UgoTrade

There were many demonstrations across Second Life today in support of peace and justice in Myanmar (Burma) where hundreds of Buddhist monks are being arrested in government raids on monasteries after leading large protests against the military regime.

I joined one of the avatar chains organized by Second Life avatar Vivienne Casavettes. It stretched across multiple sims. Many of the participants wore robes or like me “went bald for Burma.” It was a powerful experience to meet so many people in Second Life finding ways to show there support for the monks and people of Burma.

There were T-shirts, placards and note cards giving updates on events in Burma handed out. I chose this T-shirt asking for the freedom of dissident Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Suu Kyi is a pro-democracy activist and leader of the National League for Democracy in Myanmar, and a noted prisoner of conscience, advocate of nonviolent resistance. “A Buddhist, Suu Kyi won the Rafto Prize and the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 1990 and in 1991 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her peaceful and non-violent struggle under a military dictatorship. She is currently under detention, with the Myanmar government repeatedly extending her detention.”

Rik Riel on his excellent blog has posted some of the Other steps you can take, suggested by the Peacemaker Institute:

1. Protest - Look below for details of worldwide protests. Contact US Campaign for Burma to sign up to hold a march, vigil or any sort of event in your area- thelma@uscampaignforburma.org .
2. Spread the word - Invite your friends to this group, email all your family and friends, write to local newspapers
3. Write to your elected official - they will respond if enough people contact them.
4. Wear red clothes on Friday.
5. Email the companies that still operate in Burma, their email addresses are listed here
6. Sign up for the petition! US campaign for Burma, Petition Online, AVAAZ

I am a second generation Western Buddhist. Today (Sunday) I will also observe 5 minutes of silent aspiration with members of the sangha of Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, in NYC, in support of the protest of the Buddhist monastics and lay sangha in Myanmar, and against the violations of human rights and suppression of religious freedom now being enacted by the government.

Second Life avatars Vivienne Casavettes, Sugar Seville, and Dizzy Banjo are just some of the Second Life Residents who are organizing support efforts in Second Life. Also see Cryogenix’s, Dizzy Banjo’s, blogs and here for more. Dizzy has a video of a vigil organized by Sugar Seville

Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma, cyber activism, Myanmar, national league for democracy, peace and justice in Burma, Peacemaker Institute, Second Life US Campaign for Burma

Virtual worlds are the golden path to achieving Artificial General Intelligence and positive Singularity, Dr Ben Goertzel’s, CEO of Novamente LLC and author of “The Hidden Pattern: A Patternist Philosophy of Mind” explained in his presentation “Artificial General Intelligence in Virtual Worlds” given at the Singularity Summit 2007 earlier this month. According to Goertzel, Singularity is no longer a far future idea. About a year ago Goertzel gave a talk “Ten Years to a Positive Singularity — If We Really, Really Try.”

The slide that opens this post was in Goerzel’s presentation. It depicts an Archailect, Archai from the Orion’s Arm science-fiction world — a mega scale brain, “sophont or sophont cluster that has grown so vast as to become a god-like entity.”

What is singularity?

Singularity is the creation of the kind of “massively intelligent machines” Hugo de Garis discusses in his book “The Artilect War.” — “machine mega brains that may end up being smarter than human brains by not just a factor of two or even ten times but by a factor of trillions of trillions of time i.e. truly godlike.” De Garis presents these technologies in a clear and simple way. And he discusses the ethical, philosophical and political questions of Singularity.

Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in the quintessential rapid prototyping environment for embodied virtual agents — Second Life - may well turn Artificial General Intelligence into an idea with traction. And the introduction of AGI into virtual worlds certainly gives a new context within which to suggest that Singularity is a mere decade away. With millions or soon perhaps billions of networked human minds working on it, Singularity may indeed happen sooner than we think.

Second Life Insider cracks “Do you want your pet whispering “Dave? Dave?” as you tear memory modules out though?” Remember Hal 9000 from 2001? But indicating also the sentiment that many Second Lifers will have when they hear of the plans Novamente and Electric Sheep Company have to collaboratively introduce AI into virtual worlds (the firms haven’t formally announced which virtual worlds, but Second Life seems an awfully likely guess to be one of them), the Second Life Insider post ends on a positive note. Eloise Pasteur writes “Seriously though, good luck to them all.”

What is Artificial General Intelligence?

Artificial General Intelligence has come to the fore in the last few years, Dr. Ben Goertzel explains. For a long time the AI field has been very task-focused and quite successful at that. Can you beat Deep Blue at chess? But as Goertzel points out Deep Blue can’t player checkers or Go. It cannot take what it has learned in chess over to other areas. Narrow AI has not proved to be a path leading to AGI. But fasten your seat belts Second Lifers! You may be the key to the emergence of AGI and the rapid prototyping of the Singularity.

An AGI is a system that can achieve a variety of complex goals in a variety of complex situations — something seems to require a system with the capability to understand what it is, what others are, and to understand what the problem is rather than just solving a problem or problems posed by programmers. In other words AGI achieves autonomy.

The First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence
FedEx Institute of Technology, University of Memphis
In cooperation with AAAI , March 1-3, 2008

Second Life as an incubator of Artificial General Intelligence

Last week, Goertzel’s startup company Novamente LLC announced their collaboration with Electric Sheep Company to bring artificial intelligence agents to online virtual worlds (see BBC News Coverage). So things are definitely beginning to ramp up. Novamente and Electric Sheep will show off their plans for AI in virtual worlds at the Virtual Worlds Fall Conference and Expo 2007, Oct 10th - 11th, San Jose, CA.

Goertzel explained to me some of the reasons virtual worlds such as Second Life have the potential to form very interesting environments for the development of AGI. Most importantly in online virtual worlds, if you roll out virtual babies or pets you also get a huge mass of people to teach them things. You get the opportunity to harness the wisdom of crowds. Many MMOG games have AI in them but games are narrow, not requiring much flexibility or adaptiveness on the part of the AI agents operating in them. The openness of virtual worlds creates many new possibilities for AGI. Also artificial intelligence can be embedded in a variety of embodied agents at a low cost. Robots, the previous alternative for embodied AGI development, have often proved very costly and time consuming to work with (there are exceptions, like Rodney Brooks’s robotic bugs, but these seem to lack the sophistication needed to support powerful AGI).

Skyping from New York City to China with Dr Ben Goertzel

Dr Ben Goertzel (SL name: Zarathustrapocalypse Zeta) was in China at the 2nd International Symposium on Intelligence Computations and Applications 2007 and visiting his friend Hugo de Garis in Wuhan when I spoke to him on Skype Saturday.

Ben very generously answered a range of questions I had about artificial general intelligence and Second Life, genetic algorithms and AGI, open source and AGI, and AGI in centralized and distributed virtual worlds, harnessing the wisdom of crowds, technological singularity, and monetizing AGI in virtual worlds.

My questions to Ben were in part influenced by some quite breathtaking virtual world events last week, including a discussion on the plans of the newly formed SL Architecture Group during Zero Linden’s office hours, see Dizzy Banjo - Soundtracking Virtual Worlds. Aleister Kronos picked out the headlines:

• Linden are not just talking about the sim limits we have now - they are talking truly epic scale: “to evolve the SL architecture into something that is internet wide.”
• Transition to “SL2.0″ (gah!) is being designed to be as seamless as possible.
• Now for the numbers: 60Million regions; 2Billion avatar accounts; maybe 50M to 100M on-line… though admittedly hypothetical
• And “on-line might mean something more lightweight in the future”

There is the first glimpse of what a Linden Lab open source grid architecture might look like on the Second Life Architecture Working Group Wiki, and more about this and how to get involved in the working group on Zero Linden’s blog.

Hey it sounds like there are going to be some big crowds around on the grid and a whole lotta wisdom around to harness. But, as Al noted, the discussion does not deal with issues of identity management and storage yet. And, from what I could gather when I attended Sunday’s, “Introduction to the new Second Life Grid Architecture Working Group” with Tao Takashi, the thorny problems of asset management and IP issues are definitely not on the table for the moment.

But these are heady times — Singularity conceivable in less than a decade, plans from LL for a global grid with 50M to 100M on-line in a couple of years?

Harnessing The Wisdom of Crowds

I also attended the “deep content” bonanza of Dr Dobb’s Life 2.0 Summit in Second Life last week. Tapping the wisdom of crowds in Second Life came up directly and indirectly many times. David Orban proposed a reinvention of industrial design and production with a new model of design that brings objects, social communities and genetic algorithms together to the project of evolving useful objects where the measure of success in an on-line world like Second Life is interaction. David’s presentation and slides are available here. I interviewed David after his talk so more on this later in this post.

Then there was Julian Lombardi from Croquet’s presentation at Life 2.o. Lombardi didn’t mention harnessing the wisdom of crowds but he certainly presented a whole new concept for large scale metaverses with Croquet’s: “very extensible technology that can be used to support very large scale metaverse implementations without, and I have to underscore this, without the need for servers to support them.”

I also interviewed Keystone Bouchard and his Wikitecture collaborator Theory Shaw on their plans to revolutionize architectural design and city planning in Second Life. They are busy developing new ways to tap into the wisdom of crowds in their Wikitecture project. The Wikitecture 3.0 Experiment will have its first kick off meeting Tuesday, September 25th @ 9:00am PST/SLT. Here is the slurl link to the ‘Studio Wikitecture’ parcel in Second Life. Keystone presented at Life 2.o on implementing Wikitecture in Second Life “to develop disciplined opensourcing and collaborative creation of virtual and RL architecture components and structures.” I will be posting more on Wikitecture soon!

China and Artificial General Intelligence in Virtual Worlds

There was interesting news from China too. The Chinese Government is going to present virtual world infrastructure plans at VW Fall 2007 Conf. in San Jose! And I keep hearing a buzz about HiPiHi meeting with Linden Labs. Hiu Xu, Founder and CEO will definitely be in San Jose for the conference as he is speaking there.

Phew, it is clear we are in a hang on to your hat time for sure.

As Dr Ben Goertzel was in Wuhan, China when we spoke, I asked him about Artificial General Intelligence and Virtual Worlds in China.

Ben said there was certainly lots of interest in AGI in Chinese academia. And Chinese Universities were hiring AI and AGI researchers and powerhouses. “An American professor in China may have up to 20 top quality researchers working with them in a very short time. In contrast in the US they would have much of their research time taken up writing grants just to get started, and just to get funding for a handful of assistance.” Ben said that he was not sure what the status of AGI R&D was in Chinese industry. But he did note that the venture capital community and economy is growing so fast, many things are possible in China now.

I asked Ben to speculate about HiPiHi and Second Life. “Well, obviously, in some ways life in China is more restrictive than in the West, so there will be more of a contrast between ‘real life’ and the totally freewheeling virtual-worlds life, for Chinese users as opposed to Western users. And of course China doesn’t have the continuous tradition of property rights that the West does, whereas Second Life is all about property rights. But really, right now, China is just about the most capitalism-happy place I’ve ever seen, so the laissez-faire economics we see in Second Life would in some ways fit right in with the contemporary Chinese scene. It seems to me that the Chinese — at least the ones with high-bandwidth Internet connections — are going to eat this stuff up. I’m really curious to see the culture that will emerge in HiPiHi and how it may differ from the way Second Life culture has evolved.”

How Can Virtual Agents Work In a Virtual Economy?

Novamente in collaboration with Electric Sheep Company is bringing artificial intelligence to virtual worlds as a business venture. I was interested to know about ways Dr. Goertzel thought you could monetize intelligent virtual agents. Ben pointed out that the system of micro-payments has made many different things work in Second life. The many possibilities include, for example:

– micropayments for knowledge (buy knowledge, capability, etc. for your agent)

– payment for tuition (send your virtual baby to school, etc.)

– companies hire virtual agents as employees.

On the Novamente blog Ben has a very interesting post On the Merits of Parrots … or: “The Wisdom of Crowds” as a Strategy for Educating Young AI’s)

This is Bruce Klein (president/CFO) with a parrot at Novamente’s Second Life Headquarters. Also see Bruce’s blog for a report on Singularity Sabre Rattling at the Summit.

“Openess and the Metaverse Singularity”

Jamais Cascio’s, “Singularity Summit Talk: Openness and the Metaverse Singularity,” looks at Singularity through the lenses of the four scenarios/provocations to thought presented in the Metaverse Roadmap that he authored with John Smart and Jerry Paffendorf.

what has struck me more recently about the Roadmap scenarios is that the four worlds could also represent four pathways to a Singularity. Not just in terms of the technologies, but — more importantly — in terms of the social and cultural choices we make while building those technologies.

As part of his conclusion Jamais writes:

My preferred pathway would be to “open source” the singularity, to bring in the eyes and minds of millions of collaborators to examine and co-create the relevant software and models, seeking out flaws and making the code more broadly reflective of a variety of interests. Such a proposal is not without risks. Accidents will happen, and there will always be those few who wish to do others harm. But the same is true in a world of proprietary interests and abundant secrecy, and those are precisely the conditions that can make effective responses to looming disasters difficult. With an open approach, you have millions of people who know how dangerous technologies work, know the risks that they hold, and are committed to helping to detect, defend and respond to crises.

Novamente and Open Source

With all the talk about the possible opening-up of Second Life’s server code, it’s interesting to speculate about the opening-up of AI-for-virtual-worlds code as well. Dr. Goertzel says, “Novamente.net is proprietary but we are also experimenting with the issue of open source — we’re debating launching something called OpenCog, an open source AGI toolkit and playground for AI researchers. But we’re still not sure how much of the Novamente software is going to go into OpenCog. Almost surely, if we do OpenCog, we’ll put our knowledge representation code in there, and some of our AI learning mechanisms, though. If we do OpenCog, we want to create something that a lot of researchers can build on in a lot of creative ways — coming up with some ideas we can use within Novamente, and other stuff that may be irrelevant to Novamente but useful for advancing knowledge and the AGI field.”

Ben pointed out to me in our conversation that there are really two questions to consider when thinking about the pluses and minuses of open-sourcing AGI technology:

1) Will open source get to powerful AGI faster?

2) Will it get to safer and more beneficial AGI?

The answer to these questions is not clear yet, he pointed out. There is no guarantee of safety with open source — the bad guys can take your code and do as they will with it. But on the other hand, in the open-source scenario, but there are more good guys with access to deal with security, and creative ideas about how to ensure security. And obviously in the closed-source scenario there is no guarantee of safety either; plenty of damage has been done in human history by small, dedicated, secretive teams with good intentions! These ethical and strategic issues don’t have easy answers; and because of his belief in the importance of exploring these issues, Dr. Goertzel has become involved with the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a non-profit organization focused on AGI research and also specifically on exploring issues relating to the ethics of powerful AGI.

Artificial General Intelligence at home

Novamente virtual agents can be integrated into both centralized virtual worlds (like Second Life) and distributed virtual worlds (like Croquet). While parts of Novamente need to be on a cluster of powerful servers, a server farm running Novamente could be interfaced with a peer to peer virtual world like Croquet, with the distributed network of machine that runs Croquet also potentially running some of Novamente’s cognition processes.

As Goertzel explains it,

How could our approach to AGI synergize with the Croquet model? Well, we could run our AGI on a centralized server farm and have it connect with a P2P virtual world like Croquet… but that’s not the most interesting way to do things..

The more interesting possibility is that the virtual-agents’ brains could be largely distributed across a P2P network, just as the Croquet virtual world is.

Roughly, about 1/4 or so of our AGI’s thought-processing needs to be on a centralized server farm, just for computer science reasons — but we could massively distribute about 3/4 of it…

So then the AGI brain and the virtual world would both be massively P2P and distributed around the world… in other words, a genuine Global Brain

I co-organized a conference called Global Brain 0, in Brussels, in 2001. We never got it together to have a Global Brain 1 conference — but it seems the global brain may be coming anyway….

Artificial General Intelligence and Artificial Life

A discussion of artificial life came out of my question about whether the bottom up approach of genetic algorithms was used in the Novamente brain.

Novamente AI agents, Ben explained, have genetic-algorithm-like methods operating inside them, but these are combined with other methods in a sophisticated overall design. If I understand Ben’s talk on the Google campus correctly (here), this containment of genetic algorithms is a necessary part of AGI due to the problem of “combinatorial explosion” that results from using genetic algorithms on their own.

Artificial Life experiments were popular in the ’80s but after some initial successes the interesting new results stopped coming. The reasons why aren’t quite clear but Goertzel feels they’re connected to the lack of a fully-featured physics, chemistry and biology in artificial life simulations and virtual worlds. So Goertzel’s view is that, while it would be interesting and fun to use genetic algorithms and other techniques to seed various forms of artificial life in Second Life, this probably wouldn’t lead to any major breakthroughs beyond what was achieved in Artificial Life systems in the 1980’s and 90’s. Current virtual worlds are strong on the social aspect, which is more important for AGI than for Artificial Life. When virtual worlds get more realistic on the physics and chemistry level, they may be more exciting as Artificial Life playgrounds, he feels. But for now he’s most bullish on the potentiality of virtual worlds for harnessing the wisdom of crowds — by letting the citizens of the metaverse fill AGI learning agents’ minds with human knowledge and understanding … just by interacting with them and playing with them.

Interview with David Orban on Vulcano:
Genetic Algorithms and Wisdom of Crowds

In his presentation, “Evolving Useful Objects,” David Orban, Questar, introduced two examples Dr Dobb’s Life 2.0 Summit of how Genetic Algorithms can harness the wisdom of crowds in Second Life. One example was a 3D mind map and the other a button bar.

David’s complete presentation at Life 2.o is available now on Slideshow on Slideshare.net and slidecast as well.

After his presentation I went over to the Vulcano sim with David.

How do you see Second Life using Genetic Algorithms for the evolution of objects?

The measure of success in a community in online worlds is the level of interaction. The advantage we can obtain by measuring the interaction levels does not stop at the mere metrics of an area or community: if we carefully choose the categories of the objects that we measure, and introduce variations in the populations of objects through the use of genetic algorithms, then the value of the objects to the community increases. This co-evolution of objects and communities is the heart of the value of online worlds.

I enter into a deeper analysis of this argument in my talk.

Tell us a little bit about Vulcano!

On Vulcano there are no a priori rules and everybody can build anything. The community just started from one initial indication: “Use common sense…” Since this means different things to different people, and of course there is the 15000 prim limit, there must be a communication among the people who build, in order to avoid chaos. Here we are looking at a real time chart of the prim use of Vulcano.

It is itself a social experiment in evolving social and political structures (an other talk of mine).

And it is going rather well, with interesting discoveries on both individual and group behavior. Cleaners, helpers, etc., we have different roles here, which have not been decided up front, but emerged little by little. All the roles are voluntary, and nobody is denied a role if they ask, as much power as it has (for example a cleaner can return anybody’s objects). Since the power that comes with the role creates a strong sense of responsibility. There is really too much on Vulcano going on, even I don’t know most of it.

How do people become involved in the Vulcano project?

Everybody is welcome to Vulcano, and the individual projects are not approved, or discussed, unless the people behind the project don’t initiate the discussion themselves. But as I said this is almost guaranteed, given the strong community orientation on the island.

Astronomical exhibits, RL political parties, Israeli Palestine peace project etc. A language school teaching Italian to Chinese… who then have to come out and practice! You walk around, and some avi says “Ni hao”! So the projects just come up… one after the other. And there is no voting (I think at least, last time I checked!).

How do people learn the rules of the game so to speak?

People learn by playing, and making mistakes… It is not efficient. Which here is really the point. If it were, people would not need to talk. Since they make mistakes, they are corrected, make friends, learn, and later on become teachers themselves.

The idea is also that of surrounding Vulcano with other communities. One of them to the south is Lipari, dedicated to the Universities. An other one will be for illustrating and studying technological change…

How are Genetic Algorithms integrated into interactions on Vulcano?

Each project individually can decide if it wants to use GA techniques. Not everything needs them, or applying them can be too difficult.

How do they learn or know these techniques?

You see, exactly because humans are part of the GA itself, and the community of Vulcano is a GA, at the end of the game they learn it by doing! Not all the algorithms get explicitly spelt out. I like to keep a little of the mystique, by actually not spelling out all the details all the time.

But isn’t the whole of SL a GA by that measure?

Yes, it is.

And Second Life is a very quick one as well. The evolution of new tools is amazingly quick. So there you go, my approach is proven!

For me the creativity of SL is hard to match today in other worlds. I participate a little, and experiment. But WoW for example or others, while very compelling and quick to absorb you, are not fruitful. And they are selfish in capturing your attention without giving a lot back. That is why I am rooting for Linden Lab to pull it off, and make Second Life interoperable as soon as possible. The explicit separation of Second Life from the grid is a great first step and to also explain the architecture.

What we see today is just one instance of how the grid can manifest itself and in the future we will have other grids with slightly different orientations.

artificial general intelligence, Artificial Intelligence in Virtual Worlds, Artificial Life, Artificial Life in Second Life, China and Virual Worlds, Croquet, Deep Blue, Dr Ben Goertzel, Dr Dobbs Life 2.0 Summit, Electric Sheep Company, Genetic Algorithms, HiPiHi, Hugo de Garis, Metaverse Roadmap, Novamente, Open Source Metaverse, open source Second Life, positivite singularity, Second Life Architecture Group, Second Life Grid 2008, singularity, Singularity Summit 2007, Sophont, sophont cluster, The Artilect War, The Hidden Pattern, The Wikitecture 3.0 Experiment, Virtual Worlds Vulcano

A road-map for imagining a future and the benefits of virtual worlds was laid out at The Serious Virtual Worlds Conference held in Coventry University, England last week.

In the picture above are David Wortley, Director of the Serious Games Institute (holding the user interface for Guitar Hero) and on the right Dr. Timothy W. Foresman pioneer for the global expansion of the Digital Earth vision.

On Day 2 all the speakers presented wearing the Guitar Hero guitar. Perhaps this was a reminder of Babbage Linden’s warning from Day 1 to beware of making false dichotomies between play and work. But with this in mind and wearing the guitar, Dr. Tim Foresman made a serious call to action for a Digital and Virtual Worlds Commons to address the most pressing needs of the 21st Century.

In an interview with Ugotrade Dr. Tim Foresman gave a prediction for Second Life.

Second Life taps into an element called culture. Culture is that which we have evolved to which doesn’t exist in other species which is the creme de la creme for our evolutionary consciousness. Culture is the key here.

This will be the penultimate statement I am going to give you. The Chinese are not ready for us to watch the Olympics in Second Life. And, we are going to watch the Olympics in Second Life. And, it is going to change the dialogue ‘cuz there are going to be a whole lot of Chinese people sharing the details of Chinese social and cultural evolution within the context of that display. And I am predicting that will be the milestone for 2008 for social shifts and the technologies that impact on them.

There are so many Chinese who can make this happen and so many interested people who have this figured out.

Digital Earth, Virtual Worlds and Our Future

Dr. Tim Foresman’s early inspiration was Captain Jacques Cousteau. Foresman brings a quarter century of experience as a scientist, professor, author, entrepreneur, consultant manager and administrator, and world traveler to imagining a future with digital and virtual worlds. Dr Tim Foresman explained to me the trajectory of his career which has always included working inside and outside of institutions and being active in communities on environmental issues:

to give back what Jacques Cousteau gave to me and to provide inspiration and honesty as to what is going on in a positive way.

He explained how his concern with the environment led to entrepreneurial efforts. He also played a pivotal role in Keyhole Corp. which was bought by Google in 2004 and has become Google Earth.

So once I started realizing the power of spatial tools - when the satellites went up in 1972 - I fell in love with that. ‘Cuz I was out in the field doing research the hard way. And all of a sudden I could use these computers to map what I had been walking and communicate to other people these issues - just mind boggling.

So I started my own company right out of grad school because there were no companies behind me in those days so I started a company. And I have always shown that entrepreneurial spirit. But I have also joined various organizations. I have worked for the EPA, worked for NASA and for the UN. When the time is appropriate and you role is to work within an organization, I have felt it was a good thing to do. So I have worked in all kinds of the positions.

But the constant theme is to really take seriously our role here but also to have fun. ‘Cuz if you are not having fun you’re going to be spending the kinds of hours and time that I do.

I asked Dr Foresman how he became involved Keyhole Corp.

Because I led the Digital Earth program at NASA headquarters when it started in 1998. And I was monitoring all the various groups that were doing these kinds of technologies and actively engaging them and coming together and saying we need to harness this technology to deal with a virtual globe that will make a meaningful difference for the community at large - so there will be free access and we can all share information that is easily accessible and understandable. Because you are looking at the earth you are looking at your neighborhood, it makes sense.

So Keyhole was four young programmers in San Mateo. And, in 2001, I gave them there first contract when I was the chief scientist of the United Nations environment program.

We were able to demonstrate how this would profoundly change the decision making process with which the policy makers are involved with at the UN - 200 nations come together and make decisions about fisheries and forestry. They don’t have the information. This was going to be a different approach. So Keyhole was a wonderful, wonderful way of demonstrating this with our data on that display mechanism.

So Keyhole really only provided the framework, we put the information around it the satellite data etc. Well then Google bought them and now they are Google Earth. They are one of the many that are successful. There is also NASA World Wind which is open source and very good, powerful.

Imagining a Future

I snapped this slide during Dr Foresman’s presentation. It very clearly shows that how we represent data makes a meaningful difference. All the water in the world is shown on the same scale as earth on the left, and all the air in the atmosphere on the right. This puts a whole new perspective on the myth of great expanses of ocean and atmosphere.

The ITC Framework for the Operating System for Planet Earth

This slide is also from Dr. Foresman’s presentation. People working in disciplinary silos will be able to engage in collective environmental, economic and social decision making through a Digital Earth vision. But just as important as the unification of science based knowledge is the active, distributed community enabled by free access to the basic infrastructure.

I asked Dr. Tim Foresman about the role of open source and open standards in creating an operating system for planet earth.

We have to be vigorous and vigilant in all things and not assume that the approach right now is sustainable. I think that is very important. We have to actively engage and ensure that the parts of it we need for public dialogue and good decision making are done in open systems and international protocols for data interoperability - ISO standards - all the good standards for interoperability that we use. We need to be vigorously monitoring that. That is very important.

And are there any threats to that you see on the horizon re this? I asked.

When I see different systems offered for pricing and I realize that there is no policy by Google to keep this stuff free. There is nothing written down. This is just based on their good will at the moment. And corporations and goodwill are two different things. Corporations have to answer to their stockholders. And if they make a corporate decision they could end up saying well we are no longer offering it for free. But the competition will probably keep it out there for free….ArcGIS Explorer, Geomatrix, NASA World Wind.

Google is going to recognize that they have got their spot in the sun now. But it is not guaranteed and if they don’t behave they will be underwritten.

I have posted recently on the Second Earth project by NOAA that merges Second Life and Google Earth. I asked Dr. Foresman if he was aware of the policy of Linden Lab to fully open source Second Life and if he had had discussions with Linden Lab.

Yes I have talked with various members of Philip Rosedale’s team. They came out to Berkeley to our 5th International Digital Earth Conference. And the open source issue was definitely a strong suit. I think Philip would have to move his offices out of San Francisco if he went proprietary. Because that is open source Mecca. It has become a philosophy.

Yes it seems to me they are moving as fast as they can on the full open sourcing of Second Life. I added.

What we find out is that if you are a purist open source really isn’t 100% open. You are always going to find that it is difficult to find code at certain levels. But what it is - is the best that we can do and that is the approach. And by allowing the best that we can do then we can balance that with proprietary systems, interchange standards and that becomes a very effective playground. And that is what we want.

Active distributed community and the networked intelligence of humankind.

Dr. Tim Foresman gave a brilliant and commanding demonstration of why and how a Digital and Virtual Word commons will provide the operating system for planet earth and its inhabitants and fulfill the words of Buckminster Fuller.

Currently Dr Foresman is working with many international institutions and agencies promoting availability of and enhancing access to the scientific information needed by decision makers as well as the planet’s citizens for as sustainable future.

From 2000 to 2003 he served as the director of the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Division of Early Warning and Assessment from the Headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya and then as UNEP’s executive science advisor. He gave Keyhole (now Google Earth) their first contract at this time. And in 2001 they were streaming information from UN servers. They zoomed in on Africa and used this system to protect resources and to communicate issues.

Dr Forseman stressed that operating system earth will remain inoperable without us! The networked intelligence of humankind depends on all of us. We need to be involved in designing our future. And Dr. Foresman doesn’t just talk brilliantly, he walks the walk. He reaches out to all including children with the message of concern for the environment. First Editions of his new children’s book “The Last Little Polar bear” are available from Blueline Publishing (see thelastlittlepolarbear.org).

At the end of the presentation I asked Dr. Foresman if connectivity issues presented special problems in Africa. I explained that I have talked to many different people about the potential of Second Life in Africa. But broadband connectivity issues often come up as an obstacle to the idea that Africa should be at the forefront of the paradigm shift in global communications exemplified by the collaborative, immersive 3D experience of Second Life.

Dr. Foresman said that we should be careful of setting up false assumptions. He has lived and traveled in Africa and he explained:

The roads are well paved enough almost every where I have been in the world to where that is not the problem now. I worked in the mid-nineties on a project reducing poverty with women. I sat and listened for two years to how they were using technology. And when I listened from that perspective, I found they are using whatever is available. So it is a continuum.

That was why I was laughing yesterday when I talked to Maggi [Prof. Maggi Savin-Baden presented the Second Life launch of Coventry University Island and experienced lag as many Second Life avatars and "real" life conference goers sucked up the bandwidth]. That is how I experience Second Life because I am on the end of a Satellite dish. You get spoiled here with your bandwidth.

It is a matter of saying no we’ll use the tools and we will use them effectively. But we won’t use them like you see in some of the images in New York City.

The Serious Games Institute - Creating Buildings that are Sexy and Smart

The picture above is of Prof. Lizbeth Goodman (right) and Babak Davarpanah Varnosefadarani from the SMARTlab Digital Media Institute being given a tour of the Serious Games Institute “smart” building by David Wortley.

David Wortley talked to me about the SGI “Smart building” project. David “aims to make the SGI a thought leader and focal point for games based learning simulation and immersive 3D environments.” He plans to take the concept of “smart buildings” to the next level. Buildings will not only be smart and helpful to people and the environment. They will be sexy - intelligent, entertaining, conversationalists that are fun to be around.

When I talk about “smart” buildings - there is a lot of debate about what people consider “smart” buildings - I think most people consider “smart” buildings as buildings with environmental controls built into them, e.g., the light switching off when someone goes out of the room, or the heating going down when no-one is there, being able to recognize where people are and so on and keep the costs of the building down to the minimum.

I go much further to say I think smart buildings of the future are going to be about how the building represents your organization and adds real value to its stakeholders. So, instead of saying let’s design buildings that keep our overheads down to a minimum, I say let’s design buildings that use technology to increase our income and the effectiveness of our operation.

So if you are a local council you want to make the building as approachable and friendly as possible and suitable for the stakeholders who go into the building. That is why we are trying to embed technology that will allow us to do some really sexy things that will say what we want to say about Serious Games and the companies that are based there.

In this way we will bring business into these companies, helping to develop a reputation for the university, and the West Midlands region. That is why we have invested in digital signage and interactive type displays, and are implementing location tracking so that when people move through the building you can identify where they are and use that in clever ways to deliver content to them based on where they are in the building.

We are also thinking that when someone goes into a building with a PDA or mobile device the location tracking detects that person and creates an avatar in the virtual version of that building. So as you move about through the building the avatar moves about in Second Life and can interact with people in the virtual world as well as the physical world.

The photo on the left is of avatars listening to Serious Virtual Worlds 07 in Second Life. On the right, is a picture I took at the Smart building demonstration, tour and cocktail reception. Roo Reynolds, IBM, (the tall guy with his back to us) manages to keep one eye on the video stream from Second Life and an ear to the conversation in First Life.

David Wortley noted that at the cocktail party some of the ways the “smart” building can orchestrate interactions between first and second life were demonstrated.

In both the “real” and virtual versions of the Serious Games Institute there is a projector streaming video for the people gathered in both worlds. In the virtual reception there was video being shown from the “real” reception:

The thing that fascinated me was the fact that when we got the projector set up and logged on to Second Life where my avatar appeared there was nobody in virtual reception with me. We set the video streaming going and over a period of a few minutes more and more avatars began to appear in the virtual reception sitting down to watch people enjoy the real reception.

David noted that while this was a simple example it was an indication of how compelling interactions between virtual and “real” worlds can be.

Artists are playing a key role imagining a future and the benefits of virtual worlds

I have frequently posted on the vital role that artists, musicians, architects and performers are playing in creating the experience of Second Life. David also noted

One of the things that has come over extremely well in this conference, and is personified by people like Prof. Lizbeth Goodman (who is a dancer and performing artist by profession - so her background isn’t in technology) is that highly creative and passionate people have realized the potential of technology and performing arts to deliver social benefit to people in need - disadvantaged women, disabled people etc.

Hope for the future comes from grass roots people who are doing really clever things with technology

There is a lot of hope for the future for the way that technology can shape our sustainable development and that hope comes from grass roots people who are doing really clever things with technology that technologists don’t imagine.

Two of the stellar presenters that I met at the conference were the awesome Simon Stevens, (a.k.a Simon Walsh in Second Life) who presented “Wheelies - Second Life and disability: a review of the issues,” and Prof. Lizbeth Goodman, “Virtual World Community Applications.” I will meet both in Second Life to continue our conversation

Like Roo Reynolds (see his blog), I was nearly moved to tears (actually I did have to grab a tissue) by Lizbeth’s work enabling severely disabled children to play games and explore and create in beautiful custom-built worlds. And how severely disabled adults with control of only eye movement and a single neck muscle can gain the ability to create music.

The picture above is from the SMARTlab Flickr stream that has many more pictures of their great work. As part of their project “InterFACES: the human face of assistive technologies” SMARTlab has been testing the effectiveness of available tools for using eye movement as a control mechanism for communications by people with little or no other voluntary muscle movement. This picture is of collaborator James Brosnan, the ‘alpha user’ of the system.

Fireworks on Coventry Island

I was fortunate enough to be there for the whole of this superlative event. But if you weren’t the video archive is being made available on Wednesday from http://seriousgames.org.uk/ Don’t miss this ground breaking event! You will also find notes on all the presentations for Day 1 and Day 2 posted on Roo Reynolds - What’s Next? and see Eightbar. And, as Roo notes, there were a bunch of people conference taking photos. Andy Powell grabbed some great screenshots (e.g., picture above) of the Second Life portion of the event when Coventry University cut the ribbon on their Second Life island.

Here are four of the presenters preparing their digital cameras and PDAs for the Flickr and Twitter fray.

From left to right: Roo Reynolds, IBM, who presented on “Virtual Worlds for Corporate Collaboration” and engaged in some serious mo blogging repartee on Twitter with Ren Reynolds (a.k.a RenZephyr) from Terranova throughout the conference. I was sitting right behind them both most of the time. I kept in touch with their conference commentary and humorous backchat through Twitter. It added a lot to the experience of the event much the way IM channels enhance conference experiences in Second Life.

Next right is Christian Renaud from Cisco Systems who gave the keynote “Getting Serious About Virtual Worlds.” Christian is pioneering the creative use of the special qualities of networked virtual environments - the power of these electronically mediated social environments to enhance communication. “It won’t be face-to-face, but it can be richer.”

To Christian’s right is Dave Taylor (a.k.a Davee Commerce in Second Life), National Physics Laboratory, who presented on his innovative Second Health project and the use of Virtual Worlds for informal education and knowledge transfer (see Ugotrade post here).

To Dave’s right is Fabrizio Cardinali, CEO Giunti Labs, chair European Learning Industries, “Innovating learning in a flat, virtual world.”

And although he wasn’t there in person Rik Riel showed up on a slide in Dr. Timothy Foresman’s presentation!

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Second Life will be “bigger than the web” and we’re “moving away from being a lab and into an operating system.” These bold statements by Philip Rosedale, in his keynote address at SLCC, inspired my questions in the interview Philip very graciously gave for Ugotrade that morning. Philip is wearing the “Missing Image” T-shirt, created by Millions of Us, that he opened his jacket to reveal during his speech.

The interview is divided in two parts. Part one looks at the possibilities for Second Life in Africa. Part two looks at how Linden Lab “can stop being a lab.”

You can read a full transcript of Philip’s keynote here.

Philip was very present at SLCC. He visited panels, discussed, debated, and answered pressing questions from residents and the press about all aspects of Second life. A stream of admirers seemed to follow him wherever he went asking for autographs, and for pictures of themselves standing next to the man who founded the virtual world that has come to mean so much to them.

But, these quotes, “bigger than the web,” and going from “a lab into an operating system,” certainly got the conversation going.

This is bigger than the Web. That’s a bold statement. How can I defend the statement that what we’re all working on is going to be bigger than the Web.

The essence of Philip’s argument, it seemed to me, hinged around two points. One, that Second Life allows a new form of global communication between cultures that is not limited, like the old Web to predominantly hyper-linked text that you need to be very literate to read and that you visit alone without any way of sharing your experience with others there at the same time.
For example:

[In Second Life] you get to explore it [Tokyo] using a geography and topology that you grew up with. Anyone on the Web, no matter how illiterate, understands it. Want to know more? Walk forward. And the best part, that you don’t see in this picture [screen of Tokyo on Second Life], is there will be other people there.

And secondly, the opportunity Second Life gives people to join a global virtual economy free of “fees and tariffs and taxes.”

I really believe the one thread that I see a lot of lately is that the rapid growth outside the US is confirming a lot of things. The fact that SL is so flat and globalizing is going to be a huge change agent. Globalization involves fees and tariffs and taxes. None of that is going on here. That’s going to be part of the pressure that’s going to drive an enormous amount of interest.

In response to a question by Prokofy Neva who asked about Second Life’s influences on First Life (see transcript), Philip elaborated on the power of Second life’s small but thriving economy (with the caveat, “That’s a big enough question that I obviously can’t say perfectly that I know.”)

shrinking of the communication sphere is one of our biggest influences. And then the other is the entrepreneurial early phase. SL is still very early and small. The thing that makes it grow is the success of individuals in two ways. Being able to find and connect to each other and those individuals who are able to work together. There are about 1000 people who make $1000 or more each month. That’s critical mass. That’s the real-life impact we’re having today. We’re creating jobs and opportunities at a small scale, but at a scale that’s large enough to be irreversible.

After the keynote, I was so excited by the implications of Philip’s projections for the future of Second Life that before I turned on my recorder there were about ten minutes of informal discussion on how Second Life could help the developing world, and Africa in particular. What follows is a transcription of the recorded interview with some editing of my rambling questions!

The unrecorded portion of the interview was a mini brainstorming session on broadband connectivity in Africa, and how Second Life could be made available to Africans. Africans have shown the world how mobile phone technologies can be used for virtual banking and to create new economic opportunities in areas with no banking infrastructure.

“Well over 80% in Egypt and South Africa alone, according to a report by the UN’s Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad)” rely on mobile phones to run their small businesses (BBC News).

Philip talked with me about the role of Second Life in positive global development at VW2007. And, if Africans had access to the global virtual economy of Second Life and its rich immersive forms of collaboration and communication, all our first lives and second lives might become immeasurably richer.

Africa is often called the “missing link” because until now it has been left out of the global broadband revolution. But, there are many new initiatives to get Africa connected, and to find ways to deliver cheaper international bandwidth.

Well over half of the countries on the continent now have some kind of broadband offer delivered through DSL, wireless or satellite.

If you are not tuned into connectivity issues in Africa yet, the best source for information on African connectivity, that I know, is the Balancing Act News network. For up to date information on the state of the African internet in various markets Balancing Act has (pay for) publications they make available at special rates for students and universities. Also, there is a download zone for longer research publications. If you go into these reports and the data provided you will see, not only is there are some very interesting Data Bandwidth forecasts for (2006 - 2011), but also of particular interest, may be, the paper, “African Broadband, Triple Play and Converged Markets.”

Well enough pre-amble here is my interview:

INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP ROSEDALE

Part One (my questions in bold type):

How could Second Life bring the benefits of a virtual economy to Africa?

It seems that if there were a few computers, even not individual computers but shareable cafe style computers. And then there was also a mechanism where you could redeem Linden dollars for something - you were talking about phone minutes, or a local currency. If you had that minimal point of infrastructure broadband access and an individual, I suppose to co-ordinate that bank transfer mechanism - my understanding is no-one can use Pay Pal to withdraw money from banks in Africa today, so you would need a person that could pay you in minutes or in local currency. But I think, if those two things were done, and you built a cluster of machines in an area there you might actually be able to see people log in, create accounts, and create jobs for themselves.

Yes, in Africa people use mobile phones to send money to each other in areas were there are no banks or ATMs for miles. And local entrepreneurs set up kiosks where people can redeem their minutes for currency…

Well we could probably make it possible even for people to trade Linden dollars. It would be relatively easy to trade Linden dollars for phone minutes directly. I mean if there is a phone company running a back bone there where that is quite common, it would probably to fairly simple to make it possible for somebody to take Linden dollars even on our site and say redeem them as phone minutes on the exchange. That would be something that we could potentially do, if there was a way to pay for phone minutes in the US in dollars and essentially get minutes on the phones there. We could allow someone to go to our exchange and put Linden dollars up for sale, get dollars back and have them basically put in their phone as minutes.

Given the current high rates for broadband in many parts of Africa, do you think it would be possible to organize and fund the introduction of Second Life in a community there, at least a proof of concept, even before these hoped for changes in broadband costs and connectivity have occurred?

I think the thing that I am a little skeptical about in that is, if you fund a program like that and then you come back and you say, “Wow we can give jobs to people in Africa if only broadband didn’t cost anything,” I would be rather frustrated by that because then you can’t just snap your fingers, nobody is just going to relent and say broadband is free in Africa now. I guess an interesting problem in all this is, if cheap broadband is absolutely necessary, I think you need the cheap broadband first. You can’t really use Second Life to argue that people should have cheap broadband somewhere, you need to provide it.

The thing to demonstrate is a wholly entrepreneurial model. Where I guess you could charitably help the world develop are those places where you can show an operational model that soup to nuts makes money for someone. I mean if someone could go into Africa somewhere and make money by allowing people in Africa to have the jobs using something like Second Life then you’ve got it. So the trick is how to finagle that. It seems that the connectivity is the key problem there.

Part 2:

At this point in the interview, I took sometime explain to Philip how interested and excited I am about the future role of Second Life in reducing the world’s carbon footprint through large scale energy monitoring, facility management, network control centers and other projects that link Second and First life in sensor/actuator networks for the mutual benefit of both.

I have blogged a lot about the potential of such real/second life integrations, so I launched into a rather long preamble that I won’t transcribe here, as there I have many posts on this topic. But, Philip quickly teased out the main question hidden in my long intro about such projects that must have secure and powerful communications between Second and Real Life!

“You mean how quickly are we going to open things up?” he asked.

Yes, I said. And, is it all going to happen at once or are there steps that can happen first, like will people be able to back up their own assets soon?

Well I think backing up assets is something that will be very soon. We are working on it right now, so that you can do much better off line back up of assets. But, that only covers one piece of it. You still have a state, how much money you have, the various flags and global markers that are on things are not things you can back up and restore. But I am not sure what else you have in mind……

Well I know Second Life can be incredibly useful not only for facility management and energy monitoring but for city and an environmental planning. And for these applications you need to be able to import large scale architectural models, for example?

With the open source code you will basically be able to do any kind of object importing and exporting you want. And the open source that is available on the site today will allow you to do multiple imports of CADs.

But, I think I have heard from architects that using the current tools to do this is a very long and complicated procedure?

I think in the next couple of quarters we will probably have rich interchange formats for objects - we like that. But I can’t tell you anything too specific about it right now.

When will it be possible to own islands on our own computer and connect to the main grid asset server?

That is the nearest term thing that we are going to try to do with respect to opening up the back end of the system. So that what we want to do is to allow people to, even before we are able to open source all the technology, we will probably find ways to have people operating servers outside of our building. We probably will not, until we reach the full open source point, have enough security in place to trust un-trusted individuals to run servers on the grid. But initially what we can do is we can establish a relationship with larger companies of operators that we would be able to trust with everyone’s assets in second Life.

Yes, its a good interim thing…

Yes, it’s a great interim thing! What I would like to do is have servers operate internationally as soon as possible so that people in Australia, for example, put their land on servers that are hosted in Australia. So that is something that we are working very hard on right now.

So how will Linden Labs make money after the opening sourcing of everything?

It is easy for us to make money this is just one of those things. If there are network effects, which push everyone to being in one single world, we can charge fees where appropriate for registering or connecting to that world. So even if we don’t host a server for example, we can still charge you whatever we like for attaching your server to the grid. We control the registry, we control DNS if you want to be to the North East of somebody else’s island only we can put you there, even if it is your computer, even if you are the one hosting it.

So that is a fine model. It is similar to DNS. It is one in which we basically we provide a global function to people, naming and the allocation of spaces, and charge a fee for it. And, that will actually look relatively similar to the business today. So we should be able to let people run their own servers, charge them a fee for attaching those servers to the grid, run some of our own servers that we collect if you will the whole fee for and it all works fine.

But if you open all the protocols then other people can do that?

No, because they won’t be able to get a hold of you. There is only one world that you have the name that you have in Second Life.

So they will have to set up competing worlds, if they don’t link to Second Life, closed of to your grid and then who would want to be there because no-one else would be there?

There is a powerful network effect behavior there. New York will always be the largest city in the continental United States. It has been that way for 200 years. So if you are the largest virtual city, you will always remain the largest virtual city. And, we are. So that means we can open up everything we are doing without the kind of risk that you might normally see.

So are you going to open up everything all the protocols?

Yes, everything.

So some people will just go off and do their own thing?

There is a good place for lots of little or purposeful applications to be built. But the internet was completely open protocols to begin with. I notice it is not fragmented. There is only one internet. Big surprise [said with irony!].

Thanks so much Philip, perhaps you could say it one more time about going completely open source!

Yes, open, open!

*********

 

Doing what they love & getting paid for it on Motarati Island.

The picture below shows Toby Rainbow and Suku Ming from Ponitiac’s Motarati Island in Second Life, and the USA in First Life. I met them while they were standing patiently in the long line of residents waiting to speak to Philip after his keynote at SLCC. They built a stock car racing track that caught the attention of Pontiac. Now it is part of Motarati Island. And, you can find them there everyday doing what they love, and getting paid for it!

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The Philips Design Second Life Team have put out what must be one of the coolest invitations on the planet. They are asking Second Lifer’s to share in designing the future.

The Co-creation Experience is intended to be a journey over time that we hope to take together with the ‘Philips Design Friends Group’. The only qualities you need are to be open, creative and collaborative.

 

The third discussion on the co-creation experience (for more information on earlier discussions see designphilips.com and my earlier post on Philanthropy By Design) will be held on Friday the 24th, 12.00 PM -2.00 PM PDT, and Tuesday the 28th 11.00 AM - 1.00PM PDT (Second Life time) on Philips Design Co-creation experience on Virtual Holland 3. I will be on a plane to Chicago SLCC on Friday at this time. Hope to see y’all there! But, I can’t wait for Tuesday which will be a repeat of the Friday session.
The topic will be the Philips Design Probe program - an in-house far-future research program that considers what lifestyles might be like in 2020. The Philips Design Probe program

was set up to identify long term systemic shifts and to anticipate changes in future lifestyles, based on new and emerging technology, socio cultural trends and the effect of political, economic and environmental influences.

In one of those Second Life “serendipity” experiences that I mentioned in my previous post, yesterday, I bumped into Dolf Rhino (picture below). Dolf is a Philips Design Senior Director responsible for business development and operational management in the area of Design for Virtual Worlds. And, soon we were joined by three key members of the Philips Design team. Yel Oh, a Philips Design innovation director with a background in interaction and experience design, and Wendy Mahana and innovation consultant.

Yel Oh explained that the Probes work has been split into a number of projects that are theme based. The plan is to hold a series of meetings in Second Life in the coming months to share this work, some of which is not yet public.

The series will start this week by introducing and discussing more generally some of the Probes themes which are: 1) The future of self expression; 2) The future of clothing - Philips have quite some history in wearable tech (the picture at the beginning of this post is from the Design Probe Program -Skin) ; and, 3) The future of packaging. There are a couple of others but Yel Oh said they are not yet public ….. “hope to bring them to SL once they are public in RL (simultaneously),” she added. Each Probe project will then be individually presented and discussed in future meetings.

Embedded sensor/actuator networks merging virtual and real environments can increase the emotional band-width of both.

I asked Yel Oh how they proposed to bring these Probe works into Second Life as part of a co-creation experience. I am particularly interested in how this project, using sensor technologies, might use the special qualities of Second Life not just to facilitate co-creation of real world products, but also to help virtual and real environments merge into each other more deeply.

The immersive 3D experience, and Second Life’s electronically mediated environment that is already rich with meta data, is a very interesting environment to experiment with the possibilities of interaction been real and virtual sensor/actuation networks. Virtual worlds have a big advantage over the real world in terms of working with sensor data as the have built in wireless, RFID, meta data and geolocation, so it makes sense for this to be a place for proto-typing sensor/actuator enhanced communication.

Philips Design’s project of creating expressive wearables in Real Life seems an ideal opportunity to explore new ways to enhance emotional expression in virtual environments and intensify the expressive interaction between real and Second Life.

And, as Yel Oh, pointed out these concepts are about self-expression and emotion very close to the heart of Second Life. I immediately fell in love with the idea of garments In Second Life reflecting emotional expression recorded from biometric sensors in Real Life. And, I asked Yel Oh how these could become a co-creation project in Second Life soon, like now!

To learn more about how Philips Real Life clothing lights up to express the emotions of the wearer go here. And, for more pictures from the Philips Real Life “Skin” project see here. And, for a brief but cool video here.

The Philips Design Co-Creation Experience in Second Life

Dolf Rhino explained: “One of the elements we are looking to understand is how input and feedback on prototypes is valuable in SL and RL. In general we want to look at how the feedback on topics might be relevant when translated to the RL.”

I asked how they planned to start the co-creation process in SL. Yel Oh replied:

well what I would really like to do (but no promises here) is to build some of the most relevant concepts here in SL, especially ones with emotional feedback. This could be triggered by behaviour or communication from within Second Life, although connecting to real life sensors would be even more interesting. Then give them to selected members from our group to try out for a period of time here in-world. After finding out about the initial experiences it would be great to offer full permission creations. And then see how the new owners adapt and change the original concept.

Also I asked whether there were any plans to experiment with the Second Life Client to enhance collaboration and co-creation. Dolf said yes they were doing some experiments with adapting the client. But, it was too early to report about the results. It will be very interesting to hear more on this!

“Sensible Organization: Inspired Social Sensor Technologies”

Using social sensor technologies to merge virtual and real environments, and to enhance the already rich immersive collaborative environment of Second Life and other virtual worlds is, for me, one of the most exciting frontiers at this stage of the virtual adventure. There are some very interesting projects coming out of MIT that show the huge potential of sensor/actuator network technologies integrated with virtual environments.

For example, “Sensible Organization: Inspired Social Sensor Technologies,” is looking at “how we can combine data pertaining to social, physical, or real information with virtual information to improve organizational effectiveness.”

Also, look out for some innovation to be coming from Cisco in this regard! I will be keeping an eye on Christian Renaud’s blog and the new Cisco Virtual Worlds blog as Christian has some very interesting ideas and a lot of experience in this area. The post on Cisco Virtual Worlds today is on, “Making ‘Over the Network” better than ‘Over the desk.”

When you have an ‘over the wire’ or ‘over the network’ interaction, you use fewer senses. Lets summarize the pros and cons for now, and some possible technology opportunities to address the shortcomings….

I ran into Christian Ciscosystems and Coco Linden on the Cisco sim. Christian said he would have dressed for the occasion if he had known someone would be taking pictures. Coco, a relatively new Linden, works on the client. Coco said, “we have lots of new devs all getting up to speed and fixing bugs so things should get noticeably stabler.” Coco has added the anti-spam controls for notecards, textures, and landmarks. Thanks Coco!

And, an important project to watch is EOLUS One. Eolus has some very interesting projects in the pipeline using sensor techonologies to link Second Life and Real Life in ways that enhance both.

MIT’s “Responsive Environments”

MIT’s awesome Responsive Environments Group is producing more ground breaking “Things That Think” than I can begin to enumerate in this post. And, their Dual Reality Lab demonstrates “Virtual and real worlds that reflect, influence, and merge into each other by means of deeply embedded sensor/actuator networks.”

Dual reality” is the concept of maintaining two worlds, one virtual and one real, that reflect, influence, and merge into each other by means of deeply embedded sensor/actuator networks. Both the real and virtual components of a dual reality are complete unto themselves, but are enriched by their mutual interaction. The dual reality Media Lab is an example of such a dual reality, as enabled the Plug sensor/actuator network that links our actual lab space to a virtual lab space in the Second Life online virtual world.

You don’t have to be from MIT to join in the Philips co-creation experience.

“The only qualities you need are to be open, creative and collaborative.” So come and join in the discussion on Friday Aug 24th or Tuesday Aug 28th. And, you can pick up some useful virtual goods for your space in Second Life while you are there.

I have already grabbed, Photoframe, Perfect Draft, Senseo Coffee Maker and Ambilight Slide show for my cube on arcspace. (You need a space on SL where you have rights to build to use these great virtual products.) The slide show and the photoframe will soon be joining the termite mound with the Ugotrade blog link, and the coffee cup (designed by my friend Aleister Kronos - he has a cube next to mine) in my arcspace very soon. But hey, I actually dipped my toes in the the prim building world by assembling the parts. I am looking for some termites now! And, I hear Aleister found some.

I can see why people get hooked on building in Second Life. It is really rewarding to assemble an experience to share with friends in just minutes. Here I am sharing a caffeinated hot tub with Robbie Kiama of Metamart who was introducing to me his new meta Travel HUD (heads up display) that you wear in Second Life. Check it out. It is very easy to put your favorite places and your own sim (with a picture) into the lists so others can find them, rate them, and send your hot spots to the top of this “digg” for Second Life!

You can find out more at Metamart And, if you haven’t yet tried metaHUD yet – you can get a FREE copy here

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