Wilfred Pinfold, Director, Extreme Scale Programs for Intel, and the Supercomputing Conference general chair, is working with some Intel colleagues to make a project called ScienceSim the centerpiece of a special workshop event at the SC09 conference (see Supercomputing Conference, an ACM and IEEE Computer society sponsored event).

Recently, I interviewed Wilf Pinfold (see interview below), Mic Bowman (also see my previous interview here), and John A. Hengeveld (see interview below). I wanted to find out what are the underlying goals of this SC conference program?  Why are members of the SC community being encouraged to participate with the ScienceSim environment? What projects are beginning to emerge? And, what are Intel’s goals in giving infrastructure support to further the conversation between high performance computing and collaborative virtual worlds?

The vision of creating new ways to collaborate and interact with big data does seem to be one of the more significant steps we can take at a time when we find many of our most complex systems roiling and threatening total collapse. As Tim O’Reilly has pointed out – from financial markets to the climate, the complex systems we depend on for our survival seem to be reaching their limits.

But,  how can we get from the place we are now – see this example of an n-body simulation in OpenSim, to the point where we can collaboratively steer from our visualizations big data simulations of climate change, financial markets, or the depths of the universe.  The picture opening this post is a:

Frame from a 3D simulation of gravitational waves produced by merging black holes, representing the largest astrophysical calculation ever performed on a NASA supercomputer. The honeycomb structures are the contours of the strong gravitational field near the black holes. Credit: C. Henze, NASA

Wilf Pinfold explained to me part of the reason to begin a dialogue on collaborative visualization at SC ’09 is that super computing communities (that tend to be highly skilled and visionary) have played key roles in internet development in the past. Wilf pointed out,  key browser technology  developed out of these communities in the early days of the internet – see this wikipedia entry that gives  a background on the role of NCSA (National Center for Supercomputer Applications).

The hope is, while there are many obstacles to overcome, the super computing community has both the skills and motivation to find solutions to creating collaborative environments capable of the kind of rapid data movement that scientific/big data visualization needs. Solving the problems of realtime collaborative interaction with big data will  have many ramifications for the way we understand virtual reality, the metaverse, virtual worlds (all these terms are becoming increasingly inadequate for cyberspace in the age of ubiquitous computing, an argument I will make in another post!).

There have already been a number of blogs on ScienceSim (see Virtual World News, New World Notes, Vint Falken, and Daneel Ariantho). There have also been Intel blogs – see this post by John A. Hengeveld (a senior business strategist working with Intel planners and researchers to accelerate the adoption of Immersive Connected Experiences). And Intel CTO Justin Rattner’s post announcing the project this November.

But to blow my own horn a little, I think i was the first to blog the encounter between OpenSim and Supercomputing (an encounter I to some degree provoked by making the introductions) see this post.  So I have been following the ScienceSim initiative with great interest.

Very shortly after N-Body astrophysicicsts Piet Hut and Jun Makino, creators of  – GRAPE (an acronym for “gravity pipeline” and an intended pun on the Apple line of computers) – a super computer that will become one of the fastest super computers in the world (again), met Genkii – a Tokyo based strategic company working with OpenSim, the first N-body simulation appeared in OpenSim.  And in a matter of weeks  this video went up on YouTube – the result of a collaboration between MICA and Genkii.  But the nirvana of being able to create visualizations using real time data from super computers that can be steered from a collaborative environment is still a ways off.

Super computing communities tend to be geographically very dispersed and researchers often find themselves far from simulation facilities so there is both the motivation and skills to pioneer new tools for collaborative visualization. I know that astrophysicists certainly see their value (Piet Hut has some profound ideas on this). Astrophysicist Piet Hut and others  (see here for more) have been pioneering the use of VWs for collaboration.  There are two Virtual World organizations, both founded by Piet Hut and collaborators, that are currently exploring the use of OpenSim for scientific visualizations.  One is specifically aimed at astrophysics, MICA, the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics, and the other is aimed broadly at interdisciplinary collaborations in and beyond science, Kira, a 12-year old organization focused on `science in context’.  As of last week, there are two weekly workshops sponsored jointly by Kira and MICA that explore the use of OpenSim, ScienceSim, and other virtual worlds.  One of them is “Stellar Dynamics in a Virtual Universe Workshop” and the other is “ReLaM: Relocatable Laboratories in the Metaverse.”

MICA was founded two years ago by Piet Hut within the virtual world of Qwaq Forums (see the paper “Virtual Laboratories and Virtual Worlds”). The Kira Institute is much older: it was founded in 1997.  Later this month, on February 24, Kira will celebrate its 12th anniversary with a presentation of talks, a panel discussion, and a series of workshops.  See the Kira Calendar for the main event, and the Kira Japan branch for a special mixed RL/SL event in Tokyo.  During both events, Junichi Ushiba will give a talk about his research in which he let paralyzed patients steer avatars using only brain waves.

Other early adopters of ScienceSim include Tom Murphy, who teaches computer science at a Contra Costa College. Prior to teaching, Tom spent 35+ years working for supercomputer manufacturers. Tom said:

it is very natural for me to find significantly new ways to visualize and interact with scientific mathematical models via ScienceSim and the OpenSim software behind it. ScienceSim also allows us to interact with each other and teach students in new ways.

Also Charlie Peck, chair of the SC09 Education Program, (his day job is teaching computer science at Earlham College in Richmond, IN), is working with Wilf Pinfold, Tom Murphy and others “to explore how 3D Internet/metaverse technology can be used to support science education and outreach.”

Cristina Videira Lopes, University of Irvine, is doing very interesting work  on road and pedestrian traffic simulations. Crista is also the creator of hypergrid in OpenSim,

People Meet People Meet Data: A Conversation With Mic Bowman

Screenshot of ScienceSim from Daneel Ariantho

Tish: How does this work on ScienceSim  fit into a wider dialogue on linked data? Where people meet people meet data, and where data meets data?

Mic: Yeah… that’s hard by the way.  Open integration of data (and more interestingly the functions on data) is very hard if it comes from multiple, independent sources.

That’s the people part. For example, if Crista can build a model of the UCI campus somebody else builds an accurate model of several cars and another expert provides the simulation that computes the pollution generated by those cars in that environment…its bringing people together to solve real problems, no matter how far apart physically.

Tish: You mention three different simulations here. Could you explain why it is difficult to integrate data from multiple sources?

Mic: integrating data from multiple sources has always been one of understanding & interpreting both the syntax & semantics of the data. Even relatively simple things like multiple date formats require explicit translation. More complex formats, like the many formats data is represented for urban planning, are barely computable independently let alone in conjunction with data from other sources (each with its own representation for data). Its often the expertise & the collaboration of bringing people (and their bag of tools) together that solves these problems.

Tish: and in this case the bag of tools is high performance modeling..?

Mic: high performance modeling, rich visualizations and data. Its the three that matter… data, function, and interface.

Tish: Some people have a very hard time wrapping their head aropund the fact that anything that seems related to Second Life can do this.  Can you explain more about the difference between SL and OpenSim?

Mic: OpenSim potentially improves data & function because it can be extended through region modules. Region modules hook directly into the simulator to provide additional functionality. For example, a region module could be implemented to drive the behavior of objects in a virtual world according based on a protein folding model.

We need to work on additional viewer capabilities to address the user interface limitations.

Tish: Yes Rob Smart’s (IBM) recent data integrations with OpenSim (see here) are impressive. Re viewers one of the biggest objections to virtual worlds is the mouse pushing and pc tied interface.

Mic: There are great opportunities for improving the interface

Tish: Yes I really like where the Andy Piper’s experiments with Haptic Interfaces for OpenSim lead, see Haptic Fantastic! And I think that we will have cyberspace ubiquitous in our environment, not just stuck on a pc screen, sooner than we think.

Mic: Mic’s opinion (not Intel): until we get souped up sunglasses with HD screens embedded (or writing directly into the eye) there will always be a role for the PC/Console/TV).  But, it isn’t about the device… its about the services projected through the device… sometimes you’ll want a very rich experience… sometimes you’ll want an experience NOW wherever you are.

Tish: I think people are only just realizing that VWs will be a now and wherever you are experience very soon.

Mic: That’s the critical observation the virtual world is not an application you run… its a “place”… and you interact with it where you are or maybe interact through it. Speaking for Intel… it is the spectrum of experiences that are critical to support.

Interview with Wilfred Pinfold

Picture from National Science Foundation – “Climate Computer Modeling Heats Up.”

Tish Shute: I know your day job for Intel is in High Performance computing. Could you explain to me a little bit more about what you are working on in this regard – a mini state of play for high performance computing from your perspective?

Wilfred Pinfold: My title is Director, Extreme Scale Programs. This program drives a research agenda that will put in place the technologies required to make an Exa (10^18) scale systems by 2015. The current generation of high performance computers are Peta (10^15) scale so this is a 1000x increase in performance and this increase will require significant improvements in power efficiency, reliability, scalability and new techniques for dealing with locality and parallelism.

Tish: The nirvana in terms of linking supercomputers to the collaborative spaces of immersive virtual worlds is to be able to create visualizations using real time data from super computers in collaborative VW environments, and ultimately for researchers to be able to collaborate and steer their simulations from their visualizations.  Where are we at now in terms of scientific data visualization in VWs? And what are the current obstacles to using realtime data from super computers?

Wilf: Being able to steer a simulation from a visualization requires both a visualization interface that allows interaction and a simulation that operates at a speed that is responsive in interactive timeframes. For example a weather model that predicts the path of a hurricane would need to operate at something close to 1000x real time. This would run through a day in ~1.5 minutes allowing an operator to run the simulation over several days multiple times with different parameters in a single sitting to understand the likelyhood of certain outcomes?

Tish: Do you see a networked online collaborative virtual world being capable of being a visualization interface that allows meaningful interaction with the hurricane scenario you describe in the near future (next 6 to 18 months)?

Wilf: I was using the hurricane example to explain the usage model not an imminent capability. Hurricane Simulation: Accurate hurricane simulations require multiscale models able to resolve the global forces working on the storm as well as the microforces that define precipitation. We can build useful weather models today that run faster than real time (anything slower is not useful for prediction) but we are a long way from the ideal.
Visualization: There are excellent visualizations of weather systems but I have not yet seen a virtual world that can track a simulation and allow the scientist or team of scientists to see what is going on at both the macro scale and zoom in to see precipitation conditions. Today’s supercomputers are much better at this than they were a few years ago but they are a long way from ideal.

Tish: Open Source Virtual World technologies are pretty diverse in their approaches, Croquet, Sun’s Wonderland and OpenSim are quite different and have different strengths and weaknesses. As you have become more familiar with OpenSim, what have you found about the technology that particularly lends itself to this project – ScienceSim (Mic mentioned Crista’s hypergrid code for example, modularity is another feature often cited).

Wilf: We have found OpenSim’s client server model is well suited to the visualization model and the ability to put the server next to the supercomputer producing the visualization data is critical. We are however very interested in other environments and encourage papers, demonstrations and research on any of these platforms at the conference.

Interview with John A. Hengeveld

Tish Shute: OpenSim’s dependence on Second Life based viewers is sometimes cited as a limitation, and sometimes as a strength. What are your views on this?  What would a strong open viewer project directed at science applications bring to the picture?

John Hengeveld: There may be more than one strong open viewer project required for opensim compatible experiences.  The strength of the Hippo viewer, for example, is availability and its weakness is the size of the client.  We would love a ubiquitous, client.. that runs on all platforms, but each hardware platform brings tradeoff and restrictions of its own.  Today, probably all of the folks innovating in the space can deal with the size of a very fat rich client ap.. they have big computers anyway.  But as we get into more 3D entertainment and augmented reality applications.. virtual mall, collaboration apps.. etc… there is a great deal of room to optimize for the specific experience.  Balancing visual experience with bandwidth and compute performance available .. tying into standard browsers, etc… people have done some of this work.. and I think all of it adds to the usefulness of these worlds.

Tish: Integrating highend game engines and OpenSim opens up new possibilities. But licensing issues have been an obstacle. Could a project like ScienceSim get a non-commercial license on a high end game engine?  What would that bring to the picture?

John: Anything is possible. Game engines can give a great deal of design power for high value experiences, but the programming of these experiences must be simplified.  Mainstream adoption in enterprise can’t be premised on the programming model of studio games… that’s a big step to get over I think.  There are very interesting possibilities when we take that step tho.  Simulation, training, agents of various types (I just finished watching “The Matrix” for like the billionth time… I think agents are cool…)

Tish: Where does Larabee fit into the picture of ScienceSim and next generation virtual worlds?

John: We are all very excited about the Larrabee architecture and its application to work loads like next generation virtual worlds, both in the client.. delivering immersive reality.. and someday potentially in a distributed architecture simulating and producing these worlds.  For Intel CVC is an all play.  Atom will be used in strong mobile clients.  Core will be used in Enterprise PCs, Laptops and Desktops   Xeon will be simulating these environments and handling the data communication, and Whatever we brand Larrabee… will be enabling compelling visual experiences. Oh.. and our software products (Havoc, tools and others) will be building blocks in knitting all this together.  Larrabee is a part, but there are a lot of other pieces in our vision…

Tish: If the kind of rapid data movement that scientific visualization needs is achieved in virtual worlds, this will be quite a game changer for business applications of VWs too. Also it will blurr the boundaries between what we call virtual worlds and mirror worlds. It seems to me this kind of rapid data movement is a vital step towards what Mic described to me as Intel’s vision of CVC: “Connected Visual Computing is the union of three application domains: mmog, metaverse, and paraverse (or augmented reality).” It almost seems to me that if you achieve your goals for ScienceSim you will change how we think about virtual worlds in general? What do you think?

John: I certainly hope so..  Part of our goal is to stimulate innovation in the technology and usage models that will enable broad mainstream adoption of CVC based applications (what we categorize as immersive connected experiences).   By tackling the scientific visualization problem, we hope to find the key technology barriers and encourage the ecosystem to solve them.

Tish: To me virtual worlds and augmented reality should be complimentary and connected experiences. How do you see this connection evolving?

John: We certainly see them as related.  In the long term, there are many common building blocks.. but they aren’t united per se.  Its about the user experience, and in some usages these two are almost identical…  in some.. they don’t look or feel at all alike… the viewer is distinct by a lot.  Our approach is to enable building blocks that people can quickly build out usages that are robust.

Tish: What is Intel’s vision for ubiquitous mobile computing and an internet of objects?  How can high performance computing be an enabler for this vision?

John: Mobile computing is a central part of our life, culture and community in economically enabled economies.  It feeds the data of our decisions, it connects us to entertainment, it is the access point to our soapboxes, pulpits, economy and families.  This creates a massive increase in data, a massive increase in interactions, transactions and visualizations.  While many HPC applications will be behind the scenes (finance, health, energy, visual analytics and others), HPC will emerge as a part of a scale solution to serving some of this increase… particularly that part where interactions and visualizations are complex or compelling.. or where scale enables the usage per se .. I talked about my love of agents earlier.. and some of that comes in here.  Compute working behind the scenes to help managed the data complexity, manage some of the base interactions between ourselves and technology.  The other thing we talk internally about the “Hannah Montana usage” where millions of people use their mobile devices to access and participate (using the sensors in the device) with an interactive live concert.  When Mylie hears the applause of a virtual interactive audience… and can scream back at them.. we’re there.  Access to ubiquitous compute will be mobile, and interactive experiences will be complex.. and HPC can help make that real.  Watch out for the mental trap that HPC is always high end super compute clusters tho… the “mainstream HPC”.. smaller clusters… high threads, etc… will play a key part in all of this as well.

Interesting that John ended on this point as this just came in from Wired.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview with Teravus Ousley

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

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

1) Standardization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tish: Why not?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teravus: UDP or HTTP

Tish: and TCP?

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

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

Tish: Polling does sound slow?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teravus: Not documented specifically.

Tish: And OpenSim is that documented?

Teravus: Not well enough probably to define a standard.

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

Teravus: working on it..

2) Licensing Issues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teravus nods

Tish: and at the moment they only have openmv?

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

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

Tish: What are the most significant limitations of openmv?

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

Usability

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

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

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

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

Tish: Is that possible now on OpenSim?

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

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

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

OpenSim developers will be explaining OpenSim to Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo,LA, 2008, attendees from a “very-spacious booth being sponsored by DeepThink, Genkii, RealXtend, SineWave and ISID.” The booth will be an important place to meet some of the key innovators in virtual worlds.

While OpenSim is still alpha there are already some pretty advanced projects on the OpenSim platform including some truly game changing innovation from realXtend, and Tribal Media (more on RealXtend here and Tribal here), IBM’s 60 sim behind their firewall OpenSim Grid, the Microsoft Developer community’s OpenSim grid, Project Manhattan, and the awesome immersive education Greenbush Grid, the collaboration between IBM and the Fashion Research Institute to develop new technologies for the $1.7 trillion apparel industry, Genkii’s work with astrophysicists Piet Hut and Junichiro Makino on N-body simulation in OpenSim, and an extensive list of virtual world providers, and much more!

Thanks Lynn Cullens (Bjorlyn Loon in SL), Director of Communications for Metanomics for the picture of Adam above.

DeepThink has sponsored a screenshot competition so many OpenSim projects will be on display in the booth. Also, Adam a will be unveiling a new OpenSim demo from DeepThink (the screenshot above is a sneak peak). OSGrid (the OpenSim test grid) guru and organizer Charles Krinke (avatar Charles Krinkeb) will be in LA also, so this is a great opportunity to find out how to get involved with OpenSim development.

Three from RealXtend will be in LA!

RealXtend will have three team members in LA – you can look for them at the OpenSim booth. In the picture from the left – Hannu Hollström (ADMINO technologies), Tomi Kujanpää (LudoCraft/realXtend Art Director & Avatar Specialist), Antti Ilomäki (realXtend Communications/ADMINO technologies Project Manager).

ADMINO technologies and LudoCraft, the two main contributors of the realXtend project, are pioneers in virtual world development and interactive experience design. LudoCraft Ltd. is a game studio specializing in the design and development of collaborative multiplayer 3D games and simulations. ADMINO technologies develop unique, scalable virtual world server solutions.

Novamente’s virtual pets coming to RealXtend soon!

Recently, Ben Goertzel, Novamente, visited realXtend in Oulu, Finland and his visit made the local newspaper. Novamente will have their own booth so stop by to learn more. Ben Goertzel explained:

This summer a collaboration between RealXTend, Novamente LLC, and the open-source AI project OpenCog was established. The initial focus of the collaboration is on creating open-source virtual dogs using the OpenCog software, similar to the Novamente LLC virtual pets which are currently being developed mainly in the Multiverse platform (see screenshot below), and have also previously been prototyped in Second Life, and to launch these pets in the RealXTend platform.

At first the dogs will be used for research and experimentation purposes; then afterwards there is the potential of offering them freely to RealXTend users to use in their own RealXTend worlds or publicly-provided worlds. The Novamente/OpenCog virtual pets differ from other existing virtual pets in that they possess powerful, open-ended learning ability: they can learn an endless variety of behaviors, not just a handful of behaviors provided in advance by the programmers. And the pets are just the start: the plan is to roll out a series of progressively more and more intelligent, learning-capable virtual agents in RealXTend, Multiverse and other virtual worlds, including talking parrots and humanoids that can carry out various practical tasks as well as providing entertainment.

Genkii Goes to Hollywood

Virtual Worlds 2008, LA will be a unique opportunity to meet the Genkii team and see their work with Piet Hut and Jun Makino on N-body simulation in OpenSim.

In the picture above, Jeff Ames, CTO, Genkii, is coding up  the N-body algorithms in a meeting/dinner with astrophysicist Piet Hut in Tokyo. The pictures below are the CCO of Genkii, Yuki Saeki’s portraits of Ken Brady (CEO), herself, and Adam Johnson (COO).

CEO Ken Brady will be leading a panel in the Enterprise Track called “Using Virtual Worlds to Streamline and Augment the Film-Making Process.”

ISID -  business value in open source virtual worlds

On the left is Yuhei Shinada, and on the right, Takashi Shima of ISID.

ISID is one of the sponsors of the OpenSim booth at VW2008.

What ISID wants to do with OpenSim:

- Analyze the platform to search for possible business applications
- Develop intraverse environments in order to find new ways for companies to communicate internally
- Develop a closed environment to provide a place for information exchange and experimentation within the companies with the same interest

ISID’S outlook:

In the future, several open source virtual worlds will emerge. However, given OpenSim’s prevalence and level of sophistication, it will be the most successful.

Fashion Research Institute creating enterprise solutions in OpenSim

The image above is the Shenlei Winkler’s, avatar (Shenlei is CEO of Fashion Research Institute, Inc.), photographed in the OpenSim Shengri La region in the Shengri La Bliss sim, part of FRI’s 9 sim grid. Shenlei Winkler (Shenlei Flasheart in Second Life) is leading the way with IBM in making OpenSim fit for business and in using OpenSim to develop new technologies for the $1.7 trillion apparel industry, (see my upcoming interview with Shenlei to learn more about her work and vision).

We’re working with IBM to harden Opensim as an enterprise-ready solution for a number of different reasons not the least of which is the fact that IBM can handle issues of scalability, interoperability, and data security. Right now, we’re testing the IBM OpenSim installation ShengriLa Spirit so that we can really stress the platform in a controlled environment. This offers feedback to our development team in a codified way. The fatc that I insist that it be beautiful just aligns with the Fashion Research Institute’s overall vision.
FRI is a business partner and customer of IBM, plus, we have a research agreement with them to develop new technologies for the apparel industry, a $1.7 trillion industry.

Justin Clark-Casey formerly of IBM is now working full time with the Fashion Research Institute on OpenSim development. Justin will be in LA, so look out for him at the OpenSim booth or catch him speaking on the last day of the conference with Adam Frisby, DeepThink, Mic Bowman, Intel, and myself, Thursday, September, 4th, 4pm to 5pm on our panel, “Open-Source, Interoperable Virtual Worlds,” which will be part of the Future of Virtual Worlds track.

Eolus – “The Path to Sustainable Real Estate”

Oliver Goh, Implenia, will be at VW2008 demoing the latest work from Eolus on “The Path to Sustainable Real Estate,” (see my earlier posts here, and here on Oliver’s work with with IBM on prototyping Virtual Operation Centers and building automation in OpenSim).

The Eolus 3D Virtual Operations Centers represents the next level of innovation and green technology offered by the Eolus solution.   The 3D environment is customized according to unique requirements, and can be delivered as classic command centers, control rooms, datacenters, or hybrids or custom solutions.  The versatile virtual world environment ensures a platform for innovation for scalability, performance, and growth as the business value it brings is expanded to other areas.

Michael Osias, IBM, Chief 3D Architect, Grid Operator, IT Optimization

You will be able to find Michael at the IBM booth.  And don’t worry, he is not always as serious as in this photo!  So my advice is to grab this chance to meet the developer of some of the most advanced OpenSim enterprise applications.

I have blogged a lot about Michael’s work with Oliver Goh on Eolus in the past year.  They recently got a lot of main stream press attention including being written up in the Guardian (also see my posts: The Archeology and Future of Software Design: Interview with Grady Booch, Interoperability for Virtual Worlds in 2008, Eolus Goes OpenSim, Next Generation of Software Design: 3D Command/Service Centers in Second Life, Eolus Makes Leap to 3D Internet in Second Life).

Michael’s pioneering integrations of “virtual” and “real” worlds give us, perhaps, our first glimpse of how virtual worlds will play a vital role in management, optimization and control of energy, data, business processes and more, changing the way we relate to the software infrastructure of our technology driven world.

As the architect and grid operator of IBM’s fast growing ‘behind the firewall’ OpenSim grid  – it now has sixty regions and 123 users – Michael has been doing some interesting work. Most recently he has been integrating xen an open source virtualization product by Citrix with OpenSim to do dynamic provisioning of new region servers, move the region servers among nodes, resize virtual CPU and memory allocation, and more.

Doug Thompson – CEO, Remedy Communciations

Tom Hoff – OpenSim Core Developer

“Tom Hoff is an independent software developer and digital artist. He is contributing to the OpenSimulator project as a core developer, currently specializing in geometry issues. His prior experiences include a 23 year career as a technical staff member at Hewlett-Packard Company, where he spent much of his time developing digital halftoning and printing algorithms for ink jet printers and robotic machine vision systems for automated print quality evaluation. His interests include digital image processing, 3D geometry, and computational behavioral models. He is also an avid fitness enthusiast despite his higher than normal consumption of diet cola.”

Today it is official, “The IBM and Linden Lab Interoperability Announcement” – see also, Torley Linden’s video here (screenshot above).

Hamilton Linden and Inifinty Linden visited OpenSim office hours in Wright’s Plaza, OSGrid, last week with some big news (screenshot below). 25 avatars gathered to discuss with great enthusiasm Hamilton Linden’s proposal that Linden Lab would provide an Open Beta for the Open Grid Protocol for login and teleport between OpenSim and the Linden Lab Public Open Grid Beta.

This interoperability work has been pioneered by David Levine (IBM researcher, Zha Ewry in Second Life) in conjunction with Linden Lab’s Architecture Working Group. Zha has personally coded the patch and she blogged her progress on this last month. Zha’s interop patch can be viewed here.

Later in this post for Zha’s gives an outline of the steps that could lead to the advent of much anticipated and hotly debated content interoperability.

Why is this Interoperability Initiative so important?

While, in Zha’s words, “this is a proof of concept of protocol.” It is an important first step, not only toward realizing Linden Lab’s dream of expanding the influence of their technology, but for consolidating a heterogenous mix of applications for virtual worlds in an interoperable environment.

Notably, it will allow corporations to deploy private and exploratory grids on OpenSim technology while remaining interoperable with the largest virtual world community to date, Linden Lab’s Second Life.

But it is not only interoperability between Second Life and OpenSim which will unleash the power of virtual worlds, it is interoperability between OpenSim grids. New OpenSim grids like Tribal Net and innovative projects like realXtend are beginning to discuss consolidating their influence through interoperability.

Both Tribal Net and realXtend have led the way re innovation with OpenSim technology (see my posts here, here, here for realXtend and here for Tribal Net). And, both are now in early discussions with OSGrid re interoperability. Charles Krinke, a developer and very excellent open source community organizer, runs OSGrid. He gave me a some background on OSGrid (see an upcoming post for more).

OSGrid is the second oldest OpenSim grid and was created in July, 2007. I began running it in August with 150 users and a dozen regions. Others were brought in as managers, most notably “Nebadon Izumi”, “Hiro Protagonist”, “Paulie Flomar” and more in the fall. We now have 3200 users and nearly 400 regions attached as of early July, 2008.

There are two goals for OSGrid. One is to test the OpenSim releases on a daily basis and the other is to build a healthy community.

Interoperability and consolidation of virtual worlds is vital to their development not only because Metcalfe’s law states that “the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system” but because Second Life has demonstrated that one of the key contributions of Virtual Worlds so far is their potential to collapse geography (as Cory Ondrejka put it).

Open Virtual Worlds must continue to create new and richer forms of networked interaction, enabling the communication not only of personal identities, but of community identities and cultures in ways not possible or imagined before. This potential cannot be fulfilled by small isolated worlds.

A New Era for Virtual Worlds Begins!

The excitement was palable today in meetings held in Second Life and OpenSim that discussed moving the interoperability initiative forward.

Interoperability is a big deal. This much was clear. And the press were on it! Eric Reuters showed up in the OpenSim IRC today asking questions about IP and virtual economies in the Open Metaverse. And, there are many posts already including TechCrunch, Information Week, Virtual World News, Gamasutra, and Dusan Writer‘s.

In the IBM press release, Colin Parris, Vice President, Digital Convergence, IBM said. “Developing this protocol is a key milestone and has the potential to push virtual worlds into the next stage of their evolution.”

The screenshot above is from OpenSim office hours today, Wright’s Plaza, OSGrid. There were 31 avatars present including Zha Ewry, avatar of David Levine, IBM, and at least four Lindens – Hamilton Linden, Tess Linden, Whump Linden, and Periapse Linden (Whump and Periapse are running the Linden Lab Public Open Beta Grid).

Also, there were many of the key OpenSim developers, Adam Johnson and Jeff Ames dropped in from Genkii, Japan (see here for more). There were several avatars from IBM in addition to Zha, and members of the Microsoft Development Community in OpenSim, notably G2 Proto, were there.

In the foreground of the screenshot above you can see the OpenSim avatar of Mic Bowman, Principal Engineer from Intel, Finrod Meriman. Mic is an important advocate for Interoperable Virtual Worlds and active member of the OpenSim development community. This was a power house gathering signalling interoperability as the future of virtual worlds has arrived.

Hamilton announced the link for the Public Open Grid Beta, and told the gathering:

You just need to contact Periapse or Whump Linden and they’ll get you setup. Although, we’re are officially committing to July 31st to start. But we’d obviously like to do it sooner. When it starts they’ll give you the info for the downloadable viewer and access to the Agent Domain Host.

Steps Towards Content Interoperability: Interview with Zha Ewry.

Interoperability will raise many new social/business questions for virtual worlds (particularly re content and business models). However, because this proof of concept is between the Linden Lab Public Open Grid Beta, which is not part of the Second Life economy, and OpenSim there is time for some of these questions to be explored.

This exploratory process began at a large meeting held by Zero Linden last week that focused on some of the community concerns about interoperability (see transcript here).

I asked Zha Ewry what she saw as the steps that would lead to content traveling back and forth between Second Life and OpenSim. The movement of content is where most of the thorny social/legal/business questions around interoperability emerge.

Zha outlined what the technical steps would be while noting that the social questions were just beginning to be explored:

Zha: There are a series of about four technical/social/legal steps.

First, we need a protocol for establishing proof of identity between
the components. ie for the sims and services to cross prove they are
who they claim to be, which is peer to having a trusted identity for
the users.

Second, we need a way of expressing policy This is orthogonal to one,
but pretty much requires the proof of identity in order to be useful.
In particular, we want to be able to express what the content creator
desires, including whether they wish it to be restricted to a grid, or
set of grids, copy and use and so on.

Third, we need an agreed public protocol for asset fetch including
both copy, and ACID fetch, and a reliable way of managing no-copy
assets. This is the brute work of moving the digital assets around,
and would exploit one and two to determine if assets should be movable
at all.

Fourth you would want the legal and social framework for using the
technical capabilities. This would be akin to a Terms of Service for
connecting stuff together, which would spell out what policies were in
place. effectively, these become the specific agreements which couple
the first three together, so that we have a safe, agreed way of moving
only the publically accessible assets (we can in fact, do parts of
this, in parallel, so we could work on 3) with public domain assets,
on a set of sims, that only had public assets) while working on 1 and
2.

A lot of this takes on a flavor of building up a layered set of
abilities, and then allowing people to compose a range of possible
solutions. At the protocol level, we want to allow a lot of
flexibility so different grids and communities can explore different
strategies. This is not about a one size fits all approach, or about
having a good enough crystal ball to pick an approach. An open source
community, with open protocols has the luxury of encouraging
experimentation.

Tish: So have the proof of identity protocols been published in any
current AWG docs or worked on?

Zha: It has been discussed, but not in any detail

Tish: So on the agenda?

Zha: Oh, very much so!

For an in depth and somewhat technical discussion of how issues of IP, trust, and managing permissions, licenses etc. might be managed with interoperable virtual worlds see the chatlog from todays Architectural Working Group Groupies discussion.

Content is already on the move in the Open Metaverse

Tribal Net announced this week that Second Inventory is now working on Tribal:

This software lets you backup and restore content to and from different grids, like for example the Second Life(tm) grid, and Tribal Net – which makes Tribal Net an excellent tool to work in private or offline with content, or to make and transfer objects thru e-mail or the web. (You can now distribute your Second Life(tm) object thru your blog – literally!)

Also Tribal annoinced they have 200 members, “and 150 of those has published their own islands. We now have a small core of dedicated 3D pioneers.”

They have also started a community micro-blogosphere that you might want to check out.

Ron Andrade of Common.Sensible has been checking Tribal out and has written a nice post about what he has found. He also notes re the integration of Tribal with Second Inventory that this is not opened the door to all kinds of content transfer or theft.

Now don’t panic, all you against-theft-aggregations and I. P. advocates. You can only copy your inventory and you must be using the same avatar name on Tribal Net as you are using in Second Life. All the permissions remain the same. So, creators, fear not: your hard work is safe. Well, every bit as safe as it currently is in Second Life. Although it is unknown how scripts and other things will react. But hey, if you are the adventurous type with the resources and time, give it a shot.

Stefan Andersson of Tribal noted we should remember “the pioneering and experimental aspect of inter-grid content transfer, and that people should expect some bumps in the road.”

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.