MixedRealities

I made a walk in virtual Singapore, the new mirror world city of Twinity, a virtual world owned by Metaversum. Virtual Singapore is now in limited beta, and virtual Orchard Road and Marina Bay will be open in the third quarter of 2009, in conjunction with a major partner who will be announced closer to the release date. The press release explains:

In order to effect the development of the virtual site, retailers, brands and firms interested in promoting their products or space on Orchard Road are being sought after to participate in the project.

The development of the virtual Singapore brings exciting tourism opportunities for hotels, travel, airlines, tour guides and attractions along with amazing advertising potential online.

Attractions and hotels may build virtual properties as an experience in the Twinity environment. Partners to promote Singapore’s history, rich culture and nightlife and Singapore’s top-notch array of retail and shopping are also encouraged to participate.
A founding member program for those who wish to develop unique experiences to engage their customer community within Twinity is on offer, in conjunction with The AsiaOne Network - Interactive arm of Singapore Press Holdings Ltd.

I previously visited virtual Berlin, another creation by Twinity. Maybe it is just me, but walking around in realistic environments replicating cities is a bit uncanny.

One expects lots of traffic and people - and if the streets are deserted, as often is the case when no events take place, it seems like some horrible event left the buildings intact but vaporized people and animals. Maybe builders of mirror worlds should think about introducing non-player characters (NPC)?

Other issues are even more important though. It seems crucial for mirror worlds to work together with local companies and authorities, who can use the environment to attract tourists for instance.

Does this mean that also the local laws and regulations will be replicated (including dress codes for men and women?) Singapore certainly is not the most difficult case. Singapore is a parliamentary democracy, but there are laws restricting the freedom of speech that may breed ill will or cause disharmony within Singapore’s multiracial, multi-religious society, as Wikipedia explains.

It will be interesting to see how mirror worlds replicate (or not) local laws and regulations. If those worlds want to be more than innocent Disneylands, but real communities, these issues cannot be avoided.

Roland Legrand

I just come back from Metaplace, where Cory Ondrejka (former Linden Lab, now EMI) and president Raph Koster of Metaplace talked about virtual worlds. You find the logs of the session at Ramblings about programming, gaming and other random stuff…

Some things which attracted my attention:

• There was quite some talk about the fragmentation of mobile into the flash and not-flash worlds. Raph Koster said that most smartphones will be compatible with Flash by this Winter, barring the iPhone (the official Metaplace client uses Flash). Everyone seems to admit that JavaScript is improving fast and the differences with ActionScript (Flash) is getting much smaller.
• Cory said that with the myriad “we can do high end 3d in a browser” options combined with high performance JS and native code in browsers we’ll see more and more complexity entangled with the web. While Raph fears that may work against the simplicity factor, Cory thinks that the ability to execute complex code can make the client smarter, more flexible, and more reactive to the context of the user.
• Both agreed that everything is going more social and more mobile. A lot of the interfaces will have to be reworked to accommodate gphone/iphone screen size and pointing accuracy. However, there are also new opportunities: the connectivity, the GPS and voice allow for the blending of real and virtual.
• About Twitter and the internet of streams: what Cory finds most interesting is what happens when people co-opt twitter for everything from music sales to payment to presence. There is also an explosion of experimentation. “In a lot of ways, it feels like the explorations we see on the Linden scripting language, where tons of people play with programming, and we see (this) all over Metaplace as well.
• Cory of course is in favor of 3D-worlds such as Second Life. He admits however that something that Metaplace (a 2.5 D world) has done very well is to make sure the environment plays well with the web. Cory and Ralph talked about the “stream” idea (activity streams like FB, content streams… ). Being able to share all those streams from Metaplace to the web is the right decision, so Cory acknowledged.
  Raph underlined that in Metaplace, both users and worlds can generate streams as equal participants.
• Raph thinks “a big test of VWs is actually the day when the folks in this audience have no qualms about asking any of their friends and acquaintances to use one. I don’t think we are there yet, but I think someday we will be.” Cory answered that we’re a lot closer than a decade ago.

Roland Legrand

There is this notion of “flow” or “stream” that I like very much. It resonates with some texts I worked on as a philosophy student, about Alfred North Whitehead and his process philosophy, or Gilles Deleuze and his thinking of identity and difference.

Sometimes the notion appears in my blogposts when I talk about Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and virtual worlds. I think it is a crucial notion, and we see how virtual worlds like Second Life are taking the stream-like nature of the social internet into account, and I just have been reading a similar story about OpenSimulator on New World Notes.

In gaming there is also this notion of the state of flow, which is described by Stowe Boyd on /message as follows:

The implied two-by-two matrix defines so much of what happiness means in life: when the challenges we face are high enough to match our skills (and vice versa) we are in a state of flow. Otherwise, we are anxious, apathetic, or bored.

Tish Shute wrote a wonderful post about Stowe on UgoTrade: Twitter and the Web of Flow.

Stowe says (in the context of the 140 Characters Conference of all things Twitter):

You use these tools, and you are changed. And it’s just a question of how long you use them and the longer you use them, the more you use them, the more changed you are. When people shift to a basis of sociality around connection with other people as opposed to mass affiliation, it’s different. It’s completely different. Your whole system of ethics, the way you judge the world and decide what’s important is different. And not only different it’s better. It’s a better way to deal with the world.

Here you can watch his performance:

Stowe talks about Microsyntax.org, “a non-profit investigating the embedding of structured information within microstreaming applications, particularly Twitter.”

I think he really captures the disruptive potential of microblogging-streams. I learned from Tony O’Driscoll how it can take tens of years before people realize the full potential of innovations.
Newspapers even today often consider the internet to be another way of distributing their articles. In fact internet makes very new media possible. I think what Twitter shows us, is that the “flow” of internet is something very different from the object-like newspaper articles.

Tish Shute throws in another dimension by talking about the Internet of Things (which eventually will also twitter to us and to each other) and by talking to Bruce Sterling, who learns us that term Favela Chic: “That’s when you are totally penniless and without commercial prospects of any kind but still wired to the gills and big on Facebook”, and a bit further:

Google and Twitter aren’t going to last long enough to become main means of an access to government. It’s not that Google and Twitter go away and we return to a previous status quo, however. It’s that they are ramshackle digital expedients that get replaced by even more ramshackle digital expedients.
In the meantime the stuff we used to call “government” gets similarly destabilized. It’s been privatized, or offshored, or turned into a hollow shell.

Here you see a video featuring Bruce Sterling giving his vision on technology, the Internet of Things etc:

There are so many fascinating subjects in this post on UgoTrade, that relate the internet of streams to ways of getting some kind of grip on it (microsyntax), to the developing world and cities, to the disruptive effects of technology etc, it really deserves careful reading - almost meditation.

Roland Legrand

Second Life seems to be developing some very concrete steps to provide its residents a genuine social networks experience.

A few days ago Second Stindberg offered a way to have a look at the beta version of SL Dashboard using this link: https://secure-web2.secondlife.com/my/

It was supposed to be a limited beta, on June 24 an official Second Life blog post said: “right now, only a portion of logged in Residents will be able to try the beta because we are carefully monitoring the load. In the next few days we’ll open the beta to everyone.”

Anyway, the dashboard shows friends and their status (online or not), recent activity, upcoming events, blog feeds, video tutorials, groups, account information, shop information (for virtual land and goods).

As Wagner James Au says on the New World Notes, it is impressive but it would be great to add a group chat function and a feed into Twitter and Plurk.

Dusan Writer posted an detailed analysis of this development. He is very positive, and makes a number of very useful suggestions to improve the Dashboard. One of them is API integration:

API Integration: Let me integrate outside gadgets if I want. Keep them in a nice ‘clean space’ below the fold, but let me pull in a Twitter stream or two if I want, so I can load in a few of the “must follow” SL Twitter feeds. And while we’re at it, throw in a little API OUT so I can send a Twitter notice from this page. We have Twitter integration with Immersive Workspaces and it works like a charm.

Second, I’m thinking here of things like BlogHUDs or Koin-Up maybe. The ability to take photos and post them to your Web profile with cross-posting to Flickr or wherever. The ability to blog status with cross-posting to Posterous or FriendFeed or whatever.

The official Linden blog says:

In future releases, you’ll be able to customize the dashboard with your favorite features and preferences. We’ll make it easier to invite friends and add content from your other social networking sites – and integrate Xstreet shopping with the rest of your web experience.

I think what this new development shows, is that the momentum of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, Youtube and the many other social media household names is so strong that they will be integrated soon in the virtual worlds and gaming environments.

Whether we talk about the upcoming virtual world Blue Mars or the Xbox, it seems they all promise to provide access to online social networking - which is far more popular and mainstream than virtual worlds or hardcore gaming.

They will be integrated in this sense that the social media data streams will be integrated in various ways, but also the big fundamental lessons of online networks will be learned, such as the importance of managing your friends groups and events, and the importance of providing intuitive interfaces.

Linden Lab will profit in two ways: enabling a richer user experience will attract more users and make it easier to keep them coming back, and the virtual goods and services business can get a boost because of a clever integration of the land business and XStreet SL.

Roland Legrand

On MetaWorld2 you can watch the rough working materials of a documentary Mal Burns and Tara Yeats are working on about the future of virtual worlds. Avatars from all over Second Life give their vision on that future, and you can find all this in the on demand section of the streaming video site (the 60 second series).

I was among the avatars expressing themselves as you can see in the video here (I am the first guy speaking), but I went totally over time and I even forgot to present myself - but I am sure the people at MetaWorld2 will take care of that as they produce the final version of the documentary!

It becomes increasingly difficult to keep up with events in areas which are of immediate interest to MixedRealities. Second Life has an impressive number of interesting groups and events, but also other virtual environments are worthwhile checking out.

Let’s start with a classic in Second Life: the weekly Metanomics meeting.

Join us at Metanomics on July 1st at 1:00 p.m. PST/SLT (10 pm CET) for a discussion of the “Future of Work”.

Does meeting in a virtual provide a measurable return on investment? What virtual world platforms are best suited for business? What are the best practices that make an event or initiative successful?

Margaret Regan, CEO of the FutureWork Institute will discuss three virtual world platforms that her organization has used to successfully deploy enterprise solutions, including Protosphere and Second Life.

More information about the institute and Margaret can be found on the Metanomics site.

Here you see a video featuring the Institute’s island in Second Life:

Now let’s have a look at Metaplace, where on Tuesday, June 30th at 2:00pm (PST) - 11 pm CET Cory Ondrejka (former Linden Lab, now EMI) will talk about virtual worlds in the Creative Series.
“Known originally for co-founding Second Life at his time with Linden Lab, Cory Ondrejka (now at EMI) will be joining our President Raph Koster in a lively discussion about virtual worlds. For anyone interested in virtual worlds, education, music, and technology, this is an event you won’t want to miss!”, so Metaplace announces. The show can be attended in Metaplace at TheStage.

Also the mirror world Twinity had some interesting events, which I missed unfortunately because of other virtual worlds activities elsewhere in cyberspace. Expect stress to increase because of the proliferation of initiatives in several virtual worlds!

Roland Legrand

I have been looking at Blue Mars again, now that the full transcript of the Metanomics show with Jim Sink has been published. Sink is Vice President of Business Development at Avatar Reality, the company behind Blue Mars.

Blue Mars wants to offer “richly rendered” 3D environments, worlds wich outperform in graphical and animation-qualities Second Life or World of Warcraft. This comes at a price: specific hardware is needed to use this world, and of course sufficient bandwidth.

However, it is important to look into more detail what this world is about. In this post I’ll try to tell a bit more than usual about the tech-stuff, because what I learn from this all is that fully immersive and scalable environments are maybe something which can be realized in a near future.

But first, here is new teaser trailer:

• The most spectacular aspect is of course is the fidelity of the visuals, for which the company created and enhanced a version of the CryENGINE, a very sophisticated real-time graphics engine. Here’s a wonderful real time example of the physics engine used to mimic the   famous Bravia advertisement: Blue Mars Cryengine sample.
• There is another very important aspect, concurrency: Blue Mars wants to allow people to create social spaces that would contain a lot of users. A big event with many thousands of people will be possible, in one space.
• The downside is that the system is partly not compatible with OS X because of the CryENGINE. As soon as that is solved, a Mac edition will be launched.
• But, looking closer, there are solutions: users could use the Boot Camp software included with Mac OS X that lets them run compatible versions of Microsoft Windows on an Intel-based Mac.
• But what about Windows XP users? The Blue Mars client is built for Vista based machines with dedicated 3D graphics… In the questions&answers which went on after the show on the Metanomics site, Sink said: “We are aggressively exploring server side rendering technologies like OnLive which promise to bring advanced 3D to virtually every device with a fast internet connection.” Wikipedia learns me that OnLive is a gaming equivalent of cloud computing: the game is synchronized, rendered, and stored on a remote server and delivered online. The service is currently in closed beta with plans to have an open beta during the summer of 2009. The service is planned for release in the winter of 2009.
• What about the graphics cards? It seems there are low-cost cards (around a hundred dollars) that are doing really well for Blue Mars. “We expect, within a year and a half, that virtually every machine sold in the world will have plenty of rendering power to run Blue Mars”, Sink explained. Very interesting is that the iPhone is putting programmable graphics hardware in that is “a big steps towards running stuff like Blue Mars”.
• There are already more machines on the market today that will run Blue Mars well than there are Xbox 360s and PlayStation 3s combined.”
• Those machines do not have to be terribly expensive: Sink claims they built machines for 450 dollar that run Blue Mars quite well.
• Another important technological issue is whether the developers have to use expensive tools such as 3ds Max or ZBrush or Maya. Sink explained that anything that exports in COLLADA can be brought into the world (there is no in-world collaborative building): cheap or free tools such as Blender can be used as well.
• Creating games does not have to be total rocket science. Blue Mars created a Casual Game API to streamline a lot of the common functions game developers need. “Our goal is to make the complexity of 3D game development in Blue Mars comparable to 2D Flash based games. As an example, our Golf game is just a few hundred lines of code.” Virtual items which are put into the virtual world get a unique registration code and time stamp which should help protecting that content.
• What about the integration of social media? Blue Mars wants to embrace the networks the users have already established. “In other words, the easier we make it to communicate both into and out of Blue Mars with friends regardless of network they are on, the happier our users will be and the more useful Blue Mars will become”, so Sink said.
• What is a bit odd though is that Blue Mars does not support platform wide voice. “It is on our road map and we hope to integrate it at the platform level as soon as possible. Individual developers can offer VOIP options in their regions through LUA scripted objects”, so it was explained.

On the Metanomics site a lot more interesting stuff can be found about the business model and other aspects. What fascinates me is that even though the platform is very ambitious in high quality rendering and concurrency (the number of people attending), the technological requirements for users and developers don’t seem to be that totally futuristic.

Once again, it is early stage of course. I don’t see me using Blue Mars for our newspaper community as long as XP and Mac-users cannot have access in a very easy way - but it seems solutions may be not too far away.

Roland Legrand

On the set for a documentary about the future of virtual worlds, in Second Life

In about one hour I must give my take on the future of virtual worlds for MetaWorld2, Malburns’ television station. I have exactly 60 seconds, and here are some notes about what I would like to say.

• Of course making predictions about media technology is about as difficult as making predictions about currency fluctuations. People always find innovative ways to deal with new media, often to the bewilderment of those inventing those tools. But anyway, let me give it a try.
• I think the use of virtual worlds for education (in the broadest sense), for collaboration and entertainment will increase. Not only Second Life will continue to grow, but I see new environments catering for the same audience (meaning those who look for open ended environments which can be used for entertainment but also for collaboration, education and networking). For instance Metaplace is something we should cover closely, but also opensim/reactiongrid, Twinity and quite possibly also Blue Mars - and others will follow.
• In this proliferation of environments one can see a movement towards easier access for 2.5 D environments (Metaplace) but also a movement towards even more realism (Blue Mars, MellaniuM…).
• Even though more people will use those environments in a very interesting way, they will not go mainstream anytime soon. They are like the French literary and philosophical salons of the 17th century and 18th century, they are places where ideas are being discussed and tested which will change the world, but they are no mainstream venues.
• The internet of streams will capture a lot of interest: microblogging and micro-vlogging (Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook-status updates etc). Virtual worlds will try to capture this mometum by trying to integrate those social networks and those streams - whether they are 2.D worlds or highly immersive environments.
• Why won’t we go mainstream? Because we are still very early phase, with different technologies and practices - one environment goes for immersion but has very specific system requirements, another is very good in access but not in scalability etc.
• The other reasons have to do with mentalities. An avatar is not a neutral tool, and people have ambiguous feelings about having an avatar. There is also the issue of time and content management. Virtual worlds increase the opportunities for networking and participation dramatically, which is overwhelming for most people. Even the internet of streams has that problem: many people give up on Twitter, the realtime stream on Facebook is not universally appreciated.
• What is needed and what probably will happen is the integration of those tools and environments in interfaces which are very intuitive: think Google’s Wave maybe, and the many variations on Nintendo’s Wii, and on the accelerating development of the mobile internet because of the iPhone. For virtual worlds to be integrated in this movement of more intuitive interfaces, more time is needed.
• We are over-estimating what will happen in the next few years but under-estimating what will happen in about 5 to 10 years time.

Roland Legrand

People in Second Life react on the events in Iran. Meetings and vigils are being organized, notecards are being distributed supporting worldwide action against the violence. While other social media are far more important for coordinating protests and influencing the mainstream media and public opinion, Second Life enables smaller groups of people to discuss the situation and to share their feelings (cfr. previous post).

I took the above picture on Thursday at a vigil at the Palais Orleans Art Studio and Designs in Roissy, Second Life. The virtual monuments, with the giant screens and laptop, refer to the social media the protesters - and, to a lesser degree, their opponents - use.

The text on the laptop reads as follows:

A stream of videos posted on social networking Web sites depicted scenes of chaos — the sound of gunshots and helicopters whirring overhead and graphic images of wounded men and women being carried away.

Unconfirmed reports put the death toll as high as 150 on the seventh day of post-election protests. Sources at one Tehran hospital confirmed 19 deaths Saturday.

Roland Legrand

Talking about hyper realism in virtual environments: remember MellaniuM, a company specializing in “3D Virtual Real World™ that is realistic of the past, present, future, or imaginary world”? We posted about this company about a year ago.

This is the background I got at that time, meeting the Canadian Joe Rigby from MellaniuM:

We have successfully imported King’s College London (KCL’s) “Theatre of Pompey” into the UNREAL 2 platform”, so an enthusiastic Joe tried to explain me. “The technology I would like to present to you comprises a unique method of importing 3D Studio Max and AUTOCAD models into the UNREAL TOURNAMENT 2004 multi-participant platform”, so he went on.

Now the technological ideas behind all this seem to be very different from those behind Second Life or similar virtual enviroments:”…the concept hinges on the ability to import high polygon models (static meshes) with high resolution textures into an MMO platform such as UNREAL. The environments and client are locally administered off your PC. Any web based browser client where the assets are stored remotely and must be downloaded as you travel through the virtual space can only result in lag and “less than immersive” latency effects. We have produced a movie to compare the graphical fidelity for archaeological visualizations of the MellaniuM application and Second Life.”

The movie compares the Theatre of Pompey and the Titanic rendered in Second Life and in UNREAL using the MellaniuM application:

A year ago Rigby showed me this video and commented using Skype. Today I (or rather my avatar) could for the first time actually walk around in such a very realistic environment. The global access has been made possible through the NORTEL web.alive (project chainsaw) delivery system.
On the MellaniuM website I read:

Could you ever imagine meeting up with 50,150 or even 500 people in an environment created to contain dimensionally accurate buildings with high resolution graphics and high polygon 3D models? It is now entirely possible to do so at the click of one single solitary URL weblink. (…)

In other words, this time I could meet Rigby and other participants in the realistic industrial environment you see here:

Depending on the purposes of those concerned, we see how the virtual worlds landscape seems to expand in all directions at once: 2,5 environments for easy access and maximum compatiblity with web tools and technologies, 3D environments like Second Life for those who want more immersion while still enabling a large audience to actually produce the world themselves, and the hyper realistic environments for certain professional applications or for even deeper immersive effects.

Roland Legrand