UgoTrade

HiPiHi is taking up the challenge of building a managed world with the emphasis on creating a strong virtual economy and a community built around the trading and creation of virtual goods, just at the moment when Linden Lab is beginning to make serious moves to an open grid (see here, here, and here).

While HiPiHi will not focus on real life integrations or enterprise applications, they will provide APIs for enterprises to do that themselves. They will be using the Chinese micro payment system Alipay, by alibaba which unlike PayPal does not have prohibitive costs for micro transactions.

IBM is a “solutions provider” for HiPiHi helping them design a systems architecture that will facilitate running a scalable world with a strong virtual economy. The early focus of HiPiHi is on building an architecture to support the virtual economy.

Toshitaka Jiku, HiPiHi’s new CTO and Executive Vice-President notes: “Virtual goods will be housed in a server for the purpose of creating a market place that will be our vision for an ebay for virtual worlds, so these virtual goods would be portable as opposed to having avatars being portable first.” IBM is also working with Linden Lab in the Architectural Working Group (see earlier post) on scaling and interoperability for Second Life and interoperability and avatar portability is part of the long term vision for HiPiHi.

And, HiPiHi is partnering with Intel to tap more CPU power. It has often been noted that one of the weaknesses of all current game engines and virtual worlds is they do not tap the power of the new CPUs.

HiPiHi has only 40,000 users so the focus of the public beta, which began April 2nd, will be on community building. While they have a future vision of interoperability with Second Life and other platforms based on the Linden Lab technology, the focus, for now, is on building a Chinese community. But they are experimenting with a dual naming system with avatars bearing English and Chinese names because international communication is very much in the HiPiHi vision of the future.

While HiPiHi plans for some mobile integration early on, IMing friends and inventory management for example, the emphasis at the moment is building the community inworld (also note Second Life’s recent integration with mobile, “Samsung Unveils Second Life..” ). But Toshitaka Jiku, HiPiHi’s new CTO is one of the first to develop a mobile interface for SL. And, Jiku comes from NGI the Venture Capital company that is also backing 3Di, so look for interesting innovation with mobile integration in the future.

While HiPiHi is commonly seen as a mere Second Life clone, the work they are doing with IBM and Intel on the system architecture is hoped to produce some valuable innovation. They are also researching the innovations of realXtend’s client. HiPiHi has a close relationship with OpenSim through their connection to 3Di and with Adam Fisby’s company, Deep Think, that is opening offices in Shanghai. It will be interesting to see how these relationship develop over time. Xu Hui and Philip Rosedale met last year and there is a long term vision of cooperation possible. These connections if they blossomed into cooperation and full interoperability would create a very interesting step forward for positive global development through virtual worlds.

Interview With Xu Hui, CEO of HiPiHi

Xu Hui, CEO of HiPiHi with Toshitaka Jiku, HiPiHi’s new CTO and Executive Vice-President

Bjorn Lee, Senior Manager, Marketing & International Business Development for HiPiHi, did an excellent job of translating for this interview, not only with Chinese and English but with the skillful and patient way he worked with me to find the essence of some of my long stream of consciousness questions! Bjorn also contributed many insights, and Toshitaka Jiku stopped by with some interesting insights into HiPiHi’s direction.

Tish Shute: Please could you tell me about your vision for the future of virtual worlds?

Xu Hui: The global virtual world industry will be undergoing a revolution over the next few years. What HiPiHi, Second Life and the other virtual worlds have done in the past few years has really been just setting the stage, exposing the world and educating on the possibilities - kind of like a proof of concept for what virtual worlds can do and can’t do. The goal this year for most virtual platforms will be to build system architectures that can truly scale for a massively-concurrent user base, in addition to inter-operability.

Tish Shute: I know that HiPiHi has formed a patnership with IBM. Could you tell me more about this?

Xu Hui: We are working very closely with IBM in terms of building new technical infrastructure for our platform. What this means is that we will specifically be collaborating very closely on aspects such as redesigning our architecture.

Tish Shute: RealXtend has been working on interoperability of virtual worlds with “real life” and working on meshes and facilitating 3D imports. Have you been in contact with realXtend yet?

Xu Hui: We are actively researching what realXtend is doing, as with other exciting virtual world technologies; and will seriously considering integrating them with our new system architecture.

Tish Shute: What is the strategy of HiPiHi re building a community of content developers?

Xu Hui: This is one of the focuses for HiPiHi this year. We are looking into incentive systems for content creation, including monetary and non-monetary forms. For the former, our approach will be to facilitate universal trade and have a secondary market for people to exchange their virtual goods, their creations, their applications, and so on. But in China, the model will be slightly different initially as we favor an ecosystem approach where we work with third-party providers of virtual economy functions and services. An example could be in payment systems, where instead of reinventing the wheel, we could explore ways to facilitate transactions conducted through Alipay, often regarded as the Paypal for China.

Tish Shute: I am a Mac user and, of course, I am really interested to know when there will be a Mac Interface and easy to use english version?

Bjorn Lee: I am a fellow Mac user too, along with an increasing number of colleagues. So do rest assured we have an internal Mac evangelist team! Since December, we have had a very basic English version but our lack of bilingual staff has affected the development of a satisfactory support system, not to mention interface only for English users.

Tish Shute: How big is the market in China for Mac?

Bjorn Lee: It is about 1%. But of course it is out of a larger population base here in China. Despite their relative lack of scale among China users, Mac users here are very enthusiastic, grassroots, and very tightly knit. Macbook Air ads are playing heavily across Beijing too and have garnered strong brand awareness among the younger set of Chinese consumers.

Tish Shute: What are some of the goals for the public beta which is starting in early April?

Xu Hui: The Public Beta will begin April 2. For public beta what’s interesting is this dual naming system that we are developing for the very first time. The first phase is for the current Private Beta users to migrate to the new naming system before we release that naming system to the public.

We expect a fair amount of proactive user feedback in the initial days, as with all things new. But I think it’s a good step forward because it will try to bring together the English and the Chinese speaking worlds. In a “first” for the virtual world, this new naming system displays both your English (that we call international name) and your Chinese name on top of your avatar. Across many in-world interactions such as chat, social networking, and for future commerce , we are trying to break down the language barrier in the virtual world.

But we are trying to do something to move forward in trying to foster multi-cultural interaction, with the foreign audience and local Chinese audience. Because there’s a lot of demand from local audiences here who want to internationalize and meet people from overseas and the same feedback is coming from our foreign users such as Suezanne C. Baskerville who seems very keen on learning some Chinese. She would like to put some Chinese and English on her avatar too - it’s like a social “code”, you start putting Chinese words in your avatar and so you say that you know I’m friendly and I’m willing to speak to Chinese users. And so too for the Chinese because with the English names up there it doesn’t look so foreign to the foreign audience.

In the later part of the year after our new system architecture is up, we will begin to consider micro payment systems. But because we are migrating to this new infrastructure, the initial stages of the public beta will just be to get more people to use the tools and continue to gather feedback.

Tish Shute: “What is the business model for HiPiHi?”

Xu Hui: Our platform is oriented more for the individual users, that is the residents as opposed to the enterprises and the corporate residents. A lot of the features we are adding and a lot of the feedback that we’re taking is user centric. But, as for our relationship with corporate residents, we will be opening a series of programs and that includes opening our API to allow development on our platform by the enterprises. We think of it as a self-service approach, in the form of open APIs and maybe incentive programs for enterprises to kind of drive this for themselves. But we will design and customize the platform more according to our core user group which are the non-corporate users.

Tish Shute: What is HiPiHi’s relation to other virtual world initiatives, e.g., Entropia’s and other virtual world start ups in China?

Xu Hui: My starting point in responding to this is the definition of a virtual worlds in our company’s opinion is an open-ended user-directed environment. User-directed means that users would drive the content creation, the development of not just their own content, but also feed back to the company, and what they hope to see on a platform level. Open-ended also in the sense that they can have a freer rein in creating and managing their creations.

Concerning that kind of concept, as it plays right now in China, we are the only company that really does that. A lot of the other initiatives that have sprouted recently from the interested companies or other startups in this space have more of what we classify as virtual communities which means that they place real limits and constraints on the users ability to create, and actually have more control over their lifestyles in these worlds.

We will welcome other players as they enter too. We actually welcome the entry of others into this ecosystem because it helps this ecosystem grow and mature faster. And, it can only be good for the users to have so many different companies push out their products and try to reach out to them. So it’s good because then they’ll be able to make an intelligent choice and see how fulfilling a virtual lifestyle they want.

Tish Shute: How do you plan to expand beyond China and how will HiPiHi differ in other countries? I know Linden Lab has met some interesting legal challenges as they have expanded globally.

Xu Hui: HiPiHi will be the sole platform operator for China. As for regions outside China we will take a partnership approach to finding local companies which will then operate this platform. They will be licensed and hence operate this world on our behalf. Thus they will be entitled to benefits commercially and so will have to be responsible to bear the legal costs and challenges. This will reduce the amount of legal burden on our side. A US based operator of the HiPiHi platform in US will certainly have to follow US laws to be entitled to collect revenues but also they will have to handle US based law suits.

Tish Shute: Will HiPiHi have a strong ID verification system tying virtual identities to real identities as a way to try and control griefers etc?

Xu Hui: This question itself doesn’t address how we think about identity. First, we are not going to have a very strong link between real world identity and virtual identity because we feel that our focus would really be to improve accreditation of what is popularly known as a reputation system for virtual identities. So we will focus on building an attractive incentive program for avatars to view their virtual identities in our virtual world as opposed to saying that you’re going to tie this virtual identity very tightly to your real identity.

We want to create mechanisms to facilitate and encourage residents to improve their in-world reputation. But it doesn’t mean we’re not going to manage disruptive behavior such as griefing, which is already known to create problems for virtual worlds like Second Life.

We will have a monitoring mechanism for these troublemakers in our virtual world. But our intention is to let the actual policing be done by residents themselves, through self-organized groups and features we provide for them. .

Tish Shute: The next generation of the Linden Lab grid architecture will separate avatar identity from what constitutes their environment. Will you be going in this direction too.

Toshitaka Jiku: (HiPiHi’s new CTO) Our server architecture will have a different focus. Our server architecture picks out virtual goods as an item that we will separate from the others in the sense that we are going to place them on different servers first. So virtual goods will be housed in a server for the purpose of creating a market place that will be our vision for an “ebay for virtual worlds”, so these virtual goods would be portable as opposed to having avatars being portable first. These are just our first steps and it does also mean that avatars would be housed in a separate server. But the focus right now is to make virtual goods portable and enable the virtual economy.

Tish Shute: How is HiPiHi going to deal with issues of protecting IP rights? This issue has become quite a difficult one in Second Life.

Xu Hui: This is a very big question. I am just going to lay out some basic principals. We like the concepts of giving back the rights of a media creation and returning it back to the creator, enhancing the motivation and incentive systems for people to share their creations and so on. A lot of our influences come from Creative Commons - that is the first part. The second part is when IP rights are infringed we understand where we stand in the whole legislative environment. We are not a legislative body, nor can we judge or rule on certain issues of conflict. Hence what we can do as platform is to provide the data but when it comes to actually making decisions in the legislative environment we are going to rely on third-party intermediaries. This could involve bringing in real-world law makers and courts to uphold some of these IP right because we can’t do that ourselves. So we do face limits somewhat similar to Second Life.

Tish Shute: What are your goals with IBM and Intel?

Xu Hui: IBM to us is really a solutions company. They have expertise in almost every single aspect of the IP sector which makes them a very good partner for us because we considering the architecting of our systems across all areas, client, the backend, algorithms and so on. They can help because they are pretty broad in their understanding of all IP areas.

But Intel has a little bit more focus. Intel is the father of the CPU. They are still the best right now in their understanding of CPU performance and we believe they are going to continue to lead this sector. So when we work with them it is going to evolve around the understanding of the CPU unit - what kind of features and abilities are we able to extract and are going to be useful for virtual worlds. I think this is something many virtual worlds have not focused on - that is extracting value from the CPU. And where better to find out how than from the makers themselves which is Intel. So we work across a broad spectrum with IBM, but with Intel we work in the vertical, and we drill very very deep.

“Surveillance is all about when people in authority know a lot about you. Instrumentation is when you know a lot about the world,” Cory Doctorow, Craphound.com, boingboing.net

When we spoke at the Virtual Worlds Forum in London last week, Cory Doctorow outlined a vision of how ways individuals tap into data and metadata to create instrumentation in “virtual” worlds might be thrown out into the “real” world to give people more agency there.

Cory D. turned my initial question inside out and gave a brilliant glimpse of something a little like Bruce Sterling’s idea for an Amazon.org. Amazon.org is a social software entity that can answer questions. Questions about our world. Questions about objects. “What questions? Not the profit-centric questions that obsess Amazon. The serious questions.” (Shaping Things)

“The Inverse of the Surveillance Society”

Me: What happens when Virtual Worlds become flooded with data from “real life” objects, geo- positioning, etc., and extreme life–logging enters virtual worlds?

Cory: Well this is like Spook Country the new Gibson novel – What happens when cyber space everts – hmmm? I’m not sure I have anything very pithy to say on that EXCEPT………

Apart from all the traditional kind of overlay reality stuff, if there is one thing I am actually interested seeing from a virtual world migrating to the real world its instrumentation.

I think lot of things that are characteristic of very successful internet based business is that they are extremely finally instrumented so like Amazon knows in aggregate on a second by second basis how their site is being used by people and they can twiddle the dials in real time.

As users of the world we have very little access to that kind of instrumentation. We don’t even know how the tube is running. The tube knows how the tube is running and we kinda of don’t. I would be really interested in seeing that. You’ve seen Joi Ito’s WoW interface right. Have you seen it …

Me: Ummm no! [But I have now. Joi Ito sent me a Flickr link to his photo. Thanks!]

Cory: When they are doing a raid at a certain point the number of instrument panels on his screen actually eclipses all of the vision of the raid you no longer actually see the raid. You are experiencing WoW through a purely numerical and data visualization system.

There are different abstraction layers at which you can experience the world and one of them is through the instrumentation of it. It is in some ways the inverse of the surveillance society.

Surveillance is all about when people in authority know a lot about you. Instrumentation is when you know a lot about the world. And it allows you have more agency. When people know a lot about you it takes away your agency.

Me: So is that on the lines of personalized virtual operation centers – like MySpace’s with instrumentation….?

I don’t have this fleshed out into a nice solid like a non abstract thing. But the thing that I have been noodling with is what if all the kinds of data visualization and aggregate statistical information about the world that big companies use in order to realize their enormous profit and control over us as individuals was in our hands.

This is a little like Bruce Sterling’s idea of an Amazon.org [see page 111 Shaping of Things] where all the data from the positional and temporal characteristics of all the objects that we own were in aggregate visible and available so that we can mix and match them remix them understand them and have more agency in the world.

I think that empiricism, measurement, understanding more about the world is the thing that the Enlightenment is grounded in. Like being able to write down how the world works using objective measurements being able to compare them with other people in terms of peer review and experimentation that is the core of what makes us contemporary human beings – post enlightenment, non alchemic, non superstitious, empiricism grounded people.

Being able to understand what is going on the world – How much RFI is there right now where I am standing? What frequencies is it running on? What are the aggregate histograms? Tell me about it. Are people looking at the web around here, or talking on their phones, or sending SMS? Am I in a spot where the thermal signature of lots of people is high or low? What was it like ten minutes ago? Is this typical or atypical of the characteristic histogram of thermal and electromagnetic energy in this space for this time, year on year, day on day, and hour on hour?

Just knowing that and knowing it on some liminal way where your clothes feel different based on whether the room is typical or atypical. That is a really interesting thing to know.

Games do this all the time. You know a lot about the way the game is performing by things like audio cues, like coloring cues, Also by cues that have to do with network jitter. You hop onto a shard with like a zillion people on it that shard performs differently. You don’t know when you walk into a room necessarily what the activity level in that room is, especially if it is a room subdivided by a lot of physical baffles and things that hide what is going on from you. But you know when you walk onto shard whether it is an active or inactive shard.

So can we grab all that stuff that lets us know a lot about the virtual world and exert agency over and influence over it and throw it into the “real” world.

That what be very cool.

A Global Virtual Worlds Open Source Community

Open Standards are frequently cited as a key part of what will make virtual worlds “fit for business.” But for a reverse surveillance society where virtual operations centers could be universal information resources for all of us open sourcing and open standards are also the key to tapping into the myriad data streams currently only available to business and government.

At the Virtual Worlds Forum in London the virtual worlds open source community was not on one panel together. But they were a small but noticeable cohort that caught my attention.

Of particular note was the presence of Adam Frisby of OpenSim, Adam Johnson of 3Di and Bjorn Lee of HiPiHi. HiPiHi and 3Di are both funded by the ngi group, Inc. And 3Di are developing a virtual worlds platform Jin-sei based on OpenSim. 3Di is now in a partnership with Mixi (the largest social networking site in Japan with over ten million users) developing virtual worlds on the Jin-sei platform. OpenSim is the BSD Licensed Open Source Initiative that has evolved from Second Life.

Some 3Di employees using Jin-sei

“3Di, Inc. believes its innovations will be the key to developing the new 3D Internet.”

The picture above shows the location of the 3Di offices in Tokyo - a location that may turn out to be significant.

3Di, Inc., a Tokyo based subsidiary of the Japanese holding company ngi group, Inc., aims to revolutionize the way virtual worlds and the web work together. 3Di, Inc., as an international company based in Japan, is uniquely positioned in the underdeveloped Japanese and Chinese markets to deliver language and culture sensitive solutions, while still maintaining a global perspective. 3Di, Inc. believes its innovations will be the key to developing the new 3D Internet.

Drivers of the 3D Internet:

Every time I saw Ian Hughes of IBM (far left) and Adam Frisby of OpenSim (next to Ian), Adam Johnson of 3Di, and Bjorn Lee of HiPiHi talking together. I couldn’t help thinking wow: “I am witnessing the team that will pioneer the 3D internet.”

So I decided to interview these four to who seemed to me to be already well on the way to being a global virtual worlds interoperability team.

While there were many interesting stories to tell at the Virtual Worlds Forum, I focused my attention on players who seemed to be weaving the following five virtual world threads together.

1) social networks 2) user generation 3) open source/standards 4) 3D immersive 5) social gaming

I also spoke to Ginsu Yoon, from Linden Lab. Linden Lab has been making interoperability and the movement to create open standards for virtual worlds a priority. But as Ginsu Yoon spoke from the podium on Linden Lab’s expansive vision for a 3D internet and podcasts will be available on the VWF site, I did not do an individual interview with him. But we spoke a couple of times. And I ran by Ginsu the direction of my thinking.

The essence of these chats was that the interoperability of virtual worlds would not come from top down from a “standards committee.” Rather standards of interoperability would be worked out from the bottom up by people coming together to actually work on the architecture, e.g. in groups like the Architecture Working Group that is attended by OpenSim, IBM, and many others.

In the picture above David Orban shows a delighted Ginsu Yoon his new Second Life viewer an: “Immersive stereoscopic projection of a life size screen covering 180 degrees of vision, connected to the live grid, tracking the avatar with ultrawideband emitters, created by the University of Milan and Eximia, in Italy.” David has posted a video gives a full explanation of “Real 2nd Life” on his blog, so check it out!

Interview With Adam Johnson: Movable Life & 3Di

The picture above shows Steve Prentice of Gartner Research (famous for his quote earlier this year that “80% of active internet users will have a “second life” in the virtual world by the end of 2011″) talking with Adam Johnson of 3Di and Bjorn Lee of HiPiHi.

Me: Could you introduce yourself please Adam?

Adam: I’m Adam Johnson. I’m working for a 3Di a company based out of Japan. We have our own virtual world platform and web services between virtual worlds connecting them. The Capital company is called ngi Group. It’s the number one incubator company out of Japan. We started about four months ago and now we have a virtual worlds platform, Jin- Sei, which is based off the open source software OpenSim. We’re marketing that towards B-to-B right now. On the services side we have Movable Life, which is a web-based Ajax client for logging into Second Life through a browser or iPhone. We’re working on other mobile interfaces as well.

Me: Why did you think Movable Life and this OpenSim application got launched in Japan as opposed to here?

Adam: That’s a good question, I’m not really sure. I think because in Japan a lot companies are really starting to look at virtual worlds. Because in Japan everyone has the same notion that virtual worlds are just going to explode and probably in the near future be more popular than in other countries. Japan will be like a hub for Virtual Worlds, I guess.

Me: And how did you get involved because you’re obviously American.

Adam: I was working at ngi Group before actually. So I had been living in Japan for 2 years.

Me: ngi is the investment company?

Adam: Right. We’re fully owned by ngi Group - the incubator company.

Me: So you were working for the venture capitalist company?

Adam: I was working for another startup and then I just transferred when they started this company.

Me: So what’s your job title?

Adam: I’m Project Leader for Movable Life.

Me: Why did you choose OpenSim?

Adam: we were just looking for ideas on what open source tools there are already to get our own virtual world platform off the ground. The best one out there at that time was OpenSim so we decided to go full on with Open Sim and LibSL and get involved. So Movable Life is based on LibSL as well so we’re very involved with open source community.

Me: Is Movable Life open source?

Adam: Movable Life code is proprietary at the moment, but we’re looking at open sourcing that in the future.

Me: So what physics engine are you using for OpenSim?

Adam: For our platform Jin-sei, we’re currently using the open source ODE at the moment. But we’re looking at maybe going to Havoc in the future.

Me: I know in the Open Sim that we’re using only about half the scripting is implemented. Is that still the same with you?

Adam: Yes, but the core of the scripting engine is based on C-Sharp, it has a C-Sharp engine. For user scripting it’s about half implemented. But server side we can do C-Sharp full on.

Me: What can Movable Life run on?

Adam: It runs on the iPhone. So it’ll run on Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Opera, anything.

Me: How how far have you got in terms of making OpenSim a grid or making it interoperable with Second Life?

Adam: We’re doing a lot of performance testing now. And for Jin-sei we just have a partnership with Mixi where they’re going to be running private virtual worlds using our platform. They have more than ten million users. Mixi is Japan’s number one social networking site. My Space tried to go in there and they totally failed.

Me: That’s interesting!

Adam: The Mixi deal will at first be a limited private test for a certain group of Mixi users, just to get good data on how everything is performing. We have a lot of large companies that are really interested in using Jin-sei for several different things, private and public.

Adam: Right now I’m focusing on creating a virtual hub for all of the virtual worlds. This is my project. We have two different sides, we have our platform and then we have our Movable Life Hub.

Adam: Movable Life comes from LibSecondLife and right now that’ll connect you to Second Life, and soon to an OpenSim grid and Jin-sei.

Adam: The goal is in a few months we’ll have a new version coming out which will kind of merge all of them together. So you log into Movable Life and you’ll have a central portal to each virtual world. Movable Life is not a virtual world. It’ll be like a web service to combine them all. It’ll combine anything using OpenSim or Second Life, probably HiPiHi later on. We’re working with some Japanese companies as well for their virtual worlds. We want to connect all of them if possible.

Cory Doctorow and Bjorn Lee of HiPiHi

I recorded part of the conversation between Cory Doctorow, Bjorn Lee from HiPiHi and Adam Johnson of 3Di (with their permission of course!) about social networking in immersive virtual worlds versus social networking in less immersive spaces.

Raph Koster of Metaplace was not able to fly out of Southern California because of the wild fires so I couldn’t follow up on what had been an interesting debate on 2D versus 3D social networked spaces at the San Jose Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo. If Raph had been there I would have loved to ask him some questions about interoperability and Metaplace also. Ian Hughes of IBM talked with me about how Metaplace’s use of RESTful APIs will create many interesting possibilities. And I had a long conversation with Bruce Joy CEO of the newly launched Vast Park which potentially will be interoperable with Metaplace.

Cory D. on the place of social networking sites in an increasingly immersive 3D future?

In response to questions from Bjorn (HiPiHi) and Adam (3Di), Cory Doctorow argued persuasively why from a social networking point of view less immersive 2D spaces might hold their place alongside immersive virtual worlds. I turned on my iPod recorder mid-stream in the dialogue.

Cory: ………[re how to drop] a whole bunch of people you don’t like very much who’ve recruited you into their social circle. The best way to do it is to say oh you know I am just tired of Facebook. Not like you people all bother me. Its like I just not using Facebook anymore. You just stop logging in. That’s the reason not like deleting you account in a huff. Just kind of slowly disengage from Facebook. They can see you haven’t updated your Facebook in 6 months. You are just kinda not there anymore. Then you just delete your account and no-one cares anymore. That’s like a socially neutral way of disengaging from a group of people who you had to friend and who friended you.

The cost of blowing off your social network is pretty low because the value of your social assets which is the articulated social network of people you like is offset by the negative value of the articulated network that is wrong where you have named all these people as your friend.

In a virtual world the problem is confounded by the acquiring of assets that actually have real world monetary value whether that be a currency or objects that can be bartered for a currency. So blowing off you WoW account actually costs something. It has a monetary expense as well. Its not that people don’t do it. But they often do it on mass as the game gets less fun for some reason.

Like when SWG re-factored and it got less fun and everyone left. One of the things that contributed to that was WoW lit up and a whole bunch of SWG players said I’ll go and play WoW for a week and SWG was just kind of empty so the value of those assets blew up. So it cost less to leave SWG after SWG crashed and so people were willing to leave.

But if you have to wait until the game crashes before you can blow it off that means you have this complicated relationship where you have to remain friends with people you don’t like or abandon your virtual goals. That is a terrible conundrum to be in. I think there will be elements of this. But I don’t think that is going to take it all over.

Bjorn: My question was more about the fact that in a virtual world’s social networking site the main difference is a sense of place. Your have friends and you want to hang out in the Mall, for example, you can’t do that in a [2.D] social networking site. But a virtual world is like going to a Mall you can go there see who is there, hang out with people, you can use hand gestures, and communicate through text and sound…

So now that now technology has advanced to a stage whereby text based social networks on which you can just send pictures and videos are pretty primitive. Do you think this kind of social networking site will still be prevalent in the future?

Cory: So its a really interesting question. I think that we are typically pretty bad at evaluating the long term costs of our actions. This is one the big privacy problems. We sell our privacy very cheaply and subsequently regret it because it costs us a lot when we’ve sold our privacy. But we don’t find that out until one year or two years later. Or we buy DRM media and we don’t realize how much that cost us until it is time to throw out your iPod and buy a competing device right.

So I think people will be willing to migrate into social networks that are on games because I think it will be on crack. I mean all the monkey pleasure of laying out the pictures of all your friends and all the grinding pleasure of doing all that game stuff and all the cyber sex and all the rest of it. Its going to be like on crack.

But how many times will you going to be willing to do that. Cuz you are going to have to blow it off eventually. And are you eventually going to say to your self, “oh shit this sucks. I am bankrupting myself every eighteen months in order to escape the people I don’t like very much.” And that’s really tricky. I don’t know. I think that might leave a place intact for social networking sites.

Adam 3Di: What if you had different levels of privacy in virtual worlds where you could throw them into this group where they don’t get to see as much information on you.

Cory: Its very hard to prospectively evaluate the cost of adding someone to a friend list. That’s the problem. You have to know a priori to know what level of trust to assign to that friend to. Then you get into this thing, where people are like, “Am I on your A list, your B list, or your C list.” And you become one of these self obsessed terrible, obnoxious … you become one of these people who in 8th grade who had the list of good people, medium people, bad people, sub bad people. That’s not reflective of a natural social dynamic. Now it may in fact push back - its kind of a nightmare scenario - what if it does push back? What if that actually does become the organizing principle by which we establish our social relations in the “real” world. Are you an A person or B person for me? But I just kinda hope we don’t get that.

Interview with Adam Frisby about OpenSim

Adam Frisby discussing architecture? with Ian Hughes of IBM

Me: Please could you introduce yourself Adam.

Adam Frisbee: I’m the executive director of a company called DeepThink Labs. We’re an international company with people in the UK, US and Australia. I started off last year working on the LibSecondLife project which just basically built a protocol description of the Second Life protocol.

We’ve built a programming library from that which allows you to connect in third party applications into the Second Life grid. In early January, just after the Second Life Client source code was released, another developer called Michael Wright developed a piece of software called OpenSim, and I got involved in that pretty much as soon as I saw the announcement of it. And since then I’ve been working as one of the developers of the Open Sim project.

Me: What Physics Engines does OpenSim support?

Adam: Right now we support four. But we’ve got our own one called Basic Physics which is just a very very simple engine, it doesn’t do physics solving really. We’ve got a second one called ODE which is the Open Dynamics Engine that ngi is using right now. That one’s a fairly mature open source physics engine.

We also support Bullet. Bullet is a new type of open source physics engine designed by Erwin Coumans, who was a major developer on the Havok Physics engine, it’s new – but it has a lot of potential.

We also support something called PhysX. PhysX is a commercial physics engine like Havoc. Its about on the same scale. But it supports optional hardware acceleration so you can actually get an accelerator card, put it in your computer, and then you get the ability to use that to accelerate the physics that’s going on in that server.

Me: How do people get involved developing code for OpenSim?

It’s essentially a meritocracy. We look for good developers, who are submitting good patches, to the project and we invite them in to be permanent contributers. Right now the way the OpenSim project works is strictly by consensus. There’s about 9 people right now who’ve got a voice in the consensus. And whenever a decision needs to be made such as whether we add another person into the development team it has to be done exclusively through consensus. It can be a very interesting process when people disagree, but nonetheless that’s how we’re operating.

Me: Where do you meet?

We don’t meet inworld in Second Life anymore, we’ve moved to an opensim …..
The majority of the discussion happens pretty much in two places. The first place is our mailing list, that an email list the developers are welcome to subscribe to and then people send out long emails and get long winded replies back.

The other way we communicate is over IRC which is Internet Relay Chat. We’ve got a channel on EFnet, and a lot of people hang around there. There’s about 60 people there all the time. Then there’s a secondary channel which is #opensim-dev which is all the developers and everybody interested in the development side of things. So it’s sort of broken up into the two groups, users in the one channel, and the developers in the other channel.

If you need help with getting it running then that’s the users channel. We split them up basically because we were trying to discuss technical topics and at the same time there was a collision with the people trying to get basic help.

So in the development channel we are discussing things like future architecture. If there’s a big decision that needs to be made and it’s brought up in the IRC channel then someone will go off and write that up to a mailing list as a post so those who weren’t there at the time, can go off and read what’s happening.

Me: Do you attend the Linden Lab Architecture Working Group?

We made an effort to actually attend those. That’s because Zero’s been discussing allowing the interconnects between the Second Life Grid and potentially third party servers like OpenSim. So of course being there is valuable if we want to make sure we are compatible with what the plan is.

He goes into very technical topics which is fantastic. And he’s willing to go into good depth on them. They are well worth attending if you’ve got any interest at all in things like protocol design. We had a great discussion once on the merits of parallel programming.

We have had a lot of benefits from Linden Labs experience by watching what has worked and what hasn’t. At the same time, what we’re working on is of course fundamentally very similar to what Linden Labs working on. In fact the architecture working group will probably produce something that’s going to be used by both Linden Labs and everyone else who wants to host a virtual worlds grid.

Right now we’ve got an opportunity to re-engineer and add scale to things. Second Life’s biggest flaw is that you can’t have an event with 5000 people in it. The grid just collapses and you can’t get all those people into a reasonable contiguous area. Whereas for OpenSim we can actually write a customized server that will actually support that by degrading certain things like physics. You degrade that down to a very low quality of physics. You turn off scripting, that kind of thing. You can customize a server to do something like that and Open Sim’s got the potential that hey Linden Lab can use it too and take advantage of these things.

Making more lightweight situations, removing central dependencies, that kind of thing.

We’re working with everything from a simple engine like Basic Physics to some of the most complex proprietary engines you can get, e.g., the PhysX one. It’s a very powerful engine.

It’s the opportunity to pick and choose what you want to use. Our key aspect is that everything is modular. You can take out any module and replace it with any other compatible module or even have no module at all. You can do that for scripting, for physics, everything down to instant messaging and chat are all modules, so you can chop them out.

Me: Will there be any problems of interoperability with the Second Life physics engine?

I think it will fine. It’s not such a big deal. We can always write a module to implement the Second Life physics engine. The Havoc caveat. They’re talking about implementing Havoc 4. We’d just implement that as another module. And suddenly we’d suddenly support 5 different engines.

Me: And what about assets and interoperability?

Assets aren’t too bad either, the interoperability issue is protocols. Simply speaking the same language. We’ve got the protocols from the client to the simulator. What we don’t have is from the simulator to the grid. That’s the language we’ve got to learn to be able to connect to the Linden Lab infrastructure.

It’s on the plan. The Architecture Working Group is actually devising a new language. But we don’t have the current language. That’s why you can’t connect to an Open Sim to the existing grid.

Our grid infrastructure is running on our own one. But that’s going to disappear and be replaced as soon as we’ve got something better which is what the Architecture Working Group will produce.

We will use the best new protocol thinking from every idea everywhere.

Interview with Ian Hughes, IBM (a.k.a Epredator Potato)

Picture above shows Epredator getting involved with a CSI: NY in Second Life at csiny orientation west95

Ian Hughes was one of the early pioneers for IBM in Second Life, particularly in the area of “virtual” and “real” integration, including the IBM Wimbledon project in Second Life. I asked Ian to talk about the early days linking First Life and Second Life.

In all the virtual world stuff there’s initially a feeling that it’s somewhere you go, and the emotional attachment is that it’s somewhere else. And even with Second Life, it’s called Second Life, it’s somewhere else.

From day one for me I wanted to know whether I could do the same things in the same way as we do on the web, where we’ve gone with mashups and in terms of SOA (Service Orientated Architecture) is to say I’m over here at the moment but all my stuff’s over there, can I get it there? That works both personally and at a business level.

And just knowing that there’s any channel to go from one place to another is no matter how small as long as it’s bi-directional even if it’s only a few bits flowing you know that that channel’s going to get bigger, it’s going to get faster, and it’s going to get more standardized.

So from day one it was, “great can I control a second life object from outside?” And that was before the http stuff in Second Life. It was just yes of course I can. But you have to actually do it. So I made a light switch. No big deal a light switch. That was just sending a message in. That was just one line of code. and its one line of code any techie would do and many techies has done the same. But I also wanted to know if could demonstrate messaging and flow within the environment in a publish/subscribe way. [Ian did explain how he accomplished this].

This was 18 months ago or it might be 19 months ago, March - April time. [This early work on messaging and message brokering in Second Life Ian explained was very helpful in introducing Second Life to other IBMers. ]. We had this thing which was turning a light on which was now responding to an external message. Roo augmented that so that a message from Roo’s laptop when it gets tilted was being injected into Second Life. Roo built a laptop on a gimble so that when you tilted his laptop in Real Life it would tilt the Second Life one.

Now in any demonstration where you say “here’s this quirky virtual world and isn’t it funny” now let me just pick my laptop up - you’ve caught them out - you’d pick the laptop up and the one on the screen would tilt. Controlling a virtual object like that is no big deal now. But it’s got a whole lot of messaging stuff underneath. And it was our core technology concept from Hursley that was being used.

Behind the scenes at Wimbledon in Second Life

That became sort of an iconic moment for us that we’d achieved that. We’d got all the bits so that we then knew that we could get further with Wimbledon having more data and more stuff and more instrumentation coming from the real world. So that’s when they [Linden Lab] opened up their http request APIs which they did just before Wimbledon luckily. I knew that I was going to be able to start to represent things in the virtual world in a way that we’d never got around to before. And I knew we could get buy-in from customers. And, I could get buy-in from other IBMers because it was Wimbledon.

My own Hursley Island rapidly went from a small plot of land to multiple IBM islands. Some of this [rapid growth] was just telling everyone that we were doing it. We were writing internally on blogs to our fellow early adopter people. I was reaching an audience particularly with Wimbledon.

Jessica Qin, IBM, builder/scripter/evangelist

In sharing that meant other people started to come to us. So thats when we met people like Jessica Qin. She had been in Second Life for years, living there and having an existence there but not in a work context originally. We kind of found them [IBMers around the world]. We realized we’re trying this stuff at the same time and that was good so we immediately had gone across the pond and further.

An Early Meeting At Hursley

Then again lots of people suddenly started to turn up and the core people, a lot of the people who are here at VWFE, are the ones who were there at the start. And that formed this little community and it started off with 2 people and then 10 people and by November 2006 it turned into 3,000 people. It was a bottom up process. Now it is over 5000.

Virtual Control Centers as a Mass Phenomena?

At the Virtual Worlds Forum in London last week putting the kinds of data visualization and aggregate statistical information about the world that big companies use in our hands didn’t seem too far off when you listened in on some of the “off stage” discussions

I blogged in my previous post that Eolus One is developing what I thought might be the first major business application using OpenSim. Eolus I wrote is developing secure virtual control centers for facilities management with sites on OpenSim. And, next on the table for development are plug and play modules based on the Eolus VWCI that will bring the kind of facility management now only possible in large scale facilities into every home.

In the picture below Oliver Goh (on right) is showing the Eolus Virtual World Communication Interface to Sara de Freitas the Serious Games Institute (center and holding the Eolus VCWI), Adam Johnson of 3Di (on the left) and Bjorn Lee of HiPiHi (standing under the chandalier).

Old Media & Big Business Enter “The People Age.”

At the Virtual Worlds Forum, “old” industry/media was often indistinguishable from the new user generated, socially networked/gaming, 3D immersive, open standards, interoperable generation as we stood and chatted under the lights of the gilded chandeliers in the bar, or sat in alcoves on comfy couches streaked by color from disco lights.

In the picture below from left to right Dolf Wittkamper, Senior Director, Philips Design, Chris Carella Chief Creative Officer, Electric Sheep Company, Oliver Goh, Paradigm Engineer for Implenia Global Solutions, and Giff Constable, VP of Electric Sheep Company’s software practices. They were logging on to the CSI:NY sims that had just opened to the public.

The VWF venue was an old night club/roller disco near Kings Cross that London cabbies seemed to call The Potato Market. It seemed an awful lot like Second Life at times. And Delé Atanda, Global Digital Marketing Business Partner, Diageo, pointed out the virtualness of this space that is soon to be demolished to make way for some Eurotowers? I interviewed both Delé Atanda and Dolf Wittkamper at the VWF. I will cover these interviews and the very interesting approaches to Second Life that both these companies have taken in conjunction with Rivers Run Red in an upcoming post.

The Rivers Run Red exhibition at VWF.

One of the highlights for me during VWF was chatting with Louise Jorden of Rivers Run Red (center in pic above) and Delé Atanda, Diageo in “real life” at The Hospital Club - one of RRR’s partners.

Delé and Dolf exemplify to me to corporate executives that understand that the future will not only blur the lines between the “virtual” and the “real” but also the distinctions between corporations and individuals. Traditional hierarchies are disintegrating leading to what Josephine Green, Director of Trends and Strategies for Philips, calls the “people age,” and Delé Atanda, Diageo, calls the “age of imagination.”

This age is characterized, as Joesphine Green points out, by “the decline in trust in institutions and leadership; people becoming increasingly empowered and creative about their own lives; a desire to co-create and produce their own experiences; the search for greater customization, personalization and autonomy.”

Delé Atanda presenting the Diageo Digital Workspace in Second Life - developed in conjunction with Rivers Run Red and IBM.

3D Internet, 3Di, amazon.org, Architecture Working Group, Bullet, Cory Doctorow, craphound, data visualization in virtual worlds, David Orban, Deep Think Labs, EOLUS One, epredator potato, Ginsu Yoon, Havoc, HiPiHi, immersive spaces, immersive virtual worlds, instrumentation in virtual worlds, instrumentation in WoW, interoperability of virtual worlds, Jessica Qin, Jin Sei, Joi Ito, Joi Itos WoW interface, libsecondlife, Linden Lab, Linden Lab Architecture Working Group, Metaplace, metaverse, Mixi, Movable Life, ngi Group, Open Source, open source/openstandards, open standards, open standards for virtual worlds, OpenSim, physics engines, PhysX, Real 2nd Life, RESTful APIs, reverse surveillance society, Rivers Run Red, Second Life, Shaping Things, social networks, The inverse of surveillance society, using virtual worlds to exert agency, Vast Park, Virtual Worlds Forum, virtual worlds open source community, Wimbledon in Second Life, World of Warcraft WoW

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