These are my brief (and very rough) notes from 5 minutes ago summarizing some guidelines I feel are critical for application & service development:

The cloud is everywhere.
Applications grab eyes.
Mobile/desktop/cloud - Don’t draw partitions.
Seek integrations across platforms.
Scale services by UI. Eg editing photos on a mobile is not appropriate but capturing images and uploading them to a workspace is.
Build communities.
Provide ubiquitous workspaces.
Communicate, Collaborate, Create, Share

I’m heartened to find the Metaverse Roadmap, sponsored by the Accelerating Studies Foundation. While I’ve been moaning about the shortcomings of immersive 3D technologies, they’ve been defining the template for progress. Much of their thoughts align with my own, painting an exciting future of convergence across modalities, devices, and workflows.

The emergence of a robust Metaverse will shape the development of many technological realms that presently appear non-Internet-related. In manufacturing, 3D environments offer ideal design spaces for rapid-prototyping and customized and decentralized production. In logistics and transportation, spatially-aware tags and real-time world modeling will bring new efficiencies, insights, and markets. In artificial intelligence, virtual worlds offer low-risk, transparent platforms for the development and testing of autonomous machine behaviors, many of which may be also used in the physical world. These are just a sampling of coming developments based on early stage Metaverse technologies.

In sum, for the best view of the changes ahead, we suggest thinking of the Metaverse not as virtual space but as the junction or nexus of our physical and virtual worlds.

I have a lot of issues with Second Life - mostly because I’m frustrated by their potential and their seeming inability to act on it - but it’s nevertheless an interesting sandbox to explore the greater frontiers of virtual immersion and social ontology. To this end, Japanese researchers have wired up a Second Life avatar to respond to the thoughts of a paraplegic.

…he wore headgear with three electrodes monitoring brain waves related to his hands and legs. Even though he cannot move his legs, he imagined that his character was walking.

He was then able to have a conversation with the other character using an attached microphone, said the researchers at Japan’s Keio University.

…”In the near future, they would be able to stroll through Second Life shopping malls with their brain waves… and click to make a purchase,” Ushiba said.

In games, immersive worlds, forums, social networks, and in blogs we inhabit multiple selves. In most cases, theses virtual spaces are walled islands with little relation between them. Increasingly it’s becoming apparent that continuity is necessary to resolve these fractured selves and to open up the channels of communication between the diversity of online containers. This can be seen in the new wave of web 2.0 aggregators like FriendFeed and Plaxo that aim to collate our myriad profiles, friends and content streams into a single portal. Now, Technology Review reports that several companies are working to enable avatars to move between virtual worlds.

More and more, such affordances will move into virtual spaces. 2D content streams and communication pipelines will feed into and across immersive worlds. A WoW player should be able to call up a HUD console in the game and locate their friends across all of the virtual worlds they’re currently in. They should then be able to communicate with them through IM or VoIP and subsequently transport to join them in another world. GTA4 has announced a feature to allow users to call each other in-world using the game cell phone. Shouldn’t this extend across game worlds and out into real-world mobiles? API’s could evolve to mine user communications (Twitter in WoW?) and chart locations on world maps. In the age of digital society, findability is key.

The vast amounts of personal profiling we’re building up around ourselves in MySpace, Facebook, blogs, and other forums should be accessible through our avatars and from all places we inhabit, virtually and in reality. It should be present in our devices and our profiles. As avatars, it should follow us like a digital skin (secured and opt-in, of course) layered in transaction-appropriate trust profiles that fly-out on mouseover. My avatars should contain more information than just polygons and scripted motions. Social transactions are information exchanges. My LinkedIn profile should be accesible to anyone in 2D and 3D if I so desire.

The realness of immersive worlds should leverage the fundamental reality of our digital profiles and interests. If these platforms are going to become truly compelling, they must work to integrate the API’s, content streams, and communication channels of the web2.0 revolution. We’re in the midst of a completely unprecedented historical shift as all of our cultural and intellectual content is going digital, made manifest in searchable, findable, and persistent datalogs. The profiles we create around our virtual selves are growing larger and larger, and they are being recorded and left open for many eyes to see. Imagine the political candidates running 10 or 15 years from now. So much of their lives will be a matter of public record easily searchable and graphed out to show affiliations, donations, histories and contradictions. So much of who they are will live online like a shadow. SO much of who we all are.

Virtual worlds are poised to engage directly in this shift and draw culture and identity into their domain. Instead of closed platforms, worlds like Second Life must open up and grow to become contiguous spaces whose character arises from the types of people that choose to gather there by affiliation, interest, and intention. MMORPG’s like WoW will continue to offer highly crafted narratives, specialized social groups and hierarchies, and bleeding edge rendering tech but will acknowledge the tremendous personal content within each player distributed across their digital and analog lives.

Of course, if virtual platforms become more open, their business models will inevitably shift towards advertising. Space is space, whether 2D, 3D, or 4D, and eyes are eyes especially when they gather in great enough concentration. As in the real world, the exchange of goods and services will always be of great value in any domain, so the shift towards continuity will be a shift towards reality. Virtual worlds have the unique proposition of creating fantasy within the world of life. So the shift towards reality in the context of a realized fantasy brings both closer together. It is part of the alchemical formula of bringing spirit into matter. It is the power of gods to create in an unlimited universe. It is the movement of the ghost in the machine as our real selves grow more and more to include virtual, digital, non-local aspects of identity and presence. Who am I but the sum of my transactions with the world? These words I’m writing and posting on the global billboard become preserved bits of my self. Your interactions with them extend my identity into the virtual world. All my words are facets of my expanding digital identity. My self-reflection extends from my body, my deeds, my actions towards others around me, to include the ideas and statements I leave online, the avatars I inhabit, and the webs of disembodied people I associate with. In 100 years I may roll up in bits under some social anthropologist’s data-mining PhD nudging their graphs this way or that with my Tweets and posts.

Aggregation of social data serves a very practical role of making it easier for us to manage an increasingly vast amount of data, but it also serves a larger role of helping us defragment our sense of self as it fractures out across so many new digital domains rising and falling daily. If we’re to walk like new gods through worlds both real and virtual, shouldn’t we do so with as much wholeness as possible? In a world that’s made it so challenging to have a fully integrated psyche it’s really imperative that we lay down a strong foundation of holism and continuity as we move into the unfettered vastness of the digital noosphere. As strong cohesive selves we can better wear the masks of avatars and wield the power of virtual gods.

To briefly elaborate on an earlier post about Second Life… And specifically, ways in which I believe a modern 3d immersive world can leverage the new wave of cloud tech and create a truly compelling experience:

I want downtown billboards streaming Twitter feeds, rich dataviz, global network traffic, weather patterns, Flickr streams, and cycling media channels. I want to Dj from Traktor directly into a virtual club. I want interactive music and video remix tools that include the world as a substrate. I want to endow my avatar with metadata callouts, grouped in trust profiles, that display my affinities, affiliations, tag cloud, LinkedIn profile, sms number, twitter id, and credit accounts as appropriate to those I meet. I want to be free to re-purpose 3D assets from 3DSM, Maya, and Sketchup into my worldspace. I want a beautiful living homeworld that gathers the populace and inspires users and developers to create their own content elsewhere on distributed servers. I want to join friends on a virtual hilltop and watch the clouds drift past, watch the sun set, and the moons rise. I want to get lost in emergent behaviors, intelligent agents, and the beauty of physical dynamics. I want to easily find friends across multiple servers, across social nets, and out into mobile, gsm, and phone networks. I want an open-standard, opt-in, cloakable virtual ID that can be searched for and found across all dominant gaming and immersive networked worldspaces - and then when I find my friend I want to be able to join them wherever they are. I want peer-to-peer drop-boxes and back-channels that can address files to dominant industry and open-source applications, then back to in-world interfaces. I want an in-world, heads-up fly-out phone/sms/notepad/web-browser overlay that’s data synched to my mobile phone. I want to stumble into sinuous plotlines that sweep me away to distant parts of the virtual world. And yes, I want an SDK that allows EA to stick the Tony Hawk trick and physics model into a nice binary that can be purchased and installed into my client so I can skate around the place. And yes, I will try to grind your avatar if you have any linear edges sticking out.

I’m totally dreaming, I know. But dreams are what the future is built upon.

This was a great conference and the most consistent collection of speakers and topics I’ve ever experienced. Very fun and inspiring. Lots of hip 30-somethings trying to dream up tomorrow and make it real. It was a a very balanced, yet cutting-edge talk aimed at an eager (and surprisingly mixed-gender)crowd. I noticed that most folks were using Mac laptops - this part of the edge seems to prefer Apple - and it was fascinating to watch many who were blogging the talks while pulling up references dropped by the speakers, tweeting out to Twitter, and snapping/downloading/posting photos in real-time. As speakers dropped references I was pulling them up on my laptop and dropping links into my blog notes.

In the lobby a team was showing off a data viz video mapping real-time communications connecting NYC to the rest of the world. Andrea noticed that a surprising number were with an Italian city called Perugia. Maybe next year they could map the live feed of all web traffic from ETech. Imagine the bitstreams rising off such a gathering of digiterati.

Maybe it was just the Sudafed coursing through our virus-ridden veins (thank you Portland) but ETech was a total intellectual turn-on, from ambient objects, Asian mobile media, green policy and sustainability, hardware hacking & drone building, Austrian post-Situationists, neuroengineering, and the digital salvation of Democracy itself.

I hope I can go back next year!

What are the mechanisms of normal and pathological human function? And how can we improve them? Bridging the gap of human behavior, social behavior, and molecular function. Can we augment emotion & cognitive functions? Why do we feel and act the way we do? HOw can we cure intractable disorders?

Controlling neural circuits. INvent new tools and understand how to use them. What is the abstraction layer we need to deal with? Need to understand entire neural circuits from input to output.

Augmentation: towards a cognitive augmentation tool box. Transcranial Magentic Stimulation. Modifying magnetic fields across the cortex, activating brain circuits. Approved to treat depression. OpenStim open source brain stim - wearable device, cheap, light. How to target deep noninvasive stim?

Targeted brain stim can precisely alter cognitive processing. Ex: increase/decrease risk-taking; trust/judgement; memory. Can we make a creativity prosthetic?

Cognitive behavioral therapy: cancel out a negative thought by behavioral/psychological strategies. Better than pharm. Easy to learn, difficult to excercise in the midst of depression. POss to use hypnotherapy to treat procedural anxiety. State of suggestibility, attention , and distance from feelingss.

Customized adaptive treatment engine: generate scripts to match anxiety and pain-release strategies to individuals. Can be used before and during surgical/invasive procedures to reduce anxiety.

Neuroeconomics: scan the brain during work tasks to identify areas of activity, derive consequences of brain lesions and other problems. Why does someone do what they do, buy what they buy, invest or not invest? Intervene to temporarily perturb specific low-level function in order to study it’s role in higher-level emergent behavior. [scary! how to better market to the lizard brain]

Brain disorders are a huge problem. Problems are sever, robbing happiness, self, identity. Great untapped need inspiring many business opportunities for treatment. 20th century the era of pharmaceuticals. Developments are slowing down, lots of side effects, nonspecific.

Optical neural control: precisely sculpt activity in specific regions and cell types. Thousands of cell types. Most severe disorders are loss of specific cell types. Can tune molecular promoters to express chemical modulator, using viral vectors (gene therapy). Adeno-associated virus seems very safe so far. Modify specific cells to respond to light. Can drive neural activity in modified cells using colored light. Can turn on with blue light, off with yellow. Looking at hardware light arrays (ex: modulate epilepsy neural circuit, Parkinsons). Shuffling neural code to offset epileptic spike trains.

This is just a test to see if my urbeingrecorded RSS feed will automatically post to my new Tumblr account. I really dig Tumblr, btw. It collates text, pics, and emails from my mobile, as well as any of my RSS content feeds, all onto a sweet little home page. eventually I hope to consolidate everything onto one main portal.

From a post at Electroplankton about high convergence functionality in Japanese mobile phones.

Claude is a 27 y.o. Japanese male… (His) typical day starts with him checking his email on his phone. He gets all his daily tasks and calendaring events this way. He then syncs it with his computer. He pays for the subway by placing the phone on a kiosk granting him access past the gates. The commute is spent watching TV on his phone by rotating the screen. A small antenna extends up and catches the wireless digital TV signals (something we will never have here in America). About 45 minutes later, he’s in Tokyo and heads to a vending machine to buy fresh fruit and water. He places the phone up against a pad. The vending machine reads his bank information which is tied into his phone. He then places his thumb on the phone’s tiny thumbprint reader to verify his identity. As he makes his way to the office, he waves the phone near the door handle to unlock it. During a 10 minute break, he’s flips thru a magazine and sees something he wants to buy. The item has a tiny stamp size barcode pictogram next to it. He scans the pictogram with his phone. A receipt and shipping confirmation hits his email minutes later. As the day ends, he syncs with his work computer and goes grocery shopping paying for items with his phone. Before heading home, he heads to a bar his friend has invited him too. He uses the phone to give him step-by-step directions. The day is finally over and his phone’s battery is nearing the end of its life. He plugs it in and goes about the rest of the evening relaxing before bed.

Very cool tech from Ribbit uses Flash/Flex to emulate telephony in web pages and software. This enables direct 2-way communication between widgets and mobiles. The lines between software and webware continue to blur, as are the distinctions between mobile and desktop.

Ribbit software hooks up standard phone services to the Web. Users simply forward their mobile phone numbers to Ribbit, which delivers the calls back to personalized Amphibian Web pages that offer a series of unified communications features.

…As a demonstration of the power of Ribbit, one independent developer using new Adobe AIR software has built a full-featured version of Apple’s iPhone that works on Web pages.

From a recent internal email thread (slightly modified and redacted):

I’ve done a reasonable amount of work developing 3D spaces and evaluating the opportunities in immersive worlds. Along the way I’ve learned a lot about virtual worlds and the people who frequent them, least of which is the unfortunate reality that nobody seems to be able to make any real money on the open-ended, user-generated content model.

While Second Life enjoys the occassional publicity bumps on the backs of Boing Boing and Wired et al, they have yet to really nail down their business model short of “get bought by Google”. As others have noted, the connection between their virtual economy and that of the real world are tenuous at best and criminal at worst (see the shady operations of some of it’s private banks…). IBM and others respond to the hype and dump millions into corporate islands, only to realize that people aren’t particularly interested. The tools offered to users suffer from poor UI and steep learning curves, leading to small cliques of content creators sucking up Linden dollars from downstreamers who wish their avatar was more interesting. As we learned with Atmosphere, letting the users take responsibility for all the content leads to very limited and insular creativity with a lot of folks simply standing around in fancy outfits. Spending any substantial time in SL or the other user-content worlds leaves me with the sad aftertaste that millions and millions of polygons are being wasted on a fancy chat client.

Now clearly, virtual worlds are extremely compelling. We want cyberspace and the metaverse, and companies like SL ride this sci-fi future dream as far as they can hoping that if enough people believe it, then it will come true. A common side-effect of the hype machine is that people jump on the panacea bandwagon and start to think that the 3D world can replace everything we do on the desktop or IRL. As others have noted, running trainingseminars in full-featured flat apps like Connect is much better than trying to do it in 3D. Likewise with watching video or surfing the web or writing spreadsheets. To find value in virtual worlds is to determine what they do better than flatware. Blizzard knows that one of the best things 3D worlds do is provide an immersive environment in which to unroll a compelling narrative. SL ditched the narrative and assumes that the users want to create their own world from a blank palette. A simple glance at the numbers shows who has the better game plan for virtual worlds right now.

Content creation in 3D worlds is fraught with peril due to it’s complexity. Modelling in 3D will always be a professional endeavor, as it should be. It’s fricken hard. Scripting actions is also challenging but a little more accesible. Skinning jpegs for fashionable avatar textures? Maybe your average photoshopper can do this if they wish but don’t we already make a lot of money off the professional gaming companies that integrated PS into their workflows a long time ago?

The real point of interest for me in spaces like SL is not the creation of virtual design content, but the creation and management of social content. The most compelling thing in any social network, flat or 3d, is the ability to find your friends/connections, to share and retrieve information, to discover affinity groups based on your interests, and to have access to simple agents that help better integrate the online self with the real-world self.

To my mind, the current value proposition lies in creating extensible flash widgets that crawl through social nets and help users manage the data and enhance their productivity. How can I find the knowledge experts that can help me use Photoshop for pre-press? As a knowledge expert, how can I let others know I’m here to help? How can a user manage and personalize their Suite workflows and integrate them with their online data? What’s the easiest way to meet a LinkedIn contact in a Connect session to show off a portfolio of Flash content? How can I derive a color space from an image that will then lead me to an online resource for similar images? How can I capture real world media inspiration from my mobile and make sure it easily and reliably gets into my Suite workspace? How can a Second Life avatar show more personal attributes, interests, connections, profiles, etc to others in the virtual world? If an SL buddy texts a friend from within the 3D world, can the friend receive the text and respond with their cellphone?

I think we need to regard virtual worlds not as islands of discrete opportunities but as extensions of the real world and of the datasphere. I see little value in creating tools to enable SL/There/etc content creation or in buying advertising space in-world. To me, the most exciting virtual space right now is the social information and collaboration space - and it’s moving into the mobile form-factor a lot more quickly than into 3D worlds. The best value, IMHO, is working on the interstitial technologies that integrate all of these diverse spaces and workflows.

In the meantime, I’ll continue dreaming about the metaverse until it arrives.

[video]

Wow, I was in quite a fog over the holiday. Sleeping in, lazing about, drinking and huddling on the couch to avoid the cold and rain outside. It was great, mind you, but not especially productive (though I did make some impressive gains in Guitar Hero - and I managed to help nurse a car-stricken kitty back to health). So anyways, happy new year to everyone!

Speaking of Guitar Hero… Leave it to Sony to figure out yet another way to lose money. I tried to connect to the Playstation Online store from my PS3 and it told me I could not connect until I downloaded and installed the latest system update. This is like saying that you can’t get to the iTunes store unless you first install the latest version of iTunes. Duh. Way to make it harder for customers to give you money. Sony really has to let go of their maddening need to control everything.

But then it’s humbling when you spend so much time hating on asstards and then you suddenly find yourself being one. I almost changed lanes into another car this morning. Had it not been for the driver’s attentiveness, I would have smashed my car into his. Humiliating and scary. I really did look and saw noone but he was right there. Funny how the sensorium can simply miss things that are right in your face.

My special lady friend and I are actually thinking of setting up a hateblog for all the fine (but good-natured) hatery we get up to. So much stupidity in the world it’s hard not to be completely entertained by it all!

Anyway, that’s all for now. I’m sure my 3 readers have been on the edge of their seats waiting for my next missive. Sorry to keep you waiting…

Deeper into the Googleplex:

One plan, which has already tentatively started, entails making literally everything in the world accessible at the click of a button. For now, this means every book, piece of music, film, TV and radio broadcast, official document and photograph.

But eventually… Google boffins believe it can be extended to people and their personal belongings.

The idea is that we, and our treasured possessions, will be fitted with minute microchips which could be linked to the internet, via computers, by a digital radio frequency.

In this way, you would only have to type “Where is my watch” or “Find Joe Bloggs” into your PC or handheld computer, and Google could assist you.

…More immediately, Google is switching its main focus from PCs and laptops to mobile phones.

NEC brings Japanese translation to the mobile:

NEC’s latest software is far beyond the drawing board… the firm has developed a system that can understand around 50,000 Japanese words and translate them to English text on the mobile’s display in just a second or two. The software was made compact enough to “operate on a small microchip mounted in a cellphone,” and was designed especially to help users convert common travel phrases.

Googles appears poised to bring cloud computing to reality:

Google… recently announced Android, a platform that allows people to build software for a variety of mobile phones. The alliance could spur the creation of mobile applications geared toward cloud computing… People want to seamlessly move their data between computers, the Web, and phones, Vander Wal adds. “If Google is starting to solve that piece of the problem, it could have an impact because that’s something no one’s been able to do yet.”

“I think every generation of application sort of peels away another layer of the computer,” he says. Initially, people interacted with computers using command lines, Schillace explains, then used a graphical interface; now people can do much of their work in a Web browser, which can be on a personal computer or a small handheld device. “It’s about letting the computer get out of our way so we can work with other people and share our information.”

We are in the midst of a computing shift from desktop and laptop devices towards mobile handhelds. Increasingly, the cloud will be where the data and processing power lives, with thin clients wired up to plumb it’s depths.