Techno-travels and HASTAC Part II

In brief, here's a demo of a physical/virtual mashup. In this case, UbiSense tracking is used on individuals within a space called the Social Computing Room, and depicted within a virtual representation of the same space.

One can think of a ton of ways to take this sort of thing. There are many examples of using the virtual world as a control panel for real-world devices and sensors, such as the Eolus One project. How can this idea be applied to communication between people, for social applications, etc. What sort of person-to-person interactions between persons in the SCR and remote visitors are possible? I have this idea that virtual visitors would fly in and view the actual SCR from a video wall. Then they could fly through the wall (through the looking glass) to see and communicate with the virtual people as they are arranged in the room. A fun thing we'll using as a demo at HASTAC.

IBM Employees and Second Life Guidelines

IBM tells employees to behave in Second Life, from Network World.

Wired, SL, 3D web, the hype curve in action

This is sort of fun, the back and forth about advertising and the 3D web based on a Wired mag article, sort of like that previous LA Times article. In the bubble days, businesses thought they could sell sock monkeys and pet food, and just because it was on the web, they'd be millionaires. The corporations that think they are going to sell mac & cheese because they put up a virtual store are as deluded, and the press will be all over that, I imagine. The most useful thing in the back and forth is the fact that sites in virtual space often appeal to the long tail, versus a mass-market appeal. The long tail is ignored in the original Wired write-up, and I think that's the critical omission.

There's that old saw about asking a farmer what would help his farm work better, and him responding a better plow or a stronger mule, rather than responding that automated farm equipment would help. In other words, the farmer only can apply the world he knows to the question. I'd say we're in the middle of a prime example of the phenomena.There's also the old adage that we overestimate change in the short term, and underestimate it in the long term, and this has a lot to do with the shape of the hype curve.

History repeats itself, and at an accelerating rate, it seems.

The future of virtual worlds, LA Times says it's bleak

It's odd sometimes, the way backlashes go. I've been blogging a bit, and being somewhat evangelistic about the 3D web. I didn't invent the term, and wasn't among the first to catch on, but I have a gut feeling (me and Chertoff) that the term means something. Lately, especially after the LA Times article about the death of commerce on the 3D web, I've been approached by multiple people who want to explain to me that this is all a tempest in a teapot.

A proper, direct response to the LA Times article about Second Life can be found here, and here, so I won't try to recapitulate the common myths that make up such negative press. I was considering reasons why I am intrigued by the whole topic of virtual worlds, though, and I wanted to jot some of these down. These observations are shaped by my own interests, by past projects I worked, and so forth. You may discover other reasons to pay attention to the 3D web.

Real and Virtual are Merging

This is a drum I was beating well before I delved into Second Life. In this older post, and this one soon after, I talked about Mobile2.0 and Web2.0, trying to relate these terms to this larger idea of real and virtual merging. The main idea was that mobility and the new web were, in part, about the 'web of things'. Sensors and actuators talking on the web, and smarter applications to discover and manipulate this explosion of new information and services. Whole new types of applications stretching the definition of the web. Virtual worlds are important because they are a metaphor for this merging. In a way, our avatars allow us to cross the barrier, and physically inhabit the web of things. That's a bit sketchy, but I see the 3D web riding the coat-tails of the emerging web of things.

There are potential, practical benefits to visiting the virtual world to understand and manipulate the physical too. I've been interested lately in the development of EOLUS One, as described in this UgoTrade blog entry. This is a fairly wide-ranging project, but it does serve as an interesting illustration real world/virtual world merging.

People Make a Comeback

The ubiquitous social networking web site provides many benefits. I'll pick on a few, and tie them to a virtual world experience:

• a venue to expand social/professional networks
• a tool to maintain connections to existing friends
• a platform to shape and present our own identity
• a tool to filter and flag important information (use of social networks to compensate for a deficit of attention)
• a collective tool to add value, from which we individually extract benefit

All of these points can be extracted from classic definitions of Web2.0, and many of the points are mirrored in virtual worlds such as Second Life.

Expanding Social Networks

The first point, virtual worlds as a venue for expanding social networks, is primarily a function of the ability of a virtual world to create an event, or common experience. Think about where friendships start, it is often based on some shared experience, like a college course, or a conference, or some notable event. Virtual worlds can provide an immersive, compelling experience from which these connections can take root.

Social networking also relies on sharing connections, in a friend-of-a-friend style. Given the existence of shared experience in virtual worlds, the familiar mechanism of meeting new people through current friends has a virtual analogue.

Maintaining Current Connections

It's probably a question for sociologists, but what quality of social experiences can be achieved in a virtual environment? I'm quite sure it's not the same as real life, but I also suspect it's a richer interaction than what one would suspect.

We're using tools like Twitter, Flickr, and FaceBook as a way to keep up with our friends and colleagues when we're separated by time or distance. The function of these tools do not map onto the real-time nature of virtual worlds, but I suspect that virtual worlds can add some unique new tools to serve these ends. One example that comes to mind is the ability to establish 'hang outs' particular to a group of friends and colleagues.

Shaping Identity

People use social applications as a way to shape and present themselves. Virtual worlds such as Second Life have an economy partially based on the customization of personal avatars. People take great care to build an image of themselves. Does this aspect of virtual worlds play into this basic function of social networking applications? I guess this is another one for the sociologists...

Tapping into Collective Power

Successful Web2.0 sites often become so because they provide tools to build something interesting, let the tools loose on the world, and leverage the resulting content. I'd toss out Wikipedia and Flickr as two prime examples. There's a fundamental principle at work there, and a lesson that virtual world developers need to take to heart.

Professional 3D developers really don't like Second Life. I picked that up! I can see why, I think the building tools are crummy. This is something I had observed in a previous blog entry, but it bears repeating...the quality of the tools matters, but more important than professional level, sophisticated building tools are accessible tools, available in-world, suitable for the average Joe to get something done. There are indeed master builders within environments like Second Life that could take advantage of special tools, but I will guess that the vast majority rely on simple constructs, and use the ecosystem to purchase the rest.

I think about how bad HTML is, and how crude the tools still are, and would not be suprised to find out that, back in the day, that the web was dismissed as consisting of poor technology in the hands of unqualified developers. I know there are two sides to the coin, as I still encounter poorly designed sites with flaming clip-art, but I look at how far the web has come based on simple HTML, and simple scripting, and don't think it wise to assume it won't happen again.

It's not there yet!

Don't take this as a Second Life fan site. There are lots of things lacking in Second Life, and lots of other virtual worlds out there. I'm going to a Croquet presentation this afternoon, and have begun looking at that tool, getting used to Blender, and intent on learning Squeak. The dust has not settled on the particulars, but I really do think the 3D web means something.

There are 'virtual natives' coming up fast. Under my watchful eye, my little kids spend a little time wandering around Nicktropolis, and similar sites that approximate virtual worlds. These kids don't even blink, they just jump right in, and they are right at home. It's a mistake to put our own preconceptions and limits on a new technology, based on our own experiences and habits. I liken this to the way that younger people don't have a problem editing and keeping documents out on the web, or in alternative, open-source office suites, versus the old MS Office stand-by. I look at my own kids, and it makes me think that the metaverse is as natural to them as Tom and Jerry was to me.

It's especially clear that issues like identity, security, scalability, and application development support all are lacking in many of the current contenders. The power of open source and standards needs to be applied to this space, but the 3D web is here, and it's going to keep growing, I feel confident in saying, even if everyone wants to observe that this is just a game with no future...heck, I'm still waiting for the death of Java!

Mobile AJAX, then some really cool SL stuff

I read this blog posting about mobile AJAX with some interest. The main premise was that, due to the difficulty in porting to so many mobiles, even with the efforts of the J2ME specification, large-scale deployments remain prohibitive. The blog concludes:

AJAX offers a potentially better solution in comparison to the incumbents (J2ME and XHTML) due to a combination of fewer potential choke points because of its distribution mechanism. The economic models do not favour J2ME and AJAX offers a superior user experience to XHTML. It has the support of the developer community.

I think the idea is cool, but the one fly in the ointment is the fact that mobile connectivity is still so sketchy, and applications need to really support a 'sometimes connected', or event 'mostly connected' environment, as well as the ability to receive pushed-in data. I suppose there are all sorts of creative ways around this, but for the foreseeable future, web browsing on mobiles still sucks.

To other things, we're working on a really cool idea for physical/virtual mash-ups. Imagine a physical space embedded within a virtual space, where real people can see and interact with avatars, and vice versa. In this environment, the virtual avatars can 'reach in' and alter the physical environment, and real life individuals that inhabit this space can use physical 'things' to alter the virtual environment. Sort of a twilight-zone between two parallel universes!

The pic below shows me standing in the virtual room that surrounds the physical room. Imagine that the virtual walls are projected on the physical walls that surround the room occupants. On the walls are windows that avatars may approach. The avatars themselves see real-time streams of audio and video, so from their perspective they are looking into the real room. This sort of thing has been done before, but I think the context is unique. It'll be a cool place to explore the merging of the physical world and the virtual world. This is being tested right now by pushing a custom Second Life client through four monitors arranged as the walls of the room, and will eventually be projected on the actual walls of the real room. (I didn't write the client!)



It's just the start, a fascinating range of possibilities opens up from here. One SL friend, Uskala, mentioned the idea that the walls of the room could change from a meeting space to an auditorium, so that's something that I just implemented, where the walls reconfigure to reveal an auditorium space, and seating rises from the floor. Imagine giving a SL presentation by standing at a podium, looking out onto an audience of avatars. If time permits, I'd like to program these room alterations into the room control system, so a physical knob or button could select different room configurations. This is really cool stuff! More later as it develops, but the first tries today look promising.

3D web as disruptive technology - Mitch Kapor

I've had the videos of the IBM & MIT Media Labs conference on virtual worlds running in the corner of my monitor all morning, and I was highly impressed with Mitchell Kapor, Linden Lab Chair, and his view of virtual worlds as disruptive technology. He brings up the term macromyopia, which is a nice word that captures the idea that we overestimate change in the short term and underestimate it in the long term.

Anyhow, his talk is entertaining and thought-provoking, and worth the investment of about 45 minutes of your time.

Pics from the SL iCommons Summit

I popped in, and blogged a bit about his event here, and here's a link to some interesting pics from the occasion.

Second Earth in MIT Technology Review

From MIT Technology Review...

The World Wide Web will soon be absorbed into the World Wide Sim: an immersive, 3-D visual environment that combines elements of social virtual worlds such as Second Life and mapping applications such as Google Earth. What happens when the virtual and real worlds collide?

This is worthy of a read. The basic premise is that 3D worlds as part of a mash-up with real life locations and data will transform the way we view the 'web'. I'm down with that...

Waiting for Lessig at 11:00

Popped into the iCommons summit in Second Life, waiting for 11:00 SL time when Larry Lessig will be speaking. Here's where I'm at..

Some audio probs right now they are working out.

Cool..things are worked out, watching a short film about the remix culture...

Oh well, looking at a grey screen, having media probs here..



OK, switched computers and I'm able to see, right now Johnathan Zittrain is speaking.





Larry talking about debate with Brett Cottle re copyright. How do people in creative commons movement get respect? We get that respect by demanding it loudly like they (copyright people) do. Who are 'we'...iow creative commons?

CC is a movement of open source for culture. Copyright's power comes from its complexity..it's the command line interface that gets to the core of the machine, great for geeks, not good for most people. For most people, layers are put on top. Think about CC as a gui overlay for the copyright system's power. Another function is as a signal. The people displaying the cc sign send the message that they are part of the sharing economy. Money not part of terms of exchange...instead it's poison. This economy is important provider of value, (wikipedia, flickr). Money is not why people participate.

CC has a role in protecting the sharing economy. CC protects participation in the sharing economy.

"You are helping artists to starve!" as a criticism. Responds that CC can help artists cross over from a sharing economy to a commercial economy when they want to, and when appropriate. New component, beatnick, from creative commons, that allows commercial licensing of creative commons content. Enables bottom-up creativity. You share, and choose when to allow work to be commercially exploited.

We have allowed other side as if this is a debate about piracy. We are fighting for the right to steal, etc...E.g. defense of p2p, as if cc is fighting for the 'right to steal'.

How to respond? This is not a movement about the right to take, it's about the right to create, the right to share in the sense that the artists, creators can be free to choose without the government speaking for them.

General problem, people controlling government is that they only listen to money. (Global warming, healthcare as examples).

CC people need to stand for the movement and make it grow. Standing O.

iCommons Summit in Second Life

This looks interesting, another SL overlay of a RL conference...

The USC Center on Public Diplomacy, Linden Lab and iCommons are delighted to announce that the iCommons 2007 Summit in Dubrovnik, Croatia, will be run in parallel in Second Life!

The aim of running the iSummit 2007 in Second Life is to mix the real and virtual world for both attendees of the Summit, and for those who are unable to make it to Dubrovnik, thus expanding the community who will be able to learn, collaborate and share their knowledge and experiences of the Summit. The parallel summit will also help to introduce new users to Second Life and to build the global diversity of participants who are collaborating in-world.

The schedule is posted here, looks like some interesting people will be there, e.g. Larry Lessig, Jimmy Wales.

Making Connections, virtual reality, agent computing, robots, and even real human beings

So I spent a few minutes digging around after reading the Slashdot article about using AI, agents, and 3D visualization to train firefighters. Off on ZDNet is the original article, by Roland Piquepaille.

ZDNet describes the system this way:

The system is currently used by the Los Angeles Fire Department. DEFACTO has committees of AI ‘agents’ which can create disaster scenarios with images and maps seen in 3-D by the trainees. The software agents also evaluate the trainees’ answers and help them to take better decisions.

This is interesting in several ways.

Virtual simulation and training

One of the great potential uses of virtual worlds is the creation of immersive training and simulation environments. I'd anecdotally observe that interacting in a 3D environment with an avatar provides a pretty effective experience. Situations like a fire or a disaster are prime candidates for such an application. Other uses might include immersive language learning, law enforcement, or hospital/medical situations.

Collaborative visualization, ambient data, situational awareness

Collaborative is the key word here, because there are better, higher resolution methods for exploring data through visualization. A simple equation may be to combine your avatar, the avatars of collaborators, and the visualization, so that remotely distributed teams can fly around, point, manipulate, and refer to parts of a visualization as a group. This is somewhat linked to the themes illustrated by multi-touch displays, such as the Microsoft Surface Computer that I mentioned a few posts back.

I'm mostly looking at Second Life, for many reasons. It's safe to say that SL is not a platform for visualizations, but I have tried several small prototypes with the premise that the collaborative nature of these environments yields qualitatively different experiences. Another way of saying this is that it might be useful to look at ways of creating 3D visualizations within virtual environments, not necessarily as the best visualization tool, but as points of reference in virtual collaboration.

Take a look at this image from the DEFACTO page, and imagine how that application, combined with a collaborative, avatar-based environment, could have interesting possibilities, even as far as visualizing and managing an actual event, versus a simulation.

Agents again!

I had a brief run on some earlier projects where I looked at agent technology. At the time, we were looking at the state of context-aware computing, especially as it applied to the development of smarter mobile applications (location awareness, etc). This was mostly using the JADE agent framework, and was based on a research framework called CoBrA. Honestly, I have not been thinking about agents for a while, but this article made me think about agent technology again. Agents are a great model when you have heterogeneous, autonomous, entities that need to cooperate. Especially important is the ability to dynamically form associations, and negotiate to solve a shared task. Web2.0 talks about small things, loosely joined, and agents share that same philosophy in their own arena.

Agents have always struck me as not getting enough play in the whole 'next generation web' yap-space, especially considering the merging of the virtual (web) and physical world through the explosion of sensors and actuators that are starting to talk on the web. Both agent technology, and the physical/virtual merging still seem like blind-spots, when both may play an important part in the post-web2.0 world.

In this case, agents are seen as proxies for what Machinetta calls RAP's. Machinetta is one of the underpinnings of the DEFACTO system, and it is essentially an agent framework that supports negotiation, assignment of roles, and other aspects of team-work. RAP's are the Machinetta term for "Robot, Agent and/or Person". Cool...we got robots too!

Virtual/Physical merging

So this was just mentioned, and bears repeating. The web is not only the information and people, but also the parts of the physical world that are being hooked in. This has gone on for a while, but what is interesting is to see that merging playing out on something suggestive of a virtual environment as well. This is actually something I've been messing with in Second Life, though at a much less sophisticated level. The DEFACTO application seems to suggest some of the same notions, in any case.

Virtual ambient information

The last point I'd make is that this application shares some common characteristics of many of the location-aware mash-ups that are everywhere, especially using tools like Google Maps, Google Earth, and now Google Mapplets. This gets back to the original point about interacting with visualizations in an immersive environment. In a virtual, 3D space, it seems like the potential is there for mash-ups on steroids. Here's a shot from an earlier post of a modest example using 3D symbols on a map...





It might be hard to get the gist of this, but, just like in DEFACTO, virtual worlds can represent ambient information about state and situation by the appearance and behavior of the objects. There is no reason that these objects could not link to DEFACTO RAP's for example, and provide handles to communicate or interrogate the state of the various agents.

Lots of possibilities!

Bit of vid showing RL/SL mashup

Willi had captured a bit of video from Second Life showing a campus walkabout with his mobile -> second life reporter. What can I say...it was a nice day on campus!

This afternoon, the band I'm in starts recording a new cd. As we're complete unknowns, (and probably deservedly so), we're all DIY. The first time we did this, about eight years ago, it was to a Tascam 80-8 with one bad channel, using a DBX unit that had 4 good channels. We're starting this one out with capability for about 80 tracks, and all the eq's, compressors, and misc. rack gear that we'd rationally want to use. In addition, we can carry the project between home studios and our tracking 'shed', and do independent overdubs. The whole thing is probably going direct to the web under Creative Commons...the march of technology is changing the lives of anyone with any creative impulse, and the web will allow us to reach the dozen people that would want to listen to us prattle on, long tail indeed!

Next version of SlIcer deployed

I've been up late a few nights on this, so allow me to go on a bit...This is the next version of SlIcer, which is essentially a utility for hookup up things in Second Life to things in real life. I've seen things like ObjectOverlord that work on the client code, but I wanted to do things that would work within the vanilla client. Good idea? Not sure, but at least it's workable.

What it does now:

• Inventories people and objects within a sim using scripted sensor objects that are placed in strategic locations. This inventory can be for multiple regions, and is kept in a database.
  
• Creates a queue for messages bound for Second Life. These messages are stored in a database, and delivered through scripted hub objects (co-located with the sensors). Essentially, the hubs poll the database for pending messages, which come down in a bundle, and are distributed to target nodes.

The test case is a mapping room, with a map on the floor, and 3D symbols that reflect state and position. Messages can come in from external applications, and the objects on the map change position, reconfigure to reflect state changes, and can also display floating text for other messages.



That's a picture of the map floor. The round object floating in air is the sensor/hub. Against the wall is our people sensor that looks for individuals, sort of virtual RFID. The SlIcer web app, which is still very much a work in progess, can show an inventory of everything discovered by our in-world sensors.


That's a screen shot that shows, for example, a rover_counter on the map. The database contains info like the last sense time, the x,y,z coordinates, etc. The cool thing is, there are simple URL's that an external app can call, targeting a region and object by their known name. This obviates the need to keep up with SL UUID's.


I'm an awful object builder, but this is my pitiful truck object in a 'stowed' state..an external source (such as a mobile GPS unit), could send telemetry by calling a URL, this enqueues a message for delivery to the sim...




And bammo...state/position change...




What's next:

• I've already got a database of objects, and it will be easy to add a table of arbitrary name/value properties per object. This gives a Silo-like capability to maintain object state outside of the sim. Objects could update their own state, or pick up state changes pushed in from the web. What would be cool is that that state can survive object name changes, and also re-rezzing. The drawback is that objects have to have a unique given name, I don't do duplicates.
• Thinking about a pub/sub system for events. For example, do something when an object is rezzed, when an object moves, when a certain person walks into a room, etc. I thought about putting this up in an additional sim, and doing some stupid pet tricks where moving and object in one sim causes a change in an object in another.
  

From there, I'm not quite sure, but it seems to open a lot of possibilities up. I have some cruft in the database for doing some reliable delivery stuff, but that's not a burning issue right now. The whole thing is done using Ruby on Rails, which I am really keen on these days. This has not taken a huge effort, development can go very quickly one you make the mental jump!

Rails, SL, mash-ups, all in one project...how cool is that...

3D RL/SL location aware mash-up working...

Well, mostly...we have some tweaks to line up the RL coordinates and the offset on the map. We might need to re-do the map we use to texture our sandbox.

Anyhow, this image is my avatar on our 3D interactive mapping floor. The green prim represents Willi (approx31) walking around on the UNC campus with a mobile phone/GPS. Check Willi's blog for particulars, but we take the live GPS signal, and send the lat/long to a PHP script. That script converts to x and y offset from a known origin on our mapping table, which is then scaled to the map on the SL object. The upshot is that the map symbol moves in real-time based on Willi's GPS report. After we tighten down the positioning, we'll be looking for more things to instrument. A cool thing would be to outfit various vehicles with GPS transponders, and other status telemetry, as well as various individuals. Then, at any time, you could see the corresponding 3D symbols moving about and changing state. This is really cool to watch.

By the way, this is using the SlIcer framework, which I had originally proposed a few posts back, and which is up and running in it's first pass. I'm busy doing a second pass, with lots of optimizations and new features. Really that next version will be the first 'usable' one, and maybe can be used in other places, such as the UNC Island. One thing that's cool in the coming version is the ability to inventory and message across multiple regions, so you could move a prim on one sim, and have something happen on another...

Second Life Best Practices in Education - Link Dump

Here's a nice link dump to catch up on the SLBP confo last week...

More of SL Best Practices in Education confo

A few keynotes this afternoon worth catching...catching the end of the IBM keynote. Place is SRO.

Search IBM and Secondlife in YouTube (do that later) to see some examples of their use of virtual worlds. ? on when virtual worlds truly become mainstream? Mainstream is difficult to argue..what is mainstream? Talk in terms of internet 1 (democratization of access), lots of people connected now took about 10 years. Web2.0 (democratization of participation), took about half the time. 3D internet is about people coming back. People are going to be involved in every aspect of environment, and it will happen fast.

Pirate Shipman, adjunct faculty at Pepperdine, is next keynote. Right brain attitudes important in today's world:

• Design
• Story
• Sympathy
• Empathy
  
• Play
• Meaning

Basic premise is that we need to focus on these areas, versus left brain logic. Pirate did a class project do develop virtual content reflecting these 6 aptitudes. This comes from the book "The Whole New Mind". Students given a small area and a 150 prim limit for their projects. We watch slides of the building progress on the class island. Students experimenting...Conclusion was that it was a powerful learning experience for all involved.




That's the keynote in progress..

Question...how do we teach in a virtual world? We need to discuss strenths and weakneses.

Strengths:

• SL is a spatial experience. Virtual world has physicality. Shapes, sizes, movement, spatial relationships take on deep meaning.
• SL is an immersive experience. We can respond as if we are really there...effects emotion and mood to be in a virtual situation.
• SL is a social platform. We can craft and present an identity to others. "This makes the us that engages with others easier to become". (Interesting).
• SL has tools to connect to and communicate with others. LSL allows us to develop socially aware objects.
• SL democratizes the ability to create content and learning artifacts, it's a participatory medium. (This is what I think is the key point, which SL captures well).
• SL enables collaborative development of objects. (I think building things with others, and having the tools in-world, is the key...this is why SL works, and why importing from blender, etc is not important, and rather not the point, but that's just me!).

Some talk about the playful spirit that is the game part of the environent...the keynote speaker is wearing a pirate eyepatch.

Weaknesses:

• Effective communication of large amounts of data is difficult.
• Technological overhead high.
• Combo of 2d with SL lacks synergy most of the time. Showing 'flat' images, for example, still easier in a browser interface..
• Activities outside of the scope of what second life does can usually be done better outside of SL. "Sometimes, though, the novelty may be enough".

OK...gonna hit some posters, then I gotta go....

Here's a parting shot of one of the posters, this one for the SL Genetics Center. All in all a remarkable day, and an effective use of SL. I've even got an inventory full of junk now I have to sift thru!.

Second Life Best Practices in Education

Popped into the SL Best practices conference. Hit the registration tables, got my gift bag, off to a discussion about DRM and contracts in virtual space.


Here's the scene at the presentation space...Parallels right now to Viacom v YouTube, discussion of safe harbor provisions as they will apply to Second Life. Real life money is involved in Second Life, real life legal action will follow.




What happens if someone misappropriates my content in virtual space outside of virtual space (outside of the 'rules' in Second Life)? There are layers of rights (game code, copyright) but do they give a practical answer?

Interesting angle...What happens when the players don't like what the game desigeners/owners are doing. Interesting because this could be seen as a game, but significant investments could be made in virtual space. How does freedom of speech, etc play in?

Second Life may be more open source. How about Creative Commons licenses? There are some mappings between the SL object permissions and CC permissions. What does CC give us in SL that copyright does not give us in SL? We need to be careful here about coding or contracting away rights that may be in copyright. Note this is from an Australian perspective.

Next pres, Profiling e-world customers...This is an e-marketing presentation.

• personalization of products and services (CRM)
• online profiling of customers (what's that)?
• all e-world transactions leave traces of data
• issues involving trust, accuracty, privacy

Online profiling is practice of aggregating info about consumers lifestyle, product preferences, purchase history. Adds up to info on customer's buying behavior. Now talk about SL specific approaches..

Brands and self image apply in virtual space. Research discussed addressing the issue of online profiling by introducing self-profiling. Capture online ideal self-image via brand personality. What evolving brands traits could be highlighted online? SL objects must be designed in a way to construct an ad-hoc shopt display for each customer, sensing their profile, brand identity, self profile.

Between presentations. It's interesting to watch typical real life confo behaviors play out in virtual space. Small groups congregating, people walking in to check the scene, and deciding to attend the other talk after looking at the boards. Presenters trying to figure out how to get their slides to show, etc. IOW oddly familiar. Also cool is how people linger to associate, and look around to check who else is in the room. Lots of networking going on, and informal off-line talk.

Into a panel discussion now... gonna sneak to the Grind for coffee. Just like a real confo!

OK..came back at the end of the panel..darn..took too long. Off to the vendor area, outreach, etc.


Popped in to a bit of discussion, SL Education is about collaboration and partnerships. Example, various teachers can swap sections to teach content that they are best at, and enjoy teaching the most. The content is the focus.




That's a shot from the discussion area. I'll wander over to the exhibits now. Saw the Moodle Booth, vendors who build sims, libraries. Here's an interesting thing, a booth for the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, who will be coming to Second Life...




More wandering..

Digital Campfires Foundation, looking at creating thinklets within second life. UTD has an impressive booth, going to have to visit their campus. Some discussion ensued about an open source model within SL. SLForge was one attempt to start this. Perfect for higher ed!

Schome looks like an interesting pilot project. "Schome park was the site of a pilot project during which over 100 memebers of NAGTY (National Assoc of Gifted and Talented Youth) collaborated with staff in Second Life to seek ways to transform educational spaces and practices"

Map of forces shaping future of education, from the Knowledge Foundation...Feed of current projects from My SL Project. Here's their academia edition. Saw Columbia College Chicago has a cool sim, I AM Columbia. I'm going to do a quick tele to their sim.




Checking out the galleries at Columbia College.

Back to the presentation hall. Instead of turning of our cell phones, we are reminded to kill all particles and animations. No SL bling for lag's sake.

Suzi Mazzenga (Xirconnia Morphett-SL) Drawing on Second Life Experiences to Enrich the First Life.


This presentation is being simulcast over the plain old web via SLCN (Second Life Cable Network) now.

Living outside of the circuit box...applying learning about self in Second Life to First Life...Compare your avatar in SL to real life. Mine is a virtual doppleganger. Or is your avatar a subconscious blueprint for making a better 1st life you?

What does your SL interaction say about you? Is your avatar a virtual extension of your personality? What does your SL home say about you? Did you put up a virtual wall to block your neighbor's view? Would you do the same things you do in SL in real life? Is there morality in SL? Various giggles and grins in audience.



Here's a shot of the talk, note the video screen showing the live simulcast.

How many have group meetings in SL? Do you have a traditional board room for meetings? Look at other non-traditional settings. Coffee shops, koi ponds...no walls, no chairs. Restrictions and expectations can be changed by working within SL as groups.

There is no 'back of the room' in SL collaborations. Gonna break out, do some RL work, and hit the IBM keynote...

IBM Promo Video on their new Virtual Biz Center

The simple thing that stuck with me, back when I heard Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger talk at as part of the RENCI Distinguished Lecture series was the observation that the '2D' web was about taking the catalog and putting it into the browser, while the 3D web was about taking the whole store, sales staff included, and putting it in a virtual space. The purely commercial side of the web is not the whole story by any means, but I suspect that the next Amazon or Ebay will rise from the 3D web, and that makes this stuff exciting to watch.

So dig this little YouTube video about the new IBM Virtual Biz center. I took five and logged in, and happened upon the real virtual site, and saw this thing on the Eightbar blog. IBM's Second Life presence is impressive, and I often point people there when they let me know that the virtual web is just a game....

Approx 31 Blogging about moble + SL, Croquet

Willi's got a bit in his blog about some prototypes we're working on. This one is meant to show on-scene disaster workers walking around assessing damage with gps and camera equipped mobile devices.

I messed with Croquet a bit yesterday. just out of interest, and also a bit because I was miffed at Second Life for deciding to bring the grid down yesterday. Such is life on the front end of the hype curve!

Initial impressions...

Second Life is more like the web, it has the chaotic, random feel that comes from random exploration, searching, and inputs from your social/professional network. Croquet has more of a self-contained, peer-to-peer feel. Right now I see Croquet as a targeted application development platform. I also see Croquet as lending itself to more abstract presentation. I really love the metaphor in Croquet of jumping through portals to navigate to new worlds! I'm quite sure I've only scratched the surface on Croquet, but it seems less collaborative, and more about cool new metaphors for information. In other words, I don't feel as much immersion, or presence of myself or others in the Croquet demos, but I do see more of a free-flowing, abstract experience.

That's not a knock, I see different horses for different courses. I'm even more of a Croquet noob than a Second Life noob, so take everything with a grain of salt. I've got to dive into Blender and Squeak, I think, before I really have a good grounding on the potential of Croquet.

IBM Presentation on Virtual Worlds

I think IBM has correctly identified the conceptual link between today's Web2.0 formulation and the future 3D virtual web.

Check out this presentation from the eightbar blog, now in my 2D Google Reader. One great point is made in a qute from Ian Davis' blog, where he says, about Web2.0, Web2.0 is an attitude, not a technology. It's about enabling and encouraging participation through open applications and servers.

I have been been asked several times why I'm messing with Second Life, when X, Y, or Z allows you to use your 3D modeling tool of choice to import a CAD drawing, etc. This is a very good question, and I can't claim to know the answer, but here are some observations.

First, I think it's been said that people working in technology A are probably better at predicting the future of technology B, which may be a less familiar field, than in their 'own' field. This could be true. I know that as a hard-core Java/J2EE developer, it took me some time, and distance, to understand the Web2.0 ethos, as well as the value of dynamic scripting languages such as Ruby. I think the same holds true thinking about virtual worlds. My immediate reaction to the questions about various virtual worlds is to try and remove the lens of past experience with 3D technologies.

Second, my reaction is to re frame the question, and to reconsider the 'things that matter' when judging virtual content. I helped (in small ways) as UNC worked on its Second Life campus. The natural first step was to make the UNC island look like UNC by building various familiar landmarks, such as the Old Well and the Bell Tower. Great...Then soon after the island opened up, Intelligirl took one look and pretty much said it can be a mistake to push the real world into the virtual. I took a step back, and had to agree that the virtual space is different, and is neither a game, nor is it real life. It needs to be taken as it is. The true goal in virtual space is not the ability to accurately replicate real life, the goal is to provide content formed by community participation.

Third, remember when Mosaic came out, and all there was was a tour of Amsterdam with some hyperlinked pictures? Anyone looked at any HTML source lately? HTML is crap, I'll go ahead and say it! The most important point is to imagine the end product based on the creative power of the participants, not on the nature of the component tools. Here is where Web2.0 comes into play. The power of Web2.0 is built from simple pieces of technology...RSS, HTML, AJAX, XML, etc. It's the fact that modest tools have been put in the hands of the many, with low barriers to entry, that's made the web a revolution. Comparing the tools in a space like Second Life to those on the workstations of professional designers is not the test! These comparisons lead to faulty conclusions. The real test is, does the environment provide sufficient facility to create compelling content, and enough critical mass to create communities around that content.? To me that's the test, much different than the ability to manipulate sophisticated polygons!

I'm still somewhat skeptical that Second Life is the answer. Its move towards open source gets things moving in the right direction, but if the Web2.0 analogy is to hold, than it implies that a walled garden will fail. Certainly the ecosystem is there, but new generations of web users are fickle, and will jump if a more open, buzz-worthy environment arises. My guess is that alternative virtual worlds will reach hype-parity with the current Second Life buzz, there will be an explosion, and potentially open source will move in to create some standardization. Either way, it's going to be an interesting, and increasingly virtual web.