you-see-is-what-you-get. Most breakthroughs in computer use are like that. So starting with the enormous investment already in the visualization aspects of Virtual Worlds, you can then run your simulations within them, or so it seems. Whether they actually run in there, or in a hidden way elsewhere on a Cray or GRAPE is of no real concern for the user.

2) Collaborative code writing and debugging. Traditionally, observers collaborate — can’t build a telescope and observatory with one person. Theoretical folks now have to learn to collaborate. You can’t write a whole simulation package in one PhD three-year period.

Most breakthroughs are inverting something, first direct addressing to make the computer fast, but a pain for humans, then you switch to indrect addressing, makes more sense for the human, slower at first for the computer, but the advantages in software productivity are overwhelming. Same with going from assembly code to compilers, same from complied languages to scripting languages

Theorists are learning to collaborate and they have to write computer code together! What better way than to do pair programming in a virtual world, so pair coding and pair debugging becomes possible within a VW, especially when you can see the results in your simulation.

Tara5 Oh: oooh that is interesting, so being able to “play” with a physics engine could be very key!

Pema Pera: YES! You simulate at large scales VERY directly into the fabric of the simulated world iteself. It is the difference between having a stage on which you play and having the stage itself play for you!!!!

Tara5 Oh: Why are N-body simulations so key to astrophysics?

Pema Pera: Ah, great question! Gravity dominates. On short scales we have electricity and magnetism and friction and much more but on large enough scales only gravity is felt. Electricity cancels + and – charges but gravity is only attractive, hense a gravitational N-body problem. You cut up the world into N parts as large an N as you can handle and then you simulate the UNIVERSE.

Will Farr (MIT) implements the “Hermite Algorithm” in OpenSim

The Thumbnails of screenshots above (in order) are from a simple N-Body simulation of 32 bodies in OpenSim. Basically, you can see the bodies collapse, eject some of their members, and form a cluster of the remaining bodies in the sequence of photos

It wasn’t long before MICA members were deep into OpenSim. Notably, Will Farr, Eamu Godenot in Second Life is a MICA member and a 5th-year graduate student at MIT working on numerical relativity and N-body simulation algorithms, “lots of theory and numerics, very little observing, unfortunately,” he told me. Will was one of the first MICA members to pick up on the N-body work in OpenSim.

Tara5 Oh: Could you explain what you have been doing with n-body simulation in OpenSim?

Eamu Godenot: When Adam and Jeff wrote a Newtonian physics engine for OpenSim, this was a couple of weeks ago. they showed that it was possible to run gravitational simulations using a custom physics engine, but they didn’t know a lot about n-body simulations. I don’t know a ton, but I know more, and I was coming to Japan to visit Piet/Pema and Jun/Makino. So, Piet suggested that we try to improve the algorithms that the physics engine used. Maybe enough to do some physically relevant simulations

Tara5 Oh: You all met in Tokyo?

Eamu Godenot: Yes, it was exciting—I met Adam and Jeff two days ago, and spent some time learning about OpenSim and the code from them. Plus pestering them with lots of questions about genkii, programming, and OpenSim in general. Then, on Wednesday and some of Thursday, I started improving the n-body part of the physics engine. They had implemented a nice algorithm for evolving the bodies, but the standard ones used in the field are more efficient and accurate. In particular, Jun Makino invented a technique called the Hermite algorithm that is, more-or-less, the “industry standard” So, I implemented that.

Interview With Jun Makino (avatar Makino Magic)

Tara5 Oh: MICA has been doing some work on N-Body simulation in OpenSim in which you have access to the physics engine. How doe this open up new possibilities for astrophysics to use a general simulation platform in conjunction with super computers?

Makino Magic: Well, what Piet and other people have done so far is mainly to implement some simple models directly as simulation modules in Opensim. That itself is nice, but not quite enough to share and work on really high-end simulations. However, once we learn how to show things in SL/OpenSim, it *should be* not too difficult to connect the Opensim program directly to data visualization or analysis program which runs on any other computer, or actually connect it directly to a supercomputer or GRAPE.

Tara5 Oh: Could a general simulation platform like OpenSim ultimately become an operating system/user interface to super computers? And do you think this could bring a new kind of interactivity to number crunching?

Makino Magic: I think it could. That’s rather similar to the web browser becomming an general user interface for whatever programs people develop. Well, I think the important thing here is the possibility of people in different places working on a single dataset or simulation in really real-time.

Tara5 Oh: Yes it is really my big dream for virtual worlds, or rather for the free form, programmable, 3D collaborative space exemplified by OpenSim. to make the previously invisible world of software becomes visible in a shared interactive environment!

Makino Magic: Yes, not just dataset and simulation, but the possibility to share the program for simulation itself and to do the development in that way like pair- or “Extreme” programming, so more than two people physically far away that can really change the way we do research and development.

Tara5 Oh: Yes! What is you role in MICA?

Makino Magic: Well, at this point not much. I have been too busy with my real-life duties….

Tara5 Oh: What do you think MICA could achieve re integrating virtual worlds in astrophysics? And what to you think you colleagues who are the first evangelists of the use of virtual worlds in astrophysics may be overlooking?

Makino Magic: Well, at this point I cannot predict. But the simulation stuff implemented in OpenSim looks very promising

Tara5 Oh: Do you have any different ideas from Piet re the the role virtual worlds can play?

Makino Magic: Hmm, I must say I do not know all the details of Piet’s ideas, but for me the first step would be to use the environment to really do some collaborative research and discusssion, and we do not yet have simple tools to do so…

Tara5 Oh: And what are the most urgent tools you need now?

Makino Magic: A very first thing, which might be actually there, is to really work in multiple windows much in the same way as yo do in the pair-programming. You should be able to use one editor window, a graphic window to show result, etc, and should be able to edit one file….

Tara5 Oh: and secondly?

Makino Magic: Well, that is hard to predict… But clearly we need a “virtual” 3D “screen” , in which we visualize 3D results and see, walk into or fly.

Tara5 Oh: And is the N- Body simulation in OpenSim the first step to this last requirement?

Makino Magic: Yes, I think so. And that is useful not only for real research but for educational or public-outreach type stuff. Which is also important to get the attention of wide range of people, many of them are better programmers than astrophysists, like the people from Genkii who implemented the first N-body simulation in OpenSim.

Tara5 Oh: Do you have an OpenSim running in your own lab yet?

Makino Magic: Well, the server is running, but I have no client PC in my office yet (My windows PC in my offiice is toooo old and slow…)

Tara5 Oh: What is the contribution that being able to play with physicis engine so easily in OpenSim makes to N-Body simulation research?

Makino Magic: The most important thing is that you can show the result to people, including yourself, much easier than without OpenSim. well, hopefully…

Tara5 Oh: Piet said something to me that I was interested by: “If we really want to reverse simulating and visualizing, we can IMAGINE doing everything on the visualizer and then using a “simulations accelerator” (the opposite of a “graphics accelerator”) to get speed.” He went on to say, “similar techniques can be used in visualization as in simulations, actually, where also you don’t compute the force on one particle from all the billion other particles in a large simulation, so we have a lot of experience there already both conceptually and practically.”

Makino Magic: Hmm, Well, for me it is not too important where the simlation is done, but it must be reasonablly fast. Currently, really cutting-edge large-scale simulation can take months on the largest Cray or GRAPE.

On the other hand, lots of things can be done real-time, and my guess is Piet is mainly interested in those kind of things. There are many interesting problems for which we need to do simulations, but not the largest ones on supercomputers.

Tara5 Oh: So there are many interesting problems for simulation that do not require a super computer?

Makino Magic: Yes. for example, just by solving many three-body problems we can learn a lot, and can even publish an interesting paper in Nature (we did in 2004).

Tara5 Oh: What will scientific computing look like 25 years from now?

Makino Magic: Well, Piet has been in on that for more than 25 years, and I’m approaching to that many years, but it is hard to predict….

Tara5 Oh: But just some speculation, hehe!

Makino Magic: Well, one thing is that it’s becoming more and more difficult to develop large simulation programs. Much of the code we use now has been maintained for more than 20, or 30 years. In that sense, even though the hardware changes, the software changes very very slowly, and that is the problem.

Tara5 Oh: Do you think the intereactivity of virtual worlds could be useful in solving or preventing the problem (frequent in science) of 25 year old code still being in use?

Makino Magic: Well, interactivity itself might not be the solution, but the way SL/OpenSim works and the way it talks to other simulation programs might be able to change the view. In some (many) cases, the program to be solved is really simple, like one line of and equation of motion, resulting in millions of lines to be able to efficiently solve a partucular kind of initial condition with very limited computing power. I do not say there will be any real solution, but there may be some alternative approach.

Tara5 Oh: Do you think that a virtual astrophysics organization like MICA could apply and recieve funding for this kind of research on their own, or would they neeed a RL university partner?

Makino Magic: In the case of MICA it is not difficult to get RL partner, IAS or Drexel or whatever.

[The MICA steering meeting began to convene at this point]

Tara5 Oh: Have I missed asking you any important questions do you think?

Makino Magic: Hmm, no.

Tara5 Oh: Thanks so much Makino!

Makino Magic: Okay, this was fun! Thanks a lot!

Tara5 Oh: And I look forward to hearing about the continuing story in the future!

Makino Magic: Yes, bye for now.

Recently, I met Kyle Gomboy, a former aerospace test engineer turned entrepreneur (pictured above working in Project Manhattan OpenSim), at a realXtend open house in Second Life. I quickly realized that this little bot (his avatar in Second Life is a cute energy efficient robot called G2 Proto) was one of the power houses behind a big vision.

Kyle, with partner Robin Gomboy (the G of G2), is now working with Microsoft, OpenSim, realXtend and the community of over 800 TechNet and MSDN/.NET that has already come together in Second Life to establish:

a technology grid for companies to come together with community members to form a high tech silicon valley virtually

The Microsoft connection, of course, really intrigued me! IBMers have been a movers and shakers in OpenSim since the early days. But Microsoft had not to my knowledge shown any interest in joining the immersive 3D party.

But within hours of meeting Kyle I had an interview set up with Zain Naboulsi (C# Writer in Second Life), a Microsoft Developer Evangelist who is the engine on the Microsoft side for this “community effort.”  Zain pointed out to me that despite his title, he is known as “the guy for Virtual World Evangelism” at Microsoft. I asked Zain how many virtual world evangelists there are at Microsoft?

Ha good question! There is probably about four or five of us right now.

Zain described his role in Microsoft and how this relates to this community effort in OpenSim?

I am relatively young in Microsoft I just celebrated my first year anniversary so I can’t talk about what happened several years ago, all I know is what happened over the year that I have been there.

My job description when I started this absolutely didn’t include anything about 3d worlds or anything of the kind. I became interested in 3d worlds and I think it speaks volumes for Microsoft that they said alright fine lets make it your job. And, that’s exactly what they did and likewise with other folks it is on their commitment now. Our strategy is straight forward, if you you can prove that your efforts in the community work then you are given carte blanche. If you can’t prove it then why be given the resources to waste.

My friend Ben Lindquist, of Green Phosphor, who is the only developer I know that develops in all the major open source virtual worlds, sent me a link pointing out that Microsoft has been interested in virtual worlds for some time.  But I asked Zain about this notion I have that Microsoft has been hiding its light under a bushel re the free form 3D immersive space. Zain responded:

I think we want to be careful. I mean just because we didn’t show up to the party doesn’t necessarily mean we didn’t like the party. Like most very large companies we wanted to make sure it was a viable type of thing. I think what you are seeing now is the beginning of the emergence of that experimentation and that is validation of the fact that we are definitely interested in this space.

As both Kyle and Zain were very clear that this is an open source community project, with no expectations of paid Microsoft developers being involved, at least in the short term, I was very interested as to how Kyle and Zain saw the big question of how such community driven Open Source development will reward people for their efforts (also see Second Thoughts for an alternate position to my own Open Source advocacy).

The full transcript of my interview with Kyle and Zain follows here. But, I will highlight one of Kyle’s responses. He is an experienced open source developer and entrepreneur and this is the answer he gave to this billion dollar question.

That’s a great question and since I got involved with communities and Open Source it has been a tough one to figure out. But I came to grips with when I found out that you could create this cool java script and that anyone could open new source and take what you did and that annoyed me. And I remember thinking many many years ago, how am I going to get anywhere if everything unique I make people can just take?

But then I began to thinking I can do that to. I can look at their code and then we can move up the whole technology the whole effort together, we’ll move forward faster and that will benefit us all because we will be able to send twice the product to market that we could have if we all stayed in our own little cubicles.

As far as the Manhattan project goes anything we develop there goes back to open source immediately and once it is embedded and tested it goes right back in cos OpenSim is open source and that is the ideology it was started with and we are not going to interrupt that at all.

Of course turning back code to an open source community is not always a straightforward process as a recent debate about the integration of realXtend code in OpenSim sparked off by Justin Clark-Casey and Dusan Writer indicates. But another good friend – an astute virtual world developer/evangelist, Peter Quirk, made an important point re the idea that realXtend “may not be giving back what it takes.” He noted too this must also be viewed from the perspective of “how hard it is to merge source trees that are changing rapidly without any stable releases.”

As I have heard on the grapevine great efforts are being made by both OpenSim and realXtend to work out an approach to integration. I cannot say much specifically at this point. But as Dusan Writer notes, I am an “OS promoter” and as such I think the fact that OpenSim, at such an early stage in its development, is being faced with the challenge of integrating such large contributions as realXtend’s is not just about “cracks in the open.”  This is just as much a question of how to deal with an abundance of riches in an unstructured and rapidly expanding community. The arrival of another important new community of developers from the Microsoft .NET and TECHNET will of course bring more riches and challenges too.

Interview with Zain Naboulsi (MIcrosoft) and Kyle Gomboy (G2)

Tish: Are you going to get involved with the OpenSim community?

Kyle: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been trying to catch Adam [Frisby]. He’s been chatting with me through Facebook. The first thing we want to do is start working with him and Microsoft’s Zain has offered to get support going for some of the packet handling issues that Adam was talking about that might be limiting how many people could be in OpenSim. So Adam was looking to run some code by Microsoft, and Zain was saying that he definitely had some volunteers to help out. We definitely plan to get involved.

Tish: I was interested to know how deep you were going to get in terms of OpenSim development?

Zain: Kyle you want to start and then I’ll take it?

Kyle: I had thrown out to Tish that I had already started discussion with Adam, and first thing he mentioned was some issues with performance that he was hoping if Microsoft got involved they could contribute. Zain had already asked to start working with codeplex and getting some of the files up on there so we could swarm in the .net community and possibly some Microsoft help as we get them more educated on the OpenSim movement.

Zain: Absolutely. You asked how far we’re going to go with this? We’re going to go as far as it lets us go. We honestly believe we’re forging the future here so it needs to go as far as people want to take it.

Tish: Have you thought about where you want to be interoperable with other Microsoft projects, XBox even eventually, Virtual Earth? Have you gone that far or are you just going a step at a time at the minute?

Zain: That’s a great question. Honestly we haven’t thought beyond seeing if people are really interested in this concept and from what Kyle tells me a lot of uptake. And, I know we’ve started some basic experiments, nothing really major, to see. But certainly it’s not inconceivable. I think what it is though, you mentioned the Windows aspect of it, that’s great. But we’ve already proven, if you just look around here, it doesn’t really matter to us that much what the platform is. I think the main reason we’re going to OpenSim is not so much because it all runs on Microsoft stuff which is just a nice bonus, but because I really feel like (and I just love the Lindens by the way so let me get that out!), but I really feel like we’re kind of restricted here [in Second Life]. I think that we can have a lot more flexibility by going the OpenSim route, and working with folks like Adam who I haven’t met personally but Kyle tells me he’s just phenomenal. And everybody Kyle’s met has been cool and talking about all these great things we can do with OpenSim that I don’t think Second Life’s going to give us the ability to do this anytime soon.

Tish: I know some groups are involved in the OpenSim core, are you aiming to be that involved or are you just not sure yet?

Zain: Honestly, this is the very early stages now. [Project] Manhattan is the first real test to see if first of all people respond, secondly if it’s something we want to stay involved in. All indicators are right now that it’s phenomenal. Third, I think the big thing is will this resonate with the community? The main reason we’re in this game right now is about the community. That’s why we built everything you see around you, and that’s why we want to do what we want to do with OpenSim. Then if it benefits the commmunity and the community responds to it, then we’ll stay with it. If the community doesn’t like it, doesn’t think it’s a good idea, then obviously we’ll get out. But from what Kyle has been telling me the community has just had phenominal response to the Manhattan project.

Kyle; Yes, I am pretty much lost to OpenSim at the moment because of all the options and the flexibility and the code familiarity. And everyone I’ve talked to who has gotten their own sim set up, every single person who is getting their ports configured to hook up to our grid agrees, and it doesn’t seem to be a contest even with the quirks here and there, and the lack of some features. There is so much ability – the scripting the c#sharping is everything that we had been talking about needing in SL and the desk top sharing that realXtend is doing. It is exactly the work we want to get involved in. I don’t see myself developing in Second Life, I see myself attaching the work I do in Second Life to OpenSim and everyone else is joining in so far too.

Zain: Let me clarify though too. While OpenSim will be the R&D and experimentation side of what we do, by no stretch of the imagination are we even considering abandoning our Second Life presence. So this sim [Microsoft sim in second Life] isn’t going anywhere. Community is what drives us so now we will have the community folks come here for some things and go there [OpenSim] for other things.

Tish: Just to be absolutely clear, when you say community, you mean your .net and C# developers community right?

Zain: Yes, and the technet folks, all of them, any of the community that wants to come here. But obviously the Microsoft focus people in general, so yes .Net and TechNet.

Kyle: yes we have almost 800 total in Second Life. And Zain is right noone’s leaving Second Life. But this is a community based thing and the biggest number is our c# developers. And what c# developers want to do is get into something and tinker and the top community leaders dove right into OpenSim and have seen past the quirks. So I think it will turn into a socializing place here on the islands [project Manhattan] but I think in the next year you will see a lot of .net innovation coming out of the group that was just meeting here in Second Life.

Zain: Yes I really agree with that. This is a playground now for them but I think it will evolve into something more than that.

Tish: Your focus is really on your developer community isn’t it?

Zain: Yes and I think that we may be the only project from a large company that is hundred percent community driven. I don’t go to outside folks and ask them to build this stuff. The community does it, the community decides on it, the community drives it. That’s the biggest deal. I am here to help the community in any way I can.

Tish: When you say that, it’s not just about people who are interested in Immersive 3D development, it’s people who are working many Microsoft areas right?

Zain: Absolutely. My job as Evangalist is fairly broad in nature. Today I just got done doing a webcast on new features in AJAX. I cover a very broad spectrum of things, but without a doubt an enormous amount of my time is spent with virtual world evangelism. As you aptly pointed out people are getting more and more interested in this stuff so I find more and more of my time is spent there.

Tish: I suppose future directions depend on what the developers pick up on in OpenSim doesn’t it to some degree? Do you have people who have started doing any projects in OpenSim yet?

Zain: I don’t focus internally, yes, Microsoft folks are doing stuff in OpenSim a variety of projects. But my main goal is to get out and encourage the community to get involved in OpenSim. If we can’t get the community engaged and involved in this then ultimately we’re doomed to fail because the community has to want this. The community has to pick this up as early adopters or we’ll never get to the point of mainstream acceptance.

Tish: I know Kyle is interested in something I’m really interested in which is seeing OpenSim as something much more than a 3d virtual world. Some people see OpenSim as something potentially more like a next generation operating system with really far reaching potential for dynamic, interactive data visualization and virtual operations centers and applications like that. I know Kyle you’re interested so perhaps I can ask you about that?

Kyle: I’m one hundred per cent interested in that. You might be able to send an engineer a drawing and then pop in a little active-X control and they can read about the drawing and then just click and have a view of OpenSim and move the camera around and inspect it in 3d. I see more as another output device like an excel graph or something like that.

Zain: I’ve got to agree with Kyle. I think in the short term the only way you’re going to initially get adoption is, to use a metaphor, if we think of the client as the next generation of the web browser. I think by going that path you’re going to get a lot more folks to want to try it. But ultimately certainly it’s entirely possible it becomes the shell or something like it becomes a shell. It might become, not the entire desktop which is probably unlikely, but a major component of the desktop integrated with it just like you get pieces like IM and things like that today. I don’t know if you’ve seen TouchWall yet. One of the technologies we’ve come out with. It’s like surface except it’s a big wall you can use with your interface. And, I can see TouchWall combined with the client we have today, and doing some pretty cool things especially if we can do what Kyle’s talking about – bring in some Exel spreadsheets – basically bringing in the ability to do office type activities into these clients.

Kyle: I don’t mean to say that I rule that out as a possibility, I do think that’s a possibility. I just look at what can I do in the next one or two years with this because whatever I start now that’s about as far as I can really look because the whole game will be changed in three years.

Zain: I totally agree with Kyle on that.

Tish: As far as I can see Intel might have a key part to play now, because I think that the graphics cards are a limiting factor here, particularly for the applications you are talking about Kyle?

Kyle: Yes. The video requirement is pretty steep and not only that I need probably 4 times the resolution that OpenSim has now maybe a thousand by a thousand grid before I can do any real high resolution data visualization. There needs to definitely be some expansion but if you pick the right project and the right application, it’s perfect for a lot of things right now. The other thing that Adam [Frisby] mentioned was some of the threading issues. That would help with concurrency where we can have more than 30 people or so. Even though I’ve read some hidden blogs here and there that someone’s working on a mod that lets you do over a hundred people in a sim. That would help a lot. But you’re right Intel getting involved could mean some help with some of the threading issues.

Tish: I’m really interested when you even start to mention taking this technology into other user interfaces. There’s just something wrong with being stuck in a little 2d window when you have all this 3d power. Anything that gets you away from pushing around a little mouse in a tiny window, that’s where it begins to rock.

Zain: I was in this game place where they had video arcade games and there was this one where they had these motion detectors and you play this karate style game. and you kick and the avatar does what you do. And in the end that’s where all this technology’s headed. You won’t have bulky crap attached to your hands and body like we see now, but you’ll have motion detectors that are finely tuned so that you can move and manipulate things in the virtual world.

I think Phase 1, if we’re really going to get wide adoption of OpenSim, is to treat OpenSim like the conference call center of the future. For the big events that’s where you start getting the budget and interest from internal Microsoft. I think that naturally leads to whole lot of Microsoft folks becoming much more heavily involved.

Tish: I’m assuming at the moment, your OpenSim community just has separate islands. You haven’t gridded them, they’re not related in any way right?

Kyle: That’s right. I’ve only really had the sim up a little over a week now. The initial Manhattan sim. I’m just setting up some different group meeting places within that sim. For example, we’re working on Live-ID integration so you can login with your LiveID and a few other live services integration projects. So I have a designated area, and at that area we have a colored ball that’s a certain color that you know is a wiki for that area or API for that area. You click it and open up the services for that API. Also the inworld scripting area has a link to the approved LSL commands for OpenSim. So the first sim is resources for anything and everything to do with developing in Second Life and OpenSim because we will really be developing for both. I’ve got five or six sims from community members up and running and they are just waiting on me to fire up my grid server. We’ll even try and organize our grid according to different disciplines. There’ll be a .NET developers area with a bunch of islands having to do with .NET work. And then you’ll be able to fly to the TechNet area where there’ll be a windows server and SQL server. So there’s going to be a community grid but it’s going to be organized around the developer community.

Tish: Are you hosting sims for the community for free?

Kyle: Yeah, I’m going to have a few sims up for community experiments and things like that. In addition, since most of the community has at least a broadband connection at home, and a spare computer. Everybody’s been reformatting that old 3 gigahertz single processor computer in the closet and opening up ports, so I’m going to have a grid half made up of hightech companies that want to do their own experiments and the other section of the grid will be community members that just pop in with their own simulator.

Tish: Very nice. So you’re basically showing people how to do a very quick community grid aren’t you?

Kyle: Absolutely. And then any company that has some sort of experiment going on can connect to the grid too. I’m hoping that if Intel develops a grid that they’ll at least teleport link to us or something like that so that we can start out as a community and expand out to Silicon Valley or something like that where we have gateways to all kinds of different experiments. So I’ll let Second Life be the social networking thing and then I’ll have all the Star Trek type of projects going on in OpenSim.

Tish: I love your approach – building a grid based on developer communities – people do need to be very geeky to handle OpenSim development at this level at the minute.

Kyle: Exactly. And you happen to be talking to two developers. Our job is to try and match the technology with the problem. Right now the people most likely to embrace virtual worlds and use it is the technical crowd. That’s just the way the internet came to be and all that. So put it in their hands first, get all the really hyper geeky stuff going, and let it evolve from there down to the regular person. One of the things that is in Manhattan sim now is a meeting place for a standards committee. I want to start right away setting up common standards for how navigation and walkways are done, even making accessibility possible for blind people one day where we use sound to guide you along. And we make sure like on web sites we have the proper alt. text in so audio readers can translate what’s going on. The first step is testing it, putting some standards in so anybody can go into any type of sim and can know how to get around. The we’ll really be able to bring this to the common person who can just pop in there like they can a web page now.

Tish: A question for Zain. I have this notion that Microsoft has a reputation for not liking the free form 3D immersive model?

Zain: I think we want to be careful. I mean just because we didn’t show up to the party doesn’t necessarily mean we didn’t like the party. Like most very large companies we wanted to make sure it was a viable type of thing. I think what you are seeing now is the beginning of the emergence of that experimentation and that is validation of the fact that we are definitely interested in this space.

Tish: A big question for many people looking at OpenSource development is how will people be rewarded for their efforts. You see this as a community development project – how will the members of the community be rewarded. This is a question for Kyle I think!

Kyle: That’s a great question and since I got involved with communities and Open Source it has been a tough one to figure out. But I came to grips with when I found out that you could create this cool java script and that anyone could open new source and take what you did and that annoyed me. And I remember thinking many many years ago, how am I going to get anywhere if everything unique I make people can just take? But then I began to thinking I can do that to. I can look at their code and then we can move up the whole technology the whole effort together, we’ll move forward faster and that will benefit us all because we will be able to send twice the product to market that we could have if we all stayed in our own little cubicles. As far as the Manhattan project goes anything we develop there goes back to open source immediately and once it is embedded and tested it goes right back in cos OpenSim is open source and that is the ideology it was started with and we are not going to interrupt that at all.

Tish: Are you going to become involved with the interoperability efforts like the one launched by Linden Lab – The Architecture Working Group that is making efforts re: the interoperability of OpenSim and Second Life, in particular?

Kyle: It is projects like the LIveID integration that we are working on and many people are interested in OpenID. There may be a lot of third party type of log ins that handle authentication. So you may see that even Linden Lab uses multiple methods for people to authenticate into their grid. And I think that this new group that they have started [AWG] is just proof that they know that they must open up and embrace these other grids and get ahead of the game so that they can work with these other grids right away.

Zain: And as far as standards go i think we have a ways to go before we start getting down to the hard core standards path. First we have to establish that this medium is going to be viable to the market in general. And then start bringing it together much like we did with the web. The web took off and there was a governing body that evolved into the world wide web consortium and I think that eventually you will see that with this who knows maybe even W3C will take over aspects of standards for this medium.

Tish: A question for Zain – how do you describe the community development in OpenSim and how does this differ or follow on from other Microsoft involvement in OpenSource communities? Oh and how do you describe your roles what you do for Microsoft and how this relates to this community effort in OpenSim?

Zain: From my personal experience, I am relatively young in Microsoft I just celebrated my first year anniversary so I can’t talk about what happened several years ago, all I know is what happened over the year that I have been there. But without a doubt I think our approach is simple straight forward and elegant. And as a developer evangelist I am hired to interact with the community. My job description when i started this absolutely didn’t include anything about 3d worlds or anything of the kind. I became interested in 3d worlds and I think it speaks volumes for Microsoft that they said alright fine lets make it your job. And, that’s exactly what did they did and likewise with other folks it is on their commitment now. Our strategy is straight forward if you you can prove that your efforts in the community work then you are given carte blanche. If you can’t prove it then why be given the resources to waste.

Tish: So you actually have the title Metaverse Evangelist?

Zain: No I am still a Developer Evangelist but I am the guy for Virtual World Evangelism which is what we call it internally at Microsoft and I guess externally as well. It is known as Virtual World Evangelism.

Tish: So how many Virtual World Evangelists are there at Microsoft?

Zain: Ha good question! There is probably about four or five of us right now.

Tish: So have I missed asking you any important questions!

Zain: No I think you have hit the big points! If nothing else the one key point I would walk away with from this is the emphasis in my virtual worlds evangelism on the community. That’s really what we are about and that is why we are embracing folks like Adam [Frisby] and the realXtend guys because we want to come in and get more community involvement and get people excited about this. We are not interested in anything but really fostering a good environment for making this stuff happen.

On Sunday February 17 at 11 AM SLT, Eureka Dejavu and Schmilsson Nilssson will be hosting and bringing into Second Life a virtual world Arts & Culture round table live from the Brookings Institution-hosted U.S.-Islamic World Forum, Doha, Qatar. The panel features a cross-section of artists, including Nashwa Al Ruwaini, who is, among many things, Executive Director of the Middle East International Film Festival, Howard Gordon, executive producer and show-runner of 24, and Salman Ahmed, founder of the Pakistani Rock Group, Junoon.

Eureka sent me the picture above and explained:

We wanted to contribute in an artistic way, not just host an event. But when the subject is bridging gap between Muslim and Non-Muslim cultures through art, what can you do? Obvious cultural and or religious images are often too loaded emotionally.

Nevertheless, we wanted people to feel they were in a cathedral of sorts but open to all. Tricky…

So….we took my kaleidoscope to Venice Beach and shot a whole series of light paintings symbolic of the way cultures develop in isolation and then build bridges over time coming together in unpredictable ways due to people meeting one another in various ways, including, now, in virtual worlds, which are unprecedented in bringing people together who never would have met otherwise.

While “questing the globe” to find out about the meaning of virtual worlds in the lives of real people, Eureka and Schmilsson, have been blogging their experiences including some of their preparations for the Qatar event in their, “Dispatches from a Virtual World.”

In this post Eureka who is Rita J. King (CEO and Creative Director of Dancing Ink Productions) in “Real” Life works with screenwriter and producer Howard Gordon as he creates an identity in Second Life. Eureka writes: “Howard Gordon’s creation of characters and storylines on the Fox show 24 has sparked dialogue about the artist’s role in creating a deeper understanding between cultures.”

And, in this post, Eureka describes how Dancing Ink Productions finished creating the avatar for Salman Ahmad of the multi-platinum South Asian rock band Junoon. Eureka writes:

Salman is also a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for HIV/AIDS. As an artist, he works to build peace between India and Pakistan. In fact, we could go on all day about his remarkable accomplishments and luminous insight.

I was planning my (sort of) vacation in Seattle just as three of my favorite Second Life writers Gwyneth Llewelyn, Hamlet Au (a.k.a Wagner James Au) and Onder Skall (a.k.a Caleb Booker) tagged me. Now I am here in Seattle. And, even though the weather is beautiful, that “old worn-out blogmeme” – write eight things about myself, and tag another eight people to do the same – seems like something I can do!

Gwyn, Hamlet and Onder set the bar for writing about Second Life. So they are a hard act to follow. Please excuse me if I try and wriggle out of this a little and keep my contribution to this dubious endeavor a little brief. I am on vacation, sort of…..

The Rules for the “Eight Random Facts Blogmeme”:

1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog

1) I am a bit of a “lifer” as an early adopter. Although when I checked my early adopter credentials against friends they really aren’t that good. I was the proud owner of a TRS-80 Model One and my Panix ID is in the first 2000. But then being an Oh in Second Life is nothing to write home about.

2) I have owned some pretty cool cameras in my time including The Elicon back in the late eighties. We (my partners and I in a little start up) ran The Elicon on 40ft of track in an industrial park in Orange County, LA. We stayed up many a long night doing multiple pass motion control photography hoping our lack of air conditioning wouldn’t crash the Dec PDP 11 that housed Eli’s FORTH brain. But Eli turned out to be the start of many adventures in film making that took me to special effects studios all over the world.

The Elicon (picture above) is still around it seems – see here. But we used 35mm film back in the day!

3) I have some colorful relatives who are/were writers including a grandmother who was a novelist, aspiring screenwriter, bohemian, and author of supposedly “scandalous works.” Also my aunt, who died recently at 96, wrote acerbic film reviews, risqué novels, histories, memoirs, and a ‘book of confessions’ that was a bit of a best seller.

5) I have an unfinished novel and screenplay too!

6) I have certainty (unlike Peter Ludlow – see here) that we are living in a simulation.

7) I still feel the thrill of adventure every time I log into Second Life even after year of spending a lot of time in world.

8) I am currently reading Multiagent Systems: A Modern Approach to Distributed Artificial Intelligence by Gerhard Weiss, Halting State by Charles Stross, and The Songs of Milarepa.

I am picking on some of my Twitter friends to tag. Please forgive me for propagating the “evil meme” and feel free to cut it a the root if you want!

Hiro Pendragon, Dizzy Banjo (thanks Dizzy for the picture of Tara5 Oh for this post), Aleister Kronos, Christina Greene, Malburns, Goldie Katsu, Sophrosyne Stenvaag, Tao Takashi

The Scilands panel at SLCC presented three projects, “Second Health – Visiting A London Hospital of the Future” (picture above), “Demystifying Nuclear Power,” and NOAA‘s “Second Earth in Second Life.” These innovative projects put Second Life center stage in a vision to design better worlds for tomorrow (see also Maya Realities).

All the panel members are key players in the formation and development of SciLands – “an emerging Second Life continent dedicated to serious applications.” SciLands was only founded in January of this year. But the number of projects has escalated rapidly – now up to 34 islands and members from 3 continents.

From left to right: panel moderator James Dearnley, Loughborough University Dept. of Information Science; Dave Taylor, (SL: Davee Commerce) who leads the UK’s National Physical Laboratory‘s (NPL) Second Life activities including Second Health – The Future of Healthcare Communication, and Nanotechnology Island in Second Life; Jeffrey Corbin (SL: Zazen Manbi), research associate at the University of Denver, who is preparing to build a nuclear reactor in Second Life to train the next generation of environmental assessment specialists and to educate people about nuclear power (This project is a collaboration with Robert C. Amme, a research professor of physics at the University of Denver.); Eric Hackathorn (SL: Hackshaven Harford), NOAA, who has designed a public 3-D space to highlight the research NOAA performs, and recently formed a company Maya Realities to explore 3-D virtual world metrics, and Katherine Prawl (SL: Kat Lemieux), co-founder of The International Spaceflight Museum in Second Life.

Government Agencies are doing some very innovative work in Second Life.

This is Dave Taylor’s personal avatar, Davee Commerce. Another of his avatars, named “Innovation Projects” manages Nanotechnology Island, NPL’s pavilion at the International Spaceflight Museum and UK Future Focus, a cross-Government thinktank.

At SLCC, Dave Taylor, Knowledge Transfer Leader in the Quality of Life Division of the UK’s National Physical Laboratory unveiled publicly, for the first time, NPL’s healthcare of the future project for Imperial College London, Second Health.

NPL is a government laboratory and world leading research institute with specialists in a whole range of different skills. Part of their work is to manage knowledge transfer networks which enable scientists, technologists and policy makers to talk about issues of the day.

Dave explained that scientists and technologists are all used to talking to people in the same discipline. But, his interest in SciLands was the opportunity to get different science communities, who are normally in their silos, together “to get a conversation happening across the boundaries of different disciplines because that is where innovation really happens.” For example, “in one technical discipline people may very well have the solutions for problems for another technical discipline. But, they would never know about it because they never speak.”

Second Health

Second Health is a project created by NPL for Imperial College London (ICL) to communicate “complex healthcare messages and illustrate what healthcare of the future could look like.” Dave Taylor introduced Second Health by explaining that most of today’s most pressing social concerns, like healthcare, have underlying technical considerations. And, that the mass media does not always lend itself to the nuances of technical issues. Through a series of recent newspaper headlines he demonstrated how traditional media is unable to communicate the complex issues facing healthcare today.

At the heart of the Second Health project is not only a virtual hospital in Second Life but also a series of machinima (videos made using Second Life) that tell the story of future healthcare to help people understand different pathways of care, and to “develop a better understanding of how they may experience healthcare.”

In the picture above I am watching one of these films in Second Life. These machinima make the virtual health campus accessible to people “wherever they are, and whatever their comfort with digital technology.”

The virtual hospital in Second Life and Second Life avatars were used as the sets and characters in conjunction with real life settings and people to create these films. They are very high quality productions by film maker Dylan Byrne. They are distributed on a range of websites including YouTube, and, in Second Life.

Click on the image to play the video, “Second Health: Emergency and Specialist Care.”

Dave chose a conventional film maker rather than an experienced machinimatographer as he intended to break new ground with these movies. “I also discovered how difficult it is to create normal-looking people in Second Life. Almost all of the store bought avatars and clothes are too exotic to represent patients and staff in the NHS.” When people not used to Second Life see these movies they understand them immediately through the story-telling. “That is exactly what we had to achieve”, says Dave. “They treat them like conventional computer animations they see all the time.”

But, unlike regular computer animation, the virtual hospital in Second Life lives on and is open for people to visit. It is in the SciLands and has it’s own orientation experience. The virtual hospital campus in Second Life provides an immersive 3D learning experience that allows people to explore health care of the future in a collaborative environment where they can meet and talk to other people and share their experiences on the spot. The movies start automatically whenever an avatar comes close, so that people new to Second Life don’t have to search around for where to click to play.

The future hospital in Second Life does not represent any single hospital or plan but is a vision of what hospitals could be like. It is built to Imperial College’s specification based on recommendations in the UK National Health Care Service London Framework for Action report which details how Professor Sir Ara Darzi believes London’s healthcare needs to change over the next ten years. Professor Ara Darzi, who is now Parliamentary Under Secretary for Health in the UK and a member of the House of Lords is now leading the reform of the National Health Service.

However, ICL and NPL are testing the effectiveness of Second Life as a medium for conveying complex healthcare delivery messages and essential healthcare information to care givers, doctors and the public. “In the future we expect to provide healthcare services in the metaverse.”

Dave Taylor said:

Our challenge was to help people understand what it might be like to visit a London health campus in the near future, before building work has even begun. By inviting them into a virtual hospital, we can communicate directly with future patients. We are not testing the London review’s specific recommendations, although the hospital is built on the principles that Sir Ara Darzi developed – that will be done at the local level through public consultations.

What we are interested in doing is understanding and measuring exactly how well this kind of technology communicates these technical ideas to the public and whether it can be used for public consultation, or even for the delivery of health services in the future.

This is Minna Runo the avatar of Ani Simon-Hart a Knowledge Transfer Delivery Specialist at NPL working with Dave. I met her on Second Health when I dropped in to take some photos.

Interview With Dave Taylor at SLCC

At breakfast, Sunday morning at SLCC, I had the opportunity to ask Dave some questions. We began with how he got into Second Life.

I got into Second Life when I realized what a powerful collaboration and social networking environment it was. And, in general what a great way it was to disseminate information to people who don’t know to come to your web site and look for it there.

In 2005, I discovered there was a group planning an International Space Flight Museum – a virtual museum that couldn’t exist in the real world and I thought wow! NPL does a lot of development, testing and knowledge transfer work for the real world space industries. There must also be people who are interested in space in Second Life. So I knew who I wanted to talk to when I first logged in. And, because I found them within half an hour, I thought this is the best networking environment ever! And, it has proved to be the case because a lot of people I am working with today I would never have met in the real world, wouldn’t have mixed with them. And, there are many new projects that are coming out of that meeting. The SciLands is one such project.

NPL was the first real world organization to rent space on the International Space Flight Museum. And we were there the day they launched. So I have watched the growth of interest in the space industry right from the start.

And, I discovered, and this is what went on with the Web too in 1994, you couldn’t really understand what is going on unless you are there. And just being there as an observer isn’t enough to understand what all the affordances of a new media are. I knew that from the Web. And, it is certainly true of Second Life. Now knowing what is going on means you have got to be a participant, you have to be practically doing stuff.

Dave’s first effort on Second Life was an exhibition for TRUTHS, NPL’s proposed low cost Earth Observation satellite – and calibration laboratory in space that can help gather fundamental climate change data 10 times as accurately as any other instrument.

And, I discovered from people that blogged about it that people had actually understood the science I had been explaining. And, it was about a very important issue which I feel very strongly about and a lot of people at NPL feel very strongly about and are doing a lot of work on – that is improving the data behind climate models, and therefore be able to make much more accurate and certain predictions about what is going to happen to the climate under a number of different scenarios.

Dave pointed out how his early experiments in Second Life quickly showed him what a great environment Second Life is for getting across the complex technical issues across to people who care about the social issues behind science. He uses Second Life metric analysis tools of Maya Realites to show the “stickiness” of various aspects of these Second Life projects. Dave is one of the founders of SciLands – and this provides serious users a supportive environment with orientation help, a networking environment with like minded people, weekly meetings, and shared resources such as lecture theatres and an auditorium that can seat 200 avatars.

Dave has some very interesting projects in the pipeline including a new TRUTHS exhibit and Nanotechnology Island in Second Life.

Philip Rosedale Invited To Speak at Framework 7 Conference on Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

NPL and the Location and Timing Knowledge Transfer Network have invited Philip Rosedale, founder of Linden Lab, to be one of the keynote speakers at the ‘Fine Balance 2007′ event in November. This event’s workshop on Web 2.0 aims to help identify and prioritize strategic research directions and provide input to the European Commission on privacy enhancing technologies for virtual worlds and Web 2.0.

The output from this workshop will be taken into consideration for a future Framework 7 research call, funded by the EU in these areas. Some of the technologies the European Commission will likely support are privacy enhancing technologies for the internet, health records, biometrics, identity cards, social web, virtual worlds and more.

EC supported workshop to be held in Whitehall, London and in Second Life.

This is the first time that a European Commission supported event has been held in Second Life. It will be a one day conference held in Whitehall, London with about 150 people attending. The keynote speakers and afternoon workshop on Web 2.0 and virtual worlds will be streamed into Second Life for participants and speakers who cannot be there in person.

Second Earth and “Science on a Sphere”

After SLCC, even though I returned home to New York City with a massive content overload, I couldn’t resist dropping into Meteora to talk to Haskshaven Harford the avatar of Eric Hackathorn from NOAA. Eric has designed a public 3-D space to highlight the research NOAA performs, and is COO of Maya Realities a company formed to explore 3-D virtual world metrics.

NOAA – part of the US Government specifically for climate change that looks at global warming and includes the National Weather Service. At SLCC, Eric introduced NOAA’s exciting new project on Second Life called Second Earth. Eric gave credit to this Technology Review article for the name.

Second Earth is a project that NOAA has just acquired 9 sims to start. They aim to stream live data onto a replica of the earth in Second Life, to bring geospatial, weather and many other kinds of data into the collaborative environment of Second Life to create a social decision making tool.

Dave Taylor is keen that the International community also participates and is working hard to get European funding for a collaboration with NOAA. According to Dave “Scientists need data for their research, and lots of data are locked up in individual projects. This project and others being considered by climate researchers will enable the sharing of data by scientists, researchers and policymakers.” Dave explained that NPL chairs a global community that is studying the problem of comparability and validation of Earth Observation data, just the kind that this project supports. “Visual data is so much more compelling and understandable to the non-specialist and scientists in other fields”.

The project brings together two projects that NOAA has already implemented in Second Life – Science on a Sphere that at the moment is limited to streaming video onto a globe (see the picture above), and the weather map project (picture below) that streams live weather data from the NOAA web site onto a map in Second Life.

Hackshaven explained: “There are already installations of Science on a Sphere in several locations now all over the world. This is the virtual version and the basis for the new second earth project.”

Science On a Sphere is a room sized, global display system that uses computers and video projectors to display planetary data onto a six foot diameter sphere, analogous to a giant animated globe.

“Second Earth is just getting started,” Hackshaven explained. “Eventually it will be a globe like this one only much larger 9 sims worth. And, it will be a combination of science on a sphere and the weather map, google earth + second life.”

“Nuclear Power Stations in Second Life”

Jeffrey Corbin, whose avatar Zazen Manbi is pictured above, recently obtained funding for teaching an environmental impact course in Second Life. He and Dave Taylor intend to build a functional but virtual Nuclear Power Station, as a shared facility between the US and Europe to help explain and demystify nuclear power and its vital role in controlling global warming.

Some of the boldest adventurers on the virtual frontier are architects. These artists of the 3D experience are the cavalry of the “Age of Inspiration.” They lead the charge to liberate the world from the ravages of the industrial age.

“Go West Young Man, and Grow Up With the Country,” John B. L. Soule, 1851

Some 114 years later, the call to “Go West” has been converted to the call to “Go Virtual.” Second Life has effectively ushered in the next great migration into a New Frontier.

And, so ctrlshift07 – a New Zealand Architectural Congress announces – their virtual land rush competition. The grand prize is an island in Second Life (including 3 months of maintenance charges).

And, the winner is Keystone Bouchard! The runner up is Theory Shaw! These pioneers, and their innovative work in Second Life, had already caught my attention before the competition. I interviewed both for Ugotrade in June (see my earlier post). Then, Keystone explained an earlier version of Architectural Jazz which is now his winning entry. And, Theory talked about his vision for participatory city planning and the Studio Wikitecture experiment he has initiated with Theory on, Architecture Island, Second Life .

But the speed of innovation is so rapid in Second Life that, in the 6 weeks since I spoke to Keystone and Theory, much has changed both in Second Life, and in their work.

One month ago, the EOLUS One initiative driven by Implenia AG, a Swiss-based construction, civil engineering and facilities management company, in collaboration with SAP, IBM, Cisco, Siemens and others had not been unveiled.

Now, EOLUS has put the spotlight on Second Life/Real Life integrations as a doorway to a sustainable future. EOLUS, in Second Life, is creating a “think tank” for city scale technology projects – energy monitoring, preventative maintenance, building automation and management, as well as community based initiatives for a better planet (e.g. SODIS). And, in my mind, this initiative brings Theory’s interest in Wikitecture for city planning, and Keystone’s commitment to virtual architecture one step closer to serious real life integrations.

Not only can real life buildings be designed in new collaborative and participatory ways in Second Life. e.g., city planning through Wikitecture. But, once built, these cities can stream back into Second Life as data that is responsive, beautiful, and delightfully habitable. In virtual worlds we do not need shelter from the elements. We need refuge from the ugly and unmanageable data of real life. If we are to work and play all day in virtual environments we must create a palace of data bliss.

Keystone Bouchard is a Real Life architect who has recently transitioned exclusively to a virtual mode as a “3D Experience Architect” with Clear Ink. Keystone is interested in the future potential of purely virtual architecture and the dynamic, reflexive relationship between avatars, data and 3D experience.

He has started to blog up some manifestos about this new language for virtual environments. He explained his ideas through a series of three diagrams on Architecture Island in Second Life.

The diagram on the left is the physical model best exemplified by Winston Churchill’s statement, ‘We shape our buildings and thereafter, they shape us.” Physical buildings are artifacts – that are difficult and expensive to change – people and program flow through them like water.

So, in virtual worlds, we tend to do the same thing – that’s described by the second diagram. So, we try to build that artifact but, our minds, our avatars, and our cameras can just flow right through it so, it isn’t as effective its trying to be solid – when it doesn’t work that way here.

So, the third diagram describes a new kind of reflexive or responsive architecture one that is capable of shifting shape and changing – and being as liquid and changing as the community and people who use it.

Click on this image to watch a machinima of Architectural Jazz.

Keystone’s winning entry to ctrlshift07, Architectural Jazz, makes the visitor an active part of both the musical and archtectural composition. Keystone observed the movement and people visiting Architecture Island for several weeks then wrote a piano score loosely based on their movement. He recorded his real life piano playing it – just the keys moving and then imported that video into Second Life. Then he added “keys” in Second Life that get larger and change colors and play a not when you approach. So by their changing and dynamic composition, the viewer becomes an active part of it – no longer passive.

I think we’ve been approaching Second Life projects – for the most part – like we do traditional architecture. We spend big on the initial concept and build, then hope it will attract crowds of people. But I think the evolution of virtual architecture should be ongoing, never ending. It should be informed by the people who use it, ‘smart’ architecture. The future of virtual architecture lies in our ability to completely remove barriers between disciplines.

Theory Shaw and Collaborative Architecture

Keystone and Theory Shaw have teamed up to use virtual worlds as a tool for a collaborative approach to architecture in the Real World. Theory Shaw has outlined how virtual world can be used in the the planning of future cities.

And, the central build on Architecture Island is the Studio Wikitecture experiment – an open source approach to architecture that everyone is free to join – co-creating projects and participating in collaborative design.

Theory’s entry for the ctrlshift07 competition is explained in detail on The Arch. But the idea behind the nine floors of his Temporal Tower is collaboration across disciplines.

Since someone is able to hear conversations transmitted through walls as well cam out and view remote spaces at the same time, avatars can essentially be in two places at once. The Temporal Tower explores how this characteristic might facilitate a cross-fertilization of ideas between disciplines that rarely intermingle in the real world. The ascending floors in the Temporal Tower are dedicated to informal conversations in the following disciplines: Science, Psychology, Language, Society, History, Literature, Music, Aesthetics, and Religion. The ultimate idea being that a conversation overheard on one floor might spark a discussion on an adjacent floor and provide a new perspective to help solve an otherwise entrenched problem. To further facilitate these impromptu discussions, the building itself visually transmits an avatar’s presence to the rest of the island by changing the color and size of its ‘leafy walls’ when an avatar is near.

Wikitecture 3.0

Theory is deep into Wikitecture 3.0. He is working with scripters to make it less intmidating to the casual contributor.

One thing I want to accomplish in this next experiment is to develop a “wikitecture tree” that floats above the parcel…. where all the different iterations of a design can be saved in the different ‘leaves’ of the tree. This wikitecture tree will allow people to come by and ‘cycle’ through all the different iterations within the leaves.

Basically the idea in short is, if someone come by and ‘touches’ on of the leaves of the Wikitecture Tree, it will rez the design it ‘holds’ on to the parcel of land. They can then touch another leave and that design will unrez and another will take it’s place. As a person cycles through the designs, they can vote for their favorite design. The tree will also allow you to rez different branches and leaves, if the person wants to leave their own iteration of the design.

Arcspace comes to Second Life!

Photo: arcspace

More exciting news for architecture in SL is the arrival of arcspace. To read more about KK Jewell’s plans go to the arcspace.com. Keystone Bouchard has taken his second SL office in arcspace. Roofdog Rau, owner of Vanilla Five.com, is setting up his video (arc)space. And the legendary architecture blog, ArchNewsNow.com, is working on their space, as is ArtCatalogues.com at MOCA.

Join and get an arcspaceSL Tshirt.

Email your avatar’s name:
Kirsten Kiser – arcspace
Subject: arcspaceSL – avatar name

Or IM KK Jewell in Second Life

EOLUS One – Where Creative Minds Come Together

I met Eolus McMillan from Implenia on Second Life yesterday. And, I heard the extraordinary story of how creative minds from different backgrounds, IBM, SAP, Wago, Zumtobel and Implenia amongst others, have come together to make a major leap towards 3D internet. The fruits of this collaboration will be unveiled on July 6th, on Second Life. The picture above shows a birds eye view of EOLUS One on Second Life.

The most important aspect of this breakthrough is the EOLUS focus on Real Life and Second Life interactions that serve to make a better world – addressing many aspects from CO2 Reduction, Energy Management, Health, to Education, Collaboration , Networking, and more.

I hoped that positive global development would be embedded in the DNA of 3D internet. And, almost all my writing in the last few months has been with this in mind. But now, in the work of Eolus McMillan, positive global development and 3D internet have come together.

“I can’t convey just how big this is as a leap towards 3D internet.”

This is how I first heard about EOLUS One from Aleister Kronos. He is first on so many ground breaking stories on Second Life! He talked to Eolus McMillan hours before leaving for vacation in Japan. But, he sent me a condensation of his thoughts before he left. Here are some of them, lightly edited by me.

EOLUS One is a number of things:
A forum or think tank for creative minds looking to explore how SL can help make a better planet (does that tweak your interest? LOL).
A technology solution to integration to back-end systems, using not just SL but any kind of “I/O device” (like Roo controlling his house from his mobile?)
The construction of virtual operations centers to manage the environmental controls of a house/housing estate.
The definition of Virtual Worlds Communication Interface.

For me, it was a revelation. I’d stumbled on an IBM site (Boblingen or some such) a long time back, which showed similar operations centers, but Eolus are launching for real next week (6th July) and will have proper integration with RL systems- including an integration with SAP supply chain and CRM systems. I will rephrase that, you will be able to buy stuff in SL, using SL currency, that gets handled by a back-end RL system (here, SAP) that will deliver the goods to your RL address… and you can track the order in SL.

And, then there’s the “better planet” think tank!

My mind started racing at the news. I immediately logged onto Second Life and contacted Eolus McMillan to arrange a meeting. And then, Eolus gave me a teleport to EOLUS One. What follows is what I have learned so far about this wonderful story.

One of the first places Eolus McMillan took me on the EOLUS One island was an art gallery currently showing an exhibition of Eshi Otawara’s real life paintings. Eshi Otawara is a talented Real Life Artist and the 3D Experience Architect for EOLUS One.

I am impressed that Eolus wanted me to see this first. This kind of respect for others and their creative work gives you an idea why Eolus and Ansi have managed to spark the kind of creative collaboration across disciplines and enterprises that any major leap towards 3D internet had to accomplish to succeed.

So lets take a journey through time to find out how the story of EOLUS (which means fast moving/flexible in Greek) began.

EOLUS – The Birth of a Virtual Corporation.

The story of EOLUS One is told visually in a museum on the EOLUS One Island on Second Life. And, there will be an official global press release out soon. As a virtual corporation EOLUS has been able to work faster and more creatively than any real corporation could.

The story began, March, 15th, 2007, at the European Computer expo called CEBIT, when a Paradigm Pioneer, from Implenia Global Solutions (who was soon to become the avatar Eolus McMillan), and Ansi Orochi (Lead Architect, Virtual Worlds, IBM Research and Development) met because they both had a booth at the IBM stand. Eolus McMillan the avatar was born, March 20th, 2007.

The German Chancellor Checks Out The Implenia Model House

At the opening of CEBIT, Implenia got a chance to tell their story to the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Eolus remarked, “we initially got 4 mins from her people, but she found the story so interesting she stayed for 15 mins. Then Ansi (Lead Architect Virtual Worlds, IBM Research and Development) presented the concept of Virtual Worlds using Second Life to her for a few minutes.

In this picture Angela Merkel the Chancellor of Germany is peering into the Implenia model house. Anette Shavan Minister of Education is on the right behind the house. And, the General Manager of IBM, Germany, Martin Jetter is standing in the back against the backdrop of the IBM banner.

Real Life Mashups

Eolus and his newfound friend Ansi have engineered a paradigm shift, from conception to successful trials of use examples, in three short months. And, the lynch pins of this lightning fast success are two of the most powerful tools for collaborative visualization available to us today – the napkin (typically found at a table with a sympatico mix of creative minds and good wine), and the great virtual napkin of collaboration and innovation (the world scale dinner table where artists, futurists, inventors and uber geeks of all stripes come together) – the think tank for a “better planet” – Second Life.

During one of those late night expo dinners, Eolus and Ansi met and the napkin is drawn. And, they decide to take their vision to reality – building automation components to IBM Websphere to SAP ERP2005 linked to Skype and IP Factory. They also took down some basic ideas for the island on Second Life and defined some simple use cases that would relay the message of how useful Second Life/Real Life interaction can be. Just a few of the many examples shown:

Building Automation

Energy Monitoring

Alert Management

Preventive maintenance

Virtual eshop

Here is the first paper napkin, which I hear still exists.

A Time-line Showing The Trajectory of EOLUS One Over the Last Three Months.

The pictures starting bottom left show the Implenia demo at CEBIT where they showcased their work on intelligent building, advanced metering infrastructure, energy monitoring/management, and facilities management.

The house in the bottom left corner of the picture is a copy of a real life house. Eolus said that sensors, collecting data on energy (e.g. electricity, gas, oil, water) and security plus other relevant data – temperature, humidity, setting of devices, errors that come from devices etc., are installed at his home, office and a large shopping mall in Zurich.

Before CEBIT Implenia had already completed a field test on 35 buildings with a total of 170000 SQM over a period of two years where Eolus says, “we managed to reduce the cost by 34 swissfrancs per sqm per year.”

VWCI – Virtual World Communication Interface

From this meeting at CEBIT other innovators came on board, including a German University student Panini Lane, who wrote his thesis on VWCI. And, EOLUS One, a world changing project, began to evolve. A key part of the EOLUS technology solution is the EOLUS Virtual Worlds Communication Interface (this is a working title).

VWCI is a piece of hardware and software that on one hand solves the problem of ‘talking’ to the various protocols in building automation (LON, KNX, Enocean, ZigBee, CANOpen, Profibus, Modbus…..) and on the other hand links RL buildings to SL to allow for a drastic improvement on facility management processes, reducing the carbon imprint of everything from commercial buildings, individual homes to shopping malls, industrial facilities, and more. VWCI uses IBM’s MQtt messaging protocol and the IBM WebSphere portal in the backend (see my earlier post on IBM Senior Inventor C.J Chowderhead).

Meeting A WebSphere Genius From IBM and an Automation Guru From Wago

And, as Eolus McMillan points out, VWCI is only the enabler. The conditions are defined at a field level e.g. sensor readings, part numbers etc. Then you define a communication path to an object that knows what to do with the information. The information is transfered using a messaging protocol (MQtt) and the database stores it then triggers the action which might result in a transaction in an ERP other external system which would result in a work order being issued.

Hence two other important members of the EOLUS team are a WebSphere Genius from Böblingen, IBM Lab Germany, Hattori Kurosawa, and Sika1972 McMillan a building automation guru from Wago. Both were on EOLUS One when I visited. This picture shows Eolus McMillan, Eshi Otawara (the EOLUS 3D architect), Sika1972 McMillan, and myself.

Eolus and the team are working seamlessly across both worlds. In fact during this meeting in the EOLUS One Control Room he was called to a RL meeting and handed my tour over to 3D Architect and Real Life Artist Eshi Otawara. She kindly took time from her work to show me some of the many features of EOLUS One even though the build will open July 6th. Here is a picture she took during our tour.

Energy Monitoring: A Massive Contribution To Reducing Carbon Footprint

Using EOLUS to indicate when things go wrong before they do!

Eolus described how energy monitoring can drastically reduce the carbon footprint of houses and large facilities. By looking at the state of our systems, we can know when things start to go wrong. People can be doing things wrong in their house, in a large facility, or building management operation for years in, terms of energy management, and not know they are wasting vast amounts of energy.

By tracking the interaction and integration of different systems, e.g., heating, cooling and fuel consumption, energy leaks that cannot be understood from a single data stream can be identified and resolved. The following example of using the EOLUS technology for State of the Art Call Center Managment shows how EOLUS will also enable a much more effective interaction between people and data.

State of the Art Call Center Management

Eolus gave an example of an Alert Management Scenario, and how a control room on Second Life (with 24hr 365 day uptime, of course!) could transform Building Automation Management.

For example, in a traditional Building Automation System, a person would sit in a control room and watch a number of screens that show the state of the various systems. HVAC, Lights, Access Control, Elevators etc. A user might have to monitor a number of buildings and in the information overflow might miss an alert, or might not be fully trained and misunderstand the info, or even worse not have enough practice on certain alert handling issues that only happen ever now and then. These are just some of the many pitfalls of traditional building monitoring.

We are actually drastically expanding the possibilities with what we have in mind here using virtual worlds. We are adding a new dimension.

Let me give you an example. Now Safeway or other large supermarkets have a few thousand stores and a huge number of maintenance staff, some better trained, some less, some know the equipment they work with but they might not know the current configuration, or are out of practice to change a setting.

At present they have a number of screens they must monitor, and often systems are not linked – one system for AC, one for heating, one for the refrigeration, one for the lights, one for this one one for that! The people that know one system within a store might not know how to handle the same system in another store, because there might be new firmware there, or a special setting, or 1 million reasons for that.

Now imagine you had a system that could talk to each device, interface with it and tell it what to do. And then imagine that instead of looking at a monitor in a control room, you simply define a set of rules for certain categories of stores, rules that tell you when interaction is needed, and which information to provide to the maintenance person at the time.

A virtual environment creates new possibilities for data representation and communication, Eolus explained further:

And then think of a rack full of virtual ‘shoe boxes’ each box representing a store, to each box a set of rules attached to it. Depending on the rules set for the store (box) it would indicate its present state in relation to a particular user. In a normal condition the box is green.

And, for example, if the avatar of a technical person approaches the box, they would see the status in regard to the technical rules set for the building(s), a financial person would see the status based on financials (vacancy rate, cost, income, net income, yield, etc.).

New Tools for effective management of work flow :

Now lets assume that one of the rules applies which might mean that a person could be stuck in an elevator which would require immediate attention.

The box would signal that by a change of color, and the dispatcher sitting there would then see which person (avatar) is close to the incident, drop the pic of the avatar on the shoe box and then the backend system, in our case SAP, would initiate a work order and pass the required info to the technician.

He/she would go there fix the issue, give feedback on the incident (mins/hours taken to fix, material needed, persons involved…) by mobile or PDA, and the case would close meaning the box would return to its initial color – green.

Next Generation Building Automation and Much More!

At EOLUS One one of the key challenges was to create and integrate new concepts that would address many of the common issues found in technical facilities management.

Configuration-/ Product Lifecycle Management

Preventive Maintenance

Conditional Monitoring

Training of technical Personnel

Data Representation

These are some of the most interesting aspects of the EOLUS One Initiative. So if you come Friday, July 6th, you will hear lots more about building automation.

There is a virtual model house currently under construction – one on a website (web control panel and image from internet camera), and one in Second Life. They will be fully implemented by July 6th. Then, you can have a little fun controlling the Implenia model house in the real life EOLUS laboratory using one of the virtual Houses, either in Second Life or on the web. Here is the model house on Second Life (currently under construction).

EOLUS working with Spimes and Wranglers

EOLUS is a project all about spimes and wranglers, in my view. The model house, as it has evolved from CEBIT to Second Life, has become more and more spime like. If you know Bruce Sterling’s work or have read, Shaping Things, you are familiar with “spimes” and “wranglers” – technosocial concepts at the core of Sterling’s vision of a shift from archaic forms of energy use and production to a sustainable world. Why do Spimes Matter? Because Spimes Can Save the World. Spimes are:

manufactured objects whose informational support is so overwhelmingly extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system.

Spimes are visionary concepts – both a thing plus a lot of information about that thing and a technosocial interface. (Biots – another Sterling concept for tomorrow, or rather tomorrows tomorrow, are at the interface of cybernetics, biotechnology, and cognition).

If you think about about things in your life, e.g. your shoes, most of the information is still trapped in the shoe and only accessible through a direct connnection with the shoe, if you lose your shoes you can’t (yet!) in Sterling’s famous opening line “google your shoes.” (see the historian of science and futurist, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s blog, The End of Cyberspace. He unpacks some of Sterling’s visionary thought).

But, this current disconnect between objects and information about them is very costly to society not just ‘cos you can’t google your shoes (or keys!) when you lose them. And, the massive energy waste in our homes and other facilities because we lack information about the state and interaction of the systems is just one example of where spimes (like the Implenia model house) can help us make a better world.

And, as Soojung-Kim Pang points out, while spimes aren’t prevalent yet they are coming.

They’ll pose challenges, but we can design around them; “the future is yours to make.” (Sterling)

Spimes must have wranglers. And, in my view, designing wranglers is also what EOLUS is about. A wrangler must crunch the complexities. Their interfaces must make our relationships to objects feel much simpler and more immediate (Sterling).

Bruce Sterling writes:

Real air traffic control systems are grim complex bureaucracies heavy with fail-safes. Who can make objects that integrate elegantly and dependably within an Internet of Things? Who can make that system as relatively simple and inviting as, say, the Internet’s Web browsers and Weblogs? It’s a design space rife with profound opportunity.

And, I guess the ideas of Edward Tufte – dubbed the Leonardo Da Vinci of data will be important here. Tufte is famous for his analysis of the shortcomings of Power Point (see my earlier post) that “disrupts and trivializes,” and whose poverty of information he points out has not only turned business meetings into arenas of excruciating boredom, but contributed to calamities like the Columbia Shuttle disaster in 2003.

And, of course, the brilliant work of Hans Rosling, (see my earlier post and the amazing Gapminder.org videos of Hans Rosling, presented at TED – see TED blog) has changed our relationship to data in profound and world changing ways.

Dealing with world scale development on issues like poverty, global health, or even the rate of growth of a developing world like Second Life, it is very hard to get a handle on events that occur on this kind of massive scale. Hans Rosling (see Gapminder), shows through amazing, animated, interactive statistical analysis how new ways of visualizing data can debunk conventional pessimistic views on beating world poverty – and other major “Myths about Developing Worlds.”

3D eCommerce

The combination of an interactive 3D environment with a back-end Real Life system (SAP) will open almost limitless new possibilities for people to become active participants in the act of shopping, designing their own products, arranging for the delivery of goods in SL to a RL address… and tracking orders purchased in SL.

On EOLUS One an example of 3D eCommerce has been implemented using the shopping floor and its articles, linked to the backend SAP ERP2005 system to illustrate how the store of the future could look.

Any new visitor will receive a little questionnaire (5 question) when he enters the island. After successfully answering that he will receive a gift voucher with 100 credits. He can step into the gift shop to pick items for those 100 credits , things like a baseball cap, an umbrella…. After he is done with the selection he drops his virtual shopping basket onto the cash register.

A backend process is started, a form is opened, the user enters his RL name and address after which all the info is passed to the SAP system, an order is generated, and the estimated time of delivery will be announced.

There are so called ‘magic boards’ all over the shopping floor, when an avatar comes close to it the current status of his orders will be shown. In the backend the order is placed. The producer of the goods will complete the order have it picked up by a local courier who then updates our backend system with the status of the parcel until it reaches the destination. The user can at any time go to the magic board and find out the details.

Another example:

The picture above was taken on the IBM 10 island where there is an IBM/Sears project for remodeling your own kitchen – you can select appliances, configure panels as you like and much more. If this project was linked to EOLUS each configuration would be a different article number in the back end system and once you were done designing it the way you wanted, you could press the purchase button. The complete configuration then passes the parts to the back end where transaction is being handled in SAP.

I asked Eolus McMillan what was the plan re ID authentication, an important part of making eshopping in virtual worlds viable. Eolus replied that he was in discussion about using products from RSA for strong authentication.

A Creative Context For A Better Planet

The idea of the EOLUS One initiative is to create a platform for creative minds to come to together to evolve the Better Planet theme. On July 6th there will be an opportunity to hear more about this and become part of the vision.

The EOLUS One build is designed to give people the opportunity to engage the different interests they have in Real Life.

For example energy conscious visitors will find areas on EOLUS One devoted to this. But, artists, or educators will also find things to do. Five more islands are planned – one for innovation, one for health care, one for education, one for business, and one for creative arts.

The picture below shows a project that Eolus is working on. SODIS – “a water treatment process used at a household level” – is a project to bring clean water to developing countries. It shows how very simple technologies can often make a big difference. In this case, ordinary plastic bottles are used to remove dangerous bacteria from water by leaving them out in the sunlight for six hours. SODIS, has been organizing funding and support to get this simple technology, and the knowledge of how to use it, to the people who need it. The story of SODIS will be included in an exhibition of projects for a better planet on EOLUS One on Second Life.

Eshi and I both took some pictures during my tour of EOLUS One. Below is a mashup of some of them. The exteriors are Eshi’s pictures the interiors are the ones I took.

July 6th Launch of EOLUS One on Second Life

I just heard from Eolus that Ansi will be at the launch. He has been away on projects, so I did not get a chance to meet him on my tour. Sounds like there will be an opportunity to talk with many members of the EOLUS team this Friday, July 6th.

I was very fortunate to be at the sound check for Jaynine Scarborough who will be performing for the launch. Get ready for a real treat!