Participation Camp 2009, an unconference held at NYU’s ITP,  is part of a broader vision of the organizers to position open government at the leading edge of an open organizations movement. For more on open organization Matt pointed me to David Johnson’s work and the Virtual Company movement, vermontvirtual.org.

Matt Cooperrider (@mattcoop on Twitter) – the initiator and main organizer, and Suresh Fernando (@sureshf), and Stephan Dohrn (@sdohrn) – who worked with Matt on the virtual aspects of the conference, share an interest in open collaboration, the intersection of collaboration and technology, and “how practices in this space can scale up to a global level.”

Matt and Suresh met as a result of their deep commitment to the social venture space (see Suresh’s paper, “On  the possibility of an open system mobilization platform”).

Stephan worked with Suresh to build the virtual strategy – choosing the tools, and working with the virtual presenters to stream them into the conference and the presenters on site who were streamed out. Stephan and Suresh are part of Radical Inclusion – an international group with 2 people in Germany, one in Seattle, one in London. Suresh is based in Vancouver, and Stephan in Brazil.

Participation Camp was both a global gathering with virtual presenters from India, Netherlands, Canada (Montreal and Vancouver), and the US; and it was an extraordinarily vibrant and focused forum for current issues in New York City and State.

Open Collab

The next step for Participation Camp is an experiment called “Open Collab” – to take the evolving ideas into a persistent space that people can stay engaged in. This is in contrast to traditional conferences that are discrete events. There is already a Participation Camp Wiki. But OpenCollab hopes to explore virtual collaboration processes on a number of levels (Google Wave, perhaps?).

“We see that there is already a healthy movement of self-organized camps and conferences all over the world, but no thread that draws them together.  Presumably many of these camps and their participants share common interests and goals, and a desire to contribute their discoveries to a larger pool of knowledge.

There is of course, no shortage of online discussion groups and wikis.  While useful, these are no replacement for the energy and excitement generated by real-time interaction.  We think that the best way to tie the world’s many camps together is to curate a series of open virtual sessions that anyone can join and be a part of.

Our experiment, with the working title “Open Collab”, begins Wednesday July 15th at 15:00 GMT in our PCamp Skype Chat.  We’ll focus on building out this concept and a community to support it.  Our long-term vision is to build a solid framework for cross-camp collaboration in time for Spring 2010, when most camps gear up.

PCamp was primarily focused on Open Government, in part because better government is necessary for improved collaboration in the face of shared challenges such as climate change, poverty, and war.  Help us take our efforts to the next level.”

This Themes doc gives a a good summary of ideas to take Virtual Participation Camp forward and questions about how to make virtual collaboration more effective.  It is an excellent frame for those interested in getting involved with the continuing virtual experiment, “Open Collab.”

There was a rich integration of virtual sessions into the ITP event with video streams that brought in remote participants from across the globe. The conversations from the Skype group chat are archived here, here, and here.  I asked Stephan why he chose Skype over say, CampFire, or even an immersive environment like OpenSim. I mentioned how useful OpenSim had been in creating Virtual HomeCamp for HomeCamp2. But I wasn’t surprised to get the response that simplicity and users’ levels of comfort with different tools were the key factors.  Although Stephan mentioned that another Radical Inclusion member, Sofia Bustamante (see Turn Up The Courage), is exploring virtual worlds for collaboration.

I recorded the three sessions I attended at ITP on Saturday: Mark Belinsky’s – audio, Gale Brewer’s audio, and Noel Hidalgo’s audio.

Mark Belinsky: OpenMyCity

The pictures opening this post are from Mark Belinsky’s session on the OpenMyCity project (pic of the session notes on the left and Mark Belinsky on the right). Mark is director of Digital Democracy (@mbelinsky Twitter).

“OpenMyCity is backed by a coalition that formed around the Pioneers conference that took place recently in New York and Amsterdam…The goal of OpenMyCity is to find the best ideas about how to make use of municipal open data by asking citizens and organizations to answer a simple fill-in-the-blank question: “If I knew ___, I could do ___.”

Peter Corbett, CEO of iStrategy Labs (@corbett3000 Twitter), and the creative force behind Washington D.C.’s hugely successful Apps for Democracy, participated in the session (which followed his). Peter (picture above) brought up an interesting hypthetical framework to use an open source dating platform to create resource matching to needs:

“What we are thinking about is how in any given city or country or even globally on the net, there are people who have specific needs and there are people who can provide solutions to those needs. So it’s really sort of like a dating site analogy that we use when thinking about how to match those two for the most efficient outcome.”

Although I missed Peter’s session, I caught up with him for an interview (full transcript below) in which I asked him more about this repurposing of an open source dating platform idea, and the latest developments in Apps for Democracy.

Gale Brewer: New York City’s Open Data Legislation

NYC Council Member, Gale Brewer (@galeabrewer Twitter)

NYC Council Member Gale Brewer’s session on opening government data – Introduction No. 991-2009, gave an important explanation of the Open Data Legislation and why this effort to get raw data to the public legislatively is important (audio here – the recording is not of the highest quality but OK, and I hope to have a transcription soon).

Unfortunately, the Bloomberg administration and the Council are at odds over this now as the Bloomberg administration doesn’t appear to see the immense value of raw data over data packaged in accordance with what an administration thinks people needs (see this post on Gateway to Gov research and Discussion Blog, and John Geraci’s post on O’Reilly Radar, “Open Gov Is a Dialogue Not a Monologue.”)

Samuel Wong (@samjwong Twitter), Legislative Aide on Technology in Government, Office of Council Member Gale A. Brewer, attended Participation Camp (picture above), and is active in the virtual forums. Sam points out that Big Apps is a great idea, but cannot be implemented without open raw data from the government.

In email, I asked Sam what people could do to support the Open Data Legislation and he suggested:

“Right now, we are trying to gather information from other cities that have tried to open up their government – possibly some stats on cost-savings. The administration is worried about this.  If people can submit a brief written statement of other cities’ efforts, that’ll be helpful.

As the Administration considers a demand model for NYC Big Apps, the supply side is missing. A top-to-bottom model will be ineffective, in comparison the people-government collaboration model generates a sense of government accountability and trust.

In order to engage and collaborate with the people, the first step is to tap into the unique intellectual capital in New York City that will revitalize the private sector.  Once the government data is available, developers will competitively build applications from the raw data, which will help daily New Yorkers find the information they need.

Intro 991-2009 fosters competition among developers by supplying raw data that can be used for many purposes, including education and quality of life issues: the legislation complements NYC Big Apps, as greater results will yield from it.  Open data is a public service enhancement.

Thus, in addition to your advice and support, please participate in Apps for Democracy’s NYC Big Apps Ideas Feedback Forum [www.bit.ly/bigideas] to show your enthusiasm for more data for programmers, developers, and the daily New Yorker.”

Links from other blogs on Open Data legislation below:

http://www.politickerny.com/4271/bloomberg-administration-resists-online-mandate-citing-user-friendliness

http://nyfi.observer.com/politics/182/new-open-data-standards-legislation

http://nyfi.observer.com/politics/208/pdf-bloomberg-announces-big-apps-contest-says-dine-winner

http://personaldemocracy.com/blog-entry/nyc-council-gives-open-data-hearing

“Several notable individuals” participated in the discussion on Open Data which as Lou Klepner noted,  in his post, included but was certainly not limited to, Andrew Hoppin (CIO, NYS Senate), Noel Hidalgo (Director of Technology, NYS Senate, ), Steven Clift (Founder, e-democracy.org), Silona Bonewald (Founder, Legal of Technical Voters), and Craig Newmark (Founder, Craigslist.org).”

Craig Newmark (@craignewmark Twitter) brought up some vital questions concerning how we can raise public awareness around the Open Data Legislation.  I had a quick chat with Craig after the session.  I was surprised and happy to see him playing such an active role in a small unconference.

Tish Shute: I noticed Gale Brewer was very enthusiastic just now about some of your recent work -  there was a boot camp I think? What is that?

Craig Newmark: Something that the Craigslist foundation does is to run a boot camp. The idea is to help people who want to help to be more effective at it. Focusing on non-profits. For example, last week one theme was to help people present what they’re doing more effectively. Because if you don’t – if you can’t tell someone what you’re doing in 30 to 60 seconds, they’re going to start tuning out. There’s also grant writing issues if you’re a foundation or a non-profit of some sort. And then there’s the effective use of technology. The idea is that if the bootcamp can help give someone a clue about any of those, that can make life much easier for someone who’s trying to help other people.

There is a nice short video here about Craig Newmark’s commitment to Gov 2.0, also see his blog.

Andrew Hoppin and Noel Hidalgo: nysenate.gov

Andrew Hoppin (@ahoppin Twitter) – pic above, was an active contributor to the discussion on OpenData. His team seems to have survived the upheavals in Albany to continue their innovative work on nysenate.gov that now allows “constituents to give direct feedback to Senators on proposed bills, hearings and issues in “crowdsourcing portals” for property taxes, ethics reform and campaign finance,”(see here for more, and also see my post on the work of Nathan Freitas the great developer for this team).

Director of Technology,  NYS Senate, Noel Hidalgo (@noneck Twitter) – picture below, led the excellent session on nysenate.gov (audio here).

More on Virtual Participation Camp

This week I got a chance, through the PCamp Skype group, to follow up with Suresh, Stephan and Matt (picture above of Matt Cooperrider participating in Gale Brewer’s session).  One of the topics I was interested in hearing more about was the Twitter and Iran Workshop that was part of the ITP program. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend in person.

I was interested in following up on some of the issues raised in my previous post, Twitter and The Web of Flow: Talking with Stowe Boyd & Bruce Sterling about Microsyntax, Squelettes, Favela Chic and the State of Now.

Matt noted that the centralized hijacking was taken as a given and the question was:

1. how do we get more reports out despite that

2. how do we aggregate/filter those reports

But, he also noted, the group at hand was less interested in a specific solution and got philosophical pretty quickly.  What is our goal with these interventions? To support people’s right to democracy?

Matt explained:

“I was pushing a project described here: http://votereport.pbworks.com/Iran-Election but the more experienced folks seemed to think it was too late for a solution like that but everyone pretty much agreed that the main goal was to get something like that ready for the “next one:” someone, Noel I think, suggested an international ICT “Red Cross” style organization.”

One of the virtual presenters at Participation Camp was Gaurav Mishra (@gauravonomics Twitter), the founder of 20:20 Web Tech, Votereport.in, and a leader in India’s Gov2.0 scene.

Stef Van Grieken (@stefvangrieken), New Voting Foundation also presented on the use of electoral compasses to identify key candidates for parliament in the Netherlands.

“The application matches candidates to voters based on the party program’s and individual political views.”

Ed Pastore (@epastore), Metagovernment, delivered a talk entitled, “Making Direct Democracy Practical,” outlining the drawbacks of representative democracy in various contexts; and exploring the historical criticisms of direct democracy and detailing, “several emerging projects which are actively working to overcome the limitations of direct (or otherwise more inclusive) democracy by applying sophisticated web technologies.”

And, Gabriel Flacks, Newsactivist and teacher at Champlain College in Montreal, Quebec, gave a talk entitled “Teaching Participation: the Newsactivist Curriculum.”

Talking With Peter Corbett

Tish Shute: What do I think are the most important apps for democracy to come out so far?

Peter Corbett: Well I won’t say what the most important are, because I think all of the ones created in the first round last year and the ones that are being developed now are important in some way shape or form. I’ll say what the most interesting were, and which were the ones that won medals.

So “ilive.at” won the gold medal in Apps for Democracy last October. What it does is, you put in your address and it basically forms the world around you. And you can see where crimes happened and where the post office is, and where the grocery store is. It’ll also show you an overlay of U.S. census data, to show you sort of the composition of that neighborhood – so what’s the average age, what’s the ethnicity, the composition from a married/single perspective.

The city thought it was really great and that it could help people decide where to move, and what that place looked like if they were in a certain sector of the city. Another really interesting application that was developed was “We the People Wiki,” and if you go to wethepeoplewiki.com you can see it. What it does is it creates all in one place all the information around crime you can imagine for a specific case. So if there was a homicide, you can see who the community prosecuter is, who the defender is.  You can see the ward within which it happened mapped, the specific address where it happened mapped. Also realtime data will stream up showing the last 5 homicides in that area – trying to identify, “Are there some trends around this thing, etc.?” So those are two interesting cool apps that were created.

In this new edition, Apps for Democracy “Community Edition, amongst the applications we’ve seen entered, there’s one that is essentially an iPhone application that lets you walk around the city and geolocate yourself so it’ll show you you’re on this street corner and you can take a picture of a pothole, upload it to the 311 service request system, and then hit “send to facebook,” and it publishes to your social profile, and people see that you’re concerned about this stuff.  And what that does is it creates little social hooks to get your friends to say, “Oh I can do this too and I should do this too.”  So we start to build a better view of what the problems are in the city, so that the city can then take care of them.

I think the promise of something like that is building an additional layer on top of it later, maybe where citizens would be empowered to solve some of these problems themselves. Because some of the things that get entered won’t really be things the city can take care of. Certainly litter is within the perview of the citys’ responsibility, but could there be community organizations who take care of things like that if you start to see trends in certain places of having a lot of requests around that.

There’s a last application I’ll talk about in this community edition, it’s called “PointAbout”. What it does is it builds an interactive map of all the vacant properties in the district which happen to be havens for drug abusers and possibly dangerous areas at night and things like that. Building that is really important. It’s really hard right now to do that in the city because it’s a lot of footwork and paperwork. So citizens themselves can identify addresses when they’re out and about and say this is a vacant property. It’ll make DC a safer place.

Tish: So have you seen the Sprx Mobile app “Layar,” an augmented reality browser?

Peter: I have seen that. It’s very cool. I think augmented reality is A the present and B the future. So it’ll be very cool to see augmented reality applications developed for DC in the future. Or anywhere, I’m very DC centric obviously. I live there and DC’s my client.

Dimitry Kachiev who’s the director of research and development for the city of Washington DC, just released an API actually that will show you in realtime the location of DC’s circulator buses. The circulator buses only go inside DC and are therefore not owned and operated by WAMATA which is metropolitan area transit authority, which won’t release their realtime data. So looking at Google Earth you can literally see the buses moving around the map. I use the circulator. I live 5 blocks from the line, but I never know when to leave my building to go to it. And now I can go, “Oh I see bus number 1150 is 5 blocks down, I might as well start walking now. Because then I’ll intersect it.”

There’s no live application. There’s just a data feed. But it can be visualized on Google Earth. And if you go to api.dc.gov you’ll see the beta API for that feed. So then you just click it, load it into Google Earth, and you’ll see the busses moving around.

Tish: I was fascinated by the idea you mentioned to use an open source dating platform to create resource matching to needs. But I didn’t quite pick up whether you actually built something yet?

Peter: No that is a hypothetical framework that we haven’t really put to the test yet. What we are thinking about is how in any given city or country or even globally on the net, there are people who have specific needs and there are people who can provide solutions to those needs. So it’s really sort of like a dating site analogy that we use when thinking about how to match those two for the most efficient outcome.

So think about males being people who have needs maybe females as being providers or something. So when you login and create your profile, you say I can provide this stuff. I’m a web developer, I’m a designer, I’m a great carpenter, I can transport food to places. and then what the needs are. We need food, we need web design, we need whatever, here’s our location. I’m not currently married, I’m single. So going into the system an algorhythm would say OK based on the need, and based on the provider, Peter Corbitt should provide web design to this non-profit because A it’s 2 blocks away from him, B he’s not on a project right now, C they’re not currently being satisfied with that need. Matched.

Tish: How is that different from what Mechanical Turk’s doing other than the payment thing?

Peter: I think there’s a lot of differences. Mechanical Turk is really just paying for specific actions in a discrete period of time. I want ten thousand people to click this link ten thousand times.
So the dating site analogy is extended when assuming that this need is fullfilled there was a discrete need like we just need 20 loaves of bread, well great done that need is gone. The need is gone out of the system, the matching doesn’t happen again. But if it’s an ongoing need like elderly care or afterschool tutoring, when that marraige is broken, when there’s a divorce, that needer goes back into the matching system to be rematched. Everywhere it happens, someone has a volunteer for a specific thing at a non-profit, they lose that volunteer, they have to go back and get a new one and it’s just an ongoing process. If you automate that it’ll be much more efficient. You’ll get more done.

Tish: How is that different from what the The Extraordinaries does?

Peter: The Extraordinaries concept I think is similar to a certain extent. The concept is very cool. So the it’s probably a little synonymous.

Their concept is a mobile micro volunteering thing, which is terrific. And I look forward to using it. I don’t know yet that they’ve gotten their application developed and approved?

Tish: You work for a very busy marketing company, how do you fit this all in? Where does it all fit? How do you monetize it? How do you keep it together?

Peter: Sure. I’m the CEO of iStrategy Labs, and 95% of our revenue comes from brands like Geico, American Eagle Outfitters, Rockstar folks like that, that pay us to do cool weird things with marketing technology. The D.C. government is our client, and pays us to create cool new things like apps for democracy.

Tish: So the D.C. government pays you to do Apps for Democracy?

Peter: That’s right. So we created the concept, and execute it and run it and champion it. Apps for Democracy is a way to engage citizen technologists in building applications for their city, by incentivising them with a little bit of fame, and a little bit of fortune.

Tish: But it’s basically D.C. based?

Peter: Nope. Yes and no.  It’s focused on applications for the city of Washington D.C. The first round that we had last year, 80% of the applications were developed by D.C. based people, I should say the greater D.C. area so D.C., Maryland, Virginia. The other 20% came from California, Massecussets, North Carolina, from specific hackers that like to work on this kind of stuff. There’s an Apps for Democracy Finland, there’s an Apps for Democracy Belgium. It’s spreading as an idea, as a way to do things differently. And those aren’t paid consulting engagements that we have for iStrategy Labs.

I give that insight away freely because I want people to do it. I think it’s the right way to do things. And it certainly helps our initiative be more well known and give us more impact when we do something.

Tish: And you mentioned you’re very involved with Government 2.0 camps and O’Reilly’s upcoming Government 2.0 Expo, and Government 2.0 Summit?

Peter: I’m on the programming committee for Government 2.0 Expo. Government 2.0 Summit I just sort of help promote a little bit. Government 2.0 Camp I co-created with 3 other individuals, and Government 2.0 club I co-created, and Transparency Camp.

Game Play and Collaboration

A collaborative sculpture (pic above) emerged at Participation Camp, also a game of Nomic

“Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed.”

—Peter Suber, the creator of Nomic, The Paradox of Self-Amendment, Appendix 3, p. 362.

Also there was a linkcube unit stationed at ITP throughout the conference, but unfortunately I didn’t have a moment to check it out.  Linkcube is part of the 80+1 project.

“Using real-time data exchange, the users, who are geographically distant, are presented on screen as if they were right next to each other. This closeness lets users get momentarily acquainted with other humans to whom they would not otherwise be exposed. What results is a set of playful interactions and the ultimate photographs serve as a tangible record of this memorable virtual experience.”

Are you one of those people who need something more to get you excited about the future of virtual worlds than, “I am in ur browser, chatting in 3D?”

Well, perhaps, it is time for you to take a close look at the burgeoning open source ecosystem surrounding OpenSIm.

Jonas Karlsson, Xerox, (avatar Poinky Malaprop) wrote an excellent post (I quote his great title above!) explaining why he is not turned on by the big bubble of browser based worlds that have sprung up recently – Vivaty, Lively, JustLeapIn, ExitReality, WebFlock and more

This flood of browser based worlds into the virtual world scene has caused many commentators in the field to articulate clearly what is important about virtual worlds and where these lite weight worlds fall short (see Dusan Writer) and how they can’t realize virtual worlds’ potential as innovative disruptive technnologies that will actually improve the human condition.

Even the the mainstream of the blogosphere can see how retro and limited this new crop of VWs lite are (see PC World’s look at Lively).

I am not arguing that these “stepping stone” browser worlds won’t be something that many people try out. But, like Jonas and Gwyneth Llewelyn, I believe that the destiny of virtual worlds lies elsewhere. I agree with Jonas, the keys that opened the doors for virtual worlds to bring something new, exciting and very beneficial to human communication were sown in Second Life with the “in-world creation tools, that enabled co-creation and a new form of collaboration” – none of these “in ur browser” wannabes are even close to offering this kind of paradigm shifting experience. Though some of them may play a role in introducing a wider audience to a limited sense of the possibilities of avatar interaction.

Why is OpenSim Important?

While Second Life demonstrated most of the key paradigm shifts to social interaction possible through virtual worlds, open source and open standard development, as Linden Lab has acknowledged for a while now, are central to unleashing the full potential of virtual worlds into a scalable, global and world changing phenomena.

A number of interesting open source virtual world projects are out there. But, of all these, OpenSim is beginning to show its got the right stuff to move virtual worlds forward quickly, in a positive direction. Open standards are not arrived at by ivory tower committees. They are worked out on the ground in a process which requires the magic of “rough consensus and running code” (this phrase is drawn from a conversation I had with Mic Bowman, Intel, about interoperability of virtual worlds).

This magic, “rough consensus and running code” is exemplified in the rapidly developing ecosystem committed to growing OpenSim technology – OpenSim provides powerful and fexible software modules for building virtual worlds.

There is a powerful community of amazing diversity working with OpenSIm – from many enthused individuals to contributors from some of the world’s largest corporations, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft (see the many commentaries, here and here, in the blogosphere on the MS dev community entry into OpenSim and for my interview with Kyle Gomboy of the MS dev community and Zain Naboulsi, Microsoft, see here).

And, while Linden Lab do not contribute code directly to OpenSim yet, some of Linden Lab’s top developers are involved in a major an interoperability effort between Second Life and OpenSim. This effort has also been spearheaded by David Levine (avatar Zha Ewry), IBM.

David’s interoperability patch and Linden Lab’s OWG (Open Grid Protocols) will go into Beta on the LL Preview Grid at the end of the month. To become part of this Beta you must join the Gridnauts group in Second Life. The code developed from this interoperability work will eventually be part of the OpenSim trunk.

There is a common misunderstanding about OpenSim. OpenSim is NOT a virtual world, and is certainly not as many in the blogosphere like to suggest a virtual world competing with Second Life. On the contrary as the err “love child” of Second Life, it carries the qualities of Second Life into the future. And Linden Lab’s acknowledgement and support of OpenSim is clear in their interoperability efforts.

Adam Frisby sets the record straight on his blog:

OpenSim is not a virtual world. It’s a piece of software, which if configured in a specific way allows you to run a virtual world. Consider it another way – the Apache Webserver is not a website, but ~50% of the websites online are running Apache.

I have blogged some of the diverse projects OpenSim has spawned including the highly innovative realXtend (see here, here, here and here -my most recent post on reX) and Tribal Net (see here). But Adam includes an excellent list of some of the diverse applications that have been developed on OpenSim and explains the difference between application and platform in this post.

Check out this wonderful slide show of the work some 3rd – 4th grade students are doing with their quests on the Opensim based GreenbushGrid VW.

How to become Involved in the OpenSim Community

Here I am as noobie in OSgrid standing in front of the fountain built by master builder and OpenSim developer, Nebadon Izumi (Michael Cerquoni in RL). Charles Krinke told me: “The fountain behind me was built by Nebadon last September and the day scripts were sufficient to run the particle system, we turned the water on.”

OpenSim is alpha still. But there is an immense pride and excitement to being there a

nd contributing in these ground breaking days. The OpenSim Wiki is the most complete source for information on OpenSim but there is a nice tutorial here on White’s Virtual White blog on how to get your own standalone openSim server up and running in Windows Vista (hat tip to Dusan Writer)

But there are many different ways to become part of the OpenSim effort.

One of the important entry points to the OpenSim development community, other than joining the IRC channels #opensim, #opensim-dev, and #osgrid is to visit and participate in activities in OSGrid (see later in this post for a complete list of the goals of OSGrid).

OSGrid is also the place where developers, content creators, and ordinary users can support the OpenSim effort. Two good times to find the OpenSim community gathered in OSGrid are:

“Test Hour”, “Wright Plaza”, Saturday 1900UTC, Noon PDT, 3PM EDT.

“Office Hour,” Wright Plaza, Tuesday 1900UTC, Noon PDT, 3pm EDT.

OSgrid is the second oldest OpenSim grid. It was created in July, 2007.

The picture opening this post is taken inside the Scriptwerks building, Wright’s Plaza, OSGrid. This room is part of the effort in OSGrid to teach scripting. It is built by Pablo Pharmanaut (avatar name), a pharmacist in Northern California. Pablo has set up a number of demonstrations of scripting including the scripts themselves. The scripts are also on the forum. One of the goals of OSGrid is to encourage folks to copy the scripts and use them to learn how to script.

The picture below shows Wright’s Plaza where office hours are held. OSGrid guru and organizer Charles Krinke (avatar Charles Krinkeb) is showing me a demo of OpenSim’s version of html on a prim, which is implemented differently from the LL version. And on the right is the “grafitti” board written by Justin Clark-Casey that is used to set the agenda at meetings now.

Th first “Office Hour” in OpenSim was on a blank island, no physics, no scripts, no clothes, last August. This blank island is now Wright Plaza, named for Michael Wright, the creator of OpenSim. Stephan Andersson, known as “Lbsa” is honored in the second plaza created.

There are several ways to join the OpenSim effort. And Charles Krinke the tireless and brilliant community organiser for OSgrid pointed out to me there are roles for all who want to get involved as:

The goals of OSGrid are 1) to test OpenSim releases on a daily basis and 2) to build a healthy community.

Charles Krinke (avatar Charles Krinkeb), whom I met first in the OpenSim office hours, began running OSGrid in August with 150 users and a dozen regions. Others were brought in as managers, most notably “Nebadon Izumi”, “Hiro Protagonist”, “Paulie Flomar” and more in the Fall. “We now have 3200 users and nearly 400 regions attached as of early July, 2008,” Charles noted.

In the picture above, Hiro Protagonist (James Stallings in RL) and I are seated in Zaius Plaza, OSGrid (see also Hiro’s blog).

The Goals of OSGrid

Charles Krinke described the Goals of OSGrid in detail to me.

Goal 1: “Testing OpenSim releases”

There are several considerations here from a grid viewpoint. First and foremost is the fact that differing regions on OSGrid run on differing operating systems and with differing configurations. This includes both Windows and Linux servers running regions. Some regions run scripting with the dotnet script engine. Others run with xengine for scripting. Some regions use local assets, some grid assets. Regions running different operating systems and different configurations are right next to each other. Additionally two regions might be adjacent on the grid, but physically on opposite sides of the planet. Some are in colo-farms with fat pipes and some are in homes with modest cable modem connections.

Testing things like avatar appearance editing, script functionality (or lack thereof), region crossings, inventory usage all become important in a heterogeneous grid like this as we use a systems approach to testing and facilitating software development.

It is entirely appropriate to report at http://opensimulator.org/mantis bugs found in OpenSim regions on OSGrid particularly if these bugs can be confirmed on at least two regions running different operating systems. To the extent we can identify and replicate with a simple recipe problems in the software, it becomes easier for the core developers in OpenSim to fix these problems. OSGrid provides a fairly rich spectrum of region configurations to allow more bugs to be identified then with a single standalone of even a grid will all identical regions.

Goal 2: “Building more community”

Our “Plaza” regions all honor a different personality in OpenSim history. Each one is a little different. But each serve as seed regions to expand the mainland and folks wishing to connect regions to OSGrid are encouraged to attach to a face or corner of one of the plazas to help expand and fill in the gaps of our mainland. As we expand, there will be new plazas from time to time and all of them will have a unique personality.

All of our plazas run on donated, community servers and the OSGrid control operators administer the servers and encourage community builds, freebie zones, script demonstrations and the like. As time goes on, we establish more “Hours”, which are dedicated times set aside to discuss, learn, teach or demonstrate some aspect of using OpenSim.

Around the plazas are various personal, corporate and university regions. All of these regions are owned by their providers and not by OSGrid. Commercial activies are encouraged by those whose corporations put up regions. Other things such as artist colonies, homesteading areas and the like exist and are encouraged.

It is reasonable for organizations to build additional mainlands elsewhere on the grid. There is no requirement that all regions be near the existing mainland at 20000,20000. After all, OSGrid is intended to develop a diverse, global Metaverse and it certainly seems to be happening.

Folks are encouraged to donate original creations to the various freebie areas for others to get with the “Take Copy” option and use, modify and understand as they wish. Also there are a number of scripts on the forums at http://osgrid.org/forums for folks to use as they expand their scripting knowledge.

Junichiro Makino, University of Tokyo, leads the way into the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) in Tokyo. Piet Hut, Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton, is right behind with the Genkii team. Jun Makino has offered the use of a server at the observatory to set up an OpenSim environment. History is about to be made.

Thanks Genkii for the photos! Genkii is a Tokyo-based strategic consultancy focusing on social media and virtual worlds (see here for my interview with CEO of Genkii, Ken Brady and COO, Adam Johnson).

Next day Piet Hut announced to the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics MICA:

Adam Johnson and Jeff Ames, developers of OpenSim, and members of the Tokyo Genkii team, have succeeded today in tweaking their physics engine in OpenSim to let stars dance according to Newtonian Gravity.

On a Mac laptop, they let hundreds of stars move in real time, as a gravitational N-body problem (yes, a few hundred!). This is a historic watershed.

A video was soon up on YouTube here. But as Adam Johnson noted:

I don’t think the video can capture the pure fun of this thing, it makes computational astrophysics approachable to a 3 year old… like legos for astronomy. And it really puts OpenSim in a new light! This same method can be applied to other areas too.. think protein folding visualizations.

Computational Astrophysics is a field that has long been associated with some serious number crunching. Jun Makino is holding up a piece of the new GRAPE (an acronym for “gravity pipeline” and an intended pun on the Apple line of computers) – a super computer that will become one of the fastest super computers in the world (again).

Later in this post there is an in depth interview I did in Second Life with Jun. His Second Life avatar is Makino Magic. Jun discusses the future of computational astrophysics, and how this may be tied in with virtual worlds

The photo above was taken by Adam Johnson of Genkii. Adam noted:

We want to use super computers like this (the Cray and GRAPE) to offset the simulations and push the results to OpenSim. That way it can simulate thousands, or millions of stars/planets

The picture below shows the Cray at the National Observatory of japan on the right, and on the left Jeff Ames is shown working on the N-Body simulation in OpenSim. I heard Jeff implemented most of the code for Newtonian Gravity in OpenSim on the train ride to the observatory!

Genkii, in addition to their work on OpenSim are developing, with 3Di and other open source virtual world developers, an OpenViewer a “from scratch” that should allow people like scientific researchers, game developers, educators, etc to make fully customized viewers more easily than they could before. Adam explained:

Open Viewer is (BSD Licensed) using, at the moment, OgreDotNet for rendering and LibSL for the protocol.

But you can use any protocol you want actually and any rendering engine – ideally we want to allow it to support numerous virtual worlds with one viewer. We have been talking to HiPiHi guys about getting their protocol working with it as well, and soon will talk to some IBM guys in China to see if they want to take part in that action.

MICA – Pioneering Astrophysics in Virtual Worlds

Piet Hut has been evangelizing the potential of virtual worlds for astrophysics, and bringing astrophysicists into virtual worlds through the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA) for quite a while now (see my previous post). And, Piet and Eiko Ikegami have just published a fascinating paper about Japanese History and Second Life.

MICA, begun in 2007, is a virtual astronomy institute featuring many MODEST-related activities. Aimed at harnessing the capabilities of virtual worlds and 3D collaborative environments (such as Second Life, Qwaq, Sun Wonderland), it fosters interaction among astrophysicists with interest in large-scale simulations, including dense stellar systems. Outreach and educational activities are also major MICA goals. MICA weekly events include popular talks, computational astrophysics lectures and Journal Club discussions of recent astro-ph papers. The MICA wiki, containing more information, schedules of events, and links to related pages, can be found here.

Also, there is an excellent video of Piet’s talk on the “Scientists and Science Outreach in Second Life,” that was part of the SL5BD events posted on YouTube here.

In the picture above, MICA members Prospero Frobozz (Prospero Linden a.k.a. Robert Knop in RL), Tara5 Oh (me, Tish Shute in RL), Pema Pera (Piet Hut in RL), Peter28 shostakovich (Peter Teuben in RL), Paradox Olbers (Spike MacPhee in RL) see also Paradox’s Spindrift in Scilands blog, Pan Numanox (Alfred Whitehead in RL), Jazz90meteotl Loon, Eamu Godenot (Will Farr in RL), and Lagrange Euler (Steven McMilland in RL). Thank you MICA member and SL photographer Kirk Smythe (Tom Deluca III in “real” life) for this picture, and for the portrait of Piet’s avatar Pema Pera below.

I have been attending MICA meetings as an observer since spring when their activities were mostly focused in Qwaq. Now the focus of MICA is Second Life and OpenSim. There is a regular schedule of events. In fact, I was invited to speak about Open Source virtual worlds at one of the daily “coffee” meetings. I later heard that my talk was in fact the trigger for the collaboration between Piet and the Genkii team!

I invited Adam Johnson to come to the discussion after my talk when the conversation focused on OpenSim. After I introduced Adam to Piet, they realized they were both in Tokyo in RL, they met for lunch and the rest is history.

I have blogged and attended a number of MICA’s events including Dr. Rob Knop’s (a.k.a Prospero Linden a.k.a Prospero Frobozz) talk, “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.

Why does MICA want to do simulations within Virtual Worlds?

I asked Piet (Pema Pera in Second Life, picture below) why MICA wants to do simulations in virtual worlds and, why N-body simulation is so important to astrophysics?

Pema Pera: For two reasons:

1) Traditionally simulations were where scientists spent years and visualization was an afterthought, a few pictures in a journal, never the right tools to really mine the data, not enough time, money, tools. So we can use VWs to start with visualization and then have the simulations follow. Another example of inverting a traditional priority, like going to what-you-see-is-what-you-get. Most breakthroughs in computer use are like that. So starting with the enormous investment already in the visualization aspects of Virtual Worlds, you can then run your simulations within them, or so it seems. Whether they actually run in there, or in a hidden way elsewhere on a Cray or GRAPE is of no real concern for the user.

2) Collaborative code writing and debugging. Traditionally, observers collaborate — can’t build a telescope and observatory with one person. Theoretical folks now have to learn to collaborate. You can’t write a whole simulation package in one PhD three-year period.

Most breakthroughs are inverting something, first direct addressing to make the computer fast, but a pain for humans, then you switch to indrect addressing, makes more sense for the human, slower at first for the computer, but the advantages in software productivity are overwhelming. Same with going from assembly code to compilers, same from complied languages to scripting languages

Theorists are learning to collaborate and they have to write computer code together! What better way than to do pair programming in a virtual world, so pair coding and pair debugging becomes possible within a VW, especially when you can see the results in your simulation.

Tara5 Oh: oooh that is interesting, so being able to “play” with a physics engine could be very key!

Pema Pera: YES! You simulate at large scales VERY directly into the fabric of the simulated world iteself. It is the difference between having a stage on which you play and having the stage itself play for you!!!!

Tara5 Oh: Why are N-body simulations so key to astrophysics?

Pema Pera: Ah, great question! Gravity dominates. On short scales we have electricity and magnetism and friction and much more but on large enough scales only gravity is felt. Electricity cancels + and – charges but gravity is only attractive, hense a gravitational N-body problem. You cut up the world into N parts as large an N as you can handle and then you simulate the UNIVERSE.

Will Farr (MIT) implements the “Hermite Algorithm” in OpenSim

The Thumbnails of screenshots above (in order) are from a simple N-Body simulation of 32 bodies in OpenSim. Basically, you can see the bodies collapse, eject some of their members, and form a cluster of the remaining bodies in the sequence of photos

It wasn’t long before MICA members were deep into OpenSim. Notably, Will Farr, Eamu Godenot in Second Life is a MICA member and a 5th-year graduate student at MIT working on numerical relativity and N-body simulation algorithms, “lots of theory and numerics, very little observing, unfortunately,” he told me. Will was one of the first MICA members to pick up on the N-body work in OpenSim.

Tara5 Oh: Could you explain what you have been doing with n-body simulation in OpenSim?

Eamu Godenot: When Adam and Jeff wrote a Newtonian physics engine for OpenSim, this was a couple of weeks ago. they showed that it was possible to run gravitational simulations using a custom physics engine, but they didn’t know a lot about n-body simulations. I don’t know a ton, but I know more, and I was coming to Japan to visit Piet/Pema and Jun/Makino. So, Piet suggested that we try to improve the algorithms that the physics engine used. Maybe enough to do some physically relevant simulations

Tara5 Oh: You all met in Tokyo?

Eamu Godenot: Yes, it was exciting—I met Adam and Jeff two days ago, and spent some time learning about OpenSim and the code from them. Plus pestering them with lots of questions about genkii, programming, and OpenSim in general. Then, on Wednesday and some of Thursday, I started improving the n-body part of the physics engine. They had implemented a nice algorithm for evolving the bodies, but the standard ones used in the field are more efficient and accurate. In particular, Jun Makino invented a technique called the Hermite algorithm that is, more-or-less, the “industry standard” So, I implemented that.

Interview With Jun Makino (avatar Makino Magic)

Tara5 Oh: MICA has been doing some work on N-Body simulation in OpenSim in which you have access to the physics engine. How doe this open up new possibilities for astrophysics to use a general simulation platform in conjunction with super computers?

Makino Magic: Well, what Piet and other people have done so far is mainly to implement some simple models directly as simulation modules in Opensim. That itself is nice, but not quite enough to share and work on really high-end simulations. However, once we learn how to show things in SL/OpenSim, it *should be* not too difficult to connect the Opensim program directly to data visualization or analysis program which runs on any other computer, or actually connect it directly to a supercomputer or GRAPE.

Tara5 Oh: Could a general simulation platform like OpenSim ultimately become an operating system/user interface to super computers? And do you think this could bring a new kind of interactivity to number crunching?

Makino Magic: I think it could. That’s rather similar to the web browser becomming an general user interface for whatever programs people develop. Well, I think the important thing here is the possibility of people in different places working on a single dataset or simulation in really real-time.

Tara5 Oh: Yes it is really my big dream for virtual worlds, or rather for the free form, programmable, 3D collaborative space exemplified by OpenSim. to make the previously invisible world of software becomes visible in a shared interactive environment!

Makino Magic: Yes, not just dataset and simulation, but the possibility to share the program for simulation itself and to do the development in that way like pair- or “Extreme” programming, so more than two people physically far away that can really change the way we do research and development.

Tara5 Oh: Yes! What is you role in MICA?

Makino Magic: Well, at this point not much. I have been too busy with my real-life duties….

Tara5 Oh: What do you think MICA could achieve re integrating virtual worlds in astrophysics? And what to you think you colleagues who are the first evangelists of the use of virtual worlds in astrophysics may be overlooking?

Makino Magic: Well, at this point I cannot predict. But the simulation stuff implemented in OpenSim looks very promising

Tara5 Oh: Do you have any different ideas from Piet re the the role virtual worlds can play?

Makino Magic: Hmm, I must say I do not know all the details of Piet’s ideas, but for me the first step would be to use the environment to really do some collaborative research and discusssion, and we do not yet have simple tools to do so…

Tara5 Oh: And what are the most urgent tools you need now?

Makino Magic: A very first thing, which might be actually there, is to really work in multiple windows much in the same way as yo do in the pair-programming. You should be able to use one editor window, a graphic window to show result, etc, and should be able to edit one file….

Tara5 Oh: and secondly?

Makino Magic: Well, that is hard to predict… But clearly we need a “virtual” 3D “screen” , in which we visualize 3D results and see, walk into or fly.

Tara5 Oh: And is the N- Body simulation in OpenSim the first step to this last requirement?

Makino Magic: Yes, I think so. And that is useful not only for real research but for educational or public-outreach type stuff. Which is also important to get the attention of wide range of people, many of them are better programmers than astrophysists, like the people from Genkii who implemented the first N-body simulation in OpenSim.

Tara5 Oh: Do you have an OpenSim running in your own lab yet?

Makino Magic: Well, the server is running, but I have no client PC in my office yet (My windows PC in my offiice is toooo old and slow…)

Tara5 Oh: What is the contribution that being able to play with physicis engine so easily in OpenSim makes to N-Body simulation research?

Makino Magic: The most important thing is that you can show the result to people, including yourself, much easier than without OpenSim. well, hopefully…

Tara5 Oh: Piet said something to me that I was interested by: “If we really want to reverse simulating and visualizing, we can IMAGINE doing everything on the visualizer and then using a “simulations accelerator” (the opposite of a “graphics accelerator”) to get speed.” He went on to say, “similar techniques can be used in visualization as in simulations, actually, where also you don’t compute the force on one particle from all the billion other particles in a large simulation, so we have a lot of experience there already both conceptually and practically.”

Makino Magic: Hmm, Well, for me it is not too important where the simlation is done, but it must be reasonablly fast. Currently, really cutting-edge large-scale simulation can take months on the largest Cray or GRAPE.

On the other hand, lots of things can be done real-time, and my guess is Piet is mainly interested in those kind of things. There are many interesting problems for which we need to do simulations, but not the largest ones on supercomputers.

Tara5 Oh: So there are many interesting problems for simulation that do not require a super computer?

Makino Magic: Yes. for example, just by solving many three-body problems we can learn a lot, and can even publish an interesting paper in Nature (we did in 2004).

Tara5 Oh: What will scientific computing look like 25 years from now?

Makino Magic: Well, Piet has been in on that for more than 25 years, and I’m approaching to that many years, but it is hard to predict….

Tara5 Oh: But just some speculation, hehe!

Makino Magic: Well, one thing is that it’s becoming more and more difficult to develop large simulation programs. Much of the code we use now has been maintained for more than 20, or 30 years. In that sense, even though the hardware changes, the software changes very very slowly, and that is the problem.

Tara5 Oh: Do you think the intereactivity of virtual worlds could be useful in solving or preventing the problem (frequent in science) of 25 year old code still being in use?

Makino Magic: Well, interactivity itself might not be the solution, but the way SL/OpenSim works and the way it talks to other simulation programs might be able to change the view. In some (many) cases, the program to be solved is really simple, like one line of and equation of motion, resulting in millions of lines to be able to efficiently solve a partucular kind of initial condition with very limited computing power. I do not say there will be any real solution, but there may be some alternative approach.

Tara5 Oh: Do you think that a virtual astrophysics organization like MICA could apply and recieve funding for this kind of research on their own, or would they neeed a RL university partner?

Makino Magic: In the case of MICA it is not difficult to get RL partner, IAS or Drexel or whatever.

[The MICA steering meeting began to convene at this point]

Tara5 Oh: Have I missed asking you any important questions do you think?

Makino Magic: Hmm, no.

Tara5 Oh: Thanks so much Makino!

Makino Magic: Okay, this was fun! Thanks a lot!

Tara5 Oh: And I look forward to hearing about the continuing story in the future!

Makino Magic: Yes, bye for now.

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

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

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

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

Why is this Interoperability Initiative so important?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New Era for Virtual Worlds Begins!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steps Towards Content Interoperability: Interview with Zha Ewry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tish: So on the agenda?

Zha: Oh, very much so!

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

Content is already on the move in the Open Metaverse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves” Carl Jung

Philips Design’s Ideation Quest in Second Life (SLURL) explores how to effectively combine the emerging technology of virtual worlds with a customer-centric perspective of open innovation. Co-creation and open innovation are important concepts for Philips Design and part of their vision for design as a catalyst for a better future (see also my earlier post on Philanthropy By Design in Second Life and Designing Lifestyles for 2020 ).

Philips Design Co-creation Island and the Ideation Quest has a soft launch in Second Life on Monday June 16th, 12pm SLT. The aim is to start some communication and to attract people from the Second Life community and Philips Design friends group, and to introduce the island to people “as a place to cooperate and explore the future by design.” There is a schedule on the island showing when members of the Ideation Quest team will be available for questions and tours twice a week.

Josephine Green points out in her paper “Democratizing the future”:

At Philips Design, we believe that we have to challenge and re-think our approach to creating business and values for the future…….It seems that making sense and making sense in the future lies in understanding how people are evolving, engaging with them on a journey of discovery and exploration and co-creating and envisaging the future together.

Philips Design’s vision for co-creation probes deep into core human desires for happiness and love. Fast Company back in 2006 noted how under the leadership of Stefano Marzano Philips Design was taking on the great themes of human existence through design:

“How can we provide more happiness, a more relaxed life,” [Marzano] asks, “without actually entering the utopian idea that the world should change overnight?”

[Marzano] calls design nothing less than a “catalyst for a paradigm change,” the mechanism behind the improvement of the human condition.

I was fortunate enough to witness Josephine Green and Stefano Marzano discuss the theme of Love and Business during a panel at the 2007 Philips Simplicity Event at London’s Earls Court exhibition center. This was also one of the great “aha” moments for me re the potential of virtual worlds. And, while I rarely write about the engagement/enhancement of qualities of love as one of the most powerful aspects of the immersive 3D space, this is exemplified clearly in the most successful virtual world to date, Second Life.

While love has many forms, at it’s heart it is about a powerful two way connection. And virtual worlds because they create new possibilities for connection also create new possibilities for love, happiness, and our ability to improve the human condition.

It is clear how people’s love for their fellow humans and this planet is finding new ways to express itself in virtual worlds in all the amazing non profit work done by such groups as Virtual Africa, Global Kids and Non-Profit Commons in Second Life. But, the notion that business (for profit) can work through virtual worlds for a better future where love and happiness is center stage is a more radical notion in contemporary culture. Although, as Business Balls points out in this article, love and business were not always so far apart:

High finance and loving principles rarely appear in the same sentence now, but many regional banks, long since swallowed by the multi-nationals, were once Quaker businesses, run on caring principles.

So how does Ideation Quest engage these themes of play, happiness and love through linking business and customers in co-creation and innovation in Second Life?

I interviewed Dolf Wittkamper, Philips Design Senior Director (Second Life avatar Dolf Rhino) and Thomas Kohler, a Ph.D. candidate in Marketing and Innovation from the University of Innsbruck (Second Life avatar Rein Spire) last week. They have been developing the concept of playful co-creation that uses immersive 3D environment of Second Life to create collaborative relationships in a “playground of ideas.”

The Ideation Quest on the Philips Design Co-creation Island was conceptualized by Dolf and Thomas with Avaty and design support by Apple Antwerp (SL avatar name) and scripting by Dirty Mclean (SL avatar name). Also Slava Kozlov, Philips Design senior people researcher (Second Life avatar Centrasian Wise) supported the whole concept. He is the co-author of an interesting paper called, To Play or not to Play, very relevant in this context. And, Dr. Daniel Stieger and Dr. Johann Füller from HYVE played a substantial role in shaping the concept of the Ideation Quest.

The Ideation Quest explores people’s love of games, ideation and collaboration, for example, through the collection of points which are given by other avatars. An avatar on the Ideation Quest has a so-called ideation meter above their head which is the mechanism to keep score and “participants can collect points along the three dimensions that are considered relevant for innovation: creativity, collaboration, and expertise.”

But, both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards of play are vital to Ideation Quest.

Elements of The Ideation Quest

After an arrival experience where basic questions “Where am I? Why am I here, and what do I want to do?” are answered, the Ideation Quest moves into an inspirational scenario drawn from one of Philips Design’s award winning probes into a sustainable future through off the grid living. This is the heart of the quest that encourages individuals to explore and ideate on the topic together.

Philips Design presented, “Off the Grid: Sustainable Habitat 2020″ in Japan in the AXIS building. “Off the Grid” is part of the Philips Design Probe program and is a continuation of the Skin probe which was listed as “best innovation of 2007″ by Time Magazine and was recognized with a Red Dot “best of the best” award.

Dolf explained:

We call it a Design PROBE. It is in sense a provocation to think fundamentally differently about a topic. A probe is to start a discussion, to shift boundaries and it can ultimately be used to brief technologist to develop in certain directions too. The skin of the building is smart and on the inside there are 4 zones where treatment of water, air, waste and light is explained. We have more SKIN related probes on the site.

In Second Life there are a number of distinctive features to the Probes so users are given a chance to “directly” experience a creative concept, not by just reading about it, but through audio-visually interacting with it in virtual space.

Then the Ideation Quester moves on to the challenges in the third phase. These tasks aim to stimulate creativity by involving avatars in a number of activities.

The first challenging task a user faces is a so-called free word association. Participants are invited to react to a stimuli word and picture and according to how many associations users typed in they get the points. To overcome the second challenge users need to answer a set of knowledge questions and engage in a sentence completion task. Every object holds a multiple-choice question and is related to the question. The questions encourage the acquisition of domain-specific knowledge.

The third one is a brainstorming session. After 4 participants are seated, a brainstorming session is initiated.

The fourth is ideation. Avatars are invited to visualize and express their ideas. In the sandbox area participants can collaborate to innovate and interact in real time. The final task of this stage is for avatars to submit there ideas in the form of a 3D model, in writing or in any graphical representation through a web interface.

In the final stage of the quest participants are able to review comment and judge other submissions.

How does Ideation Quest reward all the participants in co-creation?

Tara5 Oh: What are the rewards for individual participants in being involved in a co-creation project like this?

Dolf Rhino: Good point. We believe we have to give before we can expect anything back. What we are giving here is sharing scenarios and ideas about a sustainanble living in 2020 and how a building could be disconnected from the grid. Water, light, waste and air are considered and collected through the skin of the building.

Rein Spire: Research has demonstrated that participants of co-creation are partly motivated by the process itself – meaning that they enjoy the creative process. The IQ aims toward facilitating such compelling experiences.

Dolf Rhino: But we think it is also important to celebrate the winner with some relevant present.

Tara5 Oh: And how do issues of IP work? I know Wikitecture has many meetings about thinking about ways to credit and recognize peoples roles in the design process?

Dolf Rhino: Our ongoing exploration and research on this topic has the purpose to clarify this. We think there are good solutions.

Rein Spire: One option would be to reward the ideas that will be commercialized. But as you say if more people are involved there needs to be a fair mechanism in place. In the case of the Ideation Quest the most active participants will be rewarded with material prizes but again the approach is directed to not only depend on extrinsic rewards but to intrinsically motivate customers.

Tara5 Oh: But the designs are not owned in common, i.e. participants will have to sign a contract that gives rights to Philips?

Rein Spire: Everybody can review the ideas – so its open – but Philips retains right to use, publish and eventually commercialize.

Tara5 Oh: Wouldn’t you think that with a more radical approach to IP you might get a higher lever of collaboration?

Dolf Rhino: In the exploration we want to try various ways. The beauty is that the only way it will work is when we have a model which is valuable for everyone.

Tara5 Oh: Is Ideation Quest aimed not so much in professional designers but at customers?

Rein Spire: I think all kinds of users can take on various roles and bring in different contributions. If, for instance, they are not designers they can still review and comment other ideas or designs.

Dolf Rhino: The focus now is a broad audience

Tara5 Oh: But the challenges of working out IP would be more complex in a community of professional designers wouldn’t it?

Rein Spire: I agree and a more flexible approach to IP would presumable facilitate participation.

Dolf Rhino: Yes, if that is the focus then we need to present and work differently.

Tara5 Oh: I suppose my question is have you though about taking this model of ideation into the level of high end design?

Dolf Rhino: We take one step at a time and the 2 elements: co creation and VWs are complex enough to master at this moment.

Tara5 Oh: Yes I agree! And would you say as Philips already does quite a lot of customer collaboration in RL and this is why you decided to start in this way?

Dolf Rhino: That’s right.

Rein Spire: I think the degree of a company’s involvement is a different for open source and for this kind of co-creation. To me this approach is about providing a platform to empower customers, to allow them to enter an active dialogue with products or companies they care about. On the one side companies are opening up their doors to involve participants and on the customer side, people want to be involved during all phases of value creation.

Picture of Philips Design Co-creation Island in Second Life

Next Steps

We can expect more in the future on the Philips Design Co-creation Island. It has amongst others 2 areas in progress Poeme Electronique and Next Simplicity.

There is also another Ideation Quest in Second Life – on the topic of the future motorbike experience together with KTM.

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.

]]> http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/04/21/the-federal-consortium-of-virtual-worlds/feed/ 0 http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/04/11/the-architects-of-the-open-source-metaverse-at-virtual-worlds-2008/ http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/04/11/the-architects-of-the-open-source-metaverse-at-virtual-worlds-2008/#comments Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:28:09 +0000 http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/04/11/the-architects-of-the-open-source-metaverse-at-virtual-worlds-2008/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the architecture of the Open Metaverse?

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

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

Topics discussed were:

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

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

Will the open metaverse have a virtual currency?

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

How will IP be protected and will obfustication be employed?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New Era of Business Tools and Business Process Modeling

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript of Discussion at the Open Source Virtual Worlds Round Table

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam Frisby: We will.

David Levine: Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Question (inaudible) Christian Westbrook I think!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prokofy Neva: No sounds like World of Warcraft…

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

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

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

Prokofy Neva: Sound inaudible

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

Discussion – sound inaudible…….

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

Inaudible question……

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

Roundtabler?: And there are low prim sims.

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

END…

HiPiHi is taking up the challenge of building a managed world with the emphasis on creating a strong virtual economy and a community built around the trading and creation of virtual goods, just at the moment when Linden Lab is beginning to make serious moves to an open grid (see here, here, and here).

While HiPiHi will not focus on real life integrations or enterprise applications, they will provide APIs for enterprises to do that themselves. They will be using the Chinese micro payment system Alipay, by alibaba which unlike PayPal does not have prohibitive costs for micro transactions.

IBM is a “solutions provider” for HiPiHi helping them design a systems architecture that will facilitate running a scalable world with a strong virtual economy. The early focus of HiPiHi is on building an architecture to support the virtual economy.

Toshitaka Jiku, HiPiHi’s new CTO and Executive Vice-President notes: “Virtual goods will be housed in a server for the purpose of creating a market place that will be our vision for an ebay for virtual worlds, so these virtual goods would be portable as opposed to having avatars being portable first.” IBM is also working with Linden Lab in the Architectural Working Group (see earlier post) on scaling and interoperability for Second Life and interoperability and avatar portability is part of the long term vision for HiPiHi.

And, HiPiHi is partnering with Intel to tap more CPU power. It has often been noted that one of the weaknesses of all current game engines and virtual worlds is they do not tap the power of the new CPUs.

HiPiHi has only 40,000 users so the focus of the public beta, which began April 2nd, will be on community building. While they have a future vision of interoperability with Second Life and other platforms based on the Linden Lab technology, the focus, for now, is on building a Chinese community. But they are experimenting with a dual naming system with avatars bearing English and Chinese names because international communication is very much in the HiPiHi vision of the future.

While HiPiHi plans for some mobile integration early on, IMing friends and inventory management for example, the emphasis at the moment is building the community inworld (also note Second Life’s recent integration with mobile, “Samsung Unveils Second Life..” ). But Toshitaka Jiku, HiPiHi’s new CTO is one of the first to develop a mobile interface for SL. And, Jiku comes from NGI the Venture Capital company that is also backing 3Di, so look for interesting innovation with mobile integration in the future.

While HiPiHi is commonly seen as a mere Second Life clone, the work they are doing with IBM and Intel on the system architecture is hoped to produce some valuable innovation. They are also researching the innovations of realXtend’s client. HiPiHi has a close relationship with OpenSim through their connection to 3Di and with Adam Fisby’s company, Deep Think, that is opening offices in Shanghai. It will be interesting to see how these relationship develop over time. Xu Hui and Philip Rosedale met last year and there is a long term vision of cooperation possible. These connections if they blossomed into cooperation and full interoperability would create a very interesting step forward for positive global development through virtual worlds.

Interview With Xu Hui, CEO of HiPiHi

Xu Hui, CEO of HiPiHi with Toshitaka Jiku, HiPiHi’s new CTO and Executive Vice-President

Bjorn Lee, Senior Manager, Marketing & International Business Development for HiPiHi, did an excellent job of translating for this interview, not only with Chinese and English but with the skillful and patient way he worked with me to find the essence of some of my long stream of consciousness questions! Bjorn also contributed many insights, and Toshitaka Jiku stopped by with some interesting insights into HiPiHi’s direction.

Tish Shute: Please could you tell me about your vision for the future of virtual worlds?

Xu Hui: The global virtual world industry will be undergoing a revolution over the next few years. What HiPiHi, Second Life and the other virtual worlds have done in the past few years has really been just setting the stage, exposing the world and educating on the possibilities – kind of like a proof of concept for what virtual worlds can do and can’t do. The goal this year for most virtual platforms will be to build system architectures that can truly scale for a massively-concurrent user base, in addition to inter-operability.

Tish Shute: I know that HiPiHi has formed a patnership with IBM. Could you tell me more about this?

Xu Hui: We are working very closely with IBM in terms of building new technical infrastructure for our platform. What this means is that we will specifically be collaborating very closely on aspects such as redesigning our architecture.

Tish Shute: RealXtend has been working on interoperability of virtual worlds with “real life” and working on meshes and facilitating 3D imports. Have you been in contact with realXtend yet?

Xu Hui: We are actively researching what realXtend is doing, as with other exciting virtual world technologies; and will seriously considering integrating them with our new system architecture.

Tish Shute: What is the strategy of HiPiHi re building a community of content developers?

Xu Hui: This is one of the focuses for HiPiHi this year. We are looking into incentive systems for content creation, including monetary and non-monetary forms. For the former, our approach will be to facilitate universal trade and have a secondary market for people to exchange their virtual goods, their creations, their applications, and so on. But in China, the model will be slightly different initially as we favor an ecosystem approach where we work with third-party providers of virtual economy functions and services. An example could be in payment systems, where instead of reinventing the wheel, we could explore ways to facilitate transactions conducted through Alipay, often regarded as the Paypal for China.

Tish Shute: I am a Mac user and, of course, I am really interested to know when there will be a Mac Interface and easy to use english version?

Bjorn Lee: I am a fellow Mac user too, along with an increasing number of colleagues. So do rest assured we have an internal Mac evangelist team! Since December, we have had a very basic English version but our lack of bilingual staff has affected the development of a satisfactory support system, not to mention interface only for English users.

Tish Shute: How big is the market in China for Mac?

Bjorn Lee: It is about 1%. But of course it is out of a larger population base here in China. Despite their relative lack of scale among China users, Mac users here are very enthusiastic, grassroots, and very tightly knit. Macbook Air ads are playing heavily across Beijing too and have garnered strong brand awareness among the younger set of Chinese consumers.

Tish Shute: What are some of the goals for the public beta which is starting in early April?

Xu Hui: The Public Beta will begin April 2. For public beta what’s interesting is this dual naming system that we are developing for the very first time. The first phase is for the current Private Beta users to migrate to the new naming system before we release that naming system to the public.

We expect a fair amount of proactive user feedback in the initial days, as with all things new. But I think it’s a good step forward because it will try to bring together the English and the Chinese speaking worlds. In a “first” for the virtual world, this new naming system displays both your English (that we call international name) and your Chinese name on top of your avatar. Across many in-world interactions such as chat, social networking, and for future commerce , we are trying to break down the language barrier in the virtual world.

But we are trying to do something to move forward in trying to foster multi-cultural interaction, with the foreign audience and local Chinese audience. Because there’s a lot of demand from local audiences here who want to internationalize and meet people from overseas and the same feedback is coming from our foreign users such as Suezanne C. Baskerville who seems very keen on learning some Chinese. She would like to put some Chinese and English on her avatar too – it’s like a social “code”, you start putting Chinese words in your avatar and so you say that you know I’m friendly and I’m willing to speak to Chinese users. And so too for the Chinese because with the English names up there it doesn’t look so foreign to the foreign audience.

In the later part of the year after our new system architecture is up, we will begin to consider micro payment systems. But because we are migrating to this new infrastructure, the initial stages of the public beta will just be to get more people to use the tools and continue to gather feedback.

Tish Shute: “What is the business model for HiPiHi?”

Xu Hui: Our platform is oriented more for the individual users, that is the residents as opposed to the enterprises and the corporate residents. A lot of the features we are adding and a lot of the feedback that we’re taking is user centric. But, as for our relationship with corporate residents, we will be opening a series of programs and that includes opening our API to allow development on our platform by the enterprises. We think of it as a self-service approach, in the form of open APIs and maybe incentive programs for enterprises to kind of drive this for themselves. But we will design and customize the platform more according to our core user group which are the non-corporate users.

Tish Shute: What is HiPiHi’s relation to other virtual world initiatives, e.g., Entropia’s and other virtual world start ups in China?

Xu Hui: My starting point in responding to this is the definition of a virtual worlds in our company’s opinion is an open-ended user-directed environment. User-directed means that users would drive the content creation, the development of not just their own content, but also feed back to the company, and what they hope to see on a platform level. Open-ended also in the sense that they can have a freer rein in creating and managing their creations.

Concerning that kind of concept, as it plays right now in China, we are the only company that really does that. A lot of the other initiatives that have sprouted recently from the interested companies or other startups in this space have more of what we classify as virtual communities which means that they place real limits and constraints on the users ability to create, and actually have more control over their lifestyles in these worlds.

We will welcome other players as they enter too. We actually welcome the entry of others into this ecosystem because it helps this ecosystem grow and mature faster. And, it can only be good for the users to have so many different companies push out their products and try to reach out to them. So it’s good because then they’ll be able to make an intelligent choice and see how fulfilling a virtual lifestyle they want.

Tish Shute: How do you plan to expand beyond China and how will HiPiHi differ in other countries? I know Linden Lab has met some interesting legal challenges as they have expanded globally.

Xu Hui: HiPiHi will be the sole platform operator for China. As for regions outside China we will take a partnership approach to finding local companies which will then operate this platform. They will be licensed and hence operate this world on our behalf. Thus they will be entitled to benefits commercially and so will have to be responsible to bear the legal costs and challenges. This will reduce the amount of legal burden on our side. A US based operator of the HiPiHi platform in US will certainly have to follow US laws to be entitled to collect revenues but also they will have to handle US based law suits.

Tish Shute: Will HiPiHi have a strong ID verification system tying virtual identities to real identities as a way to try and control griefers etc?

Xu Hui: This question itself doesn’t address how we think about identity. First, we are not going to have a very strong link between real world identity and virtual identity because we feel that our focus would really be to improve accreditation of what is popularly known as a reputation system for virtual identities. So we will focus on building an attractive incentive program for avatars to view their virtual identities in our virtual world as opposed to saying that you’re going to tie this virtual identity very tightly to your real identity.

We want to create mechanisms to facilitate and encourage residents to improve their in-world reputation. But it doesn’t mean we’re not going to manage disruptive behavior such as griefing, which is already known to create problems for virtual worlds like Second Life.

We will have a monitoring mechanism for these troublemakers in our virtual world. But our intention is to let the actual policing be done by residents themselves, through self-organized groups and features we provide for them. .

Tish Shute: The next generation of the Linden Lab grid architecture will separate avatar identity from what constitutes their environment. Will you be going in this direction too.

Toshitaka Jiku: (HiPiHi’s new CTO) Our server architecture will have a different focus. Our server architecture picks out virtual goods as an item that we will separate from the others in the sense that we are going to place them on different servers first. So virtual goods will be housed in a server for the purpose of creating a market place that will be our vision for an “ebay for virtual worlds”, so these virtual goods would be portable as opposed to having avatars being portable first. These are just our first steps and it does also mean that avatars would be housed in a separate server. But the focus right now is to make virtual goods portable and enable the virtual economy.

Tish Shute: How is HiPiHi going to deal with issues of protecting IP rights? This issue has become quite a difficult one in Second Life.

Xu Hui: This is a very big question. I am just going to lay out some basic principals. We like the concepts of giving back the rights of a media creation and returning it back to the creator, enhancing the motivation and incentive systems for people to share their creations and so on. A lot of our influences come from Creative Commons – that is the first part. The second part is when IP rights are infringed we understand where we stand in the whole legislative environment. We are not a legislative body, nor can we judge or rule on certain issues of conflict. Hence what we can do as platform is to provide the data but when it comes to actually making decisions in the legislative environment we are going to rely on third-party intermediaries. This could involve bringing in real-world law makers and courts to uphold some of these IP right because we can’t do that ourselves. So we do face limits somewhat similar to Second Life.

Tish Shute: What are your goals with IBM and Intel?

Xu Hui: IBM to us is really a solutions company. They have expertise in almost every single aspect of the IP sector which makes them a very good partner for us because we considering the architecting of our systems across all areas, client, the backend, algorithms and so on. They can help because they are pretty broad in their understanding of all IP areas.

But Intel has a little bit more focus. Intel is the father of the CPU. They are still the best right now in their understanding of CPU performance and we believe they are going to continue to lead this sector. So when we work with them it is going to evolve around the understanding of the CPU unit – what kind of features and abilities are we able to extract and are going to be useful for virtual worlds. I think this is something many virtual worlds have not focused on – that is extracting value from the CPU. And where better to find out how than from the makers themselves which is Intel. So we work across a broad spectrum with IBM, but with Intel we work in the vertical, and we drill very very deep.

The social consequences of the architectural decisions that will take us into a future of openness in immersive software are potentially vast. Open immersive software is poised to begin to play a disruptive role in the next generation of the internet, and decisions about its design may turn out to be very important ones for all of us.

EbenMoglen Euler the Second Life avatar of Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center), and Zero Linden (Mark Lentczner, Linden Lab), Neas Bade (Sean Dague, IBM, Linux Technology Center), and Zha Ewry (David Levine, IBM Research) met in Second Life last Sunday to discuss crucial issues of open architecture for immersive software in a discussion on Intellectual Property and Privacy/Identity in Open Virtual Worlds facilitated by John Jainschigg and I that kicked off Life 2.0 Summit Spring ‘08 (more details on the panelists here).

It was, I think, a landmark conversation. And, with the permission of United Business Media, here is an exclusive first chance to hear it, if you missed the live event Sunday.

Audio here, © United Business Media.

Picture below of the panel members from left to right, Tara5 Oh (moderator), Zero Linden, EbenMoglen Euler, Neas bade, Zha Ewry, and John Zhaoying.

Open Virtual World platforms are just beginning to get on the radar. But open software is clearly the path to the future and as Philip Rosedale (founder of Linden Lab) has said several times re the complete opening of Second Life software (the client is already open), “Only open will win!”

In two weeks, I will be part of a round table at Virtual Worlds 2008 in the new enterprise track. This round table aims to give people an opportunity to see a variety of implementations of open source virtual world platforms and to learn a bit more about the individual platforms presented, and what they are trying to achieve. Adam Frisby of OpenSim, Nicole Yankelovich of Sun’s Project Wonderland, Jani Pirkola of RealXtend, Remy Malan of Qwaq will be the co-facilitators

Avatar Rights!

At the heart of the discussion with Eben Moglen about freedom and openness in immersive software were some propositions about avatar rights. And, as Zero Linden explained, the new open architecture of the next generation of the Linden Lab grid crucially separates avatar identity from what constitutes their environment. Separating the production of identity from the material substrate is, Eben Moglen explained, at the core of avatar rights. (For a technical view of the next generation of architecture for Second Life see the first draft of Second Life Grid Open Grid Protocol a.k.a. SLGOGP, and for more on these protocols see Tao Takashi’s (Christian Scholz in RL) blog. where the stream for yesterday’s Architectural Working Group 2 meeting held in Second Life is posted.)

Pictures below of Zero Linden (left), Second Life avatar of Mark Lentczner (right), Linden Lab.

Eben Moglen put the fundemental issue of rights in immersive software very eloquently at the start of the discussion. I have transcribed the beginning of this discussion but to see how the thoughts developed through an in depth probing of the issues, you will need to listen to the audio here.

Eben:

I think we have an interesting and powerful problem to put our minds to with respect to want it means to think about freedom and openness in immersive software. The free software movement which I spent a lot of time trying to understand and in trying to assist took for granted that the person who needed to have rights in software was the person who got a copy of a binary, and that his rights in the binary should include the right to understand, and to study, which implied access to the source code, to modify, improve and share.

Now the reason for getting into OpenSim and open virtual worlds is to achieve some of the same kinds of social consequences that the free software movement was trying to achieve including innovation that can be shared by everybody that innovates and the value of technology in commons. But, because this software is immersive software we have another set of values to take into account which are closer to rights for users who don’t have a copy of the binary, or at any rate, whether they have a copy of the program on the client side and may posses some of the code derived from the server is sort of less important than the fact they are inside the software and if they are not free inside the software, they are substantially unfree.

That led me to ask some questions about what it means for an avatar to exist as a beneficiary of the freedom that the user is supposed to get in relation to software. It seemed to me that from there one could begin to try to deduce some rules about how the open virtual worlds have to operate. The most important one seemed to me to be that there is a right to continuity. To have the avatars existence and accumulated experience trapped inside one Terms of Services contract raises the the possibility of what lawyers call unconscionability. That after a while you have so much accumulated value in the avatar that the Terms of Service can be changed on you in a way that you can’t very well resist.

That implied, it seems to me, that if the spaces in the virtual worlds are to be regarded as open they have to be contractually open. It has to be possible to move between them without being artificially constrained by Terms of Service Agreement. That also seemed to me to imply something about the question of what it was one carried from place to place. And it seemed apparent to me that in the process of traveling from place to place an avatar has to carry some rule set as was true in many parts of the world before the modern era of the Nation State. The law that you obeyed traveled along with you. And it seemed to me that we were talking about a situation very much like that.

If you move an avatar in open virtual space from one part of the grid to another or from one grid to another governed by different servers one is not in a position to be asked to surrender ones’ sense of fairness or ones’ understanding about what can be done as a consequence of standing in a particular place. And so I reasoned my way to the conclusion that we had to provide an infrastructure for both declaring persistent preferences and expectations with respect to treatment.

Those were the lines of thought which led me to the propositions that Tara5 explained. And they seemed to me merely propositions in search of simplification. I feel as though I’m looking for some axioms, like Richard Stallman’s four freedoms in the free software movement’s genesis to explain what it is that we need to do as we open the space up.

Zha Ewry:

Reacting on that just a little bit, one of the things that came to mind when I heard Eben talk back in December is something Zero actually said when we did the kick-off, back in I guess September now, for the Architecture Working Group and some of the inter-op work which was, he used a phrase I liked a lot which is “an avatar bill of rights.” It’s what are the expectations an avatar should have in a virtual world. I thought that was a very compelling way of expressing it.

Zero Linden:

I believe at the initial Architecture Working Group which is Linden Lab’s sort of open forum for developing an open protocol set we used the term – looking for “an avatar’s bill of rights.”

I think I would respond to those two thoughts that are quite good. In one case I can give you a different approach for why we came there, and the other I can give you a simplification, which I think you’re looking for. In the first case, when I looked at viewing what would have to exist in an open virtual space, and the value of immersion. Strictly looking at it from the point of view of what made this space work. Granted here I’m a technologist not a lawyer so I’ve perhaps a different view, but surprisingly the same conclusion, is in fact the ability for you to identify and for you to to associate so closely with your avatar that led me to posit as a fundamental aspect of how we build this future open protocol that you must think of it as avatar portability.

It must be a fundamental right that users are in control of their identity not the services which help provide the existence and the immersion. That’s pretty radical thought actually, at least in terms of technology, because it is so much easier to architect, and so much more quote unquote natural to build systems which work another way. Witness every single web-site where you create your own account on every single web-site, it’s much easier for each web-site to do that than it is for web-sites to understand that they somehow agree to opt into a protocol in which you can control your identity.

In virtual world services, we have to have a world in which your avatar and your identity are in control of the user not matter what the service provide is. So what is going on in the AWG and the structure of the future protocol is the surprising separation at the server side, at the internet side, of those services that provide aspects of you identity. And by separating those out, and by building the entire protocol based on a mutual understanding between those two sets of servers, we enable users to choose servers to represent their identity that meet with their needs, trusts and ideals and to still interact with other servers that provide land with other things.

Right now when we are standing on this piece of land, the server we are standing on is both providing our identities as well as providing the land. And if you come to visit this piece land you basically have to trust what this server decides your avatar can do. In the future open that we are deciding we separate those notions. There is a server which represents your identity that you have chosen, and there is a server that represents the land that the landowner has chosen. And, we embed in those systems the negotiation between them.

Eben:

That is beautifully elegant, I have to say. That does indeed make an enormous difference………(to continue please go to the audio here).

Also see Sean Dague’s (IBM and OpenSim) interesting post on his blog that highlights one of the key freedoms Eben discussed – the freedom to leave.

“freedom to leave”, an open-standards based assurance that users can move their data easily between interoperable platforms and services.

Sean notes:

Today, if you decide to leave any virtual world platform (even OpenSim), you pretty much have to leave you data behind. I think that one of the features people will be looking for in the virtual worlds of tomorrow is the same freedom to leave that they get from any standard web or mail infrastructure provider today. Part of what has made Google successful in the application hosting space is by ensuring it’s easy to leave the platform.

One of the biggest reasons I left LiveJournal was that it was hard to leave, and the longer I built up content in that environment, the harder it was going to be for me to get it out.

Also see the coverage of the panel at SLNN.

Mitch Kapor – Second Life 2.0

In his keynote at Life 2.0 Summit Spring ‘08, Mitch Kapor predicted that virtual worlds will become a very important part of corporate strategies for adapting to a world defined by global warming. Kapor the recent board chair of Linden Lab (now a board member), chair and founder of the Open Source Applications Foundation; co-founder of the Electronic Frontier and Mozilla Foundations; and the creator of Lotus 1-2-3, the spreadsheet that revolutionized enterprise computing in the 80s spoke about his current work to enhance the user interface for virtual worlds, which he likened to being in the DOS stage now. His vision to make virtual worlds useful and accessible to all is backed by work on in his own lab. He noted that videos of some of these experiments will be available on You Tube in a couple of weeks. See Hiro’s epic post for more. Kapor also made some comments re the open sourcing of virtual worlds.

I am personally very encouraged at the progress being made with OpenSim and open source components of a virtual world eco-system- some people inside the company at Linden may feel threatened by this. But my personal view all along is the most important thing that can happen is to have the largest most vibrant innovative ecosystem for virtual worlds as possible. And that means something that is open and interoperable. One wants to have the biggest pie not a little slice of a small pie. And similarly I know that there are a lot of people interested in avatar portability or open avatar in the company.

This last remark I think is clearly supported by the number of Lindens that came to the annual open Architectural Working Group meeting. I attended and there were indeed a bunch of Lindens present. The picture below is from Tao Takashi’s (Christian Scholz in RL) blog.

We have built the technology for monitoring almost everything, almost everywhere and we are making 99% of it open-source. Thanx to Bruce Sterling who inspired us, we called our technology “OpenSpime.” This is a concrete opportunity to monitor the earth, and everyone on this planet will be able to contribute to this.

OpenSpime have prepared a concept video of CO2 monitoring (still from the video above) and Google maps mashup via their OpenSpime infrastructure. For more see, co-founder, David Orban’s post OpenSpime: What do you know about your planet?

Instrumentation versus Surveillance

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.
Cory Doctorow, Craphound.com, boingboing.net

OpenSpime and SL Data Viz project (a project in Second Life “where people can contribute, review and copy open-source data viz tools” which OpenSpime will participate in) are taking up the challenge that Bruce Sterling made at end of his visionary book, Shaping Things. Sterling gave an imperative to humankind to start to make “decent technology” – social software entities that can answer questions. Questions about our world. Questions about objects. Not the profit-centric questions – serious questions. (Shaping Things).

The protagonists of this new era of social software – the narrators of the instrumented world to come – are Spimes.

Sterling invented the term by compressing ‘space’ and ‘time’. Spimes are aware of their environment, they know where they are, and when they are, and keep track of some parameter around them. Sensing, memory, and ubiquitous communication enable spimes to accurately map the physical world around them. The progressive saturation of the world with spimes is creating what is called the Internet of Things.

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.

OpenSpime is doing it! SL Data Viz project is doing it!

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. This is the third time I have posted this link but Spimes deserve all the air play they can get!

Our technology enables individuals and corporations to better understand their environment, through the use of a series of GPS-enabled sensors. We provide a set of open APIs and communication protocols to manage the data collected.

See an interview with the founders of OpenSpime here.

With free hardware, free software, open APIs and communication protocols, OpenSpime’s business model is about the provisioning of the SpimeID identification numbers for the trusted communication of validated data streams between spimes and the OpenSpime servers.

Here are David’s responses to questions about the revenue model:

The revenue model is based on the sale (in large quantities to the hardware makers) of the certified SpimeIDs. Anybody can build spimes that conform to our open specifications, but if you want us to validate the data that your spime collects, and aggregate it together with other trusted sources, than you have to pay €1 per device to get the ID. Ah, and we already have LOIs for several hundred thousand IDs to be built in devices. [smile]

The estimates are that there will be ten or more spimes per person in the developed countries within ten years. That is approximately 25 billion spimes, and counting, since by 2020 the number of people who live in countries we define developed will also increase. That’s a
market for you! And we want to define the way the data generated is managed.

What comes after humans twittering to each other? Spimetalk. And spimetalk is going to be several orders of magnitude more intense than any human2human or human2machine communication before that.

From Spimes to Mirror Worlds

Agents, avatars and spimes will eventually hang out together in Virtual Worlds, interacting in real time in networked virtual environments built of live data and 3D info machines.

Melanie Swan points out:

Virtual Worlds have been used for architectural builds and interaction and the next obvious step is making them alive with data, streaming in data and representing it visually. Data visualization in Second Life is starting to take off with an open-source movement to make open-source building-block tools available to the community and developers and end users creating specific-purpose enterprise and science applications. There is a community wiki and a “Data Visualization” group in Second Life.

The picture above is of a Bashiba Panorama – “a commercially available ambient data panorama that dynamically reflects the overall “mood” of a rich information environment. The so-called “data atmosphere” reacts in real-time multivariable changes (e.g. stock market data), that are then mapped to visual counterparts (e.g. ocean waves, sun strength, wind speed, rain). the resulting information display can be interpreted ‘without cognitive effort’.”

“once the stock market opens, our 3D simulation comes to life, & people start ‘breathing’ business information.”

The streaming Bashiba Panorama in Second Life is an experiment in collaboration with Melanie Swan (MS Futures Group) and powered by the Ohio University VITAL Laboratory streaming server (many thanks to Dr. Chang Liu + Stephen Carroll). Look for Bashiba to come to Second Life in full immersive 3D!

For videos of Bashiba in SL see here and here.

3D Command Centers the killer app of the 3D Internet

A Mobile Tactical Data Comm Unit built by Illuminous Beltran in OpenSim

Data visualization will develop increasingly into and become inextricable from operation/command centers – the 3D information machines that will reinvent the relationship between humans and the up to now invisible but most crucial layer of modern society – software. For more on Illuminous Beltran’s, (a.k.a Michael Osias, IBM) virtual operation centers/command centers in Second Life/OpenSim see here.

These 3D command centers are being used for energy management, virtual network operations centers, and for building automation (see the work of Eolus). But, as long as our society is wedded to war, the “killer app” of the 3D internet will also be a killer app in more ways than one. The instrumentation of society has grown up hand in hand with surveillance and military technology. But it is up to us, as a society, to grow the peaceful and people centered aspects of this technology.

The nascent spiming technology of RFID had its roots in military innovation.

In 1946 Léon Theremin invented an espionage tool for the Soviet Union which retransmitted incident radio waves with audio information. Sound waves vibrated a diaphragm which slightly altered the shape of the resonator, which modulated the reflected radio frequency. Even though this device was a passive covert listening device, not an identification tag, it has been attributed as a predecessor to RFID technology. The technology used in RFID has been around since the early 1920s according to one source (although the same source states that RFID systems have been around just since the late 1960s).^[2][3][4][5]

Similar technology, such as the IFF transponder invented by the United Kingdom in 1939, was routinely used by the allies in World War II to identify aircraft as friend or foe. Transponders are still used by military and commercial aircraft to this day. (for more see Wikipedia on RFID)

But, Gelertner’s vision in, Mirror Worlds 1991, is the transformation of computers into seeing machines that will empower people to understand and work with the machinery of their society. And with projects like OpenSpime everyone can contribute to the task of asking important questions about our world. And as these questions are increasingly incorporated in virtual operation centers, we will be able to interact with the previously invisible machinery of our modern world – tinker with it, hang out in it with other avatars, and agents, and command it in new ways.

Life2.0 Summit Spring ’08

Life 2.0 is the leading event on virtual world application and business development. Produced three times yearly by CMP in Second Life, the six-day virtual event draws a fully-registered, global audience of over 1000 software architects, creatives, CMOs and key executives seeking to harness the power of virtual reality for marketing, application creation, commerce, education, and to connect with the Net’s fastest-growing, smartest, most-engaged communities.

Also check out CMP’s John Jainschigg’s (John Zhaoying in Second life) post, “Life 2.0 – As green as Five Brazilian Households,” which demonstrates “that importing certain kinds of real-world activities into virtual reality saves a bagload of carbon. Or put another way, that it enables us to enjoy the benefits of global human community at small cost to the planet.”

Eben Moglen to join IPPI panel at Life 2.0 in SecondLife

The Kickoff Symposium will Discuss Opensource, IP and Privacy/Identity in Virtual Worlds On Sunday, March 16, at 1 PM PST.

Life 2.0′s IPPI (Intellectual Property, Privacy and Identity) symposium will kick off with a rousing panel discussion on Opensource, IP and Privacy in Virtual Worlds — including special guest Eben Moglen, Director, Chair and Chief Counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. Moglen, professor of law and legal history at Columbia, is a pioneer of the opensource movement, former general counsel for the Free Software Foundation, and one of the architects of version 3 of the GNU GPL.

The panel (still growing!) will be moderated by Tish Shute (Tara5 Oh), who blogs on virtual worlds (hey that’s me!), and CMP’s John Jainschigg (John Zhaoying).

Also see, A Conversation with Eben Moglen on Second Life.

There will be a Data Viz panel at Life 2.0, Monday, March 17th, 2pm to 3pm PST, organized by Melanie Swan (more on this soon). See the impressive list of data visualization tools that SL Data Viz project has already gathered together below.

Directory of Data Visualization Tools in SL:

(excerpted from the sldataviz wiki)

Interactive Data Exhibits:

• Embodiment Island Data Visualization Exhibit Hall, SLurl, contact Mark Dubin/ThreeDee Shepherd to exhibit material
• NOAA real-time U.S. weather sim, SLurl
• Daden Prime real-time U.K. weather sim, SLurl
• Daden Prime real-time LAX Air Traffic Data, SLurl

Tools – scientific:

• CAIA – Cheminformatic Assisted Image Array visualization laboratory. Status: Available to view (Gus Rosania/Caia Alter), SLurl
• Hiro’s Molecule Rezzer – Rezzes molecules from a notecard. Status: OpenSLedware. (Andrew Lang/Hiro Sheridan) ONREZ SLurl
• Histogram (20 period, real-time, on-demand stock market data), SLurl. Status: Open-source download available (Melanie Swan/Xantha Oe and Eloise Pasteur)
• Orac – Takes smi, InChI, or inchikey as input, queries three web services and rezzes the returned minimized structure in SL. Status: Avaliable upon request. (Andrew Lang/Hiro Sheridan)
• StoryMachine – Generic visualization tool for dynamic interactions. Status: In development (Peter Miller/Graham Mills), SLurl
• StoryMachine – PubMed Search. Status: In development (Peter Miller/Graham Mills), SLurl
• Protein Rezzer Toolkit – In-world rezzing of 3D protein backbone structures based on specially parsed PDB files. Status: In development (Peter Miller/Graham Mills; based on scripts by Troy McLuhan).

Tools – enterprise:

• Airline flight booking – connecting Second Life to a SAP NetWeaver system to create a 3-D Business Process (Bjoernaeon). Also see Craig Cmehil’s blog.
  
• Green Phosphor, New Jersey, USA – enterprise data visualization applications (Ben Lindquist/Arkowitz Jonson, David Cooper/Coop Upshaw)