Really

I went to visit the Collaborative Environments group at Sun Labs in Burlington to learn more about the MPK20 project. Nicole Yankelovich and her team gave us a nice demo and told us about their motivations and future plans. If I heard correctly, more than 50% of SUN’s workforce is ‘remote’, and one of the major complaints is the quality of remote collaboration tools.

MPK20 is an attempt to improve remote interactions, both to improve efficiency, but also to bring back some of the social aspects of working in the same location that remote workers currently miss. Built-in from the start is voice support and application sharing, and though the project is still at an early stage, the development team thinks they are very close to being able to use it in day-to-day meetings.

I tried downloading and running MPK20, which was remarkably easy – as long as you have ant and a recent jdk, you can check out the source yourself, build and run the system in 2 steps. The system downloads the environment from Sun’s servers, which didn’t work through our firewall, but on my home machine everything came up smoothly.

The virtual world you get by default is limited to one building (MPK20 refers to building 20 at the Sun’s Menlo Park campus. There are 19 physical buildings, and building 20 is the virtual one). When you enter the environment, you’re in the big hall shown above. There are a number of “non-player characters” standing around having conversations or doing demos. Unfortunately, the voice-bridge is not yet available for download, but what happens is that as you move closer to different groups of people, you start hearing their conversations (similar to Second Life’s voice support).

There is currently nothing indicating who is speaking, and though the NPCs in the environment are gesturing, there does not seem to be any way to animate your own avatar. The avatars themselves (and the whole building) are rather primitive looking, though I’m pretty sure that it’s because the development team is focusing on features rather than graphics (since everything is built on Java3D, better graphics should be possible).

This image shows my avatar (live avatars are labeled with their names, NPCs are not), in the “team room”. This area has information all along the walls, and the intent is to have automatic updates of various artifacts, and perhaps even have whiteboards that can be updated in both the real and the virtual world. All around the team area are smaller rooms, that could be specific to individuals, for example. As in a physical office, a closed or open door can be used to indicate whether it’s ok to disturb the occupant.

There certainly is a lot of demand for a business oriented virtual world platform. Second Life and other available platforms have many problems, either in terms of security or in cost of content creation. MPk20 is open source (the voice bridge will be released soon) , Java based, includes application sharing and claims to be scalable because of the underlying Project Darkstar architecture. It will be interesting to see the future development of this project, especially if an open-source development community forms around it. So, if you’re a Java hacker looking for something to do, helping out the MPK20 team could be an option. If you want to make me happy, start working on some of the below:

• Easy content creation. Right now you have to use Blender or something similar to create 3D objects. The ability to import from Sketchup is supposedly being developed, and in-world building tools are also being considered.
• Better avatars. Better looking, more customizable, and more controllable avatars are needed before it becomes possible to feel comfortable with interacting with others using this environment.
• Better camera controls. There are currently only a few camera angles possible. If I’m looking at an application window in-world, I’m going to need better ability to zoom-in and to quickly look at other information being displayed around the room.
• Windows Application sharing. Currently being able to display and interact with desktop apps in the environment is only possible if the applications are X11 based.

Perhaps we should start a list of the minimal feature-set needed for virtual worlds?

One of the wonders of Second Life is the new variety of ways businesses and individuals can spam you. Apart from posting billboards all over the mainland, spammers can offer you objects,notecards, and textures, as well as send you IMs and group invitations. The latest releases of the SL client have included some features to try and limit “object-spam”: muting an individual or an object lets you ignore any offers of items, not just chats and IMs. Spamming also seems to be against the Terms of Service, though in an article in the official Linden news letter Torley Linden implies that it is only repetitive spam that is a virtual world faux-pas.

In any case, abuse-reporting and muting spammers doesn’t prevent the spam from reaching you in the first place. I’m starting to get a fair amount of group invitations and IMs from people asking me to try their latest products, which is doubly annoying, since these messages get forwarded to my email. The only option available at this point is to turn off email forwarding, which is too blunt of an approach. Some more fine-grained tools would be helpful. For example,

• Only forward IMs from people on my “friends” list
• Allow IM forwarding on an individual basis
• Automatically reject group offers

Anybody have other ideas? I looked in the Second Life Issue Tracker, and could not find any request related to IM spam, so maybe there’s a possibility to fill the gap and influence the development.

The real problem is that Linden Lab has created a communication mechanism without considering the spam issue at all. Given the history of USENET, email, wiki vandalism, blog comment spam, as well as other examples (I’m even getting spam on Twitter), it seems that building in a filtering mechanism from the start of any new communication medium is an essential feature.

I finally re-read Neal Stephenson’s book The Diamond Age, something I’d been meaning to do since the Spring Virtual Worlds 07 conference. At the “Virtual Worlds Roadmap – Where is it all going” panel an audience member asked the panelists to expound on the future of the Metaverse, taking it beyond the vision laid out by Stephenson in Snow Crash, towards the world depicted in Diamond Age. Unfortunately, I don’t think the panel had read the book, so the answers tended be along the lines of “more virtual worlds blended with augmented reality” (as I recall).

Diamond Age is a lot less focused on virtual worlds than Snow Crash was, however. The book describes a future where nano-tech has been completely mastered, enabling the cheap and quick (or slow, if the story demands it…) manufacturing of goods, food, and new materials. Information is distributed via “smart paper”, which is interactive, connected, and embedded with sufficient compute power to allow for at least a limited form of AI. Those of us interested in the future of documents can definitely take some inspiration from descriptions of smart-paper workflows like:

“Cover sheet,” Hackworth said to the piece of paper, and then it had pictures and writing on it, and the pictures moved–a schematic of a machine-phase system cycling.

[...]

“Letter fold,” he said to the piece of paper, and it creased itself neatly into thirds.

Virtual worlds do appear in the form of “ractives”; interactive movies which seem to be the main form of entertainment, but are not used to socialize or do business. Ractives are one aspect of what to me is the major technological theme of the book (apart from the nano-tech): using humans as compute engines. Humans are used either for creating believable interactions, not achievable by AI, or as compute-engines linked together into a massively parallel supercomputer (Stephenson seems to believe that the human brain is not a Turing machine).

Using humans as compute engines is pretty standard today (see Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, or projects like Galaxy Zoo) , and in Second Life avatars are (mostly) backed by a human brain. Interestingly, there’s been a large number of employment services that have moved into SL recently: KellyServices, Manpower Inc. , Semper International, and Randstad (all claiming to be “first”). Will we see a future where “actors” will take on different roles depending on what currently is in demand (furry male bartender at night, female ninja for a machinima shoot during the day)?

On the nano-tech side of things, we’re seemingly much further away from a reality where we can construct products, buildings, and tools effortlessly (just a small matter of programming). Of course, in the virtual world we have that ability, so now is the time to experiment with and invent the new tools and devices that we want to be able to create as soon as the technology in the physical world catches up.

Tateru Nino has written an article on why virtual worlds are not the future on the web (and summarized it quite concisely on twitter). Tateru argues that the web and virtual environments have different purposes, and may continue to evolve together, perhaps enhancing each other, but still remaining largely separate. The web is for efficiently finding and understanding connected sets of information, whereas virtual environments like Second Life are best used for visualizations and immersing yourself in an environment to experience data: “A virtual environment is a representation of data through digital synesthesia into forms the user will find meaningful or familiar.”

If I understand the argument correctly, it comes down to the notion that some tasks are simply more effectively done in a 2D environment like a web browser; search results, or amazon product listings are best viewed in a list on your web browser, where you can quickly click on them to achieve what you want to do. So, in the future, we’ll still have our web browsers for getting information, and we’ll pop into the virtual world when we want an experience, or want to hang out with other people.

My issue with this argument (and apologies to Tateru if I mis-stated it) is that I’m not sure that the 2D desktop is the best way to interact with and create data. I think this is the problem (I mean, the opportunity – since this is a corporate blog…) that we’re only starting to address. We are so used to dealing with lists and windows and linear pieces of text that it is easy to believe that these are the best ways of doing things on computers. But there is nothing particularly natural about those techniques, and often they seem to be results of physical constraints of our devices. The interface for browsing your files on today’s computers is not significantly different from using the DIR command in MS-DOS. Apple’s use of Cover Flow to browse files in the upcoming Leopard release, is still essentially a one dimensional list, but (as I may have mentioned before) perhaps an initial step on exploring how a 3D space can be used. Other examples are The Ivory Tower of Primitives and the Particle Laboratory in Second Life, showing how a 3D environment can be a more effective mechanism to convey a tutorial than a document or a wiki. As experimenting with 3D virtual environments becomes easier, and the results of those experiments can be used on affordable consumer hardware, people will discover new interface techniques that will displace the standard browser and desktop metaphors.

Email was said to be the original “killer-app” of the Internet, and while email client apps are probably not going away any time soon, web-based email continues to grow. I don’t think it is unreasonable to believe that in the same way that people figured out how to use the new affordances of the web to enhance email, we will start to discover how virtual worlds will make our current web-browsing tasks more effective (though 3D Mailbox’s tool representing your emails as people at a virtual pool party may not be the best approach, there is something to be said for feeding spam to the sharks in the pool….)

It’s been a while since I posted anything — partially because I just spent some time in Montana with no access to the Internet. However, since I was surrounded by gorgeous landscapes, Casinos everywhere, and furry animals popping up when least expected, it was similar enough to Second Life to lessen any withdrawal symptoms.

One piece of news that came out while I was away was Linden Lab’s announcement of the impending arrival of the “Hetereogeneous Grid”. Apparently, the latest upgrades have set up the underlying architecture of Second Life to allow different versions of the server software to be running on the grid simultaneously. This will allow the Lindens to run Beta versions of the server on the main grid, or gradually roll out the latest version of the server to a small set of regions, only affecting those residents who chose to visit them. Viewer upgrades are also optional, so users can run older versions of the client without crashing or being forced to upgrade.

Enabling the heterogeneous grid will hopefully lead to a more stable Second Life, where new features can be tested more thoroughly and shutting down the entire world on “upgrade-Wednesday ” is no longer necessary.

What else is possible? Linden Lab could offer different versions of the server software to sim owners, perhaps a “premium server” with additional features (for a moderate fee, of course). If they were in a more benign mood, they could allow users to develop and run their own versions of the server (once the server code is open sourced). Land-owners could then try to lure residents and businesses by offering more features than the competition. One could even try to lock-in residents by providing features that also require a custom version of the client. The result will be a truly heterogeneous grid, with different clients and servers, only unified by a common protocol, similar to the World Wide Web.