New World Notes

Mixed Reality Portrait: Gatsby Crumb, PhD Candidate Studying Real Politics in Virtual Worlds

Known as Gatsby Crumb in Second Life, Max Burns is the author of Pixels and Policy, a promising new blog covering the intersection of real politics and virtual worlds. His most recent post summarizes a fascinating experiment in racial prejudice recently conducted in There.com, which sadly seems to suggest that white avatars receive somewhat better treatment than black avatars. (He references some New World Notes posts which anecdotally suggest the same.) Burns' blog is an outgrowth of his academic studies, which he is now pursuing as a subject for a doctoral degree.

"I got into virtual politics/culture as a serious prospect after watching how Iran's pro-democracy activists made a seamless transition to Twitter, Second Life, and Facebook after the Iranian government basically made real-world protesting a death sentence," Max tells me. "The idea that these networks and virtual worlds we'd built for fun could be engineered to serve a real purpose in political speech and improving the lives of people motivated me to make Pixels and Policy into a kind of clearinghouse of research and information on the ways virtual worlds are slowly creeping into our real world media and policymaking."

See the whole Mixed Reality Portrait series here. Want to send me your own Mixed Reality Portrait? Here's submission guidelines and suggestions.

Active Avatars Have Active Real Life Owners, Study Suggests

A new study from leading research firm RTI International seems to contradict the stereotypical assertion that people with athletic avatars are probably overweight and sedentary in real life. In a perfectly-titled paper, "Does this Avatar Make Me Look Fat?", RTI researchers found nearly the exact opposite to be the case. According to lead analyst Elizabeth Dean, "[I]t seems likely that virtual reality users may adjust their identity to be consistent with that of their avatars." In a survey of 29 Second Life Residents, Dean and team found that 80 percent who said their avatar was very active in-world said they were also physically active in the real world. Just as intriguingly, Residents' perception of their avatar would change based on the interviewer's avatar: When the researcher's avatar was overweight, the interview subject would describe their own avatar as overweight, and vice versa.

These are very interesting results, albeit gathered from a very a small sample; I hope to read the full paper and chat with Dr. Dean when I can. The results do seem consistent with the "Proteus Effect" described by Stanford researchers; at the same time, I wonder how much the results were shaped by the survey questions. If you had a buff, bodysurfing avatar, and an academic asked if your real life self was also in good shape, wouldn't you feel a bit embarrassed to answer No? Mixed reality file photo from my profile of Laura Oh. Hat tip: Botgirl Questi.

Obama Administration Advisor To Appear in Second Life

Shortly after President Obama was elected last November, I noted that two of his FCC transition team members, academics Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach, were involved with Second Life in its early years. That's Kevin and his avatar, Eli Gorham, at left; his Supernova conference in 2006 included a heavy SL component, which he described then as "an extraordinary playground... [giving] you tremendous freedom to experiment". He's still a part-time advisor with the Administration, helping craft a Broadband stimulus grant program. Werbach will be back in-world this Wednesday at 1pm Pacific to appear on the Metanomics show, for an extremely apropos topic: "The Age of Obama: Virtual Worlds, Open Government, and Policy". (All the event details at that link.) Kevin tells me he can't discuss the particular policy advice he gave the Administration about virtual worlds, but I suspect he'll provide some great insider perspectives on how they're being shaped.  Read more about him on his site. (Avatar screenshot courtesy Prof. Werbach; photo by Joi Ito, from his Flickr stream.)

Take an Academic Survey on Virtual World Intimacy

Tyler Pace and Shaowen Bardzell are Indiana University researchers specializing in virtual worlds, now conducting an intriguing study on avatar-based intimacy.  While numerous worlds/MMOs are covered by their research, they're looking for more input from the Second Life community.  Tyler's promised to share a summary of the results on this blog, and I look forward to their findings.  Here's the anonymous survey, which should take about 15 minutes to complete.  

Fermilab/SLAC Magazine On Second Life's Large Hadron Collider-- And Linking It To The Real One

Last week I wrote about the brilliant machinima tribute to the Large Hadron Collider from Ryushimitsu Xingjian, the Resident who created his simulation in SL from photos of the LHC's ATLAS project.  (Click for a side-by-side comparison above.)  I found out later that I wasn't the only fan: so was David Harris, a physicist who's also the editor of Symmetry Magazine, a joint publication of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and Fermilab.  He actually attended the LHC's "first beam day" at CERN last September, and is thus able to compare Xingjian's efforts with the real thing: 

"Not everything is scientifically accurate," Harris writes, "but I can tell you from having been in the ATLAS cavern while it was being built, that this does a very good job of the look and feel of the real detector."  High praise.  Even more intriguing, he mentions that colleagues at Fermilab/SLAC had already considered creating a mixed reality LHC:

New World Newsfeed: PARC Research On Avatar Perspective (And Collaborative Building) In Second Life

Recent dispatches from the outside world...

PlayOn: Collaborative building in Second Life

The legendary Palo Alto Research Center have been conducting studies in Second Life, and recently published some of their findings on their blog, PlayOn.  To investigate collaborative building, PARC researchers observed teams of volunteers completing specific building tasks. 

One of the interesting observations, however, wasn't specifically about building:  Most SL users, they discovered, do not maintain the default camera position of looking over their avatar's perspective (or "in-avatar").  Instead, only 43% of their volunteers remained in-avatar, while 57% used their camera controls to move away from their avatar's position (or "in-camera"). 

What's more, this phenomenon changed drastically in direct relation to experience:

Garrett Lisi Explores Second Life's Crooked Tesseract House-- And So Can You, Here's How

Last week while theoretician Garrett Lisi was in SL visiting the recreation of the E8 model that best explains his unified field theory, I casually mentioned to him that someone had also built a four dimensional tesseract house with no front or back.  Curiousity piqued, he asked for a landmark, and away we went.  Here he is in the white robe and sneakers, exploring the place with Seifert Surface, the mathematician who built it.

I wrote about The Crooked House (named after the classic Robert Heinlein short story that inspired it) in 2006, but it's been moved from its original location.  To get there, you must first teleport to a floating platform in a region aptly named XYZ. 

Here's the direct SLURL teleport link to the Crooked House entry point.

Once there, be careful not to move until everything around you has resolved, or you're liable to step off the platform and fall hundreds of meters.  Instead, be sure to read the Crooked House instructions located there, and when you're ready, click the oblong granite sculpture nearby.  That will transport you to the Crooked House itself.

Universe In The Metaverse: Garrett Lisi Explores An E8 Polytope In Second Life

The E8 Polytope, on display in Rezzable Visions-- direct SLURL teleport at this link

Last weekend a candy-colored platinum blond named Wizard Gynoid stood in Second Life space, while a latticework of colored lines that describe the entire known universe were drawn around her.  After some time, she was joined by a tall bald man in a white robe named Garrett Netizen.  Some courtesies were exchanged, and Mr. Netizen surveyed the multi-colored latticework that started to surround them. 

"Kind of looks like the inside of my head," he observed. Which as it turns out, was quite true.

Offline, Garrett Netizen is Garrett Lisi, a veteran surfer and snowboarder who also happens to be the author of "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything", which many people far brighter than me consider the most likely candidate to become the unified field theory, bringing all our knowledge of the physical world together into a single, elegant, comprehensible explanation.  Einstein died trying to create one, but after hearing Lisi explain his theory, a co-founder of loop quantum gravity pronounced it “one of the most compelling unification models I’ve seen in years.”  (This recent New Yorker profile is a good introduction to Lisi and his thesis, and the controversy over them.)

In between frequent stints on Maui's waves and Tahoe's slopes, and answering that whole ticklish fundamental question to all existence, Lisi occasionally visits Second Life.  "I first tried out Second Life at the SIGGRAPH conference in San Diego in 2003," he tells me by e-mail.  "I step my toe in every now and then to see how it's progressing."  Usually too consumed in real physics, he adds, "This last visit was inspired by Wizzy's invitation."

Which brings us back to the platinum blond with the "Wizzy" navel ring glinting from her exposed midriff.  What she created in Second Life and wanted to show Lisi was an E8 Polytope, an extraordinarily complex algebraic system geometrically represented as a kind of fragile, intricate crystal sphere.  In Lisi's "Theory of Everything", the E8 Polytope is the framework which explains the working of all known physical particles.  A former philosophy of science student, Ms. Gynoid and her colleagues created a Second Life scripting system that converts all the vertices of E8 into thousands of multi-colored fiber, which constantly draw and re-draw themselves.  "The full color is the whole object," she tells me.  "It cycles through subsets of the object.  Each color is a set of strut lengths."

So last Sunday, Wizard Gynoid held the official opening of her E8 Polytope model, which floats in the inky blackness of Rezzable Visions. (Direct SLURL teleport at this link.)  By the time I arrived, near a dozen avatars were there, furiously discussing the math and physics of her project.  Shortly after I got there, Lisi himself showed up.  Which from one point of view, is sort of like Einstein wandering through a museum diorama about general relativity.

"Garrett inspired this build with his Theory of Everything!" Wizard tells her audience, by way of introduction.  An impromptu cosmological conversation from within the center of the E8 polytope ensues:

The Second Life Of Tokugawa: How The Metaverse Resembles Japan's Transformational Era

As it turns out, Second Life culture is not a uniquely odd society with no real world analogues.  Instead, it's useful to compare SL to the Tokugawa/Edo period of Japan, which ushered that country into the modern era, preparing it to become the global power it is today.

That's the revolutionary thesis of "Avatars Are For Real: Virtual Communities and Public Spheres", a groundbreaking academic paper by Eiko Ikegami and Piet Hut, recently published in the first volume of The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, a peer-reviewed publication.  Pictured at left, Ikegami is a Sociology professor and Department chair at Manhattan's esteemed New School, and the paper is based on her experiences in Second Life as Kiremimi Tigerpaw, at right.  (Hut is the Princeton astrophysicist whose work simulating Newtonian mechanics in SL and OpenSim was featured here; he also happens to be Eiko's husband.)  Through their in-world Second Life activity, they began noticing commonalites to a period in Japan that emphasized culture, the arts, and the sensuality of Ukiyo lifestyle-- literally, "floating world."

So how does the culture of 16th-19th century Japan resemble Second Life?  How about Tokugawa activity that eerily resembles avatar-based roleplay, virtual world construction, and communities based on creativity, not social barriers?

Second Starcraft: Princeton Astrophysicist Simulating Cosmology In Open Sim

In Second Life, Piet Hut of Princeton's Interdisciplinary Studies Institute for Advanced Study is known as Pema Pera.  The two identities are intimately related, for Hut is one of the driving forces behind MICA, the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics, a group dedicated to creating simulations of comsmological phenonena in virtual worlds.  Why?  In the past, he explains to Tish Shute of UgoTrade,

[S]imulations were where scientists spent years and visualization was an afterthought, a few pictures in a journal, never the right tools to really mine the data, not enough time, money, tools. So we can use virtual worlds to start with visualization and then have the simulations follow.

Working with Japanese scientists and metaverse developers, MICA recently created an N Body Simulation of Newtonian mechanics in Open Sim, the open source spin-off of Second Life.  Here's a video of it in action, an impressively complex simulation (even with "Final Countdown" as the background music.)  [Update, 8/12: Piet writes in to credit the video's producers, Jeff Ames and Adam Johnson.]

Interested in reading more about the technical/theoretical background? UgoTrade exhaustively reports from Japan, Open Sim, and Second Life, and interviews all the players involved.  MICA also holds regular "coffee time" discussions in Second Life as well-- details here.

Image credit: Ugo Trade and Piet Hut.