Notes From Metaverse University 2009 – The State of Virtual Worlds

I attended the Friday session of Metaverse University 2009 at Stanford last week. Here are some of my observations:

Themes: interoperability, open source, simulations, visualizations, breaking down the walls, and being stuck with Second Life. Little emphasis on chat and social networking, per se. Much more emphasis on architectures & component solutions.

Trends from Virtual Worlds Roadmap: simulation & training, health care, augmented tourism, mixed-reality museums, live sporting events in VW’s, virtual meetings.

Overview:
While the hype over virtual worlds has faded, many serious researchers continue to do fascinating work in the territory. Monetization of a good VW strategy is still needed but this goal seems to have receded into the future for many of the speakers, as well as many of the enterprise-scale companies investigating these spaces who seem less interested in making money (either through direct development and monetization or by riding the public hypetrain) and more interested in gaining efficiencies and trimming overhead (teleconferencing, remote collaboration).

Google (O3D), Intel (Cable Beach), Sun Microsystems (Project Wonderland), Samsung (Virtual Worlds Roadmap), and Nokia (supporting REalXtend) were all present, as well as many Stanford researchers, including the folks building Sirikata. Many are working to extend the OpenSim fork of the Second Life platform. None of them seem to be working towards direct productization (though Google wants O3D to be the in-browser standard for 3D content) but each were working to advance the platform and explore future possibilities.

With monetization off the table and money drying up, researchers are moving to embrace open source solutions (OpenSim, ScienceSim, Ogre3D) and pushing for open standards (OpenId, OAuth, XMPP) and flexible API’s. Almost everyone mentioned a desire to move away from the proprietary walled-garden approach towards an integrative one that looks to the success of social network strategies. While celebrating open source development of Second Life forks, almost everyone bemoaned being stuck on the platform, often underscoring the feeling with a groan that “there’s nothing else”.

Authoring was rarely addressed with content instead being re-purposed from upstream solutions, eg using 3DSMax & Maya content to build world content. Collada was uniformly mentioned as the exchange format. Most developers still want to shoehorn other modalities (eg PowerPoint, web browsing, document collab, etc) into the VW space. Some examples inadvertantly showed the clunkiness of current solutions. I asked why a technology like PowerPoint is any better in 3D than in 2D, eliciting a long pause from the presenter. There’s still a lot of ambition on the part of developers but not always a ton of common sense.

However, IBM’s manager of service design and service systems research, Susan Stucky, gave me the most reasonable answer I’ve heard yet about why it’s important to move 2D modalities into 3D. She said that for collaborative telepresence it was very helpful to have access to everything you would normally have access to in a meeting. Speaking with her at the break, she told me how IBM has found that the greatest use of their Second Life investment has come from the ability to bring employees and clients from around the world together into a collaborative space. They’ve held conferences, run meetings, and explored simulations of project management strategies. For her, the ROI was gained by telepresence & simulations.

And for me, I had a breakthrough speaking with Susan. One of the most compelling yet least-obvious values of collaboration in virtual worlds is the sense of embodiment conveyed by the presence of the avatar. Identity, social cohesion, team building, and friendship arise more naturally when those engaged are perceived as physically present. Self-awareness and the projection of self onto others is still quite bound to our physical bodies. Perhaps combining the embodiment of avatars with in-world access to knowledge & productivity tools represents a more effective modality for non-local collaboration. I’m not sure how this compares to video teleconferencing but I feel there’s a lot of depth to be explored in how virtual embodiment reinforces social cohesion & collaboration (attn: PhD candidates).

Other notables: Henry Lowood (Stanford Curator of History of Science, Media, & Genetics) speaking on The Ultimate Archive: building virtual museums of virtual world platforms inside virtual worlds (eg a virtual museum with a room that lets you play the first Doom level as it was originally). He noted both “perfect capture” (all the data can be archived) and “perfect loss” (experiences, emotions, and deleted content cannot be captured) in VW archiving. Sheldon Brown (Center for Research in Computing in the Arts, UCSD) showed his mind-bending work Scalable City and called for procedurally deriving world assets and behaviorally deriving world experiences.

Analysis:
Virtual Worlds have lost funding and are presently in the Valley of Hype. Effective monetization strategies have yet to reveal themselves. However, there is value to the enterprise in leveraging virtual worlds for telepresence and collaboration, simulation & training. The VW community is moving the R&D towards openness: open source components, open standards, interoperability, and engaging with the platforms and principles of social networks to enhance connectivity and move away from the Walled Garden. The most interesting work with virtual worlds continues to be in the deeper realms of behavior, psychology, telepresence, and simulations. Graphically, everyone is apparently stuck in Second Life. A smart, well-funded private investor would build a platform with the competitive graphics capabilities (surface mesh, brep, kinematics, HLSL, etc), a powerful and scalable object model that can push to XML/RDF/RSS, a powerful simulation engine with an expressive visualization/analytics front-end, a REST/JSON API capable of talking to agents, tools, and other VW’s (as well as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, SMS, Playstation Network, XBox Network, etc), integrate ActiveX embedding of 2D tools (Office apps, browsers, etc), enable a content marketplace built around highly expressive and personalizable avatars and fetish objects, and cultivate a 3rd part service ecosystem supporting all of the above.

Is this so hard? ;)

Possible Futures?

I really like the simplicity of this Possible Futures graphic from the folks at AMEE. The real effectiveness lies in how easily the image leverages both the ingrained familiarity & narrative complexity of popular scifi movies as a barometer of our sense of the coming future.

Patterns: Global Systems & Human Adaptation

Overview: The top-level context for the next 10-20 years will be characterized by growing environmental challenges across the planet, notably more irregular weather patterns with increasingly severe storms, a rise in temperatures and a reduction of rainfall leading to shifting distributions of agriculture and farming. Regions that are heated but retain humidity will face rising bacterial & viral outbreaks, especially if these regions see further economic declines due to declining food production. These changes will challenge many populations, adding pressure to invest in more climate-controlled (and energy-intensive) infrastructure and/or migrate towards more wet & fertile lands. The great dependence on rainfall and water delivery infrastructure coupled to its widely distributed nature will impact drought-stricken regions considerably, as well as neighboring water-rich regions (eg. Los Angeles and Northern California) that may see growing tensions across resource inequities.

Within this global system the primary drivers remain materials technologies, energy capture & generation, health care (freemium & premium), cleaning & streamlining industrial processes, managing supply chains (particularly with respect to resource/energy overhead, social & environmental impacts), remediating toxic environments, and coping with persistent disruptions to all of these. In communities, trends are moving towards group empowerment through emerging technologies for computation, communication, collaboration, design, and fabrication. This empowerment enables both resilience & resistance, aiding some to design better civic structures & local production capacity, for example, while others design and execute disruptive events and attacks on high-value targets.

Across the species, though in no way homogeneous, lifespans are extending, health care is more reliable, mobile computing is more powerful & ubiquitous, screens and media are proliferating, and more people, objects, plants, and animals are creating digital identities and communicating across the cloud. There is a rapid movement to digitize human information and expose it to massive computational structures, iterating exponentially across literally billions of logical nodes. This movement into the cloud has a huge energetic overhead only recently being considered – not to mention the social and economic impacts rapidly rewriting much of the first world.

Computational systems are evolving to model and predict larger living systems. We now model natural systems, business enterprise, financial variables, and human behavior deriving greater ability to predict future probabilities. All in order for the species to continue its adaptive success while willfully managing our resource requirements & impacts while effectively supporting a global virtualization of human endeavor, expression, and creativity.

In a nutshell, the patterns and processes we’ve relied upon are moving into a time of great flux with all systems facing regular perturbations. Change is the only constant. Survival, as it always ultimately has, depends on flexibility, resilience, collaboration, and adaptation.

Disruptive Civil Technologies
Six Technologies with Potential Impacts on US Interests out to 2025 (National Intelligence Council):

Key trends, “most likely to enhance or degrade US national power out to 2025″
- Biogerontechnology
- Energy Storage Materials
- Biofuels and Bio-Based Chemicals
- Clean Coal Technologies
- Service Robotics
- The Internet of Things.

[The NIC report offers some interesting signals but I personally disagree with their sense of trending towards biofuels. Turning human energy sources (food) into industrial energy sources (biofuel) is exceptionally short-sighted and dangerous and has already incurred a large backlash in common sense. I don't know enough about so-called "clean coal" to comment... but I'm highly dubious.]

From the IFTF Winter 2009 Overview and Jane McGonigal’s initial Superstructing results.

Top Signals 2009
- Geolocation
- Biometrics & accelerometers
- Handheld augmented reality
- Simulation engines
- Lifecasting platforms
- Social networks for every living thing
- Avatars everywhere
- Virtual worlds based on real worlds

Critical Factors
- Evolvability
- Extreme scale
- Ambient collaboration
- Reverse scarcity
- Adaptive emotions
- Amplified optimism
- Playtests

DRAFT 2009 Climate Action Team Biennial Report to the Governor and Legislature (California Climate Change portal):

All simulations indicate that extremely hot daytime and nighttime temperatures (heat waves) increase in frequency, magnitude, and duration from the historical period. Within a given heat wave, there is an increasing tendency for multiple hot days in succession—i.e., heat waves last longer. Furthermore, the number of days with simultaneously hot daytime temperatures in multiple regions in the state increases markedly; this has important implications for emergency response and satisfying electricity demand in the state.

…In the northern part of California, the tendency for drying fades and even reverses but in Southern California the amount of drying becomes greater, with decreases in some simulations exceeding 15% drier. became significantly wetter by the end of the century.

…The results suggest that climate change will decrease annual crop yields in the long- term, particularly for cotton, unless future climate change is minimized and/or adaptation of management practices and improved cultivars becomes widespread.

…In summary, without changes in operating rules for the water system in California the reliability of water supply will be severely affected. On the other hand, it seems that California could afford the implementation of adaptation measures that could significantly reduce the system’s vulnerability.

Kevin Kelly – The Nine Laws of God

I’m re-posting this from The Whole Earth Catalog archives because I think it’s an excellent summary of the core principles needed to evaluate natural systems. This also speaks to the foundation of much of my own thought about human social, cultural, and technological evolution.

The Nine Laws of God
By Kevin Kelly * Whole Earth Catalog * Spring 1994

Distribute being. The spirit of a beehive, the behavior of an economy, the thinking of a supercomputer, and the life in me are distributed over a multitude of smaller units (which themselves may be distributed). When the sum of the parts can add up to more than the parts, then that extra being (that something from nothing) is distributed among the parts. Whenever we find something from nothing, we find it arising from a field of many interatting smaller pieces. All the mysteries we find most interesting – life, intelligence, evolution – are found in the soil of large distributed systems.

Control from the bottom up. When everything is connected to everything in a distributed network, everything happens at once. When everything happens at once, wide and fast-moving problems simply route around any central authority. Therefore, overall governance must arise from the most humble interdependent acts done locally in parallel, and not from a central command. A mob can steer itself, and in the territory of rapid, massive, and heterogeneous change, only a mob can steer. To get something from nothing, control must rest at the bottom within simplicity.

Sow increasing returns. Each time you use an idea, a language, or a skill, you strengthen it, reinforce it, and make it more likely to be used again.

Grow by chunking. The only way to make a complex system that works is to begin with a simple system that works. Attempts to instantly install highly complex organization – such as intelligence, or a market economy – without growing it, inevitably lead to failure.

Maximize the fringes. In heterogeneity is creation of the world. A uniform entity must adapt to the world by occasional monumental revolutions, one of which is sure to kill it. A diverse heterogeneous entity, on the other hand, can adapt to the world in a thousand daily mini-revolutions, staying in a state of permanent, but never fatal, churning.

Honor your errors. A trick will only work for a while, until everyone else is doing it. To advance from the ordinary requires a new game, or a new territory. But the process of going outside the conventional method, game, or territory is indistinguishable from error. Even the most brilliant act of human genius, in the final analysis, is an act of trial and error.

Pursue no optima, but multiple goals. Simple machines can be efficient, but complex adaptive machinery cannot be. A complicated structure has many masters and none of them can be served exclusively. Rather than striving for optimization of any function, a large system can only survive by “satisficing” (making “good enough”) a multitude of functions.

Seek persistent disequilibrium. Neither constancy nor relentless change will support a creation. A good creation, like good jazz, must balance the stable formula with frequent offbeat, out-of-kilter notes. Equilibrium is death. Yet unless a system stabilizes to an equilibrium point, it is no better than an explosion, and just as soon dead. A Nothing, then, is both equilibrium and disequilibrium.

Change changes itself. Change can be structured. This is what large complex systems do: they coordinate change. When extremely large systems are built up out of complicated systems, then each system begins to influence and ultimately change the organizations of other systems. That is, if the rules of the game are composed from the bottom up, then it is likely that interacting forces at the bottom level will alter the rules of the game as it progresses. Over time, the rules for change get changed themselves.

Evolution – as used in everyday speech – is about how an entity is changed over time. Deeper evolution – as it might be formally defined – is about how the rules for changing entities over time changes over time. To get the most out of nothing, you need to have self-changing rules.

These nine principles underpin the awesome workings of prairies, flamingoes, and cedar forests, eyeballs, natural selection in geological time, and the unfolding of a baby elephant from a tiny seed of elephant sperm and egg.

These same principles of bio-logic are now being implanted in computer chips, electronic communication networks, robot modules, pharmaceutical searches, software design, and corporate management, in order that these artificial systems may overcome their own complexity.

When the tecfinos is enlivened by bios, we get artifacts that can adapt, learn, and evolve. When our technology adapts, learns, and evolves, then we will have a neobiological civilization.

Dematerialize: Changing the Ways We Relate to Product & Ownership

There is a large and fast-moving shift occurring within the landscape of tools & technology. Increasingly, products are dematerializing and being re-engineered as services. This shift is being driven in part by rising production costs and an increasing awareness of the very real environmental impacts of producing durable goods and managing their end-of-life downstreaming into landfills. It is also a response to the rapid digitization of culture pushing many consumables into less tangible data transactions, often mediated through increasingly fetishized devices. Thus, content is becoming disengaged from fixed carriers like disk media and paper and is, instead, flowing through networks and devices.

Perhaps the most iconic and revolutionary example of this trend is the pairing of Apple’s iPod with its iTunes service. For the past 20 years, millions upon millions of cd’s, dvd’s, cases, and printed inserts have been consuming resources, fixing materials into unrecoverable or downcycled hard media and filling landfills. Apple has fundamentally rewritten this paradigm by dematerializing the content – music & movies – and connected it directly with the player. The materials & energetic overhead has been consolidated into a (hopefully) more durable device, freeing the high-volume transactional content from such a large resource burden. While there are manufacturing and reclamation costs associated with the device, the impact is lessened by decoupling those costs from the content.

There have since been an ever-increasing movement away from product towards services, as easily illustrated with the rise of online services within the Web 2.0 age. Digital cameras are another example that, like the iPod, decoupled the relentless production of content from a toxic & non-renewable material carrier – in this case, film & print paper. Likewise, print production itself has increasingly moved away from expensive, wasteful, and toxic inks & papers and has re-targeted to the ubiquity of screens. More & more “print” content – once the domain of magazines, newspapers, brochures, and advertising shwag – has moved away from hard carriers. Again, the pattern shows content being released from material substrates to move effortlessly across networks and devices.

There are a few interesting effects of this trend. Of course, piracy of content becomes considerably easier and cheaper. Content can be copied and moved across networks effortlessly, and copy protection is just another set of bits to be cracked. As Stewart Brand keenly observed, “information wants to be free” and the rapid digitization of culture has radically reinforced this proposition forcing every pre-web industry to completely re-evaluate their business models. Conversely, the bitifying of content and the democratization of powerful desktop authoring tools has empowered and emboldened the historical allure of remixing and massively reinvigorated our cultural creativity. Ironically, in an age that has enabled so many to create so much, the notion of intellectual property has less merit now than ever. When your content contains bits from 10 other pieces of content, who actually owns it? As has been noted by many authors & analysts, the genie is out of the bottle.

But perhaps more interesting are the behavioral and psychological shifts happening in response to these trends. As stuff dematerializes into intangible bits, the fact that we can no longer touch product subtly undermines the very notion of ownership. We begin to abstract our relationship to stuff as something we interact with more than possess. While this is potentially liberating it also makes it easier for content providers to assert total ownership in perpetuity: you’re merely borrowing content through a service provided by the “real” owner. Without direct ownership, are we protected and do we still have the right to share?

With respect to content, personal ownership has shifted to the device – the increasingly fetishized container through which content is constantly flowing. Our smart phones are awesomely empowering extensions of our selves, conferring unimaginable abilities to their owner. The simplest & most intuitive of these devices become second nature, third-hand extensions of our bodies, effortlessly wiring us to each other, to content, and vast stores of knowledge. Of course we fetishize such objects and of course we’ve grown dependent upon them.

Industrialization has regrettably optimized its business model through planned obsolescence, with much hard product designed to time-out and push an upsell to the next model. No doubt the devices we now rely so heavily upon have their own built-in failings, whether intentional or simply as a byproduct of the profit margin incentivised to invest in no more quality than is absolutely necessary. So have the benefits of dematerializing content from cheap carriers been negated by the resource requirements and inevitable breakdown of our devices? Has the energetic and environmental impact spared by going paperless been doubled by the sheer overhead of manufacturing and running vast global server farms? Any real evaluation of the dematerialization of products to services must consider the very large impact of the infrastructure supporting it.

Nevertheless, this is where we’re headed. Mobiles will get smarter & prettier and will be increasingly targeted for content and transient marketing. Screens will continue to multiply at an exponential pace finding their way into all aspects of our lives. Hardware manufacturers will be increasingly beholden to both international standards committees and shareholders to account for the carbon and environmental impacts of their processes. And the notion of object and ownership will continue to be challenged in ways yet unknowable.

[Acknowledgements to Gavin Starks of AMEE, Tish Shute at Ugotrade, and Lane Becker and Thor Muller of Get Satisfaction.]

E-TEch 2009: Living, Reinvented: The Technology of Abundance and Constraints

I’m at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Jose this week.

Mind: blown. Future: amazing.

I’ll post complete notes from lectures I’m attending later this week or (more likely) early next. Stay tuned…