Nathan Freitas holding a Peek with Oliver+Coady partner David Oliver talking to fans at New York Tech Meetup – Mobile Meets Social

Volunteerism and participation in public life seem to come naturally to Nathan Freitas. Nathan is one of the leading innovators/developers in NYC in mobile strategy/design (for more on his Android development read on). And he is much in demand as speaker who shows others how to realize their mobile experience and design dreams (for upcoming speaking engagements see Nathan’s blog). But also Nathan has spent much of the last ten years working on new ways for causes and non profits to benefit from technology.

Most recently Nathan has started working part time for the NY Senate under, “Albany’s King Geek,” the new CIO Andrew Hoppin:

“The CIO team is organizing training sessions for senators and their staff on social networking platforms and how to pay attention to online feedback. Last week, they hired mobile specialist Nathan Freitas to create new phone applications that will allow citizens to get government news on the go.”

Also, Nathan is currently supporting engineer on, The Extraordinaries, a smart phone application that explores territory “beyond the flattening tendency of online relationships” (see this list from Andy Oram of the Questions on Government participation).  The Extraordinaries is Ben Rigby and Jacob Colker’s prize winning project  – “a smartphone application that delivers volunteer opportunities on-demand.”

Ben’s post, Information Age Volunteerism – Open Sourced! Crowdsourced! and the extensive comments give a detailed analysis and critique of this brilliant and creative new approach to volunteersim in the information age.

Nathan, in my view, is a great example of how to “do well by doing good.” And, I am particularly excited by the work Nathan and his partner in Oliver+Coady, David Oliver, are doing on Android, e.g., Nathan’s new gReporter – opensource, geotagging, media capture report client (you can download the source here).

I first met Nathan when I interviewed him about Cruxy in 2007 (see my post, The Mixed Reality Metarati and “Destroy TV:”  Merging Art, Technology, Politics and Play).  Nathan recently announced that “the fat lady has just uploaded her last song.” Cruxy was an innovative distributed music venture Nathan started with Jon Oakes.  Although, as Nathan explains, Cruxy “never really broke through in the way we hoped.” Nevertheless Cruxy seems to have been a fertile garden for ideas that are coming of age in Oliver-Coady’s current mobile experience endeavors.  As Nathan explains, “the world, including Apple and iTunes, has shifted to embrace some of the ideals we have always had – open formats, more ways to distribute and promote online, more avenues for niche content to be discovered and heard.” Cruxy’s technology platform, built by the incomparable Will Meyer:

“was a great success in my mind, being one of the first to fully embrace Amazon’s cloud and provide a widget-based commerce system that actually worked!”

Nathan has a new company, Oliver+Coady. But Nathan told me that he feels he is over his “start up phase.”

Nathan Freitas: I am just tired of the term “startup.” I’m more interested in being defined as person than a member of a corporation. Also I am more interested in the ideas of cooperatives, and have been working on this idea (see here for more on the New York Creative Cooperative ).

Tish Shute: You do a high percentage of non profit work. Are you still managing to keep the home fires burning in the economic downturn?

Nathan Freitas: There is definitely profit to be made in non-profits because even if you only get paid half of what you get for corporate work, it is worth it in terms of fulfillment, ego, respect, and general contribution back to the planet. However, I’ve also been investing time & energy w/o pay into thinking about how causes can benefit from technology for over ten years. So its not just something you decide to do one day, and suddenly are successful.

Tish Shute: What are some of the highlights of your non profit work recently?

Nathan: Well, The Extraordinaries project is definitely a highlight. It is focused on a whole new approach to volunteering and winning the first prize at the WeMedia Conference for the non-profit tech category was a great validation of the work. I am just a supporting engineer on the effort, which was founded by my good friend Ben Rigby (a longtime non-profit tech guy as well) and Jacob Colker.

Ben wrote this excellent book on mobile tech and organizing, Mobilizing Generation 2.0 He’s done a ton of mobile work with youth voters via his non-profit, Mobile Voter.

The Extraordinaries is really taking all of our joint experience and putting it into a whole new system that is meant to go beyond generic email blasts that just ask you to “send a fax” or “send a link”. it gives people specific tasks they can accomplish on their phone or in their local area using their phone.

Tish: Did you do Twitter Vote Report with Ben too?

Nathan: Oh, no, Twitter Vote Report was with a different group of folks…mostly east coast-based, organized by the TechPresident.com blog. But Ben and I worked on SMS efforts for the 2004 election. We sent 40,000 messages out to SEIU labor members and MoveOn members… really the first time SMS was used in a wide-scale manner to help get out the vote on election day.

Tish: Do you have a new mobilization project planned?

Nathan: Its all about The Extraordinaries right now. We’ve got a big launch coming in June, and are working actively to add more causes that can benefit from volunteers and organizations that have volunteers but don’t know what to do with them.

Tish: I was just looking at your post on Peek too.

Nathan: Yeah… fortunately that is a completely  “for profit” gig.  But I like the company a lot, and think their spirit of providing access to email at a very low cost plays well with the non-profit world.

Tish: So it isn’t just iphone apps that are paying the bills?

Nathan: Nope. iPhone is just an aspect. Everyone is so obsessed with it and how to strike it rich quick, but in the greater scheme of things, there is a huge ecosystem of mobility out there for you to find a niche in, if you are looking.

Tish: Are you able to monetize your work on Android yet?

Nathan: here and there… releasing some for pay apps soon, also including “free” Android ports in some high-profile iPhone apps we hope to have out soon. Some successful iPhone app developers are looking for people to port their apps to Android, as well.

gReporter – opensource, geotagging, media capture report client

Tish: So what are your hopes for Android development in general and your gReporter app in particular?

Nathan: I think Android represents right now what Linux on desktops did in 99 or 00  Though as we all know, cycles of technology seem to speed up. There is huge interest in it at the academic level and there is also a genuine interest in its use by non-profit/development agencies working around the globe.

You have to jump through hoops to get an unlocked, open iPhone w/o contract. Android provides an alternative solution to this, that acts more like a true platform, and not just a consumer product.

Tish: At the moment the Android market place is only for free apps right?

Nathan: No, it now supports paid apps. I just bought one today for $2.99

Tish: What did you buy?

Nathan: An app that allows me to turn my G1 phone into a WiFi hotspot sharing my 3G connection to anyone who connects.

Tish: So what are the most important aspects of Android in your view?

Nathan: There are  two sites to help demonstrate what is really going on with Android that makes it significant

1) Open Intents – this is the ecosystem of developers, all creating services and apps that interoperate, share data, and generally build a very rich Microsoft style platform:
except all these are open-source and built by lots of small developers and not one big corporation.

2) Android on HTC – this is the home for all the efforts to port Android to pre-existing HTC/XDA mobile phone hardware. You can see the status of ports here: http://wiki.xda-developers.com/index.php?pagename=Android_devices  Imagine… taking an old Windows Mobile HTC phone, and then popping in an SD card that reformats it over to Android brand new phone!  For much of Asia, India and Africa, there is huge interest in this.

Tish: Nice! You mentioned earlier that you are thinking of doing SDK for the android sensor API’s?

Nathan: That would be part of the geo report app… expanding it to capture all sensing data and report that when you submit your text, photo or audio report.  Right now it just detects your lat and lon, but no reason it couldn’t also check your compass, altitude and whatever other data the device might offer.

Tish: So what will your geo report do now?

Nathan: It allows you to submit a text, photo or audio report, tagged with geo coordinates, timestamp, and basic user info (name, email, home location, etc) to whatever server it is configured to us. it is the latest release of code used for the TwitterVoteReport and InaugurationReport efforts.

There is also just a lot to learn or use from the code itself, which is available at: http://github.com/natdefreitas/georeport-android

Lots of little lessons learned packaged up into a functioning application

Tish: How many sensor APIs does android have?

Nathan: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/hardware/SensorManager.html

int SENSOR_ACCELEROMETER A constant describing an accelerometer.
int SENSOR_ALL A constant that includes all sensors
int SENSOR_DELAY_FASTEST get sensor data as fast as possible
int SENSOR_DELAY_GAME rate suitable for games
int SENSOR_DELAY_NORMAL rate (default) suitable for screen orientation changes
int SENSOR_DELAY_UI rate suitable for the user interface
int SENSOR_LIGHT A constant describing an ambient light sensor Only the first value is defined for this sensor and it contains the ambient light measure in lux.
int SENSOR_MAGNETIC_FIELD A constant describing a magnetic sensor See SensorListener for more details.
int SENSOR_MAX Largest sensor ID
int SENSOR_MIN Smallest sensor ID
int SENSOR_ORIENTATION A constant describing an orientation sensor.
int SENSOR_ORIENTATION_RAW A constant describing an orientation sensor.
int SENSOR_PROXIMITY A constant describing a proximity sensor Only the first value is defined for this sensor and it contains the distance between the sensor and the object in meters (m)
int SENSOR_STATUS_ACCURACY_HIGH This sensor is reporting data with maximum accuracy
int SENSOR_STATUS_ACCURACY_LOW This sensor is reporting data with low accuracy, calibration with the environment is needed
int SENSOR_STATUS_ACCURACY_MEDIUM This sensor is reporting data with an average level of accuracy, calibration with the environment may improve the readings
int SENSOR_STATUS_UNRELIABLE The values returned by this sensor cannot be trusted, calibration is needed or the environment doesn’t allow readings
int SENSOR_TEMPERATURE A constant describing a temperature sensor Only the first value is defined for this sensor and it contains the ambient temperature in degree centigrade.
int SENSOR_TRICORDER A constant describing a Tricorder When this sensor is available and enabled, the device can be used as a fully functional Tricorder.
float STANDARD_GRAVITY
with a few easter eggs as well
GRAVITY_DEATH_STAR_I
SENSOR_TRICORDER

Nathan: They are all in the API however, there isn’t hardware to support all of them yet… for instance TEMPERATURE is not yet supported
nor is LIGHT.

Tish: and errr what is gravity_deathstar

Nathan: It is a value representing the fictional gravity on the Death Star from Star Wars – geek humour

Tish: That makes me think of this great essay by Julian Bleeker, Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design Science, Fact and Fiction:

“When you trace the knots that link science, fact and fiction you see the fascinating crosstalk between and amongst ideas and their materialization. In the tracing you see the simultaneous knowledge-making activities, speculating and pondering and realizing that things are made only by force of the imagination. In the midst of the tangle, one begins to see that fact and fiction are productively indistinguishable.“

Picture below is Nathan playing his dream ukulele – designed using the free, open-source Inkscape vector drawing tool (see his open-source Ukulele plans here)
See Nathan’s blog for the whole story of how the Flying V Rockin’ Ukulele Design he posted to Thingiverse a few weeks ago, after being inspired by Bre Pettis’ talk at ROFLThang materialized at the  NYC Resistor “amazing workshop laboratory in Brooklyn where they let anyone come over and hang out at, to learn how to make, build and fabricate pretty much anything. They also have a laser (aka “LAAAZZZOOOR”) which you can think of as an automagic thing cutter-outer!”

so this….

became this …

Nathan and David presented Coovents at NYTM – Mobile Meets Social. They had a large group of questioners surrounding them (see picture below).   I talked to David after the presentation.

David Oliver was a software architect, user experience designer and product manager in the areas of mobile/wireless and electronic payment at IBM for over a decade.  Most recently, he lead the effort to productize a mobile client for IBM’s Lotus Connections enterprise social networking suite.  As a software architect, David was often technical lead for IBM’s business partner relationships with mobile device manufacturers.  Prior to IBM, David was co-founder of the Internet’s first “micropayments” company, Clickshare.

Talking with David Oliver

Tish Shute: How are smart phones are causing us to rethink what networked online relationships are all about.

David Oliver: You know these [mobile] devices are .. there’s a long time we tried to pitch that we’re going to treat them like they’re PC’s, or they’re just like anything else. But they’re really not. It may be the same coding style but the way you think about using them is entirely different. And the way you think about your program. so if you use html, java and that kind of stuff, yes it’s same code type but the way you think about it is entirely different. And to me these little devices make what you said [relationships inherently about who YOU are, WHERE you are, WHAT you are doing, WHAT is around you, etc.] a lot more possible than a PC. because in a PC you almost have to sit in front of it and like it controls you. But the device is so little and there’s almost no user interface by comparison. You got to be very smart how you build something so that it’s almost invisible. And of course that’s the beauty of the iphone, Apple will tell you. The idea of ubiquitous computing. Ubiquitous what? Am I really computing? I don’t feel like I’m computing. I feel like I’m interacting or something.

I think twitter is very cool. The real way it’s cool is that there’s no required client. You can access Twitter any way you want.  You can imagine other ways to use it. Tweet Deck happens to be a nice for now. What I like about Twitter is, if you give it a tiny bit of thought, the Twitter network’s complete white noise, just like the internet itself. If you put a probe on the internet it’s all white noise, it’s all unordered packets. It makes no sense. So it’s cool that Twitter is at the level of little bitty conversations, but collectively all white noise. Totally meaningless white noise.  There’s some neat things going on, but I think we haven’t seen barely the first of what you can do with Twitter.

The way I see it is it’s like instant messaging where you don’t instant message to someone you instant message to the network and there are listeners. So normally in the old world of IM like AOL IM I would say Tish let’s talk and I kind of like grab you. Then it’s a narrow pipe you to me. You can add a few people in and make a little group, and that makes a bit of a closed network. But with twitter you just like talk into the air as if I were standing over there and you had a twitter client here, we could have the same interview. Because I would be watching you OH I see Tish’s question. I’d be over there talking  and you’d be picking me up over here. I’ts like you’re talking into white noise, like at this bar. You choose to hear me, this guy is not choosing to hear me right now.

Tish Shute: So what does Android bring to the party?

David Oliver: They have the notion that you have a telephone platform that’s open, and that everybody can use. And it’s got a variety of sensor data – not just location but also accelerometer and compass and more.  So in theory you can almost broadcast that data. It’s connected to a network. It’s easy, open API’s to get at that data. But the question is who are you going to broadcast it to or who are you sending it to. What are they going to do with it? How are you going to control it, and make sure people don’t misuse it? As you heard with the services tonight, there’s a central kind of service necessary to filter and rebroadcast that stuff back out to places that need it, or can use it, or you want to have use it. I think the mobile device is only one piece of this. Nat and I always talk about well we do mobile applications but a portion of it is on the server. And coordinating with the people or the group or the central resource that brings all this data together.

Tish Shute: There seems to be a lot of new location based services – platforms to aggregate location based data being developed (e.g. xtify and viaplace). What do you think about the direction this development is going in?

David Oliver: It’s not conventional wisdom but it’s one of these things where when a crowd of people does something, and that means people themselves are the service providers,  when they all get together the net effect is greater that the individual effect would be. Pooling together makes more sense than doing it individually. Its a little bit like an advanced version of you have to have a password for every single site and you manage your passwords. Location is the same way. If you had to give every single website that you enjoyed your location data or tell them how to get it, what a huge pain. So they’re offering a way to do that in a more general sense. There are humongous privacy issues though. Just like passwords. Would you really trust a place that held all your passwords centrally?

Even with the most basic level of calling. Now that you can call from anywhere. Largely people are getting into a mode where their mobile phone is them. It’s always with them. That’s how you reach me. Forget the home phone, the work phone it’s just a mobile phone. You have an address attached to you, an address I can reach you at that’s location independent. So there some beauty in that and it’s very freeing. It makes your location unimportant, you can call me anywhere. You can text me anywhere, message me anywhere. You can be anonymous. My son told me something recently. “I love going to New York City because I can just walk around and nobody knows me. I’m completely anonymous. That’s the coolest thing”, he says. At one level that is a good thing and a lot of good things can happen that way. But this new thing is sort of the flip side where everybody knows your location. And we haven’t figured out if that’s a good thing yet. But we’re in the throes of that whole changeover happening. And we’ll see. There’ll be some misuse. I’m not an advertising guy, so the fact that everything’s got to be ad supported makes it potentially very creepy and very dangerous. So we’ll see how that evolves.

Is there any model where you can go “Oh this is just like ‘S’”? I don’t see where that’s possible. It’s a new world. Where you’re exposed all the time, potentially. And how do you figure out either as an individual or a larger group, society or whatever, when that works and when that doesn’t. And you know there’s going to be some mis-steps probably. But the tangibility creates some of these interesting opportunities, there are just some amazing things that could happen, really, really good things. But we’re not going to get there in one step.

One of the things that was really a killer for privacy and a killer for in some ways the internet, was during the dot com bust. Prior to the bust, there were web sites that you’d given your name and email, and they said “we promise to preserve this privacy.” But as soon as those companies went bankrupt, their email list was gold. It was value. And a bankruptcy judge, in a court in Delaware, created a legal basis to sell that data. Those things that were formerly private were no longer private – “no no no that’s got value. I’m going to sell it so the shareholders get their money.” So all these web sites who had lists of user names that they promised were private, became public information. That was one of the biggest blows to privacy in the history of the internet. That’s going to happen again and again. Like if MeetMoi goes out of business the likelihood is all your shit’s going to get sold. I’m sorry it’s all going to be sold. It’s all a big joke. And that’s why central services are horrid, and I don’t like anything about a central service.

There are some pragmatic things about the way routing on networks actually works and the fact that the internet has gotten very centralized itself. The core ideas of the early internet which were essentially a survivable telecommunications network, remember it was the defense department that did the original internet? So the original idea of the original internet was survivability. The Russians could bomb the daylights out of the United States, territorial U.S. and we would still have a survivable network. That was the idea. And therefore all the nodes were dispersed and did not count on each other, and could reroute. Well now one company UUNET or whatever they are they own the whole thing. And you can look up all their locations on some internet database. 18 well placed bombs and the whole internet goes down. That’s what happens over time.

Well the whole cloud thing is also kind of a myth. It’s a very neat sounding term, and some aspects of it are different and new. Nate and I do a lot of cloud computing, it’s all on Amazon.

But we’ve always had that. That’s called time sharing. Strictly speaking it’s a thin contractual accompanied by a much much much easier application programming interface. That’s what cloud computing is. It’s a very skinny contract. Timeshare was a  huge contract. Literally it’s legal and a little bit of API ease. It’s just timesharing. But at Amazon and the other ones too, you’re not responsible for your node going down. If it goes down, they push it somewhere else automatically. Your disk goes down. You’re not responsible for backing up your disk, it’s already on 14 copies on 8 continents. They do that. So it’s a higher level of service. Nate and I have this thing called slice host. And we’ll probably build some services on it, and if they get popular, it’s like a vending machine. You just drop in a dime, they give you another slice. No contract at all. It is growth and learning about old ideas. Like this whole idea of software as a service. The company called ADP Automatic Data Processing, who basically in short do payroll for everybody. It’s software as a service. It’s been going on since 1952 or something. It’s more like a reconception using modern tools. It’s like virtual worlds are a different thing. That’s a whole different beast.

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!

Open Grid Public Beta opened today (see Second Life blog) marking the beginning of a new era of interoperable virtual worlds and a new architecture for Second Life TM. The magic of “running code and consensus” is here and, at least between OpenSim and Second Life TM, avatars are jumping back and forth. Hamilton Linden, who is leading the Open Platform Product Group (OPPG) as Director, Engineering for Linden Lab said:

The Public Open Grid Beta is an important step towards opening up the Second Life Grid to become interoperable with other virtual worlds. Having successfully demonstrated interoperability with IBM, we’re excited to begin interoperability testing with the entire OpenSim community.

In the picture opening this post Adam Frisby (avatar Adam Zaius) one of the founders of OpenSim, David Levine, IBM, (avatar Zha Ewry) who wrote the interoperability code. and myself are about to teleport from the Ugotrade OGP (Open Grid protocol) enabled OpenSim to the Linden Lab Open Grid. The teleport to an external region option is in a pull down menu that brings up the box you see on the left. If you join the Beta and want to visit, my region URL is http://ugotrade.net:9000

As these teleports are about moving identity, at the moment, and no digital assets are moved, we are all Ruths.

You must join Gridnauts in Second Life TM if you want to participate. The download and instructions for the OGP (Open Grid Protocol) Open Grid Viewer will be on the Wiki. And, to get a zipped binary package to set up an OGP enabled OpenSim you can go to the OpenSim forge site. Thanks to Mono and .NET using the same bytecode format, the same package will work just fine for .NET and Linux/Mono. Mike Ortman, DeepThink has generously created the zip package which he will keep updated.

In the screenshot below, Adam Zaius, Zha Ewry and Tara5 Oh are preparing to teleport back from Open Grid to the Ugotrade OGP OpenSim.

Linden Lab’s New Architecture

But along with interoperability the Open Grid Beta marks the debut of Linden Lab’s new architecture that has been incubated in the Architectural Working Group (AWG) spearheaded by Zero Linden. As Zero Linden explained:

A key component of virtual worlds that sets them apart from web sites, is that you interact with them with your chosen identity. Separating out the Agent Domain enables your identity to be held and hosted by a organization of your choice, and enables your identity to be truly independent of the many organizations that will eventually host regions. The web can’t do this – your identity on a web site is tied up with that web site. You have an account at each web site. In virtual worlds, independent persistent identity is key to the experience – and Agent Domains are just the technical mechanism that enables them in an open virtual world.

The interop protocols developed in AWG and used in David Levine’s, IBM, (Zha Ewry in Second Life) interoperability patch not only play an important part in enabling virtual world interoperability, they will be a key component of the new Linden Lab architecture and eventually part of their main production grid Agni, that is the grid we call Second Life. Zero explained:

The plan is, that once this is shown to work, that this code base will eventually be rolled into Agni, probably even before Agni is opened up to outside grids. TPing, and Login will be done on Agni using these interop protocols as the standard method. Of course, there are legacy viewers to support – so the existing stuff isn’t going away for some time. And we’ll proceed very cautiously onto Agni, with “kill switches” that allows to revert all viewers, even new, back to the old pathways.

Zero Linden and Zha Ewry will be speaking on “OpenSim and the Future” – the progress they have made, and the implications of their work at Metanomics, Noon PST on Monday, August 4th. Dusan Writer will also be announcing the follow-up to his much-lauded competition to create a better Second Life client viewer at the start of the show.

The picture below shows how the Open Grid client which, in addition to the teleport option after login, allows you to select an external region even before you log in

The Open Grid – a community of developers, “playing with shiny things”

There is a strong team of Linden’s working with Hamilton in the Open Platform Product Group. Tess Linden, Technical Director, leads design and Implementation for the OPPG, and Layla Linden has been getting the agent domain ready. Periapse Linden is project manager for OPPG. Whump Linden is managing the Open Grid Public Beta. Whump is also a very interesting contributor, I think, to the evolution of the Open Grid. He has an enormous amount of web experience and has been a blogger since 1998. Whump came to Linden Lab from Apple’s MobileMe group. He is the point person for the Open Grid Beta which is organized through the Second Life TM Gridnauts group.

Enus Linden and Infinity Linden are working on testing tools known as the PyOGP test harness. These testing tools are a very interesting project themselves. Tao Takashi who was the prime mover in the PyOGP project before it became part of the Open Grid Beta explained to me:

My vision was always to create something like libsecondlife but for plain Python instead of .NET. The old protocol was just too undocumented to really get something like this done quickly so when OGP was getting born I though of trying again but with a better protocol and by coincidence Linden Lab need a test harness for testing all those components out there so PyOGP was born, as the library can now serve as backend for the tests. But in the long run of course more is possible. It can also become a full implementation of client and server, web service interface and more. I am working on an agent domain implementation for pyogp right now and I have some ideas for some text based or maybe even 2d gfx client.

Something worth noting about the Interoperability effort between Linden lab and OpenSim, the Architectural Working Group, and the PyOGP initiative is the large number of experienced and talented developers that are putting extraordinary amounts of time and effort into these projects.

The meetings are packed. I had my first God-mode teleport into a full sim in Second Life TM from Zero Linden today so I could get into the AWG meeting to ask some questions for this post. Yes, God-mode is truly the finest way to travel! I hope to devote a series of posts to the pioneering developers that are creating the future of open source virtual worlds. Their dedication and brilliance is quite extraordinary.

Hey but for starters a tip of the hat to the indefatigable and omnipresent Saijanai Kuhn (Lawson English in RL) – “a 20+ year script kiddie programmer who always wanted to get into game programming.” Saijanai says: “This is my chance to do something kool on a significant scale, so I’m excited about the whole AWG OGP thing.”

And, If you want a little example of how quickly some of this developing brilliance produces results in this community check out this prototype for a “Livelyâ„¢”-style viewer for OpenSim+SL. that Adam Frisby (OpenSim/Deep Think) whipped up in a few hours! There is a currently a petition to release llmath/llvolume.cpp under a more liberal license which Adam pointed out to me is “somewhat required to do accurate rendering in alternate clients.”

I spent this weekend jumping around Second Life and OpenSims with Whump Linden and Zha Ewry. The picture below shows Zha, Whump and I arriving on the LL Open Grid from Zha’s laptop sim. There is a bug Zha told me that is making us arrive at (0,0,0) on the sim.

Managing Assets and Identity in an Interoperable Open Grid

Linden Lab is NOT throwing the baby (the Second Life economy) out with the bath water (the old Second Life Architecture). Linden Lab have made this very clear many times but Zero reiterated for me when I asked this question:

Absolutely — after all, I love babies — we positively need to build an architecture that supports the economy of SL — while at the same time allowing the virtual world to be open to a wider variety of experiences.

And, if you have already watched the video of the NYC Metaverse Meetup you will know that interoperability of assets and managing identity in open virtual worlds is what’s on everyone’s minds. But as David Levine (Zha Ewry in SL) pointed out several times: “These teleports are just about moving identity for the moment they do not bring a single digital asset with them for a moment.”

There was a long but very interesting discussion about some of the issues of managing and federating identity and moving assets between multiple virtual worlds at the Meetup. And, Adam Frisby and David Levine outlined some of technical and social steps to full interoperability in that discussion.

David Levine has also asserted several times that a big priority for him is looking at how the interoperability of assets can be implemented without detriment to “creators” whom he describes are “the secret sauce” that makes Second Life a compelling place and the ingredient that makes a virtual world either work or not work. But, interoperability, regardless of how particular virtual worlds decide to handle it, will force virtual worlds to rethink the way they do or don’t help their content creators and users to relate outside of the little puddle of their own particular terms of service. But, David pointed out, if we want to do something that spans not just one or two applications, this discussion, which is social as much as technical, has to be done in a broader community

For now, the goals of the OGP Beta are narrow. As Whump pointed out:

The matter of inventory is not in scope for this part of the beta. Figuring out inventory is a combination of technical and community work. Some of this will be figuring out a common vocabulary for talking about these issues. We want to figure out the basics of protocols for teleport, find the bugs, and refine these issues. We want to have running code and test suites, because that will bring interested parties.

But, while the beta has begun with a simple version of OpenSim trunk the next step will be to work on interop with projects like realXtend and Tribal Net. Both these initiatives are bringing a lot of innovation to OpenSim. Both realXtend and Tribal see interoperability as a key project and are looking forward to joining the Beta soon.

Roadmap for Open Grid

I asked Zero Linden what the roadmap for the next few months would be:

Zero Linden: Well, now that we’ve demonstrated some technical work, and are going into a public beta, August is going to find much of the LL side hunkered down and fleshing out much architectural detail. For some areas, especially inventory and identity, we’ll be putting together some concrete frameworks so those more complex discussions can make progress in the Fall. So the next step is to pave the way for clear progress on them. They are big issues and deserve the time and background work to make them be successful discussions and eventually successful desgins.

Tara5 Oh: So when you say concrete framework you mean code and architecture?

Zero Linden: I mean more of a specific set of issues, use cases and design options to have a discussion about. We’ve been talking about identity and inventory in largely general terms for almost a year. I think we as a whole have a common sense of what we are talking about. Now we need some specific points to answer, and a guide for the design. Then, the code will follow.

Tara5 Oh: so when you say uses cases do u have a wish list yet?

Zero Linden: Well, I have may personal pet use cases — who doesn’t — what we will be developing in August is a more rational set. So, in short, nothing yet. I’m trying to stay purposly “zen mind” about it — since it can be such an explosive topic.

In the picture below Whump Linden gazes out at the open horizon.

There is a lot of excitement in the Japanese Metaverse these days.

I met some of the the most important Japanese metaverse companies at the Virtual Worlds Expo and Conference in New York City earlier this year. And, last week, I managed to catch up with Naoyoshi Shimaya, CEO of Metabirds, and Hiroshi Asaeda, CEO of Meltingdots. I also had a very interesting conversation with Ken Brady and Adam Johnson about their recently launched metaverse consulting company Genkii.

The picture opening this post is a self portrait by Yuki (Genkii’s CCO). See my interview with Ken and Adam later in this post, and my interviews with Metabirds here, and Meltingdots here.

Adam also clued me in to the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo 2008, Tokyo May 28th to 30th. You can attend the conference in Second Life â„¢ (A registered Trademark of Linden Lab). Today, I had a little walkabout the conference site in Second Life (picture below).

Philip Rosedale, founder of Second Life ™ (A registered Trademark of Linden Lab) will give “his first and long awaited lecture in Japan.”

Thanks to Genkii’s Adam Johnson for sending me all the updates on the conference! Also, Adam sent me some very interesting news about NTT’s recent investment in the ngi group (see below). This news is making 3Di and their OpenSim developers smile, I would guess!

Big news for the Open Source Metaverse in Japan!

NTTとngi、3Dインターネット関連事業などで業務・資本提携を発表

NTT, the largest telecommunication company in Japan will invest in the ngi group with a total of 1,630,000,000 yen. ngi group is the owner of 3Di so NTT is planning to work on metaverse business with their new NGN (next generation network) system (see Second Times).

I contacted 3Di who are very involved in OpenSim development and part of OpenSim core to try and find out more. But though “currently engaged in a lot of interesting discussion with other companies, and a lot of interesting projects” they are not commenting on this new round of funding. There was an English article in the Nikkei news, Thursday, May 8th, about the ngi/3Di/NTT deal, ” NTT To Take Stakes In ngi group Firms To Tap 3-D Virtual Space Tech:”

NTT will use the ngi group’s 3-D image processing technology to develop a system for managing virtual spaces on its fiber-optic based next-generation network (NGN). It will build such systems on behalf of companies that want to sell goods and host online advertising forums, among other businesses. It will begin receiving orders through such subsidiaries as NTT Communications Corp. as early as October

I asked Ken to comment on this news:

Ken Brady: As far as NTT taking a stake in ngi group and 3Di, I think we’ll have to wait and see what that means for the industry as a whole. NTT is huge, and they have a record of encouraging some really significant innovations. They could really be a driving force behind Japanese adoption of virtual worlds.

Tish Shute: Will this funding specifically get chaneled to any OpenSim projects or is that still another open question?

Ken Brady: I would bet some of it will go toward OpenSim projects, though I think it’s too early to say to what extent. Since NTT is taking an interest in 3Di, and since 3Di is so involved in OpenSim, I think there’s a pretty good chance that they are looking strongly in this direction.

Genkii:

“A Strategic consultancy for social media and virtual worlds.”

Above are Yuki’s portraits of Jeff Ames (CTO), Ken Brady (CEO), and Adam Johnson (COO) and a photo of the Genkii team in Tokyo.

Genkii is not only one of the coolest new companies on the planet, headed up by CEO, Ken Brady, formerly Director of International Strategies at Centric, a science fiction writer, and award winning film producer. But I think Genkii is one of the first Metaverse consulting companies in the world to put “a strong focus on leveraging Open Source platforms.”

While Japanese communities in Second Life are flourishing showing the some of the highest retention rates of anywhere in Second Life, Japan has become an important hub for OpenSim development.

The Open Metaverse enables a melding and reinvention of what has up to these point been divided realms – virtual worlds and the web. And, this company of metaverse “strategists” seems to be gearing up to make productive the fertile ground the first generation of metaverse evangelists has prepared.

As Ken points out virtual worlds are in an unusual and enviable position right now.

It’s really going to come down to what system gives users the experience they want. I think there is a lot of experimentation and head-scratching going on right now about this. In all phases of advertising, purchasing content, etc. Virtual worlds are in an unusual (and enviable, I’d argue) position because we are developing these things while still in the early stages of the industry, while industries like TV, print, movies, music are struggling with radical change.

I think what comes out of all this is a meshing of technologies. Hopefully we grab the good of what’s worked for the web and the good of what’s worked (so far) in virtual worlds and fuse them into a viable, scalable model. We need to create a system that allows people to create and play and work in virtual worlds as easily and as robustly as they do now on the web. That’s a pretty big order.

Also, that requires a huge melding of the minds. A lot of people from a lot of industries need to work together to make this happen.

Genkii already has a strong roster of strategic alliances including:

3Di, Centric, Metabirds, Synthespian Studios, Anvil Media, i-POP, Yosh, Fix8, Metaversatility, DeepThink Labs, and Syn Entertainment.

Interview with Ken Brady and Adam Johnson

Tish Shute: Ken how did you end up in Japan (Adam has told me his story before now he came to Japan to work for ngi!)

Ken Brady: My grandmother is Japanese and I’ve been coming back and forth here for about 5 years. My wife, Yuki, is Japanese/Taiwanese (she’s Genkii’s CCO), and we knew we’d like to live here at some point. While I was with Centric, I was back and forth helping them set up some operations in Asia, and moved when it worked out for everyone involved.

Tish Shute: It seems like Europe and Asia are blazing the trail with OpenSim. Is the US stuck in the dinosaur age re the Open Metaverse?

Ken Brady: OpenSim is growing quickly, there are more and more people (and companies) getting involved in its development, and it’s getting quite a bit of attention in VW media and blogs.

But I think it’s odd, isn’t it? When the web revolution really got its legs in 1995, the development was very US-centric, with other countries following. Now that we’re in the throes of a virtual world and 3D web revolution, it’s a real global undertaking. I don’t know if the US is exactly behind, but they’re certainly not holding all the cards in the game. What happens in Asia and Europe is certainly pushing the US these days.

Tish Shute: Yes you are right. It is not fair to say US is behind ‘cos everyone still has to take a hat off to Linden Lab!

Ken Brady: You’re absolutely right about recognizing LL as the icon they are. Especially in Asia, people always mention SL as the baseline on which every other upstart is measured. It’s all about whether something is a copy of Second Life, an alternative to Second Life, etc. Their name recognition is high.

Tish Shute: And yes SL asset development is spectacular!!! I am wondering if Linden Lab will make a move that could facilitate the rapid development of content in OpenSim. Then we would see a 3D revolution so much quicker, wouldn’t we?

Ken Brady: Agreed that asset development is key. OpenSim needs a robust system that will encourage interest in the platform. Active involvement by a large number of users is what’s going to get it really moving, of course. There’s something of a chicken and the egg dilemma there, right? Many people won’t use OpenSim until all the features are in place, while all the features may not be in place until more people use it.

Tish Shute: I am interested to pursue what your view on virtual economies is. Nao from Metabirds suggests that many new forms of virtual economies will emerge to promote asset development in the Open Metaverse but others seem to think virtual economies are a dead dog, and new models will drive asset developement. And, there are many that think Second Life be the heart of asset development in many prototypical virtual worlds if there work on interoperability with OpenSim proceeds? But what is your view on this very contested question?

Adam Johnson: The easiest route is just to plug in a system that’s already out there. Visa, or Paypal for example. There are also some pluggable game economy systems out there as well. Twofish comes to mind. The second way would be for Linden Lab to open up some sort of API to use their economy. OpenSim already has most of the inner workings in place for economy transactions. All that needs to be done is to customize it to your needs.

Ken Brady: Though I agree with Adam regarding plug-in economies (an easy route), I think there are so many possible models that could arise, depending on the nature of the virtual world in question. Closed systems offer some level of stability, such as with the L$, QQ coins, etc. But there will be certain situations where a virtual economy is not necessary to the development of the world. Barter systems can arise, a more open set of IP rules (like creative commons) could arise to allow more of a reputation-based economy.

Tish Shute: I know you are close to HiPiHi and they have a vision of creating a protected environment for a virtual economy but with some innovations on the Linden Lab model? They mentioned a virtual world ebay idea to me. Do you have thoughts on this idea?

Ken Brady: I don’t think that one system is right for every space. Unless we have all worlds becoming the same, operating on the same rules, with the same users, with the same goals for using each world. Of course, in that case, we’ll all create one virtual world, right?

I really think that reputation economies are viable, though, and what better place to prove the model than in a virtual world?

Tish Shute: Could you explain more about your idea of a reputaion model and what kind of economy that would work in?

Ken Brady: It was a science fiction idea that moved toward an economic model while no one was looking, I think. Both Jason Stoddard, Centric’s CEO and a fellow science fiction writer, and I are big propenents of this model. eBay is, to an extent, an example. In that case, your feedback (others’ satisfaction with your transactions) raises your standing in the community. As more people see your high rating, more people buy from you.

Tish Shute: Didn’t people game the reputation system in Second Life so much they had to take it out?

Ken Brady: Yes, people did that in SL. But it was a limited system, really. It was a popularity contest that didn’t truly mean anything. You didn’t get anything out of having a high ranking. With eBay, it’s self-correcting. Look at Digg or other systems that allow you to rate people up/down. Eventually, you know who to listen to/block. Or who to buy from/stay away from.

Adam Johnson: I think that it’s not well represented solely by a number. Something based on word of mouth probably holds more value.

Ken Brady: Exactly. In a world with no monetary system, though, reputation becomes the goal. The better your reputation, the higher your standing the community (whatever that may correspond to).

For this system to work as an economy, though, there has to be a way to actually get something out of your good reputation. Say, in SL, that land was given out based on reputation, and people with a certain rating got an island…it would make for a radically different environment. If there’s money coming in somewhere, it’s easier. If there is ad revenue, the higher your reputation, the higher the percentage of ad revenue passed on to you.

But this is all just conjecture. I guess I’m just saying that Nao from Metabirds is right: there are so many different models, and that there will be many concepts attempted.

Tish Shute: I realize from your work in Centric you are very familiar with all the social media plays. But I know many people are erked by the social media model of monetizing through advertising. They see advertising as taking over the internet! Will virtual worlds become Scobleized to survive in the open metaverse?

Ken Brady: I don’t actually think advertising is taking over the internet, nor will it take over virtual worlds. That’s been the argument from the beginning, but I think it’s a bit overstated. Ads are everywhere: TV print, movies, the room you’re in right now. They’re just more in your face online where you’re staring at a screen.

Adam Johnson: I’m sure there will be advertising free VWs, but they will cost you. If users want something that’s free, advertising will come into play more than likely. But, as computing power gets better, and the VW systems more efficient, and bandwith cheaper, it will become easier to support a VW with little money.

Ken Brady: I think Scoble offers an insight into the possibility of a reputation economy, so I think that will be one model.

Personally, I don’t have a problem with being paid to disseminate an idea I already have and support. Scoble hypes things he wants to hype, and that’s how advertising could change with that model of propagation. I don’t like the idea of people hocking products and ideas they don’t support, which is how it has worked with advertising in the past.

Adam Johnson: With reputation at least, if you hock something not good, you lose your reputation status. It is all balanced out and keeps people in check.

Ken Brady: I think having a two-tiered opt-out model (ads for a free experience; ad-free for a small fee) works sometimes. It may work in virtual worlds, but it’s not yet proven.

Tish Shute: Yes and there are two ends to this aren’t there? Because on the one hand much of the sophistication of the Web 2.0 revolution in terms of monetizing (and I agree Scoble is an example of that) has gone on apart from the development of virtual worlds up to this point. And, conversley the innovation of VWs has not really melded with the web so now we are at a turning point with OpenSim where these two directions collide and what will come out of this collision is…………?

Ken Brady: It’s really going to come down to what system gives users the experience they want. I think there is a lot of experimentation and head-scratching going on right now about this. In all phases of advertising, purchasing content, etc. Virtual worlds are in an unusual (and enviable, I’d argue) position because we are developing these things while still in the early stages of the industry, while industries like TV, print, movies, music are struggling with radical change.

I think what comes out of all this is a meshing of technologies. Hopefully we grab the good of what’s worked for the web and the good of what’s worked (so far) in virtual worlds and fuse them into a viable, scalable model. We need to create a system that allows people to create and play and work in virtual worlds as easily and as robustly as they do now on the web. That’s a pretty big order.

Also, that requires a huge melding of the minds. A lot of people from a lot of industries need to work together to make this happen.

Tish Shute: Yes but I take my hat off to Genkii, Tribal, Rex, Deep Think, HiPiHi, 3Di because none of you seem to be retreating in 2.5 D and flash plug ins or simply a model that plugs 3D into the web?

Ken Brady: I think those models are right for many people, but aren’t necessarily right for what we’re trying to accomplish overall. I think of most 2.5D/Flash virtual worlds as stepping stones. Sure, there are some great ideas and technologies that will come from them, but they are mostly grabbing a segment of the population that’s not ready (in hardware, broadband, or desire) to make the jump to more free-form 3D worlds. I firmly believe the 3D web is coming, but many times you have to take it in steps. And, really, that’s what Second Life, HiPiHi, OpenSim all are anyway. All steps toward something new.

Don’t get me wrong: I also think the 3D web will incorporate a lot of 2.5D/Flash technology, and that all that we learn from current and upcoming platforms will be integrated in those that come after. 3D worlds need to be easier, no download, more stable, etc. We’re just not there yet.

Tish Shute: And what about the intergration of mobile with immersive 3D?

Ken Brady: Mobile technology is absolutely central to any social technology here in Japan. Sometimes, I think people don’t realize how true that is, but think it’s an exaggeration. There are, I believe, now over 100 million mobile subscribers in Japan. And these are 3G phones. Coverage is awesome, and phone use is ubiquitous. Look at mixi, Japan’s largest social network. Most of its users update by mobile phone. Much more often than using a computer. Social media that doesn’t support mobile dies in Japan.

Tish Shute: But the integration of mobile and virtual worlds is not as easy is it – and I don’t mean technically I mean conceptually?

Ken Brady: It’s not easy. Conceptually, it’s a much different thing to be in a virtual world on a computer, keyboard and mouse at the ready, than using a mobile. I think that way of thinking stems from a western outlook. In the US, I think it will be hard to get people to log into a virtual world on their phones, even when the technology is available. In Japan, it wouldn’t be any more strange than sitting on the train watching TV on your phone, or writing a novel on your phone for others to read from their phones, or updating your mixi blog. These things happen constantly here already.

Tish Shute: Also as Genkii is the first consulting agency for VWs that I have seen that foregrounds open source (are there any others) could you tell me more about that?

Ken Brady: We don’t know if we’re the only consulting agency for VWs putting open Source upfront, but, if not, we’re one of the few. I know NMC has talked about its Open Virtual Worlds Project with Sun and I know others have mentioned open source worlds, but I’m not entirely sure where they stand on actual development and involvement.

Tish Shute: I should ask you articulate why you have directed you energy towards OpenSim and OpenSocial (but I am pretty sure I know the answer to that question) but many other people will not!

Ken Brady: I think you’ll see a lot more agencies talking about open source as soon as more clients are interested in it. Demand will drive it, as always. In our case, we believe that open source development is important to advancing these young technologies. We want to see virtual worlds and social media mature into the amazing technologies we know they can be.

OpenSim represents, we think, an opportunity to build a platform that will advance virtual world technology and the user experience. OpenSocial represents the same, albeit in a tangential industry.

Adam Johnson: We may have a bias towards OpenSim, but we are still agnostic in that effect. We are keeping our eye on the other projects such as Croquet, and Sun’s platform as well.

Ken Brady: We think this will be integral to advancing relevant industries, and we want to help where we can. It’s not about any one player or one platform. Adam is right. We’re platform agnostic, but we will recommend open source where it’s possible, and therefore applicable.

Adam Johnson: But I am in favor of all of the projects coming together to at least collaborate on knowledge, lessons learned, tips, etc.

I’m sure we are all going through similar problems, and are solving them over and over again needlessly.

Ken Brady: Agreed. I think the virtual worlds industry is awesome for one reason above many others: almost everyone I’ve met in the industry I like and want to collaborate with. I don’t feel competitive against most of them, because we’re all so early in this field. We all need to work together.

Adam Johnson: I think this year you will start to see some first steps in interoperability between the OpenSim projects. Within OpenSim, you will start to see all of the grids starting to interconnect with eachother, forming one large grid of grids. And from there, hopefully we can get some SL and OpenSim interconnect happening as well.

Tish Shute: So any involvement with enterprise solutions from Genkii?

Ken Brady: As far as enterprise worlds, we’ve certainly talked to some folks about it. I’ve discussed this in length with a lot of people in the film industry, especially. I think it’s a fascinating and exciting direction to go. 3D space is such a good collaborative environment and it’s being under-utilitzed. This summer I’ll be doing an interactive presentation for the Directors Guild of America on using virtual worlds for film production and collaboration. Having worked in the film industry myself and made movies, I feel it would be an outstanding use of the technology.

Adam Johnson: We definitely want to get involved there at some point. I know our partner Jeff Ames, who is also a core dev of OpenSim, and a major contributor to the OpenViewer project has some great ideas for dataviz.

Tish Shute: Then I have a big question for Ken re the science fiction to science moves that we may see soon in virtual worlds (the one i would most like to see is get 3D off a 2D screen!).

Ken Brady: I think there are an exciting number of science fiction concepts coming to life in virtual worlds already. I’ve gotten some grief from some of my fellow SF writers who ask why I’m wasting time in virtual worlds, seriously. I then show them some of the things that they wrote about or read about becoming real in the virtual space. Sometimes it scares them, sometimes excites them. It’s weird.

Certainly some of the most exciting are 3D devices. Who hasn’t been pining for full 3D? I still remember wearing a 3D helmet and playing with Dactyl Nightmare in the early 90s and I want to see integration of that sort of technology. We all know it will happen, but exactly when and which sort of system will be dominant is questionable. There are helmets, 180 degree screens, iGlasses, etc. Inobtrusive, wearable tech is really my personal choice. I look forward to augmented reality and my iGlasses. Input devices are also moving forward quickly. Mitch Kapor’s work in SL, Johnny Lee’s Wii hack, Surface, Keio University’s thought controller, and other similar technologies make me giddy.

Some of it is open source and some is not. I’m trying to get in to go play with as much as possible for an article I’m writing for Analog about virtual worlds. I’ll let you know when I find out!

I met Naoyoshi, CEO of Metabirds, at the Electric Sheep Company’s party during the Virtual Worlds Conference, 2008. And, ever since then, I have been looking forward to hearing more about Naoyoshi’s vision for the future of virtual worlds and his pioneering company Metabirds that has developed 25 sims in Second Life â„¢ (A registered Trademark of Linden Lab).

The first part of this interview began in a gmail conversation and then we met in Second Life to talk at length about a number of directions Naoyoshi is exploring; including his blog portal web site and point service “SLMaMe”, his ventures in OpenSim with a brand new project OpenNebula, and his pioneering of manufacturing 2.0 with Naturum Islands Resort in Second Life.

SLMaMe (for the Google translation see here), Nao points out, “gets 14,000,000 page views per month.” Also SLMaMe’s innovative point service, Nao explains below, is the basis for micropayments in 2D/3D virtualworlds.

Interview with Naoyoshi Shimaya, CEO of Metabirds: Part One

Tish: Could you tell me a bit about what Metabirds have been doing lately? What are your latest projects?

Nao: Our biggest project is “SLMaMe”, which is blog portal web site about virtual worlds. It gets 14,000,000 page views per month. We produce the “Naturum Islands Resort” project in SL. It’s an outdoor resort region that uses 2 SIMs. Naturum is an EC website which is the biggest outdoorgoods EC. They have blog comunity. Metabirds brought them into SL.

And we are planning to create real outdoor product using SL creators’ design.

Tish: Are you still mainly focused in SL? Or are you working in other virtual worlds?

Nao: We are interested in the OpenSimsolution, and we have started creating a grid, OpenNebula. Also, we are interested in other metaverses.
Especially, we are interested in:
* virtual worlds in which we can create objects
* virtual worlds in which we can do business
( sell and buy objects, services, lands… using virtual money which can exchange
to real money.

Tish: How is Second Life doing in Japan? I sometimes visit Japanese sims and see a lot of enthusiasm for music and fashion? What are the most successful parts of SL from you perspective?

Nao: Creatives/arts and businesses. I believe it’s absolutely necessary for us to develop the virtual world.

Tish: What do you think is the way forward for SL in Japan? And for Virtual World adoption in Japan?
Nao: I think time will provide a solution to many of the Hardware/Software/Network problems. And the problems will be solved soon, if we keep wanting an ideal virtual world.

And, most companies will come into virtual worlds after people/users come into virtual worlds.

Tish: What are, from your point of view, the biggest changes necessary to SL to make it more appealing to a large audience in Japan?

Nao: *stability, using world wide distributed processing servers

Tish: and… for all virtual worlds..

Nao:

*output devices ( e.g. glasses )
*input devices ( e.g. brain waves )

Tish: In the US there has been a recent upsurge in 3D chat rooms and lite weight 3D and walled garden virtual worlds. Is this the same in Japan and are you still optimistic that an immersive free form 3D programmable space like SL can expand its appeal to a mass audience?

Nao: I think…
“3D chat rooms and lite weight 3D and “walled garden virtual worlds” are just services.
Second Life and other CREATIVE virtual worlds are next infrastructure for the internet.

The former can boom and can get a lot of users in the short period (1~5 years)

The latter can get a lot of users in the long period ( 3~10 years )
Because there are a lot of interesting services that can be born in these platforms.

Tish: What do you see, if any, is the role for virtual worlds in positive global development?

Nao:

*Business
The virtual market can be the biggest market we have ever found.
It will show a hidden labor force all over the world.

I think virtual wealth can be as valuable as real wealth, in the meaning that they provide – happiness… to make our life happy.
We can exchange virtual goods with each other using virtual/real money.
Businesses can develop that also provide real life goods,services for people.

*Community
We can connect with other people more richly using virtual worlds than previous internet services.
It will be able to create more powerful “Imagined communities” using real/virtual mixed world.
Some will fail, but, some communities will gain influence in “real” life all over the world.

Part 2: In Second Life

Tara5 Oh: Adam Johnson mentioned to me that Metabirds and Genkii are working together?
Nao Noe: Genkii is our partner.

Tara5 Oh: Does “Open Nebula” have an English client?

Nao Noe: “Open Nebula” is small now, because it has just started. You can join using SL client in English. But we don’t have English website, and English information yet

Nao Noe: You can log in “Open Nebula” using SL client launched with ” 　-loginuri http://60.32.217.116:8002/ -set systemLanguage ja”
-loginuri http://60.32.217.116:8002/

Nao Noe: You can register user account at

http://opennebula.net/RegistUser/entry_1.php

Tara5 Oh: Cool I will try and go in! Do you anticipate putting up an English website soon?

Nao Noe: We want to make English website…… but we don’t have time now.

Nao Noe: “Open Nebula” is a wasteland now, and not stable. It’s just a test project.

Tara5 Oh: I am very interested in how people feel assets will be built up in OpenSim projects? Are u thinking of building a virtual economy and using micropayments in the future?

Nao Noe: Yes I am. We have SLMaMe, which is blog portal website. In SLMaMe, we have a point service.

Nao Noe: I think the point service will be used for micropayments in 2D/3D virtualworlds.

Tara5 Oh: What do you mean by a point service?

Nao Noe: For now, a blog user can get 10 SLMaMe points(named MaMeTa ), when their adsence is clicked. The user will change these points to L$ next month. And, in the near future, the user can buy “MaMeta” with L$, JPY, US$ and, can get a lot of services in many Virtual Worlds.

Tara5 Oh: So an ad on a blog can earn you SLMaMe points which you can then convert into L$ ?

Nao Noe: Yes

Nao Noe: I want to make this point service to a virtual currency.

Nao Noe: But, I’m not interested in just “exchange money”.

Tara5 Oh: What is your interest?

Nao Noe: I want people to change virtual items, virtual services……. I want people to do interesting businesses using our currency.

Tara5 Oh: One of the big challenges for OpenSource virtual worlds is to make incentives for people to build interesting assets but they also want to be able to port assets across worlds. Do you see assets being exchanged between SL and OpenNebula?

Nao Noe: I think our economies/grid can be exist equally with LL and other real countries’ economy. But, it’s small we are creating very very small country. If we want to exchange money/asset with another VW, other real country, I think it’s just a political and technical problem.
But, if we want more and more, to exchange with other world/country, it will be realized in the near future.

Tara5 Oh: Yes I agree with you!

Tara5 Oh: How has the Japanese community in Second Life been growing? I see a lot of cool music and fashion events!

Nao Noe: I love Japanese users’ music and fashion very much.

Nao Noe: It’s very important that we introduce them into real world people.

Nao Noe: so, I made SLMaMe website.

Nao Noe: I know a lot of users become SL user, after reading user blogs.

Nao Noe: We are planning to create Real goods with Naturum. We are choosing a SL creator in fashion contest event in SLMaMe.

Tara5 Oh: There are a lot of English speaking admirers of Japanese fashion in SL!

Tara5 Oh: Cool are you hoping to do some RL integration?

Nao Noe: Yes

Nao Noe: At first, we are trying to create clothes in small lots, using SL creator’s design.

Nao Noe: Naturum has manufacturing network, because they have large EC website.

Nao Noe: we are trying for “manufacturing2.0″

Tara5 Oh: What other VWs besides SL and OpenSim are Metabirds developing in?

Nao Noe: I’m interested in HipiHi. I want to make SLMaMe into English and Chinese version. In the Chinese Version, HiPiHi is very important.

Tara5 Oh: In the US the Electric Sheep have moved a lot to 2.5 D and closed virtual worlds!

Nao Noe: I know ESC are moving a lot 2.5D

Nao Noe: I think it’s important in the near future, to maintain the company.

Tara5 Oh: in the US there is a huge interest in 3D immersive for corporate collaboration and education . Is that true in Japan?

Nao Noe: In my opinion, it’s true. OpenSim is a strong platform for this we will introduce OpenSim to companies.

Tara5 Oh: so to follow up on my question about 2.5 D has Metabirds managed to stay focused on the 3D immersive without having to develop more in 2.5D and flash like ESC?

Nao Noe: We are very small company, we don’t need many fixed cost. It’s a simple solution for us.

Tara5 Oh: So you continue to find SL devlopment profitable?

Nao Noe: SL, OpenSim, HiPiHi, SLMaMe.

Tara5 Oh: Which all develop the immersive 3D path which is good I think!

Tara5 Oh: Melting Dots also felt their communities in SL were strong and growing although they work across other platforms. Do you feel this about your SL communities? How many sims do you have in SL?

Nao Noe: about 25 and we have SLMaMe comunity gathering thousands of SL core users who are VW core users in Japan. it’s very strong.

Tara5 Oh: What does MaMe mean in English?

Nao Noe: Bean

Nao Noe: SLMaMe is a broad bean.

Tara5 Oh: heh Bean is a slang word for currency in English too!

Tara5 Oh: Do you have your own portal for Metabirds sims in SL?

Nao Noe: our company site is http://www.metabirds.com/ and http://www.metabirds.com/service/metaworld.html is information.

Nao Noe: And we are planning to create Social Network Site website for the metabirdssims(metaworld) user http://metaworld.jp/

Tara5 Oh: how many people work for Metabirds now?

Nao Noe: about 10.

Tara5 Oh: and you are based in Tokyo?

Nao Noe: Yes, but our staff live all over Japan.

Tara5 Oh: so you are a virtual company too?

Nao Noe: Yes.

Nao Noe: We are using SL and Skype to communicate with each other.

Tara5 Oh: Melting Dots said they saw themselves primarily as virtual world event creators and an agency specializing in social media – how do you describe Metabirds?

Nao Noe: We are “Virtual World Business Developer.”

Tara5 Oh: I saw the recent press release from NTT.

NTT, the largest telecommunication company in Japan will invest in the NGI group with a total of 1,630,000,000 yen. NGI group is the owner of 3Di so NTT is planning to work on metaverse business with their new NGN (Next generation network) system (see Second Times).

Tara5 Oh: What do you think are the implications of this for Japanese virtual World development?

Nao Noe: I think it’s good for hardware/network infrastracture for virtual worlds.

Nao Noe: and, on their service, Metabirds can provide a lot of businesses then, then the users will become happy If they provide low cost and stable infrastracture, it’s very good for us.

It is jaw dropping the number of new features that realXtend has brought to the Second Life â„¢ (A registered Trademark of Linden Lab) open source client and OpenSim server tech in only a few short months. Last week the Rex team posted a video showing inverse kinematics, character morph controls, and clothing physics- see here. And, this week they have revealed their latest feature – the integration of Facegen (see the video here or click on the screenshot above).

I attended realXtend’s recent open meeting in Second Life. The Rex team answered questions to an eager crowd that included, the Second Life avatar, G2 Proto, of Kyle “G” the lead developer from G2 (see here for more on their hardware and networking division). Kyle “G” is currently involved in a collaborative effort with Microsoft to explore the abilities of the C#/.NET based OpenSim software. He is spearheading efforts with the Second Life Microsoft .Net User Group to create the Microsoft’s new developer community OpenSim grid – Project Manhattan. Kyle seemed very interested in the work of realXtend! I have an in depth interview with Kyle from G2 and Zain from Microsoft that details their vision for Virtual World Developer and Platform Evangelism on Open Sim. I am transcribing this and will post soon!

Interview with Jani Pirkola

Jani Pirkola, Rex’s Project Manager, kindly took some time to answer a few questions in the middle of this very busy and exciting time for Rex. The new Rex video showing the Facegen integration has just been posted on the Rex media page. Jani said:

It is almost scary as it is so real! I really start to see that we are approaching something so real as in Snowcrash or Otherland series of books. You can also make yourself look younger or older, different gender or race.

Tish: Wow!! Congratulations to the realXtend team you really have shown the world what can be done with the open source Second Life client and achieved what many considered impossible at this stage! These two new avatar tech videos are awesome!

Jani: Well, the main focus of our work at the moment is on Avatar. We have integrated Facegen so that you can use photos from your own face to create your own avatar.
We are just about to release new versions of viewer and server, and we start to host public avatar storage and authentication services to promote the future internet and avatar portability.
Now we have a lot of work to do on planning. But we are going to focus on three tracks:

1) a base track to fix stability issues.

2) a user experience track to make it look extremely good.

3) a collaboration track to do all the document sharing stuff.
In the new software release we have some cool new features. For example, you can have friends list working no matter where you and your friends are, so it works across realXtend grids and worlds. The same is true for your personal inventory, you can have that too with you when you teleport to different worlds.

Tish: One of the great things Rex has done is to offer so many new and great features so fast that you have for the first time created a situation where content developers have a significant new incentive to start working in an OpenSim grid. Are you beginning to see interest from content developers?

Jani: Yes, I have received many contacts for example from architects, they see the value of using real 3D models in virtual worlds. Professor François Garnier of Ecole Nationale Supérieur des Arts Décoratifs de Paris is one of the early adopters of realXtend platform in their art productions.

Tish: Obviously SL has a huge lead on content production and will probably offer licensing to open grids that want to share content at some point? But, what new models for content production do you see emerging in the Open Metaverse?

Jani: From Second Life users we have heard some complaining about the IP rights issue. They would die to have that feature on realXtend. But we have a plan for this; We could make an object rights server, that keeps SHA1 hash values of all the assets and licenses how to use that asset plus information about which users are allowed to use that asset.

Then it is possible to build a feature to the viewer that users can check if someone is using stolen or bought jacket. That creates a social pressure instead of trying to technically prevent copying. Technical prevention is always going to fail in the end, so we need to use social pressure instead. For example, If everyone could check whether an asset is owned or stolen, someone who is representing a company would not want to use anything stolen on them.

Ben Goertzel, Novamente, said that if someone steals his AI pet dog, it is a dead dog without the AI that runs on his server. Philip Rosedale was in agreement on this point also. Philip said much the same thing when he attended our Open Source Virtual Worlds panel at VW 2008.

If you really want to protect some content, you need to have server side functionality attached to it. This combined with our idea of using asset hash on a server, we think would boost the content creation.

realXtend offers possibility to use OGRE meshes and world is full of ready made 3D models that you can convert to that format. So that solves at least part of the initial egg-chicken content problem for realXtend.

Tish: Some people are proclaiming the notion of a virtual economy is dead, others say that virtual economies still have legs. What is your view on this?

Jani: First of all, I am an engineer, so economics is not my cup of tea. Still it seems that virtual money is successful in many games and virtual worlds. If it can be tied to RL money, that can be a source of many problems, like money laundering. I am not ready to say it is dead, but we might have to wait to see what future brings in this area.

Tish: There is a lot of work on interoperability going on right now. I even heard that Qwaq is considering working on interoperability with OpenSim! And I heard Rex is in talks with Solipsis. What are Rex’s goals for interoperability? I know in order to develop some of the super cool features of Rex you are not currently integrated with the OS trunk. But Adam Frisby mentioned to me a way you could remain integrated with OpenSim but still have the freedom to be the trail blazers of the future. Could you tell me more about your plans for compatibility with OpenSim in the future?

Jani: Yes, right now we are in warm talks with Solipsis to figure out how to co-operate the best possible way. Lets see what comes out from that. Their technological ideology is the best I can think of, combination of both client-server and peer-to-peer to get best of both of the worlds.

The focus in realXtend is to lead the development. There is a secondary goal to be interoperable whenever it makes sense. I just heard from Adam that the latest OpenSim is rock solid, so that is a big incentive for us to continue our efforts to modify realXtend code to be compatible with them. The goal here is to make realXtend as modules for OpenSim for easy integration.

Tish: Rex has blazed the trail with facilitating the import/export of meshes! But large meshes from programs like 3D max, while they create totally new opportunities for applications and content development, can be time consuming to work in and often require a lot of time on the import /export work, and they can be difficult to fine tune in world. One of the dreams for the future might be prim meshes that would bring the best of both worlds together (prim and mesh) do you see this as a possibility? I have heard many obstacles from bandwidth to graphic card inadequacies. But as Rex now has a reputation for doing the impossible I am asking your view on whether prim meshes are on the horizon? If not what are you doing to make meshes more flexible and easy to work with in world?

Jani: That is an interesting idea, and we have toyed ourselves with it already. It is definitely not impossible, though we have not made any decisions whether we will implement it or not.
We are going to do a lot of improvements to world building tools and add new possibilities like projectors, and things that are familiar from game level editing tools. Mesh selection is going to be fixed, for example. So you can expect much more in the area of world building. We are doing a lot of world building ourselves and have found it too cumbersome at the moment.

Tish: OpenSim is definitely the fastest forward moving kid on the metaverse block. I know that the Rex avatar server is out and the Rex grid open. But, as I have a Mac I have no first hand experience, so I am interested to know how well things are progressing re stability, concurrency and ability to scale?

Jani: Those are currently the weak points we have, but we are going to attack also these in the near future. The stability is number one, it is a must for every application out there.

Tish: OpenSim is beginning to get a lot of interest from major corporate players. IBM, Microsoft, Intel, are three of the big ones. How do you think this will effect Rex and the developing ecosystem of OpenSim?

Jani: I think you could compare OpenSim and realXtend to operating system and a windowing system. realXtend is built on OpenSim, so every big company who starts to use OpenSim, will consider using realXtend as well. By using realXtend, you actually use OpenSim server plus some modifications we have done to enable all the new features.
I am sure that OpenSim and realXtend benefit each other as the whole ecosystem looks richer that way.

Tish: Recently I talked to several key metaverse developers in Japan and the integration of 3D immersive and mobile tech is very much part of their vision. But Japanese cell phone habits make the possibilities for interesting integration very rich. In Europe and the US what interesting directions do you think this integration with 3D immersive and mobile could take?

Jani: That is something we have given a lot of thought to, but we haven’t found a clear answer yet. One idea is that there could be communication application that you can use to have presence in the virtual world even when you are on the move.

Tribal Net, which goes into public Beta at the end of this week, not only brings us the long awaited OpenSim on your PC but by creating new back end protocols for OpenSim the Tribal Media team has introduced a key innovation to OpenSim – the decentralized grid. I interviewed the two founders of Tribal Media last week, Darren Guard who is also the founder of OpenSim and Stefan Andersson who was the first to join Darren on the OpenSim project. Stefan also led the development of “Playahead Island” in Second Life â„¢ (A registered Trademark of Linden Lab). Stefan has deep roots in web development and Playahead is one of Sweden’s largest web communities. Stefan explained the heart of the Tribal Net concept:

Everybody brings their own computing power [to Tribal Net] and we’ve packaged it for end users. I mean that basically joe schmoe can install it, set it up, and run it. Because OpenSim’s been very tech heavy, our goal with Tribal Net is to make Opensim more accessible for the wider layers so to speak. Also we’ve done some work on the map so that now when people go online their regions show up on the map. When they go off line the region disappears [it can also be persistent]. That is also a radically different approach from Second Life .

Yes! It is very easy to install and you will find your region immediately embedded in a network of other regions running on other PCs.

After I had set up my Ugotrade region, I clicked on map and it was a real thrill to see the Ugotrade come up in a neighborhood of other regions (even though I am apparently one of the first five people to try it outside of Tribal!) and immediately begin my first adventure in sim hopping – NOT across a grid run on a bunch of servers NOT on some huge server farm somewhere, but simply by teleporting to other peoples regions run on their own PC’s located across the globe. W00t!

Ugotrade Jr. got into it immediately and his terraforming and building skills are blossoming! Picture below shows his mountain retreat 2.0.

Tribal is still using the Second Life client but Darren said they hope to support the realXtend client at some point. Check out the awesome new avatar technology from realXtend in a new video out this week that shows off character morph controls, inverse kinematics, and clothing physics.

Below is a picture of Stefan And Darren enjoying a game of chess in one of the first regions I visited – a Tribal Net region running on Stefan’s laptop. Stefan explained:

The chess game application installed on the desktop is developed in c# by a third party – and anybody can create their own set of pieces and share it as an xml file

Tribal Media’s Vision

Tribal Net is the first public application from Tribal Media but it is only the beginning of their venture. Stefan explained their vision:

We see a virtual web world much more like the Web works today. Instead of a closed bubble, we should have an open, networked model. One size never fits all, so people should be able to make content on their own computers and share it with others, professionals should be able to make their own applications and run on their own servers, or to have it hosted on reliable hardware. Content should also be much more moveable, people should be able to transfer objects not only between worlds, but also via the web, blogs or e-mails. Tribal Net lets them do that. Our goal is to supply the tools to make this vision come true.

And as Darren noted: “At the moment our back end is basically customized for this one application. Each new application is going to need slightly different customization. Stefan also talked about a Facebook application they have been working on. There is not a general solution at the moment. Darren explained some of what they are hoping to achieve with Tribal Net.

From a engineering side, I think the main point is at the moment we are working on making it easier for people to start up and host their own region. TribalNet is our first demo of that process. Then we hope to make it easier for people to host their own small grids with this easy hosting of regions, so say any school or college could have their own small grid without the admin level that is needed currently for opensim. A important part of our concept is having a GUI for the regions, so that we can later provide add on modules for these GUI’s so for instant maybe we would provide a game construction toolset add on, or a presentation addon , that made it easier to host and control presentations. Some of these then at a later time could move into the viewer. Then at a higher level we have our set of extension api’s which I think its a bit too early to go into detail of.

What follows is the full transcript of my interview with Darren and Stefan. The first bit is about the history of the OpenSim project and then we discuss a number of topics including interoperability with Second Life, the Tribal teams’ view on virtual economies, asset development on Open Source grids, and what application they are most important in Tribal’s vision.

Interview with Darren Guard and Stefan Andersson.

Tish: How did OpenSim begin?

Darren Guard: For a number of years, I had thought about starting or getting involved with a open source virtual world project. But none of them seemed to be going anywhere. One of the problems was trying to create a client and server at the same time. Then in January 2007, I was looking around again at the various options, for use by my ex-employer. At the same time Linden Labs released the code for their client. Which I think from a legal point of view made creating a server that it could connect to a much more easy “sell”. So I started work on writing a very quick prototype server, to see if there was any problems with getting the SL viewer to connect to it and be able to move around. A number of people had the same idea of writing a server which was compatible with the SL viewer, it was even listed in the roadmap on libsecondlife’s website.

So, as much as we all moan about the SL client and wished there was something at least more generic, we do owe opensim’s existence to them releasing the source code. As I just wouldn’t have started Opensim if the
client was a closed proprietary one.

My initial thoughts on what I wanted to use the platform for, were very much on what would be useful in my old job. Simulation (Robotics) and 3d visualisation of data. This is why one of the stated goals of opensim is
it being a 3d application platform and not a SL clone. I see the social grids as just one small subset of the applications that a 3d virtual environment platform could be used for.

This is one of the biggest points of confusion when it comes to opensim. Most people think its goal is just to clone SL and behave exactly how that does, and support all the features out of the box. And we have to repeatedly tell them that its not the goal and that opensim will most likely never have all the features of SL as part of the main project. Other people will have to create the modules to add those features.

The goal of Opensim and Tribalmedia is to produce a common server that can be used as the base of a lot of different applications. I don’t think we can even really start guessing at what the most sucessful applications
will be in the future.

Tish: How did you meet Darren, Stefan?

Stefan Andersson: I’ve been working quite a lot with web, I mean I was quite early in the web development and I’ve been doing that for quite a lot of years. And, I was very interested in web and 3D integration. That’s actually how I stumbled upon Darren, when he first came on-line in lib second life chat room, and said hey I’ve got a prototypic open source second life server here.

Tish: Was the big moment in February 2007, Darren?

Darren: It was January.

Stefan: And I jumped on it. The first thing I did was to tweak his code, and give him some patches so I could connect his Second Life server to my then employers user database. The Employer at that time was Playahead. It’s one of Sweden’s largest web communities. So basically what I did was within an hour of getting my hands on the zip file, Darren’s first unpublished zip file, was to make sure that I could log into the SL viewer with my web community name and my web community password. When I came into a personalized world where all my friends and my friend lists were avatars, and when I chatted with them and I got guestbook messages into their guestbooks, that’s when I sat there and said WOW!

Tish: Not everyone recognised the potential then?

Stefan: I think they still don’t. You ask what’s important to us. We are very application oriented. We are very integration oriented. At the moment OpenSim is not very accessible and understandable for a large audience. We’re trying to show the world that there can be commercial application on this not just social networking applications, but actual 3D application. It’s a bit like the web, everybody thought that the web was about static HTML pages, and then now today we do much of our daily work on HTML. That’s kinda like the grand big hand motions. What we did when we started OpenSim, we had a very clear agenda, that we wanted this to be a shared experience 3D application platform.

Tish: When you say application, are you thinking more vertical applications or are you thinking vertical or horizontal on these distributed grids?

Darren: We don’t see one big monolithic grid, we sort of see, like Stefan said, like a web where you can link from one web site to another. You wouldn’t really say that every web site is part of one grid. When we talk about applications, its custom, i.e., you might go into one application to do one function then hop to do something else.

Stefan: So for example, now we have actually done Tribal Net as a showcase for our product Tribal server. And we did another showcase that we haven’t publicized yet, but basically that was web community integration.

Tish: What do you mean by web community integration?

Darren: That was a Facebook integration.

Tish: There are 2 basic models it seems being tried, a) embedding Opensims within the web or b) embedding the web in Opensims. Which model do you lean towars, or do you see a sort of heterogeneous mix of embedding in web pages and people who grid OpenSim out into larger communities and embed web pages in them?

Stefan: Actually that will probably be very much a per application decision. Some application are very suitable for 2 dimensional presentation and some application are very well suited for 3 dimensional. and we’ve done some prototypes with integrating web and 3D and obviously there’s going to be a lot of that coming.

Tish: How do you differentiate yourself from say an initiative like RealXtend?

Stefan: RealXtend? They are trying to do quite a lot of things. We are not competing with RealXtend. We would probably use Real Xtend.

Darren: Yes. From what I understand of Real Xtend, they’re focusing on the client. They have a central avatar system. I don’t really have that much knowledge of that. The main focus that we spoke about is on the client side. So we’re not really competition for them, we hope to support their client sometime.

Tish: I have heard on the grapevine you are using dynamic sims. What is a dynamic sim?

Stefan: Dynamic Sim! That can mean anything! We have quite a lot of concepts.

Darren: I think what they’re talking about is we’ve got this concept where we can bring a region up quickly when it’s needed so when you login we can bring your region up so that you wouldn’t even know it wasn’t up all the time. If there’s nobody there we can take it down.

Tish:
How have you done that?

Stefan: If you think about how Second Life works right now, how everybody seems to think about that, It’s kind of like a static model, the thing is there, whether anybody wants it or not. So you have like thousands of regions producing air. It’s a terrible waste of CPU. We wanted to do something like a web page, a dynamic web page. It’s constructed when you need it.

Tish: Are other people using this concept?

Darren: I think Adam has done something like it I’m not sure what exactly. But from what I hear Adam has similar ideas.

Stefan: That’s the thing about dynamic regions, It’s a feature of our tribal worlds platform. We used that as a proof of concept in that Facebook application where anybody could add a Facebook application and then they just went into their own private region, which was constructed on the fly for them. And when the last person leaves the room, he just turns the lights off.

Tish: And what kind of concurrencies can you get in these dynamic regions though?

Darren: I don’t think we’ve actually pushed it, but we can certainly get more because it’s basically where Second Life is based on total regions and they have to have a server up for each region, we only have to have a server or an instance of a region up for every person who wants to let a region have somebody in it. So if there’s nobody in a region we just don’t have it up.

Tish: I know everyone’s talking about putting OpenSim in clouds. Is this going to be workable with that idea too? Just in terms of being more efficient about the server side of this. Is that something that works with this or are you another direction than that?

Darren: I think it can work yes. It’s complimentary to our project.

Stefan: What we did with Tribal Net – It’s kind of like OS grid. Everybody brings their own computing power and what we’ve done is that we’ve packaged it for end users. I mean so that basically joe schmoe can install it, set it up, and run it. Because OpenSim’s been very tech heavy, our goal with Tribalnet is to make OpenSim more accessible for the wider layers so to speak. Also we’ve done some work on the map so that now when people go online their regions show up on the map. When they go off line the region disappears. That is also a radically different approach from Second Life.

Darren: To clarify that a little bit. What he means is that instead of a region having a set position on the map, we have a center of the map and the regions brought online are thrust around the center and if a region goes off it’ll be replaced by a new region that comes up.

Tish: What it’s sounding like when you describe this is you’re trying to use some of the ideas of P2P in a distributed grid.

Stefan: Yes definitely. I used to say Hey look Microsoft messenger, it should be like that. I know Darren isn’t that fond of that. But I think of it like that.

Tish: The development curve seems to have been rather slow thus far in P2P virtual worlds like Croquet and Solipsis. How do you see a lot of rich and interesting assets being built up on this kind of distributed grid

Darren: I think it’s too early for even us to say. Yes we’re more sort of a model of decentralized rather than a big monolithic grid like Second Life. One problem with Second Life is all the assets are centralized. That makes you responsible for making sure any users are updated with current textures etc. And you’ve got the problem of trying to police that to make sure there’s no textures that you don’t want there.

Stefan: We’re trying to move to P2P because that’s the only viable solution if we’re going to see web scalability. It just is. And we can’t really have stuff like central avatar repositories and things like that. We have to have a base case, which is the single server, and the single client. And then just have to grow from there. But what I wanted to say is that Darren made a brilliant choice way back when he was pondering what he would do. That was to take something that had proven itself on the market and to the user base. That is the Second Life client. What Darren did was that he combined that with another immensly popular and available technology. And that is .NET (dotnet). Basing this off .NET made it reasonably available to a community of programmers.

Tish: Second Life is the treasure chest of assets at the moment and also great content developers do not want to have to develop different content with different tools for tons of different VWs. What’s your stance on encouraging good content developers in Tribal Net? Are you aiming to be potentially interoperable with Second Life? Are you part of the Linden Lab Architectural Working Group initiative? Or are you going to try and go it alone?

Darren: First of all I need you to clarify the question. Do you mean like some people want to have OpenSim regions that are part of the Second Life grid like IBM, is that what you mean?

Tish: Oh I’m almost assuming from what you have said so far that you’re not going to do that. But are you going to aim for some level of interoperability?

Darren: I’m part of a working group that’s trying to get a common client protocol. We’ve got a sister project called Open Viewer. It’s started a few weeks ago but we’re attempting to incorporate elements of many clients like Croquet in an effort to achieve some degree of universality. Peter Fin from I.B.M. do you know him? He arranged it. We have a common protocol that you might not be able to do every feature in well. But you can at least connect, see the world and move around. We are also part of the Architectural Working Group but the focus is on Second Life there.

Stefan: If you look at what the architecture group has come up with so far, it’s Linden Lab’s protocol version 2 or not even that, it’s Second Life 1.5 – a big wish list basically. What we have, I guess, you could say that we have the small company rogue – a bit decentralized slash anarchistic – approach. We have a saying in OpenSim, I don’t know if you have seen it. I think actually I coined it but it’s “let a thousand worlds bloom.”

What we mean is that it’s too early to start drafting universal protocols. So what we’re doing with OpenSim is, and we’ve been very clear about this often repeating it over and over and over again, not to try to build a free and open source Second Life. We’re trying to build a platform, (we are not trying to make THE protocol) so that people who want to make protocols, should be able to do that with less effort. So when we’ve had our taste of applications, social applications, business applications, marketing applications, everything, then somewhere in there we can see probably something like http.

In Tribal net we have our own backend protocols. We have changed large chunks of the communication stack at the backend, the regions you install on your pc – some parts we have changed because this application needs other data and other processes. So I think we have implemented four different stacks. So we talk from experience.

Tish: Will you be publishing all your protocols?

Stefan: It is way too early to go into that. Right now we do not know what will bring everything forward. This is just one application now.

Darren: At the moment our backend is basically customized for this one application. Each new application is going to need slightly different customization. There is not a general solution at the moment.

Tish: So if it is all in the application, what are the killer apps?!

Stefan: Well we have done integration with web communities and 3D integration, that in combination with marketing applications, for example, being able to go on to say a Toyota site and click on a link and be on a Toyota showroom, not necessarily in the browser like everybody is visualizing because we have seen problems with that. We need something a bit more intelligent. The interplay between 2D and 3D is very intricate.

Tish: Everyone asks me about when they will be able to use OpenSim to create content they can upload into Second Life?

Darren: The big problem with that is SL terms and conditions, you aren’t actually allowed to export your creations out of SL. Now while it would be possible to import creations from OpenSim into SL, really until Linden Labs allows creations to be exported, there isn’t really the reason for people to work too much on adding those features to opensim. As only Linden labs really gains, as its one way traffic

Tish: Is there anything else notable about Tribal Net that hasn’t come up yet?

Darren: From a engineering side, I think the main point is at the moment we are working on making it easier for people to start up and host their own region. TribalNet is our first demo of that process. Then we hope to make it easier for people to host their own small grids with this easy hosting of regions, so say any school or college could have their own small grid without the admin lvel that is needed currently for opensim. A important part of our concept is having a GUI for the regions, so that we can later provide addon modules for these GUI’s so for instant maybe we would provide a game construction toolset addon, or a presentation addon , that made it easier to host and control presentations. Some of these then at a later time could move into the viewer. Then at a higher level we have our set of extenstion api’s which I think its a bit too early to go into detail of.

Tish: My big question is still without a virtual economy what do you see driving rich content production?

Stefan Andersson: Yeah; we’re all about content, actually; Tribal Net is about creating a content producer platform. A complete ‘ladder’ from consumer, over enthusiast, semi-pro and pro. Yeah; basically, we offer empowerment. It’s like ‘your world’ but for real.

I guess you know that content production and systems integration in a third-party hosted environment is a drag.

How many complex games and functions have you seen in SL? Stuff that would be a small thing to code if you had proper tools, becomes a nightmare.

But to me also it seems your definition of ‘content’ is close to the Linden notion of ‘content.’ The Lindens created an economy based on artificial scarcity you pay to stop somebody from sharing something but ‘content’ also often play a role in the execution of a service.

Just an example : you have a medieval battle sim with castles with all kind of nifty storytelling bound to them the busines model is subscription, perhaps; combined with added value like buying weapons well, the actual assets are for free – the service owner couldn’t care less if you walk away with the sword into another world because it only functions in a context, the context of the battle system.

So, yeah, you could have a static snapshot of a weapon or you could have the customizable weapon that actually functions in a system now, the former will be very hard to charge enough for to make up for the production cost but the latter you definitively could. charge enough for to make up for the production cost.

Tish: You have a very innovative idea for a distributed grid. Will people have problems with their firewalls though?

Stefan: That’s the big hurdle we’ve done everything we can to make everything else easy but the server still needs to be accessible from the net.

Now, next week we’re launching the next version, which has a built-in sandbox too so you can terraform and build without being public

I don’t know if you saw that in the gui, but we’re adding ‘load/save’ to it so that you can easily export terrain and objects.

Well the private mode is sharing content db with the public mode. so, basically, you just go public or, you save it to your hard disk and upload it onto a hosted region.

At the moment, it’s just “save all object definitions” and “load all object definitions” but even that’s enough to export objects, tweak them, re-import them that’s how the superprim was done and the chessboard pieces. The chessboard coder has access to objects and object definitions on a whole other level that the SL coder, for example notepad, basically. It’s like, text editing html pages all over again.

Tish: hmmm a very interesting concept…..

Stefan: well, it becomes even more interesting when you have a program creating those definitions.

Tish: Are you planning on Linux support?

Stefan: We’re planning on linux support. It’s just that these versions, that are very end-user oriented, windows is the main demography. Our commercial Tribal Server runs linux just fine. And, as I said, we’re planning for even the end-user versions to run on linux.

At this point in the interview, Stefan encouraged me to try Tribal Net myself! I was at first resistant. After all I already have an OpenSim up. But it was truly a revelation to so quickly get set up and find myself with a region (a full on free form 3D programmable space on a PC!!!) – a virtual world of my own that let me interact with my neighbors and yes, for me, Tribal Net was “an easy-to-install, easy-to-configure express version of the full Tribal Server” as the Tribal Net website proclaims!

Beta Phase

Currently, Tribal Net is in ‘Beta’ phase. They write:

This means we have made the software available to the public in order to get feedback and hunt down bugs. If you want to try the Beta out, or simply want to be notified when the 1.0 version is released, you can ‘register’ here.

See you soon in Tribal Net!!

Only a two weeks after debuting their first Hands Free 3D video showing the possibilities for navigating Second Life “hands free” without a mouse or keyboard, Mitch Kapor (MitchK Linden in Second Life) and Philippe Bossut have a new demo out – Hands Free Object Editing in Second Life.

Philippe points out on the Hands Free 3D blog that they have already seen a lot of interest in their “hands free” project even from the main press (see this article from the NYT). Hands Free 3D, a project of Kapor Enterprises, is creating a prototypical interface using the 3D Camera designed by 3DV Systems to control virtual worlds like Second Life.

Mitch Kapor told me, they are now working “so that avatars can directly mirror body language and facial expression.”

Mitch very generously gave me an interview in which he not only describes his project to explore how:

the camera could be a central device to a whole new kind of interface the way the mouse became the central piece of hardware that enabled the whole graphical user interface and it enabled the transition from character based computing DOS to the GUI.

But also, Mitch shares some of his thoughts on the future of Second Life. A full transcription follows in this post.

“Moving From Science Fiction to Science”

Mitch explained to me he began to get excited with the idea of Hands Free 3D when he realized:

we had a shot at moving from science fiction to science as it were actually making some of this stuff work that people have been talking about for a long time

As Gwyneth Llewelyn points out much of the so called virtual worlds industry has backed off the bigger vision of a unified metaverse and is retreating into a more limited vision of a multitude of closed and controlled virtual worlds (see Digado’s post Raising Kids in Virtual Worlds and this video from fastcompany.tv to see how this controlled/controlling vision for virtual worlds plays from Disney’s point of view).

But while a bigger vision for virtual environments with a revolutionary role in adult life may not not be interesting to marketeers at the moment, it has a momentum that cannot be stopped. Mitch Kapor made a prediction during the interview that I wholeheartedly agree with:

the big vision of 3D is in the process of happening. It will be very transformative and anybody who is not counting on that happening, is likely to be run over by it.

I got very excited when I heard about the Hands Free 3D project because developing a natural interaction between people and virtual environments to me is one of the “it” projects for immersive 3D.

The dialogue between science fiction and science is of course the ongoing story of the metaverse. And seeing Iron Man which is alive with new possibilities for “seamless interfaces between people bits and atoms” made me think of how very exciting this new chapter in metaverse development is.

The Tangible Media Group, MIT, founded by Hiroshi Ishii has pioneered new couplings of the physical and the virtual. And, alumni John Underkoffler’s vision is definitely in play in Iron Man. Underkoffler’s exact credit flew by me too quickly – but he was clearly a futurist for Iron Man. Matt McGann points out that there is a very cool article about his work on Minority Report here.

Oh I cannot mention Iron Man without noting Iron Man in Second Life (see Massively) and Annie Ok’s latest great machinima!

And, Click on the screen shot below or here to watch the “Hands Free 3D: Second Life Object Editing Demo”

Interview with Mitch Kapor

Tish Shute: How did you get the idea to focus on Hands Free 3D out of all the possible areas you could have begun R&D in?

Mitch Kapor: You were asking me where did the idea come from? It originated in the fact that this kind of difficulty – of creating a natural, easier user interface – that we’ve had is characteristic of virtual world interactions.

There are things to be done about that at every conceivable level. From fixing all the little bugs to a bigger initiative. I was doing a thought experiment about what would really make a virtual world fundamentally easier to use.

I didn’t have an answer, but somebody had mentioned to me – one of the other investors in Second Life – that there are two Israeli companies working on 3D cameras. I had read about and heard about lots of things but this caught my attention. And I started to ask some questions about it. I had seen the video that Johnny Lee shot with the Wii on YouTube.

That had begun to prepare my mind to think about how you could use new types of input devices to control virtual worlds. So when I heard about the cameras I said this is really interesting and I started to make some phone calls and inquire. The Idea came to me that you could use the camera … the camera could be a central device to a whole new kind of interface the way the mouse became the central piece of hardware that enabled the whole graphical user interface and it enabled the transition from character based computing DOS to the GUI.

One of the other things is that I’ve now been around long enough, 30 years – active and professional – that I’ve seen many things come and go and I have a feeling for patterns. So I was fortunate in actually being able to get hold of a prototype of one of the cameras to do some experiments with it.

Tish Shute:
They’re not yet released generally are they, later this Summer, right?

Mitch Kapor:
Well .. it’s unclear. Sometime in 2008 or 2009. There will be multiple manufacturers. They have somewhat different approaches as to how they’re going to go to market. I’d say it’s all being sorted out soon. Everybody I’ve talked to is quite certain that by Christmas season of 2009 at the latest, they’ll be available in high volume at low cost.

Tish Shute:
I just got so excited when I saw you doing this because I think, basically, in terms of free form 3D programmable space which is how I’ve come to see Second Life now, it’s the future. Everyone’s been complaining that the problem with free form 3d programmable space for a mass audience is the difficulty of the interface. So there seems to have been this big retreat back into 2.5D, 3D chat rooms – plugins to Facebook etc. It seems like a step backward to me.

Mitch Kapor:
I think it’s inevitable that we’re going to get fully interactive 3D. It’s all a question of how we’re going to get there and how long it takes. It’s understandable why, for commercial reasons, people do more incremental things, but those are only going to get you so far.

Tish Shute:
Well it seems to me ideas about the evolution of 3D are to some degree being driven by marketing on the web forces at the minute. I suppose the thinking is that you can get these 3D chatrooms up easily and they are more amenable to marketing than a freeform 3D space like Second Life.

But my question is why you didn’t decide to go to game controllers? I suppose this is where a lot of thinking goes because all the kids have already a high level of skill with these?

Mitch Kapor:
Well, I’m not a gamer. It seemed to me that the possibilities with a camera to do the imaging and to be able in real time, to extract out a 3D model of the scene and the objects in it, is fundamentally just incredibly powerful. It feels like the right direction if you can develop it. What I was pleasantly surprised by was actually creating the first demo was pretty straightforward.

Tish Shute:
How did you prevent every random motion being sucked into the program?

Mitch Kapor:
It turns out that the cameras are pretty sensitive. They can detect relatively small motions like the resolution at a distance of 5 to 10 feet is a half a centimeter. That would be one part in several hundreds. maybe one part in a thousand. So it can detect slight motions. I don’t know the details of the software that the camera came with and that Philippe wrote. One of the other advantages is that Philippe, who is the engineer that did the work, has a PhD in computer graphics. And, he has been around the block quite a few times, and had a whole bag of tricks. I know that he spent some of the time writing filtering code to filter out noise in the signal and so on.

Tish Shute:
Do you have to be particular about where you stand at the minute? Can you smoothly go back and forth between when you have to type and things like that?

Mitch Kapor:
No, I’m not anticipating problems. We have another video coming up very shortly where we show object editing. The object editing isn’t as sexy as we would like it because it has to use the existing interface. They’re having to emulate keyboard and mouse. The point is that we have the concept of a control plane, a vertical plane, in front of you, that if you put your hand out so it crosses that imaginary plane, then it interprets what you do as controlling the mouse.

If you push through to the far side than pull it back it doesn’t. That actually works quite well as a gesture. And you get visual feedback when you’re in the control plane, it lights something up, so you can see – OK. It’s sort of like when you’re using the mouse to target an object you can tell tell when a mouse is inside a clickable button. Similarly there’ll be some kind of control zones. When your hand or other body part is in that you’ll get some feedback in the same way that a button highlights to indicate I’m clickable, or you’re over me. It’ll be a similar kind of thing.

Tish Shute:
But you have to avoid ending up with a mapping that’s more difficult to learn than the original one, don’t you?

Mitch Kapor:
I agree with you, but on the navigation and flying, we’ve had people learn to use this in less than 30 seconds. We just stand them up and say lean forward, lean back, stand up, lean to the side, raise your arms, and they’re moving, they’re flying, they’re walking.

Tish Shute:
And you don’t get a problem with the casual motion?

Mitch Kapor:
No. And this was just our first shot at this.

Tish Shute:
I know! I was really impressed that you could actually have done that in 3 weeks.

Mitch Kapor:
I think the start to finish time was a couple of months including the fact that Philippe had never seen the Second Life viewer code. So, he started like any other developer, just downloading and building the Second Life client. And, we never had a camera before! Ha!

Tish Shute:
But this is the great beauty of Second Life – the power that people have to do so many amazing things so rapidly.

Mitch Kapor:
He’s already re-written the code once. We’re totally prepared to give the code to Linden. It’s a little premature because the cameras’ aren’t available, but if the cameras’ were available, we would just donate the code. The nice thing is it’s actually pretty clean. It interfaces to the client at just a couple of points. We’ve isolated the dependencies.

Tish Shute:
But that’s my other question. If you donate the code will it be open source so that other developers could get involved? I know lots of people …

Mitch Kapor:
This stuff, the demonstration stuff, absolutely. That’s the intent. The purpose of this whole phase was just to test what we could do and to promote or evangelize the use of the camera. Get people excited. We’re thinking about what we might do with it.

I’m actually incredibly excited about the thing Philippe is working on now which is to use the camera so that avatars can directly mirror body language and facial expression. So that if I’m sitting in my chair and I have my arms crossed, my avatar will cross it’s arms. If I tilt my head to the side or smile or frown, the avatar will do the same thing. We’re quite optimistic that we can do something compelling in pretty short order, like less than a month.

Tish Shute:
Wow! That is really, really exciting. I think that has just been something people have been talking about a lot recently – to have gesturing and expressions transmitted to the avatar ..

Mitch Kapor:
The reason I get so excited is cause when I started believing we had a shot at moving from science fiction to science as it were actually making some of this stuff work that people have been talking about for a long time.

Tish Shute:
So the plan is to make your work part of the open source community and …

Mitch Kapor:
I don’t have a plan yet. I would say anything we’re doing in this phase we’re happy to give away. At some point I think things are going to become clearer as to the availability of the cameras, what Linden is going to build in, and then businesses that might be built off of what we’re doing.

But I’m very confident that the kinds of things we’re doing now and in the short term are just going to become part of the standard repertoire of things you can do in Second Life in code that’s available to developers.

I don’t have the exact road map.

Tish Shute:
I heard your recent talks in Second Life and how you were very interested in seeing how Second Life could become more of a business tool. I’ve talked about what Second Life and its “cousins” offers in comparison to other open source platforms like SUN’s Project Wonderland and the Croquet platform Quaq. For example, Second Life is a free form 3D programmable space that’s really accessible and easy to develop in.

But in Qwaq you can drag and drop documents in from 2D applications easily, and Wonderland has some great telephony/audio development. I’m totally psyched by what you’re doing because it has the potential to make the free form programmable space of Second Life more widely useful, and it could be bring much innovation to business communications.

I see a future in interactive data visualization, for example, the idea that Ben Lindquist of Green Phosphor has been developing, i.e., that you can actually model business processes dynamically in a collaborative environment. What are your thoughts on Second Life’s potential in business applications?

Mitch Kapor:
One thought is that a more general platform, more general purpose, more open, in the long run, all other things being equal, will be superior to more limited, less capable, more closed platforms, for building any kind of application.

And at the moment, Second Life is the most general and most open platform. So all other things being equal, which usually they’re not, Second Life should be viewed as superior by people who are building a variety of applications.

But there are clearly some things that need to happen. Well let me put it this way some of the other platforms have temporarily at least moved further ahead in enterprise related applications by developing collaboration capabilities.

So the imperative is for Second Life to provide comparable capabilities. It has to do that, in terms of fundamental stability, reliability, in all respects. If it does that then it’s actually going to win on it’s own merits.

Tish Shute:
I absolutely agree with you because in terms of ease of use, it’s the only dynamic networked general simulation platform around. There’s no one else close.

Mitch Kapor:
It’s also I think highly scalable in ways that some other things aren’t. Even though it doesn’t have as many 9′s in uptime as it needs to have, there have been recent signs of more progress. I guess the HTML on the prim stuff is rolling out finally or at least the first version of it.

I think it’s ended in beta now.

It’s not the full thing. But it’s a huge step. That’s going to help a lot.

Tish Shute:
Plus the fact it seems Linden Labs moving towards a more heterogeneous idea of a grid where there’ll be the potential to connect behind the firewall worlds with the main grid .

Mitch Kapor:
I also know that there are some third parties that have done that. They’ve sworn me temporarily to confidentiality. But they have done some very impressive stuff with integrating the web with Second Life in ways that you can for instance in a web interface just go and grab a PowerPoint. In your Second Life window. The power point will just show up. So there is a kind of work around to using the familiar web to get your intercollaboration stuff working. There’s progress. It’s going to be some time before it all sorts itself out.

But to come back to the camera as a more natural interface, I think for personal interaction, is important. It’s going to be a breakthrough.

Tish Shute:
It’s a huge breakthrough also to have the avatar related to your real life gestures. It’s a huge leap forward. When you introduced it at metaverse meetup that really got people’s attention. I have a question. Have you thought about going even further with the thought driven game controllers?

Mitch Kapor:
At some point I intend to take another look at that. I have the feeling that your not doing anything highly profound. Kind of a cute hack.

Tish Shute:
Again they’re not available, I would guess they would give some to you though.

Mitch Kapor:
From looking at earlier incarnations of this stuff I think what they can pick up on is very superficial. So I’m not sure that they’re going to be that interesting cause we really don’t know how to do, without some invasive type of surgery,

Tish Shute:
You can do it with very very complicated brain scanning you can do a lot more, but I agree. Although I did see the Japanese University was using them for severely disabled people. Looked like they were doing some interesting things.

My question is, this is something you mentioned in one of your talks in Second Life, you thought some of the steps forward to make Second Life truly a player in the business world, would be changes on the server level. Were you thinking more about the moves that are going on towards open source and making a heterogeneous grid?

Mitch Kapor:
Yes. I was thinking about letting people run it behind the firewall, and also it’s not just putting it behind the firewall, anytime you’re talking about an enterprise application, the enterprises want to integrate all of their existing IT systems. They already have these very sophisticated systems for managing say identity, and having easy integration of those thing with Second Life identity management is not glamorous but very important.

Tish Shute:
This brings to mind another question. I know I have some ideas about what Second Life really brings to the table for business. No one else has taken on working with dynamic melded states on the internet in 3D to the degree Second Life has. That’s sort of, to me, the essence of it – having groups of people working around 3D objects that can be updated on the fly and modeled on the fly.

Mitch Kapor:

If we do things well there will be a good level of interoperability and all of the open source work and the reverse engineered clones will actually be a good thing.

Second Life is, and I’ve probably used this line, faced with insurmountable opportunities on all sides.

Let me ask you a question. I’ve read your blog, or some of it, but what do you actually do?

Tish Shute:
I spend a lot of time on my blog at the minute!!! You can tell I have kids and dogs driving me crazy [dog is barking in the background], which is exactly why I took this up a year ago. I worked in film and special effects for the early part of my career.

When I had my kids and dogs and all of that it got to be just too much to do 24/7 film production. My son’s nearly 9 now. I tried academia for a while, then I just said forget it..too hard to be in a medieval guild as a second career!

And I actually a year ago when I started looking at this (Second Life) I thought my goodness this is what we sat around and talked about every night when we were doing multiple pass motion control photography in the eighties. And so I started writing about it and that took a life of it’s own. And now it’s become a little ridiculous because it’s an excessively time consuming hobby!

Mitch Kapor:
Are you in New York or the UK?

Tish Shute:
Yes. I’m in Manhattan.

Mitch Kapor:
The reason Second Life has gotten as far as it’s gotten is because of people like you who have become inspired and become obsessed and feel the possibilities and feel them to be so utterly compelling to cause some rearrangement of life priorities.

Tish Shute:
It’s interesting cause it’s like every week I say “Oh I really can’t spend all this time writing!” Then I see something, like this week I saw all the new wave of 3D chat rooms coming out. And it just got me going again! I just can’t bear to not to have a voice because when you see the big picture you want the really innovative stuff to move forward. That’s why when I saw your work on hands free 3D, I said: “Oh my goodness, someone’s taking it the next step. And as you say there isn’t a path that’s clear. There’s no guarantees. But its a path worth traveling, in my view!

Mitch Kapor:
I firmly believe, I have complete conviction, that all of the 3D, the big vision of 3D is in the process of happening. It will be very transformative and anybody who is not counting on that happening, is likely to be run over by it.

Tish Shute:
Right. Of course you’re much more knowledgeable of this aspect of it but in terms of business applications, has anything interesting happened in a long long while?

Mitch Kapor:
There are some interesting things that are happening, I just learned this by accident, that are being kept under very close wraps. There’s at least one consultancy that is doing extremely well with very large prestigious global corporations. They have done a lot of development of this integration of web with Second Life. Their clients are shy. They do not want public exposure at the moment because of the backlash against the overhyping of Second Life that happened last year. I was very heartened to hear about this. I think it’s going to start coming out in the next few months what some of these companies are doing.

Tish Shute:
I agree. Many of the interesting things I know about I can’t write about either because there’s no interest for people developing business applications to have a lot of web publicity about it in the early stages.

Mitch Kapor:
Right. I think we’ll be in this phase for a while. But then we’ll get out of it.

Tish Shute:
In terms of specifics about business application, do you have any dreams for Second Life?

Mitch Kapor:
I would like to just personally have a really good meeting application. Just simple like when you and I want to get together and meet in world, I would like that to be easy, bullet proof, convenient, natural. I’m imagining that we both have cameras, so that we can see each other and you get body language and you get a sense something like what you would get in a face to face meeting. And I want people to have the ability to easily get more realistic avatars, if that’s what they want. And actually there’s a lot of good technology around that now. Where you can just basically take a picture or two with an ordinary digital camera, upload it and get back something that pretty much looks like you.

Tish Shute:
What do you think are the biggest obstacles to this kind of free form 3D programmable space?

Mitch Kapor:
There’s a lot of software that has to be written to bring out its full potential. And not just by Linden or any one company. It’s really a collective effort that is the work of a whole generation.

It’s comparable to all of the work that went into making the ecosystem of the personal computer. Or for that matter the ecosystem of the internet. It requires having the right architecture, it has to stay open. If that can happen I think it’s mostly just a matter of time and some patience.

It is going to happen. There are lots of individual challenges. Tons of problems to solve. I’m not a technological determinist, but at this point I don’t think anything can hold it back.

In a way though having lived through the onset of the internet, while it has changed things a lot, and in certain ways it would be very difficult to imagine life without it, it also has left things the same. I mean people bring all of themselves and their issues into every technological medium. The drama gets played out in a different ways, but it’s neither going to be a good thing or a bad thing. It’s going to be some of both. And so the question is, to me, how people of good will who want to make the world a better place are going to use whatever new things get created in a positive way.

Tish Shute:
I know Mark (Zero Linden) heads up a lot of interoperability work in his office hours and other meetings. But I got a couple of emails this week saying that all these groups that are working off of either clones or reverse engineered, and there are so many of them, and some are under wraps too, need to actually meet on an even more regular basis?

Mitch Kapor:
That’s true. I guess it’s much more desirable for people to meet and talk, and if they don’t for awhile, you get more noise in the system. It just will take longer to put things back together.

Tish Shute:
That’s what I was thinking, that it’s become pretty clear to me that cooperation, if it is going to happen, has to happen around the clones and the reverse engineered versions of Second Life because other platforms are not prioritizing interoperability at the moment, that I know of.

Mitch Kapor:
People will call – this and that should be happening but my view is that the ecosystem is still sufficiently underdeveloped that there is a risk of attempted premature standardization.

If you look at the history of things, It’s very important for there to be working instances before anybody attempts to standardize anything.

There’s a lot to be learned in the early history of the internet. pre-history, from the 60′s up through the 80′s — when the basic protocols were being developed. There’s some very smart people working on that and a certain amount of looseness is actually quite important now.

There’ll be people who want to prematurely standardize and get everybody together and all you’ll wind up with is a massive crud.

I thinks that the power of the open systems is so much greater than the walled gardens Also the open source ethic is so deeply established in large parts of the development community, even in enterprises, that overall I’m not too worried about it.

When the functionality of whatever it is, is that well known and well understood, that’s the period in which the open source alternatives can really flourish. When there’s still a lot of evolution in functionality, and design in the user experience, open source techniques can become too slow.

So it’s going to be somewhat chaotic. I think we have to embrace or at least make peace with a certain amount of chaos right now and the understanding that it’s likely to settle down. The chaos is not the last word.

Screen shot from realXtend’s wickedly cool avatar tech demo (see video here).

Some people may have walked away from Virtual Worlds 2008, NYC, thinking the vision of the metaverse has boiled down to two notions: 1) every toy should have its own own virtual world and 2) may a thousand walled gardens flourish. But, if you did come away thinking that, you missed out on another important current at the conference – the rapid growth of the open metaverse and the excitement of developers, architects and visionaries who are exploring its potential.

The discussion at the Open Source Virtual Worlds Round Table included so many of the key players, including Philip Rosedale, and covered such a big chunk of issues that that I have transcribed it and published it at the end of this post – the audio is here. The audio quality is poor (except for the round table facilitators from OpenSim, Sun’s Project Wonderland, Qwaq and myself as we were sitting right on top of my ipod!) So, I hope the transcription of the discussion will be useful to all those involved in pioneering the open source metaverse.

The dichotomy of visions – an open metaverse or a thousand walled gardens – present at VW 2008 did not escape the very savvy virtual world writer Wagner James Au (Hamlet Au in Second Life) who narrates this tale of two conferences on GigaOm, here and here. Hamlet, author of The Making of Second Life, and part of metaversal thinking from the early days is in unique position to understand the accomplishments and vagaries of its prodigal children.

The inadequacies of the short term constrained visions that held the main stage at Virtual Worlds 2008 were also commented on by Cory Ondrejka, one of the founders and former CTO of Linden Lab who wrote on his blog:

Is this really the Metaverse? Is this even the 3D internet? Isn’t this the same week that we saw Congressional testimony on virtual worlds, on their potential impact on education, community, business, and communication? Technology is just enabling us to take incredibly bold steps, to connect people in entirely new ways. From 3D camera technology to spatialized voice to novel interfaces to mobile to augmented reality, we should be ready to embark on the next exponential curve, building on everything learned from Second Life over the last 8 years.

Not game over by a long shot – the party has just started!

The young guns are working with the open source and reverse engineered derivatives of Second Life to explore the full potential of avatar presence in a 3D, interactive, dynamic, networked environment. And this is just the very beginning.

On 3rd of April the OpenSim platform was load tested with the amazing Antigone (top image), who sang live in OpenSim in an event sponsored by the Sine Wave Company (boardwalk leading to the stage in OpenSim above).

And, if you were thinking that Philip Rosedale stepping down as CEO of Linden Lab was a sign that Philip was giving up a leadership role in the future of the open metaverse, think again. Philip’s continuing deep engagement with the technical and business challenges of the Open Metaverse was quite clear when he showed up and sparked off an intense discussion at the Open Source Virtual Worlds Round Table.

In this picture, Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab, Zafka Zhang of HiPiHi, Wagner James Au (author of The Making of Second Life), Tess Linden, Eilif Trondsen of SRI Consulting Business Intelligence are just some of the metarati at the round table.

Also very visible at Virtual Worlds 2008 was Cory Ondrejka. And while Cory is now consulting on a wide range of entrepreneurial, technology, and innovation projects, he has a tremendous amount of domain knowledge about the design, architecture, and scaling challenges of virtual worlds. And, as I saw Cory chatting with the new kids on the block, I found myself thinking, how interesting it was that his experience was actually on the open market at this critical juncture for open source virtual worlds. (But Cory did hint to me that he may not be as free to consult in the near future.)

Cory noted in a brief chat after the conference that there are a lot of potential stumbling blocks for Second Life competitors and the aspirant architects of the Open Metaverse face challenges linked to design (repeating failures from the late ’90s), architecture (given target market and use, are you picking the correct technologies?), and scaling (do any aspects of your design require vertical scaling? what are the choke points?). Cory will be writing up more of his thoughts about some of this on his blog, I think.

What is the architecture of the Open Metaverse?

Picture from Nicole Yankelovich of Sun Microsystems Wonderland blog post – from left to right, Remy Malan, Qwaq, Nicole, me, Jani Pirkola, realXtend, Adam Frisby OpenSim, Adam Johnson, Genkii.

The power of virtual worlds for business collaboration was the emphasis of Sun and Qwaq’s presentation during the Open Source Virtual Worlds round table. Nicole Yankelovich demoed Project Wonderland’s multiple group voice chat that cleverly simulates “watercooler chitchat” that real-world office spaces provide and impressive telephony that allows users to communicate in or out of the virtual world space by phone (See Nicole’s blog and Hamlet’s write up on GigaOm here for more). But the discussion centered on the open metaverse as something akin to the next generation internet where business, consumers, communities and the individuals and organizations of public life have the possibility to interconnect and interact as well as stay behind firewalls. And the voices for this vision came from the open source initiatives with their roots in the Linden Lab Second Life technology.

Topics discussed were:

What is the business model for Linden Lab in the open metaverse? (Philip gave the most clear and convincing explanation of this I have heard.)

How will forking not become an issue and break up the open metaverse before it has begun?

Will the open metaverse have a virtual currency?

How can truly wicked avatars using blended animation and inverse kinematics be deployed without choking performance?

How will IP be protected and will obfustication be employed?

How will asset/content development flourish in the open metaverse?

The latter question included a discussion about different models of content production and content monetization in virtual worlds including new ideas like the open source content project of Clever Zebra. For info on their upcoming vBusiness expo see here.

I relayed a couple of questions from Peter Quirk, EMC, who unfortunately couldn’t attend the conference. Peter’s questions produced some excellent discussion and responses.

1) Is the lack of useful assets to populate a world, whether it’s OpenSim, Croquet or Wonderland the number one business issue?

2) Instead of driving to a complete implementation of LSL, has OpenSim gone off in open source fragmentation land inventing their own scripting extensions which are guaranteed to cause problems going in the other direction?

If you are interested in any of these questions you may want to study this transcript that includes lengthy comments from Philip Rosedale (Linden Lab), Adam Frisby (OpenSim), David Levine (IBM) – Zha Ewry in Second Life, Jani Pirkola (realXtend), Christian Westbrook of WelloHorld, and several other key architects of the open metaverse.

What’s New?
Enterprise Applications in Open Source Virtual Worlds?

I moderated two enterprise round tables at Virtual Worlds 2008, one on Open Source Virtual Worlds and one on Enterprise Applications and the discussion at both was driven by key innovators in these areas.

The Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo in Fall 2008 will have a full on enterprise track Chris Sherman says. But the “knights of the enterprise round table” gave us taste last week of what is to come.

It was fascinating to hear Michael Osias from IBM and Oliver Goh from Eolus and who are pioneering enterprise command and control centers for building automation, green data centers, energy and facility management debate with Mark Phillips from the Simulation Business Unit of MASA Group Inc.

“What’s new?” about these enterprise applications on OpenSim, asked Mark Philips who works at the very highest end of business simulation. It is true, from the perspective of the lofty budgets that high end business simulation is accustomed to, command and control centers in 3D environments are nothing new. But Michael and Mark who have worked together in the past did come to agree that never before has this kind of software been accessible for cheap and rapid protoyping/development/and deployment in this way and with the potential to be used both inside and outside of firewalls in both in secure and massively networked environments.

Virtual worlds for children maybe a marketers utopia/cornucopia but the open metaverse is still the most exciting social and technical paradigm shift since the mass adoption of the internet.

A New Era of Business Tools and Business Process Modeling

Melanie Swan from MS Futures, one of the facilitators of the Enterprise Applications round table described how open source data visualization tools will open a new era for business tools that have given us little that is new in recent years.

And Ben Lindquist of Green Phosphor described how virtual worlds will be more than collaborative spaces they will become where business processes are modeled on an ongoing basis within the enterprise.

What I see happening is knowledge workers, analysts, middle management, spending time in a virtual space modeling the actual business that they do and doing that on a continual basis.

Imagine a network of pipes and other objects that actually represents your business processes, your organizational model, your supply chain; and you can see your people working on it in the virtual world. They’ll be able to perform “what if” scenarios – answering questions such as “what if we combine these two offices – what does it do to responsiveness”, and then when a change works well in the model, it can be implemented in the real world through integration with the ERP system.

IBM’s big news at the conference was that they would be working with Second Life behind their firewall. But with 6000 plus IBMers in Second Life and a working interest in interoperability issues, it is common knowledge that IBM gets the open metaverse and its potential. Perhaps what is more surprising than the news of Second Life being experimented with on IBM blade servers is that this collaboration hadn’t happened sooner. For more insights on what the IBM behind the firewall project is about read David Levine’s (Zha Ewry in Second Life) post here.

Transcript of Discussion at the Open Source Virtual Worlds Round Table

Philip Rosedale (LL): Blended animation and IK (Inverse Kinematics) is a really cool thing it’s also a really hard problem, I would love to see progress on that. Its got to be one of thing to make the world really ??. We wanted to do that from the very beginning. Its a daunting problem of course. You’re simultaneously having to use the animation in-world as a kind of a mechanical guide to move what is supposed to be a mechanical hand, and the problem is there’s a lot of corner cases where trying to do that with an animation kind of won’t work. In the same way that say break your arm you can’t put it anywhere, you run into this interesting problem. But I have to say that I think that is a great piece of work. It is one of the things that in my personal opinion it’s one of the key elements of believability that the avatar lacks today that we essentially have this odd situation where we have a little bit of physics going on the avatar bumping into things and getting up on a table and then all the animations are happening without any respect for the kinetics of the environment so its a very hard problem and I’d love to see some work being done on it.

We love to work on it! But it is a question of having the people..

(for more click on “read entire post” for the rest of this transcript)

Ben Goertzel (Novamente): One of the things we’re doing is trying to use AI to control avatars in a broad sense. We run up constantly against the lameness of having just having a fixed set of animations… you know what I mean? We’d rather for AI take a more robotics type approach, so you can learn to grab something with your fingers in different ways depending on what the shape of the object is rather than having a grab animation or even a grab-1, grab-2, and grab-3 animation.

Jani Pirkola (realXtend): Right. Actually we could do it in a way that …?? knows the animation that should be played.

Philip Rosedale: Of course the other challenge you have to face and it’s true of a number of the other features discussed here today is that they may run into sever complex computational problems without really sophisticated solutions around level of detail. The problem with blended animation that I raised is that the computational cost generally is doing that for even a single avatar historically is noticeable a significant amount of ….. So if you had 30 avatars break dancing and bumping into each other it’s not computationally attractive……

David Levine (IBM): When you bring the physics simulation onto the client you are asking the question how much of that world am I transferring down the ?? boxes…..

Philip Rosedale: Even if you have a finite model well established in the client and then you try to bump the avatars into each other you’re done.

David Levine: Even worse cos you can’t just do that you also have to have regular physics model ……..

Ben Goertzel: We’ve used the IK library of the University of Pennsylvania which is Inverse Kinematic IK it’s just for an arm, right?And just solving all those non-linear differential equations just for the arm is significant and when you get a bunch of guys with a bunch of arms you’re assuming that there is a powerful CPU on their client machine.

Philip Rosedale: It’ll be done though, it’ll be done. I mean it’s solvable by breaking it down into a finite method or a lattice method or something. There’s a bunch of smart thinking about it, I’m just saying it is a great thing to work on.

Jani Pirkola: Yes, It’s a big challenge for us and I’m not saying that we will solve it once and for all but we’ll take the first step here.

Ben Goertzel: We’re an AI company (Novamente) doing AI for virtual worlds. We’re starting out with virtual pets in Multiverse.

Yesha Sivan (Metaverse Labs): My name’s Yesha Sivan, I’m working on a long term more official standardization project out of Europe a … question for the OpenSim guys what are we doing with money of any kind?

Adam Frisby (Open Sim): Well this question keeps coming up. And this is, perhaps, a good question to come up because effectively a lot of these virtual worlds you want to make money out of them you want to be the Amazon where you can sell this this and this. The problem is the money shouldn’t be part of the protocol itself, if you look at it on a fundamental level on the web today, you do not have something in there that handles just Visa transactions so we could put visa transactions in the http specification and then suddenly everyone’s going to use visa for every transaction. And the same thing applies to virtual worlds, there’s no reason to imbed a payment processing method into the protocol itself. You can make sure the protocol’s extensible so you can do things on top of it, but I think it’s fundamental that you allow people like PayPal to spring up and satisfy the niche and allow competition to occur because if you standardize these things too strictly then you’re going to run into edge cases where you won’t be able to do this or this without running up to walls. We are not too keen on developing a money standard for virtual worlds, what we’re keen to do is develop a virtual world server that handles a 3D simulation and has a very finite goal. I think a lot of problems with virtual worlds is they try to do everything. You want to do this this this and this. The fact is you don’t need to do everything. You can solve just what need to be done to allow other people to solve every other problem. So my answer is we’re not going to touch money, We’ve got support in the server software for adding a currency module if you want to. So you can write a module to extend and do that. But we won’t do it ourselves.

Yesha Sivan: Let us move it a bit further, it’s not just the money order that pay pal is receiving it has to do with permissions, it has to do with obfustication of the object so that you cannot copy it…..

Adam Frisby: I’m going to get onto this one and say that any obfustication of an object is rubbish because at some point you’ve got to have displayed it on the viewer. All the viewers that we work with at the moment are open source. And if you’re going to have obfustication someone can just look at the viewer code and say hey this is how it’s being obfusticated or they could grab it off of the video card where it has to be decoded, there is no way you can display an encrypted or obfusticated object on a video card. There’s no way you can do it.

David Levine: On the video card it’s acceptable and if the rendering is done in open source client it’s acceptable. However, that said, marking intent, making the creators intent, and supporting that is of the essence. So from a mutual operability point of view, we’ve got to be able to say this object was created by so and so, they’ve attached these creative comments or permanent licensing terms to it, and if you violate them you are on notice for stealing their item. We can’t technically stop them, there are limits there.

Philip Rosedale: You know, a couple of high level points about this topic – money, permissions, inventory, interchange. One of the reasons why we, I think it’s somewhat mystifying sometimes why we at Linden been so proactive. People who understand that acknowledge that people are indiscriminate. People who understand less about how virtual worlds work are such an empty example of how .. why would we at Linden so aggressively tried to open-source all our code and participate so actively with open-source projects when it means that if we succeed we would lose the ability to make money in business at all in the presence of a lot of open-source products. Well that’s the answer actually. Because there’s going to be enough people, not everybody, not every simulator wants to have these capabilities nor normally need it. But yeah if you’re going to sell a virtual pet in a virtual world, and you want to take it somewhere or you want to have it be able to pay for it at all, you’re going to have to use some single global mechanism for that because otherwise it’ll just become .. you don’t have to use one but it’ll become inconvenient for you to say move money around different worlds. So I agree that money should be separate from the system, and it’s an interesting point cause this is one of the ways that we as a company have been smart in thinking about the strategy here and realizing that there will be reasonable ways for us to charge fees for things like money systems, and inventory permissions, and of course it’s not just obfustication, it’s simply the marking that this was made by Amee Weber. You’ll only trust that the cloths you’re wearing were made by Amee Weber, if you care, if there’s some sort of common naming scheme that says Amee Weber. And, what our hope as a company is is to provide those types of global services and make money on them or at least some money in the market place.

And we’re so sure having thought about it that we can reasonably do that it has allowed us to take the mission and principal position which we’re very happy with that we as a company can do that which will move virtual worlds forward for everyone fastest which is to allow basically protocols, code and everything else to be out in the open (inaudible) ???. And we’ll still make money. Hopefully a lot of it! We’re making a lot of money today as a company. We’ve done well thus far, admittedly it’s been by hosting these services.

David Levine: I think this is of the essence part of that success comes from having the content created by users, and respecting their desires to do that in an economically satisfying way. And one of the things that I try to take in these interoperability discussions is how do we do interoperability in a way so that at the end of the day the people who are creating the content that makes this a special world in some ways thats one of the things that Second Life is visually unique by are feeling safe and whole and protected. That they can market their content and they have some reason to believe it’s not all being leaked out into the world instantaneously because they’re technically an open source work. That’s a really challenging work. The fact is as Adam pointed out there’s nothing we can do to prevent the client from seeing the textures. Once you give the texture to somebody they put it on your shirt, your shirt’s in world, it’s going on to somebody’s client and they’re (inaudible)???(33:03.375).

Philip Rosedale: But one point though that’s also important to make about this is Amazon.com has a really big website. Can somebody here just copy that Amazon thing and put it on your laptop and inaudible ???(33:13.750). No! You know why not? Because that Amazon stuff is connected to a bunch of back-end code that you can’t just ???(33:22.906). There’s always protection. This is the way the world works. The stack of intellectual property protection moves upward, hopefully at the speed at which horizontal ubiquity make it necessary to have uniqueness there. And people start building property at higher levels. Animals, Ben’s working on these animals in Second Life do you think you can just rip one of those off by pulling it out of the frame buffer?

Ben Goertzel: That case would be an example of behaviour the ability to learn and yet to steal a certain number of units of server time for pet learning and intelligence (inaudible) ???(34:04.844) you have to go to …

Philip Rosedale: You guys don’t have to, it’s your choice. You don’t have to expose the code that is behind these pets, either as scripts or as back-end technology. It’s elective as to whether you expose that code.

Ben Goertzel: We’re not quite sure to what extent we will. And even that (exposing the code) I don’t believe is fatal to our business model whatsoever. Most of the value is in the knowledge. It’s taught to the virtual pets and AI rather than in the source code itself anyway. The knowledge of what people have taught to the AI which is in the knowledge base on the AI server rather than the AI source code.

Adam Frisby: I dare to make a point here on this though. Some things will be ripable. Take for instance looking at the web today. If you upload a script to your web host, your web host has a copy of that script. They can rip it. Likewise if you have sell something like Vbulletin thats a forum software that’s used on world web sites. If you sell that software to someone, then you’re giving them the code and the moment you give them the code then it’s out of bounds. The solution to that to protect something exclusively, that relies on a server back-end component is to host it yourself and provide it as software as a service model. If you build the object and you allow it to be transferred from one server to another then at that point the people who it’s being transferred to can copy it. And this is just a fundamental thing. If someone is going to copy something they can make another copy.

Tish Shute: Also another question from Peter Quirk of EMC, his question is also part of the discussion we just had here about assets, and working with this wonderful artistic situation..and storhouse that’s developed in Second Life that hopefully is going to be interoperable with OpenSim. Peter’s question to OpenSim is what is your plan to make sure you stay interoperable and that you remain compatible, and are you not forking? He actually is quite specific, he felt OpenSim LSL is already forking from the Second Life LSL.

Adam Frisby: That’s actually probably a good point. I mean we have extended LSL. We’ve got something and we’ve actually renamed it from LSL to OSSL. And the reason for that was we started adding new things. We’ve added some ??? commands. Then we started changing the syntax adding things like switch statements etc. that people have been requesting for years. We still are compatible with LSL though. If you take any LSL script on the grid, it should compile under OpenSim. Some of the backend functions, LSL’s got about 327 functions, I think we’ve implemented about 118 of those. So as long as you use those 118 then they’ll run just fine. Once we’ve finished the rest of them then yes, we’re compatible with LSL 2.0. On the other hand if you use OSSL then that’s not backwards compatible with LSL you can’t take an OSSL script and push it back into Second Life. In most cases I think some of them will be, cause OSSL is a superset of LSL.

Philip Rosedale: Are you going to continue to use Mono?

Adam Frisby: We will.

David Levine: Absolutely.

David Levine: I know Babbage is already having some fairly rich discussions with OpenSim developers on things like should we share some of the mono libraries.

Yani Pirkola: OK. I just wanted to say something about content and realXtend. We at real realXtend see in the future or we hope and see that there are going to be many realXtend servers around the world, like today there are Apache servers. And each of those worlds needs content on them so that’s a problem. Where are we going to get initial content to populate the world to make it look like something. We have started donating all our content that we do in the project for public use, in this CC license, attribution only, corresponds to the BSD license on the code side. So you can take and use it. I haven’t yet seen any, at least I don’t know any good open source project around open content.

Adam Frisby: It’s an interesting point. There is the Google warehouse. That would be a fantastic thing to integrate so you can grab drag and drop items from there and they’re all in collada. There’s also commercial services. Turbo squid is a fantastic one and I know there’s some guys from them hanging around this conference. But I think there are big libraries available. The key is using standard format, using Collada, or using some common mesh format ???

David Levine: There are groups now in Second Life like Clever Zebra doing open content intentionally for open use.

Philip Rosedale: We made a statistical assessment of ratio of free to not free content. It was very interesting, I can’t remember the number. But there is a double digit percentage of items in Second Life that appear to be fully promiscuous in effect of permissions. People were OK with them being copied and so it’s be interesting to note what mass of content that is within a given sort of ???(43:28.781) of users.

You’re going to have an equilibrium point according to how much stuff people are fine giving away and how much stuff they want to take and monetize. You can do both things in Second Life. So it is interesting to take a look at how that number meshed out. You know the total volume I think of content is a significant driver of experiences even behind the firewall experience. You know the stuff we’re doing with IBM is because we strongly believe that you really still want to be to get content from the main grid must be somewhere quite easily even if you’re just use do private business conferencing on a sim???(43:58.889)

There’s no question… I mean no business right now is going to want to start from …. and build up a nice business conf. in Second Life. They’re going to have to get content from somewhere so whether it’s from a system or not it’s .. the sheer size of the content base is interesting for comparatives. About a billion assets at this point about a hundred terabytes of data. So it’s a considerable amount of data probably makes .. … the google warehouse probably wouldn’t be measurable at this point so it’s so .. this is a big issue. A lot of the experiences in Second Life, the reason they’re cool is because they have all the content that you probably haven’t seen before. And that’s the way it’s going to be and its not just visual content it’s got to be interactive content. It’s everything the most important content is actually living.

David Levine: Actually the point that you’re on there about that even though it’s behind the firewall experiences is exactly spot on. Nobody wants A) to have 500 avatars interact with 499 other companies. and that’s not going to do it the MIM gets sheared at about 5. and B) nobody wants to have to go recreate the 500 conference rooms that people seem to insist on creating though why thay don’t want to sit by a lake and enjoy the view I don’t know. Not always the same place but a waterfall and trees .. the point being that you don’t want to create these little corporate walled gardens which are empty, you want to create corporate walled gardens which are lively, and be able to say to people of this part of the corporate walled garden not only is lively but is quasi public. And those kinds of discussions are why it’s not a simple standard like http. It is not we’d be throwing content over the walls and forgetting about it.

Philip Rosedale: About a third of those billion objects by the way, as far as we can tell, are scripted.

Round table participant:
Going back to the original question about things remaining compatible. Because OpenSim is an open source project there is always someone around who can come along and say revision have gone to far and it would be valuable to bring any forks back together.

Adam Frisby: There’s a lot of commercial interest in making sure things are compatible. I’m sure that when there’s lots of installations around say if it’s a version that 3Di does which is Ginsei or it’s the realXtend server, the point is people are going to want to go from one to the other and the one that drifts too far apart and you can’t do that anymore, is going to be shunned a little bit until that’s fixed. And, there’s a commercial incentive for people to have a compatible standard here. I think that’s probably the reason or driver behind why there are so many organizations now looking to standardize virtual world technologies.

Question (inaudible) Christian Westbrook I think!

Adam Frisby: That depends entirely on the content creators whether they’re willing to license their things to go outside the walled garden or not. If they are then fantastic, that’s great.

David Levine: It depends also on getting to a model of the protocol where we can mark whether or not the end point is an end point we trust. One of the challenges is going to be the trust model. Because we want to be able to say to somebody you can mark your content always stay on Linden’s grid because that’s the agreement you want, or on any trusted grid where there’s a legal relationship that the DMCA requested and will be honored. or I don’t care, I think it’s a cool object, anyone can have it. we want to be able to get all those gradations. and again we can’t enforce them in the sense that yes some of this stuff is going to bleed. but we want to be able to know the intent was conveyed all the way to the end point ..

Adam Frisby: Interesting point here however that I think there’s a good commercial incentive for things to be more permissible. Take say someone’s avatar, someone’s got a nice furry avatar that they go from one sim to another. Now if you teleport from one region to another server that isn’t trusted your avatar’s going to disappear and you’re going to be pissed off at the creator of that. And say Hey, why can’t you let me take my avatar with me, that’s part of me. So I think that we’ll see that there will be an incentive for people to start marking their items as transferrable because the customers are going to demand it. It gives value to your item, and to your end user so that they can use it.

Rountabler?: Wouldn’t it be an incentive for the landowners to have a certificate allowing that content on his land?

Adam Frisby: There will be models all over the place. I fully expect people to show up and say -

David Levine: Practically there will be an open ecosystem where we explore all these relationships within the essential, not just interesting, the essential. find out this model really drives people to your concept, this model drives people away. And I don’t predict which one it’ll be, I’ve got some guesses, but let the market tell us. Let people explore what happens when I create a wide open sim, do I get a ton of user created content and it’s cool? Or does it turn into a real wasteland? And I think predicting that is not only sort of -

Prokofy Neva: I want to ask a philosophical question about the relationship of the average consumer to the developer in OpenSim. From here it sounds like you you are making virtuality but not virtual worlds – a world. (very hard to hear here) They may all be interoperable with an open source that they share but they are all (inaudible) … and what that sets the developer up to do is that he has to endlessly create professional content that the consumer burns through.

Adam Frisby: Sounds like the internet today doesn’t it?

Prokofy Neva: No sounds like World of Warcraft…

Adam Frisby: There isn’t going to be a single..

Prokofy Neva: ….(inaudible) how do people get the motivation….I mean three people have three things to do either play house, play store, or play war…..

Adam Frisby: Each single one of those is a use case in this thing. There’s also the corporate ones where you’ve got people who want to work the case is that you have people conglomerate their regions into some sort of federation of sites. So you’ll have web site equivelants where you’ll have big portals set up that link website A to website B to website C. And that happens on the internet today people conglomerate in certain locations so if for instance the digg.com virtual world would potentially be huge it would be giant it would be a mass collection of subsites which formed something. Also you would have things like Second Life. Second Life is just one such use case for this environment. Second life is a big virtual world where you’ve got people involved and they all exist. The key here is that you can not just go to Second Life though, you can go from Second Life to digg.com and back again. Yes some of the experience will change, some environments will decide to be consistent in their visual scheme or other types of simularities and yet other regions will group together based on simularities I expect that to happen. But like the web today, there’s nothing linking say one site to another. If they choose to make a link then great but there’s nothing linking every single site on the net to every single other site on the net.

Prokofy Neva: Sound inaudible

Adam Frisby: One of the reasons it doesn’t work is because I would say the browsers at the moment aren’t really set up to allow you to browse from one site to another. In Second Life the browser is extremely limiting, you can’t type in a URL and teleport from one area to another. You have to load up a SLURL which is a pain in the ass. Or you need to open up the world map and find where you’re going and teleport to it. Or you need to fly to it. There’s nothing that gives you a convenient A to B link.

Discussion – sound inaudible…….

David Levine: I think one of the things we talked of as a concern about like a thousand simulators sort of flower is that we’ll get a thousand simulators sort of half empty and not interesting. I think the reality is that’s not going to happen because simulators are going to end being either run or not run based on whether or not people actually come there and play. People are going to come and play because we create compelling spaces. You look at virtual worlds that die and they’re plenty of them out there which are half dead and they’re half dead because the users don’t have a reason to hang around. And yeh there are some people who draw up a simulator in their garage because they think it’s cool. And they’ll play with it and a dozen people wander in and out and it’ll be like that web page you put up because you were bored one Tuesday and you wanted to put a picture of your nephew up. And it’ll die. Eventually somebody forgets to pay their domain service or registration and they go away. I think what’s going to happen is there’ll be self grouping. We’re going to have large clusters of people who have a similar philosophy on content, and they’re going to find ways to interoperate.And a lot of them at least in the early days are going to hang off Second Life as an appropriate place to socialize and a place to get some large shopping. Situations happen. A lot of things are going to gradually coalesce and we have no good prediction what that’s going to look like. Just like we didn’t know which of the ISP’s which were going to look promising in 1985, whether it’s the AOL or Compuserve, or Prodigy extensions you go to media if you want date yourself thoroughly. Bits of those models are still here with us today. you can get an @AOL.com email address but, lots of those went by the wayside when their content models stopped being relevant. And we’ll figure that out over time.

Inaudible question……

Adam Frisby: I think that you’ll find ther’ll be a very tiered relationship. For instance say one webhost allows you to use scripts, and allows your scripts to consume 100% of the processor time. That’s going to be an expensive web host. Likewise you’re going to have environments which are very cheap. They’re not going to let you run scripts. They’re going to let you have this many objects. They’re going to let you use this many resources on things. You’ll pay for more resources. Say you’ve got one world where every single blade of grass in the environment is physically simulated, that’s going to happen on the server and you’re going to have to pay an expense for that. You’re going to find that all these web hosts are going to show up, and they’re going to offer different competing feature sets. They’re going to say well I’ll give you a really rich experience for end users but you’re going to pay out the nose for it. Or you’ll have people who do the discount web host. and to a degree this happens on the internet today. you pay for the extra database access, you pay for scripting access, you pay (YOU PAY FOR RELIABILITY) yeah you pay for reliability of services.

Roundtabler?: And there are low prim sims.

David Levine: And the other piece that I think you’re going to see is you’re going to find sims that say everybody on this sim is private, we’re not going to identify you. You’re going to find other ones where there’s going to be a OpenID requirement to login, and every range of that. And that evolution I think it began, it’s essential like the internet, we will toss out thousands of models over the next ten years in virtual worlds and just like we suddenly discovered point cast didn’t work. and why it didn’t work, (to pick on another old technology). Some of it’ll fall by the wayside and some of it’ll take off and the exciting thing is having an ecosystem where we can afford that.

END…

Eben Moglen – Open Source, IPPI panel in Second Life

Life 2.0 Summit Spring ’08 will kick off with the Open Source, IPPI (IP and Privacy/Identity) in Virtual Worlds On Sunday, March 16, at 1 PM PST, with special guest Eben Moglen (his avatar pictured above).

The event will be held in the CMP Amphitheater at CMP 1, 2, 3, 4 ( SLURL ). To attend the Second Life events or watch video you must register for Life 2.0 here.

Eben Moglen, is Director, Chair and Chief Counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. Moglen, professor of law and legal history at Columbia, is a pioneer of the opensource movement, former general counsel for the Free Software Foundation, and one of the architects of version 3 of the GNU GPL.

Zero Linden

Eben Moglen’s co-panelists on Sunday will include Zero Linden, a.k.a Mark Lentczner, Linden Lab. Zero is one of main the architects of Second Life’s evolving infrastructure. Zero recently published the first draft of Second Life Grid Open Grid Protocol a.k.a. SLGOGP a important step forward on the path to opening up the Second Life grid (see Tateru Nino’s post on Massively, Tao Takashi’s post at mrtopf.de, and mindblizzard).

The brilliant and very elegant Zha Ewry (a.k.a David Levine, IBM Research) will be joining the panel from JFK airport while he waits for his flight to San Francisco. David Levine and Eben Moglen had an interesting conversation back in December that you can find on Ugotrade here. They explore some of the problems of defining digital public space and issues of privacy on the internet, offering many suggestions on how to implement online privacy enhancing technologies and insights as to how we could design the next generation of these technologies in responsible ways.

Also Zha was a interviewed recently on Metanomics with Beyers Sellers (a.k.a Robert Bloomfield). This interview is highly recommended as some of the key issues facing Second Life’s Architecture Working Group (AWG) and a future Open Grid “that will ultimately allow the cohesive operation of both Linden-operated and non-Linden-operated Second-Life style simulators and grids.” (see Massively for more) are unpacked.

Download the video (Quicktime)
Download the audio (MP3)
Read the transcript
Metaversed video archive at SLCN

Also, OpenSim and Linux guru Sean Dague (IBM) will be a panelist. Sean Dague has been a member of IBM’s Linux Technology Center since it’s inception in 2001. He has worked on numerous Open Source technologies over the years including: Cluster Management (SystemImage and OSCAR projects), Hardware Control (OpenHPI), Virtualization (Xen), and now Virtual Worlds with OpenSim. Sean has been an active member of the OpenSim project since July 2007.

Sean’s avatar (picture below) is Neas Bade.

Tara5 Oh (below – that’s me!) will moderate with CMP’s John Jainschigg (John Zhaoying).

See you there! (SLURL)