New World Notes

Boonsri Says: Science Installations in Second Life Need a Science Guide! (Here's a List of 100+ to Start With)

Here's a very useful list of over 100 science educational sites in Second Life (teleport links included), from an artificial life lab to a Testis Tour, which as the name suggests, is a vehicle ride through a giant model of the male testes. (I crossed my legs while writing that.) The list comes to us via Ms. Boonsri Dickinson, a science and technology writer for TechStartups who is lately exploring SL's potential as an education platform as an avatar called Sydney Caramel. (Both pictured above.) Since she is apt to write about science exhibits, I asked her if she thought Second Life could really serve as a platform for same. And Boonsri said:

"Sort of. Not unless there's interaction." She was shown sites by longtime SL builder Troy McLuhan, who "told me interesting stories, which made each place more interesting. (That's what they need, a science tour guide!)" That said, she liked NPR's Science Friday site [SLurl]. "I do think SL is ready to be a science education platform," she continued. "So many institutions are on it already. What is missing are influential people that can make an impact." Maybe Boonsri herself as a start?

Boonsri RL photo copyright Alejandro Barragan. Hat tip: Robward Antwerp.

Want to See Second Life Machinima on Sesame Street? Vote For It in Aniboom's Animation Contest!

Go here to vote on this video (free Aniboom reg. req.)

Aniboom, the online animation studio, is holding a contest to select an animated short to air on the beloved public TV show Sesame Street. The selection is partly driven by community vote, and right now, among the 350 submissions, this face-punchingly cute machinima above, "10 Little Aliens", is ranked 38. Created by a number of well-known developers (Judi Newall wrote the script, Madcow Cosmos made the avatars and props, Lorin Tone the music, Chantal Harvey the machinima, Lauren Weyland the voiceover), it proceeds from the premise that the best object to teach kids how to count is alien eyeballs. (And who the hell can argue with that?) To vote, you need to take the time to first create a free Aniboom account, then click the Rate Me button on the alien video. A bit time-consuming, but just imagine Second Life rocking Elmo's world. (Pooky Amsterdam also made another fun machinima entry trailing a few dozen ranks back.)

The machinima, by the way, was almost disqualified by Animboom. According to Ms. Newall, the judges originally rejected it, on the grounds that "Machinima animations is forbidden due to right sakes, [and] video games design materials are shown in this video." After explaining SL's intellectual property rights policies, the entry was re-accepted. So were it to win, victory would be that much sweeter. Plus the kids in our life could count on it too. Deadline, I think, is May 9th!

Lifestreamers Forming Community in Second Life

This quintessentially cool chick with the Run Lola Run hair is Jessica, an MFA student who lifestreams, a kind of extreme blogging which as she puts it, "is the act of documenting and sharing your life online." That's usually done via a site with a constant feed of your photos, Tweets, etc. and in her case, video reports on Second Life (her SL name is JessicaElizabeth Diabolito) which she uses as a meeting space with fellow lifestreamers:

"Many of us are self-employed or want to be self-employed. We want to have profitable online businesses," she explains to me. "But without a boss or a workplace to go to, it can be hard to get motivated to get out of bed in the morning. By scheduling meetings in SL, we can keep each other accountable for 'showing up' to work." You could of course do that with Skype or another online communication service, but Second Life actually proved to be less complicated: "SL actually lowers the barrier to entry -- you don't have to put your makeup on to meet, just roll out of bed and log on. That's all most of us need, just a tiny push, a small group of people who will care if we don't show up." Her aim is to expand the group because "SL is a great place to do that because of the embodied communication." If you're interested in joining, JessicaElizabeth Diabolito's in-world group is called, cleverly enough, "Lifestreamers". Her own lifestream site is here.

Real Business Meetings in 3D Virtual Worlds Won't Go Mainstream For Many Years, Platform Evangelist Predicts

Real world businesses won't widely use virtual worlds like Second Life to hold meetings for quite some time -- that's the prediction of Erica Driver of ThinkBalm, a consultancy firm which specializes in the use of Second Life and other virtual worlds for business applications. (I wrote about one of their innovative SL applications in 2009.) Only last January, Erica predicted that 2013 was the year when mainstream adoption of virtual meetings would take hold. Now, however, as she tells Roland Legrand of Mixed Realities, she considers the 2013 prediction “a little bit aggressive." Since then, as Erica expands on Think Balm's blog, there's been a number of setbacks for enterprise use of virtual worlds: Oracle stopping financing its Project Wonderland virtual work platform, for instance, and "[k]ey roles on Linden Lab’s enterprise team were folded into the broader organization and several folks on the enterprise team have moved on". In the short term, she argues, businesses will get better results with what she calls “light immersive” platforms which run on the web, that are extremely easy to use, and are scaled to accommodate thousands of simultaneous participants, not dozens or hundreds. She cites three web-based virtual conferencing systems in that regard -- InXpo, ON24, and Unisfair.

I think she's right that mass market adoption of rich 3D virtual worlds for real world work is quite aways off, though I'm skeptical "light immersive" will fare any better. Looking at the Quantcast analyses of InExpo, On24, and Unisfair, they each attract less than 45K unique monthly visitors. Second Life is roughly five times more popular than all three combined. (For that matter, a single real world convention center, San Francisco's Moscone, got 1.1 million visitors in 2007-08 alone.) As I often say, general mass market adoption of Second Life probably has to happen first before general business users will show up in meaningful numbers. Until then, I think the better strategy for companies like Linden Lab and third party vendors is to concentrate on business applications that are showing good, repeatable results now, and that are only achievable on a platform like Second Life, such as architecture and filmmaking.

Husband and Wife Researchers Create System That Sends Real Hugs Through a Virtual World

iFeel_IM! is a mixed reality system that transmits the virtual interactions of two Second Life avatars to their real world owners via haptic harnesses that have hand shapes, hearts, and other contact points. Express affection for someone in Second Life, and their harness will contract to "hug" them. Recently showcased in Europe, it's the product of two researchers based in Japan's Toyohashi University, Dzmitry Tsetserukou and Alena Neviarouskaya (pictured), who also happen to be married. (In Second Life, their avatars are Milan Luminos and Alena Naidoo.) Being a couple turned out to be a convenient thing for their project, which you can read about in full detail here, and in the video below, featuring the couple in real and avatar form:

"When developing the devices, first we tested them on ourselves," Professor Neviarouskaya told me in a recent email. "The soft hands of [the] HaptiHug devices were sketched from our palms." She sees real world applications far beyond romantic touch across the Internet, however. "This device might ensure the feeling of social presence of separated family members, couples, or friends."

Making the system work wasn't just a hardware challenge. Alena Neviarouskaya created a software system that can emotionally interpret text messages, so iFeel_IM! can work automatically.

Wall Street Journal Runs Story on Health Care Training in Second Life

While it's true that Second Life doesn't receive anywhere near the outside major media coverage it once garnered during the hype wave of 2006-07, the stories that still run are generally more substantial. Case in point: Today, the Wall Street Journal has a feature story on the use of Second Life for training future health care professionals in simulated hospital/emergency scenarios. Below is the video accompanying the story -- nothing that will strike longtime NWN readers as news, but a pretty good overview of leading training projects in SL:

I say "pretty good", because while the Wall Street Journal's Stephanie Simon writes about the cost savings for running simulations in SL, she doesn't devote any attention to educational efficacy. It's definitely cheaper to, say, create a Second Life bot health mannequin than buy a real one for $65,000 (according to the WSJ, that's how much they cost!) However, is the Second Life simulation at least as effective as a real world simulation? The story doesn't say. So again I put the question out to Second Life-based educators reading this blog: When will we start to see rigorous efficacy studies around educational projects in SL?

Control Objects in Second Life With Your iPhone!

What's great about the iPhone is that if you want to control virtual objects in Second Life, there's an app for that. Well, sort of. Watch:

More video demos here. What you're looking at above is not actually an iPhone app per se, but a web app for smart phones in general, created by a French coder known as Wolden Avro of an AI development company called SONIA. "For the moment the project is still in development," Avro tells me, "so it's only usable on iPhones, but we expect to make later other versions for a complete interoperability." He hopes to make this publicly available later this year, perhaps September.

How does the app work? Full geek exegesis after the break:

Mixed Reality Project Uses RFID To Connect Interaction of Real Objects to Virtual Ones in Second Life

Mixed reality design project (2/3)
Uploaded by huggy

What you're looking at above is a mixed reality project by French developer Hugobiwan Zolnir, which uses RFID chips to connect the interaction of real world objects to virtual objects in Second Life. This is done by linking objects with an RFID touchtag to a web database that tracks object coordinates and position, and in turn sends that data into SL. Full details on Zolnir's site here. The upshot, as you see above, is pretty cool: put an object on the real world grid, see it rezzed (or de-rezzed) on the Second Life grid.

It's not just a fun hack, however, because Monsieur Zolnir sees real world applications coming out of this: "The idea is to design an immersive space on the fly by just moving tagged physical objects," he writes, "and to share and exchange in this generated space in order to experience and improve it. No mouse, no technical skills for the user of the design tool." So imagine using it, for example, as a platform for architecture and urban design conducted in two or more remote locations. Follow Zolnir's progress here.

Second Life's New Term of Service Grants General License to Machinima and Screenshot Creators; EFF Lawyer Approves (No Fooling!)

Above: the Machinima/Screenshot license in Second Life's new Terms of Service

When Linden Lab launched its new user experience yesterday, the company also added a less-noticed revision to Second Life's Terms of Service that's equally important -- perhaps much more so. Clause 7.4 gives the company and Second Life users a general license to create machinima and take screenshots of publicly accessible content in-world. Now if content creators want to prohibit machinima or screenshots made of their work, they'll have to put it in restricted, private areas of Second Life -- or designate their licensing terms in a land covenant. Much more on this policy on this Linden wiki page.

Why is this important? Because up to now, Second Life's IP rights policy has left machinima and screenshot makers in a legally tenuous state. Since SL users retain the underlying intellectual property rights to their SL creations, machinimators and photographers are technically obligated to get the permission from every single content creator whose work is visible in their screenshots and videos. (That's why the cover of my HarperCollins book on Second Life has no screenshot of Second Life itself on it -- the publishers' lawyers worried that rights clearance would be a nightmare.) Because of this, EFF Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann once observed that Second Life copyright issues are "in some ways worse" than the real world, with notable "gray interesting mysteries" around the law.

With this new Terms of Service, however, some of these mysteries have been addressed. I checked with the noted EFF attorney to get his read on the revised TOS.

Do Time in the "Hot Tub Time Machine" Prison in Second Life (For a Limited Time)!

Remember the Second Life jail featured in Hot Tub Time Machine? Why of course you do. This week, reports TROI Timtam, who co-developed the site for the movie's producers, you can actually visit it in-world, and even do hard time like Jacob in the movie. (That's me doing push-ups in the hoosegow.) "Anyone who is interested can check the Hot Tub Time Machine group in SL and follow the trail to the build," Ms. Timtam says. You may even spot Jacob himself in-world -- he's Jacob Morlim, and his avatar profile tells a sad tale of hard luck suitable for a Johnny Cash folk ballad, or maybe a furry ballet re-enactment.