New World Notes

Huge Opportunity for Metaverse Developers: News Event Dramatizations with Second Life Machinima

If you're like me, you spent a lot of last week watching news coverage of Osama bin Laden's killing, which included numerous 3D dramatizations, like this one from MSNBC. Give it a look, it's remarkably assy:

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Can you believe a major news corporation paid for this crap? I'm hardly a military expert, but I'm really guessing the Navy SEALS actually didn't look like that, and the building layout isn't very accurate. It strikes me that news event recreations like these could be done far better with Second Life machinima. The huge in-world economy already has almost all the assets needed (costumes, avatars, props, etc.), and there's more than enough talented SL builders able to quickly whip together a scale model of a given news location. (In this case, bin Laden's compound in Pakistan.)

Don't believe me? Take a look at this Second Life action machinima I wrote about a few months ago, rapidly shot with already existing assets:

US Army Project Simulates Real World Afghanistan Terrain Data in MOSES, Military OpenSimulator Enterprise Strategy

What you’re looking at above is an OpenSim recreation of Kamdesh, of Nuristan province in eastern Afghanistan, the site of a fierce 2009 battle that took place at American Combat Outpost (COP) Keating. It was developed by Douglas Maxwell (Second Life name: Maccus McCullough), a federal employee who specializes in modeling and simulation technology at the Army Research Lab Simulation and Training Technology Center in Orlando.

The Afghan terrain is created from unclassified DTED (digital terrain elevation data) databases. “We have developed a tool that will ingest the DTED data for a given region and produce RAW files for SL/OS systems.” He says there's no current plans to release the conversion technology to other OpenSim/SL developers, "but that could change if a compelling reason is made." (I bet someone could use it to quickly simulate the compound in Abbottabad where bin Laden just met his end.)

And while much of the world’s attention is on the firefight in Pakistan that ended with bin Laden’s death, the US Army is sponsoring the use of OpenSimulator to recreate this recent firefight next door, in Afghanistan, for MOSES, i.e., Military Open Simulator Enterprise Strategy. “The MOSES is running on US Army-owned hardware,” Maxwell tells me. “[T]he section of Afghanistan depicted in the 36 regions are a recreation (1:1) of the COP Keating and will create a sample training area for individuals to experience key parts of the Battle of Kamdesh from 2009.

Significantly, the MOSES project was originally developed on Second Life Enterprise, but when that was closed down last August, “We had to find a viable alternative or risk losing significant investments made in time and content.” Which is how it transitioned to an OpenSimulator-based project.

4 Second Life-Based AI Projects With Education, Training, & Research Applications Win Federal Awards

Four Second Life-based artificial intelligence projects won last weekend's Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge, led by the U.S. Army's Research Laboratory, a contest to develop and award virtual world-based applications of AI with real world use cases. (Here's the whole list.) While the awards were relatively small (several thousand dollars in most cases), the projects themselves were pretty impressive. Here's a look at the four SL-based winners, spanning applications as various as education, disaster preparedness, defense, and science research:

"Curiosity AI", by Shannon Bohle, is a prototype artificial intelligence that communicates R&D concepts to be used in our future exploration of Mars:

The Second Life Checkpoint Exercise was developed by USC's Institute for Creative technologies, and uses AIs to simulate Iraqis civilians for training soldiers to handle peacekeeping duties. (Click screenshot for video and more info):

Two more after the break:

UK Developer Gets $1 Million in Funding for Language Training in Second Life (That's Not Branded as Second Life)

Interesting news for several reasons: Language Lab, a UK school that uses Second Life as a platform for teaching English, just received $1 million in investment from Avonmore Developments, Stephen Bullock, and Huda Associates to continue developing English City, described as "a virtual world you can access through your computer where you can talk to native English speakers anytime." Virtual worlds are a proven means of teaching language (since after all, cross-country communication in them is so typical, and you're chatting in context-appropriate situations, such as restaurants and city streets.) This investment is monetary recognition of that application. (Language Lab claims 1,000 paid student subscribers and 50,000 users in over 70 countries.)

Also significant is that English City, which is actually a private island in Second Life, is not advertised by Language Lab as being part of Second Life. Looking at the landing page for English City, Second Life isn't mentioned anywhere I can see. "The vast majority of our students come to English City having never visited SL before," Marcus Allender, Marketing Manager at Language Lab, tells me. This may be a good way for other developers to approach Second Life as a platform: Avoid any negativity with SL by re-branding the experience, while still taking advantage of the best Second Life has to offer.

FarmVille Knock-Off Advertised on Facebook With Second Life Screenshot

This is pretty awesome (and by "awesome", I mean too comically recursive to inspire annoyance): An Eastern European social game company is marketing its FarmVille knock-off with Second Life content. I only discovered this because the ad on the left popped up yesterday on Facebook, and thinking it might be a FarmVille-type game someone had built within Second Life -- which might be kinda cool -- I clicked through. Only to get a knockoff of FarmVille. (Which come to think of it, is itself a knockoff of a predecessor, Farm Town.) But at the very least, we have a peculiarly innovative new use case for Second Life -- creating 3D screenshots for a Facebook ad for a 2.5D Facebook game.

SL Turk: Developer Pays Second Life Residents $46 in Linden Dollars for $9000 Worth of Translation Services

Here's an interesting real world application for Second Life: Leveraging the extremely international character of SL's user community, a real world software developer named Max Klein recently hired some Residents to translate 200 documents, which would probably cost upwards of $9000, had he hired a real world translation service. However, the virtual economy has its own logic:

Second life is filled with people who want Linden Dollars. They come from all over the world, and for them it’s just a game. They will willingly spend 30 minutes to translate the article for you for 20 cents, which is 50 Linden Dollars. For that, they can get accessories, funiture, clothes etc. within the game.

Instead of $9000, his total cost came to less than $50. In effect, he used the Second Life economy like Mechanical Turk, Amazon's crowdsourcing service. I'm surprised more people haven't done this. (Crowdflower, a crowdsourcing startup, has done a similar project with a social gaming company.) There's probablya huge opportunity to create a Second Life Turk, a management service connecting SL workers to real world work projects. Read the rest here, including an interesting conversation thread on the ethics and feasibility of the project.

Hat tip: Kimberly Rufer-Bach.

MoCap Basketball: Pantomime Jump Shots in the Real World, Make Baskets in the Virtual World!

Here's the latest innovation from Anton Bogdanovych (shaqq Korobase in SL), the University of Western Sydney researcher developing software that connects a motion capture suit to a Second Life avatar: MoCap Basketball!That's right: Pantomime basketball jump shots in the real world, and see the results in the virtual world. Watch:

But is the motion capture input precise enough to calculate the physics of the Second Life basketball? I was a bit skeptical, but Anton insists that's the case: "[I]t is as precise as it can possibly be," he tells me. "I can’t think of any type of move it would not be able to register. And it’s extremely fast. There is simply no need for any better precision as in SL you wouldn’t notice it."

But how does he translate the body language of the shot into the physics of the virtual ball? Details after the break:

Second Life Machinima Gets 2 Million Viewers at the Shanghai World Expo

Over 2 million people have seen Second Life machinima being shown in the Madrid pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo, Spanish curator Cristina García-Lasuén (Aino Baar in SL) recently told me. Thanks to Cristina's intense lobbying, SL machinima was made a centerpiece in Madrid's contribution to the massive fair. Which means since it was unveiled this Summer, millions have seen fantastic machinima like the above, by metaverse artist Bryn Oh. General public reaction, Aino tells me, ranges from astonishment ("I cannot believe what I am seeing") to nervous laughs, to wonderment and wanting to know more about the medium. Another data point to my belief that machinima is the best real world, mass market application for 3D worlds right now. Read more on Cristina's Facebook fan page.

TED Star & Media Maven Johanna Blakley on Second Life Fashion: "Offers Tremendous Insight Into Fashion Zeitgeist"

Remember Johanna Blakley, the Los Angeles media maven and USC think tank director whose recent TED presentation on the importance of free culture in real world fashion spurred an energetic conversation across the Internet last Spring? On New World Notes, we had a long, provocative conversation on the implications of her insights on Second Life fashion. But as it turns out, Johanna is already well-versed about Second Life fashion. We got to talking after that post, and I learned she even has an SL avatar, Johanna Annenberg, named after USC's Second Life island.

Johanna just shared some of her observations on Second Life fashion on her own blog, featuring the cover of SL fashion magazine Second Style. I asked her if she thought real world fashion designers can learn from virtual fashion designers, and tantalizingly, she e-mailed back: "I think that smart real world designers are already checking out what fashion designers are coming up with in Second Life." (I wonder who?)

"There are couple reasons that they should do so," she continued:

Quince, Popular Second Life Game, Becomes (Very Addictive!) App for the iPhone and iPad

Quince in Second Life and on the iPhone

Quince, a popular casual game developed in Second Life by Aargle Zymurgy (maker of the even more popular Zyngo), has been turned into an app for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad -- App Store link here. To my knowledge, this is the first port of a Second Life game to a handheld gaming platform since Tringo made the leap to Nintendo DS, in 2006. Ported by Myra Loveless, Quince is a deceptively simple solitaire game where you arrange randomly generated playing cards on a 5x5 grid, creating valuable hands, based on poker scoring rules.

I downloaded it to my iPhone a couple days ago to check it out, and don't let the no-frills art fool you: it's cleverly designed, fun, and fricking addictive. Along with the usual playing cards, you get joker wild cards to enhance your score, angel cards you can use to delete bad cards, and devil cards that degrade your combinations. Those playing variables work perfectly together to make for an ideal casual game: extremely easy to learn, challenging to master. It's also an ideal game for the iPhone, launching you immediately into play sessions that last a few minutes each. (I think the iPhone's the best game platform out there now, but a lot of the best titles are so graphics intensive, they take minutes to even start.)

Aargle Zymurgy tells me he's sold over 10,000 copies of Quince, and the game has been played many more times in Second Life on his land alone. (It's hosted by many more landowners across the grid.)

I asked Zymurgy why he think it's become so popular.