Augmented World Expo 2013 was really an amazing experience. I’m co-founder and co-organizer of the conference, along with Ori Inbar, so it has meant a lot to me to see our event grow over the last four years, and thrilling to make such a big splash this year.  There were 1,163 attendees, and the expo show cased an ecosystem of emerging technologies – augmented reality, gesture interaction, eyewear, wearables, and connected hardware of  many stripes, that mark the beginning of natural computing entering the mainstream. It was a unique opportunity to get up close and personal with what it feels like to be an augmented human in an augmented world!

Videos of AWE 2013′s 35 hours of educational sessions and inspirational keynotes are now available on our YouTube channel. I am sharing my own talk (my slides are also up on slideshare here), and a few of my favorites in this post, but there are far to many to post here, so please browse further on the Augmented World Expo youtube channel.

One notable high point of AWE2013, for me, was the showcase sponsored by Meta, a startup developing the first device allowing visualization and interaction with 3D virtual objects in the real world using your hands. It was made possible by the generous contribution from the private collections of Paul Travers, Dan Cui, Steven Feiner, Steve Mann, and Chris Grayson, and passionate volunteers who are helping advance the industry. Sean Hollister of The Verge did this excellent report on the eyewear showcase 35 years of wearable computing history at Augmented World Expo 2013
Also for more on Meta see this article by Dan Farber.

My colleagues at Syntertainment, Will Wright, Avi Bar-Zeev, Jason Shankel, and LaurenElliott all gave great talks. Ironically, we’re not building augmented reality apps or H/W. We all just happen to continue to be very interested in the field.  

Thank you to everyone for supporting the event!

The press coverage was truly extensive:

In the shadow of Google Glass, an augmented reality industry revs its engines
The Verge, Sean Hollister, June 9, 2013, 271 Tweets

The next big thing in tech: Augmented reality
CNET, Dan Farber, June 7, 2013
Pick up on Current News Daily
350 Tweets

AWE 2013 Conference Report: Augmented Reality and Marketing
The Persuaders Marketing Podcast on Dublin City FM, June 23, 2013

AR Dirt Podcast – Ori Inbar AWE2013 Extravaganza Recap
AR Dirt by Joseph Rampolla, June 18, 2013

35 years of wearable computing history at Augmented World Expo 2013
The Verge, Sean Hollister, June 9, 2013
7 Tweets

Augmented Reality: Bruce Sterling, keynote at Augmented World Expo 2013
Wired, Bruce Sterling, June 9, 2013
9 Tweets

On the road for VR: Augmented World Expo 2013
Doc-Ok, Staff, June 7, 2013
3 Tweets

My Interview from Augmented World Expo 2013 [VIDEO] Wassom.com, Brian Wassom, June 7, 2013

Augmented World Expo
ZenFri, Staff, June 7, 2013

AWE2013: Hardware for an augmented world
FBNSantos.com, Felipe Neves Dos Santos, June 6, 2013

Augmented Reality Will Be the New Reality
InvestorPlace, Brad Moon, June 6, 2013

Wearable computing pioneer Steve Mann: Who watches the watchmen?
TechHive, Armando Rodriguez, June 6, 2013

Expo puts augmented reality in the limelight
ABC 7 News, Jonathan Bloom, June 5, 2013

These OLED microdisplays are the future of augmented reality
DVICE, Evan Ackerman, June 5, 2013

Visualized: a history of augmented and virtual reality eyewear
Engadget, Michael Gorman, June 5, 2013

Wikitude announces Wikitude Studio and in-house developed IR & Tracking engine
PapiTV, KC Leung, June 5, 2013

Augmented reality expo aims for sci-fi future today
USA Today, Marco della Cava, June 5, 2013

Augmented Reality: High Dynamic Range (HDR) Video Image Processing For Digital Glass
Wired, Bruce Sterling, June 5, 2013

Will Wright at Augmented Reality Conference: Don’t Augment Reality, Decimate It
AllThingsD, Eric Johnson, June 4, 2013

Philip Rosedale’s Second Life with High Fidelity
CNET, Dan Farber, June 4, 2013

Google Glass competitors vie for attention as industry grows
PC World, Zack Miners for IDG News Service, June 4, 2013

4D Augmented Reality Leader Daqri Announces $15 Million Financing
Press Release, June 4, 2013

CrowdOptic Powers Lancome Virtual Gallery App, Crowd-powered Heat Map
TechZone 360, Peter Bernstein, June 3, 2013

Augmented humans, enhanced happiness?
Crave Culture, Angelica Weihs, June 2, 2013

Metaio & Vuzix to Showcase AR-Ready Smart Glasses at the 2013 Augmented World Expo
Press Release, May 30, 2013

Four ways augmented reality will invade your life in 2013
Quartz, Rachel Feltman, May 30, 2013

Augmented Reality: Augmented World Expoâ„¢ is next week
Wired, Bruce Sterling, May 28, 2013

Strike it Rich with Cachetown and AWE 2013 Playing the Gold Rush 49’er Challenge In Augmented Reality
Press Release, May 24, 2013

Local Community College Student Headed to Silicon Valley to Learn More about Augmented Reality
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Staff, May 24, 2013

Explore an intricate labyrinth with smartphone AR
CNET Australia, Michelle Starr, May 21, 2013

Dartmouth firm lands super app
Herald Business, Remo Zaccagna, May 21, 2013

Augmented World Expo 2013–The Future of Augmented Reality
Silicon Angle, Saroj Kar, May 17, 2013

Google Street View Hacking

This Google Street View Hack (via @timoreilly) will get my nomination for a Hacking the World Award this year, if there is such an award.

A parade (the screenshot opening this post), a marathon, a mad-scientists laboratory, a sword fight, and more (see The Infonaut Blog) were staged all along the route of the Google Street View truck by artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley working in conjunction with the local community and Google Street View.

The Google Street View Hack suggests at a myriad of possibilities for anyone with their eye on the prize for a great world hack for 2009.  In my mind’s eye, I imagine the Google Street View truck’s trek across the planet triggering local environmental street action carnivals wherever it goes.

Local energy conservationists, “passive house” architects, retrofitters, could turn the arrival of  Google Street View into an occasion to create projects for a sustainable future – a traveling StreetCamp (see my post on HomeCamp ’08 here).  As Google Street View intends, surely, to go everywhere,  this would be a global hack for sustainable living that crossed the bounds of the physical and the virtual.  And the vast public record of Google Street View would became a generative engine and global resource for sustainable living.

Working together on the noble aim of sustainable living

- this is my (and many other people’s) big theme for 2009.

A Hacking the World award should also go to  Pachube – “patching the planet” – for demonstrating that instrumenting the world is not merely a Sci Fi  fantasy anymore.  By facilitating “interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual,”  Pachube demonstrates (see diagram here) how we have only just begun to dip our toes into the many new opportunities we have to work together to save energy, rethink our culture of consumption, and to reboot our failing economy under a new sustainable operating system.

Energy awareness unlike the glut of information we have in entertainment and games suffers from a dearth of information. We really have very little idea about what we are consuming and the waste we are producing.  So more Hacking the World Awards should go to projects like AMEE – creating the world’s energy meter, and Wattzon – your personal energy meter, for giving us new ways to understand and work with energy data.

Many people and organizations, given the information, will change their behaviours. But the cultural changes necessary for sustainable living are deep and old habits die hard (see this disturbing report on the recent return to SUV buying in November as soon as gas prices fell!).

A  Small Community of Volunteers Can Bring Change on a Global Scale

Picture above by Benjamin Ellis, “HomeCamp – The Throng,” from his Flickr stream.

One of my favorite “instrumenting the world” projects to date and another top contender for a Hacking the World Award is HomeCamp ‘08 (see my previous post).  HomeCamp brings together a community of creators and enthusiasts of  “smart stuff,” creating a wikiculture for the noble cause of sustainable living.

The key to whether “instrumenting the world” empowers people and changes our lives for the better will be the capacity our systems of instrumentation have for what Jonathan Zittrain in “The Future of the Internet: And How To Stop It:,” defines as generativity, i.e.:  “the system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences” ( Zittrain, 2008).

Generativity is the “secret sauce” that makes the difference between, for example, Wikipedia and its all but forgotten predecessor – the “written by experts” Nupedia.

Jonathan Zittrain writes:

Wikipedia stands for more than the ability of people to craft their own knowledge and culture.  It stands for the idea that people of diverse backgrounds can work together on a common project with, whatever its other weaknesses, a noble aim - bringing such knowledge to the world. (p.147)

At Web 2.0 Summit, Jonathan Hochman (Known as Jehochman on Wikipedia), shared with me his insider perspective as a Wikipedia administrator. The full interview with Jonathan is later in this post.

Jonathan comments on the role of wikiculture in sustainable living:

“Sustainable Living requires everything to become more efficient. Incentives need to line up with conservation priorities. This requires a radical change to the way we govern ourselves. Command economies, whether commanded by politicians or capital, lead to huge inefficiencies.”

And surely, if we have learned anything in 2008, we have learned that very bad things happen when the complex systems of modern life are left in the hands of a few people motivated solely by the urge to make profit.

Hacking Design and Planning Processes for Real Estate and Transportation with Virtual Worlds

This great machinima by Azwaldo Vilotta shows the progress so far on the Wikitecture 4.0 project, ‘Re-Inventing the Virtual Classroom’ for the University of Alabama.

Though still a niche market Virtual Worlds are growing at a steady pace.  As I mentioned in my previous post, energy hungry avatars themselves will be a target for optimization in 2009.  But as my personal power usage breakdown from Wattzon shows, cutting down the amount of flying I do in 2009 would be far more effective in reducing my carbon footprint than deciding not to log into Virtual Worlds!

Note: Read Write Web’s recent post, “Report Enterprise Virtual Worlds More Effective Than Web Conferencing.  Also check out Web.Alive, and Immersive WorkSpaces and Dusan Writer’s post on “ThinkBalm,The Immersive Internet and Collaborative culture,”

My friend Melanie Swan points out in her Top Ten Computing Trends for 2009, that Virtual Worlds not only have the power of the 3 Cs (communication, collaboration and commerce) but they are fast expanding into rapid prototyping, simulation and data visualization.

My Hacking the World, 2008, Awards for Virtual World innovation would go to three potentially world changing projects for sustainable living:

1) Studio Wikitecture, (see “Reinventing the Virtual Classroom” for The University of Alabama).

2) Oliver Goh’s work on “The Path to Sustainable Real Estate.”

3) Encitra, a company recently co-founded by Crista Lopes and Christer Lindstrom focused on improving urban planning processes, starting with transportation, using virtual worlds (see my previous post here for more).

The latter two projects are being developed in OpenSim – the open source project that should also get a Hacking The World Award for creating an open modular architecture for virtual worlds that is unleashing all these new possibilites for integrating physical and virtual worlds.

The 2008 code contributions to OpenSim of special note re world hacking are Crista Lopes’ OpenSim Hypergrid – see Justin CC’s blog for full details on “What is the hypergrid?,” and David Levine’s work (IBM), in collaboration with Linden Lab (see Architecture Working Group), on interoperability (see my earlier post here).

Both these projects expand the frontiers of interoperability for virtual worlds although they “slice the problem from different ends,” as David Levine put it.  The emphasis in the LL/IBM approach is on security so assets are not moving yet.  In Crista’s solution you can have assets but the security issues are not addressed yet. But this work is vital to expanding the usefulness of virtual worlds and both projects should get Hacking the World Awards IMHO.

I asked Jon Brouchoud (full interview upcoming) what he thought were Studio Wikitecture’s most important successes to date:

“I think the greatest success has been in proving, on some level, that everyone has important knowledge that can inform and improve the design of a building, not just architects.  If we can continue building on that success, I hope we can eventually start to hack the traditional design process, and find ways to harness the wealth of knowledge held by the general public, instead of ignoring or avoiding it, as is most often the case.”

Harnessing the “Smart Stuff” to the Noble Cause of Sustainable Living

Robert Scoble’s, The Interview of the Year: Tim O’Reilly, is not to be missed. Tim O’Reilly discusses the key trends for 2009 that are bubbling up at O’Reilly Media.  And, Yes, Tim O’Reilly, as the guru of Hacking the World, gets the “Distinguished Thinker – Hacking The World Award of 2008!”

Tim O’Reilly’s trend list includes:

1) big data- vast peer produced data bases in the cloud accessible by mobile devices

2) “smart stuff” – sensors and robotics and hacking on stuff for fun and not for profit

3) Green Tech

4) Advances in Biological/Life Sciences.

And, in Robert Scoble’s interview, there is a nice titbit of history re his attendance of early Foo Camps.  Foo Camp is the wiki of O’Reilly conferences and a lineage holder to my favorite Hacking the World event of 2008, HomeCamp ‘08.

But what will be the “secret sauce” for these big ideas  – the generative engines that harness to the noble cause of sustainable living these vast peer produced data bases and all the creative “smart stuff” hackers across the globe are creating?  What will motivate the mass adoption of Green Tech and sustainable living?

What can Wikipedia teach us about how generative systems and bottom up approaches can change the world?

Jimmy Wales (interview coming soon!)  writes in his recent personal appeal for support for Wikipedia.

At its core, Wikipedia is driven by a global community of more than 150,000 volunteers – all dedicated to sharing knowledge freely. Over almost eight years, these volunteers have contributed more than 11 million articles in 265 languages. More than 275 million people come to our website every month to access information, free of charge and free of advertising.

To answer questions on a how to create a successful wikiculture for sustainable living, an insider’s view of Wikipedia may be a good place to start.

Interview With Jonathan Hochman on Wikipedia.

The picture on the left is from the Wikipedia article, Gamma-ray Burst, that Jonathan Hochman is currently working on.  It is a drawing of a massive star collapsing to form a black hole. Energy released as jets along the axis of rotation forms a gamma-ray burst. Credit: Nicolle Rager Fuller/NSF

The picture on the right, Jonathan at Web 2.0 Summit, is taken by me. Jonathan was part of the, Defending Web 2.0 from Virtual Blight, panel.

Known as Jehochman on Wikipedia, he serves as an administrator and as a leader in addressing online harassment, disruption and sock puppetry. He is also the founder of Hochman Consultants, an Internet marketing consultancy, and the director of Search Engine Marketing New England, a regional conference series.

Tish: Second Life and Wikipedia are the two great experiments in collaborative co-creation what do they have to teach us about the future of the internet?

Jonathan: Yes, Wikipedia and Second Life are key social spaces.  Some people have been seeing Second Life as the beginning of Web 3.0 – a wrap around environment where you can almost experience another life. Wikipedia is sort of another example of this.

All the problems that exist in the real world are mirrored right into that little universe.  For example, the Armenians and the Turks are at each others throats and the Japanese and the Koreans are going at it, the Palestinians and the Israelis, and the “Troubles”  … all the conflicts are imported into Wikipedia.  People are fighting over the content of these articles. They want to have it their way because these are first ranked in Google and they have a big impact in public opinion.

There was a huge fight on the waterboarding article a while back. Some guys from Little Green Footballs – they are a very conservative reactionary type of media. They are trying to change the article to say that water boarding might not be torture – change it to say it is probably not so bad.  Crazy stuff. They were trying to water it down.  And it is very clear, from every source out there, that waterboarding is torture.  We did a study and there are 115 sources that say waterboarding is torture. You simulate drowning – you simulate killing someone – that is a violation of the Geneva Convention and everything else. People were fighting, fighting, fighting!

One of the things I did was to try and clear people out who were being disruptive.  We actually had to go to arbitration over that article. It is like the supreme court of Wikipedia. There is a panel of 15 arbitrators.  They hear the case. There is evidence, arguments and decisions. It is really like a simulated law suit. You get all the experience of a simulated law suit with the real threat that you could be banned. If they don’t like what you are doing they can actually ban you or restrict you from topics.

So it is really fascinating how this social space Wikipedia becomes a very real platform though it is in a virtual world for real world disputes.  Most disputes are over the definition of things.  If you have a you suit most disputes are about how things are defined. And Wikipedia has become the defacto definition of things in the real world.  People want to know what are “The Troubles.”  If you go to Wikipedia you find out  The Troubles are a dispute over Northern Ireland.  What the article says has a profound impact on public opinion.

Tish: So who is on the court of Wikipedia?

Jonathan: They are volunteers. these people work two or three hours a day to run this court.  There are all kinds of projects.  There is a WikiProject Spam which has people who can write computer programs to statistically analyze Wikipedia projects – not only Wikipedia. But all of them are looking at the links and reporting them and banning those people who are abusing or gaming the system.

Tish: You were on the Stopping Virtual Blight Panel at Web 2.0 Summit – what are the most important things to think about on this topic?

Jonathan: Yes we were talking about how to defend the web against virtual blight. The thing I find interesting about Wikipedia is that because it is the eighth largest web site and possibly the second largest web site comprised of user generated content after YouTube. The problems that exist in Wikipedia are larger and more detailed than any other site.  For whatever problem someone has for their social media site or their Web 2.0 site these problems already exist in Wikipedia and the solutions are there and they are transparent. You can actually see the history of what’s been done.

If there is, for example, a problem on Digg – some problem with sock puppetry or vote stacking – it happens, it goes away.  You don’t get full disclosure.  With Wikipedia you can actually go in and look at a dispute and watch it unfold.  You can watch the arbitration cases that are filed, the arguments, the decisions, the logic, the rationale.  You can see the successes and the failures and the different things people have tried to control blight. For example, we tried to resolve this dispute one way but it was a disaster, so we have tried something else and that worked.

Wikipedia is a large laboratory for social media. Wikipedia and the large universe around it Wiki and WikiMedia projects that individuals, enterprises and put together like Commons.  Wikimedia Commons is a repository of publicly licensed images that anyone can take and reuse. They have sound and they have video, and all of this stuff is being stitched together now.

So if you go to the article on Obama  you can probably now hear his acceptance speech because that is public domain – its been stitched into the article.  If you go to the article on Richard Nixon – his resignation speech – you may even hear his conversation with the astronauts when they landed on the moon.  So this becomes a giant repository of all our culture and knowledge.  When I design a website, a lot of times I go to Commons to find images I use for free.  I don’t want to pay for an image I can get for free. 

Tish: And the Commons images get contextualized in Wikipedia too.

Jonathan: Some of these articles are fascinatingly detailed. If you want a quick summary of the Dr. Strangelove, the article is fantastic.  It is enjoyable, a pleasure to read.  I was reading about S.A. Andree’s North Pole balloon expedition of 1897. Some guys from Sweden decided to fly a balloon over the North pole.  They managed to get aloft then they flew over the icepack for 24 hrs then they crashed.

They unloaded their stuff and hiked back across the ice toward the island they had launched from. They ended up being on the ice pack for three months before they finally holed up in an ice cave and starved to death.  There weren’t found until thirty years later!  There was a camera with these guys and the frozen pictures taken 30 yrs earlier.  They developed the film and those pictures are now on Wikipedia.  It is just a fascinating thing!

Tish: Do you see real time collaboration beginning to play more of a role in Wikipedia – whether virtual worlds or just voice/IM — how could real time collaboration change the wikipedia editing process?

Jonathan:  The Presidential candidate articles were being edited very rapidly yesterday. There are certain real time problems.  Some of the more interesting problems are when you get two administrators who “get into it.” One administrator says I am blocking this user and the other one says I am unblocking him, and the other one “NO I am blocking him!” And so on…… And everyone says, “Stop fighting. You are not allowed to do that!” And they both get their powers stripped. People do get very heated over the silliest things. Wikipedia does have some mailing lists attached and there are some IRC channels. So there are some real time elements.

Tish: What is the role of avatars in Wikipedia?

Jonathan: In Wikipedia you have a user page and many users are anonymous.  They create an avatar and they personalize it and show themselves in ways they want to show themselves through an avatar. In many ways it is a lot like Second Life.

Some users have created second accounts – or a humerous second account. Bishzilla – a Swedish lady who is in tremendous command of the English language and has a razor sharp wit.  She has created this secondary account – almost like in a baby language.  Her avatar is a dinosaur that is not very bright that goes around frying people. Bizarre what people do! People may be editing a topic like an interest they have – e.g. Pokemon that they don’t want associated with their professional avatar. Or people may be editing a topic about hot political issues.  There have actually been some death threats issued to people over stuff they have been putting into the encyclopedia.

Tish: So avatars are important in Wikipedia.

Jonathan: Absolutely because people may be going in and editing articles that they may not want their friends and family to know they are editing.  One editor may say to another, “Stop putting stuff in or I will come and kill you!” Well then we have to ban them.  We have to call the police.

Tish: Can you build reputations on multiple avatars?

Jonathan: You are allowed to use multiple avatars as long as they don’t cross paths.  You can’t have two avatars editing in the same area beacuse you are going to be giving yourself double weight commenting on a discussion.


Tish: How do you know when this is happening?

Jonathan: You can watch the style of a users editing.  You have to watch behavior.  And if you have enough evidence through behavior that suggests accounts are controlled by one person you can go and request a technical check.

There are some uses who are called Checkusers who are able to access information desired from the server logs and check the technical characteristics of these accounts to see if they are using the same IP address.

Tish: So if you want to understand avatar interaction on the web it helps to understand Wikipedia.

Jonathan: Yes it is a fantastic way to understand how avatars work in some aspects, and also how to deal with community dynamics.  We have some very strong willed people – people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s – who are very successful in business.  They have plenty of money and spare time and they are doing this as a hobby. And some of these people can really butt heads.  You can have a problem when you have an editor who has been writing fantastic articles but also happens to be rude and chew other people out and tell them to f**k off if they are not behaving. What do you do?

Tish: Sounds a bit like Second Life!

Jonathan: The person is a great contributor to the community but they are telling noobies to f**k off, so you can’t allow that.

What do you do?  Vested contributors are a major problem to some of these sites. They are vested in the community but they start misbehaving. You can’t block them, because if you block them there is a huge upsroar from all their friends and it causes a cataclysm.  It requires very careful diplomacy to deal with some of these situations.

Tish: How many Wikipedia volunteers are there now?

Jonathan: Think of a Venn Diagram – a big circle. The total number of contributors are about one million different people that contribute.  But there are probably about 5,000 active editors  that are consistently and regularly contributing.  And within that kernel there are fifteen hundred people that have administrator access and probably only eight hundred of them are active.  People have a natural life span with the community.  People come an typically stay for 6 months to 3 years.  Usually after that they become bored, disillusioned or get into a conflict with someone.  There is a natural tendency for people to stay for a while and move on. Some people stay longer, a few, but the majority will move on at some point.  So it is a lot of fresh faces moving in.

Tish: What lessons of trust does Wkipedia have to teach us about new projects like AMEE that aims to aggregate the world’s energy data?

Jonathan: Well you have to know who is releasing the data. Who is creating the data? The beauty of Wikipedia is that you have an edit history so you can see exactly who has done what.  So you can judge whether this person is trustworthy or not.  That’s a huge problem on the web today.  We don’t have enough identification information.  When you see a web page you don’t necessarily know when that page was created and by whom, or how many revisions it has had.  Sometimes you can glean information by checking it.  If you see typos and errors you may decide that that page probably didn’t receive as much attention as it should have, and probably it is not that good.

Typos are an interesting thing.  People always try to figure out how Google ranks web pages. Matt Cutts was here from Google today.  And he was talking about spam.  But Matt also did a blog post about how he was in an airport once, and how he has a policy – when you are reading a document as soon as you come to the first error just stop because if the author hasn’t taken the care to make everything correct, you don’t need to read it. So he was in the airport, there was a sign, he came to a typo and stopped reading it. Somehow he got in trouble for not reading the sign and not having the information.  But it is interesting to think whether Goggle is looking for for typos, misspellings, broken links and using that as a signal of quality to rank pages.

Tish: Aaaagh typos might bring down your page rank!!!  That certainly is a scary thought for a blogger like me who likes to write impossibly long posts that are hard to check………

I was very fortunate to be in San Francisco last week for the Web 2.0 Summit 2008 co-presented by O’Reilly Media and TechWeb (see my upcoming post “Web 2.0 Meets World 2.0: The Civilization of Data”). But I was doubly fortunate to spend the historic election night, the day before the Summit, at 543 Howard Street – where Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor are incubating the future.

In the picture above: Chandler, Freada and Mitch (who is keeping one eye, perhaps, on fivethirtyeight.com).

543 Howard is a large, child and dog friendly building South of Market. It is home to several organizations all connected with one another that Freada and Mitch founded.  Some are non- profit and some for-profit, but all share a common kind of value framework – trying to make a difference in the world.

This incubator of the future links business development to building a better society. It is a community of entrepreneurs and social activists answering the call, in a daily practice, to the question at the heart of the Web 2.0 Summit.

how the Web—its technologies, its values, and its culture—might be tapped to address the world’s most pressing limits. Or put another way—and in the true spirit of the Internet entrepreneur—its most pressing opportunities.

Like the Web 2.0 Summit, 543 Howard Street is deeply rooted in the hallmarks of Web 2.0 culture where “the Web’s greatest inventions are, at their core, social movements”  (for more on the Summit’s Web Meets World theme see the intro to the Web 2.0 Summit here).

And 543 is a hot house of thought leaders, and world class entrepreneurs.

The picture above is Bettina Neuefeind (married to Larry Lessig – Change Congress). Bettina and volunteer, Roy Bowers, look as though they are feeling confident shortly before Barak Obama became President Elect.

Bettina, a photographer (see her election photoset) and attorney, took leave from her job as an attorney to work as Volunteer Office Manager for the SF Obama for America HQ back in September.  Bettina organized an overflow phone bank at 543 Howard during the November 1-4 Get Out the Vote (GOTV) .

Freada encapsulated the mission of 543 Howard to me:

So it is about empathy, It is about building understanding and it is about building bridges between the non-profit world and the for profit world, between the geeks and the social justice types between lots of different types of groups.  Everybody is smart, everybody has a big heart and everybody is working on great things. So we are really trying to work together and build community.

I will pick up more on this theme of “empathy” in my next post. I think Freada’s emphasis on empathy highlights something that will, perhaps, be key to Web Meets World thinking:  Networked intelligence which is at the core of today’s Web and, increasingly, it will become integrated with emotional intelligence. This  was a theme I saw developed in some interesting ways at Web 2.0 Summit.

Mitch explained more about the organizations at 543:

There are several organizations all connected with one another, some non- profit, some for-profit but all efforts that Freada and Mitch founded. There is Level Playing Field Institute – an activist non-profit – which Freada started that runs scholarship and leadership development programs for underrepresented students of color and is involved in reducing bias in the work place. Also there is The Mitchell Kapor Foundation which has grant programs in education, the environment and voting access.

We did a whole big program this year to help organizations in terms of people’s right to vote.  And on election day we have been hosting one of the National Call Centers for the Election Protection Coalition. We have room full of volunteer attorneys hooked up to phones connected to 866 Our Vote. So we are part of this national system where people can refer any problem they are having voting.

The Election Protection Center has been in the works for months.  We had to get tied into their 800 number.  There is a lot of set up for that. Election Protection is strictly non-partisan.  As you noticed,  when we were together there, I had to take off my Obama T-Shirt when I went in the room.  It is like a polling place you can’t have any political signs.

Also for the last few days here, we have been hosting a call center phone bank. Obama For America ran out of room in their office space in SF and we had some extra space. So they have their own cell phones and charges, and we have been making the space available so they can make get out the vote calls in the final days of the campaign.

Everyone was quite nervous at the beginning of the night!

I went into Second Life (Mitch Kapor was the Angel Investor for Linden Lab) to find people were anxiously watching there too – on Capitol  Hill.  Capitol Hill was built by Steve Nelson from Clear Ink. Steve’s Interactive Polling Map is only one of a number of interesting projects he has pioneered in Second Life.  See New World Notes for just how big the victory celebrations got in Second Life.

But we all relaxed when the results started coming in.  Freada gave me a signed copy of her book “Giving Notice: Why the Best and the Brightest Leave the Workplace and How you Can Help Them Stay” Thank you Freada!  The beaded Apple II and Lotus 1-2-3 box in the picture below were commissioned by Freada.

Mitch continued with the story of 543:

We also have start-up activities that I do. So there is an internet start-up called Foxmarks.  It is a very popular extension for the Firefox web browser.  It synchronizes bookmarks and passwords and will soon do lots of other things as well. There are also some other new startups that are being incubated here.  They are not exactly in stealth mode but they like to control their own PR.

I met Ross Fubini of CubeTree. He is the person with the laptop in the picture above where everyone is nervously watching results at the beginning of the night. But, as CubeTree still in Private Beta, my lips are sealed!

543 incubates a set of diverse projects, Mitch explained:

Then there is Change Congress which is a guest here It is a non-profit started by Larry Lessig and Joe Trippi that is trying to secure reforms on congress financing and an end of ear marks and things like that.

Larry Lessig (Creative Commons) gave a brilliant High Order Bit on Change Congress at Web 2.0 Summit. Creative Commons was also housed in 543 before it got too big and found its own space.

Several commentators on the Web 2.0 Summit have described a shift from Web 2.0 culture to World 2.0.

Thomas Clayburn’s post for Information Week, headlines, “Web 2.0 Summit: President Elect Obama Typifies World 2.0.” Clayburn reports on the discussion with New York Magazine writer John Heilemann, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, and political strategist Joe Trippi who illuminate how the internet and social networking were key to the Obama victory.  Here is the panel discussion.  It is, certainly, one of most interesting conversations at the summit.

Changing the World: “Fairness matters”

ZDNet reports that the message of Web 2.0 Summit was “It’s Up To Tech To Save The World.” And, Larry Brilliant of Google.org stressed  “ideas, flexibility and entrepreneurship” are at the heart of this endeavor.

Freada Kapor’s Level Playing Field Institute, “promotes innovative approaches to fairness in higher education and workplaces by removing barriers to full participation.”  This initiative takes up the challenge of making sure, that if tech is going to change the world, we tackle the obstacles to full participation.

Eric Wong is a Creative producer for Kapor Enterprises‘ creative team (see picture below).  Kapor Enterprises is a service organization that provides services for all the other entities in the building, accounting, IT and creative services. Trevor Parham, who I saw several times that night but without my camera in hand, is the Director of the Creative Group and a SMASH instructor.

Joining the Players of Web 2.0

A theme of Web 2.0 Summit  was that even in the worst of times and in “this is the New, New, New Economy where $50,000, MySQL, Rails, PHP, WordPress, Twitter, and passion go a long, long way.”

The panel “Tech Hunch Thrifty” featured several startups including Rashmi Sinha’s SlideShare and Garry Tan cofounder of Posterous.  Mitch Kapor is an Angel Investor in Posterous.

Rashmi was named by FastCompany as one of “The Most Influential Women in Web 2.0.” FastCompany also noted a stat that needs to change “only a quarter of those involved in computer and mathematical occupations are women.”  Changing this is something that Freada Kapor has put on the top of her agenda.

After watching Mitch Kapor post by email to Posterous I was hooked!  Check out Mitch’s Posterous and this post Mitch’s K9 Election protection crew. He is emailing it in the picture below.

I just emailed my third post on my new Posterous blog -  the picture below taken in the Web 2.0 Summit media room with exquisite timing by the artist/super star blogger Brian Solis.  See Brian Solis’ Flickr, www.briansolis.com, bub.blicio.us

I am with some legendary bloggers, who know each other very well. From left to right: Steve Gillmor (check out Steve Gilmor’s interview with Dan Farber and post here – a piece of blogging artistry contextulizing some of the key threads of Web 2.0 Summit); Dan Farber; Gabe Rivera; and Michael Arrington.

OMG! I am not sure if I can blog the inside story of the Summit Media center. But suffice to say, I learned a lot about Web 2.0 in my hours there.

Yes, from the primordial ooze, who gets to define the data rules!

Of course, one of the wonders of Web 2.0 is that Wikipedia’s collectively generated user content ranks top in Google. I had a very interesting conversation with Jonathan Hochman about Wikipedia and Second Life (see upcoming interview). There are some very interesting lessons for the pioneers of Web Meets World in how these large user generated communities negotiate the definition of data.

In the Media Center, I got a first hand look at how super star bloggers conjure up page rank and influence when they hit post. And just in case you were wondering what we are looking at, we are checking out whose post on John Battelle’s interview with Jerry Yang came out top in Google.  Not mine, of course!  I am still working on my Web 2.0 Summit posts.

Oh well that is one of the problems with writing 5000 word articles!  But, I take heart, Steve Gilmor said to me 1000 word posts, at least, are the way things are going in blogging these days. But 5000, I wonder?

Story of A Successful Startup: Foxmarks

I interviewed Todd Algunick, CTO of Foxmarks to find out what were the ingredients that had produced this successful internet start-up. Todd told me a fascinating story about how he met Mitch in a Computer store when he was a 12 years old.  And how Mitch used to come in after late night programming binges to show off the latest thing he had been working on. Todd said:

I started talking and explaining to him how some of the things he was doing could be done a little bit better. And he ended up hiring me as a contractor tp help him out on some of his projects……. We spent a lot of time working together.  I was there at Lotus in the early days while it grew into the thing it is.

There was a middle part of my career when he and I parted company.  I was out on the West Coast and he stayed East.

A few years ago we reconnected and started exploring different things that were happening. It seemed like there was something we could do in this new web space that was opening up. We experimented with a lot of different things – some protocol things, some event related things.  And we finally settled on Foxmarks just as something Mitch needed personally. We built the first thing as a prototype for Mitch to use and it worked…and we said, “well I bet other people want this too.”

Linden Lab offer $10,000 Prize

When I got back to NYC, Monday, I noticed this timely announcement on the Official Linden blog.  Second Life residents now have an extra incentive to get involved in “working on stuff that matters.”

From the Official Linden blog:

The Linden Prize will award one Second Life Resident or team with $10,000 USD, paid in Linden dollars, for an innovative inworld project that improves the way people work, learn and communicate in their daily lives outside of the virtual world. The award is intended to align with Linden Lab’s company mission–to connect all people to an online world that advances the human condition.

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.

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.

Intel obviously benefits from broad adoption of applications that drive significant compute so it is hardly surprising that they had been paying attention to the early adopters of the Gaming & Visual Computing market.  But, in a recent post the Intel blog states, “going forward the bigger growth will be coming from the other two segments Metaverse and Paraverse (for more on the future of the paraverse see the recording of the Augmented reality panel in LA in my previous post.)

(Thanks Joshua Meadows (Joshua Nightshade in SL), Abstract Avatars, for the picture of the Linden Lab booth at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo, LA 2008.  Those giant avatars from Second Life (TM) are very cool. That is John Lester (Pathfinder Linden) in the striped shirt helping give us an idea of their scale.)

Intel is also in a powerful position to facilitate mass adoption of rich, immersive virtual worlds  where there is a direct connection between more compute and better user experience.  As Christian Renaud pointed out in, The Techology Intelligence Group’s Virtual Worlds Industry Outlook, 2008 -2009 (written with Sean F. Kane Esq.), the “ability for the computer’s graphics subsystems to render the data as quickly as required” has been an obstacle for mainstream adoption of virtual worlds. But, Renaud goes on to note, Intel’s new Larrabee architecture may be a game changer for virtual worlds.

Recent announcements may change the landscape.  At the SIGGRAPH trade show in August 2008, Intel announced their Larrabee architecture, slated for product release in the late 2009-2010 timeframe.  This would take what has typically been a separate Graphical Processing Unit (GPU)  function and relocate it into the processor architecture on the motherboard of a computer.
Although the early stages of this technology will undoubtably be prone to compatibility issues with legacy graphics drivers, the assimilation of this function on to the main motherboard should streamline the graphics performance and compatibility issues that virtual worlds have been susceptible to.

Jobi George, on the Intel blog explains how Intel sees three segments, gaming, metaverse, and paraverse as driving “the next logical evolution of web, where “connectedness” and “immersion” (not just richness) come together to bring us to an era of  “Connected Visual Computing” (see the press coverage of CVC here, here, and here).

Getting from here (gaming, metaverse, paraverse) to there (connected visual computing)

Mic Bowman, Intel, was on two panels at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo in LA last week. I wrote up and posted the recording of the panel I facilitated, “Open Source, Interoperable Virtual Worlds” in my previous post. On our panel, Mic explained in detail some of the work Intel is doing to help us get from here (gaming, metaverse, paraverse) to there (connected visual computing). Mic also spoke on the Virtual World Road Map session with keynote speaker, Sibley Verbeck, Electric Sheep Company, (see Sibley’s blog). This panel focused more on cross industry cooperation.

Mic’s message for our panel on “OpenSource and Interoperable Virtual Worlds,” in a nutshell was:

To achieve a thriving, growing, broadly adopted CVC ecosystem, we believe the industry must come to some agreement on common building block technologies. Open source technologies represent a critical element in the discovery and development of these technologies, and foster innovative usages that drive adoption.

To give you a taste of how deeply (err yes we were a panel of unbridled geekiness to some)  we discussed the work being done to research and create these common building blocks. Here is a short transcription of a portion of Mic’s contribution to our panel, lightly edited.

The creation of common building blocks for virtual worlds similar to what HTML and HTTP did for the internet is a vital step, in Mic’s view, for the transition to connected visual computing and for the experience of virtual worlds to become ubiquitous and transparent in the way that when we say “browse the web,” i.e., we take the “web” for granted it is the applications YouTube, Flickr etc that gets our attention

The Evolution of the Web Into Connected Visual Computing

In 1995 we talked about surfing the web, nobody uses that phrase any more. Today we talk about updating our blogs or adding something to twitter, or I want to go off and buy something from E-Bay or Amazon. The web has become essentially a fundamental part of the fabric. It’s the applications that it enables that are important. Right now we think about virtual world technologies generally as an application. Ultimately we would like to figure out how to get that kind of technology into the basic fabric. So that we think about collaboration as an application, we think about a conference, and attending the conference, as the thing we do, not as a platform on which we do that. And to accomplish that, what we envision at Intel is a set of building blocks that are created or emerge out of the various platforms, as being consistent technologies.

And so we looked at a variety of different approaches to understanding what those technologies could be, what those common technologies were, and how they are created and adopted. What we saw in OpenSim’s modular architecture, was an opportunity to start articulating boundaries between the various pieces of technology in a way that allowed us to disaggregate the architecture so that we could start thinking about how to pull the pieces apart and think about how the interfaces could be made consistent across those pieces. For example, there’s a set of types for the basic building blocks that exist across the Second Life and OpenSim protocols.

One of the people we just hired John Hurliman has been working libopenmv for awhile, and as one of the things we were having a discussion about is how to capture that consistency of types. And so John’s going off and pulling the set of modules out of the openmv project, in order to give us a basic set of types that can be applied across multiple applications, that can be re-used in many different ways.  And so it’s useful to the OpenSim community, and its useful for building out some new test servers and clients that can allow us to actually try out different types of load, and potentially allows us a way of extracting out the set of protocols that implement those types so that we can start looking at new ways of building more efficient protocols.

Another example of that would be the meshing code, the code that actually takes the basic conceptual level of object that is being represented in the world and turns it into something that can actually be sent to a GPU in order to be put on a screen. And so that basic meshing component that breaks it down seems to be something that we see as a consistent piece of technology that occurs in  several places that’s useful both in sort of mapping the representation into the physics engine and on the client mapping it into the graphics engine. And so that’s another example of the basic technology that seems to be appearing to consistently in many locations.

And so, what we like about OpenSim in particular, and again this is just a tool and framework for us for understanding what these basic building blocks are, but what we like about it is we can experiment with these new boundaries in the framework of a complete and functioning system. And so it gives us a framework for testing out what these interfaces should be and what the basic building blocks are.

Mic pointed out some of the key points of OpenSim architecture and ecosystem at the Intel Developer Forum. The slide below is from his presentation there.

(The Genkii team created the OpenSim N-Body demonstration with astrophysicists Piet Hut and Junichiro Makino, see here for more).

Interview with Mic Bowman:  “The Future of Connected Visual Computing.”

1) First could you define what you mean by, “Connected visual computing?”

Connected Visual Computing is the union of three application domains: mmog, metaverse, and paraverse (or augmented reality). These application domains are united through common technologies, especially 3D content creation, and common properties such as persistence, social interaction, rich presentation, and user-generated content with potentially complex behaviors.

2) One of the key aspects of fostering innovation in a new technology  is recognizing the important paradigm shifts that it fosters.  New forms of collaboration are one  potentially most disruptive contributions of  virtual worlds.  However, I know you have gone a little further than most on thinking how virtual worlds create new opportunities for non-linear, asynchronous collaboration.  Could you explain some of your thinking on this? And, why developing thinking about the applications of virtual worlds is something you and thus Intel has got involved with?

This slide is from Mic Bowman’s presentation “Non-Linear Presentation: or how to use virtual worlds for asynchronous collaboration.”

Although Intel’s research agenda focuses on the hard ware platform impact of CVC applications, it is necessary to understand the different usages that CVC enables. To that end, we built an experimental tool in OpenSim where we could explore new modes of collaboration designed exclusively for virtual worlds. That is, we didn’t want to look for ways to just translate our real world collaborative culture into the virtual world, we wanted to find out what unique forms of collaboration are enabled by virtual worlds. The first result is a tool we call non-linear presentations.

In addition, Intel actively collaborates with Qwaq/Croquet to integrate information space visualization into their enterprise collaboration tool “Qwaq Forums”.

3) Why did Intel choose to engage with OpenSim?

We like OpenSim because it has the best logo. Go Hippos!

Seriously… a year ago we started to look at open source platforms for virtual worlds. Open source platforms provide a completely functional framework that enables researchers to focus on specific innovations. My group wanted to look at scalability limitations in the distributed systems software architecture of CVC applications. We considered four candidate platforms (OpenSim, Croquet, Ogoglio, and Wonderland). We chose OpenSim because it was the most complete implementation of a persistent world. In addition, the development community was most active. Further, the modular architecture makes it easier to experiment with new functionality.

4) I know you have contributed code to OpenSim,  will Intel be putting more developers into OpenSim in the future?

Our focus is on investigating general technologies to support broad adoption of scalable CVC applications. That is, we want to understand the general problems that limit scalability across multiple CVC applications. However, it is important to validate general principles through specific implementations (even better, implementations with real end users). As a result, we expect to continue our collaboration with the OpenSim development community and with the emerging end-user community.

5) You mentioned you were doing some testing on OpenSim.  Have you found specific areas in Intel’s domain  that could be significantly improve OpenSim performance?

Our research is still very early stage. In one area, however, we have some very promising early results. Script execution in CVC applications creates unique stress on the platform with potentially thousands of concurrently executing scripts. One method we are investigating appears to improve performance and scales to the number of hardware threads on the CPU.

6) Everyone I think agrees that OpenSim and a next generation browser/viewer would be killer.  And when we talked last you mentioned interest in the OpenViewer project.  What do you see as being the best way forward on this very big task?

Clearly, experimentation with new communication protocols requires that we modify both the client and server. Licensing issues with existing viewers certainly complicate any effort to modify the viewer.

7) And, what about the user experience in virtual worlds?  What might be the contribution of browser-based views?  What are your thoughts on this?

Browser-based viewers are a reflection of deployment challenges. Broad adoption of CVC applications requires that the industry address the problem of simplified deployment, whether through stand-alone viewer (or viewer platform) consolidation or through browser-based viewers.

Software as a service is one approach that could address the deployment problem. Limitations in browser-based sandboxes must be addressed to deliver appropriate client performance and experience.

9) Intel has Havok and a software ray tracing engine that scales to cores.  The latter would really make for a completely new generation of  virtual world viewers.  Can you explain some of the innovations you see coming from this ray tracing engine?  And will there be a special license offered to bring Havok into reach of the open source community? What role / impact will Larrabee have?

Ray tracing is particularly helpful in making user-created content look good. Let me give you a concrete example… In a professionally authored 3D environment, objects can be placed with complete understanding of the lighting requirements. In any virtual world where users can create or customize content (including simple customizations like changing the placement of objects), lighting cannot be predicted (and as a result it is very difficult to create the appropriate shading for objects). Ray tracing (both as a runtime component and as an offline tool) can dynmically compute appropriate lighting, shadows and reflections.

Havok is a fully owned subsidiary of Intel with an independent business model. Questions of Havok’s license should be directed to Havok. (see the link to the Havok evaluation and developers licenses)

As a compute engine, Larrabee is designed for compute loads that frequently occur in CVC applications including physics (collision detection), spatialization of audio, and ray tracing. In usages where rich immersion, ie accurate physical simulation and photorealistic content, determines the quality of user experience, Larrabee can certainly improve the user’s experience.

10) How do you see the landscape for virtual worlds five years out?

Obviously any predictions on the future of an industry as immature as virtual worlds must be considered highly speculative. That being said, Intel’s vision is that the industry, as it matures, forms around a relatively small set of basic common building block technologies that are sufficiently general to enable many different usages. Examples we see emerging include identity, presence, text and voice communication, and asset/object management/storage. These basic building blocks can be put together with physics, game engines, and other tools to address the needs of a particular usage.

OpenSim was in the spotlight at Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo, LA 2008. OpenSim won a conference Innovation Award and the OpenSim booth was a hub of activity.

At one time I saw conference attendees from Microsoft, Intel, and IBM all in conversation at the OpenSim table. A video of the OpenSim integration with Lotus SameTime was a centerpiece to Colin Pariss’, IBM,  keynote interview with Erica Driver of Think Balm. And, just to back up what might seem my own seriously partisan opinion, I will note Wagner James Au made OpenSim the first of his top three picks from the conference for GigaOM

And, if you want to know why OpenSim is sizzling hot these days and you can manage some serious gearhead discussion here is an audio recording of our “Open Source, Interoperable Virtual Worlds” panel.

I was facilitator for a stellar group of  virtual world uber geeks/phenom developers from OpenSim: Adam Frisby, OpenSim/SineWave, Mic Bowman, Intel, Justin Clark-Casey, Fashion Research Institute, Mike Mazur, 3Di and David Levine, IBM.  See Dusan Writer’s blog for more on the heights of geekdom that were reached in the discussion, and for some interesting thoughts on the intersection of code, standards and social policy.

I open this post with a picture of Adam Frisby, Joshua Meadows, myself and Tess Linden enjoying some pre-conference Venice Beach time. Thanks Tess for showing us that you can be a phenom developer and get beach attire right!

But, the heart of our panel’s message was straightforward and powerful (yes I am obviously caught up in campaign season and on a message kick) . But in case you missed the LA Virtual Worlds conference here is the essence/message of our panel again, from my perspective, and in my words, and in short (relatively!!).

Open Source and Interoperability are the Basis for Innovation in Virtual Worlds.

This picture is from Adam Frisby’s blog of OpenSim “booth babes”  with the  Innovation Award.  They were dubbed “booth babes” by Dusan Writer in counterpoint to David Levine’s comment on seeing this photo, “What a bunch of nerds!”  David is in the center. And from the left Justin Clark-Casey (justincc), Adam Frisby (afrisby), Charles Krinke (ckrinke), David Levine (zha ewry), Adam Johnson (adjohn), Mike Mazur (mikem), Jeff Ames (chil1ken)

Basic building blocks and interoperability work will make Virtual Worlds part of the fabric of everyday computing

Big players like IBM and Intel are often asked why so much interest in OpenSim, in particular, when their goals obviously reach well beyond one platform. The answer to this, panelists explained, is that OpenSim is providing the best environment currently available to explore what will be the basic building blocks similar to http that will enable virtual worlds to emerge as a mainstream phenomena.

In conjunction with the open source Second Life viewer (despite the need for licensing changes and a new modular architecture which was discussed) OpenSim is the virtual world test kit supreme. The modular open source architecture allows for components to be disaggregated and reaggregated into new formations easily and rapidly. As I have mentioned before,  Stefan Andersson, Tribal Media AB,  has a catchy way of putting this,  “OpenSim is a rapid prototyping testbench for wannabe paradigm shifters.”  Stefan, one of OpenSim’s founders, notes this has been the heart of OpenSim from the start.

Interoperability work is the path to achieving virtual world standards

Achieving standards will take virtual world innovation mainstream.  The innovation emerging from open source to produce basic building blocks, and the standards emerging from interoperability efforts, panelists explained, will be the magic brew that transform virtual worlds into part of the fabric of everyday computing.  As Mic Bowman, Intel, describes it (interview upcoming in Ugotrade). The goal is that virtual worlds will ultimately be taken for granted much as when say “browse the web” – we take the “web” for granted (it is the applications YouTube, Flickr etc that gets our attention).

Our panel argued strongly that achieving virtual world standards will emerge from a combination of “rough consensus and working code” rather than “Vapor standards” – worked out by committees in the abstract. Both David Levine, IBM, and Adam Frisby noted “vapor standards” have been lost causes in the history of the internet.

Interoperability work allows for these basic building blocks of virtual worlds to be expressed across various computational fabrics which creates an environment for what David Levine describes as “parallel innovation.” David explains:

The point about parallel innovation is that there are several ways to evolve things. Open Source, tends to foster the addition of features, in common to the main trunk of development. Its very much about everyone building together. Sometimes, we need to or want to build stuff which works with that main trunk of development, but doesn’t share code, or has to fork. That’s where standards come into play.

While the OpenGrid beta has begun with Linden Lab and OpenSim, OpenGrid is just the beginning of much more extensive efforts to test and create protocols across different computational environments that will include increasingly different models of virtual worlds from OpenSim and LL’s model.

So another key message from our panel is: “Heterogenity fosters the creation of standards and more innovation.”

Metaplace and Second Life TM/OpenSim in Dialogue: Play Metaplace on a Prim!

One of the highlights of Virtual Worlds, 2008, LA, for me, was a forty minute conversation between Raph Koster, Tess Linden and myself about Metaplace (the pictures from the Metaplace blog are screenshots from worlds Metaplace testers have made.

I will have a more detailed post on this interesting dialogue soon.  I think Raph illuminates some of the subtleties of what, Dusan Writer noted, came across as somewhat of a Metaplace v Linden Lab debate on the Future of Virtual Worlds panel. As Raph explained, one of the the things they like to say at Metaplace is that, “virtual places are going to be first class citizens of the web next to tags, audio, video, images….that’s a very different kind of picture of where this kind of stuff is headed”  (see Raph’s comments on the panel here).  But as a little warm up to more on Metaplace soon, here are some of the remarks Raph made about integrating OpenSim with Metaplace hehe!

If somebody took an OpenSim server and made it speak the tag language out.  Then every Metaplace client would be able to talk to the OpenSim one. And visa versa, if OpenSim can open a  bog standard gpt socket, because we don’t even use a binary protocol. We use absolutely bare bones of the web. If you can connect by telnet you can connect to Metaplace. So that means an OpenSim client could become a Metaplace client, parse the tags, and play them on a prim.

RealXtend bring a cool new demo to LA

In the picture above Ryan McDougall now senior software developer with RealXtend, Tomi Kujanpää (LudoCraft/realXtend Art Director & Avatar Specialist), Hannu Hollström (ADMINO technologies) have a drink with Gene Yoon (Ginsu Linden), VP of Business Affairs, Linden Lab at The Metaverse Mixer Meetup at the Hotel Figueroa.  Cheers!

Kudos  to Linden Lab for their big picture thinking demonstrated in the work they did open sourcing their viewer at a time when few other companies would have made such a move.  And, more recently, for their efforts on interoperability with the OpenGrid initiative.

And, congratulations to RealXtend who have pushed the envelope on innovation with the open source Second Life TM viewer and OpenSim server this year. RealXtend showed up in LA with another awesome “undersea” demo that will be public on September 23rd (screenshot below from Ludocraft Ltd.)

Also more exciting news from RealXtend this week. Mac’s Virtual World reports:  “OpenLife will be the first grid based on the OpenSim technology to use RealXTend features as far as I am aware of.”

Augmented Reality will bring Virtual Worlds out to the mainstream.

For an important look at how instead of more people going into virtual worlds, virtual worlds will be coming out to meet the people soon, see the Augmented Reality Panel video above. For more see Roo Reynolds and David Orban’s blogs.

OpenSim is designed for interoperability innovation. Adam Frisby explains:

By allowing easy customization and extension, we can test and refine interoperability protocols very quickly and efficiently. The interconnect with Second Life (TM) was developed by David Levine, IBM, in only a number of days (David Levine on the right, Adam Frisby, left).

Please join us on Thursday, September, 4th, 4pm to 5pm at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo, LA for our panel, “Open-Source, Interoperable Virtual Worlds,” which will be part of the Future of Virtual Worlds track.

Support for standardisation in Virtual World technologies has been growing steadily in recent times, join the developers of OpenSim and industry commentators as they discuss where open-source virtual worlds are heading and the progress made towards standard protocols for interoperability.

- Adam Frisby, Director, DeepThink (and OpenSim Developer)
- Tish Shute, Writer/Virtual World Evangelist, Ugotrade.com
- Mic Bowman, Principal Engineer, Intel
- Justin Clark-Casey, OpenSim Developer, IBM

Also, special panel guest Mike Mazur, OpenSim Developer, 3Di. We hope David Levine, IBM, will be back from Europe and join us too!

Adam Frisby, Deep Think, is one of the founders and leading developers of OpenSim. Adam has been behind so many important steps forward in the open metaverse that I cannot list them all here. But a notable recent project of Adam’s is a new “Lively style” viewer for OpenSim and Second Life (TM), Xenki (see Adam’s blog for more).

Mic Bowman, Intel

Mic Bowman presented at the Intel Developer’s Forum earlier this month. He outlined a road map for how virtual worlds will move into the fabric of everyday computing with open source software playing a key role (the slide of OpenSim architecture above is from this presentation). Virtual Worlds are an important part of Intel’s strategy for developing connected visual computing experiences. For more about Intel’s CVC initiative (see this press coverage of IDF, The Inquirer, bit-tech.net, hexus, Trusted Reviews).

Basically… my message for the panel is this: To achieve a thriving, growing, broadly adopted CVC ecosystem, we believe the industry must come to some agreement on common building block technologies. Open source technologies represent a critical element in the discovery and development of these technologies, and foster innovative usages that drive adoption.

Justin Clark-Casey, Fashion Research Institute, Inc.

Another interesting member of our panel and important OpenSim developer is Justin Clark-Casey. Justin, formerly of IBM, is now with the Fashion Reasearch Institute, Inc as a full time OpenSim developer/architect. Fashion Research Institute is considered by many one of the most advanced business cases on OpenSim (more about Shenlei Winkler, CEO of FRI, in my next post, “Meet the Rising Stars of the Open Metaverse at VW 2008.”

Recently Justin has been working on something called a region archive in OpenSim.

Basically, this is a way of saving a sim to a single file (currently a tar.gz) and reloading it into another OpenSimulator. This file contains all the necessary data (prim xml and assets such as textures and scripts) necessary to restore the entire region.

It’s currently experimental so still has some bugs. But, it can be used via the load-oar/save-oar commands on the OpenSim region console.

The ability to save and load archives is something that people developing whole applications using OpenSim will be very interested in, and will contribute to the business value of OpenSim.

OpenSim and Linden Lab are at the Center of Interoperability Innovation

Since the launch of Open Grid (beta) the interoperability initiative from OpenSim and Linden Lab (for more see here), cross world interoperability has begun with avatar hopping. Now the thorny issues of trust management, economy, and IP that are the major part of asset interoperability are on the table.

The picture above of Gridnaut, Lawson English, (Saijanai Kuhn in SL) is from Lynn Cullens (Bjorlyn Loon in SL), Director of Communications for Metanomics.
Open Grid has expanded to 31 regions in less than a month and there is now OGP support in OpenSim trunk. Vivaty has expressed interest in joining interoperability efforts so we may see some of the new browser based worlds become part of this initiative soon

Hamilton Linden, who is leading the Open Platform Product Group (OPPG) as Director, Engineering for Linden Lab, and, Tess Linden, Technical Director, leading design and Implementation for the OPPG (Open Platform Product Group), will be holding office hours at the Linden Lab booth at VW2008, LA to discuss Open Grid. We hope that both Hamilton and Tess will special guests at the panel also!