UgoTrade

White African noted last week that in “The Best of Blogs, “there’s a number of African blogs in there” and a lot of activity over the last month in the African blogosphere.

The nominated blogs include two from Africa:

• Actualités de la République Démocratique du Congo in the best Weblog category
• Diário de um Sociólogo from Mozambique in best Portuguese blog

Recently, when Joshua S. Fouts (a.k.a Schmilsson Nilsson in Second Life) who directs the USC Center for Public Diplomacy was interviewed by John Jainschigg for Grid Talk on Second Life, much of the latter part of the talk was spent discussing issues of digital divides with the audience.

Schmilsson noted that among other infrastructure challenges in Africa, “40 countries on the African continent do not have reliable Internet access. Thus, they are not a part of our conversations here. This is a major problem.” The conversation that followed covered a number of the hotly debated issues around the role of technology in situations where food, water, clothing and medicine are pressing needs.

This is an ongoing debate at Uthango’s Virtual Africa project (for more about this see Africa’s Second Life, Our Virtual Reality). Uthango are also coming up with creative ways to connect global virtual communities. They are currently organizing a BLOG CARNIVAL. The Grid Talk discussion on Public Diplomacy indicated there is much interest from Second Life residents in the topic of Infrastructure development in Africa. The blog carnival is an opportunity to connect this conversation to the wider online community and African bloggers in particular. Alanagh Recreant of Uthango explained:

We believe that Africans offer a unique perspective on global issues and all stops should be pulled out to increase their authentic presence in virtual worlds.

The BLOG CARNIVAL topic is: “Infrastructure as an Enterprise Enabler in Africa.” The carnival is managed by the acclaimed blogger Benin Mwangi (currently with African Path and respected writer for Global Voices Online, Africa Ready For Business).

It is really simple to participate by using the little form provided here:
http://blogcarnival.com/bc/submit_1680.html

Do you have any article or would like to say anything about INFRASTRUCTURE development in Africa? (This could include IT infrastructure or property or any other kind…)

Choose a blog article to share, and note its Permalink URL.
Fill in the other fields (hint: copy and paste!), and hit Submit .

Uthango’s Virtual Bike-a-thon

Uthango Social Investments is blazing the trail for African participation in immersive virtual worlds like Second Life while continuing to work at all levels of community development, on-line and off-line. Part of the registered not-for-profit company’s work include asset-based community development to identify gaps and find resources for adequate infrastructure, such as small business ‘incubators’ and shared community ICT facilities.

Another related ongoing project from Uthango in Second life is the [e]bizikile fundraising drive for a specific Opportunity Center in a Cape Town community for unemployed job seekers. Uthango’s Directors speak about transference from SL to RL and vice versa. They point out the [e]bizikile project could be an example of their attempts to do just that! Real life bicycles are also for sale as part of the project and will be donated to an African family in rural Africa.

“In many parts of Africa, bicycles (and mobile phones) are the appropriate technology to drive the local economy,” says Enakai Ultsch of Uthango.

Second Life residents can purchase virtual African bicycles designed by Shukran Fahid of !BooPeRFunK! for L$250 and next year, participate in a grid-wide virtual bike-a-thon (for more Ambling in Second Life). I picked up my bike at the November 15th launch party.

Last Saturday I went to the Book Party (and after hours party) celebrating the launch of, “Second Life Herald, the Virtual Tabloid that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse” by Peter Ludlow (Urizenus Sklar in SL) and Mark Wallace (Walker Spaight in SL).

The book, a history of the Second Life Herald which began in 2004 as The Alphaville Herald in The Sims Online, comes out at a very interesting moment.

The sun is rising higher on the metaverse(s) and there is much speculation about a bright day to come in some quarters (e.g. Ugotrade), more skepticism and a wait and see approach from others (e.g., Gartner), and fears of a “high noon” kind of show down between a “bottom up” user generated creation culture versus “top down” corporate control (e.g. Second Thoughts). For a thoughtful look at “Do virtual worlds liberate us?” see Ren Reynold’s post on Terranova.

Ludlow’s and Wallace’s book not only looks at a crucial time for the metaverse, its birth, it is also a study of some of the most important questions about the metaverse’s expansion. One question that motivates my own writing is quoted by Ludlow and Wallace in their intro. Legal scholar Lawrence Lessig in his 1999 book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace:

the very architecture of cyberspace is up for grabs: “Depending on who grabs it, there are several different ways it could turn out.”

Ludlow/Wallace’s approach to this challenge is very different from my own. I focus on the blurring of virtual and real worlds and how this access and control to data and meta data that will certainly empower business and government can also be available to benefit people and the planet. Also I try to keep people who do not yet have access to cyberspace in the conversation where possible. Ludlow and Wallace, on the other hand, focus on stories from some of the first people who began living much of their lives in the metaverse and “the conflicts between the owners of virtual worlds and their users, and between groups of users, and between individuals.”

I found myself aware of The Herald’s “mission” very soon after I began blogging about Second Life. Prokofky Neva, with a typically irreverent Herald turn of phrase, dubbed me “the chirpy whitewasher from Ugotrade” (here ) for taking too lenient an attitude, apparently, to a notorious griefer. And, in the body of the post, I was lumped fairly and squarely in the camp of the chief Herald antagonist, Philip Linden, (aka Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab) who got a wicked Herald tongue lashing for what was described as his “granola crunching fatty huffing way” of dealing with the same griefer.

For those of you who were in Second Life during the time this book covers hopefully it will bring up narratives and memories that you might have otherwise forgotten. For late sleepers who missed out on the “dawn,” Ludlow and Wallace provide an opportunity to catch up (also see LA Times Review).

For me the book provides an opportunity to look deeper into the question of what the metaverse has to teach the paraverse and visa versa by providing an intimate “Herald style” history of a metaverse, Second Life, that has truly succeeded in creating communities around user generated content.

Zha Ewry, a key metaverse architect and thinker I met in the Architectural Working Group in Second Life, said something that I have really taken to heart recently. Though Zha herself said it with a *chuckle*:

I sometimes, when I am feeling.. difficult.. assert that I don’t really trust the judgment of anyone who has never

1) Lived in Second Life or Everquest Online, or The Sims Online long enough that they can get 20 or 30 residents who count them as someone they know by name and behavior

2) Cracked at least half way up the level structure in World of Warcraft, Everquest, or similar

3) Managed some sort of small social community (wiki, bbs, moderated maling list..etc)

The Ludlow and Wallace team have done all of these three things and done them deep. So when Ludlow and Wallace talk I prick up my ears. On the left Urizenus Sklar and on the right Walker Spaight at his wedding to Destroy TV.

The Metaverse and The Paraverse

Exactly how and when the metaverse(s) and paraverse(s) like Google Earth and NASA’s World Wind actually evolve (and likely merge) to become a phenomena that millions or rather billions of people participate in is unpredictable at this juncture. But the consensus is that is will happen soon.

My own optimism for the future of the metaverse is based on an underlying proposition that the blurring of the lines between “virtual” and “real” worlds can be an exciting and liberating juncture for humanity and the planet (see many previous posts). I asked Peter Ludlow the same question I asked Cory Doctorow in London (see previous post):

1) What happens when Virtual Worlds become flooded with data from “real life” objects, geo- positioning, etc., and extreme life–logging enters virtual worlds? Or as Cory D. rephrased it: “What happens when cyber space everts?”

Peter Ludlow:

well, the blowback of info from RL might be useful for some applications of virtual worlds, but I always found virtual worlds to be fun and interesting precisely because the bandwidth of communication with the real world was *narrow*. I don’t want that crap coming into my virtual space — it kills the atmosphere and sense of presence.

I don’t doubt that massive info blowback will have a role in virtual worlds, but that is the point where they aren’t really virtual worlds anymore but just boring communication devices — information rich telephones.

So if the blurring of the virtual and the real is inevitable (which in my view it is) and I agree with Ludlow that mere blowback of data into virtual worlds is potentially a boring phenomenon: “What can the metaverse teach the paraverse?” And, “How do virtual worlds avoid becoming just another boring communication device?”

“What is most likely to become boring when the lines between virtual and real worlds blur is the physical world.”

As David Orban pointed out as we chatted in skype:

My view actually of the blurring is not that the online worlds will be invaded by the physical worlds’ data but absolutely the other way around. The richness and variety of the online worlds will explode into the physical via interfaces and mashups and we will look back and see the physical world as boring and static.

“Huh, a tree that doesn’t even tell its own species?” without the augmentation, or “How could you meet people who didn’t send ahead their v-agents?”

“If you can drape real information across the physical world there is no reason why you can’t drape imaginary information over the real world.”

Mike Liebhold from the Institute for the Future said this in his presentation at the Stanford University’s Metaverse Meetup (much more on his presentation later in this post).

This room may be a conference room in Wallenberg Hall. But with a click of a mouse or a flip of a switch, I could convert this room into a meeting room on Starship Enterprise. Or right outside the walls in the quad in Stanford you could have a Medieval Tournament going on. You can drape total fantasy, total fiction, total imaginary reality on the physical world.

He showed an example of some dramatic new thinking in the world of video games - a mock up of a game idea from a Nokia sponsored research program in Finland. And Liebhold noted, this is only a hint of the kind of ideas people are working on.

How Not To Be Just Another Boring Communication Device.

And even if cyber space everts it will not become just another boring communication device if the read-write culture that has defined the metaverse (exemplified by Second Life) continues to flourish.

Again I refer to the brilliant Larry Lessig who in his TED talk points out that read only culture was ushered in with the telephone. Lessig demonstrates how the digital age has created new opportunities for read write culture again, even though many of our laws are at odds with this.

In my view, whether virtual worlds remain the heart of a reemergence of read write culture or turn into “boring communication devices” is not so much about “massive info blow back” itself, but more about how the culture that has arisen around social networking and user generated content, again the great exemplar of this is Second Life, is worked out in the confluence of metaverse, paraverse, and meat space.

My interview with Peter Ludlow was conducted by email because the book party was too much fun. I could not ask one of the hosts and a man in demand to retire into a quiet corner. The book party was also a metaverse meetup and packed with Second Life movers and shakers including, Nathan Freitas of Cruxy, Joshua Fouts, Rita J. King of Dancing Ink Productions (Eureka Dejavu in SL - see her blog for more on meetup), Marvel Ousley (see he post on SLNN), Andrea Foster of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Eric Reuters, Jessica Segal (aka Pica Paperdoll, Electric Sheep Company, Andy Fundiger, Marshall Sponder (see his post), Morton Swimmer, California Condor, Donald Schwartz Image Link Productions, Dean Pence, and many many more. I posted some pictures to Flickr.

Notably the party was held in 3rd Ward the artists/entrepreneurs city in a warehouse that is home to WelloHorld - the start up that is the brainchild of co-author Mark Wallace, with Christian Westbrook and Jerry Paffendorf. They are on stealth mode so Mark declined an interview until their launch. But I did snap this chart pinned to their office door that might give some clues to their direction.

The after hours party that Peter hosted back in the Marriot by the Brooklyn bridge was also too entertaining to interrupt. It included both a screening of Peter’s screenshots taken through “dawn of the metaverse” and a very rock ‘n roll drama with the hotel security who were bent on ending the party early. In the picture below Ron Blechner (aka Hiro Pendragon) talks with Peter Ludlow about Peter’s early experiences in Second Life. Mark Wallace is on the left and Boris Kizelshteyn of Combined Story (aka Adonis Bussy in SL) is seated on the couch.

Interview with Peter Ludlow.

I collaborated on questions for Peter with my friends Gwyneth Llewelyn, David Orban and Hiro Pendragon. I will indicate which are their questions.

1) Who/what will be the future competition to the SL - based metaverse?

As you probably know, there are lots of alternatives to second life under development, but I continue to believe that ultimately Trevor Smith of Ogoglio has it right: the metaverse is not going to take off until we have widely available web 3.D development tools in the hands of tens of thousands of website designers. When that happens we will each be building our own little corners of the metaverse and supporting them on our desktop computers. Communications protocols will govern how we move between these worlds and what we can take with us.

2) Your current work is in RL on Philosophy of Language? The new book you are working on - is it a collaboration with the Prof. from NYU I met briefly at the party?

There were a couple of profs from NYU at the party. I’m not collaborating with them, however David Velleman has interesting things to say about narrative and avatars and agency, so I recommend that your readers check out his web site.

Right now I’m working on a book on the philosophy of generative linguistics, which has to do with conceptual puzzles that arise in computational/representational linguistic theories like Chomsky’s. Basically I’m obsessed with that at the moment.

3) What is the future of the SL Herald as an SL institution and what will be your role in it? Will the Herald go the way of SL Insider and start to cover 20 other MMOGs like Massively. That is will it become the Metaverse Herald? (This question was suggested by Gwyn)

In the past the Herald has covered other MMOs, but in the way that a hometown paper covers other towns. Typically we would only cover events in other MMOs if they involved a political protest or some dispute with the game company.

The Herald will stay in Second Life at least until our readers and the people we report on move elsewhere. That is, we aren’t really reporting on Second Life so much as a community that currently resides there. We followed them from TSO, and if they go nomadic on us again we will follow them.

4) What is the relationship between Peter/Uri -similarities/differences? Do you have alts and avatars in other verses? (Hiro’s question)

We all have many different avatars that we use in everyday life. We dress and act differently depending on whether we are conducting business, socializing or whatever. If you think of these ways of acting and dressing as modes of presentation, then you see that it is the same as using an avatar to present yourself or mediate your social interactions with others. Like you I have lots of different alts and avatars even in the real world. You’re talking to one of them now!

5) The digital doesn’t fossilize in one out of a billion specimens, but allows perfect preservation of time-sequences, in the changing metaverse. This means that unavoidably in time it is going to become richer than the physical world itself. How are we going to equip ourselves in coping with this? (Question from David Orban)

it can’t become richer than the actual world because information has to be encoded in physical states of the world. That having been said, I’ve never been impressed by the preservatory aspects of the digital so much as the fleeting and fragile aspects of it. This has been made salient to me by my years in Second Life. I’ve seen so many interesting builds and groups come and vanish. Part of the project of our book was to preserve some of this history. But rereading the book yesterday I was reminded of a lot of events that didn’t make it into the book and may be lost forever.

More generally though, digital media does not give us perfect preservation. You can’t fight the second law of thermodynamics. High entropy will trump low entropy, and there will be lots of bit rot between now and the heat death of the universe.

6) Are we living in a simulation? (David Orban)

There’s a philosopher at Oxford who says that there is something like a 75% chance that we are. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say “I don’t think so.” Actually, I know we aren’t, but if you want that story you have to take my course on skepticism.

7) What is the future of identity and IP in the open metaverse? The call for identity authentication grows louder by the day.

Identity shouldn’t be a problem. It should be possible to establish identity even for avatars using a version of public key encryption for digital signatures. IP is another matter. Technologically, preserving IP is getting close to impossible, but on the other hand if the US Congress keeps passing draconian laws that “give” IP rights for patents like crustless peanut butter sandwiches well then maybe it can be preserved by old fashioned meat space head cracking. Zero tolerance for crustless peanut butter sandwiches. Sell one and you go to prison. The only question is how much of that kind of crap people will put up with. When they finally figure out it is a scam (of if they do) then that will be the end of IP.

Is the blurring of the lines “between us and them” - human and machine the “high noon” of the metaverse? Or as Ben Goetzel writes here in his post on Global Brain Memes. ” I think this ties in with Ray Kurzweil’s point that by the time we have human-level AGI, it may not be “us versus them”, it may be a case where it’s impossible to draw the line between us and them…” (Also see David Orban’s Conversation with Ray Kurzweil on YouTube).

I don’t buy this for a nanosecond. First of all, is there even such a thing as “general intelligence”? I’d be surprised. “intelligence” is just a covering term for a basket of cognitive abilities that we prize. If you are impressive at enough of those abilities we say you have intelligence. It’s like athleticism. There is no single property of athleticism, there are rather lots of different physical abilities that we prize. If someone has enough of them we call that athletic. When we say something is “intelligent” we are just saying that we are impressed by it. I remember when playing tic tac toe counted as “intelligent” in AI. It doesn’t anymore because the problem is too easy. We aren’t impressed by it anymore.

Now, on the question of whether we are becoming indistinguishable from machines (and I can’t help but think of Blade Runner here) I am also dubious. First of all, I seriously doubt that we will ever see a machine that can pass the turing test for any significant amount of time and broad range of contexts. But that just goes to the question of whether we could be fooled in conversation. The real question is whether machines are actually like us, and here the real problem is that we have no idea what *we* are like. We have just a glimmer of a picture of the nature of our cognitive architecture and zero idea how that architecture supervenes on our wetware. Well, if we don’t know what we are like, then it is difficult to know how to build something like us. It is not an engineering problem. It is a basic science problem. If we knew *what* to build I don’t doubt we could build it. But what to build?

The State of Play

If you are unfamiliar with the state of play between paraverse(s) and metaverse(s) Susan Kish has an excellent roadmap. My friend VJ also has a nice collection of paraverse links tagged in Delicious. In her report, “Virtual Worlds: Second Life and The Enterprise,” Kish notes, “The combination – whether a Google Life or a Second Earth or another similar entity - could be the ultimate enterprise in Virtual Worlds.”

The question is also: Will this confluence be as important and beneficial to non-profit centered enterprises. For example, the notion of Amazon.org is a social software entity that Bruce Sterling evokes in Shaping Things.

And, of course, very importantly, the question that Peter Ludlow raises - will the confluence NOT be boring.

3D Data For Real Virtual Worlds

I was fortunate to attend the very inspiring presentation of Mike Liebhold from the Institute for the Future titled, “3D data for real world virtual worlds” at the Stanford University’s Metaverse Meetup organized by Henrik Bennetsen. The meetup was streamed into the International Spaceflight Museum in Second Life last week. It was an amazing lens into the state of play in the paraverse. Henrik published the talk abstract before the event:

Abstract 3D data, maps, and software will change the way we compute and interact with spatial services. Moving beyond simple texture mapped terrain and boxes, new 3D mapping frameworks are rapidly evolving into platforms for real world virtual world media, interaction, commerce, and science. In this talk I’ll review work of various groups who are building different components of a 3D Geoweb. I will first describe how their 3D data and software will work as a platform for a 3D real world virtual world, and then, what kinds of new applications and user experiences might be developed on these platforms, and then finish with a brief discussion of prospects and mechanisms for data interoperability allowing users to create, discover, use, and exchange 3D data across platforms.

And Leibhold truly covered everything outlined above! The fascinating talk will hopefully be posted to the web soon here. But there is a very entertaining and thought provoking post up on Wrxli FlimFlam’s Second Life blogSecond Front already. I chatted a little with Wrxli who is a performance artist with Avatar Orchestra Metaverse during the meetup and look forward to more conversations.

Highlights of the talk - Leibhold’s responses to some of the questions.

Once again I asked the question that came from call to action that Cory Doctorow made in my previous post:

1) How can the kinds of data visualization and aggregate statistical information about the world that are frequently only available to big companies and used by them in order to realize profit and control also be put into the hands of individuals?

Leibhold’s response was concrete and detailed but due to the sound cutting out in parts I will have to refer to the recording myself when it is posted here later this week for all the details. But Leibhold mentioned several examples including police crime maps that were increasingly available, and the sensor web project at Microsoft where they have networks of all kinds of environmental sensors out there available freely in GRSS format on Microsoft Virtual Earth. Leibhold pointed out the sensor web architecture at Microsoft is built on common standards will work on a variety of sensors. He continued:

We are also seeing a lot of sensor data collected by life scientists and physical scientists available. A lot of biological information and weather information is going to come on line. There are citizen sensing projects Eric Paulos at Intel Labs, Berkley who has being doing all kinds of things using mobile phones as sensors. There is a group at UCLA called CENS (Center for Embedded Network Sensing) that has a whole project to allow citizen sensing. And Nokia has a project called Sense Web, I think. And they have sponsored research programs at about ten universities world wide to come up with interoperable standards and mechanisms for ordinary people to create and share 3D sensor information and to visualize it as well.

Another very interesting point he made re a larger vision of interoperability was that:

while there was division between the worlds of geospatial standards, the worlds of scene rendering and Hollywood, the video game worlds, CAD, Google will prosper. And Google is creating defacto standards around KML and Collada that we are all going to have to live with.

But when I raised the notion that Second Life’s expansive vision for a new open grid architecture might mean noting that, in my view, “Second Life is also the furthest along re open sourcing of the 3D immersive worlds” (someone from Sun disputed this assertion pointing out Project Wonderland has been open sourced top to bottom since March, and I realized I should have limited my assertion to previously closed immersive virtual worlds). But Leibhold’s response was interesting:

I would dispute the fact that Second Life is furthest along. I think that quite frankly I believe that any day now Google is going to announce avatars and avatar based social networks for Google Earth and the rumors are rampant that they have already tested it. And if that is the case they are farther along. There are structural problems with the computer server architecture in Second Life that restrict the kinds of applications you can run. I think that Second Life is one of the greatest social experiments but technically I think they are going to be eclipsed.

I had IMed Ginsu Linden at the start of the meetup to offer him a TP (teleport) if he wanted to attend. But unfortunately he was busy. But, of course, immediately I shot off an IM to him reporting this prediction of Second Life’s eclipse by Google’s imminent launch of avatar based social networks for Google Earth! Ginsu sent me back this reply:

[8:32] Ginsu Linden: Thanks Tara5. I am actually really looking forward to Google’s entry into the market. Will give people something to chew over.

Yes, it will! And IMed my friend Zha Ewry too reporting this prediction of Google supremacy. In response she pointed out how much depended:

19:25] Zha Ewry: on how Google approaches things,and how much freedom they give their residents, if they are even at all residents, not merely transitory avatars. It will interesting to see how they do at running it.

And of course there is the Linden Lab initiative to restructure the Second Life grid to be watched and participate in through the collaborative effort of The Architectural Working Group.

To return to the theme of this post:

The very architecture of cyber space is up for grabs, and: “Depending on who grabs it, there are several different ways it could turn out” (Lessig).

Don’t Miss the Next Stanford Meetup!

The event is taking place on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 from 6:00pm – 7:30pm SLT/PST and to attend via Second Life you go here:

http://slurl.com/secondlif e/Spaceport%20Bravo/66/74/184/

Physically it is at:

Wallenberg Hall, Stanford University

Jamais Cascio writes about the intersection of emerging technologies and cultural transformation, focusing on the importance of long-term, systemic thinking. His work regularly appears both in print and online, and he has spoken around the world on issues such as the global environment, technological transformation, and political change. In 2003, Cascio co-founded WorldChanging.com, the Utne Independent Press Award-winning website identifying models, tools, and ideas for building a “bright green” future. In March, 2006, he started OpenTheFuture.com as his online home. Cascio presently serves as a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future, as the Director of Impacts Analysis for The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, and as a founding fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

Talk abstract: The Metaverse — what does it include, where is it going, and how will it change our lives? Based on my work for the Metaverse Roadmap Overview, I’ll look both at the underlying technologies of the Metaverse and at the social, cultural and economic impacts it could have.

3rd Ward, architectural working group on Second Life, artificial general intelligence, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, Brooklyn Metaverse meetup. Stanford metaverse meetup, citizen sensing, embedded sensor networks, geospatial standards, Ginsu Yoon, Google Earth, Lawrence Lessig, Linden Lab, Mark Wallace, metaverse, Microsoft Virtual Earth, nanotechnology, NASA World Wind, Ogoglio, paraverse, Peter Ludlow, positive global development, Project Wonderland, Second Life, Second Life Herald, Sensor Networks, singularity, social networking, The Dawn of The Metaverse, the metaverse roadmap, the open future, Urizenus Sklar, Virtual Reality, Virtual Worlds, Walker Spaight, Wello Horld, Zero Linden Zha Ewry

“Surveillance is all about when people in authority know a lot about you. Instrumentation is when you know a lot about the world,” Cory Doctorow, Craphound.com, boingboing.net

When we spoke at the Virtual Worlds Forum in London last week, Cory Doctorow outlined a vision of how ways individuals tap into data and metadata to create instrumentation in “virtual” worlds might be thrown out into the “real” world to give people more agency there.

Cory D. turned my initial question inside out and gave a brilliant glimpse of something a little like Bruce Sterling’s idea for an Amazon.org. Amazon.org is a social software entity that can answer questions. Questions about our world. Questions about objects. “What questions? Not the profit-centric questions that obsess Amazon. The serious questions.” (Shaping Things)

“The Inverse of the Surveillance Society”

Me: What happens when Virtual Worlds become flooded with data from “real life” objects, geo- positioning, etc., and extreme life–logging enters virtual worlds?

Cory: Well this is like Spook Country the new Gibson novel – What happens when cyber space everts – hmmm? I’m not sure I have anything very pithy to say on that EXCEPT………

Apart from all the traditional kind of overlay reality stuff, if there is one thing I am actually interested seeing from a virtual world migrating to the real world its instrumentation.

I think lot of things that are characteristic of very successful internet based business is that they are extremely finally instrumented so like Amazon knows in aggregate on a second by second basis how their site is being used by people and they can twiddle the dials in real time.

As users of the world we have very little access to that kind of instrumentation. We don’t even know how the tube is running. The tube knows how the tube is running and we kinda of don’t. I would be really interested in seeing that. You’ve seen Joi Ito’s WoW interface right. Have you seen it …

Me: Ummm no! [But I have now. Joi Ito sent me a Flickr link to his photo. Thanks!]

Cory: When they are doing a raid at a certain point the number of instrument panels on his screen actually eclipses all of the vision of the raid you no longer actually see the raid. You are experiencing WoW through a purely numerical and data visualization system.

There are different abstraction layers at which you can experience the world and one of them is through the instrumentation of it. It is in some ways the inverse of the surveillance society.

Surveillance is all about when people in authority know a lot about you. Instrumentation is when you know a lot about the world. And it allows you have more agency. When people know a lot about you it takes away your agency.

Me: So is that on the lines of personalized virtual operation centers – like MySpace’s with instrumentation….?

I don’t have this fleshed out into a nice solid like a non abstract thing. But the thing that I have been noodling with is what if all the kinds of data visualization and aggregate statistical information about the world that big companies use in order to realize their enormous profit and control over us as individuals was in our hands.

This is a little like Bruce Sterling’s idea of an Amazon.org [see page 111 Shaping of Things] where all the data from the positional and temporal characteristics of all the objects that we own were in aggregate visible and available so that we can mix and match them remix them understand them and have more agency in the world.

I think that empiricism, measurement, understanding more about the world is the thing that the Enlightenment is grounded in. Like being able to write down how the world works using objective measurements being able to compare them with other people in terms of peer review and experimentation that is the core of what makes us contemporary human beings – post enlightenment, non alchemic, non superstitious, empiricism grounded people.

Being able to understand what is going on the world – How much RFI is there right now where I am standing? What frequencies is it running on? What are the aggregate histograms? Tell me about it. Are people looking at the web around here, or talking on their phones, or sending SMS? Am I in a spot where the thermal signature of lots of people is high or low? What was it like ten minutes ago? Is this typical or atypical of the characteristic histogram of thermal and electromagnetic energy in this space for this time, year on year, day on day, and hour on hour?

Just knowing that and knowing it on some liminal way where your clothes feel different based on whether the room is typical or atypical. That is a really interesting thing to know.

Games do this all the time. You know a lot about the way the game is performing by things like audio cues, like coloring cues, Also by cues that have to do with network jitter. You hop onto a shard with like a zillion people on it that shard performs differently. You don’t know when you walk into a room necessarily what the activity level in that room is, especially if it is a room subdivided by a lot of physical baffles and things that hide what is going on from you. But you know when you walk onto shard whether it is an active or inactive shard.

So can we grab all that stuff that lets us know a lot about the virtual world and exert agency over and influence over it and throw it into the “real” world.

That what be very cool.

A Global Virtual Worlds Open Source Community

Open Standards are frequently cited as a key part of what will make virtual worlds “fit for business.” But for a reverse surveillance society where virtual operations centers could be universal information resources for all of us open sourcing and open standards are also the key to tapping into the myriad data streams currently only available to business and government.

At the Virtual Worlds Forum in London the virtual worlds open source community was not on one panel together. But they were a small but noticeable cohort that caught my attention.

Of particular note was the presence of Adam Frisby of OpenSim, Adam Johnson of 3Di and Bjorn Lee of HiPiHi. HiPiHi and 3Di are both funded by the ngi group, Inc. And 3Di are developing a virtual worlds platform Jin-sei based on OpenSim. 3Di is now in a partnership with Mixi (the largest social networking site in Japan with over ten million users) developing virtual worlds on the Jin-sei platform. OpenSim is the BSD Licensed Open Source Initiative that has evolved from Second Life.

Some 3Di employees using Jin-sei

“3Di, Inc. believes its innovations will be the key to developing the new 3D Internet.”

The picture above shows the location of the 3Di offices in Tokyo - a location that may turn out to be significant.

3Di, Inc., a Tokyo based subsidiary of the Japanese holding company ngi group, Inc., aims to revolutionize the way virtual worlds and the web work together. 3Di, Inc., as an international company based in Japan, is uniquely positioned in the underdeveloped Japanese and Chinese markets to deliver language and culture sensitive solutions, while still maintaining a global perspective. 3Di, Inc. believes its innovations will be the key to developing the new 3D Internet.

Drivers of the 3D Internet:

Every time I saw Ian Hughes of IBM (far left) and Adam Frisby of OpenSim (next to Ian), Adam Johnson of 3Di, and Bjorn Lee of HiPiHi talking together. I couldn’t help thinking wow: “I am witnessing the team that will pioneer the 3D internet.”

So I decided to interview these four to who seemed to me to be already well on the way to being a global virtual worlds interoperability team.

While there were many interesting stories to tell at the Virtual Worlds Forum, I focused my attention on players who seemed to be weaving the following five virtual world threads together.

1) social networks 2) user generation 3) open source/standards 4) 3D immersive 5) social gaming

I also spoke to Ginsu Yoon, from Linden Lab. Linden Lab has been making interoperability and the movement to create open standards for virtual worlds a priority. But as Ginsu Yoon spoke from the podium on Linden Lab’s expansive vision for a 3D internet and podcasts will be available on the VWF site, I did not do an individual interview with him. But we spoke a couple of times. And I ran by Ginsu the direction of my thinking.

The essence of these chats was that the interoperability of virtual worlds would not come from top down from a “standards committee.” Rather standards of interoperability would be worked out from the bottom up by people coming together to actually work on the architecture, e.g. in groups like the Architecture Working Group that is attended by OpenSim, IBM, and many others.

In the picture above David Orban shows a delighted Ginsu Yoon his new Second Life viewer an: “Immersive stereoscopic projection of a life size screen covering 180 degrees of vision, connected to the live grid, tracking the avatar with ultrawideband emitters, created by the University of Milan and Eximia, in Italy.” David has posted a video gives a full explanation of “Real 2nd Life” on his blog, so check it out!

Interview With Adam Johnson: Movable Life & 3Di

The picture above shows Steve Prentice of Gartner Research (famous for his quote earlier this year that “80% of active internet users will have a “second life” in the virtual world by the end of 2011″) talking with Adam Johnson of 3Di and Bjorn Lee of HiPiHi.

Me: Could you introduce yourself please Adam?

Adam: I’m Adam Johnson. I’m working for a 3Di a company based out of Japan. We have our own virtual world platform and web services between virtual worlds connecting them. The Capital company is called ngi Group. It’s the number one incubator company out of Japan. We started about four months ago and now we have a virtual worlds platform, Jin- Sei, which is based off the open source software OpenSim. We’re marketing that towards B-to-B right now. On the services side we have Movable Life, which is a web-based Ajax client for logging into Second Life through a browser or iPhone. We’re working on other mobile interfaces as well.

Me: Why did you think Movable Life and this OpenSim application got launched in Japan as opposed to here?

Adam: That’s a good question, I’m not really sure. I think because in Japan a lot companies are really starting to look at virtual worlds. Because in Japan everyone has the same notion that virtual worlds are just going to explode and probably in the near future be more popular than in other countries. Japan will be like a hub for Virtual Worlds, I guess.

Me: And how did you get involved because you’re obviously American.

Adam: I was working at ngi Group before actually. So I had been living in Japan for 2 years.

Me: ngi is the investment company?

Adam: Right. We’re fully owned by ngi Group - the incubator company.

Me: So you were working for the venture capitalist company?

Adam: I was working for another startup and then I just transferred when they started this company.

Me: So what’s your job title?

Adam: I’m Project Leader for Movable Life.

Me: Why did you choose OpenSim?

Adam: we were just looking for ideas on what open source tools there are already to get our own virtual world platform off the ground. The best one out there at that time was OpenSim so we decided to go full on with Open Sim and LibSL and get involved. So Movable Life is based on LibSL as well so we’re very involved with open source community.

Me: Is Movable Life open source?

Adam: Movable Life code is proprietary at the moment, but we’re looking at open sourcing that in the future.

Me: So what physics engine are you using for OpenSim?

Adam: For our platform Jin-sei, we’re currently using the open source ODE at the moment. But we’re looking at maybe going to Havoc in the future.

Me: I know in the Open Sim that we’re using only about half the scripting is implemented. Is that still the same with you?

Adam: Yes, but the core of the scripting engine is based on C-Sharp, it has a C-Sharp engine. For user scripting it’s about half implemented. But server side we can do C-Sharp full on.

Me: What can Movable Life run on?

Adam: It runs on the iPhone. So it’ll run on Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Opera, anything.

Me: How how far have you got in terms of making OpenSim a grid or making it interoperable with Second Life?

Adam: We’re doing a lot of performance testing now. And for Jin-sei we just have a partnership with Mixi where they’re going to be running private virtual worlds using our platform. They have more than ten million users. Mixi is Japan’s number one social networking site. My Space tried to go in there and they totally failed.

Me: That’s interesting!

Adam: The Mixi deal will at first be a limited private test for a certain group of Mixi users, just to get good data on how everything is performing. We have a lot of large companies that are really interested in using Jin-sei for several different things, private and public.

Adam: Right now I’m focusing on creating a virtual hub for all of the virtual worlds. This is my project. We have two different sides, we have our platform and then we have our Movable Life Hub.

Adam: Movable Life comes from LibSecondLife and right now that’ll connect you to Second Life, and soon to an OpenSim grid and Jin-sei.

Adam: The goal is in a few months we’ll have a new version coming out which will kind of merge all of them together. So you log into Movable Life and you’ll have a central portal to each virtual world. Movable Life is not a virtual world. It’ll be like a web service to combine them all. It’ll combine anything using OpenSim or Second Life, probably HiPiHi later on. We’re working with some Japanese companies as well for their virtual worlds. We want to connect all of them if possible.

Cory Doctorow and Bjorn Lee of HiPiHi

I recorded part of the conversation between Cory Doctorow, Bjorn Lee from HiPiHi and Adam Johnson of 3Di (with their permission of course!) about social networking in immersive virtual worlds versus social networking in less immersive spaces.

Raph Koster of Metaplace was not able to fly out of Southern California because of the wild fires so I couldn’t follow up on what had been an interesting debate on 2D versus 3D social networked spaces at the San Jose Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo. If Raph had been there I would have loved to ask him some questions about interoperability and Metaplace also. Ian Hughes of IBM talked with me about how Metaplace’s use of RESTful APIs will create many interesting possibilities. And I had a long conversation with Bruce Joy CEO of the newly launched Vast Park which potentially will be interoperable with Metaplace.

Cory D. on the place of social networking sites in an increasingly immersive 3D future?

In response to questions from Bjorn (HiPiHi) and Adam (3Di), Cory Doctorow argued persuasively why from a social networking point of view less immersive 2D spaces might hold their place alongside immersive virtual worlds. I turned on my iPod recorder mid-stream in the dialogue.

Cory: ………[re how to drop] a whole bunch of people you don’t like very much who’ve recruited you into their social circle. The best way to do it is to say oh you know I am just tired of Facebook. Not like you people all bother me. Its like I just not using Facebook anymore. You just stop logging in. That’s the reason not like deleting you account in a huff. Just kind of slowly disengage from Facebook. They can see you haven’t updated your Facebook in 6 months. You are just kinda not there anymore. Then you just delete your account and no-one cares anymore. That’s like a socially neutral way of disengaging from a group of people who you had to friend and who friended you.

The cost of blowing off your social network is pretty low because the value of your social assets which is the articulated social network of people you like is offset by the negative value of the articulated network that is wrong where you have named all these people as your friend.

In a virtual world the problem is confounded by the acquiring of assets that actually have real world monetary value whether that be a currency or objects that can be bartered for a currency. So blowing off you WoW account actually costs something. It has a monetary expense as well. Its not that people don’t do it. But they often do it on mass as the game gets less fun for some reason.

Like when SWG re-factored and it got less fun and everyone left. One of the things that contributed to that was WoW lit up and a whole bunch of SWG players said I’ll go and play WoW for a week and SWG was just kind of empty so the value of those assets blew up. So it cost less to leave SWG after SWG crashed and so people were willing to leave.

But if you have to wait until the game crashes before you can blow it off that means you have this complicated relationship where you have to remain friends with people you don’t like or abandon your virtual goals. That is a terrible conundrum to be in. I think there will be elements of this. But I don’t think that is going to take it all over.

Bjorn: My question was more about the fact that in a virtual world’s social networking site the main difference is a sense of place. Your have friends and you want to hang out in the Mall, for example, you can’t do that in a [2.D] social networking site. But a virtual world is like going to a Mall you can go there see who is there, hang out with people, you can use hand gestures, and communicate through text and sound…

So now that now technology has advanced to a stage whereby text based social networks on which you can just send pictures and videos are pretty primitive. Do you think this kind of social networking site will still be prevalent in the future?

Cory: So its a really interesting question. I think that we are typically pretty bad at evaluating the long term costs of our actions. This is one the big privacy problems. We sell our privacy very cheaply and subsequently regret it because it costs us a lot when we’ve sold our privacy. But we don’t find that out until one year or two years later. Or we buy DRM media and we don’t realize how much that cost us until it is time to throw out your iPod and buy a competing device right.

So I think people will be willing to migrate into social networks that are on games because I think it will be on crack. I mean all the monkey pleasure of laying out the pictures of all your friends and all the grinding pleasure of doing all that game stuff and all the cyber sex and all the rest of it. Its going to be like on crack.

But how many times will you going to be willing to do that. Cuz you are going to have to blow it off eventually. And are you eventually going to say to your self, “oh shit this sucks. I am bankrupting myself every eighteen months in order to escape the people I don’t like very much.” And that’s really tricky. I don’t know. I think that might leave a place intact for social networking sites.

Adam 3Di: What if you had different levels of privacy in virtual worlds where you could throw them into this group where they don’t get to see as much information on you.

Cory: Its very hard to prospectively evaluate the cost of adding someone to a friend list. That’s the problem. You have to know a priori to know what level of trust to assign to that friend to. Then you get into this thing, where people are like, “Am I on your A list, your B list, or your C list.” And you become one of these self obsessed terrible, obnoxious … you become one of these people who in 8th grade who had the list of good people, medium people, bad people, sub bad people. That’s not reflective of a natural social dynamic. Now it may in fact push back - its kind of a nightmare scenario - what if it does push back? What if that actually does become the organizing principle by which we establish our social relations in the “real” world. Are you an A person or B person for me? But I just kinda hope we don’t get that.

Interview with Adam Frisby about OpenSim

Adam Frisby discussing architecture? with Ian Hughes of IBM

Me: Please could you introduce yourself Adam.

Adam Frisbee: I’m the executive director of a company called DeepThink Labs. We’re an international company with people in the UK, US and Australia. I started off last year working on the LibSecondLife project which just basically built a protocol description of the Second Life protocol.

We’ve built a programming library from that which allows you to connect in third party applications into the Second Life grid. In early January, just after the Second Life Client source code was released, another developer called Michael Wright developed a piece of software called OpenSim, and I got involved in that pretty much as soon as I saw the announcement of it. And since then I’ve been working as one of the developers of the Open Sim project.

Me: What Physics Engines does OpenSim support?

Adam: Right now we support four. But we’ve got our own one called Basic Physics which is just a very very simple engine, it doesn’t do physics solving really. We’ve got a second one called ODE which is the Open Dynamics Engine that ngi is using right now. That one’s a fairly mature open source physics engine.

We also support Bullet. Bullet is a new type of open source physics engine designed by Erwin Coumans, who was a major developer on the Havok Physics engine, it’s new – but it has a lot of potential.

We also support something called PhysX. PhysX is a commercial physics engine like Havoc. Its about on the same scale. But it supports optional hardware acceleration so you can actually get an accelerator card, put it in your computer, and then you get the ability to use that to accelerate the physics that’s going on in that server.

Me: How do people get involved developing code for OpenSim?

It’s essentially a meritocracy. We look for good developers, who are submitting good patches, to the project and we invite them in to be permanent contributers. Right now the way the OpenSim project works is strictly by consensus. There’s about 9 people right now who’ve got a voice in the consensus. And whenever a decision needs to be made such as whether we add another person into the development team it has to be done exclusively through consensus. It can be a very interesting process when people disagree, but nonetheless that’s how we’re operating.

Me: Where do you meet?

We don’t meet inworld in Second Life anymore, we’ve moved to an opensim …..
The majority of the discussion happens pretty much in two places. The first place is our mailing list, that an email list the developers are welcome to subscribe to and then people send out long emails and get long winded replies back.

The other way we communicate is over IRC which is Internet Relay Chat. We’ve got a channel on EFnet, and a lot of people hang around there. There’s about 60 people there all the time. Then there’s a secondary channel which is #opensim-dev which is all the developers and everybody interested in the development side of things. So it’s sort of broken up into the two groups, users in the one channel, and the developers in the other channel.

If you need help with getting it running then that’s the users channel. We split them up basically because we were trying to discuss technical topics and at the same time there was a collision with the people trying to get basic help.

So in the development channel we are discussing things like future architecture. If there’s a big decision that needs to be made and it’s brought up in the IRC channel then someone will go off and write that up to a mailing list as a post so those who weren’t there at the time, can go off and read what’s happening.

Me: Do you attend the Linden Lab Architecture Working Group?

We made an effort to actually attend those. That’s because Zero’s been discussing allowing the interconnects between the Second Life Grid and potentially third party servers like OpenSim. So of course being there is valuable if we want to make sure we are compatible with what the plan is.

He goes into very technical topics which is fantastic. And he’s willing to go into good depth on them. They are well worth attending if you’ve got any interest at all in things like protocol design. We had a great discussion once on the merits of parallel programming.

We have had a lot of benefits from Linden Labs experience by watching what has worked and what hasn’t. At the same time, what we’re working on is of course fundamentally very similar to what Linden Labs working on. In fact the architecture working group will probably produce something that’s going to be used by both Linden Labs and everyone else who wants to host a virtual worlds grid.

Right now we’ve got an opportunity to re-engineer and add scale to things. Second Life’s biggest flaw is that you can’t have an event with 5000 people in it. The grid just collapses and you can’t get all those people into a reasonable contiguous area. Whereas for OpenSim we can actually write a customized server that will actually support that by degrading certain things like physics. You degrade that down to a very low quality of physics. You turn off scripting, that kind of thing. You can customize a server to do something like that and Open Sim’s got the potential that hey Linden Lab can use it too and take advantage of these things.

Making more lightweight situations, removing central dependencies, that kind of thing.

We’re working with everything from a simple engine like Basic Physics to some of the most complex proprietary engines you can get, e.g., the PhysX one. It’s a very powerful engine.

It’s the opportunity to pick and choose what you want to use. Our key aspect is that everything is modular. You can take out any module and replace it with any other compatible module or even have no module at all. You can do that for scripting, for physics, everything down to instant messaging and chat are all modules, so you can chop them out.

Me: Will there be any problems of interoperability with the Second Life physics engine?

I think it will fine. It’s not such a big deal. We can always write a module to implement the Second Life physics engine. The Havoc caveat. They’re talking about implementing Havoc 4. We’d just implement that as another module. And suddenly we’d suddenly support 5 different engines.

Me: And what about assets and interoperability?

Assets aren’t too bad either, the interoperability issue is protocols. Simply speaking the same language. We’ve got the protocols from the client to the simulator. What we don’t have is from the simulator to the grid. That’s the language we’ve got to learn to be able to connect to the Linden Lab infrastructure.

It’s on the plan. The Architecture Working Group is actually devising a new language. But we don’t have the current language. That’s why you can’t connect to an Open Sim to the existing grid.

Our grid infrastructure is running on our own one. But that’s going to disappear and be replaced as soon as we’ve got something better which is what the Architecture Working Group will produce.

We will use the best new protocol thinking from every idea everywhere.

Interview with Ian Hughes, IBM (a.k.a Epredator Potato)

Picture above shows Epredator getting involved with a CSI: NY in Second Life at csiny orientation west95

Ian Hughes was one of the early pioneers for IBM in Second Life, particularly in the area of “virtual” and “real” integration, including the IBM Wimbledon project in Second Life. I asked Ian to talk about the early days linking First Life and Second Life.

In all the virtual world stuff there’s initially a feeling that it’s somewhere you go, and the emotional attachment is that it’s somewhere else. And even with Second Life, it’s called Second Life, it’s somewhere else.

From day one for me I wanted to know whether I could do the same things in the same way as we do on the web, where we’ve gone with mashups and in terms of SOA (Service Orientated Architecture) is to say I’m over here at the moment but all my stuff’s over there, can I get it there? That works both personally and at a business level.

And just knowing that there’s any channel to go from one place to another is no matter how small as long as it’s bi-directional even if it’s only a few bits flowing you know that that channel’s going to get bigger, it’s going to get faster, and it’s going to get more standardized.

So from day one it was, “great can I control a second life object from outside?” And that was before the http stuff in Second Life. It was just yes of course I can. But you have to actually do it. So I made a light switch. No big deal a light switch. That was just sending a message in. That was just one line of code. and its one line of code any techie would do and many techies has done the same. But I also wanted to know if could demonstrate messaging and flow within the environment in a publish/subscribe way. [Ian did explain how he accomplished this].

This was 18 months ago or it might be 19 months ago, March - April time. [This early work on messaging and message brokering in Second Life Ian explained was very helpful in introducing Second Life to other IBMers. ]. We had this thing which was turning a light on which was now responding to an external message. Roo augmented that so that a message from Roo’s laptop when it gets tilted was being injected into Second Life. Roo built a laptop on a gimble so that when you tilted his laptop in Real Life it would tilt the Second Life one.

Now in any demonstration where you say “here’s this quirky virtual world and isn’t it funny” now let me just pick my laptop up - you’ve caught them out - you’d pick the laptop up and the one on the screen would tilt. Controlling a virtual object like that is no big deal now. But it’s got a whole lot of messaging stuff underneath. And it was our core technology concept from Hursley that was being used.

Behind the scenes at Wimbledon in Second Life

That became sort of an iconic moment for us that we’d achieved that. We’d got all the bits so that we then knew that we could get further with Wimbledon having more data and more stuff and more instrumentation coming from the real world. So that’s when they [Linden Lab] opened up their http request APIs which they did just before Wimbledon luckily. I knew that I was going to be able to start to represent things in the virtual world in a way that we’d never got around to before. And I knew we could get buy-in from customers. And, I could get buy-in from other IBMers because it was Wimbledon.

My own Hursley Island rapidly went from a small plot of land to multiple IBM islands. Some of this [rapid growth] was just telling everyone that we were doing it. We were writing internally on blogs to our fellow early adopter people. I was reaching an audience particularly with Wimbledon.

Jessica Qin, IBM, builder/scripter/evangelist

In sharing that meant other people started to come to us. So thats when we met people like Jessica Qin. She had been in Second Life for years, living there and having an existence there but not in a work context originally. We kind of found them [IBMers around the world]. We realized we’re trying this stuff at the same time and that was good so we immediately had gone across the pond and further.

An Early Meeting At Hursley

Then again lots of people suddenly started to turn up and the core people, a lot of the people who are here at VWFE, are the ones who were there at the start. And that formed this little community and it started off with 2 people and then 10 people and by November 2006 it turned into 3,000 people. It was a bottom up process. Now it is over 5000.

Virtual Control Centers as a Mass Phenomena?

At the Virtual Worlds Forum in London last week putting the kinds of data visualization and aggregate statistical information about the world that big companies use in our hands didn’t seem too far off when you listened in on some of the “off stage” discussions

I blogged in my previous post that Eolus One is developing what I thought might be the first major business application using OpenSim. Eolus I wrote is developing secure virtual control centers for facilities management with sites on OpenSim. And, next on the table for development are plug and play modules based on the Eolus VWCI that will bring the kind of facility management now only possible in large scale facilities into every home.

In the picture below Oliver Goh (on right) is showing the Eolus Virtual World Communication Interface to Sara de Freitas the Serious Games Institute (center and holding the Eolus VCWI), Adam Johnson of 3Di (on the left) and Bjorn Lee of HiPiHi (standing under the chandalier).

Old Media & Big Business Enter “The People Age.”

At the Virtual Worlds Forum, “old” industry/media was often indistinguishable from the new user generated, socially networked/gaming, 3D immersive, open standards, interoperable generation as we stood and chatted under the lights of the gilded chandeliers in the bar, or sat in alcoves on comfy couches streaked by color from disco lights.

In the picture below from left to right Dolf Wittkamper, Senior Director, Philips Design, Chris Carella Chief Creative Officer, Electric Sheep Company, Oliver Goh, Paradigm Engineer for Implenia Global Solutions, and Giff Constable, VP of Electric Sheep Company’s software practices. They were logging on to the CSI:NY sims that had just opened to the public.

The VWF venue was an old night club/roller disco near Kings Cross that London cabbies seemed to call The Potato Market. It seemed an awful lot like Second Life at times. And Delé Atanda, Global Digital Marketing Business Partner, Diageo, pointed out the virtualness of this space that is soon to be demolished to make way for some Eurotowers? I interviewed both Delé Atanda and Dolf Wittkamper at the VWF. I will cover these interviews and the very interesting approaches to Second Life that both these companies have taken in conjunction with Rivers Run Red in an upcoming post.

The Rivers Run Red exhibition at VWF.

One of the highlights for me during VWF was chatting with Louise Jorden of Rivers Run Red (center in pic above) and Delé Atanda, Diageo in “real life” at The Hospital Club - one of RRR’s partners.

Delé and Dolf exemplify to me to corporate executives that understand that the future will not only blur the lines between the “virtual” and the “real” but also the distinctions between corporations and individuals. Traditional hierarchies are disintegrating leading to what Josephine Green, Director of Trends and Strategies for Philips, calls the “people age,” and Delé Atanda, Diageo, calls the “age of imagination.”

This age is characterized, as Joesphine Green points out, by “the decline in trust in institutions and leadership; people becoming increasingly empowered and creative about their own lives; a desire to co-create and produce their own experiences; the search for greater customization, personalization and autonomy.”

Delé Atanda presenting the Diageo Digital Workspace in Second Life - developed in conjunction with Rivers Run Red and IBM.

3D Internet, 3Di, amazon.org, Architecture Working Group, Bullet, Cory Doctorow, craphound, data visualization in virtual worlds, David Orban, Deep Think Labs, EOLUS One, epredator potato, Ginsu Yoon, Havoc, HiPiHi, immersive spaces, immersive virtual worlds, instrumentation in virtual worlds, instrumentation in WoW, interoperability of virtual worlds, Jessica Qin, Jin Sei, Joi Ito, Joi Itos WoW interface, libsecondlife, Linden Lab, Linden Lab Architecture Working Group, Metaplace, metaverse, Mixi, Movable Life, ngi Group, Open Source, open source/openstandards, open standards, open standards for virtual worlds, OpenSim, physics engines, PhysX, Real 2nd Life, RESTful APIs, reverse surveillance society, Rivers Run Red, Second Life, Shaping Things, social networks, The inverse of surveillance society, using virtual worlds to exert agency, Vast Park, Virtual Worlds Forum, virtual worlds open source community, Wimbledon in Second Life, World of Warcraft WoW

Eolus One is developing what I think might be the first major business application using OpenSim. OpenSim is the BSD Licensed Open Source Initiative that has evolved from Second Life. Eolus has several client projects that will utilize the secure virtual control centers to improve and document facilities management with sites on OpenSim.

The picture shows the architecture of the system with the OpenSim, SAP and Building Automation Server (VWCI) part of the Eolus One facility management project.

Bruce Sterling at the end of Shaping Things” asks for humankind to start to make “decent technology:”

This whirring, ultra-buzzy technology can keep track of all its moving parts and when its time inevitably comes, it would have the grace and power to turn itself in at the gates of the junkyard and suffer itself to be mindfully pulled apart. It is a toy box for inventive meddlesome humankind that can put its own toys neatly and safely away.

If you are not yet in tune with “the internet of things” here is a music video Royksopp’s “Remind Me” that Sterling suggests is some kind of “spime” theme song.

The closing words of Sterling’s great visionary book on “spimes” and “the internet of things” are:

Its not enough to think about that, or even write about. If it is to be any use to humankind, it will have to get done.

This post is about some people who are doing it!

See the exclusive interview with Oliver Goh and Michael Osias later in this post!

This giant step in the integration of “real” and virtual worlds on OpenSim comes out of a meeting of two minds and the integration of the two virtual world interfaces.

Oliver Goh (avatar Eolus Mcmillan on Second Life) is a paradigm engineer for the large Swiss civil engineering and construction company Implenia Global Solutions pioneered the Eolus Virtual Worlds Communications Interface that communicates between Second Life and most common building protocols (see my earlier post). And Michael J. Osias, Chief 3D Architect for the IBM IT Optimization Business Unit (avatar Illuminous Beltran) Michael (see my earlier post) is the architect of a virtual worlds integration middleware - The Holographic Enterprise Interface.

By integrating the capabilities of their two virtual world interfaces - the Eolus’ VWCI solution with the IBM middleware (HEI) - they are creating a virtual cockpit on OpenSim with extensive capabilities. Michael gave the analogy to Nasa’s mission control.

We’ve got the facilities data (from the Eolus VWCI) and IT data using the shared infrastructure (HEI) and rendered together. To use an example, like mission control for NASA, They’ve got rockets, they’ve got computers, they’ve got people on the ground, but they build this control center, because the want to know whats going on with any of that stuff. So its all integrated into a single operational picture.

Eolus One is creating on OpenSim one of the first (always risky to say the first) Platforms for the Facilities Management Industry (see my earlier post on “The Operating System for Planet Earth”). But before continuing this story here is a quick primer on Eolus One.

Eolus One – the Future of Facilities Management.

I blogged the Eolus One’s launch of their public sims and Virtual Worlds Control Interface in Second Life at the beginning of July (see here). At that time, Eolus One in Second Life had already an exhibition hall showing the early development of the VWCI, a demonstration of a virtual operations center and several protoype/use cases showing the cabilities of VWCI, a better planet initiative including Uthango Social Investments and SODIS, and regular music programs led by the amazing Jaynine Scarborough. But since then Eolus has been expanding fast behind the scenes.

Oliver Goh has led the the charge on Eolus One putting together several collaborations that range from “future retail center” (an initiative with Migros, SAP Research, HP) to a control center for an international hotel chain, and a project with the University of St. Gallen to produce a prototype for a “smart” apartment for an elderly person called “Independent Living.”

“Independent Living”

“Independent Living” is an innovative home health care solution using sensor technology, medical monitoring devices and a modern communication infrastructure to help seniors live safely and independently at home.

The virtualisation of an elderly person’s daily movements, sleep, medication routines, and vital signs through a PCM - personal condition monitor - worn on the wrist (see picture below) will allow a health care worker to see easily if something is wrong, or out of the ordinary, and to make the appropriate intervention.

PCM – Personal Condition Monitor

The PCM (device detail above) reports to the Eolus VWCI at all times during the elderly persons sleeping and waking activites.

- The PCM is the size of a wrist watch, it monitors the vital stats (Temp, pulse, motion) of the person
- it is gps enabled
- has a button to manually activate an alarm
- automatic danger detection (posture, motion, body temp)
- automatic or manual delivery of alert

Nokia n810 and VWCI

Eolus is working on a project to use the Nokia N810 to enhance the possibilities of the VWCI. The enhancements made will be in the area of Parts Management, Plant Maintenance and Field Service.

- reduce time to invoice by 55%

- compliance to service level agreements

- faster service delivery (increase in service revenue)

- improve customer satisfaction

- increase field productivity by 25%

- using maEmo and OS2008 to bring new services to the service teams

“Smart” buildings - making a visionary idea happen

Eolus One is not just bringing the facility management processes into virtual worlds to increase energy efficiency, CO2 reduction and transparency of energy consumption which are now global necessities. Eolus is taking the vision of “smart” buildings into new territory by exploring many ways to bring the previously “dead” systems that we live and work in (dead in the sense that up until now these structures and the appliances in them have been unable to communicate to us) into an online virtual environment where we can have a dynamic relationship with all the objects and infrastructure we depend on. So the world of objects can contribute relevant information and content to our lives.

The pictures on the left are the Implenia Global Solutions Office building, in the center the hotel, and on the right Adaxsys a the production facility for electronic components (where the Eolus VWCI is manufactured). All three facilities are used as reference sites for the Eolus VWCI.

Next on the table for development Oliver has suggested may be plug and play modules based on the Eolus VWCI that will bring the kind of facility management now only possible in large scale facilities into every home. Will this mean a a new routine? Perhaps you will get online check your IMs and see what your friends are up to, join them for some social gaming or virtual entertainment somewhere on the grid while you keep you house is in order from your virtual cockpit. How are your most significant appliances doing? Are any of them squandering energy ? Is the refrigerator in need of a defrost? Is there bread in the bread box? Did you remember to take a life saving medication on time? Does an important medication need a refill? Is the fish tank getting acidic. Does the heating need to go on? Has an expected delivery arrived? And, of course, there will be no more inconvenient visits from the meter man/woman as meters will be monitored remotely.

A “Meta-verse” Story: Connecting Second Life and Open Sim

The vision of Eolus One is far reaching. It will take building automation and facility management into realms as ambitious as city planning and as intimate as caring for the sick and elderly.

By engaging both in Second Life and Open Sim, Eolus draws on the strengths and resources of the public, open, socially networked, user generated environment of Second Life with its vibrant community of creative thinkers and virtual world developers while utilizing the open source platform of OpenSim to develop secure virtual operation centers.

Second Life is fast becoming the global town hall for scientist