Neogence is on stealth mode with an immersive mobile augmented reality platform – “tools, sdk, and infrastructure plus some applications.” They are probably six months away from YouTubing anything according to CEO, Robert Rice.  But Robert rustled up this pic for me – a Google street view of Neogence R&D labs: “the patio on the lower left is where I do a lot of pacing and smoking my pipe and the porch and office upstairs is where  a lot of  meetings have been held.”

Robert Rice (@RobertRice ), CEO of Neogence, recently tweeted:

I’m changing my name to Robert Mobile Ubiquitous Geospatial Augmented Rice. I’m betting on radical changes in next 18 months.

Although Robert’s new AR platform is still under wraps, I think you will get a good idea of what direction he is going in from this interview (full text at end of  this post). Robert is the author of “MMO Evolution” and is a key developer and thought leader in persistent immersive environments, simulations, virtual worlds and massively multiplayer games as well as large scale communities and social networking.

It is OMG finally, at least, for minimally immersive but truly useful AR.

Since the launch of Android a new generation of useful augmented reality applications like Wikitude are emerging.

After the last NYC Tech Meetup, my  friend Nathan Freitas,  (@NatDefreitas),  or rather Nathan Mobile Meets Social Freitas, demoed for me a cool graffiti app  he has developed on Android.   You leave a marker for your graffiti so other people can find view/add their own – a nice primal experience like pissing on the lamp post to let your pack know where you’ve been.  Also the graffiti app taps into a long history of  NYC street culture around tagging and graffiti art.  For more cool mobile projects Nathan is working on – Vote Report and data collection for mass events, a guide to pubs and nightlife in New York City, and more, see his blog, “Nathan’s OpenIdeals. With Camera, GPS, compass, and accelerometer, and APIs on Android for temperature, light meters, (no hardware yet), Nathan says Android:

“seems to be the platform most likely to socialize the idea that sensor data could be a piece of every application.”

As Nathan is fond of saying:

The compass is a killer app enabler!

Also see OpenIntents for some interesting Android Sensor projects.

Wikitude was one of Thomas Wrobel’s two top AR milestones for 2008 (see Gamesalfreso):

Wikitude I think. Seems the first released, useful, AR software.

AR Geisha doll is also a remarkable breakout for AR – but useful, nah.

I asked Robert if he also thought Wikitude and AR Geisha doll as  significant breakthroughs:

Yes,  these are among the first attempts to get away from the novelty of simply rendering a 3D object based on a marker and making it interesting.

Remember, one of the biggest risks that AR has, is being branded as “novelty”, which means “cool for five minutes but ultimately a waste of time.” I think we have a ways to go before something is truly useful, but as 2009 progresses we should start seeing some effort here. I’d guess 2010 before something really useful comes out…at least something practical.

Now, having said that, I should say that I expect entertainment and games to take the lead (as usual), although there are a few companies really trying to leverage AR and video/graphics compositing for marketing (brochures) and location based methods (kiosks, large screen projections, etc.)

So when is it “OMG finally!” for massively multiuser augmented reality?

The picture above is from benjapo’s portfolio on istockphoto – also see the istock video here.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang (who weighed in recently on the twitter-baby debates – see my KickBee Posterous blog) challenges design assumptions for augmented reality that take as a given the user’s desire for numerous private enhancements to their reality.

Alex points out less will probably be more so that enhancements do not impinge on shared experience.  See his write up of a talk he gave at the Royal College of Art, “and the end of my own private Shibuya.” Photo below by Stéfan, “Karaoke in Shibuya“

Part of the pleasure of these streetscapes is precisely that they’re collectively experienced, rather than individual visions: for even a brief period, we share with other postmodern, globe-hopping flaneurs and expatriates and temporary natives the light of the ABC-Mart sign and storefront.

It is collective experience of enhanced, augmented, virtual or real experiences that interests me too. This is one of the reasons I find Pachube and the EEML project of Haque Design and Research so interesting.

Extended Environments Markup Language (EEML), a protocol for sharing sensor data between remote responsive environments, both physical and virtual. It can be used to facilitate direct connections between any two environments; it can also be used to facilitate many-to-many connections as implemented by the web service Pachube, which enables people to tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices and spaces around the world.

“Distinctions between virtual and real are as quaint and outmoded as distinctions between mind and body” (Usman Haque)

Usman Haque (founder of Pachube and Haque Design and Research) points out this is an underlying premise of his work – and augmented reality (full interview coming up soon!).

The pictures above show the Haque Design project, Remote:

‘Remote’ connects together two spaces, one in Boston the other in Second Life, and treats them as a single contiguous environment, bound together by the internet so that things that occur in one space affect things that happen in the other and vice versa – remotely controlling each other.

There was a discussion in twitter recently about how the terms like Second Life, Exit Reality, Virtual Worlds are misleading and outmoded. As Robert pointed out we need:

one word please…that sums up virtual and/or augmented reality, interactive, immersive, virtual worlds, mmorpgs, simulations, etc… also, I really don’t like the term “augmented reality” or “mixed reality”. Neither is all that great. And NO “matrix” or “metaverse” please

Robert argues strongly that there is a stultification both in virtual world technology – much of what we call virtual world technology was already, basically, where it is now in the mid 90’s. And MMOGs have devolved into gameplay design “that emphasizes the single player experience and does nothing to take advantage of the potential of the massively connected internet.”

Robert suggested I take a cruise through a new Virtual Space -  CoolIris to find some good pictures for this post (note the partnership between CoolIris and Seesmic to Streamline Video Blogging. I added the Cooliris Plugin to Firefox and typed Augmented Reality into search and soon I was cruising a highway of images and links. The Road Map image grabbed my attention (see below). It shows the continua that the Metaverse RoadMap authors thought are likely to influence the ways in which the Metaverse unfolds. It is “a map of the spectrum of technologies and applications ranging from augmentation to simulation; and the spectrum ranging from intimate (identity-focused)external (world-focused)”

Quite to my surprise, when I clicked out of CoolIris to the source for the image, I found it had been drawn from a post I wrote in May 2007, Hybridized Digital/Physical Worlds: Where Pop and Corporate Cultures Mingle. My post talks about a number of hybridization experiments that were bringing together lifelogging, sensors everywhere, simulation, virtual worlds, and augmentation.

The striking difference from 2007 to now is that we have definitely moved on from mere experimentation. And the poles of the continua intimate/extimate, augmentation/simulation as expressed in the Metaverse Roadmap are now becoming entwined (note the picture above seems to be slightly different to the one used in the road map as published here – perhaps I had an early version?)

“Augmented Reality is not just about overlaying data…” (Robert Rice)

The screenshot above is from TotalImmersions video demoing Augmented Reality with 3D Cell Phones. Also see video of their immersive games, and FutureScope kiosks here and here.

Gamesalfreso noted that Will Wright, delivered the best augmented reality quote of the year. When describing AR as the way of the future for games, Will Wright said:

“Games could increase our awareness of our immediate environment, rather than distract us from it”.

Robert points out in this interview the term Augmented Reality itself has become associated with a very limited understanding of what “enhancing your specific reality,” is really about. Robert notes:

it is inherently about who YOU are, WHERE you are, WHAT you are doing, WHAT is around you, etc.

When I talk about AR, I try to expand the definition a little bit. Usually, when you talk to someone about augmented reality, the first thing that comes to mind is overlaying 3D graphics on a video stream. I think though, that it should more properly be any media that is specific to your location and the context of what you are doing (or want to do)…augmenting or enhancing your specific reality.

In this sense, anything that at least knows who you are (your ID, mobile phone #, etc.), where you are (GPS coord or a specific place like a cafe), and gives you relevant data, information, or media = augmented reality. Sure, you can make things more interactive or immersive, but that is the minimum.

So, in this case, yes, I think there will be networked applications in the next 18 months…mostly things that are enhanced by friends lists (you are here, your friend is over there). These will be *application specific*. My team at Neogence is already going beyond this, building a platform and infrastructure for other applications to be developed on…all networked through the same backbone. Now, in this context (the science fiction AR that we all dream about), no I do not see anyone else trying to leap a generation or two ahead of the industry to build a massively multiuser shared AR space. Expect to see things like multi-user AR games, virtual pets, kiosk marketing, magic book, “gee whiz” presentations (tradeshow booths, entertainment parks, etc.), and so forth.

Goggle’s Are Not The Secret Sauce…

AR Cat left and Robert Rice right

What has come to be associated with the term Augmented Reality, in the popular imagination – an idea of 3D graphics projected over markers that has been forever waiting for the advent of “wicked next generation transparent wearable displays” – nirvana for augmented reality. While such displays may be nirvana for AR (and they could be with us in less than twenty four months), Goggles are not the “secret sauce” of AR as Robert points out.

All the glasses are, is another display device. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you are looking at an LCD monitor, an IPhone, a head mounted display, or a pair of wicked next generation transparent wearable displays that magically draw directly on your retinas.

The real tricky stuff is what happens on the backend…making it all persistent, massively multiuser, intelligent, interoperable, realistic, etc. etc.

There has been quite a buzz going around about the new Vuzix Eyewear, and recently Robert talked with Vuzix and checked The Wrap 920AV eyewear out:

Vuzix is not alone in pursuing the ultimate in hardware, at least as far as wearable displays. However, I think they are much farther than the rest of the pack in vision, roadmap, and execution. They have put together a team that has a sense of urgency and ambition that will blow the industry away. After talking to them, I got the feeling that they really know what they are doing and there is a lot of mind blowing stuff in their pipeline. I’m sure they are one of the few companies that really gets it and has a clear vision of the future. Definitely my first choice to work with.

Hybrid Augmented/Virtual Reality

Cory Ondrejka posted this picture of the anybots telepresence robot and “congrats to Trevor Blackwell and the rest of the Anybots team on the launch of QA at CES.”  Cory (one of the founders and former CTO of Second Life) also made some predictions for Virtual Worlds, some optimistic and some less so, including “the increasing need to be able to diversify the Second Life product offering to begin truly rebuilding the code base.”

Robert is unabashedly irritated with the state of play in Virtual Worlds and MMOGS:

Unless both industries (Virtual Worlds and MMOGs) have some serious upheaval or radical new approaches, they will quickly be eclipsed by AR, which will eventually evolve into something hybrid..AR/VR depending on your level of access and hardware.

I’d like to see someone grab an engine like Offset, Crytek, HERO, or Unreal 3, and smack on a fat MMO server infrastructure (Eve or Bigworld)…toss in the right tools, and you would see a revolution and renaissance occur at the same time in the virtual world space. All the puzzle pieces are there, just no one is putting them together the right way.

I did just find out that Nortel’s WebAlive is powered by the Unreal 3 engine. You can try WebAlive out here.

Robert points out how rare it has become to see people really push virtual worlds technology and MMOGs into entirely new directions.  Although, of course, there are exceptions.  I managed to engage some interest from Robert in the possibilities the opensource modular architecture of OpenSim opens up, and the augmented reality experiments from Georgia Tech with Second Life (screenshot below) got praise from Robert for trying to do something new. (Georgia tech have also put out a virtual pet app for the iphone ).

But while Robert clearly has zero patience for virtual world technology which he sees stuck in the mid nineties, he notes:

the innovative and wonderful stuff about SL isn’t SL, it is what people are doing and creating on their own with terrible tools *IN* SL [Second Life].

The immersive mobile augmented reality platform Robert is building, he hopes, will generate this kind of user creativity but with 21st century tools.

So is it “OMG” finally for the Augmented Reality we have dreamed about?

According to Robert:

It really boils down to a markerless solution and a good application.

In the interview below we cover a number of topics including business models for Augmented Reality, e.g., how business models based on micro-transactions and virtual goods will translate to Augmented Reality.

Many of the challenges to becoming mainstream faced by virtual worlds  are similar to the challenges AR must overcome. Robert discusses these including the interface/gui that is a critical element for AR, solving the riddle of one world or many, patent wars in Virtual Worlds and Augmented Reality, the role of Augmented Reality in the future of sustainable computing, and what interoperability is about.

The Back Story for AR/VR…

In case you want to get up to speed on the required background reading for  Augmented Reality. This is Robert’s required reading list and Denno Coil is an absolute must see (feel free to add to this list in the comments, please).

“If you want to see the things that have inspired our vision of what we want to build, check out:

* Dream Park by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes
* Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
* Spook Country by William Gibson
* Halting State by Charles Stross
* The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
* Donnerjack by Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold
* Otherland by Tad Williams
* Neuromancer by William Gibson
* Idoru by Wiliam Gibson
* Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

and watch the whole anime of Denno Coil (subbed NOT dubbed!)”

Screenshot from Denno Coil from Concrete Badger.

Interview With Robert Rice

Tish Shute: I am glad to hear that you are working on this [an immersive mobile augmented reality platform]!

Robert Rice: We switched gears from MMO stuff about a year ago and we are finally getting some traction. It is very hard doing anything in this economy right now, but we found an opportunity to take AR to a new level beyond what you see on youtube. AR is still too “cute” and novelty. We don’t want to play around.

Tish Shute: I like Wikitude ‘cos it even manages to do something useful!

Robert Rice: Yeah, useful = traction. Now that we are getting near a prototype we are starting to get a lot of interest even though we are still technically way under the radar.

Tish Shute: r u funded?

Robert Rice: privately funded, some revenues from an early license, and ongoing discussions with several institutional investors. So, we have some funding, but nothing spectacular just yet.

Tish Shute: are you just developing an AR platform?

Robert Rice: hrm, sort of, but not just that. By platform I mean tools, sdk, and infrastructure plus some applications. The idea is to build something that facilitates everyone else making cool things and useful applications for different industries/sectors

Tish Shute: Yes that is the cool thing to do but isn’t that hard to fund!

(Robert grins) Well, that depends on the business model. We’ve got that figured out. I’d be absolutely happy if everyone and their brother were making applications on our stuff that gives us an edge on market penetration/saturation. There are plenty examples that prove the model. If you give people free and easy to use tools, they will run with it. ARtoolkit for example, has tons of people making nifty things and posting videos on youtube that has pushed them to the forefront as THE AR middleware to use right now, or heck, look at youtube free service, and they dominate video sharing.  Sure there will be a lot of “noise”, but there will also be a lot of “signal” that will rise to the top, facilitating and enabling is creating value in its own right.

Tish Shute: But how do you expect to monetize?

Robert Rice: There are a good half a dozen ways to monetize AR or an AR platform.

Tish Shute: What are your top 3?

Robert Rice: hrm, microtransactions, localized mobile advertising, and enterprise solutions (visualization)

Tish Shute: Do you think the consumer market will give the lead?

Robert Rice: I’m not sure. We are getting people from academia, intelligence, defense, border security, and some corporate types knocking on our door already, and pretty aggressively. It may be that those sectors push AR before consumer entertainment really kicks off.

But going back to a discussion we had earlier – yes working with “no markers” is a big deal.

Tish Shute: Can you talk about what you are doing there or is it still under wraps?

Robert Rice: I can say that between some university tech transfer and some of our own proprietary stuff, we are using some fairly common visual tracking technology. if you are really plugged into the AR scene, you will know there are probably half a dozen visual tracking methods out there. We just looked for the best one, licensed it for commercial use, and then started working our magic. This is a very small piece of the overall effort, but worth noting.

The downside with working with university tech is that it is usually based on research, incomplete, and not wrapped up in a nice commercial package on the upside, it can be a good start to build on.

Tish Shute: As you know I am very interested in “technology that matters” in particular tech that can help us accomplish the urgent goal of sustainable living.

Robert Rice:: oh, I’m pretty keen on sustainable living as well…after I sell off a few companies and have money of my own, I’m going to get into arcologies
❦
Robert grins

The interesting thing with the visual stuff combined with our other tech, is that we can make things multiuser, persistent, dynamic, and mobile.
The markers (fiducials) are really really limiting outside of basic applications. You can’t really plaster everyone and everything with a marker.  And they are, by nature, static (even if they are animated or whatever).

Also… our stuff works indoors and outdoors even without a GPS connection.
❦
Robert grins

Tish Shute: Now that does sound interesting!

Robert Rice: Yeah, with visual, you don’t need a compass or accelerometers either. Less hardware : )

You start with wifi triangulation or gps coord to get a “brute” location, and then you use the visual stuff for down to the meter accuracy and that by nature, gives you your orientation and positioning.

Tish Shute: Wow this is beginning to sound very interesting!

Robert Rice: Once you have that, it doesn’t matter where you go, it continues to track and continually refines areas you have been before. We’ve spent the last year figuring all this out. There are so many problems and obstacles that are going to be developing in the future for anyone trying to do what we are, but we have already discovered solutions.

oh, visual tracking = gesture based interfaces too that’s going to take some work, but its doable.  The real pain in the ass there isn’t the actual tracking, it is in the interface design.

That’s something that almost every AR company, venture, and research program is missing out on entirely. They are so focused on making cute things with markers.  They are missing the larger problems of AR Spam, interface, iconography, GUI, metaphor, interoperability, privacy, identity.

Tish Shute: So how are you dealing with all that!!

Robert Rice: We took the backwards approach of trying to think where we want things to be in ten years (and we read all the cool books…Vinge, Stephenson, Gibson, etc.) and then we spent time trying to think of what the potential problems are….like AR spam. Its bad enough when a giant penis flies by in second life, we don’t want that to happen in a global wireless AR platform.

Tish Shute: Do you have a prototype yet?

Robert Rice: hrm, 6 months away from youtubing something. Problem has been slow funding, which equals slow development. We also don’t want to show our cards too soon…too many potential competitors out there.

❦
Robert grins

Tish Shute: when you say microtransactions what is the business potential there?

Robert Rice: hrm last year I think, $1.5B was spent on virtual items. That’s games and virtual worlds. That should hit $5B in a couple of years. That’s basically people buying and selling things like WoW gold or items in SL or whatever. microtransactions, is basically the same thing, but in AR space.

Why couldn’t a 3D artist make a wicked animated 3D dragon, and then sell it to someone else? With AR, you could sit it on your shoulder. With a good scripting engine, you could train it to do stuff. Thats what I want to enable.

tools + sdk + platform = enabling people to make and create. Add in a commerce level (microtransactions) and wala.

Tish Shute: At the moment all of these virtual goods are very platform specific, is that a problem for you?

Robert Rice: Not at all. This is at a higher level. You have to switch mental models when you talk about what AR could or should be. For example, lets contrast the web and virtual worlds. For every virtual world you go to, you have to download a whole new client. Imagine if that model was applied to the web… you would need a brand new browser for every website you went to. That is just so…wrong.

It’s the same thing for AR…people are thinking about it with the same mental and business models and development philosophies as virtual worlds or web.  There are some things and aspects that work fine, but not everything.

Virtual worlds, are, by nature, necessarily different and walled gardens. The idea of 100% open and interoperable virtual worlds is a red herring…it sounds good but in practice it is a really dumb idea.

Tish Shute: I was wondering if you had a way to leverage all the 3D content already created ‘cos that would jump start things in AR wouldn’t it?

Robert Rice: Oh yeah, that’s easy. They all use the same polygons. Any virtual item in any game or virtual world is likely created with 3D studio or maya or something similar would be easy to convert and use.

Tish Shute: So people could bring their WoW weapons into your system?

Robert Rice: Not legally, but sure. Its just a 3D model with a texture.  It doesn’t matter if you use corel draw or photoshop or paintshop pro….or one screwdriver or another. Part of my team’s advantage, is that we are all experienced in MMORPG and virtual world design and development. We know the tools, the tech, and what works and what doesn’t.

Tish Shute: But some of the 3D content created in the social worlds is what has most value to people.

Robert Rice: Right, and that can be exported out easily.

Tish Shute: But back to “real” life applications. Is you platform really markerless?

Robert Rice: Yes.  marker = printed icon or glyph, also known as a fiducial

Tish Shute: But u must have some marker?

Robert Rice: hrm, more accurately, you need a point of reference.

Visual tracking has been around for more than a decade.  Lots of work for robots and other sectors.

Robert Rice: But isn’t the specificity of reference n terms of RL applications a vital key, for example, for a database of things?

Robert grin That is a different problem…tracking, registration, mapping, positioning, etc. That question has to do with mapping which is related to visual tracking, but not the same thing. We have a rather unique approach to some of this that I can’t discuss (patent pending).

Tish Shute: But for example, to create an augmented natural history of food – say I want to point at the slab of meat on my plate and know where that cow came from, what feed lot how it was treated etc

Robert Rice: That is not possible without ubiquitous nanotechnology. Shall I explain?

Tish Shute: Yes please!

Robert Rice: Ok, lets step back a minute and turn that burger back into a cow… the first problem (of this particular situation) is differentiating from one cow to another since most cows look alike, you can either attempt to discriminate visually (cow patterns) or use a much simpler option, like giving each cow a rfid chip in their bell, or hoof

Now, most people would try to figure out how to jam all sorts of info in the rfid chip, which sounds like a good idea, but isn’t, the trick would be to simply use the rfid to store a unique identifier with is then linked to a database elsewhere, or hoof.

That database should continually be updated with whatever relevant information you need so as you get close with your AR laptop, wearable displays, or embedded brain chip, you get the identifier broadcast, then you get the info downloaded to you, and it “sticks” to the cow with the generic visual tracking (object following, even simple bounding box is sufficient for a slow moving cow)

So, up to that point, you can get tons of information about that specific cow, that cow population (remember, AR is not just about overlaying data…it is inherently about who YOU are, WHERE you are, WHAT you are doing, WHAT is around you, etc.) Tie in data visualisation and some farmer tools and all sorts of other things happen. Now, lets move the timeline ahead a bit.

The butcher gets the cow and does his handiwork…because we know all the info about the cow, all of the meat can be properly labeled and marked. Ideally, with a UPC code or a unique glyph (somewhat problematic depending on how many unique glyphs you can create) so, while you are in the grocery store, you can access the relevant shopping data…age of cow, state of origin, type of feed, how many spots, how much body fat, which butcher, whatever not because of what is inside the package, but the package itself.

Getting back to your hamburger, the problem is that it is a burger…there is nothing to distinguish that burger from another one at the table…unless you stuck a rfid chip in it or splattered it with ink and a unique glyph, or maybe a special one of a kind plate.

However, a properly designed AR system could say “hey! that/s a hamburger! and I know I am at Fat Daddy’s Burger Joint in Raleigh North Carolina on Glenwood Avenue, and I know that they cook their burgers this particular way, and their meat supplier is those guys over there, and they usually get their cow meat from a farm out in Utah”

With ubiquitous nanomites or whatever, then its not that far out to consider edible nanos that are in the meat and that broad cast info so a slab of meat can tell you about itself and broadcast that to the general public.

Tish Shute: What useful scenarios can we create without the nanomites?

Robert Rice: If it wasn’t a burger or a consumable organic, the scenario changes.

Tish Shute: What is the time scale on nanomites?

Robert Rice: ehhhhhhh 20 years minimum if we are lucky. They sound good on paper, but there is a whole book worth of problems and why they are so far off…as consumer grade, all over the place, type of stuff.

Tish Shute: Did you see the Nokia Home Control center?

Robert Rice: Yes, I saw the Nokia stuff.

AR for sensors, like security systems, temperature control, etc. all become “sources of data” that a AR system can visualize. So yes, thats easily doable. You could do that in a short period of time with some half decent engineers.

The trick of what Nokia is doing is aggregating sensor data from a building/home/facility, mashing it together, and sending the mobile device alerts and data visualization conceptually rather simple, but no one has done it right or well yet.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Nokia pulled it off.

Tish Shute: yes and if they do and someone does an AR interface to it that would be an inflection point for AR?

Robert Rice: In a roundabout way, yes. You could get data directly from your house, or get it through your mobile device and in either case, use the AR for visualization and control.

The interface/gui is a critical element for AR. That is one of the areas where it, as an industry, risks doing a bad job and turning into just a fad or another novelty like VR.  Virtual worlds have been struggling with that for a while, but MMORPGs have had the effect of extending their life cycle

Tish Shute: Yes VWs have not solved the interface problem.

Robert Rice: The interface is one of their problems yes. Most virtual worlds are stuck in 1996/98

Tish Shute: If AR  is inherently about who YOU are, WHERE you are, WHAT you are doing, WHAT is around you, etc. seems that it is the ideal interface for home control?

Robert Rice: Well for home control, you must know:

1) Who am I? Am I authorized to know this information? Am I a guest?

2) Where am I? Is this my house? or someone elses?

3) What am I doing? Do I want to make all the doors lock? Turn on or off lights? Open the garage door? Trigger the security alarm?

So the same questions apply

I’d say that all virtual worlds are stuck in the mid 90s. They are at least a decade behind the game worlds…in technology, design, implementation, architecture, etc. etc. In my opinion, things like Second Life are shameful in how they are presented as state of the art, innovative, ground breaking, new, wonderful, and world changing.

But thats another topic of conversation : )

Tish Shute: Well for me the contribution of VWs is the presence enabled real time interaction with application (as 3D info machine) and context with other people.

Robert Rice: Oh,there is no doubt that they are greatly useful and have a phenomenal amount of potential.

They *could* be all those things I just said that SL isn’t…the problem is that they are either just existing, or they are meandering around without any real focus or direction. They aren’t evolving.

Even MMORPGs are losing their way and beginning to stagnate terribly

Tish Shute: yes I agree

Robert Rice: But, AR has the potential to change a lot of things.

Im sure you have seen the yellowbook commercials? The technologies you are seeing here are doable in hrm, a year or less maybe. The tricky part is the interactivity and AI…that is, the content. Everything else isn’t a problem. The avatar there could be photorealistic or stylized like a WoW character.

You could do that to some degree with markers for registration but dynamically changing the content linked to those markers is a little weird

(by the way, for the record, I like markers just fine, I just don’t think they are useful for real-world mobile applications)

I also think that the guys that want to dust the planet with miniature rfid chips are on crack and are going about it the wrong way

Tish Shute: A high level of interactivity is hard though. Isn’t it? Even in VWs it is very limited.

Robert Rice: it depends if you can track what the user is doing, and interpret that properly. Interactive is also a very lose term.

Clicking a button and making a light blink could be considered interactive.

Tish Shute: In VWs a high level of interactivity would  be to wield a virtual hammer and have a real nail go in! is physics part of the problem?

Robert Rice: physics aren’t difficult, plenty of middleware out there for it. The problem with that isnt so much the physics as much as it is the scale and purpose

Tish Shute: well for robotics?

Robert Rice: that gets into a conversation about meshes, textures, and volumetric collision detection and stuff

Tish Shute: virtual robotics?

Robert Rice: You mean teleremote/telepresence of real robots?

Tish Shute: yes!

Robert Rice: ah, for that, you need some tactile feedback and some other stuff – doable, but insanely difficult. That’s why you don’t see a whole lot of remote controlled surgery robots all over the place.

They do exist…

Tish Shute: Will AR contribute to sustainable living by freeing us from some of our energy hogging devices?

Robert Rice: AR will ultimately encourage energy saving and recycling. where did I leave a light on at? where is the nearest trash can? what is the UV index outside today?

Yes, computers are energy hogs, but as we start seeing larger SSD drives, more efficient CPUs (even if the number of cores increases in multiples), and so on, the power will go down.

Also, think about this…wearable displays potentially use less energy than LCD monitors on your desk.

Tish Shute: Yes I should pick the brains of my intel chums on energy saving!

Robert Rice: Getting rid of the monitor and switching to solid state drives will save an assload of power. Yes, I said assload.

Tell your intel chums to quit screwing around with single core mobile CPUs. We need multiple cores, that are smaller, faster, and use less power.

Tish Shute: Is AR is the sustainable future of VW and MMOGs?

Robert Rice: The fun stuff will happen when they are both integrated in some fashion.

Tish Shute: So perhaps this is why the Georgia guys are thinking in trying to combine AR and SL (see video here).

Robert Rice: That first video was pretty damn cool. It just pains me that they are using SL for it. And omg, all those markers on the table.

Although, I could care less about seeing my SL avatar on my coffee table. I would rather see an avatar representing ME in the real world, moving around in a virtual world that is a “to scale” replica of the real world. That is MUCH more interesting and innovative.

But even if I don’t like where they are going, or that they are using SL, the important thing is that they are doing something and forging ahead. I have a massive amount of respect for anyone, private, government, or academic, that is doing that.

And yes, the door (or window, or looking glass) has to work both ways for maximum potential, at least, that’s what Id like to see. They don’t *have* to, but it would be rather cool.

And going back to sustainability, AR has the potential to make monitors generally obsolete, laptops too. That’s a lot of power hungry devices with all sorts of metals and batteries inside.

But, even if the tech was absolutely crazy awesome right this minute, it would take a little while for consumer adoption.

Tish Shute: But AR unleashes the mobile device?

Robert Rice: Yes, AR is going to be built on powerful mobile devices for the near future, eventually embedded comps in clothing and whatnot. But that is a ways off

Entertainment is going to be the first huge driver.

Tish Shute: So people will get used to having a pet virtual dragon on their shoulder first?

Robert Rice: Yes, virtual dragon is way cool, easy tech for games, and can eventually be leveraged into a smart agent which becomes a practical application…agent based contextual search, etc. Yes, entertainment will also drive people to get used to the tech

Tish Shute: Oh thanks for turning me on to gamesalfresco!

Robert Rice: Ive noticed that the good stuff usually gets linked to there. They don’t list my blog, but that’s what I get for staying under the radar and not posting often. But anyway, gamesalfresco is the first place I send people that need a crash course in AR. Great site, great owner.

Tish Shute: So are you in agreement with Thomas Wrobel’s positioning of  Wikitude and AR Geisha doll as being significant milestones for AR?

Robert Rice: Yes,  these are among the first attempts to get away from the novelty of simply rendering a 3D object based on a marker and making it interesting.

Remember, one of the biggest risks that AR has, is being branded as “novelty”, which means “cool for five minutes but ultimately a waste of time.” I think we have a ways to go before something is truly useful, but as 2009 progresses we should start seeing some effort here. I’d guess 2010 before something really useful comes out…at least something practical.

Now, having said that, I should say that I expect entertainment and games to take the lead (as usual), although there are a few companies really trying to leverage AR and video/graphics compositing for marketing (brochures) and location based methods (kiosks, large screen projections, etc.)

Tish Shute: Many people would say SnowCrash (metaverse) is now and Halting State (AR) is ten years from now. But you are seeing a development timeline for some popular AR apps in the next 18 months?

Robert Rice: Anyone that says SnowCrash is -now- is living in a box. Virtual Worlds, Virtual Reality, and immersive tech in general stopped innovating in the mid 90s. I’m continually flabbergasted at the number of people that think that things like Second Life are state-of-the-art or innovative. You might as well try to market a walkman as cutting edge, even though we have IPods out there.

Id like to see someone grab an engine like offset, crytek, hero, or unreal 3, and smack on a fat mmo server infrastructure (eve or big world)…toss in the right tools, and you would see a revolution and renaissance occur at the same time in the virtual world space. All the puzzle pieces are there, just no one is putting them together the right way.

Tish Shute: Why doesn’t anyone do that?

Robert Rice: Its not cheap, people will only fund a copy of something that exists already, people fear change and innovation, etc, The list goes on. The right money goes to the wrong people all the time.

Alternatively stated, there is a lot of “right idea, wrong implementation”

MMORPGs carried the torch and have made huge strides on the technology front, but have devolved in design. More often than not the gameplay emphasizes the single player experience and does nothing to take advantage of the potential of the massively connected internet.

Unless both industries have some serious upheaval or radical new approaches, they will quickly be eclipsed by AR, which will eventually evolve into something hybrid..AR/VR depending on your level of access and hardware.

But yes, I’d say that the next 18 months are going to be very interesting with a lot of money being thrown around, new ventures, and plenty of content/applications. I expect most of this will be centered on single user AR experienced through a mobile device with a screen (iphone, android, etc.). I expect that there will be a significant boost after Vuzix releases some of their wearable *transparent* displays, putting Microvision back into the “has potential but is too quiet” position.

Tish Shute: AR conjurs an image in many people’s minds of dreadful head gear!

Robert Rice: Yes, it is either transparent wearable displays (in eyeglass formfactor) or nothing. HMDs with miniature LCD or OLED displays are good for streaming video, but for the mobile ubiquitous AR we all dream about, it has to be something that looks and feels like a pair of Oakleys.

I should also mention that several different types and modes of AR are going to find themselves being defined and refined over the next two years as we continue to blaze new trails, establish a lexicon (we keep borrowing terms from games, VR, virtual worlds, mmorpgs), and really work out the how as well as the why.

Even though the idea of AR has been around for a long time, the technology is just beginning to emerge, and very few people are even looking far enough ahead to figure out the problems and solutions that the tech creates. Really, who is thinking about how to deal with AR spam right now?

Tish Shute: Do you see any successful networked AR applications emerging in the next 18 months?

Robert Rice: Yes and no.

When I talk about AR, I try to expand the definition a little bit. Usually, when you talk to someone about augmented reality, the first thing that comes to mind is overlaying 3D graphics on a video stream. I think though, that it should more properly be any media that is specific to your location and the context of what you are doing (or want to do)…augmenting or enhancing your specific reality.

In this sense, anything that at least knows who you are (your ID, mobile phone #, etc.), where you are (GPS coord or a specific place like a cafe), and gives you relevant data, information, or media = augmented reality. Sure, you can make things more interactive or immersive, but that is the minimum.

So, in this case, yes, I think there will be networked applications in the next 18 months…mostly things that are enhanced by friends lists (you are here, your friend is over there). These will be *application specific*. My team at Neogence is already going beyond this, building a platform and infrastructure for other applications to be developed on…all networked through the same backbone. Now, in this context (the science fiction AR that we all dream about), no I do not see anyone else trying to leap a generation or two ahead of the industry to build a massively multiuser shared AR space. Expect to see things like multi-user AR games, virtual pets, kiosk marketing, magic book, “gee whiz” presentations (tradeshow booths, entertainment parks, etc.), and so forth.

The big thing I’m worried about is AR becoming the next silicon valley trend…once they realize the potential, an enormous amount of capital will flow to a bunch of startups with half baked ideas, weak business models, ten year old tech, and a lot of overhyped marketing. That is the very thing that will kill this technology as something that has true power and potential to literally change the way we interact with each other, our surroundings, information, and media.

Tish Shute: Do you think AR has value for a project like Pachube that helps us connect dtat from lots of different environments and sensor actuator data?

Robert Rice: I think that AR has value as an interface to this data (essentially data visualization based on information streaming from a sensor or source that is interpreted in some dynamic graphical manner that has meaning). This is one of the “big areas” where ubiquitous augmented reality and wearable computing will really shine. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on Pachube .

Tish Shute: I can’t help it! I am really interested to hear more about the Vuzix glasses?

Robert Rice: Yeah, everyone is getting hung up on the glasses as the end-all be all and having markers everywhere too.

All the glasses are, is another display device. At the end of the day, it doesnt matter if you are looking at a lcd monitor, a iphone, a head mounted display, or a pair of wicked next generation transparent wearable displays that magically draw directly on your retinas.

The real tricky stuff is what happens on the backend…making it all persistent, massively multiuser, intelligent, interoperable, realistic, etc. etc.

I think that we are within 24 months of the magic wearables (these new ones by vuzix are probably the real first generation attempt at doing it right). They wont be perfect, but I expect they will be functional…and once we have functional, we can start doing the good stuff.

Tish Shute: You mentioned you disappointement with VWs and MMORPGs earlier.  Could you tell me more about that?

Robert Rice: Yeah, there was an evolutionary divergence between virtual worlds and mmorpgs a while back. One stagnated almost completely, and the other leapt ahead in one sense and devolved horribly in the other sense. Neither is where the state of the art should be.  That is a whole other conversation, and probably a second book.

Tish Shute: So making AR persistent, massively multiuser, intelligent, interoperable, realistic, etc. etc. that is where your efforts are going?

Robert Rice: Yes. I fully expect that the hardware is almost ready for it. You can cobble together some amazing things in the lab right now, and I think commercial viability is imminent. The real value (as far as I’m concerned) is in making it mobile, wireless, persistent, and massively multiuser. You could argue that augmented reality will take over where virtual reality failed and become internet 3, internet one being the internet, internet two being the web…

mmorpgs are nothing more than single player games in a multiuser environment these days. I’m more than a bit bitter about it. All the right money went to the wrong people, and the best games we have are barely shadows of what we could have had by now.

Tish Shute: Are there any open source AR platform dev projects?

Robert Rice: open source? hrm, Im sure there are multiple ones out there

if not entirely open source, there are plenty of things to experiment with that are generally free if you aren’t trying to sell something, DART and ARTOOLKIT come to mind as very accessible applications.

Marker based AR is very important right now…it is easy, low tech, understandable, highly customizable, and most importantly, accessible to the average joe. Ultimately though, we need a method of pure tracking…no markers glued to everything on the planet, no “billions of RFIDs” embedded in every square inch of every object on the planet, etc.

Tish Shute: What do you mean by interoperability in AR? And what do you think about the development of standards?

Robert Rice: Ooh, good question.

Ok, so the internet is basically computers communicating with computers, and the web is mostly pages linking to other pages (I’m greatly oversimplifying here). Hold this thought for a minute.

Switch over to MMORPGs. If you want to play in one (or a virtual world), you need to download a client that is specific to that world. One client does not work with another world. There are plenty of efforts to change this, but they are all barking up the wrong tree. The specific uniqueness of each world defeats the need and purpose of true interoperability, unless you completely reinvent the whole thing with a common backbone, features, functionality, etc. The very nature of virtual worlds and mmorpgs rebels against this.You absolutely do not want an avatar from second life running around in world of warcraft (for reasons that should be obvious).

On the other hand, with the web, you can use just about any client (browser) to access nearly any website (some requiring plugins or whatever).

The thing with augmented reality, is how do we go about making this? I’ve seen a few people thinking about this from the wrong perspective. There was a question at the last techcrunch to the Sekai Camera guys (a conceptual AR application for the iphone) where someone on the panel wanted to know how website owners would convert their content for augmented reality. BZZZZZT! That is a fundamental misunderstanding of what AR is, or could be, and it falls into the same trap I see a lot of people doing…and that is looking at AR through the web 2.0 lens or the virtual world lens. It is absolutely fundamentally different at the core…sure there are similarities: it has social networking/media applications and properties, and it has 3D graphics, but it stops there.

Ubiquitous augmented reality will be dramatically different depending on which standards, approaches, and philosophies get the most traction first. Will you walk down the street with your AR glasses and have a pop up every 30 feet asking you if you want to access the AR content on another server? Will you then have to register, subscribe, or whatever?

Or will all AR content be mediated by one sole master control server deep in the bowels of google? What about some other option? Will you need different sets of glasses to access different features and content from multiple sources?

At the end of the day, it should not matter what brand of glasses you are wearing, you should never have to deal with AR server popups to join/subscribe, and so forth.

Interoperability, in the context of what I was saying earlier, is the sense of how to build the infrastructure so all of this is seamless to the end user, but still maintaining the features/functionality necessary for all of what augmented reality promises us…I dont want to see everything in AR space, I want to be able to tune in or filter out some things, and I want to customize the snot out of what I see (perhaps changing metaphors or “holoscapes”), and so on. It all has to work together and simplify the end-user experience or it won’t get anywhere

Tish Shute: So what caused the stagnation of new development and devolution of MMOGs in you opinion?

Robert Rice: yes, look at all the hope and hype for the mmorpgs released in the last 12 months really, what is different or better? Now, what is worse?

I bet any decent mmorpg gamer could give you a list of 2 or 3 things for the first question and 20-30 things for the second.

And, VWs seem to be stuck in a feedback loop

Tish Shute: feedback loop?

Robert Rice: Imagine nailing one of your feet to the ground and then trying to run ’round and ’round and ’round.

Tish Shute: Why do you think this happened to VWs?

Robert Rice: Men in suits and flashy watches.

actually, hang on…..

I saw a video clip the other day from a conference about using various virtual and game technologies for simulations and other real world applications several people were talking about “avatar technology” and how theirs was better than their competitions and what not.

Now, can you tell me what “avatar technology” is? Avatar technology is a red herring. Avatar technology is the same thing as calling a toaster a new “fire technology.”

Robert Rice: The problem is that a lot of people that don’t have a clue about what they are doing are selling the tech to other people that have no clue what they are buying, but they feel like the should for some unknown reason.

That is happening all over the government, academic, and industrial sectors now with a few companies selling virtual worlds (again, mid 90-s tech) as the ultimate solution to all problems.

Anyway, getting back to your question

Once virtual reality started getting some buzz, some people got greedy and jumped into the avatar/virtual world thing and tried making it commercial too soon half of the 3D chat worlds were being jammed into platforms for virtual shopping malls.

Most of the money funding tech R&D started funneling towards VRML, and doing 3D in web pages, etc.

Tish Shute: yes horrible idea trying make web pages 3D IMHO

Robert Rice: The money people got involved too soon, and then the greedy people jumped in and tried patenting everything possible. Take a look at the worlds.com patent for 3D worlds.

They filed it back in 2000 or so and it was awarded in 07 (it shouldnt have been in my opinion) now they are suing everyone they can.

Tish Shute: Will there be patent wars in AR?

Robert Rice: Yes, the AR patent wars will be legendary once people start waking up to the real potential here.

The only solution is for everyone to band together and pre-emptively patent or make public domain every possible patentable concept, technology, or implementation for AR otherwise, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Tish Shute: Is the AR community organized enough to do that yet?

Robert Rice: That depends on how my company fares in the next six months.

Tish Shute: Will you patent or make your tech public domain?

Robert Rice: I plan on patenting the snot out of everything we can possibly think of, and then giving away our content creation tools and SDK stuff for free. The whole goal of what we are trying to build is to empower the end user and facilitate the creation of a wonderful world of augmented reality.

There are some things we will make public domain for sure, on top of that

Tish Shute: So back to my question on networked real time experience. Will we have networked Real time AR experiences in the next 18 months

Robert Rice: It is possible, yes. Other than what we are doing, I am not aware of anyone else taking the same approach we are, but the potential for an “under the radar venture” (much like my own company) is definitely there.

Tish Shute: Will you use cloud computing?

Robert Rice: I think that’s overrated and probably another attempt at the whole “thin client” model that some companies have been pushing for the last 20 years.

It sounds good on paper, but ultimately takes power and control away from the end user.

Tish Shute: cloud computing?

Robert Rice: Yes. You know, we aren’t playing around, We are totally building “THE AR” that everyone keeps dreaming about. None of this cute stuff you see on youtube. Actually, if you want to see the things that have inspired our vision of what we want to build, check out:

* Dream Park by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes
* Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
* Spook Country by William Gibson
* Halting State by Charles Stross
* The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
* Donnerjack by Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold
* Otherland by Tad Williams
* Neuromancer by William Gibson
* Idoru by Wiliam Gibson
* Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

and watch the whole anime of Denno Coil (subbed NOT dubbed!).

Tish Shute: So scaling the real time experience won’t be a problem in your project hehe

Cos no sharding allowed in AR right

And if you have lots of API calls?

Robert Rice:: haha, sharding is one of the dumbest things to happen to the VW/MMO industry

It is a solution to a technical problem that was relevant 15 years ago.

Tish Shute: so why did it stick (i know men in suits)

Robert Rice: it stuck because “thats what the other guys did” and the mmo designers are too lazy to reconcile gameplay for PvP and RP gamers

However, there is a curious problem between dealing with “one world” and “anyone can start their own custom AR server”

Tish Shute: Now that is a very interesting problem the one world and own AR server

Robert Rice: It took me a few weeks of not sleeping to figure that one out. It gets back to the interoperability issue

Tish Shute: What did you come up with?

Robert Rice: a solution. Thats all I can say for now on that.

Tish Shute: eeextra seeekrit!

Well I will definitely have to bug you on that.

The problem has produced some creativity in OpenSim with people coming up with hybrids of p2p and oneworld

Robert Rice: As far as virtual worlds are concerned, they need to look at the problem from a different perspective. They are trying to make all virtual worlds interoperable intead of creating a new model for interoperable worlds that new ones will be created to adhere to.

Tish Shute: well some people are. I would say most OpenSim developers see their modular approach doing this.  And you choose to interoperate based on what modules you have activated and then social agreements…

Robert Rice: hrm, thats a start, but that only works on a functional and social level – doesn’t account for content (story, mythos, game rules), unique data (my +3 sword), or the concepts of commerce, inherent value, and intellectual property

Enabling my WoW avatar to run around in SL and vice versa creates more problems than it solves.

Its like two alien races working hard to make sure that their two spaceships can dock but no one is paying any attention to the fact that race A breathes nitrogen and race B breathes sulpher.

Its technically possible, but they are missing the boat on the content side of the problem.

Tish Shute: Yes but don’t you think when a modular open source tech for virtual worlds  becomes pervasive, what will happen is that those interested in a similar genre will increasingly use the module in ways that allows their content to interoperate if they want it too

Robert Rice: everyone has to use the same backend tech, and the front end clients need to adhere to the same standards. Bu I have to admit, I haven’t been paying much attention to the vw space in the last 9 months or so.

Oh I have to run now.  But download and install cooliris. I promise you will be blown away and will start using it to search for images and videos

Its frigging awesome.

Tish Shute: Will do!  Thanks so much great talking to you. I can’t wait for your launch.

“Smart Planet: Andy Stanford-Clark’s time has really come. His career of work in lightweight brokers and sensors is now going to pay off,” twittered James Governor (@monkchips), Redmonk, recently.

The picture opening this post (from Andy Piper’s Flickr stream} was taken during Andy Stanford-Clark’s talk at The Inaugural HomeCamp (for more photos see Flickr “homecamp08″).

HomeCamp ’08 was organized by Chris Dalby and Dale Lane and sponsored by Current Cost and Redmonk. A video of Andy Stanford-Clark’s talk, by Andy Piper, is up on Viddler. Also see Andy Piper’s post abut CurrentCost meters and most recently about running his CurrentCost meter’s graphs on his iphone.

Ambient displays were a hot topic at HomeCamp see here and here for some good examples.

I first wrote about IBM Master Inventor Andy Stanford-Clark’s Home Automation project June of 2007.  At that time relatively few people were playing with home monitoring. But now the lynch pin of Andy’s work - MQTT and RSMB – Really Small Message Broker, is available free on IBM AlphaWorks for anyone to download and play with.

This puts a key tool into the hands of developers and mashup artists ready to explore the possibilities of home automation as a generative technology that can bring the power of participatory culture to the urgent task of creating sustainable living.  Andy points out:

“Lots of people can start playing with home energy monitoring, social aspects of the data sharing, home automation, ambient displays, etc. The powerful thing about messaging middleware like MQTT, is that you don’t have to worry about how to get the messages from A to B: you can focus on how to capture the data, and what to do with it when it gets to the other end.”

The full interview, that I did with Andy last week, is later in this post.

Also recently, I did an interview with Gavin Starks, founder of AMEE. As a neutral data aggregation platform, “AMEE’s vision is to enable the measurement of the “Carbon Footprint” of everything on Earth.”  A press release last week announced that a “collaboration between O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures (OATV), Union Square Ventures (USV) and The Accelerator Group (TAG) will enable AMEE to expand its reach by enhancing its data, and extend globally.”

The combination of a neutral aggregation platform and MQTT and RSMB can enable new forms of data sharing to meet broader sustainability goals (see my interview with Gavin for AMEE’s direction re privacy and data sharing), and the kind of ecological intelligence that Larry Brilliant, Google.org,  talked about at Web 2.0 Summit.  Dan Goleman’s new book: “Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything,” will come out in April, 2009. (see my previous post).

There is already a virtual worlds integration to AMEE by Jim Purbrick of Linden Lab!

Links For HomeCamp ’08

Chris Dalby has a list of blog posts about homecamp in his HomeCamp Review.

Homecamp by Dale Lane
Home Camp Unconference – inspired me by the thoughts
The Inaugural Homecamp
Home Camp Deman Shifting
Homecamp from Phoebe Bright
Homecamp ’08
HomeCamp Event: Andy Stanford-Clark’s View

Virtual HomeCamp

In 2007, I published the picture below (thanks Annie Ok as Destroy Television for SL pics) which shows:

On the right the virtualization of Andy’s RL house which is part of a Second Life Real Life Home Automation project. The pictures in the bottom row shows Mrs Stanford-Clark’s Real Life Llamas on the left and their virtual counterparts on Second Life on the right. Real and Virtual Llamas are linked through GPS and MQTT so people can “track the trek” when the llamas are out on a walk (see this IBM podcast).

I am currently working on a Virtual HomeCamp which will probably be nomadic from meetup to meetup but will kick off in Andy’s virtual house in Second Life. Andy Stanford-Clark, Adam Frisby (one of the founders of OpenSim ), and Chris Dalby have all agreed to talk (more presenters to come!) at the first Virtual HomeCamp.

Charles Crinke, OpenSim has offered Virtual HomeCamp a patch of land on OSGrid, and to give a talk on interesting home automation projects to get started in OpenSim. Charles has a cornucopia of great ideas!

And Kyle Gomboy (avatar G2 Proto) of the Microsoft Developer Community has set up an OpenSim on ReactionGrid that virtual HomeCampers can use to develop projects related to participatory culture and sustainable living.

The interview with Andy Stanford-Clark in this post gives Virtual HomeCampers some great ideas for good projects “that matter” to work on.

If you have a Second Life or OpenSim venue and you would like to offer your sim for a meetup – please let me know! Meetups will need to be streamed to the web as there is already a dynamic and rapidly growing HomeCamp community. See:

HomeCamp Wiki

HomeCamp Blog

HomeCamp on Upcoming

HomeCamp on Facebook

Google Group Discussion

FriendFeed Room

Reducing the Carbon Footprint of Avatars and Getting Energy Awareness to the Masses

As Andy notes:

“We need to get energy awareness and energy saving to the masses; and by saying “you can reduce energy by interacting in a virtual 3D world”, just isn’t going to cut it for all but a very small fraction of the people we need to get to.”

But, perhaps, some of our phenomenal OpenSim developers will push the envelope and produce the code that will make open source virtual worlds one of the most important future contributors to sustainable living. And, hopefully, Virtual HomeCamp will leverage both the collective intelligence of the web and the real time presence plus rapid prototyping capabilities unique to immersive 3D virtual worlds, to explore new ways to get energy awareness and energy saving to the masses in the short term as well as the long term.

And yes we will have to address the topic of those energy-hogging avatars!!!

Adam Frisby has been doing some interesting work with OpenSim that has the potential to reduce the energy consumption of VWs. And Michael Osias, IBM, told me:

“We operate the IBM grid [100 OpenSims] on almost all virtual machines with Xen. Recently, we migrated the opensim appliance into the IBM Research cloud appliance catalog.”

So I will definitely be calling on Michael and Adam to present on how server virtualization and cloud computing can reduce the carbon footprint of avatars.

Setting Up Your Own Home Automation Hub

There is an amazing choice of home automation technology becoming available now. Recently Nokia announced their home automation ecosystem – available in late 2009. And I recently saw The Apple Macintosh Z – Wave Home Automation System. If you don’t already, start checking out Automated Home for lots of good ideas and smart devices.

In the interview below, Andy describes how he achieves some impressive energy consumption reduction with some very affordable and readily available hardware, a little detective work, and a tip from his son to examine the energy consumption of the home automation set-up itself. And with the newly “available for free download” Really Small Message Broker from IBM AlphaWorks, IBM has made available a cool way to give creative home automators a free vehicle to broker and share their data and integrate home automation in all the exciting ways we can come up with.

The pictures below (see here for enlargements) are the before and after shots of a streamlining effort Andy made on his own home automation setup.

Andy said:

“I’ve moved my entire home automation system from the pile of equipment shown in the first photo, to a single Viglen MPC-L with a load of USB serial connections (second photo).

The pile of equipment I replaced is: A Cisco wireless access point, an IBM ThinkPad, a  Linksys NSLU2 SLUG, an Arcom Viper, and an Arcom Field Sentry I/O box.

Moving to the Viglen and turning off all that lot, has replaced 50W of always-on standby power with 10W, i.e. 40W less, or about £40 a year!”

See Chris Dalby’s post, Viglen MPC-L Useful Commands and Tips.

Interview With Andy Stanford-Clark

Tish Shute: I just got a good question for you from Gavin Starks AMEE, “if the Stern report is going to be out by 100% by 2020, and we have to start seeing an actual reduction of 10% per annum starting next year: What would you do, personally?” (See The Climate Safety report, backed by IPCC).

Andy Stanford-Clark: Oh, man! Now you’re asking the tough questions!

We have to change attitudes, otherwise just a few people making a noise about this stuff isn’t going to make any significant difference – and the way to change attitudes is by starting to make people aware of just how much energy various things we have, and things we do, take. But it needs to be something in each person’s home, that’s not “in your face”… something more subtle – “ambient”… otherwise people reject it out of hand.

Also, people are suspicious of the power companies asking us to use less power: “what, give you less money?? Surely there’s a catch?” This is a real problem. Someone phoned one of the power companies here and accused them of sending her an energy monitor that would suck electricity out of the wall socket at night, to INCREASE her bill! If that’s the kind of thing we’re up against, it’s going to be a long journey!

Tish: So what it the best way to change attitudes  – have you seen projects like Wattzon?

Andy SC: Yes, projects like Wattzon are exactly the kind of thing that start to make people realise the true cost of wasting energy.

Personally, my family has reduced our home electricity bill by 30%, which is great! But my neighbours didn’t, nor the other 4 billion or so people who have electricity.

Tish: How did you reduce your consumption so much?

Andy SC: We reduced our home electricity bill when we got a currentcost meter – a plug-in energy monitor which gives a total for the whole house.  When we got it, it showed up really quickly a couple of things…. that our “standby power” was really high (i.e. in the middle of the night, when everyone’s asleep, you creep up to the meter with a torch (flashlight <grin>) and see what it’s showing).

That was about 500 Watts before we started paying attention to it. The other thing was the lights.. I had no idea the lights in the kitchen used 480 Watts.. we just used to leave them on all the time when we were in the house. A simple change, once I realised: turn them off when you leave the room!

Our standby power was really high because I had a load of geeky home automation stuff running, and my first-generation, homebrew, energy monitoring solution (how ironic!)… which included 3 laptops doing various things (monitoring data and displaying information round the house). I just didn’t think about the cost.

So one weekend we went round the house making an inventory in each room of things that were on (the children were keen to help!). That enabled me to pretty much track down the whole 500 W… there were a few things that took some sleuthing, like the alarm system and the central heating controller. We used a plug-in meter to see what individual appliances were using.. a really useful diagnostic aid.

It’s worth having a look at AutomatedHome’s review of these energy monitoring products, by the way.

So I turned off a load of things that were sitting there on standby.. things like stereo, microwave, scanner, Wii, power bricks… each taking 4-6 Watts just doing nothing – each one small, but it all adds up. The big hitters were the PCs… turned off 3 of those, and consolidated onto a low power (10W) Linux server (Viglen MPC-L)…so that got our standby power down to 180 watts. And that, combined with being proactive about turning off lights, reduced our power usage from 900 KWH a month to 600… i.e. 30% and it has been at that for 4 months now.

Tish: Interesting that your home automation was one of the power issues as I am an aspiring home automator myself!

Andy SC: Yes, you have to strike a balance of using energy to save energy, and make sure you know what your standby power is. There are a number of home energy monitors available – there’s a review on the AutomatedHome blog. The CurrentCost meter has a handy serial port so you can plug it into a computer to download history data or make it live on the internet.

Tish: That is interesting because it opens the door to having a social energy network, doesn’t it?

Andy SC: Yes.. absolutely… you should watch my intro talk at HomeCamp! About 50 of us at IBM in the UK (and one in Australia!) have put our home energy graphs online using a currentcost meter plus a cheap low power Linux server like the Viglen MPC-L or Linksys NSLU2 (SLUG) type devices.

And a community has formed around the graphs (I described this in my HomeCamp talk at some point).. so people ask what’s that spike, or why’s yours so high in the morning, or how do you get your standby power so low.. and people talk about it and exchange ideas. There’s a facebook group (currentcost) too, with people talking about this.

And there’s some peer pressure too.. if my power is really high compared with everyone else, I feel bad about it and see what I can do to reduce it.. or if not reduce it, at least know why it’s high, and have been through a process to justify that to myself.

Tish: You mentioned earlier that it was important to have ambient solutions, not “in your face” messages from Big Brother like “turn your lights off now!” What kind of “ambient” solutions have you been working on?

Andy SC: Ok – ambient devices … so an “orb” is a good example.. wired up to the home automation system, or the energy monitor.. or maybe even controlled by the power company…

It glows different colours (e.g. blue through red, or red/amber/green) to tell me how “healthy” the house is from an energy point of view. So I don’t have to open a browser and pull up a geeky graph and analyse it.. it just lets me know subconsciously how we’re doing.

Tish: But it doesn’t necessarily help you find out what your problems is, right?

Andy SC: In our house, it’s in my study, so when I go to bed, for example, I glance in to see it, and if it’s green, all is good… but if it’s still amber or red(!), then I think.. hmm – what’s still on.. oh, the dishwasher.. ok – that will finish soon… or.. oh, I left the heater on .. I’ll go and turn it off.

Tish: What do you have to help you troubleshoot the problem?

Andy SC: If the orb doesn’t jog your memory, then you can pull up the graph to give more information, or a dashboard which shows various things that are turned on, both of which help with knowing what’s going on.

Tish: And how to fix it?

Andy SC: Yes, so if things are on X10 or other appliance control systems like Bye Bye Standby, for example, and under computer control, then you can have a dashboard of what’s on so you can see.

Tish: Good interfaces to home automation seem to be a problem yet to be solved?

Andy SC: There’s at least one company which has technology to analyze your power usage (voltage and current together) to “learn” which appliance has which profile on the graph, so you can see what’s on that’s using lots of power and also get a pie chart view of the whole house with slices showing different appliances – so many % for the TV, so many for freezer, etc. that’s Onzo.com . Their product isn’t out yet, but will give a much finer grain understanding of what’s using the power in your home.

There are also some “IAM’s”.. Individual Appliance Monitors, which are like the plug-in meter I showed you, but with a (usually wireless) link back to a base station to tell you how much power is flowing through each of them. So by knowing what appliances you plugged into your IAMs round the house, you can break out the usage by appliance. And if they’re 2-way, which some of them will be, you can have the computer turn them off if you tell it, say from the web, or your mobile phone, etc. Or maybe the home automation system will make an autonomous decision to turn it off for you!

Back to interfaces to home automation: there are two typical approaches – PLC (power line carrier) like X10, and wireless (like Bye Bye Standby, etc)… there are computer interfaces to both, but it’s all still quite expensive (in UK at least – cheaper in the US because X10 is more ubiquitous)…  but the cheaper ones don’t tell you that they definitely turned the device on or off – all you know is that the command was sent out. It might not have got there, so you don’t really know if the heater got turned off.. unless you monitor it by some secondary means, like seeing if the temperature goes down, or if the power usage goes down, or (for a light) if the room goes dark, or whatever.

BTW, my standby is now down to 120 watts

Tish: Yes!

Andy SC: I consolidated some more home automation stuff into one device.. there are two photos on this page – my “before” and “after” shots. It gets a mention in the podcast. They did a promotion on the low power Viglen servers.. £80 instead of £150… bargain! Loads of people have bought them for home automation.. you can’t have failed to see the #viglen references on twitter over the past few months!

Tish: I think there is a lot of enthusiasm for virtual worlds as a good interface for home automation. But we need to come up with something simple enough for everyone?

Andy SC: Yes, virtual worlds are very interesting.. though let’s not mention the carbon cost of running a VW!

So you know already, I think, that I can control my home automation stuff from SL… if I turn on my lights in SL, my FL (first life, i.e. here!) lights turn on, and also meter reading.. my live electricity and water meter readings are displayed on virtual meters in my virtual house so the meter reader doesn’t even need to drive to my house <grin> and the orb is there too, so I can see how healthy the house is, energy-wise, in-world.

Imagine a row of houses each glowing blue through red according to its power use – peer pressure again. If you have local generation.. the power hogs could be made to feel guilty for using all the town’s energy from the wind farm or gas turbine generator.

Tish: So every one would see if you have a Bad House eeek!

Andy SC: right!

The picture above shows Andy Stanford-Clark’s electricity meter in Second Life.

Tish: Yes and the great thing about a VW is you get a sense of confidence your controls are working and how to adjust them. But yes the carbon cost is one of the obstacles.

Do you think the power hogging sims of Virtual Worlds could be improved by server virtualization techniques and clouds – I know there is an IBMer here in US who is working on server virtualization integrated into OpenSim?

Andy SC: Yes, cloud technologies have a lot to offer in terms of making best use of a set of machines to run a set of applications, rather than one machine per application as often tends to be the case.

And with dynamic load balancing, like we do for our sporting event on-demand server farms for things like Wimbledon, as the load ramps up, we squeeze out the other apps that are using the farm to give extra capacity (as Wimbledon takes priority in that instance!)

But there was a popular statistic when SL became really popular – over a year ago now, that was something like to have an avatar in SL for a year was the same carbon footprint as driving an SUV from NY to SF or something – don’t quote me on that till we check it … here it is – 2000 miles

Tish: Yes I remember Judge telling me about some of the interesting load balancing you do at Wimbledon.

Many of my friends are thinking ahead to AR solutions now too.

Andy SC: Yeah – AR very interesting too.. you have to read Halting State by Charles Stross

Tish: Yes loved it!

Andy SC: So “Halting State is to 15 years’ time as SnowCrash was to NOW, 15 years ago”

SnowCrash is effectively a history book now.

Yeah, I think AR with glasses and overlays is going to be really cool! In cars too.. heads up satnav..

Tish: Also could you tell me the role of the messaging technology you developed in all this?

Andy SC: using MQTT of course.. which is the area I have been working on with my team for the past 10 years: the IBM messaging technology which underpins all this cool stuff we’re doing for home automation, energy monitoring, inter-world messaging.. all that stuff.. all using MQTT and WebSphere messaging technology.

Tish: I would be interested to know more about how you see VR and AR with what we have available today producing a cool interface for home automation that could get some mass traction.

Andy SC: So I think the AR/VR thing.. at the moment, far too few people are using these technologies.. we need to get energy awareness and energy saving to the masses (looping back round to the original Gavin Starks question!)… and by saying “you can reduce energy by interacting in a virtual 3D world”, just isn’t going to cut it for all but a very small fraction of the people we need to get to.”

Tish: Yes in basic ambient ways first.  How does the messaging technology you have developed open up possibilities for leveraging network effects and creating new forms of participatory culture around reducing consumption?

Andy SC: It is important because the messaging allows the real-time interaction that can be used to give dynamic feedback, and it’s that immediacy which makes people react to changes.

And, with MQTT and RSMB – Really Small Message Broker, which is now available free on IBM AlphaWorks for anyone to download and play with, lots of people can start playing with home energy monitoring, social aspects of the data sharing, home automation, ambient displays, etc. without having to worry about how to get the messages from A to B.. that bit’s done for you.. you can just focus on the interesting stuff. Folks at HomeCamp got quite excited about it! And for those who care (e.g. if you want to link your home in to infrastructure like the power company or distributed building management, or whatever) then the MQTT and RSMB technology is compatible with IBM’s WebSphere enterprise messaging products, and so can link right in.

Tish: So people could use this to build some interfaces with projects like AMEE say? For example letting you know when your light bulb went out which was the most energy efficient one to replace it with?

Andy SC: Yes, indeed.. was talking to Pachube this morning, as another example.

Tish: What did you discuss with Pachube?

Andy SC: using MQTT as the feed to get EML data into and out of Pachube rather than over HTTP. That’s interesting because MQTT is a much more lightweight protocol, designed for small sensors and low bandwidth / expensive (e.g. cellular) networks… and it’s also true push.. i.e. data is pushed to you directly from the broker (the hub in the middle), rather than you having to ask for it constantly (polling). It is an easy way to interface existing MQTT/RSMB home automation or energy monitoring systems into Pachube and it’s scalable publish/subscribe.. so one data feed in, many data feeds out.  This opens up lots of new possibilities for Pachube feeds. Here is one Pachube feed coming from MQTT.

Tish: Ah yes, no polling! That is a killer in HTTP

Andy SC: Absolutely!!!

Tish: And other examples of interfaces using MQTT with potential applications in the sustainability area are …

Andy SC: The power graphs (as described in my talk) are a good example. Also when people start generating their own power with PV or wind, they’ll want to monitor the contribution their power plant is making to their power usage, and compare it with spot prices on the grid, weather data, etc, etc. These are exactly the kinds of data feeds that MQTT is great for.

Tish: As you said the most important aspect of MQTT is that it frees people up from having to worry about  getting messages from A to B so they can “start playing with home energy monitoring, social aspects of the data sharing, home automation, ambient displays, etc. …..How to capture the data.. and what to do with it when it gets to the other end of the comms link.”

Andy SC: Yes, exactly – the incremental cost of adding new devices and applications is very low, once you’ve got the messging infrastructure in place. So once you’ve got your home RSMB hub set up, it become easy to integrate new data sources and play with new applications which use that data in interesting ways!

I’m fascinated by the social aspects of energy saving – the way communities have formed around the graphs we’re generating from the currentcost data. I’m sure that’s only the tip of an iceberg – it’s still quite geeky, but if you start to bring in some kind of gaming or competitive element, then I think harnessing the peer pressure and competitive spirit in people will be a powerful way to encourage change in people’s energy-using habits.

Ambient displays are another area of interest – the orb is just one way of doing it. Using twitter to keep you ambiently aware of what’s going on is another, and there are other media like sound and images, which can tell you things in a subtle way. Lots of scope for more experiments

In a conversation with Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing) at Web 2.0 Summit 2008, Al Gore suggested that only the aggregate bandwidth of the internet could supply us with the kind of emotional intelligence we need to respond with appropriate urgency to the challenges of our times, for example, the CO2 targets necessary to avert catastrophe.

“People hear these things, and there are many other similar signals, and then the next day it’s gone. Now the neuroscientists have explanations for why that is ….. The urgency center of the brain is geared to snakes, spiders and fire and things that evolution posed as tests to our species…

But when we have to use our neo cortex to connect dots in an abstract pattern and then push that down to the urgency and fear center – that’s just a little footpath.

Its  like the internet, mostly, it’s an asynchronous connection.  There is a big connection going from the fear center to the reasoning process but just a very small pathway coming back.

It needs to be stored in the cloud. It is the aggregate bandwidth than counts. We need to have the truth – the inconvenient truth, forgive me, of this challenge stored in the cloud so that people don’t have to rely on that process and so that we can respond to it collectively.”

Tim O’Reilly responded: “Who knew you were the guru of Web 2.0 as well as global warming. You have totally outlined our premise here.”

(Photograph opening this post of the Former Vice President Al Gore on stage with Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle at  Web 2.0 Summit 2008, co-presented by O’Reilly Media and TechWeb. Produced by Good Company Communications. Photograph copyright James Duncan Davidson – see Duncan Davidson’s Flickr stream for a complete photo essay of the event.)

I was trying to find a word to express how powerfully  Al Gore addressed the Summit audience.  And I was discussing this with a legendary serial entrepreneur, Richard Titus, who is also a great admirer of Al Gore, at the closing party. Richard came up with the phrase I was seeking.  “He was totally naked,” Richard said.

Al Gore described himself as a recovering politician.  And yes, he seems totally recovered from the “woodeness” of politics and utterly at home with the “nakedness” of participatory culture.

Al Gore made clear that to change the world we have to change ourselves (he did).

Bertrand Russell is often attributed with the following quote:

The mark of a civilized human being is the ability to read a column of numbers and then weep.

Gore’s exhortation that the internet needs to be a puppy with a purpose resonated with his audience.  From climate change, global issues of health care, to rethinking global economies we desperately need to optimize our collective and individual intelligence.

Instrumenting the World: Life on the Cloud

Kevin Kelly’s  High Order Bit – a brilliant impressionist view of the internet’s next 6537 days describes what “Life on the cloud” will be like.

“If you are producing some information and it is not webized, i.e., it is online and not related and shared to everything else, it doesn’t count.”

This is already the case to some degree. And the challenge of understanding where our networked identities begin and end is with us. But Kevin Kelly points out, “life on the cloud” will heighten our dilemmas.

Nat Torkington’s presentation to the Privacy Forum in Auckland , New Zealand, “Web Meets World: Privacy and the Future of the Cloud” looks at our changing idea of identity through the lens of privacy – both “the nature of privacy” and “how expectations change over time.”  Nat cites William Gibson (interviewed by Rolling Stone on their 40th Anniversary):

“One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real.  In the future that will likely become impossible.”

The critical layer between this database of things and the ultra, mega cloud (see Kevin Kelly’s slide below) is the web of shared intelligence. This is where the transformation will emerge with its dangers and opportunities.

Brian Solis, in his excellent post, “Barack Obama, The Social Web, and the Future of User Generated Government,” proposes Zappos and their “public and transparent customer-focused culture” is a good model for how government can use the internet not only to push out its message but to create a whole new culture of participation.

Far fetched?  Watch Tony Hsieh’s High Order Bit for yourself. The idea that every interaction at Zappos has relevance to the value exchange between consumers and producers is a very interesting idea to apply to the relationship between government and citizens.

“Ecological Intelligence”

Instrumenting the World requires new models of data sharing. Last year, Cory Doctorow described to me an instrumentation model of data.

An Instrumentation model for data differs from a surveillance model of data sharing.  Instrumentation is “when you know a lot about the world,” in contrast to surveillance – “when people in authority know a lot about you”.

(Note: Mashable has an interesting post on the theme of a “instrumentation,” see:  Seventeen Killers Apps for Taking Control of Your Government:“Government is increasingly putting much of its public records online, creating opportunities for developers to build useful applications for citizens.”)

But corporate culture and governments around the world have embraced the surveillance model of data up to now.  I was fortunate to have the opportunity to ask Larry Brilliant, Google.org, a question about how the tables might get turned.  After his conversation with Tim O’Reilly,  I asked:

“What would motivate corporations and governments to participate in the kind of data sharing and transparency that could produce the changes that our world needs, particularly in the area of health and climate change? For example, why would corporations reveal the aspects of products we use and the food we eat that have negative effects on our health and our planet?” (This is more succinctly phrased than my original question!)

Larry Brilliant replied:

“I don’t know how many of you know Dan Goleman? He created emotional intelligence [quotient] – EQ. He is coming out with a book which I have just had the pleasure of reading in draft form which deals specifically with what you are talking about.

How we can have commercial intelligence. How we use the power of corporations and their various different stakeholders, including their customers to drive corporations to do the morally right thing by losing the commercial support of customers who won’t support them unless they are more green, fairer to women, respect gay and lesbian rights, do the things you would like them to do whatever that happens to be, so that you can vote with your dollars.

It is really a fascinating book:  “The Application of Ecological Intelligence to the Commercial World.”  I don’t know what the final title will wind up being but I recommend it to you.

Dan Goleman’s new book: “Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything,” will come out in April, 2009.

An Extraordinary Gathering At An Historic Time

Web 2.0 Summit was a brilliantly orchestrated gathering of many of the thought/business leaders and entrepreneurs who have shaped the internet as we know it today.

As my friend Jonathan Hochman, Wikipedia, said on Day 1:

“If everyone here [Web 2.0 Summit] shut down their website it would be the end of the internet!.” (See my upcoming interview with Jonathan on Wikipedia and Jon Brouchard on Wikitecture and what these projects can teach us about participatory culture).

But also in this elite crowd of “C” level execs were the next generation of entrepreneurs who are working on a hunch and prayer to create the future Web.

And this year, as the Web 2.0 Summit architects explained in their intro, the decision was made to extend the scope of the Summit even further:

“….our world is fraught with problems that engineers might charitably classify as NP hard—from roiling financial markets to global warming, failing healthcare systems to intractable religious wars. In short, it seems as if many of our most complex systems are reaching their limits.

It strikes us that the Web might teach us new ways to address these limits. From harnessing collective intelligence to a bias toward open systems, the Web’s greatest inventions are, at their core, social movements. To that end, we’re expanding our program this year to include leaders in the fields of healthcare, genetics, finance, global business, and yes, even politics.”

Truly an extraordinary gathering at an historic time – commencing the day after Barak Obama became President Elect, it seemed the causes and conditions for participatory culture and sustainable living were coming together at last!

Virtual Worlds and “The Web Beyond The Web:” Creating “A Supple Approach to Sharing Identity”

Virtual Worlds were not on the schedule.  But this is not surprising as their potential contributions to the very big problems at the heart of the Summit’s theme are only just beginning to emerge.

But new forms of  participatory culture were a recurrent theme of the Summit.  And Virtual Worlds at the high bandwidth tip of the pyramid of global connectedness and SMS at the bottom of the pyramid have a lot to teach us about participatory culture.

Crista Lopes recently co-founded with Christer Lindstrom a company, Encitra, that is focused on improving urban planning processes, starting with transportation, using virtual worlds. Christer Lindstrom has been a key evangelizer of PRT (personal rapid transit – see photo above).

Crista Lopes is Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine, in the Department of Informatics (full interview coming soon).  Crista is using the dynamic shared viewpoint of virtual world technology to offer a way for the many stakeholders involved in a city scale transportation infrastructure change to participate in the process of planning. Crista is working with OpenSim – see the video of  “Encitra – Creating Immersive Worlds.”

There are a number of use cases for Virtual Worlds in sustainable living being developed. I have written several posts on Oliver Goh’s work,  “The Path to Sustainable Real Estate.” See my earlier posts here, and here, and IBM’s Virtual Network Operation Centers.“

Also see the recent announcement from Intel Research to create ScienceSim using OpenSim (more on this soon). Justin Rattner writes:

“Wilfred Pinfold (an Intel colleague and general chair of Supercomputing 2009) announced to the Supercomputing 2008 conference attendees plans to create a new virtual world called “ScienceSim.” Supported by Intel and the conference committee, this collaboration aims to use these immersive, connected environments to further cutting edge scientific research.”

George Jobi, Intel, writes in his post on ScienceSim: “Intel is one of the founding members of OpenSim and had been building its vision of open standards based 3D web architecture around OpenSim.”

The Achilles Heel of Web 2.0…….?

As Crista pointed out:

“The  Achilles Heel of Web 2.0 is trying to build the concept of person in a platform that doesn’t have people, at the center of the architecture. With Web 2.0 we go through a lot of hoops trying to integrate basics concepts of identity and storage onto a platform that wasn’t designed for it.”

Most of us have bits of our identity scattered all over the web, e.g., partial friends list here, there and everywhere. Some of us have literally hundreds of different log ins and profiles. Our list of applications with pieces of our identity locked up in them might look something like the slide below from the High Order Bit of Beerud Sheth, Webaroo Inc.

In contrast, Crista noted:

“The key component that a Virtual World offers you is that you can take your identity from place to place and the presence of people is at the center of the whole thing.”

Crista has already submitted code that introduces hyperlinks to OpenSim (see here). Crista is computer scientist of many accomplishments including being the co-inventor of Aspect-Oriented Programming.

There is a long conversation in the comments on my interview with Tim O’Reilly about whether the concept of avatar is the Achilles Heel of Virtual Worlds. So I asked Crista:

“Are avatars the Achilles Heel of Virtual Worlds?”

Crista explained why she thinks this is not the case in the modular open source architecture of OpenSim at least.

“The concept of people is not tied to the concept of avatar in OpenSim: One of the important parts of the OpenSim architecture is that the concept of user is very different from the concept of avatar.”

In OpenSim, Crista noted:

User = identity +storage

When I asked David Levine, IBM, what Web 2.0 could learn from virtual worlds re sharing identity, David, who works on interoperability and protocols in the Architecture Working Group, said:

Immersive spaces, are the real time, multi-user online component of Web 2.0, and identity is deeply part of that……..virtual Worlds teach us, as they expose more resources to Web 2.0, that there needs to be increasingly “supple” ways of sharing identity that go beyond simply anchoring it on gmail or openID, or such.

Social media has been one of Web 2.0′s success stories – giving the impression that Web 2.0 has people at the core of its architecture. But, as Crista pointed out, this is not the case.

There is no way in Web 2.0 to do identity at the level of platform, at the moment. As soon as you want to create identity on the Web there is a big mess.”

Participatory Culture at the Bottom of the Pyramid: “The Web Beyond The Web”

The “Web Beyond the Web,” Beerud Sheth, Webaroo Inc quipped, is not his announcement of Web 3.0. Rather, Beerud is describing the parallel innovation at the bottom of the pyramid where lower prices on mobile devices rather than new features drives adoption and voice and SMS (short messaging service) rule.

SMS is the web of the people for most of the world.  The current ratio is 10:1 with 10 people using text messaging to every 1 that has web access and the SMS population is growing at a much higher rate than web users. The  innovation at the top of the pyramid, where a plethora of Web 2.0 apps are built on top of  http, looks like the unreadable slide above with a forest of applications.

In contrast innovation at the bottom of the pyramid, until recently, has been limited to ringtones, wall papers, and voice response mechanisms.  So Beerud introduced a new service GupShup.

Gup Shup = Chit Chat

“Think of GupShup as another cool word from the language that gave you yoga, nirvana and karma sutra,” Beerud said.

GupShup is a “Twitter for India” but on a vastly bigger scale (only 18 months from launch they are up to 12 million users).

But, Beerud points out, don’t just file away GupShup as another twitter clone.  While they have Web and WAP site, they are deeply intergated into SMS as the lowest common denominator. GupShup can be used entirely from mobile which is vital as they have more users already than the total number of web users in India.

This idea of fully integrating into the lowest common denominator medium, SMS, has allowed GupShup to grow extremely rapidly. And, interestingly, when you look at the use cases you see the end users are deploying many of the uses cases that are familiar from the web,

Beerud left the audience with the take away that all the use cases are surprisingly similar to the web as are the ways of monetizing them,  This is creating enormous opportunity for creativity and entrepreneurship in building out this web beyond the web.

He invited those who already know the possibilities of the web to come and join this new adventure.  The enormous scale of the “web beyond the web,” and the fact people are connected almost continuously, creates vast opportunities for participatory culture to expand beyond the small triangle at the top of the pyramid.

On the “web beyond the web” the potential of 160 characters is explored on a scale unimaginable on Web 2.0 where Twitter, for example, is just one app in a vast ocean of other possibilities.

Crossing the Chasm Between The Top and the Bottom of the Pyramid

This total separation between the top and the bottom of the pyramid is, in part at least, constructed through the current web culture of web exclusive subscriptions.

It is perfectly possible to write an app that would accept SMS text and post it on a web page without ever requiring a web visit from the SMS subscriber. The same app could also accept text input from a web page and send it out as SMS to one or many subscribers that have never visited a web page, thus enabling communication across this gap.

Oxygenating the System: Monetizing Doing the Right Thing

The VCs, business leaders and  entrepreneurs at Web 2.0 Summit had their entrepreneurial Spidy Senses (as John Battelle calls them) tuned to the challenges and opportunities of Web Meets World.  Some of the winners of the Web 2.0 Launch Pad Competition explored the premise that doing the right thing can be monetized.

Danny Kennedy’ Sungevity was the overall winner.  Sungevity’s aim is to “scale solar electricity as a solution to climate change.”  Their use of a Virtual Earth feed to streamline the installation of solar panels and ambition to be the SalesForce.com for the solar industry was a very winning combo.

Good Guide, a really excellent service (also available as an iphone app) providing a guide to all products from the perspective of their healthfullness, greeness and other socially valuable criteria clearly scored a 10 on doing the right thing.  But Good Guide’s ability to succeed on the monetizing side of the equation was questioned by one of the VC’s on the Launch Pad panel.

Carbon Networks pitched with the mantra “do the right thing and enhance the balance sheets in the process.” But the difficulty there, it seems to me, is that there are many questions re the benefits, or lack of them, of global carbon trading markets.

Carbon Networks argued that carbon markets, which are already a giant industry, present enormous opportunity for companies to monetize doing the right thing.

I asked Gavin Starks (who I interviewed recently about his venture AMEE – a BIG project to aggregate the world’s energy data) about the problems of carbon markets.

“They have high levels of inappropriate use even for a new market area,” he commented, noting:

“There are some superb projects out there, but it would be fair to say there has been good dose of snake oil in the space – which has certainly not helped to build consumer confidence. However, markets are necessary to engage with the scale of investment that is needed to address the issue – it’s the use of funds that needs more scrutiny and greater transparency needs to be given to the whole process.”

There are projects working with Voluntary Emissions Reduction which aren’t tradable on proper carbon cap-and-trade markets, “though in theory the step up to CERs (certified emissions reductions) isn’t too great a thing,” Gavin noted.

MicroEnergy Credits the  initiative presented on the Track Me panel by April Allderdice, co-founder and CEO, is a good example of this.

Gavin pointed me to CheatNeutral and their YouTube video for a hilarious and razor sharp look at the problems of carbon offsetting. The text below is from the CheatNeutral site.

Gavin also explained a new initiative Sandbag (beta). Sandbag aims to take the permits that allow polluters to pollute out of the system.

“Thanks to policy makers in the UN and Europe levels of pollution are now controlled. Permits must be bought by polluters to let them keep polluting. But there is a finite number of them in circulation and the good news is anyone can buy them. So by taking a permit out of the system we can reduce the amount of pollution taking place and force industry to invest in cleaner technologies. One less permit means one less tonne of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.”

AMEE is working with  Sandbag

Consuming Less and Redefining Prosperity

This picture is from the Sustainable Mobility Panel at the ASPO-USA Peak Oil Conference.

Perhaps nowhere is it more clear than when we look at the reports that link catastrophic climate change to the assumption of growth that what is really at stake in terms of averting catastrophe is not just retooling our energy infrastructure, but fundamental changes at the level of culture and identity.

Consuming less may be the single biggest thing you can do to save Carbon Emissions, Tim O’Reilly said, in his Tweet on “Why politicians dare not limit economic growth.”

A growing band of experts are looking at figures like these and arguing that personal carbon virtue and collective environmentalism are futile as long as our economic system is built on the assumption of growth. (New Scientist)

But few of us are willing to contemplate what a sustainable economy and averting the catastrophe of climate change require – redefining prosperity and reducing consumption (see Redefining Prosperity).

Web 2.0 Summit took on the challenge of reimagining giant industries like energy, food and transportation and how we might  be able to shift away from a culture of food and energy consumption that is basically killing us and our world (see Michael Pollan’s brilliant High Order Bit on the culture of food in the US).

The Summit gurus urged that taking risks and tackling very big problems has always been what Web 2.0 is about and indeed cultural shifts of the magnitude needed would be hard to imagine without a Web 2.0 perspective

Shai Agassi, Better Place, explained how paradigm shifts require new business models. See Shai’s High Order Bit here on the evolution of “Better Place,” -  by giving away free electric cars he is creating a new business venture that will bring clean cars into the mass market.  New business models not just new technology are required to drive change.

Breaking News From Reuben Steiger’s blog

First Israel.  Then Denmark.  A few weeks ago, Australia.  Today,  Mayor Newsom along with Governor Schwartznegger and the Mayors of San Jose and Oakland, announced that they would be making a major move towards bringing electric vehicles and the Better Place network to the Bay Area.

Please, visit Planet Better Place to sign the petition,  join the movement and bring Better Place to your town or country.

To motivate yourself and others how important it is to change patterns of consumption see Saul Griffith’s High Order Bit here and Project Wattzon

“…..from flying, driving, powering a home, eating, shopping, working and even one’s share of the energy necessary to make our society function. WattzOn helps users understand their personal impact on the environment and how they rate compared to others WattzOn users, as well as global averages.”

“The Secret Sauce”: New Business Models for Web Meets World

I spent some time talking to Don Dodge, Director of Business Development, Microsoft’s Emerging Business Division, about the future of  virtual worlds and what technologies he thought would play an important role in developing the participatory architecture of the web (full interview coming soon!).

“The question is how do you apply these technologies? Where is the best use for them? And this is the hard part.  When you look at social media and social networks and things like Wikipedia, don’t look so much at the technology because that is fairly simple.

Look at the rules of social interaction and how people interact, and how you put protections in there so that people don’t game the system or do bad things.  Look at the processes because that’s really the secret sauce of how it all works.  The technology is simple. It looks easy from a distance, when you start getting into how it really works from a social perspective that’s the secret sauce.”

(screenshot above from Threadless )

Also I caught up with John Battelle, Federated Media Publishing (see his Data Bill of Rights here), and Jennifer Pahlka, TechWeb, at a small press conference. I managed to squeeze in a couple of questions!

Tish Shute: If marketing has been the oxygen of the system up to now, what will oxygenate the system of the new participatory culture of Web meets World”

John Battelle: I don’t think marketing ever stops being one of the most significant pieces of the economy -  because it is, of the whole economy. So what I do think will happen, and this is the company that I run, I do think marketing will shift very dramatically in terms of its approach and how it is a part of the value exchange that occurs around goods.

One of the reasons that I had Tony Tsieh from Zappos was to show that.   Tony shows how every single human being in his organization is a marketer and sees every interaction they have as marketing.  Can you imagine  a company as big as Intel that has that kind of an approach?  That’s when we will have a real shift. Business models based on that idea are emerging.  I run a company that is involved in that. I don’t try to push it on the stage ..but I do it is right there Federated Media!  And now I am pushing it [laughs]

Its an idea that comes from all this staring at this. I do think marketing is going to shift quite dramatically. So we may see in 10 yrs that we don’t have a big media budget  pushing adds at people. But will there always be budgets for creation of value exchange between consumers and producers? yes! There will just be new models for how that money is distributed and spent and new services and intermediaries for that value exchange.

Tish Shute: But who controls definition of data will remain key right?

John Battelle: There is a reason why Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, MySpace, all of whom are here, and Google, are all about the data….all about the data….sorry I have to go!

Jennifer Pahlka: I think in addition to the enormous changes that John was just talking about in marketing, and I think these are very significant – the way marketing will be seen completely differently 5 years from now.  There is also the shift in Web 2 away from an over identification with  Web 2.0 as being primarily about and driven by advertising  because of these models that are emerging for Web 2 that are driven by data, driven by services, subscription.  There are a whole bunch of other business models for Web 2 start ups and for enterprise that really don’t have anything to do with that at all.

Tish Shute: And in terms of participatory culture and sharing data?

Jennifer Pahlka: And even on a simpler level than the data.  Think of a company like Threadless [see screenshot above]. Their co-founders are keynoting at our Spring event.  They have taken some of the other principles of the architecture of participation and the creativity of the community and built a whole difference around that.  And all they do is sell T-Shirts.

“A Billion One-Person Enterprises”

New York Times writer, Saul Hansell, in his article, “Web 2.0 Gets Big and Corporate,” writes, “the best minds of our generation are turning to the Web for solutions.”  …..the big companies that make very complicated systems are reworking them using the principles of Web 2.0 companies.”

But “big companies” themselves may soon be a thing of the past.  One of the potential futures many my friends in virtual worlds have been looking at is, “if the future consisted of a billion one-person enterprises.”

Tony O’Driscoll described some of his thinking re the role virtual worlds will play in this potential future.  See Tony’s presentation, “A brief history of a potential future” on SlideShare. Tony’s research provides a window onto the new participatory architecture of business, government and the economy and the ways the individual and the collective will have new dynamic relationships based on “co-creation.”

Second Life and Wikipedia are the two great experiments in collaborative co-creation. They show us how co-creation can be one of the keys to a participatory global culture and sustainable living – part of creating an alternative to this economy of escalating consumption that has us in its death grip today.

Tim O’Reilly has outlined some of the world’s big problems in his talks, and urged technologists to “work on stuff that matters.” I was one of O’Reilly’s listeners at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC (see my post here).

But, I found out at the Head Conference in London, recently, that O’Reilly is doing more than just talking about solving the world’s problems. The O’Reilly VC company is investing in technologies that tackle these big problems, for example, a very interesting startup, AMEE.

AMEE is a new company with a VERY big, world changing idea – “to create  a neutral technology platform to aggregate all the energy consumption data in world ” – “to be the world’s energy meter.”

I was fortunate, when I was in London, to get an opportunity to chat with Tim O’Reilly about AMEE, Web 2.0, and the role of virtual worlds in positive global development. Also, I met the CEO of AMEE, Gavin Starks.

We are still, just, in the pre “Internet of Things” era.  But, soon, as Bruce Sterling puts it, we will be able to “Google our shoes” or find out which super market shelves are out of sandwiches at any particular point in time! But for now, it can still be very hard to find a sandwich, even in central London. So, I had plenty of time to talk to Tim O’Reilly whilst searching for a hand held bite to eat.

We journeyed past several sandwichless restaurants (Tim picked up the Financial Times under his arm in the picture above in one of them), and super markets with shelves stripped bare except for some end of the day sushi (it looked scary so we passed on that).

Finally, McDonalds came through for us with the sandwich in the top left corner of the photo above.  The full interview is later in this post.

First, more about AMEE.

Tim O’Reilly says he doesn’t like predicting the future. But the future comes to Tim O’Reilly in very powerful ways.  And AMEE asks us to play a new proactive role in our own future. AMEE’s call to action is:

“If all the energy data in the world were accessible, what would you build?”

AMEE, to me, is a quintessential example of an effort to harness the key paradigm shifts of Web 2.0 (see O’Reilly, “What is Web 2.0?“) to tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems.

AMEE’s mission is to be a neutral technology platform, using open source and standards, and an architecture of participation, to address the need to standardize measurement, encourage collaborative development, and create a market place for energy data.

AMEE’s goal is to enable us to understand energy consumption from the level of the individual to the scale of whole countries.

This would address the need O’Reilly notes here his son-in-law Saul Griffith argued at Emerging Technology Conference earlier this year:  “to pick a target CO2 concentration and work backwards to get to an energy policy, rather than guessing at an energy policy with fingers crossed, hoping for a climate outcome that is tolerable.” AMEE is also involved in Saul’s Wattzon initiative.

Gavin Starks, CEO, AMEE, (pictured above standing under the Head Conference banner – a recording of his talk is here), explained:

AMEE’s vision is to aggregate all the energy data on Earth. By energy I include electricity, gas and all types of fuel, water, waste, you name it: everything we do is energy consumption, which means really building towards our sustainability footprint rather than just our carbon footprint. The initial thing we’ve focused on is Carbon and CO2, because that’s the most pressing issue we have to face: but it’s quite a thin layer on top of the whole sustainability question.

AMEE is not building the front-end applications to harness this energy data. Gavin noted:

We’re aggregating all the standards. This is a massively complex area, so we’ve got a science team whose job is to harvest all the scientific research and methodologies. That’s not something developers tend to want to go anywhere near: it unpacks itself into enormous amounts of complexity very quickly (e.g. building methodologies that have 700 data points).  Our Chief Scientific Officer, Dr Andrew Conway, is ex-NASA and has worked on massive scientific data analysis.

We aggregate government standards and other international standards, so that you know when you’re integrating with us, that you’re working to those standards. But much more than that we actually publish those standards on an open Wiki (the Wiki and the API actually talk to each other). As these standards emerge and evolve, we’ll be tracking them, ensuring that we are up to date, and granularity is added as needed.

We were very fortunate that one of our first clients was Defra which UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Defra is currently restructuring into DEC – the Department for Energy and Climate Change. So in the UK they’re actually fusing Energy and Climate Change into a single government department. I think this is quite remarkable: a giant step forward.

We were contracted by them because they were building a national campaign to raise the awareness of every citizen’s personal and household footprint, and they were looking for an Open Source solution – which AMEE is. Defra/DEC now use AMEE for two purposes: they make their standards available through the AMEE platform, so that everybody else can use them, and as the back-end solution to their national campaign, “Act on CO2″.

AMEE is SaaS – a web-service API – we’re not trying to compete with anyone on the front-end development and delivery. Because we aggregate two moving targets: standards and consumption, we enable those integrated with us to be current at all times.

Who Owns the Data?

But, if AMEE hopes to harness global network effects as a neutral aggregator of energy consumption data from individuals, businesses, and governments, one of the key questions that AMEE must answer (also a key question for Web 2.0 in general) is: Who owns the data?  I have delved into this question before on Ugotrade. See David Levine’s conversation with Eben Moglen on privacy here.

Gavin told me that this is a question AMEE has given a lot of thought to.

How AMEE answers this question, Who owns the data?, will probably determine the success of their mission as an ethical endeavor,  and their ability to scale and leverage the network effects of the internet as a platform while still allowing ” a very granular level of energy activity to be tracked.”

Gavin explained where AMEE is going re their approach to this issue. And, how this relates to AMEE’s business model – software as a service (SaaS).

We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to approach this, from both a commercial perspective and an ethical perspective.

We’re in a position where we’re aggregating vast amounts of personal and business information, on an ongoing basis. If we were to integrate with your credit cards, your smart meter, your supermarket, and your vehicles: we actually know everything about your life. Aside from the Data Protection issues we felt, “How could we protect everybody around ‘excessive’ exploitation of that data and ensure the user has long-term control?”.

As the saying goes, “we don’t know what we don’t know”: when it comes to predicting what our privacy issues will be, and as the data around our physical lives becomes digitally available, we wanted to err on the side of caution. Danny O’Brien, the EFF and MySociety have certainly helped to shape our thinking in this respect.

So if you’re a Google user and you go into the Google and you kick off a calculation, all your answers to the questions are stored in AMEE – but we don’t know who you are. We’ve got an anonymous key, Google’s got the anonymous key. Google will have your user name and so on and so forth. In AMEE we’ve got the aggregate of the responses to the questions. It’s up to Google’s Privacy Policy to determine what they and their user’s can do.

However, this doesn’t preclude us from enabling data-portability on behalf of the user. The anonymous key is not dissimilar to an OpenID, but applied to a specific data set. We are heading towards allowing you to control your data’s portability, as an individual.

It’s a fragile space. We want to give you the opportunity to glue together your AMEE IDs with your OpenID, or whatever login you choose, so that you’re in control. We aim to enable this to be both cloud and edge-based, which while fragile, is in the interest of the user. The more value we can provide, we believe, the stronger the value of our proposition.

But, because were dealing with a range of different massive organizations … imagine credit card companies sharing data with energy companies sharing data with petrol companies, sharing data with airlines etc. That’s a massive challenge from a business and political perspective – almost impossible to navigate.

We can enable people to collaborate, by making it opt-in all the way through the chain. We don’t undermine peoples existing databases: we can actually add value to them, or we aim to add value to them. We think this has got a huge amount of potential to stimulate new business for our clients.

It’s very “web” in its execution: we are part of an ecosystem. Part of our imperative is to be commercially enabling to everybody else. If we’re not being commercially enabling to other people, we’re not going to get the kind of scale of change that we need.

This was another design feature. We felt, “how could we create something which other people could build businesses or platforms on top of”?  And, how could that scale incredibly quickly? If we’d gone beyond our boundaries as an API, we would have been competing with people we want to work with.

While many services have taken similar strategic approaches, most seem to start with a form of lock-in, or evolve quickly to the point of lock-in, which satisfies a current trend in their valuations. We believe this trend will change and adapt to a more “privacy-based” intelligence, which has substantial value.

Tim O’Reilly in The Magic Circle

The motto of The Magic Circle where the Head Conference was held, “Indocilis Privata Loqui,” can be roughly translated as “not apt to disclose secrets.”  One of the wonderful displays of memorabila there was Robert Houdin’s Mystery Clock (picture below).  Luckily, for me, I was was treated to a full explanation of the “Mystery Clock” by another attendee during the Head Conference cocktail party.

As Tim O’Reilly pointed out, in his interview with Aral Balkan, he felt it was a privilege to be talking in this theater and center of magic.  Capturing the magic, spreading the magic, and sharing the magic is at the heart of what he has spent his career doing.  He explained:

I guess this is kind of a root idea for O’Reilly…… When I look back on my career….What did we really do?  Find cool people who were doing cool shit. They didn’t really need any help from us. But then there were a bunch of people who were saying, “How did they do that”? Those are the people we help.

We find the people who are doing what appears to be magic. The Arthur C. Clarke kind of magic you know…. We document – we teach people how to do it.

It is such a great  privilege to be here in a theater devoted to magic – The Magic Circle. This is really what we try to do.  We try to capture the magic, spread the magic, share it with other people.

Interview With Tim O’Reilly

Tish Shute: I was interested in your comment on Chris Brogan’s blog post the other day.

Tim O’Reilly: Actually it wasn’t Chris Brogan’s post. Dennis Howlett was a guest blogger. I was reacting to him saying there is nothing new in Web 2.0. My reaction was: “Well gosh it’s very easy to make a straw man out of Web 2.0 and say, ‘What’s new?’”

Howlett was specifically reacting to the Web 2.0 start ups that are superficial and not really what the trend is all about.  For me, Web 2.0 is about the internet becoming a platform. Does he think that is over?

And, it is about understanding that the rules of business change when the internet is a platform. I think a lot of people do that with Web 2.0 [make it a straw man].

They don’t like the term Web 2.0 and they attach ideas to it that reflect the most superficial elements. And then, they say these aren’t interesting. And, what he was saying was that there is a lot of superficial social media stuff – consumer apps, and what really matters is what will bring ROI to business.

I just said that he is totally missing the point because learning how to use the network as a platform matters very much to business. The same rules that apply to everyone else apply to businesses.

So, for example, I have made the point in my talk in New York, just a few months ago, that in many ways you can think of Walmart as a Web 2.0 company. They are infused with IP – they are taking the data that the users give them by buying things and making themselves a more responsive organization by using that data.

That is the heart of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. Not, do they use social media or not, or the social media buzz words.

Tish Shute: I am going to do an interview with Gavin Starks, CEO of AMEE. Could you tell me about your role in this project?

Tim O’Reilly: My role is as an investor. Our venture firm, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, has just finished closing on investment in AMEE. We think global warming is a really important issue to come to grips with. And, a big part of it is actually keeping track of all the carbon we’re emitting. AMEE helps with that problem.

Tish Shute: What is the potential, now we are beginning to break virtual world technologies down into basic open source building blocks, to create useful mashups with sensor technology, Web 2.0 and Virtual Worlds? Could Virtual Worlds play a key role in this work of instrumenting the world?

Tim O’Reilly: First of all, I don’t think that Virtual Worlds in the Second Life style will have this role …while I like the concept of Second Life, in that we have a Second Life in a virtual world, I am not sure that 3D avatars are [the way to go]…. at least they are certainly not my Second Life.  My Second Life is in other types of media.

But, when I look at this idea of instrumenting the world, one of the things that is very, very clear is that we are turning all the millions of consumer cameras into sensors.

For example, Microsoft’s Photosynth demonstrates how these consumer sensors can be used to build 3D models. We are starting to build a 3D representation of the real world, not a separate virtual world. And, we are all going to be part of that world. So I think that the real Second Life will be ………..well I think the first layer is going to be….to get the 3D models of the world as it is, and then we will have doorways into additional rooms and additional spaces.

That’s when its going to take off because people are going to get used to it through navigating the real physical world with maps – with 3D imagery of buildings and spaces.

And, another piece of this… I talked recently with Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk……and he was talking about how much even the Autodesk workflow is shifting to scanning things first.

He was describing how they have built this new demo center in an old building.  The first thing they did was photographs and measure it exactly. Then they go and make stuff that fits in the exact space.

Also, he was talking about how in his own hobbyist work, he found this shark’s jaw and he loved the curve of it.  So he scanned it and made it into the arms of a chair.

Tish Shute: I think the two important pieces that might come out of virtual worlds technology are the real time interactions where people can view the same application or context as and when you do, and the rapid prototyping.

Tim O’Reilly: Yes rapid prototyping, no question. But, as I said, the idea of moving an avatar around isn’t very compelling to be quite honest.

Tish Shute: But the web doesn’t do real time interaction very well does it?

Tim O’Reilly: Well Twitter is doing a pretty good job!

Tish Shute: Yes I love Twitter. But, in terms of if you want to get a 10,000 foot view and gather around and interact with data with other people…..what about that?

Tim O’Reilly: Well that’s true. I am using that example of the Squeak based virtual world that Fidelity is using. And, that is exactly what they are using it for – business interaction.

Tish Shute: What about the role Virtual Worlds might play, for example, in instrumenting the world through facilities management?

Tim O’Reilly: Yes, SAP did a very interesting project on property management – and that is interesting.

Tish Shute: Yes, on my way back to New York City tomorrow, I am going to stop off in Zurich and visit Oliver Goh who worked with Denis Browne, SAP, on that project. In fact you showed a picture of Oliver’s Goh’s avatar demoing the virtual counterpart to his instrumented Playmobile house in Second Life in your post, “SAP as a Web 2.0 Company?” (see the picture below).

Tim O’Reilly: I make no attempt at predicting the future.  So you could well be right that Virtual Worlds will be a very powerful tool.  But, I think with the pace that other technologies are progressing, we will get there with photorealism and video, etc.  I think the fundamental problem in most virtual world stuff is the idea of the avatar.

Tish Shute: Why do you say that?

Tim O’Reilly: Well just imagine if when interacting with people in the real world you had to look at yourself interacting with someone else.  First person point of view is our fundamental experience.  And, you are being forced to see yourself in the third person.

Tish Shute: I have always been more interested in avataring the world than in my avatar identity.

Tim O’Reilly: There is something very interesting in having an avatar that you don’t ever see.

[At this point there were less than ten minutes before Tim's interview for the Head Conference, so it was time to concentrate on eating!]

Virtual Worlds: Where Web Meets World

As Ian Hughes, IBM, notes in a recent post on Eightbar:

The last few days have seen a plethora of virtual world pitches, reports, articles and blog posts around certain types of virtual world platform. The first was over at @monkchips a.k.a James Governor analyst blog around a visit to Microsoft to see about the ESP platform. This appears to be a high fidelity simulation platform and toolkit. The second was widely reported. But Wagner’s New World Notes is the one most of the metarati will have read on the matter. This centres around some statments by Craig Mundie that avatar based interaction was of limited interest and really it was photosynth that was the way forward, modelling the real world from photos…….

I agree with Ian when he says:

the interesting thing here is that all the discussion is not about why would anyone want a virtual world, but instead what sort is best.

Tim O’Reilly was not questioning, in my view, that we are moving towards new understandings of virtual spaces or virtual worlds but whether avatar based virtual worlds will be the most useful model.

I began my questions to Tim O’Reilly by bringing up his comment on Dennis Howlett’s post not only because he succinctly states there what is really important about Web 2.0, i.e., “internet as platform, and the rise of applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.”

But also, this comment caught my attention because Tim used virtual worlds as one of the examples of the value of Web 2.0 to enterprise.  He wrote:

Guess what : they [SAP] understand that harnessing users is good for their business. At O’Reilly, our InPractice division is working with them to actually turn their documentation into an open source, crowdsourced project. They are doing fascinating experiments at SAP Labs with how to integrate virtual worlds into property management. They have built a great internal social network for employees that has already affected their HR practices.

It is Oliver Goh’s instrumented virtual house in Second Life that Tim mentions in his post “SAP as a Web 2.0 Company?” to make the point that:

This prototype is also very on trend with one of the big ideas we have about where Web 2.0 is going, towards Web 2.0 applications that are fed directly by sensors, so that “participation” no longer just means typing on a keyboard, but the accidental information we create “merely in living as and where we live.”

I have been blogging Oliver’s work prototyping various use cases for virtual worlds in facilities management and energy optimization, e.g., virtual operations centers, in Second Life and OpenSim, since its inception (see here and here).

Now, Oliver has developed a complete solution for sustainabililty in the real estate industry that optimizes energy consumption through the entire life cycle of properties - see here for more.

Also, look out for some interesting intersections between AMEE’s mission – ” to create the world’s energy meter,” and Oliver’s mission to “optimize the world’s energy usage” in the future!

I visited Oliver in Zurich on my way back to NYC from the Head Conference.  In the picture below, Oliver is standing by the Playmobile house that is RL counterpart to the virtual control center house pictured above!

The ability of virtual worlds to play a role in solving the world’s pressing problems is, in my view, linked both to their ability to fully integrate in Web 2.0 and “real” world  data.

I have been blogging a lot on these issues!  Rob Smart, IBM, (see my recent interviews with Rob here and here – “Web 2.0 to OpenSim Made Easy”) has been doing some very interesting work recently integrating JSON support to OpenSim. This is one of the recent important steps forward in virtual world to real world communication.  See this cool video, “OpenSim Meets MQTT jedi mind numbers.”

The powerful value add that virtual worlds, even in a basic form, have shown in the realm of social media that “the people with you can view the changing states of that application or context as and when you do” can also play an important role in the front end applications for projects like AMEE and Oliver’s work.

This is not to discount the role of social media virtual worlds in the participatory work of instrumenting our planet. There is already  a nice integration of AMEE  with Second Life. See Jim Purbrick’s Carbon Goggle’s for Second Life here.

Carbon Goggles from Jim Purbrick on Vimeo

But, if virtual world technology is going be part of the evolving power of the internet to help us solve the big problems facing humanity, there must be an evolving vision for virtual worlds and their relationship with the “real” world.

Most likely, many of the dichotomies, e.g., the notion of avatar based or non avatar based, or simulation versus augmentation, and mirror worlds versus virtual worlds, will increasingly dissolve as all these aspects of virtual reality are woven together into the fabric of everday computing to form new digital/physical realities. And, while I’m not trying to predict the future, perhaps, this will happen sooner than we think!

I have just got back from attending two conferences in the UK, the Head Conference, and Virtual Worlds London.  I was on a mission at both the events to ask questions about how Virtual World technology will answer the call Tim O’Reilly made at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City to “create more value than you extract” and do something worthy and useful with the internet.

The Head Conference was an ambitious, timely, and much needed creative exploration of the potential for “green” conferencing using Adobe Connect Pro, Second Life and  local conference hubs in various cities. For more on the conference organization see this pre-conference interview with Aral Balkan.

Head will be the focus of my next post, so more on Head soon!  One of my main goals in attending the London Hub of Head was to interview the CEO and founder of AMEE, “Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine,” Gavin Starks. AMEE aims to be “the energy meter of the world.”

AMEE is a neutral aggregation platform designed to measure and track all the energy data on Earth.”

AMEE is a project with the kind of big goals that O’Reilly talked about in his keynote at Web 2.0 Expo, NYC.  Tim O’Reilly is an investor in AMEE. He announced, at Head, that the O’Reilly VC company has just closed a deal with AMEE.

I had an extraordinary opportunity to spend time some time talking with Tim O’Reilly while looking for a sandwich in Euston Square.  More on this sandwich adventure and my interview with Tim O’Reilly, and my long talk with Gavin Starks about AMEE, in my next post!

Tim kept saying in London that he doesn’t like predicting the future. But the future comes to Tim O’Reilly!

And, after talking with Tim and Gavin, I felt I had a very exciting glimpse of what is emerging from the tech’s burning issues. George F. Colony, Forrester, summarized these issues nicely in his post, “Why This Tech recession Will Be Different.” Colony noted, “Virtualization, social computing, mobile computing, Green IT, SOA, extended Internet (connecting the physical world to the digital world) are front and center on the agendas of large companies.”

And, yes, this is supposed to be a little bit of a teaser for my next post on AMEE!

Virtual Worlds Road Map.

The final keynote at the Virtual Worlds London was what Ian Hughes in his post on the conference for Eightbar, aptly described as a call to arms for the Virtual Worlds Roadmap. As Ian pointed out: “This needs a post in its own right as we all need to get on board with this across the industry and help.” Ian Hughes’ (IBM) own presentation on “Business Process Management” was one of the best I attended in conference.  Yes, amazingly, he made this topic very interesting and fresh!

The pictures opening this post are the Virtual Worlds Road Map presenters. Victoria Coleman (Samsung) -seated at center, Sibley Verbeck (Electric Sheep Company) – in trademark hat, Jeffrey Pope 3Di – far left, and  Bruce Damer – close up in the picture on the right.

I am delighted to join Bruce Damer, later today, for a FastCompany.com Technology Group Call-in: “Next Generation Interaction: Are Virtual Worlds Waiting in the Wings?” with Donald Schwartz (October 28th at 4:00 PM EST).

I will also be in Second Life at Train 4 Success (SLURL) on Thursday, October 30 (starting at 9AM PST) with Peter Quirk, EMC, and Jani Pirkola, realXtend talking about OpenSim and realXtend for an event organized by Eilif Trondsen of the Stanford Research Institute and the Gronstedt Group.

John Hengeveld (Intel) – was off screen for this group picture (above). But, Intel is doing some very interesting work in Virtual Worlds see my earlier post here.  And, John is  “helping NASA work out how to deflect extinction level event asteriods from Earth!).”

As Ian noted, the main aim of Virtual Worlds Road Map, “is to gather together and cut through use cases to understand and help people come to terms with which applications need to be built for which case.”

For more great coverage of Virtual Worlds London check out Ian’s post on Eightbar. And, check out Roo Reynolds’, live blogging here and here. Also see Roo’s post on his panel on “ARGs [Alternative Reality Games] and Virtual Worlds.” which includes slides and audio. Picture below is Roo in action live blogging. Roo is Portfolio Executive for Social Media at BBC Vision.

Tribal Media: A Teacher Training Intranet For The Swedish Government on OpenSim

One of the more interesting developments I saw at Virtual Worlds London was a highly customized training intranet for 50,000 teachers being developed for the Swedish Government by Tribal Media. The flexibility of OpenSim to provide cost effective custom intranet solutions was nicely demoed by Darren Guard, Tribal Media R&D (pictured above). Darren is one of the more reclusive founders and phenom developers of OpenSim.

Virtual Worlds and Web 2.0

In my earlier interviews with Rob Smart here, and Teravus Ousley here, we discussed the work to integrate OpenSim with Web 2.0.

To meet the O’Reilly challenge – to do something useful with the internet and help solve some of the world’s big problems, in my view, Virtual World technologies must engage more fully with the power of the internet-as-a-platform – “a system without an owner, tied together by a set of protocols, open standards and agreements for cooperation.” (see O’Reilly, “What Is Web 2.0?” ).

Unfortunately the worst presentation at Virtual Worlds London was purportedly on standards for virtual worlds.  I do not want to waste energy rehashing the misinformed and misguided presentation on the MPEG-V’s archaic blunderbuss approach to standards in this post.  I completely concur with Jim Purbrick of Linden Lab’s characterization of this talk as “the worst talk I’ve heard in a long time.” (Also, see Jim’s post for an astute commentary on other aspects of Virtual Worlds London.)  Luckily, there is much productive work from quarters aimed at leading to standards for Virtual Worlds. And, some of these efforts I have blogged here on Ugotrade.

Because there is confusion, sometimes, in Virtual World discussions about how business models work on a “system without an owner,” here is the concluding quote from, “What is Web 2.0.”

This is not to say that there are not opportunities for lock-in and competitive advantage, but we believe they are not to be found via control over software APIs and protocols. There is a new game afoot. The companies that succeed in the Web 2.0 era will be those that understand the rules of that game, rather than trying to go back to the rules of the PC software era.

What is the Killer App. for Virtual Worlds?

“The killer is that any app you do create is automatically presence enabled.
The people with you can view the changing states of that application or context as and  when you do.” Rob Smart, IBM.

The picture above are the presenters for the “Platform Integration Considerations for Enterprise Virtual Worlds” panel. From left to right: Jean Miller, German Market Development Manager, Linden Lab, Matt Furman, Software Engineer, Northrop Grumman, Rob Smart, Emerging Technology Specialist, IBM Hursley,

Interview with Rob Smart, IBM: Part 2.

Tish Shute: Up to now, Virtual Worlds have been relatively isolated from Web 2.0, living somewhere between the gaming world and the Web 2.0 world. How are the curtains lifting and virtual worlds becoming the linking the space between social media, and online gaming?

Rob Smart: Virtual Worlds that allow user created content and the association of behaviour to that content via scripting put themselves forward as the ideal platform to combine realtime social interaction with existing Web 2.0 tools. The data and function out there currently on Web sites can serve to augment the real-time social interactions. For example enhancing/enabling cross cultural communication with chat translation (example my translation HUD from wayback in 2006).

Another example is augmenting personal spaces with flickr images, video etc. In many flash room based Virtual Worlds this level of integration exists. However without the ability of the users to create their own gadgets and gizmos the pressure is on the development team to innovate and give users what they want, tough to do in the long term. A blended approach is to open APIs and content creation to registered developers.

Rob Smart: When you’re integrating any system with another it becomes so much simpler if the creators have provided,  services and APIs for external systems to interact with. It becomes even easier if those system entry accept/give inputs and outputs in a common way e.g. xml/json. The same goes for both data and media.

By using common existing standards we shorten the development time taken, because if a standard is widely adopted there will be a multitude of programming language libraries for it. The existence of which means the developer can get straight onto the important task of creating the logic for their application/gadget rather than messing around trying to understand some weird data encoding method you’ve invented.

Having an Open Source platform spreads the work load around, as long as the method under which the OS software is licenced isnt too prohibitive then developers from all walks of life will contribute. Spreading that workload also leads to an increase of innovative features as people always bring their experience and interests to bear, the features they create can be shared back and others build on top of them.

If a company chooses to implement a feature they specialize in or integrate with their existing products they can sell this as an add-on, this creates a market where the base product can improve through contributions from companies making a living of the OS product, it also introduces some competition and financial incentive to the platforms well being.

People keep talking about killer apps within Virtual Worlds, the killer is that any app you do create is automatically presence enabled. The people with you can view the changing states of that application or context as and  when you do.

Rob Smart: I still think Virtual Worlds is a good term, though it is very fuzzy. If we’re talking about VWs that can be extended and integrated with web 2.0 then maybe we need to talk about Immersive Application Platforms. Yep not very catchy but probably something more people in the enterprise world would say out loud in front of their boss In addition another term that could be used is 3D Internet it conjures more of a picture of integration between the different parts of what is a vast networked system.

Tish Shute: The  original metaverse roadmap had four distinct segments Augmented Reality, and Life Logging at the pole of augmentation, and Mirror worlds and Virtual worlds at opposite corners of the pole of simulation. How are these areas coming together?

Rob Smart: There’s no reason these need to be separated, its all down to the use of the VW platform these four segments are just applications of a virtual world platform. A platform like OpenSim can merge several of these together if neccessary. For example the Publish Subscribe messaging module written about on eightbar that I created lets me do things like bring in Realtime Flight data and show planes positions etc. across a region I could at the same time call an API that gives me more details on that flight. I could even search for blogs that mention that flight number and bring them into the same space. I could add additional script functions to the plane objects so that when a visitor clicks on a plane it thereafter sends them messages about its position.

Tish Shute: Virtual worlds are being broken down to open source basics building blocks and modules that can be mixed and matched and mashed up with Web 2.0 to create a new ecosystem that enriches both what has been know as virtual worlds and traditional web environments. What kind of innovation do you see coming out of these new opportunities to mashup virtual worlds with Web 2.0?

Rob Smart: I’m hoping to see as a number one priority an increase of accessibility, despite a number of people saying that browser based virtual worlds aren’t worth the effort they certainly are. The ability to just send a friend a URL or Instant Message etc.. and pull them in with you is an important step to adoption. As are simplified interfaces that don’t scare off those unfamiliar with gaming. An example of this is the Lotus Sametime 3D work with OpenSim that lets you invite a friend or colleague in via an instant message.

Virtual Worlds For Enterprise: A Coming of Age Party?

As Ian mentioned I did think that the London Conference was a coming of age party for enterprise virtual worlds. In the picture below there are just some of the Lindens who were there, many to promote the Linden Lab collaboration with Rivers Run Red on “Immersive Work Spaces” which was written up in Wall Street Journal. Also see this post yesterday on Silicon.com, “Virtual Worlds Set For Second Coming.”

Someone please help me with the all the names of the Lindens in the picture below!  Matt Furman from Northrop Grumman is center and Joey Seiler from Virtual World News is on the right.

Justin Bovington said to me that this conference was in his view: “the enterprise virtual worlds coming out party – an acceptance that this is a tangible solution- about selling relevant tools and relevant ROI – rather than talk about virtual worlds it is about relevant tool sets.”

And, while the conference was small, I think the engagement level of the enterprise attendees did back up this assertion of Justin’s. Matt Furman, Software Engineer, Northrop Grumman was asked by more than one attendee how he was dealing with scaling up the behind the firewall virtual world he is developing for Northrup Grumman with Linden Lab to meet a big demand internally to start using virtual worlds for collaboration.  Apparently some attendees were seeing so much interest in virtual world solutions for internal collaboration in their own companies, they were concerned about meeting the needs of thousands of employees in short order.

Immersive Work Spaces

I asked Justin a few questions about Immersive Work Spaces while waiting for an elevator!

Tish Shute: And what are the relevant tool sets from your point of you?

Justin Bovington: Collaboration, sharing, integration of existing backend systems and applications.  For example, we have developed seamless ways to share powerpoint or share screens. And, also going back down to the ROI models as well,  tangible ROI based on subscription based system where basically in four or five usages it has paid for itself. We have never had that with Virtual Worlds. It has always been in the bounds of experimentation or the bounds of isn’t it cool technology. Now we are seeing this become a serious collaboration tool.

And as I have said before that argueably the twentieth century ended two weeks ago and the twenty first century is now with us.  And that is about companies rengineering their thinking particularly in the financial sector they have to restart again. And that is going to be about  using additional tools and additional guide lines to do that. This is the change over and I have said this in the panel as well. This show in particularly is enterprise virtual worlds coming out party.

And again we see a massive change between the last three shows – there is a level of interest we have never seen before and also an acceptance that this is a tangible solution not just something that is cool…

We have hundreds of users in out product and it will go  to thousands and tens of thousands in the next year.

And we know where it is going – data visualization is going to be the next big thing and getting this 10,000 ft view of your company. We are using this term called snow globing which lets you pick up a snow globe and shake it and let you see exactly what a company is about and this is exactly what virtual worlds are about.

It’s about having a ten thousand foot view of your company because that’s when it becomes powerful because then it becomes a broadcast medium. And I think it will change people’s perception of data. And it is also moving to beyond just having the avatar as the main presence. The environment itself becomes an essence or a kind of dynamic level that is inside there. We are working on stuff at the moment that allows you have direct influence on data or the environment you are in which on a massive collaboration scale could actually give you a huge amount of input and ideas around company. And there is a genuine need to have this kind of collective intelligence.

Sine Wave Dinner!

The grand finale for me was the excellent Indian meal very generously hosted by Rohan Freeman of Sine Wave Company. Standing on the left is Chris Collins, Linden Lab, seated left front is, Steve Spangaro, bigpipemedia, and on the right Ren Reynolds of the Virtual Policy Network. Many other metarati were there including Bruce Joy, Vast Park, Corey Bridges, Multiverse, Dave Taylor, Imperial College, Gia Rossini, Sloodle, Peter Haik, Metaversality, Adam Frisby, OpenSim, Mal Burns, and many more – please help me out with the name tagging!

The curtains are lifting between Virtual Worlds, Web 2.0, and online gaming. There are many indications of this in the news including, the rebranding of the Virtual Worlds Conf. and Expo in New York City as “Engage! Expo – 3D Web, Virtual Worlds, and Virtual Goods,” and Google’s Lively opening up an API for game development.

And, If you have been reading Ugotrade recently, you will know I have been up late several nights trying to keep up with the pace of the  OpenSim, Architecture Working Group and OpenGrid Protocol teams that are proceeding at a fast clip with their work on Web 2.0 integration for immersive Virtual Worlds (and there is still much more to write on this!).

Also, this week, there was the preview launch (the full launch is scheduled for November) of a new collaboration, “SHASPA,” between EOLUS^® One and The Serious Games Institute.  SHASPA was unveiled to a select audience of business decision makers at the Globe Theater, London on Wednesday.

SHASPA- making a “smart” world with “shared spaces.”

Oliver Goh said, “SHASPA” is a unique cooperation to bring together Virtual Worlds (OpenSim, Second Life^®), Web 2.0 Applications and the world of mobile applications….”

The pictures above show Oliver speaking (far left) and David Wortley, Director of the Serious Games Institute (SGI) at Coventry (far right), and some of the audience (center). I recognize several very important virtual world pioneers and innovators in the midst of the frey – Rohan Freeman (CEO of the Sine Wave Company), Prof Jeremy Watson (Arup), Dr Anthony Dennis (infoterra),  and Dave Taylor, Programme Lead, Virtual Worlds and Medical Media at Imperial College London.

EOLUS^® One initially started as an innovation project with the focus to develop new service oriented offerings for the real estate industry. Oliver explained to me:

The focus is on sustainable real estate, enhancing the structural and technical performance of properties which will be the first use case for SHASPA. SHASPA uses the combined power of the work done by the SGI and EOLUS One to create Smart Shared Spaces for various industries. The first use case will be in the Real Estate industry to revolutionize approaches to facilities/property performance optimization and energy management.

RealXtend harnesses OpenSim as engine for their server side development

Adam Frisby sent me the picture opening this post today.  Adam pointed out It shows:

…Realxtend just running under OpenSim rather than the forked version of OpenSim realXtend did. It’s been converted to a set of OpenSim plugins – we’re still at a semi-preliminary stage, however, we’ve got Rex avatars and a few other features now working.

Realxtend is now able to leverage the OpenSim core, and OpenSim developers can work with realXtend innovation as plugins. For more details on this modular integration see my previous post.  This modular architecture will create many new opportunities for mashups.  And the Web 2.0 integration and interoperability work that is central to the OpenSim vision will be aligned with the advanced 3D Internet layer realXtend has been building on top of it.

On their diverse and multifaceted team, RealXtend has a number of world class game developers  who have in a very short time progressed rapidly towards the goals Tony Manninen, Ludocraft, described to me back in February, “making sure the realXtend development reaches the required quality and performance standards you would expect from MMOGs.”

And as Jani Pirkola, Project Manager for RealXtend, points out:

For realXtend it means that we can have all the OpenSim development directly benefit realXtend, whether it is Web 2.0 or other features.

Web Friendly Standards for Virtual Worlds

I am off to London next week to the Virtual Worlds Conf an Expo.  But, while I am very excited to meet old and new friends there, it is disappointing to note that the open source developer communities and the interoperability and open protocol efforts of OpenSim and Linden Lab are sadly unrepresented in London.

Making virtual worlds part of the fabric of the internet and everyday computing will not happen because some arbitrary standards body pontificates on elaborate requirements and then tries to get the backing of big business to implement their standards from top down. There are many white papers on why this old fashioned way of developing standards is not applicable to the fast moving internet environment.   As David Levine, IBM, so nicely put it a while back, interoperability and standards for virtual worlds:

will emerge battered byte by battered byte from the hands of grubbie techies each with an agenda. Except on Second Life some of us are blonde, with a pert smile but yeah….

It is, in my view, unfortunate that Dr Yesha Y Sivian, Metaverse1, in his talk “Virtual Worlds State of Standards (SOS): MPEG-V, Metaverse1, Open-SIM and more” has put OpenSim in his title (and Architecture Working Group in the body of his abstract) when he does not seem to have (yet) invited anyone from OpenSim or Architecture Working Group or OGP to represent their own work.  Again, unfortunately, a panel including key industry leaders and representatives from OpenSim and Architecture Working Group did not get the opportunity to present in London because Dr Sivian’s proposal gave the conference organizers the impression there was already a “similar panel.”

MPEG-V and Metaverse 1 are Dr Yesha Sivian’s projects and they are at a very early stage of development (basically an effort to define a set of requirments and garner business support for the notion of creating so called MPEG-V standards). To have credibility, in my view, these projects need to engage with other groups that are working on standards and actually have working code, as  Architecture Working Group and OpenGrid Protocol (OGP) do.

There are some common misunderstandings about the approach of the Architecture Working Group that should be cleared up.

As key architects of OpenGrid Protocol (OGP), and the Architecture Working Group, frequently stress, OGP is a point of departure.  While its focused on the existing code of OpenSim and Second Life, the overall framework is as broad, or broader than the meteverse work.  The goal is to create a fully described set of web based protocols and formats which will do anything MPEG-V wants to do, but meshed far more fully into the web.

Metaverse1 needs to be in dialogue with the standards work that has already produced code, if they are serious about creating good standards.

Out of the Trough of Disillusionment onto the Slope of Enlightenment

It seems Virtual Worlds may have started onto the Slope of Enlightenment (see Gartner Hype Cycle).  Virtual Worlds, and immersive Virtual Worlds (in particular Second Life^® and OpenSim), continue to garner broad consumer interest. And, the ability of Virtual Worlds to deliver added value in key areas of collaboration and energy conservation is fueling a a lot of interest from education and enterprise.

While worries of depression and recession in the global economy abound, and the internet is abuzz with discussion of Joe The Plumber (as Mitch Kapor noted in Twitter: “Not since Nixon have we heard so much about plumbers”).

Nevertheless, there has been quite a steady flow of positive news from Virtual Worlds. See Caleb Booker’s roundup and  Virtual World News and check for yourself. And just in, Forbes.com post, “A ‘virtual’ Escape from Economic Pain,” After scanning my reader I checked my perception in Twitter and quickly got replies from Mitch Wagner of Information Week.

@MitchWagner – while you didn’t find any negative stories have you seen an increase in positive stories in mainstream media? about 13 hours ago from web in reply to MitchWagner

Recents News Events of Note

The coming of age of Open Source Virtual worlds is attracting some mainstream attention now.  One of the leading authorities on Open Source Software and Services,  OStactic has several recent posts on OpenSim and Open Source Virtual Worlds. And, of course, I was thrilled that Ugotrade got a mention in the most recent one, Open Source Virtual Reality Spreads Out.

This post, and my previous post about integration of OpenSim into Web 2.0, explore how immersive virtual worlds, through a full architectural integration into Web 2.0, will become part of the fabric of everyday computing.

The diagram above shows where OpenSim sits in Web 2.0 (click on the diagram to see a readable enlarged version!). The following interview with OpenSim developer, Teravus Ousley, describes some of the work being done to create documented protocols that will make OpenSim fit seamlessly into Web 2.0 architecture.

OpenSim is in the news a lot these days, explicitly as in the case of the announcement last week by 3Di of their “3Di OpenSim” Standard (for more see here and here), and implicitly with the launch of ChinaQ.  Adam Frisby, OpenSim, pointed out to me if you download the ChinaQ client that it is based on OpenSim, it connects nicely to OSGrid too. There is speculation the client is a rebranded version of the realXtend viewer (which is based on the open source Second Life viewer) as all the version numbers are the same.

So OpenSim is not only attracting the interest of business giants like IBM, Microsoft and Intel, it is becoming the architecture of choice for virtual world initiatives from Chinese and Japanese telecoms (see here and here for more). Also, see the press release about Nokia and the City of Oulu, Finland, joining as supporters of realXtend.

But, as Raph Koster in his post commenting on 3Di’s OpenSim announcement notes, the question how immersive virtual worlds can go from strong niche or enterprise markets to mass adoption in consumer markets must be answered.  As Raph points out, Lively, Whirled, SmallWorlds, Vivaty, and yes, Metaplace have a very different architecture that they hope will attract broad consumer markets.  (I did a long interview with Raph on this at The Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo in LA which I will post as soon as it is transcribed, so more on this soon!).

Architectural integration into the heart of Web 2.0, I would argue, is the key to mass adoption for immersive virtual worlds. While architecture alone will not guarantee the necessary breakthroughs in usability for widespread consumer adoption, it will create the ideal conditions for the innovation through which usability obstacles will be overcome, and the enormous potential for immersive, real time interaction over the internet will be realized.

Interview with Teravus Ousley

Tish: What has been  the most fundamental problem re virtual world architecture that has kept immersive virtual worlds isolated from web 2.0 to date? 

Teravus: a lack of standardization, licensing issues, and the difficulty of entry into the industry.

1) Standardization

Tish: In order of importance what in your view are the priorities for standardization?

Teravus: Probably the same order that OpenSimulator was tackled in, basic connect (current state of OGP – Open Grid Protocol).  Basic Service (interaction standards).  Advanced connect/mashup/aggregate extensions.   Preferably people will have working code in the various spaces there to use freely under various licenses..

Tish: Can you show me where OpenSim will fit in this drawing of Web 2.0 architecture? [Teravus makes some modifications on the drawing I send him from Dion Hinchcliffe’s presentation from his Web 2.0 Expo workshop, see original here]

Teravus: The modified diagram [now opening this post] is a great view of how it will look.

Tish: Why is the TCP stream left out of the original drawing? [For more about Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite see here.

Teravus: It is left out because the person who made this diagram had web pages in mind.  Static large files, or small changing files. In the the drawing the fact that TCP streams are smaller then HTTP is on purpose.

Tish: I have heard different opinions on the percentage of the communications for virtual worlds that can be done over HTTP?

Teravus: The fact is that the biggest usage of communications in virtual worlds is transmitting images that’s the number one bandwidth usage. So, if we’re counting by ‘usage’ I say 91%.   If we’re counting by services that use http.   I say probably 75%  I definitely think that http should be evaluated for use on new things ‘first’. But, there are a few places where HTTP doesn’t shine.

I am skeptical about replacing things in the UDP with HTTP  thinking that they’ll ‘perform better. [For more about User Datagram Protocol (UDP) another of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite see here.]

I think there’s been a huge test going on now and for the last 5 or six years with regards to the UDP protocol and it really has performed admirably.   In the last year and a half, I’ve seen attempts to convert several things to HTTP that have failed, and failed somewhat spectacularly sometimes.  In the end the items get reverted back to the UDP protocol. One such item that sticks out in my mind is CAPS(HTTP) based inventory retrieval. The capability to do that in the client has been available since before February. And, it’s been turned on and off on ‘Agni’ at least once in the process. Additionally, we (OpenSimulator) enabled http inventory, and, the  inventory failures rose pretty steeply.

I think some services are really just not ‘right’ for HTTP.. . particularly where a ‘poll’ methodology is used, or, the data is significantly dynamic enough that it makes caching useless.

Anyway, as far as the future is concerned, I do want to see some services over HTTP. Other services, it would be more appropriate to have a TCP stream. Stock market data, for example, uses a TCP stream. The Scalability of the stock market, is just one example of a scalable TCP stream.

Tish: So you see TCP  as the communications protocol that would do the work for the parts of virtual worlds not suitable for HTTP. At least that is how you have shown it in our Web 2.0 architecture drawing. But should there also be a UDP stream?

Teravus: For the virtual world of tomorrow? .. probably not.

Tish: Why not?

Teravus: You have less control over the quality of service when it’s delivered over UDP then TCP.

Tish: What is the exact relation between TCP and UDP.  My understanding is UDP a lower level protocol.

Teravus: TCP offers guaranteed delivery through flow control, while UDP does not.  One of the failures of UDP, is the ‘resend’ technology we’ve put on top of it to try and make it reliable.   TCP does this automatically and better then we could at a lower level but it does also cost up to twice the bandwidth depending on what is being sent. HTTP is a layer on top of TCP.

Tish: So just like the HTTP/TCP discussion there has to be a TCP/UDP boundary discussion …so it is HTTP then TCP then UDP and the boundaries have to be worked on.

Teravus: Those are the orderings in my mind…  probably if UDP uses any..  it should use less then 0.5%.

Tish: And the current Second Life architecture what does it use if it isn’t using HTTP? [to see the work of the Architecture Working Group on the future Second Life architecture here]

Teravus: UDP or HTTP

Tish: and TCP?

Teravus: Well, TCP is a layer under HTTP.  As far as I know, SL doesn’t use TCP streams directly

Teravus: Instead, it uses HTTP polling.  This is one of the places, that I’ve highlighted where it doesn’t shine.

Tish: Polling does sound slow?

Teravus: Polling is essentially..     (connect) Got any data for me? No?(disconnect), (connect) Got any data for me?  No?(disconnect).

Tish: So what is the path to standards for this then?

Teravus: Distilling what we know works and what we actually intend on supporting as far as adoption under these standards.

Tish: Where does MPEG-V fit in?  Have you read their document yet?

Tervavus: MPEG-V is interesting reading…     but is there any working example? I have just the overview. But I’ll read it over to have a better determination of how to ‘keep it in mind’ for the future. It looks like they’ve only really defined the requirements of the MPEG-V spec. The MPEG-V spec looks quite far reaching..  but  the documents so far are requirements and marketing talk aimed toward business people – obviously intended to get more people interested in working on them.

But I have a feeling that any format with MPEG before it will be onerous to support. ..for me it’s too early to tell. It’s quite far reaching…it isn’t anything like ’signal processing’ which the MPEG group is most famous for.

Tish: The whole top down approach of the MPEG-V initiative seems counter to Web 2.0 principles to me.

Teravus: Well, remember..  that even if there’s a virtual world format war (reference to DVD-HD vs BlueRay) we still need to win over the rest of the web.

Tish: Yes and don’t you think the way to win over the web is to use as many existing standards as possible?

Teravus: Well, it’s to use as many existing standards as ‘fit’ though.. KISS, as always (K)eep (I)t (S)imple (S)tupid if we have 30 different internet standards..     people looking at it will @.@

Tish: But it is just lack of documented protocols that has created isolation from Web 2.0?  And really doesn’t it boil down to standardizing that small percentage that is outside HTTP – the TCP and UDP stream that we talked about earlier where the real time stuff that virtual worlds bring to the web happens?

Teravus: no..  actually the HTTP standardization is just as important.

Tish: You mean even though SL used HTTP it isn’t standardized?

Teravus: Not documented specifically.

Tish: And OpenSim is that documented?

Teravus: Not well enough probably to define a standard.

Tish: Is AWG (Architecture Working Group) doing the documentation?

Teravus: working on it..

2) Licensing Issues

Tish: It sounds like some of this work has to go on across client and server.  Are we running into the issue of BSD for OpenSim and GPL for the Second Life viewer?

Tervaus: Well, some of the issue here is license choice.  One of the reasons that libOMV was able to achieve what they did was they did it /before/ the client was open sourced.

Tish: So open sourcing the client actually became an obstacle!!???

Teravus: I don’t think so in a whole.  I think it was great for the community.  I do, however think that C++ UDP stacks will be scrutinized more for GPL license violations because, of course, the client is GPL and C++ .

Tish: It is my understanding that Linden Lab is open to discussions on making the licensing more efficient for the open source community?

Teravus: Well, the client, in a whole, should not be changed as far as the license.   JUST the things that they expect people to adopt should be made more open. If they expect people to adopt PRIMs, then there should be an efficient implementation available for anyone to use..   at the very least, in LGPL format. Otherwise, the die hards are forced to re-implement them from scratch, and most people will just choose something more open.

Tish: Has anyone ever put together a list of the parts that need to be LGPLed?

Teravus: Well, I think it’s there in a few places.  There is at least one jira open on it.

Teravus: A few that come to mind for me..   is the UDP stack and the prim to mesh/UV code.   I think there are some things that can definitely be improved about the UDP Stack.  There are some things, (images come to mind), that would be better over HTTP

Tish: Do you think if the UDP stack were L GPLed that would be a significant help to integrating OpenSim better with the web?

Teravus: Well, it would certainly be adopted by more clients. GPL + (your own code) = GPL Licensed client. LGPL linked library + (your own code) = Your own license.
You still need to mention that you used LL’s UDP stack, and provide the source code for it at request.

The general client itself should remain GPL, it’s better for LL that way.  Just the items that they want people to ’standardize’ on. It would help..   if it was at least LGPL

Tish: And the value to  LL on LGPLing these parts is it helped spread their basic technology while protecting the rest of their viewer?

Teravus: It furthers their goal of standardization on their systems because it allows more people to adopt it for their own uses without worrying about GPL-ing their own client.

Tish: It is hard to standardize without access to the low level parts of the client right?

Teravus: The general population of Developers..     will want a libX that they can plug into their application for communicating.. .  libY to deal with object data..

Tish: Hence your requests for LGPL were  UDP stack and  the prim->mesh/UV

Teravus nods

Tish: and at the moment they only have openmv?

Teravus: That’s the only ‘truly’ open standard right now as far as the LL technology is concerned. OpenSimulator’s use of that data..   could also be seen as a standard..

Teravus: But we have not published anything beyond code..   neither have they  really..  technically..  but their organization of the way things work is very very clear

Tish: What are the most significant limitations of openmv?

Teravus: Probably..  just it not being in c++.   c++ has it’s benefits and it’s pitfalls.  Changes in c++ usually take longer then ones in C#.  But, of course c++ is always faster.  With libOMV It isn’t always clear about what packet is used when.  However, with some experimentation, you can figure it out in 30 minutes or less..

Usability

We didn’t spend much time discussing some of the innovation in usability that this architectural integration into Web 2.0 will enable (more to come on that!). But, Teravus mentioned one interesting use case he is working on.

Teravus: You might also stick a ‘cloud renderer’ into the graphic [Tervaus was looking at the diagram (from Dion Hinchcliffe) that opened my previous post on “Web 2.0 to OpenSim Made easy”  click on the thumbnail below].

Some people have discussed having a ‘video stream’ that’s rendered on the cloud and providing that to flash clients would be the best solution to it for them.

The cloud renderer is for organizations that have large pools of servers with GPUs so would allow for very powerful rendering. The servers can render the scenes and stream them to the low end browsers. It would allow extremely high quality rendering for really low end browsers..  such as ‘cell phones.’

Tish: Is that possible now on OpenSim?

Teravus: Nope.  But it’s something that in the future, I intend on working on. It would essentially be a video [streamed to low end browsers].

Tish: Is that different from what Vollee is doing? The mobile client for SL?

Teravus:  It appears that they are, indeed, pre-rendering the client’s view and streaming it to the mobile device

Web 2.0 surpasses all previous technologies in its ability to “explicitly leverage network effects” (a definition of Web 2.0 from Tim O’Reilly). But, while virtual worlds pass another classic litmus test of Web 2.0 – two way participation, they have been, up to this point, largely cut off from Web 2.0 power/network effects.

Persistent immersive virtual worlds, led by Second Life, have done well as niche markets but they remain relatively isolated from Web 2.0, even though they bring something  vital and new to the internet – real time interaction and dynamic melded states – in contrast to the current web’s large static files, or small changing files.

The slide opening this post is a modification of a slide from Dion Hinchcliffe’s presentation from his Web 2.0 Expo workshop – Building Successful Next Generation Web 2.0 Applications. Virtual worlds are not anywhere to be found on the original. So I asked Rob Smart, IBM, who has just added JSON support to OpenSim to draw OpenSimulator into this picture. In my interview with Rob, later in this post, he discusses the relationship between virtual worlds and Web 2.0 and how JSON is an important step towards virtual worlds taking up a place in Web 2.0 architecture.

When people think of the current architecture of Web 2.0 virtual worlds do not come to mind. But we are on the cusp of a big change in this regard.  Linden Lab and OpenSim, in the Architectural Working Group, AWG, have been working on trust negotiations and the standardization, documentation and use of http (REST enabling).  But more work remains on standardizing and documenting where TCP and UDP streams have to be used to create the immersive real time interactions that are the heart of what virtual worlds bring to today’s web (see my upcoming interview with Teravus Oursley, OpenSim, for more on this).

There is a complex network of connections through identity (1st and 2nd life) that have enabled virtual worlds to implicitly leverage the social networks of  Web 2.0 (see botgirl’s lovely illustration of this above)  The slide above is from W. James Au’s “The Post-Hype State of Virtual World Marketing: What Works, What Doesn’t and Why.”

Mryl (beta) is an application hoping to streamline these linkages with a social gateway for virtual worlds that will provide what  KZero terms “outeroperability”.  In this vein, Second Life developers have produced a number of interesting high level communications applications, including Chatbridge from Intersection Unlimited, to link Second Life better with the web. I will moderate a panel for Orange Island Innovation Week, Wednesday, Oct 1st, 12 noon PDT, Innovative Communications Devices, with Beyers Sellers, Chase Marellan (Chatbridge), Kevni Koolhaven (Learning Tree International).

But, it is the low level architectural integration of virtual worlds into Web 2.0 (along with improved usability and new User Interfaces) that will weave virtual worlds into the fabric of  Web 2.0 and  our everyday lives.  But unlike Eric Schonfeld of TechCrunch, I see interoperability work (see OpenGrid Beta), and the production of standard protocols (see Open Grid Protocol, OGP) that interoperability work helps negotiate, as an important part of the process.

Immersive virtual worlds are still a long way from mainstream.  I attended the Forrester Business and Technology Leadership Forum in Orlando last week to help Oliver Goh, business development executive at Implenia, talk about delivering results with virtual worlds. We found the audience, while familiar with many aspects of Web 2.0 and its business value,  had relatively little direct experience with virtual worlds. But, the interest and excitement with this technology was very apparent.

Architectural integration of  virtual worlds in Web 2.0 and the standardization of protocols (using existing web standards where possible) will change the picture, creating new opportunities to improve usability, create specific clients for particular needs, facilitate mashups, and leverage network effects, and more!  And, JSON support for OpenSim is an important step as it allows virtual worlds to explicitly begin talking the language of Web 2.0.

Rob Smart is an Emerging Technology Specialist located at IBM Hursley where he works as part of the IBM CIO office Metaverse Initiative. In Second Life he is known as Yossarian Seattle and became known to some as the inventor of the translation HUD, which was his second foray into integrating Virtual Worlds with Web applications. The first project was enabling some of IBM’s messaging products to publish events into Second Life, including creation of an RSS Viewer for Second Life.  Recently, Rob has been working with clients integrating their internal IT services with various virtual world platforms. His interests now extend to the OpenSim project, with a focus on integration of enterprise data and common web APIs into OpenSim.

Interview with Rob Smart, IBM

Tara5 Oh – on the right (me, Tish Shute)  interviewed Yoassarian Seattle (Rob Smart, IBM) in Second Life outside Andy Stanford-Clark’s remote control house on Hursley island  (for more see here)

Tara5 Oh: I am interviewing you from the media lounge at Web 2.0 Expo and coincidently it seems JSON is the hot standard here, in fact, the hottest it seems other than RSS for its ubiquity.

Yossarian Seattle: Yes, well the popularity of JSON stems from increase of AJAX enabled websites that need to frequently pass data between server and web browser and have the javascript in a web-page understand that data. It provides a simple, lightweight way of serialising your server-side objects and doesnt require lots of extra coding in the browser like XML data does.

Tara5 Oh: As virtual worlds are still isolated from many of the network effects of Web 2.0, at the moment could you explain how integrating JSON support to OpenSim is “Web 2.0 made easy for OpenSim?”

Yossarian Seattle: JSON was created to make data exchange from browser to server easy. We want that same exchange between VWs and web servers to be equally as simple. However JSON was written with javascript in mind as you can call a simple eval() function and that’s it, you’re done and you have a nice object to use in the browser. So as a result lots of these nice service APIs out there in Web 2.0 land talk JSON, e.g. Google Translation service, flickrs image querying etc. Also our internal IBM web 2.0 systems talk JSON.

But Second Life and OpenSim so far have poor string handling functions which meant that in LSL, in particualar, parsing anything more than a simple piece of JSON was just not an option.

Lots of coders and developers in Second Life have to run PHP and other scripts on external web servers to act as an intermediary stage in calling thse Web 2.0 APIs.

Thats a real pain, and means you need to have a server somewhere and up full time if others are to use your scripts. Whereas now, with this osParseJSON. function you can forget all that hassle and go straight to the source from OpenSim.

Its a simple but powerful enabler of Web 2.0 technology. I expect it will take people a while to find it and start using it, but it just widens the accessibility for those people who get into scripting in OpenSim.

I’m planning to do a similar thing for XML parsing, but its a bit lower on my priorities at the moment. JSON parsing gives a good quick win so to speak

Tara5 Oh: I just sent you a couple of slides ‘cos one thing I have noticed here at the Web 2.0 Expo is that the understanding of where OpenSim might fit into the architecture of Web 2.0 is vague to zero.

Can you sketch something that relates OpenSim into current understandings of Web 2.0 architecture?

Yossarian Seattle: Really in that first diagram with the APIs etc OpenSim just fits on the level of the web servers. And actually that diagram is a bit wrong as there should arrows between the web servers as sites should really be connected to each other.  I’ll stick in here

OpenSim is being REST enabled. At the moment its access to assets, clothes, objects, etc. from the asset servers. But there is no reason that REST interface cannot give access to people logged on, object positions sim layouts etc.

Tara5 Oh: Could you explain the difference between the power of REST for virtual world technology in relation to the power of JSON?

Yossarian Seattle: So REST is really just calling a web URL. You use the tree structure of the URL to indicate your asking for different data. Whereas JSON is an encoding for the actual data that’s returned to you. So they are complementary really. But there has already been some discussion within the OpenSim community about introducing new APIs to OpenSim that allow different clients to connect.

I personally think that VWs are too siloed currently. At the moment in VWs it’s pretty much one world one client. Providing REST or other interfaces to the world data opens up the possiblity of a wider range of clients accessing those worlds. And when i say clients i’m talking about flash interfaces, browser interfaces or other 3d interfaces such as Unity3d clients.

Tara5 Oh: Could you tell me more about Unity3d?

Yossarian Seattle: Unity3d is a game engine. It’s a very flexible engine and adheres to a lot of the 3d modeling standards etc. One of its most interesting features is the ability to deploy the games/applications you make as web brower plugins (as well as windows/mac stand alone). I’ve been messing around with it for a while now, I can show you some demos while you’re over at the VW conf in London.

Tara5 Oh: Another theme at this conference, raised by O’Reilly in his keynote, is that the future is “world to web,” e.g ., sensor projects etc.

Yossarian Seattle: Ah well that’s another favourite topic of mine with regards to VWs Hursley is the home of realtime messaging technology.

At the moment as I say there is pretty much one VW client to VW server and because the only library to acces SL and OpenSim is openmv( formerly libsl) that restricts new clients to being written in c#  There isn’t a java library, a flash library , a php library a ruby library etc.

So if in OpenSim we add new connectors, REST ones, talking JSON or XML then we enable lots of new client types and VWs become another mashable service in the Web 2.0 world.

Its about making it easy to get information in and information out. Web 2.0 sites don’t do realtime very well, whereas VWs do. VWs are the real time space that the web often tries to provide but kind of half fudges. Web Servers aren’t built to deal with realtime asynchronous data.

Its interesting how you mention Web 2.0 not really acknowledging Virtual Worlds as when I read the terms of service for a lot of the APIs they’re very specific about use from other web sites but they often dont cover the use of the API from other applications.

Tara5 Oh: Really?

Yossarian Seattle: Yes.

Tara5 Oh: What does this mean?

Yossarian Seattlee: It doesn’t necessarily have any significance for some services. But there is often specific text saying for example that you must use a particular piece of HTML on a page and show the API owners logo etc

I think as time goes on though and more people connect to Web 2.0 services from within VWs then they will be acknowledged as a valid service consumer, after all VWs are platforms that provide novel ways for people to display and interact with data.

Tara5 Oh: I know Hursley and other IBMers have done some nice use case of RL data integration in OpenSim and Second Life. What is your favorite for illustrating the power of Virtual Worlds to bring realtime world to web experiences to Web 2.0

Yossarian Seattle: Andy Stanford-Clark’s remote control house on Hursley island is still a favourite.

I did a hook up ages back with a messaging product MQTT and Second Life. I’d like to revisit that work and extend it. i’m interested in propagating events between platforms whether they be VWs or Web sites.

Tara5 Oh: I am amazed how little play virtual worlds have here at the Web 2.0 Expo.

Yossarian Seattle: Virtual Worlds live somewhere between the gaming world and the web 2.0 world. We see it with the flash social worlds too they edge more towards gaming.

Tara5 Oh: What do you think are the gains of virtual worlds getting more integrated with Web 2.0?

Yossarian Seattle: Virtual Worlds are a platform and and its often said by some that they’re not interested in taking part yet as they haven’t yet seen a killer app for Virtual Worlds. Some of that view stems from the fact that VWs are very isolated it’s hard to get content in and hard to get it back out again.

Virtual Worlds are the shared realtime spaces of the Internet, up until now this position has been filled by IRC chat rooms and instant messaging apps. Neither of these forms lend themselves particularly well to group interaction. VWs are streets ahead in terms of rich social interaction and sharing of content and experiences.

Tara5 Oh: You mentioned you just started working on OpenSim development and becoming part of this growing effort.

Yossarian Seattle: Yep thats right. There is a very vibrant community around OpenSim.

Tara5 Oh: Why did you decide to put your energy into OpenSim at this time?

Yossarian Seattle: I’m now working for IBMs CIO office Metaverse initiative and investigating all of the relevant VWs is one of our remits. OpenSim is my chosen focus.

Tara5 Oh: What is CIO?

Yossarian Seattle: One of the IBM CIO office responsibilities is to look at and provide technologies and tools that improve the productivity of IBMers world wide. But as you know IBM has several people working on the OpenSim project and there is an interested community internally. I’m looking at how we can hook up OpenSim to our existing web 2.0 services internally.

Tara5 Oh: What kind of internal Web Services?

Yossarian Seattle: We have a number of internal Web 2.0 based systems that provide APIs for data sharing, things like Blogcentral our internal blogging platform, Fringe which contains customizable profile information, Beehive is a social networking platform helps people share their interests, track and schedule events within IBM. We also have a platform called TAP (Technology Adoption Program) where people can share services and applications they have created with other IBMers. In addition we have Cattail, a file repository that allows easy sharing and tagging of all types of file. There are many more useful internal services than this even all of which could be integrated with OpenSim.

The nice thing is though that OpenSim affords that flexibility to integrate it with our products and with existing web systems, and provide value back to the community at the same time.

Tara5 Oh: So do you have any thoughts about the path to standards for virtual worlds?

Yossarian Seattle: In terms of standards I think it’s a case of look at whats out there and successful at the current time not just in terms of 3d models, but in terms of real time chat protocols like XMPP things like JSON, REST as well and pick those for the relevant components

The reason for this is every time you introduce a new standard, you have to wait for the communities to catch up and write language specific APIs for that standard.

[Better to use existing ones where possible and give the communities that will build the tools and the extensions a head start.

Tara5 Oh: This is also some of why top down standards like MPEG-V have issues?

Yossarian Seattle: Yep, standards often work best when they’re bottom up, like JSON.

As I mentioned before because the messaging structure currently for OpenSim and Second Life is proprietary (although open) and the only library is libsl (openmv) thats stopped a lot of potential innovation by restricting client/bot developemtn to the c# language.

Tara5 Oh: why is client/bot development restricted to c#?

Yossarian Seattle: Because currently the only library you can use to talk the Second Life libsl (openmv) is written in c#

Tara5 Oh: What do you see as the way through this obstacle?

Yossarian Seattle: If for example the messages that went between your SecondLife client and the OpenSim/SecondLife servers was a standard protocol which had a bunch of libraries for a variety of languages. Then you could start logging into VW servers from all kinds of clients

Tara5 Oh: Aren’t there plenty of standard messaging protocols to use?

Yossarian Seattle: Yep, but at the moment they’re not being used. There are some technical reasons for that. like reducing the amount of data to be downloaded etc. But there’s a balance to be had somewhere.

Tara5 Oh: But in a modular architecture like OpenSim what is to stop them being implemented?

Yossarian Seattle: There isn’t anything to stop them being implemented in OpenSim Which is why i like it

Tara5 Oh: I hear a lot about people wanting to change the physics in OpenSim/Second Life (the linking to the physics simulation in particular). Do you have thoughts on this or is it not on your agenda currently?

Yossarian Seattle: There are a few different physics modules already. Though to be honest i don’t think its the most important area to focus on, for me at least.

But obviously a high end physics engine is going to benefit anyone who wants to do any kind of simulation.

And that’s the beauty of Open Source, someone else will have that as their priority.

Yossarian Seattle: I think there’s a lot of work that needs to be done around ease of adoption still. i’d like it to be easy for people to write new clients for OpenSim.

When we get to that stage then people can produce simplified cut down clients to suit their precise need, so if you’re a retailer and just want to showcase products and let people shop you have a UI to reflect that.

Tara5 Oh: What about the OpenViewer project?

Yossarian Seattle: It’s a wider problem and piece of work. Well notice that openviewer is written in c# That’s because they’re limited again to using libsl (openmv). libsl recently changed it name by the way which is why i’m bracketing it.

Tara5 Oh: So it doesn’t address the underlying issue of messaging and open API’s for OpenSim.

Yossarian Seattle: Not really. But they have made the wise choice of releasing it under a free BSD license, which will enable more people to work on the project.

Tara5 Oh: Intel is working on breaking out openmv into smaller building blocks and basic types. How will this contribute to efforts to integrate OpenSim with Web 2.0?

Yossarian Seattle: Yes they recently hired John Hurliman who wrote a lot of it. i’m following what they do with interest.

Tara5 Oh: John wrote the original openmv?

Yossarian Seattle: He started the project back in 2006 .

Tara5 Oh: How will the work he is doing on openmv now help with the goal of making it easy to write new clients?

Yossarian Seattle: Well if they provide libraries in different languages that would be a good start and breaking it into chunks would allow anyone writing a client to pick and choose between the function they enable in their custom client.

However I’m not sure that’s tackling the root of the problem still.

Tara5 Oh: ‘cos the root of the problem is the messaging protocols which restrict you at the minute to C# for the client?

Yossarian Seattle: The standards need to be applied at the server end, to make it truly accessible.

Tara5 Oh: And these messaging standards need to allow for more than C# development?

Yossarian Seattle: exactly.

Tara5 Oh: well is seems like something quite doable, just time?

Yossarian Seattle: and careful thought

Yossarian Seattle: A lot of people are focusing on issues such as object portability in VWs but i’m not sure those are the ones to be concerned about right now, the games industry seems to have settled on collada as a standard for that. These VWs platforms are complex beasts and the games industry has already solved a certain amount of problems. However in terms of social interactions the VWs industry is ahead, a blend of games and social media.

Tara5 Oh: But games platforms have not solved either the web 2.0 effects or the web to world have they where things get most interesting now?

Yossarian Seattle: No and the games industry is playing catch up in that sense.

Yossarian Seattle: Little Big Planet will be the game that brings user created content into the mainstream for 3d worlds.

Yossarian Seattle: did you read this article? http://eightbar.co.uk/2008/09/10/moving-cubes-from-world-to-world/ that’s not a hack or anything in there.

That’s a full publish subscribe messaging client embedded in unity3d, realtime events across worlds.

Tara5 Oh: What do you think are the most interesting  world to web ideas that Andy’s house points too?

Yossarian Seattle: Well the fact that the communication is two way, both in and out of world and also that its real time. when something happens in Andy’s real house it happens here too.

Tara5 Oh: Yes I am very interested in the development of  the paraverse!

Yossarian Seattle: There is a personal project Peter Finn has been looking at in IBM, which is actually called Paraverse and is taking real world data including geospatial mapping information and applying it in OpenSim.

Unfortunately our interview ended here, at a very interesting point (I had to go to a panel at the Web 2.0 Expo, NYC). But  James Governor’s post/essay – a superlative ode to the paraverse - prompted by his first look at Microsoft ESP visual simulation platform produced an interesting debate on the potential of the Paraverse in the comments that includes a response by Rob. So check it out!

Metanomics host Robert Bloomfield interviewed Second Life founder and Chairman of the Board, Philip Rosedale, at the Second Life Community Convention in Tampa, Florida.  The Rosedale interview is available here (pictures above are Philip Rosedale and his avatar).

Rosedale talked about Linden Lab’s long standing commitment to open source and open protocols in one segment of this interview and Robert asked me to post a brief reaction. The full interview covers a wide range of topics and Robert has gotten responses on different parts of the interview from Wagner James Au, Christian Renaud, ‘Bettina Tizzy,’ Nic Mitham and ‘Dusan Writer,’ and Benjamin Duranske as well.

A System Without an Owner is A beautiful Thing

While Philip Rosedale’s comments may not, at first glance, appear to be saying anything new, they are in fact a very cogent summary of the important and crucial role Linden Lab has played, and continues to play, in moving virtual worlds out of their walled gardens and bringing them closer to that beautiful thing – a system without an owner.

Only a system without an owner can unleash, for virtual world technology, the kind of creative, world changing power that we have seen on the 2D web from http and html.  Anyone with even a vague idea of the history of the internet understands that it is only through openess, open source, open protocols, open standards, and open APIs, that we will get from here – the alpha days of virtual world technology, to their coming of age of age as a mainstream phenomena.

It is very much to the credit of Linden Lab that, as Rosedale says, they have never been afraid of openess: “I don’t think that the open grid will impact our revenues any more than open sourcing the client,”  he says. While there have been criticisms of licensing choices and ways Linden Lab handles contributions back to their viewer from the community, I think that overall Linden Lab has made very important and visionary moves, first to open source, and now to open protocols.

Open sourcing the viewer at a relatively early point in Second Life’s development created an enormous opportunity for the rapid development of an open source re-engineering of the server side, OpenSim.  OpenSim with the Second Life viewer is the most complete, open implementation of a persistent virtual world.  Without the head start from the open source Second Life viewer, and the connection to the thriving developer community of Second Life, the light speed progress of OpenSim would have been considerably more difficult.

Now OpenSim is getting closer to breaking free from the Second Life viewer. And, standard messaging protocols between client and server are, perhaps, the next step. Rob Smart, IBM, discussed this with me recently (see my upcoming interview with Rob Smart, “Web 2.0 Made Easy in OpenSim,” and see his post by this title for more).

As, Rob Smart, IBM, notes, “If, for example, the messages that went between your SecondLife client and the OpenSim/SecondLife servers was a standard protocol which had a bunch of libraries for a variety of languages, then you could start logging into VW servers from all kinds of clients.”  (for more see my upcoming post, “Interview with Rob Smart, IBM: Web 2.0 Made easy for OpenSim.”

Open Standards Will Emerge From Rough Consensus and Working Code

There are some that subscribe to the view that standards will arise in a virgin birth from an ivory tower, i.e., professors and captains of industry, removed from open source developer communities, will produce long documents that describe all of the fields, and every one of the messages, and all the APIs in detail prior to implementation.

But as, David Levine, IBM. Mike Mazur, 3Di, Mic Bowman, Intel, Justin Clark-Casey, and Adam Frisby, Deep Think/Sine Wave cogently argued, on the “Open Source and Interoperable Virtual Worlds” panel at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo in LA, this top down approach to standards, (or “vapor standards”), does not, typically, produce good results. For more on the the virtues of creating standards from “rough consensus and working code” as opposed to top down there is a full recording of the LA panel here.

Thus, in my view, Linden Lab’s current focus on open protocols, OpenGrid (for more see here), and interoperability is another key step towards the creation of open standards for virtual worlds. And Linden Lab are again leading the way in creating an environment that fosters innovation.

OpenGrid creates a testing ground where protocols can be worked out, and it enables the kind of heterogeneous ecosystem to develop that can nurture the creation of standards. I  agree with Rosedale when he says content makers will have an important role in driving interoperability and standards. The creation of standards is certainly a social as well as technical process. And as Rosedale notes content creators will have compelling reasons to move their content around in an open metaverse.

David Levine’s (IBM), described in detail in LA (again see recording here) the importance of interoperability and parallel innovation for the creation of standards. OpenSim has already produced an extraordinary amount of innovation, realXtend, Tribal Media and more. Also see my interview with Mic Bowman, Intel, for more on the role of open source/open standards in fostering innovation and in moving virtual worlds into “the fabric of everday computing.”

While Linden Lab only have a small team working on OpenGrid, it is a vital one.  And, with MarkLentczner (Zero Linden in Second Life) leading the Architectual Working Group for Linden Lab, and a collaboration with IBM led by David Levine (Zha Ewry in Second Life) driving the interoperability effort, plus the OpenGrid project, Linden lab has a high powered, agile, lean, machine working for an open future.

So with no more ado, here it is: Robert Bloomfield’s interview with Philip Rosedale!

Rosedale on Open Sim:  Pandora’s Box Was Already Open

Introduction from Robert Bloomfield

Naturally, a major topic of my interview with Philip Rosedale was on the implications of OpenSim and the Open Grid project, which both involve creating open source server-side implementations of virtual worlds that can replicate Second Life’s funcationality.  As a relative newcomer to this corner of the tech industry, I still find myself asking what a company would essentially create its own competitor.  Here is what Philip had to say; I have asked Tish Shute of UgoTrade to comment, as one of the people who has covered the OpenSim/OpenGrid movement with more detail and passion than just about anyone.

PHILIP ROSEDALE: I just really hold true to the strategic belief that there’s going to be a tremendous amount of consolidation and interconnection between these worlds because the content development process is so challenging that the content developers are going to push us all together. They’re going to say, “Give me a file format. Give me an interchange format. And let me move that chair from this grid to that grid. I’ve got to be able to do that because I’ve got a customer here who wants to buy it.” And so I think that that consolidation is going to happen, and it’s going to happen earlier than people would have thought.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD:  And this is looking at the success, the energy around OpenSim, open grid.

PHILIP ROSEDALE:  The energy, yeah. I think, at this point, we’ve got an appropriate level of energy – I think that’s exactly the right word – around exploring how quickly we can generalize all this stuff and open and interconnect everything together. I really think that’s going to continue.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD:  [D]o you feel like you might have opened Pandora’s box and that it’s not really under your control now?

PHILIP ROSEDALE:  I think that Second Life has, in many ways, not been under our control from the beginning and that it’s been a basic operating assumption that to create the kind of incredible place and business opportunity, and social opportunity more broadly, that Second Life would require a certain lack of control. And that was true with the content from day one.

So for us, oh, we open-sourced the client a while ago, and now we’re trying to do the same thing with respect to operating standards to interconnect grids. This is a pretty logical progression, using worlds that we’re pretty familiar with. I mean we’ve always felt that, if you have a compelling use proposition, which certainly Second Life does, in other words, if there’s real utility, real fun or real business or real whatever in what people are doing, then there should be a way, as a company, to be open, global and still make money on an hour-to-hour or a user-to-user basis or whatever on what we’re doing. And the economic aspects of the business have been fantastic from the very early days, and we don’t really even worry about them.

Our ability as a company to find a way to make a reasonable amount of money per hour that people spend in Second Life, it’s really never been that much of a problem. It’s actually been fascinating as we’ve changed pricing and as we’ve changed the ways that we make money. Introducing new ways of making money –  like selling currency on the LindeX – it’s been amazing how stable our revenues have been as a function of usage hours. It’s one of the things that we sometimes marvel at. It’s almost an emergent effect, if you will, that the company’s business, its operating revenues are really very stable.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD:  Even though they’re coming from different streams.

PHILIP ROSEDALE:  Even though they’re coming from different streams. And sometimes the requirements of the platform and decisions that we make will really substantially change the nature of those streams, but when you put them all together and you divide them by the number of usage hours, it’s like a constant. It’s almost a magic number. And it’s a magic number that allows us to be profitable, and therefore, is certainly adequate to make a business in the future. I don’t think that continuing to open Second Life up as we have been is going to impact that. Again, I just think there are so many opportunities to make money that we shouldn’t have to worry about that too much in the company. And, again, I think that’s a lot like the early internet. I mean if you step back and look holistically at the internet – you look at PayPal, the payment systems, auction systems, transaction systems, posting, naming – you look at all the businesses that comprise the internet, well, those are all the kinds of businesses that we as a company can be in, in this emerging market. There’s no business that’s denied us. We are in the hosting business. We can continue to be in the hosting business long term, putting servers up and providing access to them.

We can certainly be in the naming business. We’re in the currency and transaction support business. It’s funny, it’s something that’s often discussed. We worry much more about improving the scalability, stability and the usability of the system: reducing that initial user experience, reducing the time associated with it, making it easier. That’s got to be the lever that drives more growth in the overall industry, more revenues for us. So it’s really all we worry about. But I don’t think that the open grid will impact our revenues any more than open sourcing the client did.

Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media addressed the audience of the Web 2.0 Expo with a series of challenging questions. I felt happy that so many people I know are already answering this call “to do something worthy” with Web 2.0 and “to make technology that matters.”  However, many of these people were not at the Web 2.0 Expo.  This is, in part, because as O’Reilly pointed out:

if you look at the focus of a lot of what you call ‘Web 2.0,’ the relentless focus on advertising-based consumer models, lightweight applications, we may be living in somewhat of a bubble, and I’m not talking about an investment bubble. (It’s) a reality bubble.”

But as I explored the conference and expo, I did find friends, old and new, dedicated to figuring out how to use Web 2.0 to make a better world.

Caroline McCarthy has an excellent post, on CNET news on the message of Tim O’Reilly’s keynote address.

If you have read Ugotrade before you already know the threads I have been following re the potential for virtual worlds for positive global development and to reduce the carbon footprint of business, so some of McCarthy’s comments caught my attention:

There’s an inherent irony in what O’Reilly said, given the fact that massive conferences like the Web 2.0 Expo are packed with the trendspeak and hype that birthed SuperPoke-like entertainment, and certainly aren’t helping the environment by distributing tons of press kits and swag–not to mention flying in hundreds of attendees in a massive spurt of carbon emissions.

To be fair, O’Reilly Media has been printing fewer event programs and encouraging conference goers to recycle, and it has used carpeting made of post-consumer material.

There is clearly a lot that needs to change, and perhaps the tech industry trend of large-scale conferences is part of it. We’ll see whether Silicon Valley’s leaders and moguls are willing to do what they think is right, rather than what they think is profitable.

But, as Tim O’Reilly pointed out, the huge problems we face today create an enormous amount of opportunity for us to find creative solutions.

“We are going to figure out how to make a better world using the power of the web.” O’Reilly

Virtual World technology will soon, play a major role in re-imagining these tech industry large-scale conferences. There is an talented and dedicated community of open source developers working hard to take this nascent area of Web 2.0 technology mainstream through open source, open standards, and open API’s. I am so proud to be part of this global community!

Virtual Worlds were only a very small part of the Web 2.0 Expo. W. James Au’s “The Post-Hype State of Virtual World Marketing: What Works, What Doesn’t and Why” was the only panel I noticed focusing on Virtual Worlds in any of the main tracks. This reflects the relative lack of integration of virtual worlds into Web 2.0.

One of my passions is to make this isolation of virtual world technology from Web 2.0 a thing of the past (see my upcoming post on Rob Smart’s, IBM, integration of JSON support into OpenSim – which is a vital step towards Web 2.0 made easy for OpenSim).

But, as W. James Au pointed out very eloquently, this notion of isolation is really not accurate, even now. For example, Second Life communities interact in myriad and powerful ways with other social media communities on the web despite the current  lack of common protocols that have kept immersive virtual worlds architecturally cut off from some of the networking effects of Web 2.0.

But, for all of us living here in the US, O’Reilly’s most important message was simple and fundamental. So let’s reblog, retweet, plurk, friendfeed, facebook, send it out on notecards in SL, make machinima, and spread the word in every way available to us.

“Bad politicians are elected by good people who don’t vote.”

“There is no reason in 2008 to do shit you hate, ‘cos you can lose just as much money being happy as hell.”

Quote and pic above from Gary Vaynerchuk’s keynote, Web 2.0 Expo, 2008 (also see Execute on Being you).

“Do something you love,” Vaynerchuk

I personally can’t wait until the potent mix of real time interaction in immersive spaces is combined with the networking effects of Web 2.0. Not just because this will unleash an awesome new wave of innovation and creativity but the early adopters I have met in immersive virtual worlds, and the phenom developers in the rapidly growing open source communities of this emerging technology, have passion, do stuff they love, and do stuff that is worthy, w00t!

And further: “Do Something Worthy,” O’Reilly

While speakers and exhibitors from virtual worlds were scant in the main hall and panel tracks, Second Life had a strong showing in the  “Do Something You Love,” “Do something that need’s to be done” zone of the Not For profit strip. “Create more value than you capture” (from O’Reilly’s keynote) is the natural heart of their mission.

Below is the awesome Evonne Heyning ( InKenzo in Second Life) of Amoration.

What is Amoration?
AMO:  The root of love
~ation:  The state of being, practice and study
Amoration:  living in love, a practice of open engagement
Our Mission:  To Create a Culture of Conscious Compassion

Evonne addressed the problem of the Not For Profit’s being in an out of the way strip in the Expo hall with some very tasty peanut brittle.

In Contrast, the MS Surface crew, in a prime location, playing with super shiny things, did not have to do much to keep a crowd at their table!

I IMed my friend Kyle Gomboy (G2 Proto in SL) from the Microsoft Development Community in Second Life and in OpenSim to ask him if the Microsoft  .net, technet, and c#  developers in OpenSim had any plans to integrate Surface with OpenSim.  I saw the Surface/Virtual Earth integration  and realized Surface with OpenSim would be hotness for a small company looking to develop a vertical for hospitality, medicine, or education. At between 12 to 15K with SDK and two days training, Surface is priced in a range a small company can probably afford.

G2 also came up with a thought that would bring shiny together with worthy when he mentioned to me how great it would be to see Surface in every public school library in the country.

See Rik Riel’s blog for a nice video of the MS Surface demo in the expo hall.

“The Making of Second Life,” W. James Au’s book signing

From left to right, Rik Rik Panganiban from Global Kids (Rik Riel in SL), Joyce Bettencourt, Rhiannon Chatnoir, in SL, W. James Au, (Hamlet Au in SL),  Evonne Heyning ( InKenzo in Second Life), Jennifer Schlegel (Schlink Lardner in SL).

And further more: “Make technologies that matter,” O’Reilly

One of the highlights for me of w2e was getting an inside look at the Interop NOC and meeting Bill “WEJ” Jensen the Troubleshooting Lead of the InteropNETteam (WEJ center sitting at the Mac).

The Interop NOC is a “real” world work of art  – “the largest temporary network in the world” where voluteers have come together with industry leaders to take on the ultimate network challenge – “creating a completely interoperable network using the industry’s most cuting edge technology.”

If you have been reading Ugotrade you will know I have been following the work of Michael Osias, IBM,  (Illuminous Beltran in SL) who has been creating virtual network operation centers (VNOCs) in OpenSim (for more see  here).  I am looking forward to introducing “WEJ” to Michael’s work which I believe foreshadows a new era for software – along the lines Gelertner first envisioned in 1992. Michael follows the Gelertner vision pretty closely.

Gelertner talks about software as an embodied information machine. And, as virtual worlds come of age so will this notion of software as 3d info machines that we can walk around, tinker with, and hang out in with other avatars and agents in real time.

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

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

More on VNOCs in an upcoming post.