I was very fortunate to be in San Francisco last week for the Web 2.0 Summit 2008 co-presented by O’Reilly Media and TechWeb (see my upcoming post “Web 2.0 Meets World 2.0: The Civilization of Data”). But I was doubly fortunate to spend the historic election night, the day before the Summit, at 543 Howard Street – where Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor are incubating the future.

In the picture above: Chandler, Freada and Mitch (who is keeping one eye, perhaps, on fivethirtyeight.com).

543 Howard is a large, child and dog friendly building South of Market. It is home to several organizations all connected with one another that Freada and Mitch founded.  Some are non- profit and some for-profit, but all share a common kind of value framework – trying to make a difference in the world.

This incubator of the future links business development to building a better society. It is a community of entrepreneurs and social activists answering the call, in a daily practice, to the question at the heart of the Web 2.0 Summit.

how the Web—its technologies, its values, and its culture—might be tapped to address the world’s most pressing limits. Or put another way—and in the true spirit of the Internet entrepreneur—its most pressing opportunities.

Like the Web 2.0 Summit, 543 Howard Street is deeply rooted in the hallmarks of Web 2.0 culture where “the Web’s greatest inventions are, at their core, social movements”  (for more on the Summit’s Web Meets World theme see the intro to the Web 2.0 Summit here).

And 543 is a hot house of thought leaders, and world class entrepreneurs.

The picture above is Bettina Neuefeind (married to Larry Lessig – Change Congress). Bettina and volunteer, Roy Bowers, look as though they are feeling confident shortly before Barak Obama became President Elect.

Bettina, a photographer (see her election photoset) and attorney, took leave from her job as an attorney to work as Volunteer Office Manager for the SF Obama for America HQ back in September.  Bettina organized an overflow phone bank at 543 Howard during the November 1-4 Get Out the Vote (GOTV) .

Freada encapsulated the mission of 543 Howard to me:

So it is about empathy, It is about building understanding and it is about building bridges between the non-profit world and the for profit world, between the geeks and the social justice types between lots of different types of groups.  Everybody is smart, everybody has a big heart and everybody is working on great things. So we are really trying to work together and build community.

I will pick up more on this theme of “empathy” in my next post. I think Freada’s emphasis on empathy highlights something that will, perhaps, be key to Web Meets World thinking:  Networked intelligence which is at the core of today’s Web and, increasingly, it will become integrated with emotional intelligence. This  was a theme I saw developed in some interesting ways at Web 2.0 Summit.

Mitch explained more about the organizations at 543:

There are several organizations all connected with one another, some non- profit, some for-profit but all efforts that Freada and Mitch founded. There is Level Playing Field Institute – an activist non-profit – which Freada started that runs scholarship and leadership development programs for underrepresented students of color and is involved in reducing bias in the work place. Also there is The Mitchell Kapor Foundation which has grant programs in education, the environment and voting access.

We did a whole big program this year to help organizations in terms of people’s right to vote.  And on election day we have been hosting one of the National Call Centers for the Election Protection Coalition. We have room full of volunteer attorneys hooked up to phones connected to 866 Our Vote. So we are part of this national system where people can refer any problem they are having voting.

The Election Protection Center has been in the works for months.  We had to get tied into their 800 number.  There is a lot of set up for that. Election Protection is strictly non-partisan.  As you noticed,  when we were together there, I had to take off my Obama T-Shirt when I went in the room.  It is like a polling place you can’t have any political signs.

Also for the last few days here, we have been hosting a call center phone bank. Obama For America ran out of room in their office space in SF and we had some extra space. So they have their own cell phones and charges, and we have been making the space available so they can make get out the vote calls in the final days of the campaign.

Everyone was quite nervous at the beginning of the night!

I went into Second Life (Mitch Kapor was the Angel Investor for Linden Lab) to find people were anxiously watching there too – on Capitol  Hill.  Capitol Hill was built by Steve Nelson from Clear Ink. Steve’s Interactive Polling Map is only one of a number of interesting projects he has pioneered in Second Life.  See New World Notes for just how big the victory celebrations got in Second Life.

But we all relaxed when the results started coming in.  Freada gave me a signed copy of her book “Giving Notice: Why the Best and the Brightest Leave the Workplace and How you Can Help Them Stay” Thank you Freada!  The beaded Apple II and Lotus 1-2-3 box in the picture below were commissioned by Freada.

Mitch continued with the story of 543:

We also have start-up activities that I do. So there is an internet start-up called Foxmarks.  It is a very popular extension for the Firefox web browser.  It synchronizes bookmarks and passwords and will soon do lots of other things as well. There are also some other new startups that are being incubated here.  They are not exactly in stealth mode but they like to control their own PR.

I met Ross Fubini of CubeTree. He is the person with the laptop in the picture above where everyone is nervously watching results at the beginning of the night. But, as CubeTree still in Private Beta, my lips are sealed!

543 incubates a set of diverse projects, Mitch explained:

Then there is Change Congress which is a guest here It is a non-profit started by Larry Lessig and Joe Trippi that is trying to secure reforms on congress financing and an end of ear marks and things like that.

Larry Lessig (Creative Commons) gave a brilliant High Order Bit on Change Congress at Web 2.0 Summit. Creative Commons was also housed in 543 before it got too big and found its own space.

Several commentators on the Web 2.0 Summit have described a shift from Web 2.0 culture to World 2.0.

Thomas Clayburn’s post for Information Week, headlines, “Web 2.0 Summit: President Elect Obama Typifies World 2.0.” Clayburn reports on the discussion with New York Magazine writer John Heilemann, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, and political strategist Joe Trippi who illuminate how the internet and social networking were key to the Obama victory.  Here is the panel discussion.  It is, certainly, one of most interesting conversations at the summit.

Changing the World: “Fairness matters”

ZDNet reports that the message of Web 2.0 Summit was “It’s Up To Tech To Save The World.” And, Larry Brilliant of Google.org stressed  “ideas, flexibility and entrepreneurship” are at the heart of this endeavor.

Freada Kapor’s Level Playing Field Institute, “promotes innovative approaches to fairness in higher education and workplaces by removing barriers to full participation.”  This initiative takes up the challenge of making sure, that if tech is going to change the world, we tackle the obstacles to full participation.

Eric Wong is a Creative producer for Kapor Enterprises‘ creative team (see picture below).  Kapor Enterprises is a service organization that provides services for all the other entities in the building, accounting, IT and creative services. Trevor Parham, who I saw several times that night but without my camera in hand, is the Director of the Creative Group and a SMASH instructor.

Joining the Players of Web 2.0

A theme of Web 2.0 Summit  was that even in the worst of times and in “this is the New, New, New Economy where $50,000, MySQL, Rails, PHP, WordPress, Twitter, and passion go a long, long way.”

The panel “Tech Hunch Thrifty” featured several startups including Rashmi Sinha’s SlideShare and Garry Tan cofounder of Posterous.  Mitch Kapor is an Angel Investor in Posterous.

Rashmi was named by FastCompany as one of “The Most Influential Women in Web 2.0.” FastCompany also noted a stat that needs to change “only a quarter of those involved in computer and mathematical occupations are women.”  Changing this is something that Freada Kapor has put on the top of her agenda.

After watching Mitch Kapor post by email to Posterous I was hooked!  Check out Mitch’s Posterous and this post Mitch’s K9 Election protection crew. He is emailing it in the picture below.

I just emailed my third post on my new Posterous blog -  the picture below taken in the Web 2.0 Summit media room with exquisite timing by the artist/super star blogger Brian Solis.  See Brian Solis’ Flickr, www.briansolis.com, bub.blicio.us

I am with some legendary bloggers, who know each other very well. From left to right: Steve Gillmor (check out Steve Gilmor’s interview with Dan Farber and post here – a piece of blogging artistry contextulizing some of the key threads of Web 2.0 Summit); Dan Farber; Gabe Rivera; and Michael Arrington.

OMG! I am not sure if I can blog the inside story of the Summit Media center. But suffice to say, I learned a lot about Web 2.0 in my hours there.

Yes, from the primordial ooze, who gets to define the data rules!

Of course, one of the wonders of Web 2.0 is that Wikipedia’s collectively generated user content ranks top in Google. I had a very interesting conversation with Jonathan Hochman about Wikipedia and Second Life (see upcoming interview). There are some very interesting lessons for the pioneers of Web Meets World in how these large user generated communities negotiate the definition of data.

In the Media Center, I got a first hand look at how super star bloggers conjure up page rank and influence when they hit post. And just in case you were wondering what we are looking at, we are checking out whose post on John Battelle’s interview with Jerry Yang came out top in Google.  Not mine, of course!  I am still working on my Web 2.0 Summit posts.

Oh well that is one of the problems with writing 5000 word articles!  But, I take heart, Steve Gilmor said to me 1000 word posts, at least, are the way things are going in blogging these days. But 5000, I wonder?

Story of A Successful Startup: Foxmarks

I interviewed Todd Algunick, CTO of Foxmarks to find out what were the ingredients that had produced this successful internet start-up. Todd told me a fascinating story about how he met Mitch in a Computer store when he was a 12 years old.  And how Mitch used to come in after late night programming binges to show off the latest thing he had been working on. Todd said:

I started talking and explaining to him how some of the things he was doing could be done a little bit better. And he ended up hiring me as a contractor tp help him out on some of his projects……. We spent a lot of time working together.  I was there at Lotus in the early days while it grew into the thing it is.

There was a middle part of my career when he and I parted company.  I was out on the West Coast and he stayed East.

A few years ago we reconnected and started exploring different things that were happening. It seemed like there was something we could do in this new web space that was opening up. We experimented with a lot of different things – some protocol things, some event related things.  And we finally settled on Foxmarks just as something Mitch needed personally. We built the first thing as a prototype for Mitch to use and it worked…and we said, “well I bet other people want this too.”

Linden Lab offer $10,000 Prize

When I got back to NYC, Monday, I noticed this timely announcement on the Official Linden blog.  Second Life residents now have an extra incentive to get involved in “working on stuff that matters.”

From the Official Linden blog:

The Linden Prize will award one Second Life Resident or team with $10,000 USD, paid in Linden dollars, for an innovative inworld project that improves the way people work, learn and communicate in their daily lives outside of the virtual world. The award is intended to align with Linden Lab’s company mission–to connect all people to an online world that advances the human condition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Moving From Science Fiction to Science”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview with Mitch Kapor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t have the exact road map.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think it’s ended in beta now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mitch Kapor:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tish Shute:
Yes. I’m in Manhattan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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