i was just reading pranab’s interesting blog entry about “user generated content — how important is it?”, in which he looks at how user generated content is perceived by the corporate dudes & dudettes, and he remarks

Also at the same time, I feel that UGC is very important, and unlike what some people consider that UGC is secondary, my conclusion is that is perhaps the most important factor for VWs. VWs like Second life gives tools to its users who can build 3D models without the need for expensive 3d tools like Maya or trying to learn open source 3D tools like Blender.

— and i wholeheartedly agree. in fact, i think it’s one of the reasons that secondlife will become increasingly difficult to beat: it’s got tons and tons of user created content. even if you were willing to cough up the money to recreate content on a similar scale, it would not be the same because of the diversity of the content creators — we thrive on textures (visual textures, but also sound textures, fabric textures, food textures!), content generated following a corporate recipe will always lack that quality of textures we get from an environment that has grown over time (history!) and has been contributed to by many creative people. it’s also one of the reasons that internal, corporate driven virtual worlds and web 2.0 systems never really fare as well as external systems: too little texture, not enough real culture (the term corporate culture is in many cases, and increasingly so, an oxymoron, i think). chatting to the CTO of a larger consulting company recently (as part of my IBM work, i’m not about to change jobs i learned that their internal facebook look alike system was used by about 800 or so of their employee, but that they found more then 14′000 of their employee being active on the real facebook…

for me the conclusion is clear: don’t waste time with internal virtual world systems, don’t waste time with internal web 2.0 systems for which there are much better systems on the internet (don’t get me wrong: IBM’s fringe web 2.0 service is excellent and very useful, for example) — instead concentrate and contribute to open up and standardize on a SL based open grid!

walt mossberg has a very nice writeup of what’s wrong with the current mobile phone software model (though, it seems to be less of a lock-in here in old europe than in the “colonies” ;-):

Suppose you own a Dell computer, and you decide to replace it with a Sony. You don’t have to get the permission of your Internet service provider to do so, or even tell the provider about it. You can just pack up the old machine and set up the new one.

when we did a consulting project for a large european mobile phone operator several years ago (looking at and developing, among others, the personal mobile hub idea out of which came the IBM Personal Care Connect system for monitoring patients) we learned that you need to get type approval for new mobile phone in (back than) about 70 different jurisdictions — and, that if you even moved the holes for the microphone a couple of millimeters that you had to redo the whole certification! yikes…

with the true cost of an SMS being around £750 per MByte in the UK (about CHF 1′074 per MByte with my swiss provider) it becomes obvious that a mobile phone operator license is a license to print money nowadays: you can charge outrageous fees on data and SMS and on “roaming surcharges” (funny, isn’t it, how difficult it seems to be to merge in all those data records from those foreign mobile phone operators, why it seems to requires them at least 10% more work to do that!), plus you can keep your customers locked in…at least you think you can

just been looking at the definitive mobile phone project, the one to rule them all and came across the following youtube clip:

not much to add…except:

a bit tired today after a longer than usual train ride from .ch to .de: took the scenic route from einsiedeln to st. gallen to munich to erlangen because of the strike of the german train drivers…

also, it seems, even though i thought i was sound asleep the last couple of nights (it is quiet at night at our new neighbourhood), i must have been talking in my sleep — worse, i must have been giving interviews while sleeping! when i checked my business email this evening, i found a note from our communications people inquiring about an interview i seem to have given to pressetext.at — thing is, i never gave an interview on anything related to secondlife, at least not while i was awake…lol (i did give a public presentation on secondlife a couple of weeks ago, perhaps a journalist from pressetext.at was present at that occassion?)

p.s.: just so that you don’t have to pay €72.00 for my presentation¹, i’ve uploaded the PDF.

one of my partners in crime, sifu moraga, just twittered about an entry on tony walsh’s clickable culture blog relating the news that IBM & SecondLife are going to cooperate on the development of the “3D Internet”.

among the points listed is:

Open standards for interoperability with the current Web: Open source development of interoperable formats and protocols. Open standards in this area are expected to allow virtual worlds to connect together so that users can cross from one world to another, just like they can go from one web page to another on the Internet today.

the press release goes on:

Linden Lab has formed an Architecture Working Group that describes the roadmap for the development of the Second Life Grid. This open collaboration with the community allows users of Second Life to help define the direction of an interoperable, Internet-scale architecture.

excellent news that we are officially cooperating with Linden Labs on several issues!

andrew tanenbaum once remarked that “the network world is a jungle” and back then he was referring to the plethora of network protocols to choose from (anyone remember ISO CONS, TP4, X.25, X.400, the ISO/OSI vs TCP/IP wars, ISODE? ah, those were the days…) — a couple of years later (well, actually more than 20 years later, i’m showing my age) the jungle has become even denser and sometimes it seems we are going to suffocate in it.

looking at virtual worlds, we don’t (yet?) have a jungle but there sure are quite a number of virtual world systems and virtual world “wannabes” out there — raising the questions which ones are really virtual worlds (and which ones are just glorified 3D or worse 2.5D chat systems) and which should we support?

virtual worlds & glorified chat systems

the first question — what features make a system a virtual world system as opposed to a mere embellished chat system with avatars — is, i admit, a bit of a challenge. intuitively, i guess, we are all tempted to state, “i’ll recognise a virtual world when i’m in it.” — which is probably true for most of us, but is not really a good criterium.

what do we expect from a virtual world? well, it has to feel real; that means, it has to be able to draw us in to the virtual world in such a way that we no longer realize that we are not the avatar and also forget that we in fact and in reality sitting in front of a computer with just a tiny window into the virtual world and a rather limited way of interacting with that virtual world — this being drawn in is what we call immersive experience. for me an immersive experience only occurs when i can interact with a credible, 3D world. Credible in this context means that the virtual world at least exhibits similar features to and “behavior” as the “real-life” world i’m living in (is it real, though?):

• 3D: things and scenes before me appear to be three dimensional[^1]
• free movement: i can move about a scenery as i want to and change perspective as i want to
• impact: i can influence and change the environment i (or my avatar) am part of
• interact: there are others “in-world” and we can interact with one another (chat, take a walk together, do things together)
• create, sell & buy: i can create stuff, i can give stuff away, accept stuff from other avatars, i can sell and buy stuff
• physics: the virtual world exhibits limitations[^2], either by imposing “laws of physics” on objects or by restricting resources (size of an virtual world space) or by restricting my abilities (e.g., how far can i see? how far can i hear?)

those points, i think, establish a baseline of what constitutes a virtual world system. anything below that baseline is a glorified chat system at best, i’d say. anything above that baseline just enhances the experience.

ideal virtual world systems & virtual universes

what would an ideal virtual world system look like? when can we talk of a virtual universe?

obviously, an ideal virtual world should be more than just a virtual world, so what are the features that (i think) make it ideal?

• real word–virtual world interconnect: first, i’d like to be able to link real world and virtual world. touching an object in the virtual world, for example, could open a browser window (or map a browser window into the virtual world); or the status of an object in the real world should influence the status of one or more objects in the virtual world.

• internal & external APIs: then, second, we should be able to program the virtual world system from the inside as well as from the outside. this feature, requires that there are in-world and real-world virtual world APIs that allow us to interact with the virtual world at least on the same level as an avatar of that virtual world.

• property: an ideal virtual world system gives me control over the stuff i own. i can take my belongings and make a backup onto my backup service. i can take my belongings and leave (and join a different virtual world). i can pass on whatever i own to another avatar.

• self-hosting: next, with an ideal virtual world system i can host my own private virtual world and have complete say over who can access and who cannot access it.

• virtual universe grid: i can hook up to other, independently operated virtual world systems of (at least) the same type and create a virtual universe grid.

• cross-platform & accessibility: an ideal virtual world aims for cross-platform coverage and accessibility. i can run the client on a windows system, on an apple OSX system, a linux system, or on a mobile platform. if i’m blind i can use a text-only client. when i’m away from broadband connections i can use reduced graphics clients or even text-only clients.

• open source: finally, an ideal virtual world gives me open-source[^4] access to both the client and the grid (server) code.

“so weit, so gut“… the next step will be to try and collect information about existing virtual worlds.

SecondLife, contender to the throne?

SecondLife seems to do quite well in the virtual worlds category. the source code to the client has been open-sourced by linden labs (who own the current SecondLife grid). the server code has been promised by linden labs but that so far has not happened. however, as tao takashi reported on his blog recently, linden labs have instantiated the SL Architecture Working Group recently and invited experts from all over (disclaimer: yours truly is part of it as well) and with the following vision (in the words of zero linden):

We imagine a future where Second Life is able grow beyond the borders of Linden Lab. We see regions running on open source, alternative simulators. We see web services that allow people to build mash-ups of Second Life and the Web. We see organizations being able to integrate their members and their members’ avatars. This is the vision of future Second Life Grid that we want to develop.

Last week we hosted the first Architecture Working Group meeting. Our aim is to build the technology and standards for such a vision by developing them through the direct involvement of Linden Lab, external developers, and the community. The initial group included Residents and organizations active in the technical development of Second Life, as well as virtual worlds in general. We hope it will be the first of an ever expanding process.

thus, we can hope for and, in fact, expect SecondLife to develop over the coming months and years into a fully fledged virtual universe!

OpenSim

OpenSim while in many aspects not quite on par with the SecondLife grid (but making steady progress) has already the concept of foreign grids, providing the first version of a virtual universe!

others…

still need to investigate ActiveWorlds, torque based VWs, & croquet. stay tuned

xyzzyxyzzy.net is running the latest wordpress release (2.3) which has a completely revamped tag system — breaking, unfortunately christine davis’s ultimate tag warrior plugin that i had been using on my wordpress blog(s) so far. while checking her blog for updates i noticed a trackback to the gormful — if you can’t fix it, don’t break it blog, mentioning that gormful had created a technorati tag display plugin to re-create the ultimate tag warrior behavior.

so, download, install, activate…and xyzzyxyzzy.net has technorati tag display again