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Nanotechnology Island has launched in Second Life with the goal to establish a place for the Nano Science and Technology communities to come together and to bring key ideas and research into public discussion.

Nanoscience and technology like virtual worlds are frequently cited as “disruptive” technologies. These fields should evolve in relationships between scientists, engineers, policymakers and regulators in a global setting with the opportunity for public debate and engagement.

Nanotechnology is a term used to describe the manipulation of materials at a nanometer of scale - a nanometer is a billionth of a meter. Chris Ewels explains: “This is the scale of large molecules; molecular chains (like plastics), proteins (from biology), nano-crystals (for example nanocrystalline diamond) and new large molecules like fullerenes and nanotubes.” See his site for more info and many wonderful pictures including the picture above from his gallery fantastic.

While nanoscience is rooted in the physics and chemistry of objects at the nanoscale, it involves a broad collection of technologies and scientific research — from diverse fields such as physics, materials science, engineering, chemistry, biochemistry, bio-engineering, medicine, optics and more.

Shifts in thinking and technology emerging from nanotechnology have big implications for our future and may lead to the end of the age of industrial design, production and consumption (see the seminal book on nanotechnology Engines Of Creation by K. Eric Drexler).

Creating a community of communities in SL

The communities of nanotechnology and science are dispersed across disciplines and geography. This Second Life project aims to “create an exemplar for using SL as a community aggregator (community of communities).”

Nanotechnology Island is based in the multidisciplinary SciLands in Second Life. SciLands is an international cross-disciplinary community, currently numbering 34 islands, with its own orientation island and regular events. This is an ideal location for Nanotechnology Island to begin to encourage inter and intra-community dialogue and give an opportunity for many people to play a role in envisioning and defining the future.

Dave Taylor, of the National Physical Laboratory (in the UK), explains that some of the key objectives are to:

provide resources to nanotechnology-related individuals and organizations to help them get started in SL: mentoring, technical help, access to shared land and facilities, and subsidised SL development. This last part means that NPL will help cover the costs of developers for SL projects that are approved for display on Nanotechnology island.

Dave then added more specifics about the services that would be made available:

1) Free assistance with Second Life basics for Nanotechnology subject specialists new to Second Life. Nanotechnology Subject Specialists attending meetings can use the SciLands orientation zone and meet with our representatives in Second Life to learn about the basics (e.g. how to move around, how to communicate and give presentations, how to change your appearance, how to search, how to find more help).

2) Free assistance with preparing, promoting and supporting suitable events on Nanotechnology Island.

3) Free space (land) on Nanotechnology Island to host displays or exhibits relating to nanotechnology.

4) Funding to help build (develop) an exhibit or display to be shown on Nanotechnology Island. Note: some simple exhibits (e.g. posters or simple molecular models) can be made for free.

Nanotechnology and the OS for Spaceship Earth

In an earlier post, I discussed the role that online, immersive, collaborative 3D virtual environments like Second Life will play in creating the operating systems for planet earth. Buckminster Fuller, whose visions reemerge in nanotechnology, makes a call for human cooperation in creating a future in the final words of his book, “Operating System for Spaceship Earth,” 1963.

The phrase Spaceship Earth brilliantly suggests the relationships on a galactic scale that nanotechnology both emerged from and can be extrapolated to. And Buckminster Fullers’s operating system for spaceship earth foreshadows not only ideas of “self-assembly” that emerge from nanotechnology but the notion of virtual operations centers emerging from the collaborative networked intelligence of virtual worlds. See my earlier posts, here, here and here to learn more about Eolus One and other projects that are beginning to develop Virtual Operations Centers in Second Life for energy monitoring, environmental management, health care and more.

I was kindly given permission to use this picture and the picture opening this post by Dr Chris Ewel, Research Fellow at the Institute of Materials, Nantes where he models impurities and defects in nanostructures, and EELS microscopy of new nanomaterials. They are from his gallery fantastic. Ewels calls the one above “Dreams of Buckminster Fuller.”

Buckminster Fuller structures are reappearing in the chemistry of the nanoscale. And, as Ewels points out, Buckminster Fuller once designed a geodesic dome large enough to cover mid-town Manhattan. . “So why not extrapolate a little?!”

C₆₀, the carbon molecule [known as the “bucky ball"] arguably started the whole nanoscience revolution in the eighties, was originally discovered by accident - by a group of scientists trying to understand the formation and behaviour of carbon molecules in interstellar gas clouds.

Extrapolation on an unprecendented scale is intrinsic to the nano revolution. For as much as nanotechnology is rooted in a precise notion of measurement at a very small scale, the implications of the discoveries are far reaching. The famous and controversial heart of nanoscience thinking is the possibility of “self- assembly.” “Self-assembly” is the fundamental principle which generates structural organization on many scales, from molecules to galaxies.

Nanotechnology presents the opportunity to go beyond what natural mechanisms currently allow by creating assembly systems that can build complex devices from elemental atoms or molecules.

The manipulation of matter on an atom-by-atom basis to create specific configurations for molecules, or “molecular manufacturing”, is probably at least a decade away from being used at commercial levels, but self-assembly systems are widely used in nature and have already been harnessed in scientific experiments.

As Nanotechnology matures, it will likely prove to be revolutionary in reversing a fundamental basis of human-based manufacturing.

To date, human manufacturing has been a top-down process taking larger materials and cutting and shaping them down into parts of products. Molecular manufacturing, on the other hand, starts with the building blocks of atoms and molecules and combines them to form objects from the bottom up. This is how nature has worked for billions of years. Eventually this approach may replace many of today’s production processes and find applications throughout society. (UCLA Journal of Law and Technology).

Chris Ewels noted when I asked him to comment:

nanotechnology works with both bottom-up and top-down and there’s lots of cool stuff being done with top-down.

Chris also pointed out that many of the ideas In Drexler’s book in his view are more science fiction than science fact:

(scientifically they just don’t work – if you’ve seen pictures of molecular cogs made from individual molecules, these ignore the fact that molecules tend to stick together, for example). For me the thing that nanotechnology does and will do well, is it allows us to do stuff that happens now, but better! So solar cells that are much more efficient, catalysts that work better, etc etc – not quite so glamorous but if you can make a solar cell 4 times more efficient then you can change the world!

One of the most exciting things about nanotechnology communities coming to Second Life will be that the ideas in nanotechnology that are about exploring the fundamental limits of human ingenuity - provocations to possible futures on the one hand; and on ground innovations from nano science and technology that are changing our world now on the other - will be integrated into the networked human intelligence of the virtual frontier. And this virtual frontier, exemplified by Second Life, is itself a new adventure in human imagination and possibility

A Tour of Nanotechnology Island on Second Life.

Two avatars operated simultaneously by Dave Taylor from the National Physical Laboratory showed me around Nanotechnology Island. ‘Davee Commerce’ is the avatar on the right and on the left is ‘Innovation Projects’ an official NPL avatar.

While the prime objective is to help others make exhibits there are some very interesting exhibits that have already been developed by NPL. The first one (pictured below) Davee Commerce showed me is a SIMS instrument. SIMS stands for Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry - and is used to analyse complex structures.

Nearby are giant animated models with an explanatory display to explain SIMS - a process in which “you basically fire charged molecules or atoms at stuff and see what comes out.”

I watched both an animation of a charged red bismuth ion and one of a “Buckyball,” striking a sample, developed for NPL by Troy McLuhan. Troy pointed out the red and yellow things that go flying are ions and they get pulled away for analysis. “It’s sort of like figuring out what the surface of a watch is made of by shooting it with a narrow-beam sandblaster and seeing what the sand knocks of.”

Also in the exhibit is an AFM - Atomic Force Microscope that works by dragging a very narrow point (atomic sized) across a surface and watching the point go up and down (with a laser beam bounced off a reflector attached to the point). “Sort of like blind people reading braille,” Troy noted.

See the NPL website for more on AFM. DNA structural change and single molecule detections are key areas of AFM research. Carbon nanotubes are ideal tips for AFM because they can have diameters as small as one nanometer.

Davee Commerce took me on a flying tour of a carbon nanotube.

Single-walled carbon nanotubes are being used for investigating surface-protein and protein-protein binding and developing highly specific electronic biomolecule detectors.

Dave took me on a tour inside a single walled carbon nanotube and also explained the structure of DNA to me (image behind the nano tube above and detail below).

Nanotechnology Island includes several interesting buildings produced for NPL by NMC Virtual Worlds and an auditorium that will host regular nano-related events.

The center piece, The Tower of Ten, will house a series of exhibits that change scale by a factor of ten at each level all the way down to the nanolevel. The AFM and SIMS exhibits are housed in an a reproduction based on the architecture of the NPL building in the UK. The laboratories inside were modelled on some of those at NPL, but are typical of specialist nanotechnology centres around the world. Outside there is an animated reproduction of “Newtons Apple Tree.”

A tree grown from a graft from an old tree in Newton’s family garden in Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire still drops apples outside the “real” life NPL building.

According to popular accounts, it was the fall of an apple from this tree that suggested to Newton that the force of gravity that caused the apple to drop to Earth was the same force that kept the moon on its path. The original tree was cared for until it was blown down in 1820 (”Notes and records of the Royal Society Vol 9″).

Playing With The Havoc 4 Physics Engine To Explore Nano Ideas in SL

Seeing Newton’s revered apple tree gave me an idea to ask some nano thinkers the question:

Can ideas of self assembly at least as concepts be explored on SL by playing with the physics engine - and could that be of value in communicating and understanding these concepts better and bringing the rapid prototyping and collaborative potential of the SL environment into nano thinking.

I gave this question to David Orban whose company Questar is in SL consulting, “but with our twists… No architectural building, but community creation, etc. ” David Orban is an entrepreneur interested in the Technological Singularity (see my earlier post) and Memetic Engineering. He is a member of the Singularity Institute, and is on the Advisory Board of the Lifeboat Foundation.

We know how the world works in the macro-scale. That is why building real-scale stuff in SL in rather unexciting, at least to me. But we do not know well enough how stuff behaves on the nano-scale.

And in SL, or other online worlds, we have the chance to simulate the world as we would perceive it if we were able to directly participate in them.

We have to change the physics. For example: to us water is fluid but on the nanoscale it is not.

The bipolar nature of the water molecule manifests itself, with the Van der Waals forces becoming very, very important. The surface of water becomes an almost impenetrable barrier.

In my opinion, once again, it will be with the open-sourcing of the server that makes this kind of experiment.

You have to change just a few parameters, and see the consequences. Let me give you an example:

In the good old days of Virtual Reality 1.0 in the end of the eighties with VPL Research, Jaron Lanier, etc. the immersive RL was not fun to me as it was emulating reality.

What I wanted to do is emulate irreality so for example change gravity, and learn to juggle then turn the gravity knob up little by little, and once I got to Earth gravity take off the goggles and juggle for real!

I want to change just a few parameters as well, and learn from them. Right now the changes have to be programmed into each individual object, instead of being a feature of the background.

They way to do it is to tweak the underlying Havoc engine which is the basis of the simulation calculating the collisions and what happens to objects as they clash at given speeds, at given characteristics, etc.

For example, making stuff sticky: that is chemistry!

Or making stuff blow up: that is nuclear reactions…

Or model how the changing nature of mechanical resistance can help or hinder the building of self assembling structures.

I asked David Orban if he was willing to give me a cartoon to illustrate our conversation in skype. And he very gamely posted these two drawings to Flickr for me.

Start juggling with a low-gravity setting, and follow the balls with your conscious brain. Turn up…

Sticky objects simulate chemistry, and materials’ science.

But you can’t……..

But you can’t just tweak some parameters in the physics engine to simulate physics at the nanoscale. [this was Troy McLuhan's initial response to my question]. That’s fundamentally wrong. Quantum mechanics is NOT classical mechanics with some tweaked parameters. It’s qualitatively different?

I am sure that Troy is not alone in the scepticism he expressed to me on playing with the SL physics engine to explore nano ideas.

Early in my career I spent some time working on ways to represent time travel in film and for this we were constantly playing with ideas of light and motion through algorithms, lenses, and film printing technologies. Obviously this did not further the technology of time travel per se. But constantly pushing at the possibilities of time travel’s representation I believe enhances its possibility in human imagination and endeavor. So to me tweaking the physics engine of Second Life to explore the possibilities of nano thinking seems a logical next step. I asked David Orban if he could clarify further his ideas. He responded:

Quantum Mechanics is fundamentally different. But it is so much so that we have probably just no way of perceiving it in the ‘right’ way in any simulation just as we can’t in reality. We don’t even know what Quantum Mechanics means!

Playing with the havoc engine is just another way to play with an idea with cannot and never can see right!

Anyway: the realm of reality we perceive is one, that of the quantum is an other. Making that one visible is likely to be impossible.

But we can work around that. I think

We’ll see…if we don’t start from somewhere, and “tweak some parameters” we won’t get anywhere.

Picture from Chris Ewels’ Image Gallery

Atomic Force Microscope, Buckminster Fuller, bucky ball, carbon nanotube, Chris Ewels, Dave Taylor, Davee Commerce, David Orban, disruptive technologies, Engines of Creation, EOLUS One, fullerenes, havoc 4 physics engine Second Life, K.Eric Drexler, metaverse and nanotechnology, molecular manufacturing, nano revolution, nanoscience, nanotechnology, nanotechnology island, nanotubes, National Physical Laboratory, SciLands, Second Life, Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry, self assembly, singularity, virtual operations centers on Second Life virtual worlds and nanotechnology

Coincidently Justin Bovington (avatar Fizik Baskerville) from Rivers Run Red invited me to join the beta trial of Vodafone InsideOut in Second Life on a day I really wanted to send messages from Second Life to all my friend’s “real” life mobile phones.

I wanted everyone to know that I was spending Saturday as my avatar Tara5 Oh standing in an avatar chain in Second Life to demonstrate for peace and justice in Myanmar (Burma). I was eager to ask my friends out enjoying the autumn weather in New York City to come and join me when they could in Second Life (see my previous post).

In the picture above I’m picking up my HUD from the Vodafone dispenser in Second Life. I’m wearing my T-shirt calling for the freedom of Burmese leader, Nobel Prize Winner and pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi.

I received a stream of useful URLs and ways to help the Burmese people from other Second Lifers at the peace demo. And, while I was there, I wanted to connect directly with my friends in real life as my avatar in Second Life. This is what Vodafone’s InsideOut is all about.

You can sign up here to join the beta trials and learn more about Vodafone InsideOut which “will allow you to communicate between virtual worlds and the real world via your mobile.”

Ingmar, Head of Technology for RRR, explained:

The service which has just come out of closed beta allows you to call and text in an out of Second Life. You get a HUD object (and a handset which is just for show and plays animations while you are on the phone.

You must sign up on the web page with your real mobile number and get verified. From then on you can call other users with your HUD, or text message them. If they are online, they get it on their HUD, but if they are off line they get the call or text on their mobile phone. The message/call comes from a virtual phone number, which hides your real one to keep your privacy. They can call or text the virtual number back at any time they want from their phone.

The virtual numbers assigned for the beta trial next week are from a German pool (+49) and, since it’s not restricted to users on Vodafone’s mobile network, when you call these your mobile network operator will charge you for whatever they charge for a call to Germany (based on where you are located in the world).

On the upside, for the beta trial the service will be free when used from Second Life which means free international calls and texts. We suspect some people will get a Second Life account just for that

The Second Wave in Second Life - Convergence and Relevance

Justin Bovington of RRR (a.k.a. Fizik Baskerville) spoke to me about Vodafone’s InsideOut project. RRR is working closely with Vodafone to bring the InsideOut to Second Life and other virtual worlds. Justin explained:

This is the start of Second Wave projects - the business tool world - convergence and relevance.

Open source is more than just a programming term, it should also apply to our thinking in terms of how we approach virtual world projects taking aspects of legacy systems [in this case Vodafone mobile communications], relevant technology and proven ways of working into Second Life will be the measure of future success.

InsideOut is very much about that. We’re not replacing the mobile phone. By trying to create a metaphor we’re using your real life moby as part of the experience. This is true convergence. Exciting stuff!

The emphasis has been on ‘modify the browser’, rather than looking at the bigger picture of integration. Open source is a call to action, not just a nerdy way to create cool interface changes. Integration is part of that message.

We’re seeing it more and more in relation to companies now viewing SL as a logical extension to their collaboration. We think that Vodafone is another level of validation in the same way Adidas did last October with the first true global brand presence [in Second Life].

I have written a lot in this blog about open source as a concept that is vital to develop “an operating system for planet earth.” And I have elaborated on how real life and second life integrations are paving the way for Second Life to play a big role in positive global development. I have argued that such integrations of open virtual worlds like Second Life will produce business and community applications that not only transform current modes of industrial production and design but are one of the keys to a sustainable future.

Integrating First Life and Second Life

There were other important landmarks last week for an increasing convergence and relevance between first life and second life.

Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, spoke at length in Second Life on the important role he saw Second Life playing in domestic/global politics and civil life. You can find a full audio feed on the Clear Night Sky blog. It is rather ironic that a conservative should be one of the first major public leaders to come to Second Life to talk about the relevance of Second Life to “real” public life. Adding more weight to his words was the fact that he had actually engaged in the experience of being an avatar. He drives his own avatar and is knowledgeable about many aspects of Second Life (for more on this event, brought to Second Life by Clear Ink, see Reuters “Second Life Ready For Prime Time at Ginrich Event” and Rik Riel).

Public figures engaging with Second Life and innovations like InsideOut that allow Second Lifers to engage more fully with public life are certainly important markers of a Second Wave of relevance and convergence.

As with all technologies, the uptake of InsideOut by Second Life residents is sure to produce many creative and unexpected applications. And in Second Life especially because of the emotional bandwidth the experiential is a vital to understanding the possibilities for innovation in SL.

Certainly, for me, Justin’s words took on more significance as I stood in the avatar chain in Second Life thinking of all the ways this InsideOut HUD could enhance the already powerful experience of participating in something very close to my heart on Second Life that is showing my solidarity for the monks and people of Burma.

Creating an API and integrating Mobile Phones with Second Life

Another topic that I have written about on Ugotrade frequently is the important role mobile technologies have played in positive global development particularly in Africa. Also an underlying theme of Ugotrade is my hope that access to the global virtual economy and the immersive 3D space of virtual worlds like Second Life will be possible in all parts of the world soon.

I discussed with Philip Rosedale at SLCC the possibilities for the integration of mobile phone technologies with Second Life and how that might create new ways for people to access, participate, and benefit from the virtual economy of Second Life. Along these lines I had many questions for Rivers Run Red on how they had accomplished the integration for InsideOut.

I also wanted to know whether InsideOut was likely to expand into even more applications including a bunch of OutsideIn ones! Justin kindly introduced me to RRR’s head of technology Ingmar so I could discuss all the issues of integrating the mobile space with Second Life.

Prior to RRR Ingmar was working as an IT security consultant in Germany. “He started using the internet before web-browsing became widely accepted and has an extensive background in networking, security and system administration. Ingmar discovered Second Life in June 2003 and became immediately fascinated by it. He spent much of his time contributing to user created scripting documentation at http://lslwiki.net and creating interactive content in Second Life.”

I asked Ingmar a number of questions about the design of the API. I asked about how they had overcome some of the messaging bottlenecks that I frequently hear are an obstacle to developing APIs to SL.

We’ve designed and implemented an API together with Vodafone for both calls and text messages and all the other stuff we needed like account status and channel registration (so it keeps working when you go into another sim). All information exchange is encrypted and signed and the Vodafone servers are using Verisign SSL certificates to ensure we only connect to the authentic ones

The messages are near real-time, we just don’t need to send a whole lot of data, as SMS messages are fairly short in nature so bottlenecks with that weren’t that much of a problem (although they are for some things like contact storage).

LSL memory limits where a much bigger issue to the point were we couldn’t add some features we wanted because even with splitting the HUD up in a lot of scripts we eventually reached the point where the main code grew too large in bytecode size alone.

Securing Second Life: Will mobile phones be a gateway to virtual banking in Second Life soon?

I asked Ingmar what he saw in the future for Outside In applications for mobile phones and Second Life. And what were the challenges to making mobile phones an interface to virtual banking in Second Life? Re the second question issues of security are of course paramount. Ingmar began by pointing out that the introduction of Mono will make big differences for securing data messaging in and out of Second Life.

But the other major issue is that any bank (and all users) are trusting Linden Lab not to interfere - since Second Life currently runs on their servers. [I have written re LL 's intention to allow "trusted" providers to run Second Life on their own servers here.]

Mono is no manna from heaven. But it will hopefully help with the current limitations of LSL in that it will be faster and allow more memory - which is what’s currently limiting security because you can’t even fit a modern algorithm into LSL.

But you managed to do this project on LSL?

LSL is actually quite cool for what it is. I think this is one of the most complex items done in LSL The amount of linkmessages it uses internally is staggering (it spams you horribly when you actually make them visible).

Mono just runs bytecode so you have to have a compiler that converts any language to mono bytecode. I think LL was definitely intending for LSL to be one of those languages, and another hopefully will be Python.

Did you use Python for this?

No the backend is written in PHP. Personally I prefer Python but I did not write the backend, a Vodafone tech (Bruno Rodrigues) did. And we designed the protocol/API together. RRR did consulting work on the development of the backend (like explaining why some stuff should be done on the backend, because it’s such a pain to do it in LSL), but obviously left the telecomms stuff to them (things like integrating SMS messaging and calls).

Are you thinking of developing some OutsideIn project, e.g., mobile dashboards for SL?

Hm, interesting idea, but that’s really the opposite direction - bringing SL onto mobile devices. I can’t really talk about that at this time

Aung San Suu Kyi, avatar chain on Second Life, Burma monks, Clear Ink, creating an API for Second Life, Free Burma, Ingmar RiversRunRed, InsideOut, Justin Bovington, LSL, mobile banking, mobile phones and Second Life, mobile phones and the metaverse, Myanmar, Myanmar Monks, Newt Gingrich, Newt Gingrich on Second Life, Open Source, open source and Second Life, open source and the metaverse, Rivers Run Red, Second Life, the mobile space and Second Life, virtual banking, Vodafone, Vodafone in Second Life Vodafone InsideOut

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is singularity?

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

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

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

What is Artificial General Intelligence?

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

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

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

Second Life as an incubator of Artificial General Intelligence

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

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

Skyping from New York City to China with Dr Ben Goertzel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harnessing The Wisdom of Crowds

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

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

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

China and Artificial General Intelligence in Virtual Worlds

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

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

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

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

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

How Can Virtual Agents Work In a Virtual Economy?

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

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

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

– companies hire virtual agents as employees.

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

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

“Openess and the Metaverse Singularity”

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

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

As part of his conclusion Jamais writes:

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

Novamente and Open Source

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

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

1) Will open source get to powerful AGI faster?

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

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

Artificial General Intelligence at home

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

As Goertzel explains it,

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

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

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

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

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

Artificial General Intelligence and Artificial Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell us a little bit about Vulcano!

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

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

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

How do people become involved in the Vulcano project?

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

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

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

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

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

How are Genetic Algorithms integrated into interactions on Vulcano?

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

How do they learn or know these techniques?

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

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

Yes, it is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital Earth, Virtual Worlds and Our Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

I asked Dr Foresman how he became involved Keyhole Corp.

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

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

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

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

Imagining a Future

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

The ITC Framework for the Operating System for Planet Earth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Active distributed community and the networked intelligence of humankind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fireworks on Coventry Island

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

active distributed commun