UgoTrade

Today, I had what felt to me like a ground breaking meeting with Alanagh Recreant on Second Life (a.k.a. Dorette Steenkamp in Real Life). Dorette Steenkamp is Executive Director of Uthango Social Investments, Cape Town, South Africa. Uthango is the first African-based NGO with a presence in Second Life.

You can visit Uthango’s newly established offices on Second Life here! SLurl: Uthango in Second Life.

Ginsu Linden, Linden Lab, told me earlier this month there was interest from Africa in the Linden Lab Global Provider Program. So, I was very excited to meet Alanagh in person, or rather in the pixels, and hear that an initiative to create an access portal and community for Africans on Second Life was actually underway.

“Not exclusively [for Africans] but with the exclusive aim to promote access to virtual reality.”

Uthango have just begun establishing their presence in Second Life. Their current offices are a first base from which to address the digital divide. But, please watch for more news about Uthango projects on Second Life to be announced shortly!

Uthango is an investment company specializing in finding and creating sustainable programs - connecting corporate/government with communities through collecting local intelligence and translating it to the business sector. But, “we only work at the invitation of communities. We are a relationship broker and bridge-builder between diverse interest groups to create mutual benefit.”

Uthango is serious about access for all. They will be working in parallel at establishing internet hubs in communities. And, they are seeking partnerships with mobile telecoms on mobile applications for Virtual Africa, and to develop links between mobile space and Second Life.,

They are putting together an Uthango Global Advisory Board that will be an innovation team both socially and commercially - to put out and receive ideas concerning producing a viable Virtual Africa Platform.

It is so exciting to see the first steps towards realizing a vision for a Virtual Africa being taken by Uthango. This group is deeply experienced at working on the ground with rural communities on sustainable development and poverty relief. And, they are expert at creating commercial partnerships with social value.

Uthango won the Centennial Award from Rotary International for Sustainable Projects in Communities in 2005, for District 9350, and The National Impumelelo Innovations Awards in the same year for Innovation in Private/Public Projects for their micro-enterprise project affecting a community of 45000.

I am especially impressed with how Alanagh, while very committed to expanding the possibilities for mobile technologies in sustainable development, is equally committed to the idea that Africans should not be excluded from high quality internet connectivity, access, and the potential that Second Life, as an immersive virtual world, has for Africa.

These are exciting times for African innovation!

Tags: Second Life | Virtual Africa | Africa on Second Life | Uthango Social Investments | Web 3.D | Linden Lab | Linden Lab Global Provider Program | Sustainable Development | Digital Divides | Poverty Relief | African Innovation | Africa Sustainable Development | Ginsu Linden | Alanagh Recreant | Web 2.0 | Dorette Steenkamp | mobile phones in Africa | mobile phones and sustainable development | mobile space and Virtual Worlds | Mobile Phones and Second Life | Metaverse | Virtual Reality | Virtual Worlds | World 2.o | virtual realities |

Metaverse Meetup at Jerry’s Loft - A Generation Y Think Tank

Jerry Paffendorf’s loft is a true Generation Y think tank, tingling with orgone energy radiating from a new cosmos of connectivity, social networking and mobility, where immersive virtual worlds are a natural habitat.

Generation Y - 20 to 35 years old [a.k.a the 3pointD generation], are living demonstrations of the potentiality of digital and electronic media in supporting/shaping our social environment (Wonderlust).

Current metazens of JLoft include Metaverse Architect Christian Westbrook a.k.a Christian Prior, rising Machinima star Pierce Portocarrero, who has recently come to town to work on his upcoming machinima sitcom for Virtual NBC, and the legendary Glitchy - a contributor to 3pointD who “stands astride a number of virtual worlds.” Mark Wallace notes, Glitchy is “a card-carrying member of the 3pointD generation.”

This was the setting for a Metaverse Meetup, last Thursday, on the topic of Global Online Cities: Trevor F. Smith and Ogoglio. The meetup was packed with metarati listening, questioning, and giving Trevor F. Smith feedback on his new metaverse technology, Ogoglio (click here to listen to the whole talk).

Ogoglio is inspired by car free city design - city planning based on human scale space. Ogoglio takes ideas of city planning online to create virtual cities by dropping 3D spaces into the web where they can connect using existing patterns of web development.

Satchmo Prototype a.k.a. Chris Carella - the Creative Director, Electric Sheep Company, and Becky Carella, Software Developer at The Electric Sheep Company, Hiro Pendragon a.k.a. Ron Blechner, CTO of Infinite Vision Media, and Murat Aktihanoglu of Holoscape, creator of Unype - the multiuser Google Earth experience, and Donald Schwartz, Image Link Productions, and many other movers and shakers of the metaverse listened and asked important questions about Ogoglio.

While this post is going to focus on this real life Metaverse Meetup in Jerry’s loft, I would like to point out that thanks to the miracle of Second Life you don’t have to live in the New York area to participate in a full on Geek Meet. Nick Wilson has organized The Metaversed Geek Meet:

a weekly networking event where we discuss the weeks business and technology news, make new friends swap blog and twitter urls and more. Join us today at 11am SLT/PST at the this landmark!

Dreaming Up A New Social/Virtual Environment - First Some Back Story to A Metaverse Meetup

The ideas of Tufte - dubbed the Leonardo Da Vinci of data - are resonating with the 3D generation. Tufte is famous for his analysis of the shortcomings of Power Point that “disrupts and trivializes,” and whose poverty of information he points out has not only turned business meetings into arenas of excruciating boredom, but contributed to calamities like the Columbia Shuttle disaster in 2003.

As new ideas of virtualizing reality are integrated into immersive worlds and reworked in 2.o thinking, mirror worlds, or whatever you want to call them, are going to become rocking places to hang out in.

To get a glimpse of some of the ways the high end technology is developing see Photosynth. Photosynth combines the Seadragon technology which obliterates limitations of screen resolution with 3D photo tourism, allowing people to create immersive 3D worlds from hundreds of thousands of different photos and form interconnected user generated environments.

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Mirror Worlds on Second Life

Epredator (a.k.a Ian Hughes) and Yossarian Seattle a.k.a Rob Smart, both of IBM and Eightbar, gave Destroy TV a guided tour of Hursley. “The Unofficial Tourists’ Guide to Second Life,” says “the IBM island Hursley, is being kept strictly under wraps.” But, thanks to Epredator, Yossarian and Destroy TV, a tour of this inner sanctum of innovation - invention and insight, IBM’s incubator for pervasive computing and the meaningful virtualization of reality and more, on Second Life, is documented and searchable online in Destroy TV’s Flickr stream. Destroy TV has created the most searchable archive of Second Life to date.

“Innovation has to be part of your life.” (Andy Stanford-Clark)

The Real Life house pictured above is IBM Master Inventor Andy Stanford-Clark’s Real Life farm, and Llama trekking business on the Isle of Wight, UK. On the right is the virtualization this house which is part of a Second Life Real Life Home Automation project. The pictures in the bottom row shows Stanford-Clark’s Real Life Llamas on the left and their virtual counterparts on Second Life on the right. Real and Virtual Llamas are linked through GPS and MQ telemetry so that Andy S-C can be a good shepherd when away from his farm (see this IBM podcast).

Pervasive and Mobile Computing and Virtualizing Reality: Why High End Business Executives Care

“because it’s what enables an event-driven, on-demand business.”

While his Llama mapping project began because Andy S-C needed to protect his trekking lamas from theft and misadventure, it evolved into a solution to a customer demand for “Pay As You Drive” insurance for Norwich Union.

If you want a detailed explanation of how IBM inventors are using Second Life and IBM’s MQtt messaging to virtualize and make meaningful data from Real Life on Second Life there are many relevant posts on Eightbar. Also see my earlier post on C.J. Chowderhead’s virtual lab.

Virtualized Worlds Are Key To Sustainable Development

Also, described in the IBM podcast and virtualized in Second Life (and visited by Destroy) is the bridge below where in Real Life Andy Stanford-Clark invented a flood monitoring system that has wide applications not only to the insurance industry for better flood prediction, but for monitoring the effects of global warming.

If you have read Ugotrade before you will know that I try to explore the possibilities of virtual realities and 2.0 thinking, pervasive and mobile computing in positive global development. The work of virtualizing reality has incredible significance for a sustainable future.

From an uber visionary perspective, this is a future where “green” means, perhaps, eliminating the need to build anything at all. This remark comes from Keystone Bouchard, Virtual Architect for Clear Ink, who was also visited by Destroy TV - more later this post about Keystone, and 3D Experience Architecture.

On Ugotrade I try integrate an expansive view that imagines an end to this era of industrial production, all it’s horrors of inequality, waste, pollution and scarcity, with an on the ground perspective that not only tracks corporate innovation, but looks at how people in developing economies (including Second Life) are using virtual realities in innovative ways, for example:

Mobile phones have enabled Africans to leapfrog lack of banking infrastructure and invent virtual banking. And, how ordinary people all over the world are reinventing their lives and careers in Second Life.

Virtualized Business on Second Life

Destroy’s visit to the IBM Business Center is also worth a mention. So much of business reporting on Second Life has focused on whether Second Life is “working” from a very narrow and often poorly conceptualized marketing/sales perspective. This kind of reporting on Second Life has been all too common lately, even by reputable business writers. But, it has been rife with inaccuracies and is based on many misconceptions - see here for a thorough analysis.

I found out, on the ground, some of the innovative ways IBM is developing their Second Life Business Center as a place to relate with their customers, on what is approaching a 24/7 basis, on Destroy’s Flickr stream!

A Searcheable Guide To Second Life

Destroy TV has, in the last ten days, created, an extraordinary guide to Second Life (which will be released as a DVD later). But this guide is available now as a searchable Flickr stream of more than 99,000 photos and the accompanying chat. You can check out Destroy’s flickr tags that logged every place she has been and every avatar she encountered here. Flickr tags were created from the Second Life chat lines and are correlated with a SLurl.

This is the first time that such a vast searcheable document of Second Life has been created. Perhaps, you can, tell how powerful it is by the way I was able to match up Second Life photos from Destroy’s record with Real Life photos I found through Googling Hursley Park on the web.

A toast to Destroy’s accomplishment!

The cover of “The Unofficial Tourists’ Guide to Second Life” is held in front of the camera streaming the Fuse Gallery event into Second Life.

Sharing The Experience Of Second Life

Steve Nelson from Clear Ink notes:

I think both machinima and exported live feeds will be an important part of one of the hurdles of SL, namely the learning curve. The more people are acclimated to the environment before they enter for the first time, the more accelerated I think their introduction to SL will be. It’s like visiting a new country after having seen videos - it isn’t as much of a shock when you actually get there.

As Destroy toured Second Life her adventures and chat were not only streamed live to the web at Destroy TV, they were also projected on a wall in Fuse Gallery, New York City, where people could watch and interact with the avatars. Also what was happening in the Real Life Gallery in New York City was streamed back into Second Life to the GHava{SL} Center for the Arts. This was quite a conceptual and technical achievement.

Pictured above is Clear Ink’s 3D Experience Architect, Keystone Bouchard. When Destroy accompanied by Jerry Paffendorf encountered the team from Clear Ink (one the most visionary agencies working on Second Life), they found people who really got the significance of the multiple levels of reaction this project created (photo from Destroy’s Flickr stream).

A good opportunity to check out Clear Ink and their work on SL will be this event on Autodesk Island HERE (SLurl), June 14, 10AM PST Chris Luebkeman : Future Challenges: Global Creative Contexts.

Annie Ok writes of this extraordinary meeting of minds in a long comment on this post on 3pointD. Here is an excerpt:

the exemplary moment of Destroy’s potential educational/informative application has been the happy accident of running into Keystone Bouchard and him immediately TP-ing in Theory Shaw and the ensuing tour they gave to destroy of architecture island and the Wikitecture project.

Keystone talked to me later about the Clear Ink encounter with Destroy. There are several key-points Keystone touched on:

Sharing The Experience of Second Life with People In Real Life

At Clear Ink, we had several people watching on my screen, who could see both my avatar’s movements and Destroy’s view through my browser. So, on my end, there were several people viewing both portals simultaneously. But, what makes it really interesting is that through this virtual medium, it ended up being both absorbed and transmitted through a multitude of experiences. Because, on their end, they had the virtual scene being projected onto the wall of a real life gallery with several people in real life witnessing the phenomenon - even taking pictures of themselves standing next to avatars - as you would in a real life gathering. It blurred so many lines - it was quite extraordinary.

Interacting With An Avatar On Second Life To produce A Shared Narrative

We could see what Destroy was looking at through the browser. I could see her camera so, when she would move her camera over to a certain build, I could describe what she was looking at, so the people in the gallery could read what i was describing. In a sense, we even transcended our avatars - and became invisible cameras - flying around the island looking at, touring and describing the entire island - while our avatars stood still. Plus, at Clear Ink, it was a great way to engage my co-workers, and show them a really unique experience - using SL in a way it hadn’t ever been used before.

Sharing Avatar Viewpoint To Enhance Collaboration On Second Life

Architecturally - in a virtual environment - understanding the avatar’s gaze is absolutely critical - and one of the biggest challenges in a virtual environment. Because, I can design something using Mouselook - and it could be visually compelling based on the way I use my camera - but another user would have an entirely different experience based on the way they use their camera. So, you have to design a building to accommodate many levels of approach and viewpoint.

Being able to see what Destroy was looking at did truly provide a missing link. I was able to give her a more thorough description of the island. At one point, I was describing the Wikitecture experiment. But I could see that Destroy was looking at the Architecture 101 build - so I shifted the conversation to describe that. At which point, Destroy started going from project to project, knowing that I could continue the narrative. The collaborative potential is something we’re very interested in and actively building experiments around on Architecture Island.

The Metarati In Action

Jerry Paffendorf at Destroy’s wrap party last Saturday at Fuse NYC watches Destroy’s visit to Relay For Life - the American Cancer Society’s SL adventure that has sparked enthusiasm and creativity from Second Lifers (three years on SL now!) Destroy was welcomed by a large crowd of avatars.

Jerry Paffendorf, Metarati and Futurist in Residence for the Electric Sheep Company (this is an independent project) teamed with artist Annie Ok, curator and collaborator, and Christian Westbrook (Metaverse Architect ESC) to create Destroy TV. Ben Byer, who is from Apple BSD technology group, was visiting from California, (on right). He came up with the name for Destroy TV.

It is an extraordinary feat of vision combined with some coding genius. They pulled off the extended two way streaming, projection and logging to Flickr with only a few minor burps. This is no minor feat. See Christian’s blog for a post on what happened when their Flickr stream topped 99,000.

Turning Extreme Lifelogging Into Meaningful Virtual Experience

I talked at length with Jerry Paffendorf at the closing party at Fuse Gallery about the challenge of extreme life logging in virtual worlds both from a technical and expressive point of view. Just like there is a need for a new language of virtual architecture as Keystone points out - “a more interactive, reflexive architecture” - there is a need to find an expressive language for life logging. Jerry Paffendorf has been pushing the envelope on this and has some very interesting projects in the pipeline (which I will let him reveal).

Flickr, the poster child of Web 2.0, began as a user generated virtual world.

Jerry talked about how Flickr is a big influence on his thinking right now. Flickr as he notes is the poster child of Web 2.0 - it gets better the more people that use it and interact with each other inside it. But, Jerry also pointed out something about Flickr that may not be so well known, i.e., it started out as user generated virtual world called Game Never Ending.

It is fascinating how Destroy TV by using Flickr to document Second Life begins to reconnect with this initial conception. Jerry noted that it is possible Destroy TV was the most prolific poster to Flckr in the world, during Destroy’s ten day adventure.

Also, Jerry sees the Destroy Project as a sketch for how we are our going to record and organize our own Real Lives - remembering the places that we have been and the people we have been around. This is what Destroy TV does, and documents. Like Game never Ending turned out not simply to apply to organizing a virtual world, Destroy TV is also about inventing ways to organize our experience of the real world, and bridge the imagination gap needed to do this (also see 3pointD on Ambient Gaming: Life Logging in Disguise). Talking about the future of Destroy TV, Jerry said:

What I want to see happen is that anybody who logs into Second Life, or any virtual world, can record absolutely everything that they see and create a lifelog of their Second Life experience.

Virtual Worlds have a big advantage over the real world re life logging because they have built in wireless, RFID, meta data and geolocation, so it makes sense for this to be a place we will proto-type life logging.

The search for a an expressive language for extreme lifelogging -where the traces and tracks of real life can be expressed in virtual space in meaningful ways - is where 3D experience design and the virtualization of real life merge to create innovative hybrid realities.

A 3D Experience Architect- building a new language for virtual design.

I have been meaning to visit Architecture Island for a while now, and seeing Destroy’s Flickr stream inspired me to go yesterday. First, I talked to Keystone Bouchard.

Keystone Bouchard is a Real Life architect who has recently transitioned exclusively to a virtual mode as a “3D Experience Architect” with Clear Ink. He is standing here in an experiment he is working on. You can click on the video grab below to see a short machinima.

The blurring of lines between familiar and unfamiliar experiences of music and space create an other-worldly environment that is cinematic yet still an invitation to interaction.

Keystone observed avatar movement and behavior on a Architecture Island, then wrote a piano score that approximated that movement. Then he transposed a video of him playing that score and imported the video. His goal is to make the architecture interactive so that it understands where you are and what you’re doing - and provides an audible reaction to it.

Wikitecture On Second Life

Keystone is also interested in the crossroad between the professional practice of architecture and virtual environments, as well as the development of a new language of virtual architecture. Keystone and Theory Shaw, pictured below, have teamed up to use virtual worlds as a tool for a collaborative approach to architecture in the Real World. Theory Shaw has outlined how virtual world can be used in the the planning of future cities.

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

Theory is an architect living in Chicago. He is currently researching the prospect of using an open source (or wiki) type paradigm toward the improvement of architecture and city planning.

I feel our cities are so complicated that no small group of people can possibly design them from the top down….it’s a such a grand problem, that we need to set up a framework (or platform) where people can come together and tackle the problem from a local perspective.

My ultimate goal is to use Second Life, or what will be ultimately the next metaverse, (and the tool you utilize for open source architecture should be just as open), as a tool for the world’s population to come together, and solve collectively, how architecture should be defined.

The Studio Wikitecture experiment needs a complete post, so I will not go into all of the interesting aspects of this project Theory mentioned in our chat right now. But, Theory has written a program and protocol for the experiment - available here.

Tags: Extreme Life logging | life logging | 3D experience architecture | Second Life Builders | Second Life | Web 2.0 | Web 3.D | Web 3D | mirror worlds | virtualizing reality | wikitecture | open source architecture | architecture island | vitual architecture | Destroy TV | virtual experience | IBM Virtual Business Center | virtual business | machinima | virtual worlds | metaverse | sustainable development | virtual banking | pervasive and mobile computing | virtualized worlds |

These two pictures are from Nicolas Nova’s Media and Design Lab, Mediamatic Workshop, Amsterdam, May 2007 (see Pasta and Vinegar). The picture on the left is what hybridization is NOT about - rather think from a less utilitarian point of view as in picture on the right. (Nicolas Nova).

This IS What hybridization is about!

Destroy Television (DTV)

If you live in New York City, or can get here, you have an amazing opportunity to participate in a full on hybridization experience, this Wednesday May 23rd:

Go to the Other Here to get:

some background and details (when, where, who, what, why/vision) on the Destroy Television art show at Fuse Gallery, GHava{SL}, dtv.sheeplabs.com, and in Second Life. Take a look, come hang out in New York or Second Life during this Wednesday’s opening, and plan your performance if you want to make a splash in Destroy Television The Movie. On this…..

Invitation To Attend And Participate In The Destroy Television 10-Day Second Life Avatar Lifelogging Art Show Movie…Thing

Destroy Television is the name of an avatar in Second Life who streams live video of her life and adventures to dtv.sheeplabs.com, where you see and chat and influence her movement and camera controls in SL from the web. But wait! There’s more! Destroy Television, or DTV for short, records and shares her life through a process called “lifelogging” or “lifecasting” (to define terms, logging is keeping the record and casting is sharing it live — a popular example of real life lifecasting is the 24/7 mobile camera at justin.tv).

An avatar of Justin in Second Life

We wonder if lifelogging in virtual worlds, that is, taking advantage of virtual worlds having essentially baked-in wireless internet and communications, cameras, GPS, RFID, and meta data about people and locations, will help prototype a more transparent, searchable, and personally and socially and globally understandable real world — the reeeaaally flat world.

Data Blogging - an advanced form of blogging.

Collecting the traces of new interaction partners is a trend in hybridization.

Question: Why would objects want to blog? Why would I be interested? (see Julian Bleeker’s blog on Techkwondo)

Answer: Traces (where you have been where you are going in a geospatial sense), history, (”turn a history on interactions into a continuous experience - object to learn from their histories”), content production (see The Aibo [the toy dog] That Blogs), and agency - e.g., having a voice in cultural circulation on public networks -streams, feeds, trackbacks, permalinks, wiki and blog posts.

Critter Cams from Nicolas Nova

And, we cannot ignore, reality mining and lifelogging’s shadow “big brother” (Justin cop helmet cams are all the rage too now).

Hybridization at an “Unconference”

Jose Marinez, at MobileCampNYC, presenting on, “The Poor man’s SMS Gateway.” There are instructions for setting up the SMS gateway on his blog

On Saturday (May 19th) our whole family went to MobileCampNYC. For a very generous description of our presentation, “Metaverse and The Mobile Space: Intersection or Inclusion,” see Marshall Sponder at WebMetricsGuru.

Nokia (who unveiled a beta mobile web server) lavishly sponsored the event and supplied an abundance of Nokia 95s, some of which were given away. A bit disappointed not to get one the Ugotrade family went shopping for their N 80 IE’s that evening with our co-presenter on “Metaverse and The mobile space, Rich LaBaca.

While as Dave Winer, Scripting News, commented:

People don’t seem ready yet to accept that knowledge is distributed through the room, we’re here to be taught.

I felt MobileCampNYC, an “unconference,” did maintain the feeling of a hybrid event. Presentations from corporate giants rubbed shoulders with more down to earth innovations such as “The Poor Man’s SMS Gateway,” Dave Harper, founder of Winksite, Cocoa UltraSMS, Paul Notzold - txtual healing ” (see Marshall Sponder for an excellent write up ), “Mashup your phone with GPS” - WHERE.com, Mexuar - who will soon be announcing a very interesting new app. for Second Life, and then there was the Ugotrade family road show!

Akaalias uploaded this picture of Ugotrade junior to MobileCamp’s Flickr pool noted:

This DS contained a Revolution R4 card with a microSD memory card embedded in it. I wasn’t expecting to get out-teched by a someone under 10. (noted by Everyplace )

Many thanks to everyone who played with UJ while I participated. As Akaalias observed in the title to this picture, Ugotrade Junior was on a mission to “Remote Control the Camp.”

Also, Timo Arnall flew in from Norway, just for this conference, and gave an inspiring presentation on Physical Hyperlinking.

Timo covered a lot of ground. He outlined many technologies for physical hyperlinking, and their creative uses in intereactive marketing and community projects. Go to Timo’s blog to really get a feel for how creative and far reaching his thinking is.

Timo has put many of his wonderful slides up too - RFID, “smart posters,” Bluetooth marketing - “turn on bluetooth to receive something naughty,” building size QR codes, Semapedia’s hyperlinking, experimental and niche market projects such as one to tag the provenance of craft items and unusual interpretations of QR codes, and much more.

Metaverse Roadmap

I have been quite absorbed with the Mirror World, Augmented Reality, and Lifelogging quadrants of the Metaverse Roadmap lately. This picture is from Jerry Paffendorf’s (futurist for The Electric Sheep Company) blog. See here for much more on the Metaverse Roadmap project and where lifelogging and reality mining all fit in a vision of the 3D Web.

Jerry Paffendorf points out that:

massively multi-user avatar environments in whatever form, are and will become even more of a driver of the other areas [in the picture above] because of their capacity to purely simulate things digitally and because they inherently have RFID, GPS, WiFi, and metadata out the kazoo baked right into them.

You can, for example, prototype any imaginable augmented reality application inside of a virtual world, which may also be a mirror world, before you put it out onto the street, or inside of a building, or wherever out in physical space.

He also explains the importance of lifelogging and indicates what might be the future of lifelogging.

recording your actions and experiences both in the digital world and/or in the real world to create a picture of yourself over time that you can revisit to learn from and share with other people.

Linking Real Worlds and Virtual Worlds

My post on CJ Chowderhead’s virtualized lab on Second Life (in this picture with his duck that reports temperatures from Real Life locations) was picked up by several other blogs including Rob Smart’s blog, Disordered Cogitations, and Mark Wallace from 3pointD, who had this to say:

This is just one kind of application that could start to make Second Life a much more useful place. I’d love to see entities and conditions being tracked around SL in real time. Why? Because there’s a ton of information to be extracted from a digital environment, which can then be applied to real-world problems from logistics to marketing to sociology, you name it. That said, this won’t start to get really interesting until we have a nearly plug-n-play solution. Which is probably one of the things IBM is working on. Keep your sensors tuned.

All About Mobile Life also linked to the post and pointed me to the work of Mike Conway, Instanceof Idea, who has been working on “mashup info in the 3D world” in Second Life.

Mike Conway uses the freely available tools, that you and I have access to - such as Ruby On Rail’s, to get data both into SL and out to RL. He has some pretty nifty ideas he’s working on too.

He seems to be working on a storm display map that is somewhat interactive. For example, you can point and click on a storm icon on the map to bring out more information presented in what he calls flyouts (very appropriate considering dropdowns and popups are in widespread use today). He also has at least one GPS app with 2-way data. Although, he admits that the data out side is a bit buggy. The weather map also appears to have 2 way gps functionality. That is he can get the real world location of a truck and show its 3d icon on a virtual map updated as it moves. Furthermore, he talks about sending some new GPS location to it and having it go there.

Mike Conway seems to have quite a lot going on considering he is working with text streams like, RSS feeds, rather than the data input/output that IBM’s MQtt manages.

IBM IMPACT 2007 SOA event in Second Life

This picture is from the IBM Impact 2007 SOA conference that was streamed into Second Life.

SOA (service orientated architecture) is the bridge between IT and business that IBM has been pioneering. And, as far as I can tell it must be hot, hot, hot! I feel I have to mention this event, even though I need to wrap this post up. The event had the flavor of a kind of corporate Woodstock, not just because it was on an extraordinary scale for Second Life (see video on Youtube to get a sense of this), but because one got the feeling that something about this gathering was going to have a big effect on the wider culture.

And, in terms of being a global cultural mixer, it was an extraordinary event. There were multiple cultures and languages. And, aided by translator HUDs, Real Life and Second Life, and pop and corporate cultures, intermingled and exchanged ideas in kaleidosopic patterns hardly imaginable in Real Life. I am on my way back in-world as soon as this post is up!

Tags: Second Life | Web 3.D | Web 3D | Web 2.0 | physical hyperlinking | hybridization | reality mining | lifelogging | mobilecampnyc | barcamp | unconference | Impact 2007 | IBM SOA | augmented reality | mirror worlds | virtual worlds | lifescasting | Destroy Television | sensor mapping | GPS | QR codes | mobile space | mobile innovation | Nokia | bluetooth marketing | RFID | interactive marketing | WiFi | Metaverse Roadmap | blogjects | geospatial mapping | SOA | IBM on Second Life | data blogging | virtual worlds | virtual reality |

2D bar codes, or “QR codes,” made their debut (input as data) in Second Life today, thanks to the efforts of Dave Conway-Jones “CJ Chowderhead.”

This morning, CJ kindly spent time doing an interview with me. But, of course, if you are lucky enough to meet an inventor, what you really want is an invention! And, CJ Chowderhead did not disappoint. He came up with a solution to an on the spot request to bring a 2D bar code into Second Life, not merely as a texture or image, but as a QR code sent as data and readable by a mobile phone from within 2nd Life. If you project that image full screen (while in SL) a phone should be able to read it.

The QR code in this pic points at the eightbar blog. And, so yet another way to bring 1L and 2L (RL and SL) together, or at least build a small bridge between them, is born. Could it be a seed for a form of hyperlinking in Second Life?

Dave Conway-Jones” is a Senior inventor, IBM Hursley Park, Winchester, UK. He works in the “Emerging Technology Service Group.” In real life he builds and experiments with sensor networks designed to monitor real life, real time devices. These are often used for asset monitoring systems and process control. (If you are not familiar with these terms think Dow jones or your personal stock portfolio for “asset monitoring,” and robotic production lines or automated lab analysis for “process control.” Not that either of these are the actual applications that CJ is working with - at least as far as I know. I’m just trying to establish a general understanding.)

Virtualizing Real Life in a Meaningful Way

I can use Second Life to virtualize my real life sensors and see them in a more meaningful way - or more. abstract way or more interesting way - or whatever else we feel like (CJ Chowderhead).

For this project they use the IBM MQtt messaging system that Ginger Mandelbrot invented to hook all the monitoring devices together. And, Yossarian Seattle (also Rob Smart of Eightbar and creator of the much lauded SL Translator HUD), created the link from MQtt to Second Life so that messages can flow in and out of Second Life.

CJ explained to me what is going on in these pictures of his virtual office in Second Life. And, here is some of what I picked up on (we talked on skype, so I didn’t have the SL chat log to go back to!).

The floor plan is of the offices surrounding CJ in Real Life. The blue balls with white designs represent active Bluetooth devices. The pyramids scattered about the floor represent other people working, with the color designating things like physical presence or telepresence. The flame in the pic on the left is a probe under the lamp, “so when lamp is on the temp goes up.” The black rectangle in the righthand pic is a RL door (so CJ knows when someone enters his lab).

I don’t remember what CJ said about the flowerpot. But, a good guess might be that it represents the output of a bevy of environmental sensors such as temperature, humidity and light, the same things that a plant would need to thrive. I am also guessing about the building with the smoke coming out of the chimney. But, it could well represent air quality monitors.

I do know about the the duck on CJ’s shoulder though! It speaks and says:

“Quack ! The temperature in CJ’s 1st life Greenhouse is 24.0 degrees C,” or for outside or inside CJ’s house - randomly.

The pink bunny slippers no doubt represents someone always hopping around, dealing with so many different issues and problems like we all do occasionally.

Sensor Map projects have a lot of potentially very cool applications, and huge societal implications. 3pointD recently posted on this, “mirror worlds,” and Microsoft’s recent offer of “unrestricted funding” for the development of geospatial and mapping applications.

Mobile Phones as a Virtual/Real Interface

CJ explained how they use mobile phones as an interface to the data (represented in SL) both for input (voice, text, and now even bar codes!) as well as for output in the form of dashboards (think of a car dashboard of gages and other information presented in the form of instrumental readouts).

Semapedia - hyperlink your world:
QR codes will be a hot topic at MobileCampNYC

A Semapedia tag going up!

For those who have not yet been introduced to QR codes, they are a way of representing more information than can generally be put into your standard grocery store bar code. One of the big adopters of this has been Nokia who developed software for many of their phones to be able to translate these into URLs and lookup web pages of appropriate information about something near where someone has placed one of these 2DBC’s.

Semapedia is collecting and mapping sites where many of these QRs have been placed.

Our goal is to connect the virtual and physical world by bringing the right information from the internet to the relevant place in physical space.

To accomplish this, we invite you to create Semapedia-Tags which are in fact cellphone-readable physical hyperlinks. You can create such Tags easily yourself by choosing and pasting a Wikipedia URL into the form above. Once created, you put the Tags up at their according physical location. You just hyperlinked your world! Others can now use their cellphone to ‘click’ your Tag and access the information you provided them.

Twitter Users Second Life Meet Up

The Meet Up organized by 57 Miles of Metaversed today was packed with Twitterati and Metarati whose uber connecting creates flows all around the Web and the Metaverse. Apps like SLTweets, Twitterbox, Squawk, Jaiku (see Metaverse’s 5 ways to integrate your Second Life into the web), Flickr (and see Mashable for more on SL plus Web 2.0 Virtual World Mashups) and Snapzilla (post cards from life #2) were probably all in action this morning as the chat ranged across many hot topics. Wrestling Hulka was posting to Tumblr.

Johnny Ming sported a Jaiku sign - showing his continued allegiance to just saying no to the unpleasant symptoms of Twitter cat allergy?

Chisel’s Inventor, Vyrnox Ming, talked about a HUD that “works rather well with the Electric Sheep Company’s search.

And Fox Diller, of Crystal Studio, explained the work they have done running 120 sims for their client Sprott-Shaw with their own grid/asset/login/sim services. Also, Fox has a Second Life client running on the Motorola Q Smartphone.

This was my first Twitter Meet Up on Second Life. But, if you want to know what is happening on the frontiers of Virtual Worlds and Web 2.0, it is a good place to hang out. And, even though there were a lot of avatars, 57 Miles did a great job of welcoming all. See you next time!

Tags: Second Life | Web 2.0 | Augmented Reality | Semapedia | physical hyperlinks | Twitter MeetUp | IBM Hursley Park | sensor maps | lifelogging | virtual reality | internet of things | social media | social networking | IBM inventors | QR codes | virtual world mashups |

Ugotrade Goes To MobileCampNYC, Saturday, May 19th.

My friend and partner in many R & D adventures, Otto Leichliter, veteran of Ericsson’s Messaging R & D team, 3D vision, robotics, special effects for film and television, and system development, will be helping me lead a discussion, “Metaverse and The Mobile Space: Intersection or Inclusion” at MobileCampNYC .

We will talk about how the standard pipeline of WiFi will transform cell phones, from the “mashup consumers” they are now, into true interface engines that open up the relationship between real and virtual worlds. And how, as the metaverse meets the mobile space, 3D printers/fabricators may be both the killer app. for virtual worlds and sustainable development.

But, the topic is wide open. And, if you would like to help us lead this discussion, please add your name to the wiki page.

A Fab@Home Model 1 Fabber. See PopSci - The Desktop Factory

Roboticist Hod Lipson wants you to stop shopping and use his portable 3-D printer to make your own stuff.

I hope to see you at MobileCampNYC, if you live in the Metropolitan NY area. Please add your name to the wiki now if you want to attend as there is a limit of 100 people! MobilecampNYC is a BarCamp:

BarCamp is an international network of unconferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies and social protocols. The name is a playful allusion to its origins, with reference to the hacker slang term, foobar: BarCamp arose as a spin-off from Foo Camp, an annual invitation-only unconference hosted by open source publishing luminary, Tim O’Reilly.

A BarCamp in progress in Chennai, India. Original image at Kiruba’s Blog.

WiFi to link Virtual and Real Worlds

The difference between WiFi and all the various cell phone protocols currently in use is the equivalent to the difference between public access and pay per view.

WiFi is based on the TCP/IP networking communication standards and not some oddball proprietary standard that only Telcos provide.

TCP/IP is the network standard and must ultimately become the mobile phone standard as well if cell phones are to become true linking engines between virtual and real worlds. Otherwise phones will continue to be (as they are now) consumers of (costly) services, that are regulated and restricted and far from open source or user friendly.

WAP, 3G , GPRS, WAP (Wireless Access Protocol), GPRS (General Packet Radio Service)?, 3G, GSM, EDGE, TDMA, CDMA - don’t worry if you don’t know all these - the point is that WiFi can leapfrog them all with direct access to the internet, and that includes internet telephony and (with the resolution of bandwidth issues) access to virtual worlds like Second Life.

People used to talk about service anytime, anywhere - it shouldn’t matter if that’s a real or a virtual anywhere.
Zygmunt Lozinski, IBM

And, as bandwidth obstacles diminish, there will be, increasingly, a natural interaction between virtual and real worlds. And, our experience of virtual and real mixed mode events, and augmented reality events e.g. Second Life HUDs (Heads Up Displays) integrated with Real Life events will not, of course, be limited to qwerty keyboards and monitors.

The integration of virtual and real worlds in the mobile space has significant implications for developing countries and sustainable development (see several earlier posts on Ugotrade on role of mobile phones in developing countries, and also see earlier post on Bruce Sterling and Splimes).

Building Bridges Between Virtual and Real Worlds:
It doesn’t have to be all headsets and Sci Fi.

Bridge building between virtual worlds and real worlds via the mobile space is not merely in the realm of speculation. Last Friday, I was fortunate to spend time with Ian Hughes (a.k.a Epredator), Metaverse Evangelist, Senior Inventor and Innovation Catalyst and Consulting IT Specialist, with about 17 years in IBM. My inspiration to do the discussion on “Metaverse and The Mobile Space: Intersection or Inclusion,” at MobilecampNYC came from this meeting with Epredator on Second Life.

I met Epredator on one of the many IBM islands on Second Life. And, he took me to several locations during the interview. However, IBM’s presence on Second Life is far to extensive to cover in one post, so I will come back to other aspects of IBM’s exploration of virtual worlds and Second Life in later posts.

It was very exciting to have this opportunity to meet one of the pioneers of the merger of virtual and real worlds. Ian Hughes brought Wimbledon to Second Life and this project is an outstanding proof of concept demonstrating how real data can be gathered pumped to the web and to Second Life, and also to Real Life to produce a mixed reality event.

On Eightbar Ian Hughes describes a number of different ideas that were demonstrated by bringing Wimbledon to Second Life. He explained to me:

We gather the real data and pump it to the web, pump it to SL, and also to real life scoreboards on-site……so if someone wants to see the hawkeye replay, or overlay the line call, we have all the data. And, with a WiFi network we can merge the two.

It doesn’t have to be all headsets and Sci Fi. I could hold my mobile phone up and use the screen as a viewer through which to superimpose the data.

Mobile - “anywhere you need it” in virtual and real worlds: overcoming patchy connectivity

IBM caused quite a stir at the recent 3GSM World Congress where Zygmunt Lozinski showed off a service button that calls someone in Real Life and patches them in to Second Life. In an interview to BBC Click Online, Mr Lozinski said:

So for example, you can make your avatar ring a bell, like in a hotel lobby, and that would send a message to the owner of that area, to their mobile phone, to say ‘there’s somebody who’s interested in talking to you’. Because obviously you can’t spend your entire life in a virtual shop hanging around waiting for someone to stop by and buy something.

You can then see a photo of the avatar who’s calling you. You can then record a video with your mobile, and send that back so your potential customer can see that video being played to them on a video wall in the virtual world.

In effect, IBM’s model removes the need for people to exist within a virtual world.

If you’re traveling you may not always have good enough connectivity to interact with people in a virtual world, even if you need to. People can communicate irrespective of whether they’re in the virtual or real worlds.

Helping people link to virtual worlds despite patchy connectivity will have significant implications for the role virtual worlds can play in positive global development.

“3D printing is a real killer app. tacked on the side of Second Life,” says Epredator

Epredator stood for a capture session in SL, and then received a parcel from Michael at fabjectory containing “this excellent Epredator potato figure straight out of a 3d printer,” (see eightbar for more great pictures).

In my interview with Epredator, he brought up how important local manufacturing elements, 3D printers and Home “Fabbers” could be for sustainable development.

We spend a lot of time shipping products around, packaged to travel. [This could be avoided in many cases] if we rezzed them in the real world at the point we needed them from basic raw materials.

If you want to buy a product from a website and you have local 3D printing we only have to ship the model information.

Well as you you can see, my chat with Epredator left me with a lot to think about. There was so much ground covered that I will have to come back to these ideas in later posts.

As I mentioned in my previous post, and see eightbar, at IBM, Hursley, they are dreaming up the internet of things at every opportunity they get!

I do hope, if you can, you come to MobileCampNYC to discuss some of these ideas about blurring the lines between virtual and real worlds and linking the Metaverse with The Mobile Space.

MobileCampNYC is bringing together mobile enthusiasts, explorers and professionals from the NYC metropolitan area to share the current state and their visions for the future direction of mobility. MobileCampNYC hopes to support the many voices helping to unlock the potential of a truly digital life. Topics may include - but are not limited to - mobile gaming, entrepreneurship, social mobility and presence, near field communication, physical hyperlinking, mobile storytelling, the importance of open standards, protocols, and platforms, linux based devices, and mobility on other continents.

Tags: Second Life | Web 2.0 | Web 3.D | Metaverse | Virtual Worlds | Virtual Reality | Augmented Reality | Barcamp | MobileCampNYC | IBM | IBM on Second Life | Zygmunt Lozinski | Epredator | WiFi telephony | open standards | internet connectivity | 3D Printing | home fabbers | 3GSM | fabathome | home fabber | fabjectory | Wimbledon on Second Life | digital divides | social entrepreneurship | positive global development | sustainable development | internet telephony | internet of things | splimes | Bruce Sterling | mobile innovation |