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Ogle Earth - a blog that “focuses on Google Earth” published a great post on “Programming Planetariums in Second Life” last week (hat tip to Kat Lemieux also). These planetariums in SL are the work of Magnus Zeisig (Magnuz Binder) a freelance SL builder located in Stockholm, Sweden, dubbed “one of Sweden’s most talented programmers.” I acquired the 3D display of the galaxies within 500 million light years from us pictured above for my small plot of land in Second Life. Ogle Earth writes:

Second Life is not a dedicated virtual globe or virtual planetarium but a free-form three-dimensional programmable space that anyone can use to build globes and planetariums in.

This phrase, “free-form three-dimensional programmable space,” I think will end up being a mantra for me at least in the next few months. As a new crop of 3D chat rooms emerges, like Vivaty, pointing out the difference between a 3D chat and “free-form three-dimensional programmable space” like Second Life, OpenSim, realXtend and HiPiHi (now in public beta - see my interview with Xu Hui, CEO of HiPiHi, here) may become a regular task. While I look forward to inviting Facebook friends to see photos and videos into my Vivaty scene, this will not be “3D life such as you’d find in Second Life” as some blogs have proclaimed.

“Exploring The Heavens on Earth”

“Exploring the Heavens on Earth” comes from Jeanne Holm’s (NASA) talk title. She will be presenting at the Federal Virtual Worlds Expo: Implementing the Future, on April 24th (see my previous post). Last week I spent some time “exploring the heavens on earth” in Second Life with Erika Vick a second generation NASA contractor who has been with NASA almost 18 years. Erica now works in NASA HQ Strategic Communications. She is Universa Vanalten in Second Life (in the picture above we are in the Moon Rover on NASA’s CoLab sim in SL. The other NASA sim in Second Life, Explorer Island, was created by the visionary from NASA Jet Burns). But as Universa explained most of the NASA content in SL is contributed by people outside NASA. I asked Universa how NASA’s involvement in Second Life was going.

I have been in SL for about a year now and wanted to use SL for Agency purposes….. it has been slow building support for this but now its going like gangbusters.

We’re going to be doing a mixed reality event for the NASA Future Forum in San Jose CA on May 14th

NASA’s MMORPG

Universa also updated me on the Office of Education Distance Learning group’s rfi (request for information) to get feedback about developing an MMORPG around NASA missions which has now turned into a request for proposals and a controversy in the blogosphere about the level of support NASA will offer developers (see here and here). Robert Rice attended the NASA MMORPG Workshop held on Monday of this week at the BWI Marriot and says that “Slashdot, Gamasutra, Second Life Herald and even Wired are all wrong” re their interpretation of NASA’s role (or lack of role!) as a partner in the project. Robert Rice writes:

there is a pretty solid opportunity here for any smart developer that can put together an interesting proposal and find some funding for it. NASA hinted at a few sources that might consider forming a consortium and providing funding, but as I said before, half of the audience stopped paying attention after “NASA will not provide the partner any funding

I think Robert is on the right track! You can check out NASA’s RFP here.

Universa said this to me concerning NASA’s position re funding proposals:

We got 186 responses…much more than expected. Our Administrator for Office of Education totally has the vision for virtutal worlds. There is going to be a Request for Proposals go out soon to follow up on the rfi NASA doesn’t have the money to develop the MMORPG. So the first question is does anyone want to take this on. The fact that we got 186 responses sounds like yes. NASA will provide content experts to consult, and whatever resources we can bring to the table.

Robert also mentioned that the attendee list for the workshop is supposed to be published. He notes: “Almost everyone there wanted to know who *else* was there (to gauge the competition maybe?). It will be posted on the NASA MMO page.”

International Space Station

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Image above: A camera aboard the International Space Station captured this image of the Soyuz TMA-11 spacecraft shortly after undocking. Credit: NASA TV<

I posted here about my visit to the awesome replica of the International Space Station in Second Life built by Illusion Factory. And how Piet Hut (see more about Piet’s latest Second Life adventures below!) brought his friend, astronaut Ed Lu, into Second Life to visit the International Space Station in Second Life. Ed Lu lived in the real one for a half a year in 2003!

I have become totally hooked on NASA TV lately, and particularly, I have been enjoying some of the events that have been streamed into in Second Life, including the annoucement of the latest Google Lunar X entrants, and The Stephen Hawking Lecture.

Virtual Worlds Astrophysics Group

On April 4, Dr. Rob Knop (a.k.a Prospero Linden a.k.a Prospero Frobozz) gave a talk titled “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 (picture and quote from the Scilands blog).

This is the first in a series of monthly talks organized by the Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA). They are to be held on the first Friday of every month.
SLURL:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Spaceport%20Bravo/117/66/278

Also from the Scilands blog an announcement for:

Star Simulations School

Learn about software for simulating stars, star clusters and galaxies. Organized by Piet Hut from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Aimed at anyone with a serious interest in astronomy and computer simulations of stars and galaxies. The main idea is to provide guidance for those who are interested in learning to use and/or write software for astronomical simulations, on all levels.

Examples of approaches and packages that we will discuss can be found on the following web sites:

http://www.artcompsci.org/ http://www.manybody.org/manybody/nemo.html

http://www.manybody.org/manybody/starlab.html http://muse.li/

When: The third Friday of every month at 8:00 AM Pacific Time Where: In the virtual world Second Life, at the ISM Workshop room:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Spaceport%20Bravo/153/205/59

The first class will be on Friday, April 18 polling whoever attends to see what their wishes are and then in May starting to offer workshops accordingly.

Optimizing A Free Form 3D Programmable Space

The optimization of Second Life as general purpose simulation platform was eloquently explained at a Fireside Chat with Sidewinder Linden about the Havok4 Physics Engine organized by the International Society for Technology in Education. Here is ashort extract from the one hour talk.

One of the realities of a world such as Second Life is that it is a general purpose simulation. It is not optimized for detailed, high accuracy (very high frame rate) calculation of object dynamics. It’s instead optimized to handle things like “not falling over when people dump 1000 random shapes in a region from 100m in the air” and having reasonable dynamics with a scripting language that allows you to build interesting things.

Now that’s not to say you can’t do real simulation, but it is not really a substitute for high precision simulation. With that all said… you can build things that are visually compelling and illustrate points, with low effort and ‘reasonable” realism.

An analogy I’d draw is to the build tools themselves [Sidewinder Linden comes from a CAD background...]. When I look at the build tools in Second Life, I’m constantly amazed at what people build, because they are pretty basic compared to “real computer aided design” systems but they’re simple and effective.

If you think about the physics modeling in the same way, you might find that you can build many interesting things that are visually compelling and satisfy the teaching objectives of understanding without necessarily having the “smooth like butter” or “high precision” of a “heavy physics simulator” (which by the way you’ll spend many moons programming in c++ to do even the basics

This is the kind of thing I hear from folks building physics-based projects in second life - does this general philosophy work for the type of education that you do, or is precision simulation “the only and right way” to get the points across in your environments?

Exploratorium in Second Life

“What can a museum do in a virtual world that would be difficult—or impossible—to do in the real world?” Exploratorium media creators and educators have been exploring this question by experimenting in Second Life (see the Exploratorium in Second Life blog for details).

The screenshot below is from Destination Mars - A Meteor Impact Simulation on the Surface of Mars

Project Director: Patio Plasma
Model Building & Scripting: Emileigh Starbrook
Particle Systems Scripting: Debbie Trilling

Teleport to the Destination Mars viewing area and:

“Experience a scale model of a Martian asteroid impact. The model crater is 50 m in diamter and the model runs in slow motion at 1/10th the speed of an actual event.”

Watch a machinima* of the Destination Mars simulation.

In another mix of real and virtual reality, the Exploratorium team “streamed an entire rare transit of the planet Mercury live from telescopes at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) in Kitt Peak, Arizona, into the International Spaceflight Museum site in SL.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Future of Ubiquitous Game Design

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LudoCraft = The Art of Designing Games and Play

Ludo - Theories of game and play

Craft - Art of game design and development

Reinventing the technologies of expression and experience.

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

When I asked Tony this question he replied:

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

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

Man Upside Down from The Book Of Urizen, William Blake

Interview with Tony Manninen, LudoCraft

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me: What are your pilot projects?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

avatar 2.0, avatar expressiveness, Croquet, free gesticulation for avatars, game design and development, GDC 2008, global avatar mesh, home automation in virtual worlds, import of 3D models to Second Life, Linden Lab, Ludocraft, MMOG, Ogoglio, Open Source, open source virtual worlds, OpenSim, realXtend, rich intertaction in network virtual environments, social gaming, Suns Wonderland, teleports between realXtebd and Second Life, the art of designing games and play, There.com, ubuqitous game design virtual worlds as company towns

Imagine an L-System forest, a herbivore simulation and a carnivore simulation all developed separately without each having its own graphical front end. Each object in the separate simulations would communicate locally or via the network using some agreed upon protocol. Next, picture one or more 3D front end “view portals” with all the bells & whistles that visualize what is going on in the engines and traffic, putting any local “area” together into a coherent scene.

If it existed, such an A-life system could be run as a true grid, an “Evolution Grid” or “EvoGrid” if you will, with the computation not limited to one processor or one 3D scenegraph’s rendering step clock. Developers could focus on their areas of strength while the quality of the collective simulation grid would improve much faster than any one individual effort. And perhaps best of all, new developers could connect their engines, protocols or view portals into the grid or take up development of existing engines and protocols so that no projects need stagnate or die. So with this vision in hand, is something like the EvoGrid possible, workable, desirable, and doable? (Bruce Damer, 2008)

When Bruce Damer told me he is working on evolution technologies (ETs) that will come “alive” towards the end of the 21st/beginning of the 22nd Century, I pricked up my ears!

A world renowned guru of our digital past and future (see of Bruce’s projects at his personal page Damer.com and his Digibarn Computer Museum), Bruce is in the advance guard of many emerging fields, including: social visual computing - avatars and virtual worlds (see his book Avatars, 1997 and compendium of Avatars events); NASA research - surface robotics, spacecraft and mission design, agent-based modeling, and real-time physics (see DigitalSpace for space projects from 2000-2008); and, artificial life - cellular automata, complex and emergent systems (see Biota.org and the Biota Podcast with Tom Barbalet).

Bruce Damer’s architectural notes for the EvoGrid router, a finite state machine that will consume XML

EvoGrid - an evolution technology grid

Bruce envisages a grid (EvoGrid.org) in which current work on artificial life research being done with teams at NASA, universities, and in the artificial life developer community, e.g., the work of Ventrella (see below), can interact in a common ecosystem.

Bruce plans to build EvoGrid on an open source framework, communication grid and protocol (Zhengyou & Yichuan 2004) allowing future developers to extend the EvoGrid and add their own objects or virtual creatures.

By running the simulations without visuals, the evolutionary algorithms of EvoGrid will be able to develop huge populations that can interact with other large populations evolving in real time. But, with their emergence into the social visual 3D space of a virtual world, they will hit the wall of physics.

The public 3D immersive portal into the EvoGrid will support the simulated evolution of biologically inspired forms. The portal will be a virtual space where they will interact with human users.

This window into the human world raises many interesting questions. Will the algorithms/artificial life forms themselves decide when to emerge into the public eye? Or, will they be pushed out by other life forms, or summoned forth by human voyeurs/god(s)?

But, regardless of how artificial life algorithms eventually emerge into cyberspace, this will be an important step in exploring the far reaching implications of the possible emergence of artificial life from algorithms into atom space.

From Algorithms to Atom Space

J. Doyne Farmer defined a living thing as a pattern in spacetime, able to reproduce itself using a stored information blueprint, employing an internal metabolism driving interdependent parts to interact with and deal with a chaotic environment. Above all, he put forth that a lineage of living things also possesses the ability to evolve through time (Farmer & Belin, “Artificial Life: The Coming Evolution,” 1991).

Our world and ourselves are products of this collective natural technology (whether one believes it is guided by an unseen God or not). Others have argued further that human culture, whether it is in the form of writings, music, ideas and the arts also employs some of the same underlying methods to spread and evolve (Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 1986). Therefore, beyond the physical laws of nature, the most powerful force shaping the universe is what we might call “evolution technology.” (Damer 2008)

The picture above is from Jeffrey Ventrella’s website.” JJ Ventrella is a programmer-artist doing virtual world design and artificial life research. He was Principle Inventor and second co-founder of There.com, and most recently, Senior Developer at Linden Lab. “Ventrella writes papers and chapters on topics centered around evolutionary computation and creativity.”

Ventrella is also the creator with Brian Dodd of Darwin Pond.

Darwin Pond is an imaginary gene pool, a primordial puddle of genetic surprises. More technically, Darwin Pond is an Artificial Life Simulation: a virtual world exhibiting the emergence of life-like behaviors. But it’s more than just a fun and informative thing to watch, you can participate in this artificial life simulation by building scenarios and setting up experiments.

What are the possibilities for artificial life?

Evolution technology is the use of the principles of evolution as seen in nature to rapidly develop new software, chemicals, genes or materials, devices or full robotic machine systems.

Bruce is developing EvoGrid to ask some big questions about our future: Can simulation be used to deduce how life came about? Can simulated biological environments be used to create powerful and transformative technologies? Can artificial life evolve into semi-living machines that can clean our atmosphere and heal our bodies?

“Evolution is a powerful tool,” Bruce notes. It can be used in constructive or destructive ways. “We should use it to make tools - the mechanisms by which we will survive and thrive.”

When our bodies are married to this kind of technology we may live for hundreds of years.

Bruce sees the next generation of space exploration emerging out of these artificial life forms born in cyberspace.

They should be able to work in actual hardware - intelligent manufacturing done at the lowest molecular level.

If we are truly going to travel and live beyond the earth’s biosphere we have to go beyond the 19th century technology that space exploration has depended on up to now. Our spacecraft would be recognizable to the great steamship engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, made of pressure vessels and other hard parts. These craft are fragile and subject to “single points of failure” (i.e, one seal goes and there goes the mission).

In order for longer term survivable spaceflight, especially for human crews, these craft will have to almost be alive, or at least be made up of billions of individual micro or nano-parts that are self monitoring and self healing. In this scenario, human crews are going to be like the brain organs in a larger biologically inspired vessel. I believe we are decades, maybe even centuries, from this kind of technology, but it will come.

In addition, evolved biologically-inspired robotic systems will mine outer space resources and prepare the solar system for Earth-life.

Picture trillions of flakes of solar collecting chemical nano-factories working something like an “ET lichen” coating the surface of a richly endowed asteroid, processing its stores of water ice, organic compounds, or metals. Human crews would stop by such asteroids to allow themselves (and their ships) to “feed” on the ET lichen. Indeed if the ET lichen manage to hollow out the asteroid and generate the correct mix of gases then the human crew could step inside for a break.

Other versions of “ET lichen” would have the potent capability of terraforming our own planet enabling us to cope with climate change and other effects of our civilization. As many science fiction writers and Hollywood directors has shown us, out of control ET lichen may also lead us to total annihilation.

The Artificial Life Programmer, the New Alchemist?

Like the medieval alchemists before them, programmers developing “Artificial Life” software (often shortened to “A-life”) are drawn to the elusive yet seductive proposition that they have the power to animate inanimate matter (Steen Rasumussen), except that in this modern incarnation of alchemy; the inanimate medium is a microscopic substrate of billions of transistors. (from “God, Science, and Intelligent Design,” chapter by Bruce Damer, upcoming in World Scientific, Singapore)

Bruce points out there is frequently confusion between the two fields of Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence. But this confusion, he notes, is a fertile field of inquiry.

A-life is a “bottom up” approach, wherein developers simulate “a large number of simple interacting components employing relatively simple rules from which complex behaviors of whole systems emerge (Chris Langton et al). AI on the other hand has tackled the ever receding goal of creating a “conscious” entity with which we would one day be able to communicate.”

God in the A-Life Universe

In his article for an upcoming book, “God, Science, and Intelligent Design,” Bruce undertakes a thought experiment in which he draws insights from the field of A-Life into a broader Intelligent Design/Creationism vs Evolution discussion.

The open question, “what is life?” underwrites the field of A-Life much as the question “what is consciousness?” does the field of Artificial Intelligence. And, these questions beg others on the role (or absence of role) of God(s).

Will Wright’s Spore: “God as the Intelligent Designer”

The screenshot above (see CNET for more) is from Spore the much anticipated new game from “Sims” creator Will Wright. Electronic Arts just announced that Spore, released through its Maxis Software brand, will go on sale on the weekend of Sept. 7, 2008. It is billed as “massively single-player” game, that “lets users create a universe, evolving from tiny organisms into civilizations capable of intergalactic travel.” (Canadian Press)

Bruce compares Spore with Karl Sim’s Evolved Virtual Creatures and argues they demonstrate two kinds of God in the A-Life universe:

Karl Sims’ - God the Mechanic setting up the initial conditions and then returning only occasionally to view the current state of the simulation; and the Will Wright, Intelligent Designer God, constantly providing opportunities to use and outside intelligence to steer the direction of the virtual universe.

The properties of A- Life software in its early phases can be represented along a continuum which at one end can be represented by Karl Sim’s evolving virtual creatures (see below) and on the other end Will Wright’s game Spore.

Karl Sim’s “Evolved Virtual Creatures” - “God the Mechanic”

Karl Sim’s creatures start life as a simple pair of hinged blocks in a virtual universe that simulates basic physical properties such as gravity, collisions and surface friction. From that point on the simulation was allowed to continue on its own without human intervention (although random mutations were introduced automatically into the “genome” of creatures between generations).

Bruce Damer’s: “God As the Intelligent Adapter”

Bruce analyzes “the copying rule,” as a fundamental principle of life in his article for the forthcoming book “God, Science, and Intelligent Design:”

A living organism differs from bare rock, gasses or a pool of liquid in ine very specific way: the living organism contains instructions that are copied, for the most part unaltered, from one version to the next.

Bruce argues, quite brilliantly, that the Copying Rule, along with the “Laws of Nature” and the element of uncertainty leads us to a notion of God not as an influencer of the future but as an “adept adapter” . And if you don’t see God in the picture the understanding of evolution by cumulative adaptation is even more remarkable for the fact no hand guides it.

Those who wish to celebrate the presence of a God in their lives and in all nature can believe that, God as the Brilliant Adapter, played a hand in the survival and glorious diversification of life on Earth as well as the blossoming richness of human culture and technology. Those who see no need to place an actor like God in the picture can celebrate and seek to better understand the process of evolution by cumulative adaptation, made even more astonishing by the very fact that no hand guided it.

“God who created all things in the beginning is himself created by all things in the end” Wrote Olaf Stapledon in 1937.

Performing the Future

The questions evolutionary technologies raise for human and planetary future are vast and far reaching. To explore the huge social and philosophical questions (Damer 2008) raised by the outputs of more advanced EvoGrids, as well as an enumeration of how evolution technologies will impact life on Earth and in space in the future, Bruce is planning a performance piece that will tour the world - “After the Evogrid.”

As a kind of cyber-hippie empresario (see Bruce above on right and his friend and Digibarn collaborator Al Lundell on the left) of nine virtual world conferences including one just three weeks ago featuring Virtual Worlds and Space for NASA, Bruce has always been deeply involved in firing the public’s imagination about the future. Now he intends to take his involvement with the public space to new heights with, “After the Evogrid,” - a “multimedia performance piece with a spoken word narrative, sound and music, and animated visuals.”

“After the Evogrid” will present both the promise and the perils of Humanity living in a symbiotic existence with the products of the new field of “evolution technology.”

The performance piece will bring together a unique combination of evolution technologies, personal and societal impacts, full biosphere implications and the expansion of life beyond the Earth. The EvoGrid itself will create the first open extensible grid protocol for evolution simulations.

So stand by for launch into an even weirder future, brought to you by “Doc Damer”?!

A Life, AI, artificial intelligence, Artificial Life, artificial life algorithms, artificial life programmers, artificial life research, artificial life simulation, biologically inspired robotic systems, Biota, Bruce Damer, cellular automata, Darwin Pond, Digibarn, emergent systems, EvoGrid, Evolution Grid, evolution technologies, evolutionary algorithms, evolutionary computation, evolved virtual creatures, Farmer and Belin, Genetic Algorithms, God in the A Life Universe, intelligent manufacturing, Jeffrey Ventrella, Karl Sims, L system simulation, nano factories, next generation space exploration, performing the future, semi living machines, simulated biological environments, Spore, virtual worlds and artificial life, virtual worlds and space, Will Wright will wrights spore

Mirror Worlds will transform the meaning of “computer.” Our dominant metaphor since 1950 or thereabouts, “the electronic brain,” will go by the boards. Instead people will talk about crystal balls, telescopes, stained glass windows, wine, poetry, or whatever - things that make you see vividly. (Mirror Worlds, David Gelertner 1992)

As the meaning of “computer” transforms so will software. Gelertner talks about software as an embodied information machine. And, as virtual worlds come of age so will this notion of software as 3d info machines that we can walk around, tinker with, and hang out in with other avatars and agents in real time. But, exactly how the most complex, crucial, and up to now invisible, parts of our society become embodied in all their glory is not clear yet.

The photo above is used with the permission of Dan Slater. It is taken with an experimental camera Dan built, called the Spherecam. It is a one of a kind ultra wide angle camera that records a scene in all possible viewing directions (4pi steradians). The camera uses a pair of hyperhemispherical fisheye lens to record the scene in all directions.

In Gelertner’s vision the transformation of computers into seeing machines will empower people to understand and work with the machinery of their society. Edward Tufte describes, “Beautiful Evidence,” as “how seeing turns into showing.” But for this to happen, new metaphors for representing complex information will have to emerge. We will have to imagine new ways to deal with the multiple views that are already part of complex modern software (e.g., the four plus one mode view pictured below - see Grady Booch, Turing Lecture, 2007).

And, we will have to imagine radically new ways to view software.

Software today offers assistance to the specialist (in everybody) not to the citizen. The mere citizen deals with the increasingly perilous complexity of his government, business, transportation, health, school, university and legal systems unaided. Mirror Worlds represent one attempt to change this state of affairs (Gelertner, Mirror Worlds, 1992).

Design Patterns:The soul of software architecture

I contacted Grady Booch to ask him about the role virtual worlds may have in the next generation of software design. He is one of the giants of software design and methodology (known for developing the Unified Modeling Language with Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh, and the Booch method of software development). But also he is undertaking an archeology of the essential piece of software architecture - software design patterns - in a project called The Handbook of Software Architecture. The website is under construction and “this is a work in progress, and the chapters of the Handbook will be exposed as each archeologic dig for each system is finished and vetted by the original development team.”

But, I was fortunate to get a sneak preview. The Handbook, while illuminating the brilliance and short comings of software’s past is, in my understanding, about software’s future - discovering the raw materials of software’s future through a meticulous excavation of the design patterns of the past.

“Some people collect stamps, Grady collects software architectures”

The picture above, from The Handbook of Software Architecture, is of an early design drawing for Google. Google are notoriously secretive about their architecture. The “family jewels” of page rank are not elucidated! Grady pointed out the importance of the “barrels” which are the individual servers.

Contradictions of Software-Intensive Mechanisms

The cartoon/design pattern above is from xkcd, A Webcomic of Romance, Sarcasm, Math and Language - hat tip to Cory Ondrejka for this link. The next generation of software design is pushing up whole new classes of applications. The semantic web is not the last word. But, we are confronted by a set of complex challenges and contradictions. Grady points out several of these (see them in full in Turing Lecture,, Grady Booch, 2007).

1) The internet has changed the way individuals communicate and collaborate but it also creates new opportunities for griefers (for a thoughtful look at some of the issues see Identity in a new era, and for a critique of the way griefers get glorified in the media see here). Mitch Wagner of Information Week, (Ziggy Figaro in Second Life) said to me recently:

I certainly despise griefers — they seem to like to spoil things for other people through no other motivation than mean- spiritedness. A devout Christian friend says that spammers and phishers are just plain thieves, but griefers prove the existence of Original Sin.

2) The web provides unprecedented mechanisms for social networking but also new opportunities for theft, fraud and the exploitation of the vulnerable, especially children.

3) Software-intensive systems permit real time and distributed access to information but this can erode privacy and other basic human rights.

4) Email and other software-intensive mechanisms increase the velocity of communication but email and the aging of digital archives threatens the preservation of history.

5) Software-intensive systems create new forms of artistic expression but piracy can dilute the intellectual property of artists.

6) Software-intensive systems enable and accelerate scientific research but they are also at the center of a new generation of offensive and defensive weapons.

7) Software is part of the very fabric of civilization, living in its interstitial spaces but its complexity continues to grow impacting the users as well as the stakeholders in its development, operation and deployment.

“What is software?” and “What are its limits?”

Through the dedication of Grady Booch (Alem Theas in Second Life) - his archeology and anthropology of software’s past, the past is beginning to speak. The archive not only reveals a valuable history: “What worked and what didn’t?” “What was brilliant and what was a failure?” But by creating this unprecedented access to history, Grady gives us a unique opportunity to chew on the big questions and discover the cross cutting zones from which the future will emerge.

There is a grand vision in David Gelertner’s book Mirror Worlds. A vision of a software revolution in which the underpinnings of our global society, the invisible machinery of software, “becomes visible and is transformed into a beautiful, poetic experience that empowers people to understand and work with the machinery of their society.”

In Mirror Worlds, Gelertner points out, ordinary people will be able to poke around in the workings of society, business and government. You will meet software agents and other Mirror World visitors and you will be able to enter a Mirror World through any household computer.

But as Gelertner pointed out this is not “hazy science fiction” - “the tools and materials for Mirror World building are in hand, and the job is underway.” And the challenges are more social than technical. They are at their root challenges of human imagination.

Last week Grady made a presentation on Software Architecture from Second Life to a group of Canadian developers. Grady’s Second Life avatar was streamed into an IMax Theater for a live audience who watched both the stream from Second Life and a PowerPoint presentation side by side. Through a fascinating set of slides of different software architectures, I saw the process of how successful systems grow and emerge. How software architectures manage to change. How the ability to change allows them to endure over time.

Grady argued that natural forces lead to optimal developments. And, for a given domain there is a reasonably optimum architecture for that domain. Also, how domains have tendencies to grow in particular directions, e.g., How Amazon’s investment in hardware and software was applicable to some domains, e.g. Cloud computing.

Grady illuminated the characteristics of the design patterns that animate the software architecture that invisibly guides our society, the mobile phone - “wickedly complex” yet very resistant to change because customers are fickle. Mars Pathfinder - a classic example of “subsumption architecture as Pathfinder works in a semi-autonomous way, Google, E-bay, Amazon - the titans of the web centric development and web centric retail, Citibank, Visa, and air traffic control, MMOGs, and many more.

How software architectures learn

One of the insights of Grady’s archeology is that architecture that can change is architecture that endures over time. And key to this ability to be flexible and to scale, is componentization. Grady pointed out how game architecture and virtual worlds are increasingly discovering componentization. Grady links increasing maturation of architecture to increasing componentization. A quick look at these two design drawings of the Second Life architecture - one of the architecture today, and the other the new design Zero Linden (Mark Lentczner in Real Life) presented, in September, 2007, show this trend (see more of the new structural design drawings here).

Zha Ewry (David Levine, IBM research) explained to me some of the challenges of introducing an increased separation of concerns and componentization to Second Life architecture while maintaining the essence of Second Life, collaboration and dynamic content.

To a point yes, we’ll see more and more componentization. But.. there are some deep limits, driven off of the need to do state melding.

State melding is the dynamic state updating - what makes Second Life the amazing creative, social space it is. The old web works by exporting state on a per state basis. But Second Life takes inputs from 10 - 40 AVs, and 40 times a second spits out a new state. I asked Zha what are the key ways the new architecture design is different from the old?

Separating out a bunch of non state melding activity from the state melding to start. That’s the agent domain

Some examples of non melding activity are Inventory, IM , Estate management, Profiles, Search and Map. As Zha pointed out:

Anything that doesn’t involve generating the next frame of the sim’s state, or has stand alone capabilities based utilities, e.g, buying Linden. The agent domain can fetch you a capabilities (a short term secure access to a web service) to the lindex . Right now, they all route via the sim.

Many Second Lifer’s favorite design drawings from the next generation architecture for Second Life displayed on the Architectural Working Group wiki are the ones showing the designs for running your own region from a home computer.

3D Information Machines

The tools of modern software such as Rational and Eclipse with complex UML models are currently deeply lodged in the 2D realm of the user desktop. But, the third dimension is crucial to Gelertner’s vision for the future of software:

You set up a software mirror wherever you like, then allow some complex real-world system to unfold before it. The software faithfully reflects what it going on out front. But this is a three dimensional kind of reflection: The program reaches out and engulfs some chunk of reality. Like a child- sized play village modeled precisely on a real town and tracking reality’s every move, the Mirror World supplies a software object to match and track every real one.

When I wrote to Grady requesting an interview I asked him the following question:

Do you think one day we can dispense with all those 2D docs and replace them with living 3D software that we can collaborate on in real time?

Grady replied:

and why do you suppose we are not already living in such a world but don’t have the ability to see it! (hehe..one of my fav books is “Better Than Life” by Grant Naylor; it’s the sequel to the book “Red Dwarf”)

The topic of the virtualness of what we call “reality” has been coming up a lot in the WoK forums, led by Piet Hut and Steven Tainer, that I have been attending in Qwaq. And, as the worlds we call virtual become increasingly “real” in ways we have not yet imagined, what we call “real” will be experienced as increasingly virtual. So things are definitely getting very interesting.

In a few years there will be enough computation cycles for ray tracing and avatars will be more of a “real” person tied to bodily movements. Already the riddle of multi threading is the theme of much discussion and talk in Second Life (see this series of Second Life presentations by Intel’s multi threading gurus.)

These mirror worlds will become increasingly rich and, in Gelertner’s vision, they will mark a new era in humankind’s relationship to the human made world. And, “They change that relationship, for good.”

While some would argue that 2D repositories can be transformed usefully into 3D architectures there is a disruptive discontinuity in the phase shift from 2D programs to 3D as 2D respositories do not have a 3rd or a fourth dimension.

Another approach is to root the design process in 3D from the start. From this perspective the sim itself acts as the OS or middleware. Mirror Worlds are native to the 3D environment. And, prototypes for Mirror Worlds, small scale examples for the moment, are already appearing in Second Life and OpenSim.

“Beyond wickedly cool” - A VNOC (Virtual Network Operations Center) in SL

“Beyond wickedly cool,” was Grady’s Booch’s assessment of the 3D info machines of Illuminous Beltran (Second Life avatar), a.k.a Michael Osias, IBM. These are not merely visualizations they are assemblies driven by “live” or simulated data. “When real business logic is in these machines they become more than “visualizations” and models. The become 3D information processing machines.” I asked Illuminous to describe his work for me:

Nearly every technical engineer has used a program like RAD and Visio to structure and describe the architectures they are building. These drawings may be static or updated from an underlying metadata repository, and render information at different levels of abstraction based on the phase of the project. These 2D, semi-static artifacts are shared among members of the team working on the project. Via collaboration tools such as email or content management systems, wikis, etc, these models are refined, new revisions created, and the cycle starts again. Ultimately, these artifacts need to end up in a deployed system, which involves yet another set of tools, skills, and people.

There is a thought that, using Virtual World technologies, the collaboration cycle time between design, refinement, development, and deployment can be drastically reduced. The idea is that, 3D elements of what we may consider 2D software, are built in the virtual world. What does software ‘look’ like? With the phrase ‘function drives form’, they look like what they are. Components such as sockets, servers, subsystems, and applications all have well defined structural aspects that can be represented in 3D. That is not to say, every line of java code becomes a 3D object, but rather atomic elements - be they objects or collections of objects, subsystems, or other ‘normalized’ elements that represent structure and function, but also make sense.

You could stop there, and say we have a static ‘3D software sculpture’, and gain some value by having multiple avatars collaborate on the structure of the system, making changes in realtime. This provides great deal of value by allowing everyone involved in the collaboration to understand and see in realtime, the structure of the system. Taking it a step further, why not give these ’sculptures’ behavior that mirrors the ‘real’ components? Such as data flows in and out, animations, color changes, even adding in tiny screens, consoles, buttons, network connections, gauges, meters, and even sounds. These elements can be programmed to respond as the ‘real’ component responds. Therefore turning our 3D sculpture into a ‘3D machine’. Now we can determine, collaboratively, how the system evolves over time given various stimulus and behavior. Connecting these components together, like connecting wires to electrical equipment, allows composite systems to be built.

You could also stop there, with significant value in not only understanding the structure, but how the state of all components evolve over time given specific stimulus. Or, you could feed key data elements from the APIs of the ‘real’ systems to create an operational mirror image of the system. Finally, to take it a step further, you could begin to move function into the 3D machine, and begin to turn off the functions of the ‘real’ system…after all data is data, and logic is logic, no matter if the runtime is in java or the Virtual World. The data and algorithms, and the behavior of the machine, come to represent not just the ‘living’ architecture, but it becomes the ‘operational’ architecture as well. Of course not all algorithms and data volumes are appropriate for the Virtual World 3D Machines. In these cases, a hybrid of real processing versus manipulation of high performance systems via APIs is an option. This final phase, is where the design, development, and deployment, could become a single entity.

New Forms of Collaboration

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

There is much research going on in many different virtual world platforms on how virtual worlds can best be used for collaborative software design. Piet Hut is working with astrophysicists in Qwaq and Second life in a project called MICA, (Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics), to explore the possibilities for scientists.

The IBM Project Bluegrass from Li-Te Cheng, Steven Rohall, and John Patterson, The T.J. Watson, Collaborative User Experience group, is looking at virtual worlds for developer collaboration and to support distributed work. They are focusing on some of the complex aspects of visualization of work flow processes that are part and parcel of modern software design, and the critical social aspects of working across culture and geography.

Collaborative applications such as Rational Jazz for software development and Lotus Notes for business processes, provide team support for “heads down” work. However, as teams become more distributed, it is important to support “heads up” work–the kind of social interaction that is achieved by seeing people in the hallways when they are collocated.

A video demonstration of Project Bluegrass can be downloaded in Second Life at IBM Codestation. Bluegrass is a research project. They are considering the strengths of various platforms. But, their basic approach is the creation of a virtual world client installation, a VW plug in for the 2D collaborative environments of Lotus Notes and Jazz. At the moment, they have a research prototype using Torque which is currently available for use by IBM teams.

New Collaborative Tools Evolving From 3D Environments

Bluegrass uses virtual spaces to find ways to enhance the 2D environments in which developers work today - modern developers are dealing with a level of complexity that has already usurped the real estate of their screens. But there are some interesting experiments on design and collaboration native to the 3D environment emerging in Second Life.

These experiments, currently, may seem mere toys in relation to the needs of enterprise software development. But because they are evolving directly in the 3D environment - these under-featured solutions may contain the seeds of innovation that will kill todays giants. (see Innovators Dilemma).

The following pictures show Vision Raymaker (Marco Vanadia in RL), and JonnyBee Cioc’s, Spatial Mind Map project. Their source code is freely downloadable here and the latest version is here. It’s released under the Creative Commons license. They developed Spatial Map using this LSL editor - an off-world IDE integrated Developer Environment developed by Alphons Jano (SL Avatar), Alphons van der Heijden in RL. Vision told me he considers this the best off-world IDE for LSL. “This editor allows you to edit/compile & debug one or more Linden Scripting Language sources in its simulation environment (when you press a F key you can test almost all functionality as if you were in SL). It can update itself every time you open it via internet and offers help from an extensive help file, or the LSL wiki. “Vision (Marco Vanadia is becoming the first (perhaps!) Italian scripting mentor in Second Life.

Spatial mind map to public brainstorm about SL land joint venture

Talking about Singularity through a mind map

The spatial map mind mapping project was born on Vulcano, “an open community, where experimentation is encouraged to flourish, and the consequences of applying common sense and bottom-up self regulation, enable creativity to mature.” David Orban the founder of Vulcano told me: ”

I am very proud of this concrete example of its fertility. An idea is just a humble starting point, as we know, and before we can measure its validity, in the physical world there are enormous hurdles to clear, many of which don’t relate to the idea itself, but are inherent to the rules we are accustomed to obey. In online worlds on the other hand, many of these barriers do not exist, and ideas can evolve very quickly, as they are more easily tested in their utility. I fully expect Vulcano to give birth to many other excellent ideas as well, and my best wishes to Spatial Map and all the others is to succeed, and progress!”

Malachi Mulligan is working on another mind map project on Vulcano. And, see also the opening of the Pyramid Cafe, another awesome manifestation of Vulcano creativity (read more here in Italian and here in English).

Spatial Map Creators JonnyBee Cioc and Vision Raymaker

Software Architects Meet to Play Go in Second Life

Last Thursday, a group of software architects including Saijanai Kuhn (Lawson English in RL), from the AWG, and Zha Ewry, the IBM representative to AWG gathered on the Second Life Go sim created by Zarf Vantongerloo and BamBam Sachertorte for a great match between Zero Linden (as his alt Zarf) and astrophysicist Piet Hut. It was a brilliant and wonderful match to watch. Zero is a 9K player and Piet is Shodan level. The conversation during the match was fascinating too, and touched on the aesthetics of game patterns and the best way to improve one’s skills by replaying the games of the great masters until the patterns become internalized. Thanks Zha for these great pictures! Click here visit Go in Second Life (and see the newsblog and the website for a schedule of events).

3D info machines, 3D information machines, 3D Internet, Architectural Working Group of Second Life, beautiful evidence, colaboration in virtual worlds, contradictions of software intensive mechanisms, David Gelertner, design patterns for software architecture, Edward Tufte, four plus one mode view, Go in Second Life, Grady Booch, how software architectures learn, mind maps in Second Life, Mirror Worlds, Second Life Architecture, Spatial Map, spherecam, The Handbook of Software Architecture, The IBM Project Bluegrass, Turing Lecure, ultra wide angle photography, Unified Modeling Language, Virtual network operations center in Second Life, VNOC in Second Life, What Are Its Limits? What is Software?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things like that, I think, are going