Tags: dresden, museum, oldmasters, art, secondlife

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June 14, 2007

Wimbledon comes to Second Life (again)

One could argue that it was Wimbledon last year that really jump-started IBM's involvement in virtual worlds. Before all the hype, before the “but I need a first life!” meme, before IBM committed itself to the space, a small crew of talented developers out of Hursley, England capitalized on IBM's long relationship with Wimbledon* by creating a rudimentary centre court in Second Life. From there it's really a blur.

Fast forward a year and the new Wimbledon build on one of the official IBM islands is a good showcase of how far we've come. Real-time shot trajectory plotting in 3D, weather plotting, scoreboards, video playback, a shop, and a backdrop for posing your avatar against actual photos from the All England club.

Eightbar has the full scoop, of course.

If you've got Second Life, have a visit.

[*] After The Hermitage, the Wimbledon webcasts of 1999 and 2000 were my next projects in IBM. There's been nothing quite like the adrenalin of those days, coordinating live event coverage with outrageous traffic and no caching. (OK, almost nothing like it.)

Tags: ibm, secondlife, wimbledon

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April 5, 2007

Terraform this!: SXSW podcast available

Do you want to do your accounting inside a virtual world?

Terraforming the Internet panel, MP3 26.8MB.

Tags: panel, sxsw, virtualworld

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March 17, 2007

Hack the planet: Spore and Worldchanging

The two most powerful presentations I saw at South by Southwest concerned vastly different topics -- gaming and environmentalism -- but their essence was the same. How to engineer a planet?

The first was Will Wright's mile-a-minute discussion of interactive narrative and demo of the upcoming Spore (update: video) .Then, later that day was Alex Steffen's captivating Worldchanging exploration of living for a sustainable future (udpate: podcast).

Spore of course is really Wright's “SimUniverse,” starting you off in the protoplasmic goop as a unicellular creature in search of not dying and concluding, if evolution is kind, with you at the helm of a stable, interstellar civilization. Spore is, in short, a massive modeling tool for the complex systems that make up a world. It looks like a hell of a lot of fun.

Steffen's presentation was about modeling a future world too, though in this case it is the one we're currently living on. Where An Inconvenient Truth highlighted the problem, Steffen's site, book, and organization work to demonstrate solutions. He is a powerful speaker. The audience was as spellbound as it was during the Spore demo and probably for the same reason: waiting raptly to find out how this particular world was going to turn out.

Both the game and the strategy for a sustainable Earth have to do with little things that have big consequences. In Spore this might be giving your creature asymmetrical appendages, something which may serve you well when foraging in nooks and crannies but which might turn out to be a liability in hand-to-hand combat or when piloting a spaceship. In Worldchanging, it might be car-sharing, for people who share a vehicle tend to be more efficient drivers since they have to plan their excursions. Both talks were essentially about sliding the scale on civilization and seeing what happens, what Steven Johnson calls The Long Zoom. (His recent book, The Ghost Map, focuses on the interplay of scale between the cholera microorganism and the urban patterns of 19th century London.)

Wright calls interactive narrative of this sort “filling in possibility space”. There's always structure and constraint, but an element of free will allows for gameplay. You might argue the same goes for environmentalism. Natural resources, physics, and the human imagination are our constraints. We must merely fill in the possibility space, change the narrative for a happier ending.

Wright says that “the process of playing the game is the process of making assets for the game.” You could say the same thing about SimCity too, of course, but you could also say that about life. If life is a game -- and in non-trivial ways, it is: a set of goal-directed actions to maximize returns -- then we've got a rather tidy analogy on our hands. You don't live in a static world; you make the world as you live.

Consider these quotes:

“One must dematerialize the extraneous stuff that gets in the way of the experiences we want.”

“Compact living in well-designed cities dematerializes transportation and infrastructure allowing access by proximity.”

“Many things are only garbage when they are in the wrong place.”

All from Steffen, all about eco-friendly living. But they're absolutely relevant to Spore. Which isn't to say that Spore is an in-your-face green manifesto. It isn't. You might create a perfectly sustainable planet with oceans of methane. But in doing so you've foreclosed many possibility spaces suitable to human beings. Fun in a game, not so fun for carbon-based lifeforms.

Some other bits I found interesting in the Worldchanging session:

Car-sharing is an old idea (it just sounds 1970's) made useful only through recent mapping and GPS technologies. ZipCar and iGo are successful because technology has finally made it easy for people to find a car when they need one.

Steffen asked how many in the audience owned power drills. Most hands went up. (This was a geekfest after all.) He then told us that the average power drill gets used for six to twenty minutes in its entire life -- an epitome of unsustainable waste. What we want is the hole not the drill.

Measuring things changes the way you use them. The example he gave came from the UK where a test group had their energy meters moved inside the house. This act by itself reduced power consumption. When you see the meter you think about the meter and when you think about it you turn the lights off.

Why can't we separate practical objects from objects that mean something to us? Your childhood teddy bear means something to you emotionally, where your washing machine most likely doesn't. What if most practical objects were leased rather than owned? The effect would be greener production. If a cell phone manufacturer had to take the phone back at the end of its useful life the company would be far more likely to make it easy to recycle. (Steffen called computers -- which nearly everyone in the audience had on their lap -- an “environmental nightmare” because of their unrecyclability.)

It was interesting to me that some of the technologies found in the third world are the greenest: evaporative refrigeration, fog-catchers, rainwater recyclers, wired infrastructure leapfrogging.

The final bit of advice was to “green your geek.” Don't stay up at night worrying about paper versus plastic. Rather focus on whatever you are really into (i.e., “your geek”) and try to change just that. Simple, potentially powerful.

In the end these two sessions about Spore and Worldchanging kinda merged in my head. To create a sustainable world you have to imagine what you want, then build it. Spore gives us a simulator; Worldchanging gives us an imperative.

Reminds me of the History Channel City of the Future design challenge. Much more on this soon!

As a sidenote, it's been remarked that the panel-heavy structure of South by Southwest doesn't allow for sustained exploration of an idea. I'm still a fan of the conversational tone of the panels, but in looking back on the week that was I admit that the three most powerful sessions I attended had a single speaker.

Tags: environment, sustainable, sim, spore, worldchanging

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March 15, 2007

Worldbits

Some thought-bombs from SXSW. Sorry not to properly attribute quotes. Was typing too fast to look up. If not in quotes, it is just my observation and, thus, suspect.

• “Closed formats suck!” [applause] -- Raph Koster, referring to Second Life and prims.
• People are pretty much salivating for a Google Earth-powered virtual world.
• “I want to see high-detail interiors.” -- referring to the next step in Google Earth's evolution.
• DIY data visualization sites like Many Eyes and Swivel could create lots of valuable overlays for Google Earth.
• John Tolva: “page-based vs. spatial internet” vs. Ben Cerveny: “document-based computing vs. relationship-based computing”.
• Justin Hall's Passively Multiplayer Online Gaming.
• "Why do all the robots 'live' in Japan? Because the Japanese have an animist tradition and they have no problem that a non-living thing could be talking to them."
• “Why is it that as soon as we get the ability to do anything we want in a virtual world that we immediately try to recreate 'Menlo Park'? Painting sought a new direction when photography made realism easy.' Why can't we do that with virtual worlds?” This is one way of stating the oft-heard praise of the playful Wii versus the realist firepower of the PS3. Why must virtual worlds be photorealistic?
• “Online consumers are essentially non-player characters because their actions are so constrained.” LOVE that.
• Avatar psychology (from an audience response):

  Do I contradict myself?
  Very well then I contradict myself,
  (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
  -- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

• “What is the role of the non-player character in a non-gaming world?” Um, how about a tour guide?
• You do know that Flickr, archetypal Web 2.0 site that it is, started as a game, right? The .gne extension you sometimes saw at Flickr stands for Game Neverending.
• Jamais Cascio asked: “Where is the 3D Wikipedia?” Answer: “I think that might presuppose a taxonomy of everything in the world and that might be, you know, a challenge.”
• “VRML wasn't so useful for VR. It was too heavy. Online 3D spaces pull much more heavily from games. In the end, the commercial formats ended up being the good ones.” -- Raph Koster
• “The number one form of user-created content is the screenshot.” -- Raph Koster
• Word: “toyetic” -- the toy-like enjoyability of something (Sketchup was the example).
• Word: “extimate” -- opposite of intimate, but not the same as distant, referring to avatars -- Jamais Cascio
• “It is far easier to make a Mii avatar than an SL avatar, ergo, there will be more Mii avatars. It is just that simple.” -- Raph Koster
• “Humans actually relate to iconified individuals better than photorealistic individuals. 3D does not have to be photoreal.” -- Raph Koster
• “We need some aesthetic honesty here. Mashups suck.” -- Bruce Sterling
• Bruce Sterling describes the new global order, channeling Yochai Benkler:
  • First World - the global market
  • Second World - all forms of governance (local, regional, national)
  • Third World - socially-motivated, commons-based peer production (e.g. Craigslist, Wikipedia)
  • Fourth World - disorder (the largest and fastest-growing)

Tags: conferences, virtualworld, sxsw, web2.0

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Universal format

So, I spent much of my time focusing on spatial tech, 3D worlds, metaversy stuff this SXSW season. There were so many good observations. I'll sprinkle some in series a posts.

In the green room before our panel I was noting to Ben Batstone-Cunningham how odd it was that teens could not take their friend lists with them when they turn 18 and “graduate” from the teen grid to the main grid on Second Life. As a former Lindener, he said that this was entirely by design for security reasons (the two grids having no messaging interconnects) but that you could in fact bring your inventory with you to the new grid. But he also asked rather pointedly, which would you rather take, your list of friends or your actual things?

That's not being crass. It is a statement about the non-techncial nature of people networks, the foundation of the success of any social world. You can't export a personal relationship. Or, rather, you don't need to. It is a universal format. It persists across platforms. Your app may facilitate the creation and maintenance of such relationships, but the relationships themselves move smoothly between any world. Watch as the Twittersphere shrinks post-SXSW. But the relationships -- at least some of them -- will persist.

There was much talk at SXSW about OpenID. When will x application support OpenID? So people are of course thinking about identity across worlds and this will help relationship networks bridge changing technologies.

But it does come back to people. Just like blogs, podcasts, and just about anything we seem to care about. This should be the focus first. Then technology.

Tags: socialnetworking

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March 10, 2007

“Okay, I’m a little bummed. I didn’t learn anything.”

Best blog comment on my panel at SXSW this morning, above.

A good time and great discussion. Diverse panel, mosty sober audience (and panelists). Crappy interweb in the room though. Not sure it streamed into SL. Anyone know?

A few more thoughts here:

Note: lots of smart people at SXSW. Lots of good insights. Proficiency using microphones: not so much.

The truth hurts, don't it?

Transcript (ish) on 3pointD here. More soon ...

Tags: conferences, sxsw

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March 8, 2007

Digging in the virtual sands

It seems like just yesterday that the Eternal Egypt website debuted. In fact it has been over three years. Image content has steadily been added since launch, but the most popular experience on the site remains the Virtual Environments, 3D recreations of important places in Egyptian history. On the website these environments are panoramic slices of fully-modelled locales. In 2004 there was no good way to put a 3D world into a browser (still isn't, come to that) so we rendered off static QTVR's from dozens of vantage points. Compelling, but clearly a step down from the actual, navigable models.

Ah, but there's more to that story. The Eternal Egypt Kiosk was developed as a freestanding unit that displays the full environments, arcade game-style. These kiosks have been donated to museums around the world and are quite a hit, especially as Egyptomania has resurged of late.

Here's the latest list of museums that have a kiosk out for visitors. Coming soon to a town near you! [Embedded version removed 'cause it was choking Safari and IE.]

Here are some screenshots from the three environments: the Tomb of Tutankhamun, the Great Pyramids and Sphinx, and Luxor Temple.

With a joystick and a few buttons you move about the world learning as you go with the help of text and image overlays. It's a lot like a MMORPG, without the MM or the G. And that's the thing, the kiosk is great fun, but it is utterly devoid of others. Like you're the last archaeologist living. Gee, if only someone were creating a truly collaborative cultural heritage MMO ...

Tags: egypt, 3d, museum

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SXSW Screenburn panels in Second Life

The good folks at Electric Sheep will be streaming the SXSW Screenburn track of panels onto Sheep Island starting on Saturday. If you can't join us in Austin, how about visiting there? Who knows if the kinks will be worked out by Saturday morning for the first panel (mine), but we'll be in there if all's well. Nothing like sniping at panelists from the metaverse.

Sheep Island this-a-way.

A bit more.

Tags: secondlife, sxsw

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February 27, 2007

Head south, then southwest, then split the difference

SXSW Interactive is a little over a week away. I'm excited to be leading the first panel of the festival on virtual worlds called Terraforming the Internet. Even happier to announce the confirmed speakers.

Ben Batstone-Cunningham, Alt-Zoom Studios
Jan D'Alessandro, Meez
Eric Rice, Slackstreet Studios
Bill Victor, Halcyon Worlds

Talented, experienced, articulate, all of them. I am told they are mostly well-groomed. But don't let grooming be an issue. If you're in town for SXSW don't let a Friday night hangover be an excuse not to come to our panel Saturday morning. Makes for a better discussion.

If you'll be in town and want to meet up, drop a line.

And if you won't be in town, why not? How can you pass up a conference with panels like Web Hacks: Good or Evil (or: Welcome to Web 2.666) and
Game Perverts: A Robot, a DS and a Dot Matrix Printer Menage a Trois?

Or for that matter film screenings for Hostel 2 and Helvetica and music performances by Girl Talk and Hoodoo Gurus. Something for everyone!

Tags: austin, conferences, sxsw

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February 9, 2007

Austin-powered

So, I'll be back at the fine SXSW Interactive conference/festival in Austin this year. Last year I spewed forth on convergence (skeptically). This year I get to orchestrate the spewage as I am leading a panel on virtual worlds, one of a handful on the topic in the Gaming/Screenburn category.

The panel's called “Terraforming the Internet: When 3D Models Meet Business Models.” Saturday, March 10, 10am. Panelists are being finalized, but they're all brilliant, articulate, laureates-in-waiting.

SXSW is simply an exceptional event and I'm happy to be a part of it. See you there?

See also: South by

Tags: conferences

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December 17, 2006

Twelve islands

It isn't exactly news that IBM is interested in virtual worlds, but Friday represented a bit of a milestone when we unveiled our official land in Second Life -- twelve interlinked islands, open and built-out for business use, research, internal collaboration, and anything else we can think of. As always, Eightbar has the inside scoop.

It's exciting times, but not because we're in Second Life. We've been working in SL for months, albeit without the sanctioned presence that this island megaplex gives us. This is important because it represents the results of collaboration between a somewhat bewildering variety of interests inside IBM and it points to much more to come. This event, the founding and development of the twelve islands and not Sam Palmisano's announcement in Beijing (much as I loved it), is the real beginning of IBM establishing itself in this space (literally).

But what really interests me -- end press release, start me release -- is that this will be a springboard to the rest of the metaverse. Second Life itself is but an island, really, a popular walled garden that was one of the first to the game. Zoom out and move forward a few years and SL will be just a powers-of-ten-sized chunk of a much larger universe of virtual worlds. The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time will be one, as will thousands of others. In fact, to really make an impact there shouldn't be distinctions between the various worlds. One should be able to hop about as from webpage to webpage, seamlessly. That's a bit of a dream these days with the leaders in the industry less interested in standards and interop than community-building. But we've seen that before with the browser hell of the early web days and we'll no doubt see it again.

If you're in Second Life and would like to visit, just search for IBM on the map and pick an island. There's a lot to see. I'm Immerito Foley in-world. Ping me if you need a guide.

Tags: ibm, secondlife

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July 12, 2006

Flashmobbing in the virtual Far East

If all the feel-good talk of virtual community and social networking has you wanting to gag, you'll be pleased to know that mob justice is alive and well in the metaverse too.

The supremely popular Chinese online role-playing game called "The Fantasy of the Journey West" was recently the scene of a massive virtual protest over the depiction of what looked like a Japanese imperial flag inside a traditional Chinese government office. But that makes it sound halfway rational. You have to see the screen grabs of thousands of huddled avatars spewing nationalist rage to fully appreciate the lunacy.

EastSouthWestNorth has the blow-by-blow, while Salon attempts to sort out the mess.

Sheesh, some people sure get upset about flags, you know? Must be an election year in China. No, wait ...

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June 17, 2006

The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time

Yesterday in Beijing, China's Palace Museum and IBM jointly announced The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time, the project that I've been working on for over a year. Consistent readers of this blog (yes, you three) know that I spend a lot of time in China and so it is a great relief that the cat is officially out of the bag. Not that I'll be diving into excruciating detail in future posts -- gotta save some surprises for the actual launch in 2008, right? -- but it should give a bit more context to my musings.

So, what's the project? Well there's the official press release and the Palace Museum's statement (in Chinese). The Chicago Sun-Times decided to take the local angle on the announcement and ran a flattering piece on me and my team. The paper even gave Ascent Stage some love.

But what is Beyond Space and Time? Well, announcements like this at the beginning of a project are always tricky since it is the nature of multi-year, first-of-a-kind efforts to change drastically from vision to implementation. But you have to start somewhere, so here's the vision.

The heart of Beyond Space and Time is a virtual online replica of the Forbidden City. This is not a set of traditional webpages but rather a fully immersive, spatial, populated world that corresponds architecturally and historically to the vast grounds of the current Palace Museum. And not just pretty building models to ogle at. We call it a Participatory Cultural Environment to stress the importance of a space alive with people -- other visitors who you can interact with and, if possible, computer-controlled representations of historic persons. Though 3D representation is widespread in the field of cultural heritage (primarily for preservation), this kind of multi-user, education-focused cultural worlds does not exist.

If you know Second Life, you're familiar with non-game-based 3D virtual communities. Second Life is an inspiration and even a development sandbox for us (no SLURL, we're on a private island for now -- but we did recently take a SL team portait), but we're evaluating many platform possibilities. It is sometimes said that people who visit the real Forbidden City leave thinking that they've missed the actual Palace Museum. In fact, the buildings and grounds (and of course the artifacts therein) are the Palace Museum; it is not a single building with nice glass cases and wall placards. This is the primary reason that our virtual version is a spatial world rather than a more traditional web front end (however tricked out) for a database of media, as we did with the Hermitage and Eternal Egypt. The museum is a city and the best way to experience a city is by moving through it and interacting with others in it. Call it the sidewalk approach to cultural heritage.

There's an historical aspect too: that's the beyond time part. We envision being able to move between a few discrete historical moments in the centuries-long evolution of the city. The environment will morph architecturally and of course the storylines embedded in the world will correspond to the historical moment. System design verges on science fiction here as we move through the implications of a community space that exists on different timelines. For example what happens to the field trip group when some of your classmates decide to peel off for the 16th century?

Of course, a virtual simulacrum of a physical space isn't much fun if it doesn't have points of tangency with the real world, now is it? We're working with our museum partners to identify places inside the Forbidden City where visitors who are physically there can interact with the virtual version of the space. We're evaluating different location-based services -- from projection in the palace halls to mobile device interaction. The idea is to break down the strict distinction between the real world and the virtual world, to let one enhance the other. Challenges like this are one of the many reasons IBM undertakes and funds projects such as Beyond Space and Time.

There's an aspect to the project that is personally very exciting and not yet reported in the press. Modelling 800 buildings to a level of appropriate detail isn't something that can realistically be achieved by 2008. We realize this and actually think it is a blessing in disguise. Inspired by the Ancient Spaces project which itself takes a Wikipedia-like approach to collaborative content development, we propose to open the modelling effort to the global community of developers. When exactly this will happen and certainly how it will work is still to be defined, but if you are interested in being part of the distributed virtual construction crew drop me a line at .

In North America I am working with some very talented designers and developers, many of whom have years of experience from earlier museum projects. In China we're working with specialists from IBM's research lab in Beijing as well as a team at the Palace Museum who are as technically-savvy as they are informed about the history and culture inside the Forbidden City walls.

So, then, back to work.

[Note to those of you who read this site's feeds: I've played with a kind of spatial hyperlink that adds some extra information to this post. The content, alas, is not part of the RSS feeds. Drop on by the site if you'd like the extra morsels.]

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