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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.

≈

Ogle Earth - a blog that “focuses on Google Earth” published a great post on “Programming Planetariums in Second Life” last week (hat tip to Kat Lemieux also). These planetariums in SL are the work of Magnus Zeisig (Magnuz Binder) a freelance SL builder located in Stockholm, Sweden, dubbed “one of Sweden’s most talented programmers.” I acquired the 3D display of the galaxies within 500 million light years from us pictured above for my small plot of land in Second Life. Ogle Earth writes:

Second Life is not a dedicated virtual globe or virtual planetarium but a free-form three-dimensional programmable space that anyone can use to build globes and planetariums in.

This phrase, “free-form three-dimensional programmable space,” I think will end up being a mantra for me at least in the next few months. As a new crop of 3D chat rooms emerges, like Vivaty, pointing out the difference between a 3D chat and “free-form three-dimensional programmable space” like Second Life, OpenSim, realXtend and HiPiHi (now in public beta - see my interview with Xu Hui, CEO of HiPiHi, here) may become a regular task. While I look forward to inviting Facebook friends to see photos and videos into my Vivaty scene, this will not be “3D life such as you’d find in Second Life” as some blogs have proclaimed.

“Exploring The Heavens on Earth”

“Exploring the Heavens on Earth” comes from Jeanne Holm’s (NASA) talk title. She will be presenting at the Federal Virtual Worlds Expo: Implementing the Future, on April 24th (see my previous post). Last week I spent some time “exploring the heavens on earth” in Second Life with Erika Vick a second generation NASA contractor who has been with NASA almost 18 years. Erica now works in NASA HQ Strategic Communications. She is Universa Vanalten in Second Life (in the picture above we are in the Moon Rover on NASA’s CoLab sim in SL. The other NASA sim in Second Life, Explorer Island, was created by the visionary from NASA Jet Burns). But as Universa explained most of the NASA content in SL is contributed by people outside NASA. I asked Universa how NASA’s involvement in Second Life was going.

I have been in SL for about a year now and wanted to use SL for Agency purposes….. it has been slow building support for this but now its going like gangbusters.

We’re going to be doing a mixed reality event for the NASA Future Forum in San Jose CA on May 14th

NASA’s MMORPG

Universa also updated me on the Office of Education Distance Learning group’s rfi (request for information) to get feedback about developing an MMORPG around NASA missions which has now turned into a request for proposals and a controversy in the blogosphere about the level of support NASA will offer developers (see here and here). Robert Rice attended the NASA MMORPG Workshop held on Monday of this week at the BWI Marriot and says that “Slashdot, Gamasutra, Second Life Herald and even Wired are all wrong” re their interpretation of NASA’s role (or lack of role!) as a partner in the project. Robert Rice writes:

there is a pretty solid opportunity here for any smart developer that can put together an interesting proposal and find some funding for it. NASA hinted at a few sources that might consider forming a consortium and providing funding, but as I said before, half of the audience stopped paying attention after “NASA will not provide the partner any funding

I think Robert is on the right track! You can check out NASA’s RFP here.

Universa said this to me concerning NASA’s position re funding proposals:

We got 186 responses…much more than expected. Our Administrator for Office of Education totally has the vision for virtutal worlds. There is going to be a Request for Proposals go out soon to follow up on the rfi NASA doesn’t have the money to develop the MMORPG. So the first question is does anyone want to take this on. The fact that we got 186 responses sounds like yes. NASA will provide content experts to consult, and whatever resources we can bring to the table.

Robert also mentioned that the attendee list for the workshop is supposed to be published. He notes: “Almost everyone there wanted to know who *else* was there (to gauge the competition maybe?). It will be posted on the NASA MMO page.”

International Space Station

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Image above: A camera aboard the International Space Station captured this image of the Soyuz TMA-11 spacecraft shortly after undocking. Credit: NASA TV<

I posted here about my visit to the awesome replica of the International Space Station in Second Life built by Illusion Factory. And how Piet Hut (see more about Piet’s latest Second Life adventures below!) brought his friend, astronaut Ed Lu, into Second Life to visit the International Space Station in Second Life. Ed Lu lived in the real one for a half a year in 2003!

I have become totally hooked on NASA TV lately, and particularly, I have been enjoying some of the events that have been streamed into in Second Life, including the annoucement of the latest Google Lunar X entrants, and The Stephen Hawking Lecture.

Virtual Worlds Astrophysics Group

On April 4, Dr. Rob Knop (a.k.a Prospero Linden a.k.a Prospero Frobozz) gave a talk titled “The Power of the Dark Side: How Dark Matter and Dark Energy dominate our Universe.” Dr. Knop was on the team that discovered the accelerating expansion of the universe (picture and quote from the Scilands blog).

This is the first in a series of monthly talks organized by the Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA). They are to be held on the first Friday of every month.
SLURL:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Spaceport%20Bravo/117/66/278

Also from the Scilands blog an announcement for:

Star Simulations School

Learn about software for simulating stars, star clusters and galaxies. Organized by Piet Hut from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Aimed at anyone with a serious interest in astronomy and computer simulations of stars and galaxies. The main idea is to provide guidance for those who are interested in learning to use and/or write software for astronomical simulations, on all levels.

Examples of approaches and packages that we will discuss can be found on the following web sites:

http://www.artcompsci.org/ http://www.manybody.org/manybody/nemo.html

http://www.manybody.org/manybody/starlab.html http://muse.li/

When: The third Friday of every month at 8:00 AM Pacific Time Where: In the virtual world Second Life, at the ISM Workshop room:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Spaceport%20Bravo/153/205/59

The first class will be on Friday, April 18 polling whoever attends to see what their wishes are and then in May starting to offer workshops accordingly.

Optimizing A Free Form 3D Programmable Space

The optimization of Second Life as general purpose simulation platform was eloquently explained at a Fireside Chat with Sidewinder Linden about the Havok4 Physics Engine organized by the International Society for Technology in Education. Here is ashort extract from the one hour talk.

One of the realities of a world such as Second Life is that it is a general purpose simulation. It is not optimized for detailed, high accuracy (very high frame rate) calculation of object dynamics. It’s instead optimized to handle things like “not falling over when people dump 1000 random shapes in a region from 100m in the air” and having reasonable dynamics with a scripting language that allows you to build interesting things.

Now that’s not to say you can’t do real simulation, but it is not really a substitute for high precision simulation. With that all said… you can build things that are visually compelling and illustrate points, with low effort and ‘reasonable” realism.

An analogy I’d draw is to the build tools themselves [Sidewinder Linden comes from a CAD background...]. When I look at the build tools in Second Life, I’m constantly amazed at what people build, because they are pretty basic compared to “real computer aided design” systems but they’re simple and effective.

If you think about the physics modeling in the same way, you might find that you can build many interesting things that are visually compelling and satisfy the teaching objectives of understanding without necessarily having the “smooth like butter” or “high precision” of a “heavy physics simulator” (which by the way you’ll spend many moons programming in c++ to do even the basics

This is the kind of thing I hear from folks building physics-based projects in second life - does this general philosophy work for the type of education that you do, or is precision simulation “the only and right way” to get the points across in your environments?

Exploratorium in Second Life

“What can a museum do in a virtual world that would be difficult—or impossible—to do in the real world?” Exploratorium media creators and educators have been exploring this question by experimenting in Second Life (see the Exploratorium in Second Life blog for details).

The screenshot below is from Destination Mars - A Meteor Impact Simulation on the Surface of Mars

Project Director: Patio Plasma
Model Building & Scripting: Emileigh Starbrook
Particle Systems Scripting: Debbie Trilling

Teleport to the Destination Mars viewing area and:

“Experience a scale model of a Martian asteroid impact. The model crater is 50 m in diamter and the model runs in slow motion at 1/10th the speed of an actual event.”

Watch a machinima* of the Destination Mars simulation.

In another mix of real and virtual reality, the Exploratorium team “streamed an entire rare transit of the planet Mercury live from telescopes at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) in Kitt Peak, Arizona, into the International Spaceflight Museum site in SL.”

This week I received several requests to write a post reviewing the recent upsurge of OpenSim based projects. I am in England for a week, so there is no way I can do this before I leave. However there is a good opportunity to learn more about realXtend and meet the realxtend team this week on Wednesday April 23rd, in Second Life. I have reprinted the notice from the realXtend website at the end of this post.

And, as LifeRain points out, “one way to get to know more about OpenSim is to visit a public grid.” There is a complete list of these grids here. OSGrid, OpenlifeGrid and DeepGrid are goods ones to try to start with. The picture above is from Wright Plaza the orientation area for OSGrid below is OpenlifeGrid.

Or You Can “Do it yourself” - I did!

You can also download OpenSim directly from opensimulator.org. I did! And I set it up on a CariNet on a dedicated server for only $100 per month. In the picture above my eight year old son was excited to meet Adam Frisby, one of the core developers on the UgoSim, just minutes after logging in for the first time. Ugotrade Jr. is now enjoying (and so am I) learning to build in a “cost free” environment - no file upload charges! Also, you can get a Ready-To-Run version of OpenSim from OpenlifeGrid.

OpenSim Blogs

There is a OpenSimulator group blog which some of the developers contribute to, and also a Planet OpenSim which agreggates feeds from opensim-related blogs and developers

• Daltonic Gin
• Darb Dabney’s SIMGIS Blog » OpenSim
• Dave’s Educational Blog
• OpenSimulator Project
• Sean’s Mental Walkabout » opensim
• Shengri La: Utopian Micronation
• Tedd Maa
• The Word of Chaos » OpenSim
• VintFalken.com » OpenSim
• artiphys
• justincc’s opensim blog
• nebadon2025.com
• xyzzy xyzzy… » opensi

Meet the realXtenders!

Next week there will be a key event for Virtual Worlds:

Federal Virtual Worlds Expo: Implementing the Future. The picture above is from the November event.

The Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds is a newly formed group of federal government employees and contractors interested in exploring the use of virtual worlds in government, sharing best practices and policies, creating shared repositories, and networking.

April 24-25, 2008

National Defense University Washington, DC

If you cannot attend the meeting physically, you can attend through Second Life free of charge at the following NOAA SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Meteora/199/138/28

There will be a series of pre-conference workshops in SL, April 23rd, led by Pathfinder Linden, John Lester, Sue Singer, Aimee Weber

One of the speakers will be Jeanne Holm—NASA. Jeanne’s talk title: “Exploring the Heavens on Earth” inspired me to write an upcoming post, looking at the work of NASA and space enthusiasts in the the “free-form three-dimensional programmable space” of Second Life.

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)
(more…)

3D data visualization in virtual worlds, Antigone, avatar2.0, business adoption in open source virtual worlds, business process modeling in virtual worlds, command and control centers in virtual worlds, enterprise applications for virtual worlds, enterprise applications in open source virtual worlds, large scale events in OpenSim, licensing open source virtual worlds, motion capture animations in virtual worlds, next generation internet, open metaverse, open source virtual worlds, Open Source Virtual Worlds Round Table, OpenSim, rock and virtual worlds Virtual Worlds 2008

Juha Hulkko’s Second Life avatar, Jussi Hudson relaxing in his “mirror house” in Second Life - photo by Noelani Lightfoot.

The story of Juha Hulkko’s vision for realXtend, the future of virtual worlds and the next generation of the internet, is fascinating and several conversations are combined in the following interview. You can read more about realXtend’s road map and accomplishments to date on their web site. But to introduce the interview here are some of the key points about realXtend first.

Juha emphasized to me that realxtend is a joint effort with many talented people all over the world. He stressed that his personal role is to help and support these people and that it is their talent and skill that is making this vision happen. Juha especially wanted to emphasize the importance of Linden Lab and the OpenSim project. Their innovations and innovative work are the basis for realXtend too.

They are role models to all who are building the future web and they have already made history in computer science. RealXtend is one important spin-off from their great work.

Overview of realXtend

Click the screen shot or here to play the realXtend avatar technology demo also see the realXtend technology video here.

The emphasis of realXtend is real life applications: enterprises, public sector - e.g. environmental management and protection, interactive and community based (socially networked) communication, extended web, integrated communications - multimedia and 3d.

Open Source: basic servers and clients are platform and open source, platforms have no long term business value. Rex sees the value is in content, application development and support, hosting and better customer access/service.Value change innovations: e.g., content directly from content creators to end users (no middlemen needed).

Rex sees a new roles for telecomm, music, movies, advertisement creating huge possibilities that will change web. Social innovation, public and enterprises should inform the direction of the next generation of the internet. Rex takes a pragmatic approach, i.e. that is looking for real needs and keeping eyes open for better solutions: “We try to avoid “not invented here” syndrome all the time in our own doings.” The vision is for a smooth transition from traditional web to extended web (no revolutions are possible, nothing changes over night).

The Vision from realXtend is a robust OpenSim server (quality of service core issues, branches from OpenSim are maybe needed).

Separate avatar servers with identification servers (to enable same avatar usage in different applications), multi platform clients (from light, browser based to heavy duty 3d+), customizability of clients. This Rex points out is very important as clients have to be modified from servers in real time too, (as in Rex). In the realXtend vision serious applications will coexist with social applications (like SL), connected worlds, neither alone is enough.

Funding: Funding for realXtend is through a private, nonprofit foundation, 3 year program is under preparation.

Interview with Juha Hulkko

Picture of Jussi Hudson (Juha’s SL avatar) by Noelani Lightfoot the proprietor of Quixotic Photography in Second Life (see more of her great work here).

Tish Shute: Could you tell me about the vision behind realXtend and how you got involved with virtual worlds and with developing the next generation of the internet?

Juha Hulkko: My fathers fathers and his brother were the first radio amateurs in late 1920s, as schoolboys they built small transmitters / recovers and started to make contacts all over the world first with Morse code (cw). My father and brother started as school boys. I started actively after returning from army 1975 and been more or less active since that.

Ham radio operators were the first new era global community. The first ones started in beginning of 1900 century. Normal people with a technical background built simple radios with antennas and were able to make friends around the world. They were pioneers of modern wireless communications. And social aspect was there already since the beginning. In North Finland schoolboys could make friends from USA to NeXeland and keep contact with them on regular basis.

That was the first internet to me, and that has inspired me a lot to be a part of helping people to build these global platforms to enable people to be better connected, and to enable real global friendships and understanding between people. Without communication, there will not be deep understanding and respect of other cultures and people. This is almost totally missing from my generation (except radio amateur operators ). We just assume we understand global things by listening to the news or other people’s stories. That has very little to do of understanding global things. Our new generation have real friendships around the globe and that is far beyond what my generation ever had possibility to create.

Juha Hulkko’s home in Oulu, Finland in realXtend and Juha at home in “real” life

I’ve been in the communications area all of my life and I’m still involved in that, but not actively anymore at the corporate level. I’m board member of a couple of companies, yes. But, when I stepped out from my position in my company one and a half years ago, I decided to explore my life long interest in the internet. I’ve been using the internet in my work, of course, but I’ve never had time really to explore the possibilities for innovation. I was just ordinary internet user. But, I was exploring and researching things and then I ran into Second Life.

I got quite interested very suddenly because I realized that this is something which is really important. I realized very soon that it is, and I still think it is, one of the greatest social innovations in decades. I could compare it to the internet when the internet started or when this wireless communication mobile phone boom started. It’s kind of same kind of revolution which will happen with virtual worlds. This is not technological innovation, it’s social innovation. This will make the World Wide Web interactive, social, so you can create your own interest groups there, and then combined with 3D and all the media things, it’s all this combination, it’s a huge thing.

But very soon I realized that Second Life was kind of hopeless for integrating real world applications. It was a closed world which means that 90% of the people I met, they wanted to isolate real life from Second Life. That was something I was thinking about quite a lot. I understand the motivation behind that, but somehow I realized that this is not really something with a big interest for me. I started to think very fast how this virtual world, in this case Second Life, really could be a kind of extension of real life.

Juha and Jussi outside their homes in RL and SL. Second Life picture by Noelani Lightfoot.

I understand completely why some people want to isolate their experience from real life. But I was thinking more of how I could utilize these virtual worlds for real life needs. I started to speak with people and when I meet new people I ask them one very simple question: What is your dream? Why are you in second life? And over 90% of the people answered me that their motivation is to explore and have fun. Look around, see different things and have fun.

And I said to those people, that’s great, you should do that. But, I also located some people who I saw that they had things they wanted to do connected to real life. They can be really simple things. For example, you are designing clothes in real life and you want to create them in Second Life and sell them to people and see what goods are good to sell there in Second Life, and in a real life shop. This is a very simple example. This is the way I started to find very eager active people and I made friends with them.

I also realized that one problem which I don’t personally like very much. In Second Life they are selling land to young people with very, very high prices. So I bought some islands there and I started to invite these young people to the island and said to them here is free land, do whatever you want. Of course there were some people who weren’t willing to do something useful. But I said OK but I hope that you would be part of our thing but regardless, if you get some sale wherever in real life or second life still I’m not asking any rent or any revenue.

I wanted people to do what they want but I wanted at the same time those people to be part of our Arkala community. Still things started to develop and we created a community of virtual friends called Third Eye. The idea behind Third Eye was we wanted to break the barrier between Second Life and Real Life. We started to think of different kinds of technical solution, e.g., sending sms between Second Life and “real” life. We can even control a huge radio station in real life from there (see picture below ). That’s the magic motivation for me. I have been in telecommunications, I have been an entrepreneur for 25 years so I have no business interest for myself. I just wanted to see can you really break these barriers.

We had these communication concepts we made a project for vanishing species. These animals are vanished from Real Life, e.g. The Chinese River Dolphin which is extinct. You can see it on our island and communicate with it. We wanted to show people what it means when we are killing animals, whole species, in Real Life. By seeing them here in Second Life we hope people will appreciate more what is being lost and start thinking.

When we called the Chinese River Dolphins made by Nicolas Sordello a student of Ecole Nationale Supérieur des Arts Décoratifs de Paris came to us. Picture by Noelani Lightfoot.

“Save the planet” sounds a naive approach, but behind it is a growing worry about the state of our planet. That is why my dream is to use Virtual Worlds as tools to enable worldwide open communication on environmental issues. Not communication dictated by any governments, big companies or any single environmental institute. All people and organizations have equal opportunity to create change and right to contribute and offer their opinions and share their solutions with other people who are interested on these issues. It is a very powerful tool, I believe. We simply should leave this planet behind in better condition to future generations, better than the conditions we were born into. We need to start the wheel turning in a good direction. It is our generations responsibility and legacy to future generations.

Kilpisjarvi - place of great beauty where Juha tries to spend as much time as possible

I have been in global business for many years but I like the people I have met in Second Life this is something completely different they do this for love and not just for money. But pretty soon I realized we need an open platform and it has to be scalable so that you can create your own virtual world on your laptop or desktop.

I found a group of young talented people. As you know we have much technical talent as you have met some of them from Admino and Ludocraft (see my interview with Tony Manninen of Ludocraft here). We have many people from wireless telecommunications, a big base of computer scientists, engineering. I approached these people as said that in 6 months time I wanted to have these things happen. And now we have done this server concept which is scalable up from one pc all the way up to a big ISP hosted platform, so it is following very much the basic structure of the WWW not the Linden model of the closed world.

I understand why they did this and they have done a lot with this model of micropayments. But for real life applications it is not so much how much people are selling virtual goods to each other but how companies are selling content and services from virtual world to real life people. That is more realXtend’s focus - real life applications. We don’t want to compete with Linden we want to coexist with Linden. RealXtend is a free platform so of course anyone can do what they want with it, but it was originally designed to serve real life needs.

Kilpisjarvi Reindeer

A tour of Arkala Island

Over the last few weeks I have been fortunate to meet many of the talented people who are part of the realXtend team (see my post here about Tony Maninnen of Ludocraft). It was a great delight to be show round by Prof Lunasea the Second Life avatar of Professor François Garnier of Ecole Nationale Supérieur des Arts Décoratifs de Paris who is doing some extradordinary work with his students on Arkala - check it out both on Arkala Island and see their awesome films here.

A screenshot from a short film by de Grégoire PIERRE.

Spade Dagger the Second Life avatar of Tommi Hollström of Admino showed me some of the work Admino has been doing as the part of the research and development for the reaXtend project. Admino Ltd is a company established by two brothers, Hannu and Tommi Hollström. Company started in June 2003. In the beginning Admino was concentrating in ERP systems and Microsoft products. Admino Ltd was actually third business that the brothers were working together. Tommi show me the Second Life control center for Radio Arkala.

This is 3d user interface for a real ham radio in arkala radio station. The user can use real radio, change frequency, hear radio, and talk. This is an easy way give anyone chance to try it out. This was first project where we did to extend reality :-). But there are other talented people involved too. Arkala Island is an island of innovations.

Radio Arkala in Second Life and Real Life

Spade also showed me a project to sell mobile content using L$.

When the user buys content and types in a phone number he gets content directly to mobile phone. The benefit of this from a business point of view benefit is we don’t use visa or sms payment so we save about 30% mobile operator payment in Finland. Usually the operator takes about 30%. We also are also researching selling videos or renting videos.

With OpenSim server we can male better integration examples for mobile content selling systems. So we can use those databases directly and maintain preview pictures prices, product codes there. Now we have import all preview pictures to SL objects and maintain those here. Its a big problem when we have for example 10000 products.
But the good part about SL is that here is a global currency and it is good for micro payments.

Our biggest problem now in SL is we cannot offer extranet or intranet solutions (we have lot ideas in that area), but
but most big companies won’t put their intranet to SL servers. So we need overall security and a global avatar server, DRM, payment integrations, paypal, itunet, ovi etc. We don’t need make own currency or payment. For example, if we make “3d interface” to itunes, we just need api to use itunes payment.

The Key Issue is the Avatar

Juha Hulkko: One important thing we saw was - not only did everything have to be open, but that the key issue for this was the avatar. You always have to generate a new avatar for a specific game/virtual world.

The rational behind our avatar server which we are going to publish tomorrow is that for human life for hundreds of thousands of years the interface for how people communicate with each other has evolved in a certain way. We speak to people a certain way, we have body language which we use when we communicate with each other. But during the last 30 years, thanks to Mr. Microsoft and some big companies, they have taught us to sit in front of screens and use computers in a very very certain way. You have to use menus and you have to have to try to figure out what is the reasoning behind this web page before you can buy something, or how you can find information. But we simply saw that why we should not try to reinvent the wheel because Mother Nature has already developed a human interface which we use in real life. And that’s why we decided that it’s time to create completely new avatar concepts.

So if you want to be in the World Wide Web in the future you have to be there and communicate with surroundings as much as possible in the same way you do in real life, because that’s something everybody knows, you don’t have to learn. Of course, children have to learn to speak. But to get back to the natural human interface is why we wanted to make this global avatar project.

We started from very basics. For example, we started to design the avatar for 220 bones. But this physical part is only very small fraction of human life. It’s like in human life you can see people but that is not everything. So we are adding a lot of new features like mimicry. It means if I’m sitting with my laptop I have a small camera here if I smile, my other person smiles. If I cry the avatar cries.

This is very simple example. But you know from artificial intelligence research there are many people in the world who are now looking at these kind of things and looking at how people really interact in real life. We try and make everything open technically so everybody can add new kinds of features to our avatar. For us really the basic idea is to make this kind of avatar platform that enables everybody, who wants to, to embed different kinds of things in this avatar. We are doing this to create a defacto standard for virtual worlds which is based on open interfaces so that people can do what they want with it.