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See Preparing for the First Scientific Conference in World of Warcraft for background and links. As a proud member of the Science Guild I attended Session 1 of the conference: “people who have published about WoW will briefly describe their completed work, and the abstracts and links will be available on the wiki. Others, who are currently engaged in research, will explain what they are doing at somewhat greater length, including any preview of results, in response to questions. The concluding part of the session will be a debate about future in-WoW projects that would be valuable to do, especially those that students might use as term papers and dissertations”. Then I joined the Expedition 1, was killed by a beast and resurrected by a kind soul, but then lost the group.

First impressions: I was still distracted by the novel (for me) WoW environment, but the content of the conference was very interesting. WoW has built-in voice chat, but it was not used for the conference (we used private guild chat) because, as it happens with most voice chat systems, it is difficult to manage conversations with more than a few participants (everyone seems to talk at the same time etc.). Bill Bainbridge gives some useful advice: “Although most of each session will be spontaneous discussion - a happy bedlam of ideas, information, and hypotheses - some material needs to be prepared ahead of time, and may be easiest to manage during the session by judicious use of chat macros...”.

But I still think not using voice reduces the communication bandwidth far too much. Most of my groups in SL have spontaneously settled on the same strategy: The main speaker speaks, people in the audience ask questions by text chat, if someone else wants to speak (s)he asks the floor to a moderator. This technique relies on the good manners of the participants -which is normally the case for this type of events- but I understand that some technical moderation features will be implemented soon. Also, I miss the presentation aids that we use in SL (PPT slides, video etc.). I do not think this can be done in WoW (I may be wrong). I still think that SL is a better environment for this kind of events, but look forward to today’s and tomorrow’s sessions in WoW. I will try to participate actively in the last session on the future course of development of WoW and other virtual worlds.

Session 2: “the relationship of the WoW economic system to the economy of the surrounding world; interesting comparisons between WoW and other games or virtual worlds; allegorical features of WoW in such areas as colonialism and state corruption; the importation of real-world social movements into WoW like environmentalism; this virtual world as an arena for players who want to explore alternative personalities and roles; the impact of WoW on players, whether educational or possibly harmful”. A very interesting discussion of sociology of VR worlds. I did not know how to find the conference place - people in the Science Guild directed me to go there by airship (zeppelin). I even made Level 2!!

My first impression was confirmed: a very interesting academic discussion of social aspects of VR worlds, in an environment that does not really offer much support for such things. The main interest of the WoW metaverse (I consider WoW as a VR world rather than a game) to a newcomer like me not much interested in gaming is exploration and sightseeing. My Tauren character (picture below) is an explorer who loves seeing new places in this very neat fantasy world. I also find the fictional history of WoW interesting, like a good fantasy novel, and I understand why millions of gamers find WoW addictive. Contrary to Second Life, WoW does not have an identity crisis: It is, and it is interpreted as such by its users, a good solid and very well done fantasy world.

Today’s Session 3 has been the most interesting: “This session will analyze the future course of development of WoW and other virtual worlds, at a time when many highly involved observers have expressed concern that progress is stalling, even as other observers imagine we are passing a breakthrough threshold, after which virtual worlds will become central to society. The failure of Sims Online, the continuing technical issues with Second Life, and the fact that no other MMORPG seems able to surpass WoW are warning signs. Recall that Active Worlds is over a decade old, and there is little hope that home computers or Internet connectivity will be vastly more capable over the next five years. It is possible that rapid future progress will actually depend upon us, because the success of a virtual world will depend upon the socio-cultural design qualities that make it serve human needs, and our research will contribute to the fund of knowledge supporting innovative design. Ten questions to begin with:” + my own answers:

1. Given that computer technology and Internet have stabilized, are current virtual worlds a technological dead end?

I do not think computer technology and Internet have stabilized - on the contrary they are advancing faster than ever, in particular VR technology. For example very soon there will be consumer interfaces based on VR technology much more immersive than a screen and a mouse, and even direct neural interfacing (see the website of Emotiv Systems for a first implementation that will reach the marketplace soon).

2. Other than WoW’s are there really any long-term viable business models for virtual worlds?

WoW’s model based on paid subscriptions is certainly viable and successful. WoW is one of the few VR worlds compelling enough for millions of users to pay a monthly fee. Another is Entropia Universe (which will become much more interesting after the implementation of Cry Engine 2). I think there will be a few VR worlds worth paying for, and some independent operator will offer subscription packs like for TV. Other viable models are business collaboration and v-learning - see the Qwaq website.

3. Would standardization of software-data platforms be revolutionary, permitting migration across many worlds?

Perhaps, but as some people have noted at the conference this may be more of a social and cultural issue than a technical issue. Also, too much standardization too soon limits innovation, and perhaps we should let creative people experiment some more before adopting rigid standards.

4. Could virtual worlds become living memorials for deceased persons, housing AI avatars of them?

Perhaps, but I and many other participants are more interested in another scenario: that VR worlds may permit deceased persons _living on_ as uploaded consciousnesses in virtual reality. We will have to wait some decades, but mind uploading is the logical end point of today’s advances in brain-to-computer interfacing technology. Our host Bill Bainbridge is also a pioneer in the emerging field of personality preservation, and the CyBeRev website has all eleven of the Bainbridge personality modules available as interactive, web-based tools with instant access to data analysis. Of course today’s interfaces are far too slow for such application, but wait a couple of decades for very high speed direct neural interfaces, and then…

5. Will virtual worlds create social and cultural alternatives that then thrive in the “real world?”

This is already happening. Perhaps also in WoW (I still don’t know enough about WoW), but we are beginning to see some real social and cultural alternatives emerging in Second Life.

6. Which online games will become permanent features of human culture, like chess and Monopoly?

WoW could be one, also because its fantasy settings protect it from becoming obsolete, that could happen to a SF world or one strongly based on the current world. If WoW is maintained, updated and stays at the forefront of VR technology, people could play it for decades. And perhaps… (see 4).

7. Will some virtual worlds declare political independence, like geographically based nations?

This would be a very welcome development. The sooner communities are decoupled from geography the better.

8. What as-yet unrecognized social functions could virtual worlds serve?

Reducing the impact of distance and enabling the establishment and maintenance of true, strongly bound distributed communities decoupled from geography (see 7). Also, permitting severely disabled people to have a more active social life.

9. Could augmented reality (e.g. pervasive LARPs) be the next revolution, virtual and real world combined?

I see this happening soon. It is already beginning to happen with the first experiments in Second Life and Google Earth. Then pervasive sensor networks will be coupled to VR worlds and offer users a seamless integration between physical and virtual realities, and VR telepresence based on realtime data feeds may become indistinguishable from physical presence for all practical effects.

10. What will persist into the future from today’s virtual worlds?  Will they have a history?

I am proud of having participated in writing a page of the history of VR worlds by attending this conference.

I will continue to visit World of Warcraft occasionally, and certainly attend all events organized by the Science Guild. This is a group of very bright people with interesting ideas. Good news: “The Science guild will continue after this conference as a point of communication about WoW and other virtual worlds, and a fun questing group”.

William Sims Bainbridge is co-organizing Convergence of the Real and the Virtual - The First Scientific Conference in World of Warcraft. This is a scientific conference to be held May 9-11, 2008, inside World of Warcraft, devoted to research on WoW and on virtual worlds in general. It was proposed by John Bohannon, who creates the Gonzo Scientist feature for the AAAS journal Science. Bill Bainbridge wrote an article on The Scientific Research Potential of Virtual Worlds (Science 317 472 (2007)). Abstract: “Online virtual worlds, electronic environments where people can work and interact in a somewhat realistic manner, have great potential as sites for research in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, as well as in human-centered computer science. This article uses Second Life and World of Warcraft as two very different examples of current virtual worlds that foreshadow future developments, introducing a number of research methodologies that scientists are now exploring, including formal experimentation, observational ethnography, and quantitative analysis of economic markets or social networks.are exploring the methods needed to create an entirely new generation of games, called pervasive LARPs (live-action role-playing games), that have players act in the real world while simultaneously interacting over the Internet via wireless mobile connections”.

From Scientists, We Need Your Swords!, by John Bohannon: This will not be your typical conference. Sure, there will be sessions devoted to various research topics involving virtual worlds, panel discussions, social activities, and those conference goody bags that we’ve all come to love. But to attend this conference, you don’t have to splurge on grant money or add to global warming by flying to another country. And in the goody bags, you won’t find brochures, pens, or those quickly lost notebooks. Instead, each conference participant will receive (while supplies last) 10 gold pieces, a red “Sciencemag” shirt, a colorful conference tabard emblazoned with an infinity symbol, two extra bags for swag, a telescope, and a pet creature. Between sessions, there will be group field trips across landscapes inhabited by dangerous beasts--some earthly and extinct, others fanciful--an introduction to the world’s auction-based economy, and finally a massive joint assault on an enemy city. (Beat that, Gordon conferences!) Anyone with an Internet connection can take part, from anywhere in the world. All you have to do is install the game, create a character, and join the guild called “Science” on the Earthen Ring US server. If that sounds scary, complex, weird, geeky, well … welcome to the future. At least, welcome to the future of scientific research envisioned by the conference organizers, William Bainbridge (a sociologist at the National Science Foundation) and about a dozen scientists whose research involves the 10 million people who spend time--scary amounts of time--in the Warcraft universe.

The program: Session 1: Research and World of Warcraft; Session 2: Relationships between WoW and the “Real World”; Session 3: The Future of Virtual Worlds. The three academic sessions of this conference will not attempt to duplicate the (dreary) experience of traditional academic conventions, where high-status individuals read aloud long papers, while the low-status masses in the audience sit like victims rather than engaging in a more equal debate.  Rather, we will exploit the advantages of text-based chat - and avoid dealing with the challenges of voice chat which works poorly beyond perhaps five participants.

Of course I must participate in this event - so I created my WoW account and a Tauren character named Perplextar (the Tauren are a proud and tenacious race with bull-like features and a culture that is very similar to an evolved American Indian culture, building great permanent structures and tapping their engineering ability. They have large hooves, and a towering body structure. They are shamanistic, peaceful, and powerful beings). You can also do that by following carefully he instructions given in the conference website and wiki. At the beginning Perplextar did not know what to do and was even killed by wildlife a couple of times, then he received precious help from Elves Extropia and Alishya (two fellow refugees from Second Life and members of the Extropia community, in the picture above). They took Perplextar running through many danger zones to Orgrimmar. I really look forward to attending his event.

Multiuser VR worlds in the browser are coming. See last week’s Awesome: Flash MMOGs coming. Two more examples:

Vivaty‘s X3D technology, covered by the New York Times, has been first deployed as a Facebook application, currently in closed beta. Facebook users will be able to meet and talk in browser based VR micro environments inside Facebook. X3D is the successor of the late lamented VRML of the 90s, and this application may begin converting the promise of VRML / X3D to reality. In the picture above, my first visit to my VR room in Facebook.

From Russia, the Alternativa Platform is a Flash based platform for creating, implementing and supporting multi-user browser media over the Internet. Their new demo has been noticed in the last few days and highly praised: “No question about it, these guys are really pushing the limits with his Alternativa3D engine. The rendering is amazing”. Check this demo (picture above): it is like a videogame of the late 90s running in the browser.

See also the new Flash 3D / VR Green Planet demos of Away3D and chase the giant alien dragonfly around. This begins to look like Entropia Universe in the browser. Alternativa and Away3D do not have multiuser demos yet, but i guess the Paperworld3D approach would work.

Digg: Finally, an example of how Second Life shoud be used!: “Pictures and videos of the virtual visit of the fantastic Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, Italy, where a real tour guide uses her avatar to offer a complete virtual visit to New York students. This is how Second Life should be used!”. The article referenced, Virtual visit: Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi on Simone Brunozzi’s blog, describes one of the best way to use Second Life (as an educational and cultural tool). The Basilica is a perfect place to do so, since it’s perfectly reproduced from the original “real” one. See also our coverage of the opening of Assisi in Second Life in September 2007.

A virtual visit of the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, led by a professional guide who gives explanations and answers the questions of the visitor, is shown in this video clip on blip.tv (in Italian). You can also download the original, higher resolution video file.

This is an example of mature application of Second Life, with many applications to the tourism industry and the promotion of our cultural, historic and artistic heritage. This kind of highly realistic and immersive cultural experience, which had never been possible before, will permit taking art and culture closer to citizens, everywhere. A virtual visit is not yet the same thing as a visit in brickspace reality, but the gap will be more and more reduced by advances in VR technology, until VR based telepresence will be a perfectly acceptable replacement of physical presence for many applications. This is an example of how VR technology is achieving sufficient maturity for some important applications, and other killer applications to p2p (person to person), b2b (business to business) and b2c (business to consumer - this is proving the most difficult model) communication are being deployed. One thing is clear: the difference between the 3D, VR based metaverse and the 2D web lies in the social interaction between participants. This is the feature that must be exploited to design successful initiatives in the meatverse.

Yahoo News: New game engine framework allowing for development of real time Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG) and applications via the Flash platform. The founders of Influxis and Red5Server announced today the PaperWorld3D source code is now open to the public. PaperWorld, which leverages open source projects PaperVision3D and Red5, allows for rapid creation of MMOG 3D environments deployable over the Adobe Flash Player 9.

“We are very excited to see this new technology released to the Flash industry,” said Richard Blakely, CEO of Influxis. “PaperWorld3D gives Flash developers the ability to easily create multi-user 3D environments, and considering that this is a LGPL open source project, there is really no limit to where this will go.” Richard also stated that he expects to see new forms of “multi-user 3D advertising” and new business opportunities built around “virtual economies.”

For several months developers all over the Web have admired the awesome first demo of Papervision3D technology. We have described the power of the Red5 platform a few months ago and installed a server. The combination of the two technologies and the ubiquity of the Flash browser plugin will permit, if not “Flash MMOGs”, moderately multiuser virtual worlds that can be embedded in any website and used, for example, for customer support. There are at least three other technologies that permit deploying light browser-based multiuser VR world: Unity3D, recent developments in X3D, and Transmutable‘s Ogoglio technology. All four technologies are worth watching carefully -actually the last three can do now what Flash MMOG technology will be able to do after many more months of development- but I think Flash based VR worlds will progress very fast due to the near total penetration, user base and professional developer base.

Qwaq Forums, the revolutionary next generation virtual workspace for business collaboration and e-learning, has been recently covered by the Wall Street Journal: “Companies are turning to virtual offices and landscapes as tools for employees and business partners to collaborate and learn”. In an article titled Qwaq Brings Virtual Worlds To Business Collaboration, Information Week reports that “The power of virtual worlds is that they trick your brain into thinking you’re actually sharing a physical space with other people, participating in a shared activity. As a result, conversations and collaboration are richer. People who’d remain silent in a conference call, WebEx, or chat room will speak up in a meeting in a virtual world. Using Qwaq, you can bring in documents, such as PowerPoint presentations, videos, Microsoft Word documents, spreadsheets, and more, and you can discuss the documents and collaborate on changing them. You can do the same with 3-D objects created with just about any popular 3-D design and drawing software. You can create freehand diagrams on a shared whiteboard, and discuss those diagrams”. Such issues have been a major focus at Virtual Worlds 2008 in New York.

The image above shows two of the most useful features of Qwaq Forums: a Firefox in-world web browser displaying the qwaq.com website, and a video player with a presentation of Qwaq Forums by Innovex4G staff. The video presentations (in Spanish) show other important business oriented features such as videoconferencing and collaborative document editing.

Video can be imported in Qwaq Forums after converting it to MPEG2. Direct import of MPEG4 and Flash video is in the works and will be available in one of the next releases. The Wall Street Journal article shows another upcoming feature: realistic avatars and environments.

The new website of Qwaq lists five main business applications: a complete virtual environment for effective program and project management; a virtual operations center accessible from anywhere in the world; an ideal environment in which facilitators or moderators can guide more effective meeting workflows to solve challenging group tasks, such as developing strategy or resolving negotiations; immersive technology that allows all participants to communicate more effectively, enabling rich feedback between users and resulting in a more compelling learning setting for corporate training and other transfers-of-information that businesses depend on; and virtual offices as an effective way to create an immediate presence in remote locations. Like a physical office, an office in Qwaq Forums is a secure, persistent place to meet with clients and prospects, present proposals, and work with colleagues in an immersive setting that supports access from anywhere in the world.

It is frequently reported that most companies that have established a presence in Second Life for marketing and brand promotion have not been very successful. This is probably true. In 2005 and 2006, several companies have built nice “3D websites” in SL, without planning how to attract visitors and build communities, and of course their efforts have not been successful. In 2007, most online marketing agencies and many of their clients have realized that the metaverse is all about dynamic content, communities and social relations, and have tried to do things better, but there are still few Second Life success stories related to marketing and brand promotion.

What _does_ work in Second Life is cultural presentations and conferences. I will mention two examples that I am familiar with, based in the Extropia Core community in SL, home of several collectives that consistently attract visitors to their events. The weekly Sophrosyne’s Saturday Salon consists of seminars and talk shows with well known guests, and attracts a regular crowd interested in Second (but also first) Life sociology, lifestyle and technology. The SL-Transhumanists collective organizes weekly seminars related to advanced technologies and their social and cultural impact, with a large audience composed by both regulars and newcomers. The next event, on Sunday, will be a seminar of Lincoln Cannon, president of the Mormon Transhumanist Association.

The current SL technology offers many effective presentation tools: voice, a Power Point equivalent, streaming video including direct webcam feeds in QuickTime format, and many others. Soon Second Life will offer shared web browsing and Flash video, which will make all web-based presentation tools immediately available. With the ongoing incremental evolution of technology Second Life, which is already a very good platform for cultural events and distance education, will become an excellent platform that will make quality content available to users regardless of their geographic location, in an immersive and almost addictive environment.

I think this is very important. Cobalt is an emerging open source and multi-platform metaverse browser and toolkit application being built using the open source Croquet SDK. This pre-alpha version of the Cobalt application is being made freely available to the emerging virtual worlds community under the Croquet license as a way of fostering a viable community-based software development effort leading to open virtual world technologies supporting the needs of education and research. The idea behind releasing this technology is to tap into the creative potential of the broader community as a way of advancing something that all of us can use to create deeply collaborative, greatly featured, and widely interlinked virtual environments on a very large scale.

A few weeks ago I wrote: Open Croquet integrates some of the best software engineering concepts and techniques, and “deserves” success. It is currently limited by its lack of accessibility—there is no such a thing as an easy access general purpose OC browser for OC metaverses (though in this excellent audio interview Julian Lombardi, the chairman of the board of directors of the Croquet Consortium, says that there may soon be one). The closed proprietary service Qwaq Forums is a showcase example of the advanced applications that can be built on OC, and provides an excellent virtual meeting environment with groupware tools, web browsing, spatial VoIP, webcam feeds and collaborative editing of documents in popular office formats.

Well, now there IS an easy access general purpose OC browser for OC metaverses. Cobalt is in a very early stage (pre-alpha as they say above) and looks primitive, but so did Mosaic. I understand that Cobalt is a browser: a tool that can be used to access a world wide web of linked Open Croquet metaverses built by users. This (Mosaic in the early 90s) is what started the explosive growth of the Internet in the early 90s, and it could now start an explosive growth of the metaverse in the late 00s. And everyone can be involved in the development of the world wide metaverse built on open source technologies.

In the article on Metaverse platform gambling 1 I have described the three open source “official” next generation immersive education platforms selected by the Immersive Education Initiative: -Second Life in its open source OpenSim version, Open Croquet and Sun’s Java-based Wonderland - Darkstar platform-, as the best candidate Metaverse platforms available at this moment. This was correct: all three platforms have made significant advances in the last few weeks. In the image above my Second Life avatar is watching my Qwaq Forums avatar in a video presentation of Qwaq Forums (in Spanish) produced by metafuturing and Innovex4G, a Spanish company specialized in business oriented applications of VR technology. This is only a video streamed from our server and shown in Second Life, but it suggests the forthcoming interoperability of platforms. Qwaq Forums, a business oriented value added layer based on the open source platform Open Croquet, advances steadily by introducing some new features in each release and is a very useful tool for professional collaboration in geographically distributed teams. Voice and text chat, collaborative web browsing and drag-and-drop importing office documents from the desktop permit very productive business meeting in QF.

The New Media Consortium, a consortium of nearly 250 learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies, has announced its Open Virtual Worlds Project, an effort that is aimed at making it easier to learn, work, and exchange ideas in virtual space. The project will develop a range of standards-based, portable open-source educational spaces, content, and objects, and use them to extend Sun Microsystems’s open source Project Darkstar and Project Wonderland virtual world platforms. The collaborative editing of documents in the virtual space shown in this NMC presentation video has been compared to Qwaq Forums. A comment to this article describes the differences between the two approaches and the superiority of the P2P features and licensing model of Open Croquet. However, it is clear that the Open Virtual Worlds Project will permit important advances also in Sun Microsystems’s VR worlds technology.

OpenSim, the open source version of Second Life, is where the most interesting recent advances have been announced. The project has reached its 0.5 release, that has beed described as an important milestone. Independent OpenSim based metaverse operators like Central Grid are beginning to make headlines. IBM is exloring (also) this platform and has built a 3D data center application in OpenSim.  Aimed at IT professionals, the application should let them monitor data centers more effectively over long distances. IBM presented the idea of a 3D data center in Second Life last year (see video below), but the new OpenSim application should allow more security with privately hosted environments. See also the articles of Tish Shute and Gwyneth Llewelyn. Perhaps the most interesting recent OpenSim news come from the Finnish company RealXtend, see Tish Shute’s articles Evolution of OpenSim: RealXtend joins OpenSim and RealXtend’s Vision for Avatar 2.0.

So what is the best bet? At this moment I tend to agree with Tidalblog: “It’s too early to predict the winners and losers in all this—perhaps there won’t be any. SL continues to break concurrency records (64,300 most recently) as the service stability improves. Those keen to capitalise on SL skills are presumably going to be tempted either to stay or to go down the OpenSim route”. Yes, SL is still there despite the bad press and, perhaps in a new OpenSim based incarnation, will probably continue to be the best choice to reach wide audiences in the Metaverse. While Qwaq Forums and other initiatives based on Open Croquet may be more attractive for the high-end corporate and educational markets.

Video presentations (in Spanish) of Qwaq Forums, the business oriented value added layer based on the open source platform Open Croquet, bond to occupy a niche of growing importance in the emergent market of virtual workspaces (Tele-work in Virtual Reality). By metafuturing and Innovex4G, a Spanish company specialized in business oriented applications of VR technology. See our article in Tendencias21 (also in Spanish) and the article Qwaq Forums for virtual Intranets on this blog.

General presentation of business oriented features and applications (1):

Quick Time streaming (.mov)
Flash streaming (.flv)

General presentation of business oriented features and applications (2):

Quick Time streaming (.mov)
Flash streaming (.flv)

Presentation of some technical aspects, including P2P features and VR videoconferencing (1):

Quick Time streaming (.mov)
Flash streaming (.flv)

Presentation of some technical aspects, including P2P features and VR videoconferencing (2):

Quick Time streaming (.mov)
Flash streaming (.flv)

I will participate tonight in this interesting debate on Immersionism vs. Augmentationism. Topic: These deep thinkers, all fairly well-known for their positions on immersion vs augmentation, will have an energetic debate about their differences in opinion.  Expect the conversation to touch on issues such as avatar rights, voice verification, and avatars as legal entities.  This is a debate you won’t want to miss! Come to Orange Island tonight.

Updated after the event. See the picture above and some thoughts on Digital Persons, Immersionism vs. Augmentationism.

Please join us at Orange 1 (200, 200) in Second Life on Thursday, February 28th, for a day of discussions designed to explore just a few facets of Second Life culture, including a public debate between well-known residents on the topic of immersionism versus augmentationism.  IM Jade Lily for a teleport or use the landmark below:

Orange Island - Lower Plaza, Orange 1 (199, 211, 21)

Agenda at a Glance:

Thursday, February 28th
9:00 am PST:  Music in Second Life: Past, Present, and Future
10:00 am PST:  The Impact of Rules and Protocols on Community Behavior
12:00 pm PST:  Relay For Life: Diverse Avatars for a Common Purpose
1:00 pm PST:  DEBATE! Immersionism vs. Augmentationism

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Music in SL: Past, Present, and Future

Topic: The music scene in Second Life is growing rapidly, with more than three hundred artists performing regularly. We’ll take a look at how performances have changed over the years, what the current trends are, and where music is headed into the future of SL.

Speakers:

Kandi Valkyrie
Cylindrian Rutabaga
Kourosh Eusebio
Komuso Tokugawa

Rules and Protocols

Topic: This panel will take a look at the creation of space and communities in SL and to what extent they are rule-based and why, as well as the impact that rules and protocols have on the behavior of the community members.

Speakers:

Michi Lumin
Tao Takashi
Meja Milosz

Relay For Life: Connecting Cultures with Common Purpose

Topic: This presentation will introduce the Relay For Life campaign, which has raised more than US$170,000 over the past three years for cancer research and patient programs, and will illustrate how many diverse communities have come together, bringing their unique ideas, for the common purpose of fighting back against cancer.

Speaker:

Jade Lily

DEBATE! Immersionism vs. Augmentationism

Topic: These deep thinkers, all fairly well-known for their positions on immersion vs augmentation, will have an energetic debate about their differences in opinion.  Expect the conversation to touch on issues such as avatar rights, voice verification, and avatars as legal entities.  This is a debate you won’t want to miss!

Speakers:

Tom Bukowski (moderating)
Gwyneth Llewelyn (immersionist)
Sophrosyne Stenvaag (immersionist)
Hiro Pendragon (augmentationist)
Giulio Perhaps (augmentationist)

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Basically, my own attitude is derived from these two points:

1) I don’t take Second Life seriously as a parallel life. Someday online Virtual Reality technology will be able to offer fully immersive sensorial experiences and real options for a parallel virtual life, but we are not there yet. That is why at this moment I see Second Life only as an excellent communication tool. This may and perhaps will change once next generation VR technologies become available.

2) I try to live by a few very simple principles: live and let live, everyone should be free to do absolutely whatever she wishes as long as she does not do concrete harm to anyone else, victimless crimes are not crimes, and one should enjoy his own favorite lifestyle instead of criticizing the lifestyle of others. I also think we have demonstrated that Immersionists and Augmentationists can be good friends and collaborators as long as one respects the choice of the other. So I also do not take very seriously this Immersionism vs. Augmentationism division.

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Stephen Euin Cobb for his award-winning podcast The Future And You. Stephen is a U.S. science fiction author, futurist, a columnist and contributing editor for Jim Baen’s Universe Magazine, the online magazine from Baen Books. Within Second Life his avatar’s name is “Boc Cryotank.” Stephen is also a game designer, artist, essayist and transhumanist. In each episode of The Future And You Stephen interviews a variety of authors, scientists, celebrities and “pioneers of the future” as to what they believe both the near future and distant future will be like for individuals as well as for humanity in general.

My interview focused on Second Life, Virtual Reality technology and business, possible mid and long term evolutions of VR, Artificial Intelligence and other technologies, our work at metafuturing, transhumanism, the WTA, the IEET, and various thoughts about the future (and the present). Stephen’s thoughts on “schisms” in virtual and physical realities (at the beginning) are quite similar to my own.

Listen to the mp3 podcast (it is also archived on the metaXLR8 server).

Here is the text of Stephen’s blog post on the show website. See also the post on the Extropia Core blog - Extropia Core is the main meeting place for transhumanists in Second Life. Not much to add to my profile (too bad that I do not find enough time for some of the projects he mentions, such as the (almost) late lamented Fastra and FutureTAG). See my articles More voices from Second Life and Life 2.0 and Life 2.0: augmentationists in Second Life and beyond for more thoughts on the tension between immersionists and augmentationists within her virtual world.

Giulio Prisco (futurist, scientist, corporate consultant and until recently the Executive Director of the World Transhumanist Association) is today’s featured guest. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and on the Global Task Force on Implications and Policy for CRN, the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.

Argent Bury (a digital person living exclusively within Second Life) provides an essay concerning the tension between immersionists and augmentationists within her virtual world.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the February 20, 2008 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 79 minutes]

Giulio Prisco also covers the prejudice and intolerance between immersionists and augmentationists, and mentions that the day before the interview, Cervantes University held its very first college class within Second Life, and discusses many aspects of the future of virtual realities.

A virtual reality expert and consultant for companies wishing to use and benefit from many different VR platforms, Giulio describes what’s available now, and what will be available in the decades to come. From the current photorealistic graphics, to the total immersion through full sensory feedback directly wired into the human nervous system.

He describes various VR platforms including Second Life and its competitors, as well as the possibility that all the platforms will become linked together into a unified whole, just as the internet was once many separate little nets that could not share content.

Giulio Prisco is also the Director of the futurist consulting consortium called FutureTag, as well as founder and CEO of Metafuturing (a company specializing in Science and Technology Consulting, Internet Services and Virtual Reality). Based in Madrid, Spain, he founded the Spanish transhumanist group FASTRA. He is a former physicist and computer scientist, as well as a former manager at ESA: the European Space Agency.

On Tuesday, February 12, at 19:30 in Madrid (1:30pm EST), the Instituto Cervantes will host a high profile launch event for its new Internet TV platform and the virtual Instituto Cervantes in Second Life produced by metafuturing and Innovex4G. See also our blog in Spanish.

Remote visitors will be able to follow parts of the event in SL, and RL visitors will be able to see and talk to them via dedicated SL screens in the event area. The launch event will be followed by several weeks of interactive exhibitions and activities, also available in SL. The Instituto Cervantes will also launch its pilot project for teaching Spanish in Second Life: “virtual Spanish courses to reach Internet users through the new technologies of virtual reality and 3D interaction”.

Some students from the worldwide network of Cervantes centers have been selected to participate in the pilot. We have been training a team of very bright and motivated teachers and look forward to seeing this pilot contribute to demonstrating the potential of VR for education and become a full program of the Institute. The language courses will be complemented by a set of casual games related to the Spanish language, developed for Second Life.

Wikipedia: “The Cervantes Institute is a worldwide non-profit organization created by the Spanish government in 1991. It is named after Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616), the author of Don Quixote and perhaps the most important figure in the history of Spanish literature. The Cervantes Institute, a government agency, is the largest organization in the world responsible for promoting the study and the teaching of Spanish language and culture”.

Oggi ho avuto l’ onore e il piacere di conoscere il Sindaco di Assisi, Claudio Ricci, in occasione dell’ apertura del suo ufficio in Second Life. L’ Ing. Ricci ha risposto alle domande su Assisi di una ventina di visitatori. E’ stata ad esempio interessante la discussione sull’ accessibilitá di Assisi.

politicaduepuntozero: “Il Sindaco di Assisi, Claudio Ricci, ha deciso di aprire un vero e proprio ufficio virtuale su Second Life. Il suo avatar ClaudioRicci Republic riceverà gli avatar dei suoi concittadini, che avranno la possibilità di presentare domande, proposte, lamentele e progetti di sviluppo del territorio”.

Questo é certamente un esempio di applicazione matura dei mondi virtuali volta a facilitare il contatto tra l’ amministrazione e i cittadini. A una mia domanda l’ Ing. Ricci ha risposto che, a parte alcuni casi fortemente mediatizzati di “apparizioni” di politici in Second Life, questo é forse il primo esempio di iniziative delle amministrazioni locali. Spero che l’ esempio del Sindaco di Assisi sia seguito da altri politici, e che questo contribuisca a dimostrare l’ enorme potenziale sociale delle nuove tecnologie.

Non mancheró al prossimo appuntamento fra due settimane. Naturalmente, l’ ufficio virtuale dell’ Ing. Ricci, creato a immagine del suo ufficio abituale, si trova nell’ Assisi virtuale, certamente una delle piú impressionanti opere in Second Life, alla cui realizzazione abbiamo avuto il grande piacere di partecipare.

The usual pattern for a successful event in Second Life: an interesting subject, a great speaker with good public presentation skills, an interested audience, a lively Q/A session, voice. See a full coverage here and a video clip.