Virtual Worlds and Blended Reality
Posted by Jeriaska on November 10th, 2007
Virtual worlds can be described as open-ended video game or 3D chat room environments connected over the Internet where participants may have the freedom to build the world, their avatars and structure all activities and interactions. Second Life is the largest virtual world to date with over 10 million registered users and a concurrency of 30,000 - 40,000 (the number of people in-world simultaneously at any time). The economy is routinely over $1 million U.S. dollars per day.
As with any new medium, digital world participants have at first attempted to replicate physical world activities such as building houses, offices, stores and other familiar landscapes, introducing social interaction mechanisms and constructing commercial marketplaces for products and services. A new phase then occurs with a fuller exploration of the medium and a creation of concepts unique to digital environments. Featured innovations include simultaneous worldwide interaction with automatic translation, multi-threaded communication and novel collaboration in group settings, and the ability to filter and structure personal views.
In her presentation at the Foresight Vision Weekend Unconference, Melanie Swan shared an interactive overview of the current status and use of virtual worlds, including a recent standards announcement, and a review of the Metaverse Roadmap released in September 2007.
The following transcript and slides of Melanie Swan’s 2007 Foresight Vision Weekend presentation are open source and have been shared via the Unconference Wiki. Other presentations by the author have been made available at melanieswan.com/presentations.html.
Virtual Worlds and Blended Reality
Welcome everyone. I am excited to share virtual worlds with you in this talk.
A summary of virtual worlds in four points is first that virtual worlds have become routine for a wide range of recreational and professional activities for both individuals and groups.
Second, like other newtech, YouTube has been a recent example; virtual worlds are complementary and category-defining, a new concept co-existing with other entertainment, prototyping and simulation technologies.
Third, virtual worlds exemplify the trend towards increased visual representation of data, interactivity and the blending of the physical and virtual.
Fourth that while virtual worlds are not new and are over-hyped at the moment, they are more likely to persist this time due to the large number of participants and wide breadth of activities, they are becoming more mainstream.
This talk will start with a review of the metaverse and the recently released Metaverse Roadmap, then discuss virtual worlds, focusing on the demographics, activities, governance, economy and advanced applications of the virtual world Second Life and conclude with a live demo of the UK’s National Physical Laboratory’s Nanotechnology Simulation in Second Life.
Virtual worlds are part of a broader group of 3D and virtual technologies sometimes referred to as the metaverse. The tremendous growth in data, bandwidth and graphics processing have created the capacity and demand for streaming video, data visualization and 3D data display.
The biggest category of metaverse technologies is the capture of reality both generally through the geo-spatialization of Google Earth and Nasa World Wind and individually through life capture or life-logging. Geo science is one of the three fastest growing job areas this decade.
Augmented reality overlays are aiding physical world navigation, simulation for prototyping and testing is becoming standard in more areas, persistent virtual worlds are extending interaction and collaboration possibilities, fab labs and 3D printing, designing objects virtually and then printing them in the physical world, are extending creativity and utility and the next generation of virtual reality could involve more senses like touch, taste and smell, here is the video game Wild Divine where one must be mentally relaxed enough to move up levels as measured by a biofeedback device.
A broad theme here is the blending and fluidity of reality; the physical, virtual and augmented.
The metaverse roadmap is a document arising from the Metaverse Roadmapping Summit held at SRI in May 2006, synthesizing the responses to 22 survey questions from 30 conference attendees and 115 web participants into four possible narratives of the future. Parts of all four scenarios, augmented reality, lifelogging, mirror worlds and virtual worlds are already occurring.
The roadmap is an interesting document but not really a technology roadmap as understood from the semiconductor and storage industry examples. Subsequent iterations would benefit from more directional guidance by including a collaborative identification of problems, potential solutions and key milestone projections.
The definition of a virtual world is a 3D online persistent world with a sense of presence and simultaneous experience in context. There are over 30 worlds in existence right now with probably another 20 which have received funding. Worlds can be either public or private, government and some corporate activity tends to be in private worlds.
The public world Second Life is probably the largest and best known with over 10 million registered accounts. ActiveWorlds has both private and public worlds, supports 400 avatars in one space concurrently vs. Second Life’s 75 avatar limit per sim and can be accessed via Facebook which means it can be accessed on mobile devices. Entropia Universe, physically headquartered in Sweden is also popular and has a vibrant economy but has mainly role-playing sims. “There” is a popular PG world. There are many worlds with adult participants but the most commercially successful to date are the teen and pre-teen worlds, Disney acquired Club Penguin, a pre-teen world, for $700 m in August 2007.
It is worth distinguishing between virtual worlds and MMORPGs, which are massively multi-player online role-playing games like World of Warcraft and Ultima Online. MMORPGs are seen as a subcategory of virtual worlds but the salient point about virtual worlds is that the users or residents generate all of the content and the activity is open-ended as in the physical world where as MMORPGs are gaming environments with beginnings and endings, focused pre-programmed goals and content created by the world owner.
Second Life, run by Linden Lab and based in San Francisco, has been around for about 5 years but it is only in the last year that account registrations grew from 1 m to 10 m. Based on the sale of a 10% stake in the privately-held firm for over $500m in early 2007, the firm is worth well over $5b. Despite the 10 m registrations, people may have more than one account and the majority of accounts may not be used or be used infrequently so better measures of vibrancy are concurrency, the 40,000 people that are simultaneously in-world at any given time, and active residents, the 450,000 that have been active in the last week.
The size of the world is currently 800 million square meters, roughly the size of Boston, and total in-world time has surged to 25 million hours per quarter from 5 million hours per quarter a year ago.
2 million assets or objects are created per day, occupying more than 35 TB of storage and 800,000 unique items are sold or traded per month. There are 500 events per day, 15 million scripts running concurrently and a peak bandwidth usage of 10 Gbps.
When entering a virtual world, there are generally a variety of choices for creating your avatar, a visual representation of your presence where there is far more room for creativity and choice than in the physical world.
Virtual world residents are diverse per their self-reported statistics, 43% of them are female, 60% are international, and the top 5 countries are in order, the US, Germany, Brazil, Japan and the UK. Second Life is not a young person phenomenon, the average resident is 33 but all ages groups are represented, 25% are in the 18-24 age group, 35% in the 25-34 age group, 20% in the 35-44 age group and 15% in the 45+ age group. The older people are, the more hours they spend in-world, 30 hours per month on average for the 18-24 age group and extending up to 64 hours per week for the 45+ age group.
In addition to individuals, there are many organizations in Second Life, in particular, the entertainment industry, companies, academia and government. The biggest area of activity is coming from entertainment with both traditional entertainment companies like HBO entering Second Life as well as new entertainment brands being created in-world such as the company Rezzable which has several successful interactive entertainment sims such as Greenies and the surfing-themed Black Swan.
Some, though surprisingly few, physical world celebrities like Scarlett Johansson have had avatorial versions of themselves created. The fall 2007 TV season has several prime time programs including virtual worlds, including the Office and Law and Order. CSI New York has taken a step further by having a cliff-hanger episode where the detective chases a character into Second Life. The audience is invited to go in-world to the CSI NY sim to search for and evaluate evidence and submit solutions in advance of the episode’s resolution scheduled for February 2008. Earlier virtual world success stories include MTV’s “Virtual Laguna Beach” and Showtime’s “The L Word.”
Another big organizational user of virtual worlds is business, again with a blend of physical world firms coming into virtual worlds and in-world businesses and brands being created. It is estimated that over 1000 firms are in-world, including IBM, Cisco, Intel, Sun, Dell, Renault, Toyota, Philips, Vodafone, Coke and Yankee Stadium to hold events, interact with customers, recruit, collaborate internally and announce products and services.
Image, branding and presence is tricky for firms as they often feel they need to have a virtual world presence but don’t want to miss the mark strategically as the press has criticized some companies with “empty sims.” The most successful firms provide appropriately adapted or new versions their products and services for use in-world such as the Telus virtual mobile phone with busy status indication and other services. The virtual world can also be used to enhance a company’s physical world offerings and shopping experience such the Circuit City living room where potential customers can try different flat panel wall screens in a simulated configuration of their own living room.
Before establishing a full presence, companies may test the waters in virtual worlds by using available facilities to host or simulcast a conference.
One of the most successful in-world retail brands is Amy Weber’s Preen, a clothing line. In virtual worlds, it sometimes seems that there is more pressure to look good since one has more influence over this virtually. Many residents are beautifully coutured and coiffed and there are several blogs tracking virtual fashion, for example SL Men, a Style Guide for Men in Second Life.
Avatars themselves also become brands, as Pontiac Motorati signed avatar caLLie cLine as their spokesAvatar. The avatar has now even been featured on fashion magazine Maxim’s list of beautiful women.
Academia is a substantial participant in Second Life, it is estimated that over 1000 colleges and universities have a presence. The Second Life Best Practices in Education Conference in May 2007 drew over 1,300 avatars to participate in the 24-hour worldwide conference where 30 academic papers were delivered.
There are many art galleries and museums including the International Spaceflight Museum, an international aeronautics collaboration, Science Friday where NPR simulcasts its popular radio show and the Computer History Museum.
Also mirroring the physical world, wealthy residents have donated space to the non-profit commons where 50 organizations have offices and another 30 are on a waiting list. The National Cancer Society held its third annual Relay for Life in-world walk in July 2007, raising a record Linden$ 118,000 (about US $437).
Physical world governments are also present in virtual worlds, here is the US Congress’ sim fully modeled after the real-life chambers and providing information about hot topic legislation such as stem cell research. There are sims of different European parliaments and political campaigners have come in-world, most of the 2008 US presidential candidates have sims just as they have YouTube content. Virtual worlds are also a place for collective action as demonstrations for Darfur and Burma have been held and a protest of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
People come to Second Life to do all the things they do in the physical world, to interact, enjoy, experience, relax, explore, entertain and earn. To collaborate, recruit and conduct business. To build, create, prototype, model, simulate and test. To learn, teach and demonstrate.
Some interesting examples of note include the University of Denver receiving a $250,000 grant to build a nuclear reactor in-world. The UK has launched a national healthcare initiative including an in-world component Second Health. The City of Arcadia CA has fully modeled their real-life waste water treatment plant. IBM is trying to lead in virtual worlds, declaring that the firm is spending $100m on virtual worlds and $10m in Second Life where they presently have 30 islands. There is a seven-page list of science-related places in Second Life.
Here are avatars interacting…
Here is a picture of how the object building interface works, you always start with a basic shape and modify it. A variety of sophisticated objects can be built from utilitarian to art. Here is an example of a real-life dream house and its analog constructed in Second Life.
Design occurs at the object and structure level and also at the neighborhood and sim level as people organize their sims for aerial and land-based navigation. Here is a map-level view of the 34-island SciLands complex, the center of science in Second Life which includes Nanotechnology Island, the Science School, the Spaceport Museums, an orientation area and other sims.
Various groups offer free classes continuously in Second Life for newbie orientation, object building, scripting, buying real estate and other Second Life-related subjects. Many other kinds of classes and discussions are also offered, particularly by physical world institutions, some of which, for example the Harvard Berkman Center for Law and Society, that can be attended without being an enrolled student.
There is recreation of all sorts going on in Second Life.
One can relax and explore many beautiful and interesting sims.
Burning Life is the virtual surrogate to the Burning Man festival and people use the virtual medium to otherwise imitate aspects of the physical world.
Increasingly, one may expect to find physical world places represented in Second Life, sometimes sponsored by real-life tourism organizations to build community and allow people to visit virtually. Some examples are Dublin, Morocco, San Diego, Paris, Rome, China and many other locations.
Linden Scripting Language is the programming language used to write in-world scripts, the syntax is similar to C. It is event-driven, not object-oriented. The underlying engine is the Havok 4 physics engine and these parameters are not adaptable in Second Life as they are in some other platforms. The 3D objects are called primitives or prims, and sim regions have a 12,000 prim limit so economy in building is important. Objects are referred to as assets.
The architecture is client server, with local client software loading world views on demand from web servers and asset databases. The client software requirements are fairly modest, although a local cache file for a seasoned user may be about half a gigabyte. A broadband Internet connection and a good graphics processor will enhance the user experience, triggering less lag as sims rez or resolve into the client viewer.
IBM and Linden Lab announced a marketing initiative in October 2007 to work on portable avatar identity, inventory and transactions across worlds and inter-platform stability, but it was largely regarded as a PR announcement and a multi-participant standards group with regular working meetings has not yet emerged.
Security continues to be an issue both in-world as griefer attacks with image bombs and other tactics remain difficult to prevent and as corporations and other entities try to conduct business securely in-world; there is no virtual world VPN yet.
Regarding legal issues, there are four rules guiding Second Life activity, the Linden Lab Terms of Service Agreement, Community Standards, Privacy Policy and the DMCA Policy. Resident-created content belongs to the resident that created it.
There are some current cases defining precedents for virtual world legal activity, first Eros, LLC vs. Doe. This is a straightforward copyright infringement case, the perpetrator caused sims to crash and unfairly took objects from the rollback copies launched by Linden Lab. In all, the perpetrator took and sold 50 copies of a popular item for US $45 a piece, a lot of money in virtual worlds, for a total of US $2,250. Attorneys subpoenaed PayPal, Linden Lab and local ISPs for the real-life identity of the avatar Volkov Catteneo and are now pursuing the next phase of the case with Robert Leatherwood, a 19 year old in Richland Hills TX identified in October 2007. The case has attracted substantial attention since the item illegally taken and sold was the SexGen bed with 150 sex animations used in adult sims, but fundamentally it is a standard copyright infringement case.
Another recent precedent-setting case is Marc Bragg vs. Linden Lab regarding Marc Bragg’s use of automated scripts called landbots to acquire real estate at below-market value. US $8,000 of value was allegedly obtained this way. A judge found Linden Lab’s Terms of Service Agreement to be unfair to users and the case settled in October 2007.
Although the dollar amounts in these cases are low, though high in the micro-economies of virtual worlds, the cases are important in setting precedents and exploring whether there are any salient legal differences in virtual worlds. So far, there doesn’t seem to be any difference.
In addition to the Linden Lab rules, residents can specify covenants for the land they own and some have gone farther in establishing self-governing sims. A mainly European group, the Confederation of Democratic Simulators, has taken this the farthest, hiring real-life attorneys to help prepare their constitution and judicial system. All proceedings are chronicled in detail publicly on the group’s blogs and forums. The group runs two sims in Second Life, Neufreistadt and Colonia Nova, and holds bi-annual parliamentary elections. It was established three years ago but seems to have slowed down in activity in the last year. Another plan for self-governance is being established now, the Metaverse Republic, which is also to have a tri-branch system with a judiciary, parliament and executive. The main impetus for forming the Metaverse Republic seems to be for dispute resolution with some sort of enforcement.
Second Life has a currency, the Linden dollar, which is convertible to the US$ at the rate of L$265-270 to one dollar. Linden Lab runs the LindeX exchange and earns commissions on exchange transactions. Not issuing debt, Linden Lab relies on monetary policy to manage the economy, manipulating currency exchange commissions, new land supply, land fees and resident stipends as necessary. Inflation, devaluation and shocks have not been experienced to date but this will presumably get trickier to manage as economics activity becomes more portable across worlds.
The size of the Second Life economy is over $1m USD per day, on the order of $500m per year and about $7m USD of currency is exchanged each month. At the Second Life Community Convention in Chicago in August 2007, Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale said that over 1,000 people are making more than US $1,000 per month in Second Life, so we start to see, similar to the eBay example, more people generating sustainable income in virtual worlds.
Other traditional financial entities are also in the economy, Reuters has an active Second Life business news service on the web, and reporters and a news bureau in-world. The firm produces high quality charts regarding the currency exchange rate and volume and overall economic activity.
Banks sprang up 2-3 years ago, lending money in-world to virtual real estate purchasers, however got caught up in the Second Life casino industry and mostly folded or reorganized when gambling was outlawed in July 2007. Since then, some of the banking groups have opened stock exchanges, usually losing no time in listing the exchange and their own businesses. Activity has been burgeoning, there are currently at least 4 stock exchanges, SL Capex physically based in Syracuse, NY with 20 listed firms, the World Stock Exchange based in Australia with 15 listings, the VSTEX based in Italy with 7 listings and the Anacapex based in New Hampshire with 3 listings.
Not only is it a conflict for the same party to own the bank, the stock exchange and firms listed on the exchange, but all of the banking and stock issuance activity has been without regard to existing physical world banking and securities laws and is technically illegal. It is unfortunate but not surprising that initial forays into banking and securities have been more for self-aggrandizement rather than with a serious eye to building stable long-term democratic systems in this new world, in the model of the self-governing sims for example.
Regarding inter-world financial exchange, the largest land developer in Second Life, Anshe Chung, who has been featured on the cover of Business Week magazine, has announced plans to open a financial exchange platform between the Second Life and Project Entropia worlds.
Tax and accounting are also part of the economy; Linden Lab began levying the VAT tax on residents physically residing in the EC in October 2007. US authorities have indicated a likeliness to stay mute on the issue at present.
Raw land can be purchased from Linden Lab in eBay style auctions. A $9.95 per month premium membership is required to bid and land costs range from US $13 for the initial purchase + a $5 per month maintenance fee which comes out to about $75 per year for the smallest 512 sq m plot of land, to at the high end, US $1,675 for the initial purchase plus $295 monthly for a total of $5,000 per year for a 65,536 square meter private island (about 16 acres).
Land can also be purchased or leased from in-world real estate developers. A small virtual home or office may cost about $15 per month to rent; it is similar in concept and cost to having a website.
The world has been growing substantially from 2003 to the present, from a small mainland to a large mainland with many island complexes.
Now discussing some of the advanced applications in Second Life, the first concept people are making use of is that of scale, building life size models to walk around inside for a better understanding. Dell has done this with their XPS server and several science exhibits have done the same, here a carbon nanotube and a genetic structure are pictured. This could be very useful for professional and amateur education, having life size models of many things, the heart or brain for example.
Another area of advanced use in Second Life is data applications. There are several tools in the form of HUDs, heads-up displays and scripted objects that are worn by the avatar to provide and collect location-based information as different parts of sims are visited. There is a BlogHUD allowing residents to blog text and photos out to the web directly from wherever they are in Second Life.
There is some degree of automated programming, as greeter bots welcome visitors to a sim and respond in simple ways, and also the landbot programs, previously mentioned, which search for and purchase below market value real estate.
It is easy to bring web data into Second Life with an http request, so there are several dynamic data displays in-world pulling any variety of information from the web.
Bringing maps and geodata from Google Earth, Nasa World Wind and Google Maps into Second Life is not uncommon, such as in this GeoGlobe and this mashup of Brooklyn used by the city’s urban planners.
Representing data on-demand in 3D is another application, here for example is NOAA’s real-time weather sim, showing current conditions across the US complete with rain and clouds. This example brings in real-time flight data from LAX, displaying the planes in 3D over a map of the LA basin. This molecular rezzer brings in requested molecules from a web database and displays them in 3D.
For international collaboration and communication, the free Babel Fish Translator tool is available; it passes the text chat in and out of Second Life to a language of the user’s choice in Google Translate.
Persistent virtual worlds are a tremendous potential test platform for artificial life and artificial intelligence applications. Here, the Svarga artificial life sim has a complete ecology running autonomously, the clouds, rain, trees, sun, bees, birds, etc. Novamente is working on teaching an artificial intelligence up through childhood levels by using intelligent pets, passing information about the environment and users in the area out to a prediction engine and delivering behavior commands back to the pet. David Orban, a researcher in Italy, has launched an early version of genetic algorithms in Second Life, distributing 100 different versions of an object to determine which are the best or most fit.
One of the most advanced business intelligence applications is that of Eolus, a Swiss construction firm who has integrated SAP with Second Life in the back-end to conduct the real-time monitoring of energy use and other factors across its construction projects.
Finally, there is an opportunity to represent other personal information visually in the avatar form, for example, signaling the user’s reputation, value system, or physical-world activities with a color overlay on the avatar or other mechanism.
So far, we have seen that what happens in virtual worlds like many technologies, Step One is the replicating of the familiar, the architecture, neighborhood design, avatars and activities in Second Life are mainly immediately identifiable as physical world facsimiles. Then in Step Two, the extent of the medium is more fully explored with more novel and creative uses, for example, having an office inside an aquarium. Initially there was more decrying of the presence of facsimile and lack of creativity in Second Life but the focus now seem to be on enticing more of the mainstream market into the worlds so the platforms can persist.
Identity is an important consideration in virtual worlds and a phenomenon missed by most traditional marketers is that people are more likely to think of their avatar as a separate person rather than purely as a self-extension. People may have multiple avatars in Second Life or across worlds and games which leads to a greater porosity and exploration of identity and possibly a loosening up of components of identity even in the physical world.
There is a lot of homogeneity in virtual worlds, in avatar appearance, objects and buildings, an interesting but unfortunate indication of the psychological strength of cultural ideals. While there are some interesting-looking avatars, especially shown in this presentation, 80% of avatars seem to be the youngest, tallest and most beautiful they can be. Homes look like cultural ideals of dream houses. This early example could be a harbinger for what will happen when we can modify more of our real-life physical characteristics, if human parameters such as height and hormone levels are distributed normally, when self-modified, they may all move to the middle for astonishingly low variability.
New forms of communication and collaboration are emerging in virtual worlds such as multi-channel communication, real-time multi-language international collaboration and asynchronous prototyping.
One strong mainstream social reaction has been that somehow virtual worlds are different and deeply offensive compared with other leisure activities, perhaps some sort of implicit personal rejection. There are different views about whether virtual worlds help save on travel expenses or should be pariahs for the electricity consumption of the servers.
The biggest thing that is next in virtual worlds is more activity. Everything is likely to grow, the number of worlds, the number of individuals and organizations participating, the hours per resident and the content being created, especially interactive entertainment. Just like everyone got a website in the 1990s, they are now thinking about getting a sim or virtual world presence. More and more complex 3D representation of data will probably be seen; virtual worlds will not replace traditional data visualization for robust uses but can provide a useful complement. More structure should be coming to virtual worlds both from open source initiatives, allowing avatar portability across worlds as well as from security, legal and economic initiatives.
More tools should be coming to virtual worlds, just like early web tools, search and directories are needed for virtual worlds, automatic unique identifiers for objects, automatically geo-tagged photos, mobile access to virtual worlds and virtual world archiving is also needed.
A summary of virtual worlds in four points is first that virtual worlds have become routine for a wide range of recreational and professional activities for both individuals and groups.
Second, like other newtech, YouTube has been a recent example; virtual worlds are complementary and category-defining, a new concept co-existing with other entertainment, prototyping and simulation technologies.
Third, virtual worlds exemplify the trend towards increased visual representation of data, interactivity and the blending of the physical and virtual.
Fourth that while virtual worlds are not new and are over-hyped at the moment, they are more likely to persist this time due to the large number of participants and wide breadth of activities, they are becoming more mainstream.
These slides are open source and available on the conference wiki and my website, melanieswan.com/presentations.html.
Here are some URLs for more information about getting started in Second Life, URL directories for companies, non-profits and international locations in Second Life, event listings, news and blogs, particularly coverage of the Nanotechnology Sim at nanoisland.wordpress.com and www.nanodave.com.
