Transumanar

Second Life e il Metaverso: novitá recenti

Scrivo questo per un’ amica che sta scrivendo un articolo su Second Life e il metaverso in generale. Che novitá recenti ci sono in SL?

La prima é che da due mesi si puó parlare (usando la voce) in Second Life. Questo é un salto di qualitá importantissimo perché permette di comunicare in modo molto piú rapido e naturale. La voce funziona meglio in riunioni fra poche persone e “strutturate” come corsi e riunioni di lavoro, peggio per riunioni fra molte persone e incontri casuali dove tutti parlano allo stesso tempo. Naturalmente sono ancora disponibili anche le tecniche precedenti alla disponibilitá della voce in SL (streaming video e audio dove una persona parla a un gruppo). Spesso la cosa migliore é usare una combinazione delle varie tecniche disponibili.

La seconda é che sono in via di sviluppo programmi ("clienti") di Second Life piú facili da usare. Uno dei primi, sviluppato da Electric Sheep Company, sará disponibile fra qualche giorno, e usato dai molti nuovi utenti attirati dalla serie televisiva CSI, che aprirá una versione parallela in SL. Questi programmi piú facili da usare permetterannoa molte piú persone di avvicinarsi a SL.

Fra poco SL non sará piú l’ unico mundo virtuale conosciuto dal grande pubblico. La settimana scorsa, alla conferenza Virtual Worlds, sono state annunciate molte nuove iniziative di sviluppo di mondi virtuali, anche da parte di giganti dell’ informatica come Microsoft, Cisco, Google e IBM. Quest’ ultima collaborerá con Second Life per l’ “interoperabilitá” tra mondi virtuali. Il Metaverse Roadmap, uno studio di recente pubblicazione sulle tendenze tecnologiche, economiche e imprenditoriali del Metaverso (l’ Internet 3D basata sulla realtá virtuale, di cul SL é il primo esempio operativo), prevede una prossima “esplosione” del Metaverso con un fortissimo impatto economico e sociale.

Second Life á da alcuni mesi in una fase di maturazione costante, con progetti di qualitá sempre crescente tra i quali é importante citare l’ apertura di Assisi in Second Life, probabilmente la ricostruzione architettonica di piú alta qualitá realizzata finora in SL. Nonostante un periodo si stampa negativa, sempre piú aziende di rilievo, universitá e centri di formazione culturale e professionale aprono le loro porte virtuali in SL. É importante ricordare che il Metaverso é un intorno molto piú interattivo dell’ Internet “convenzionale” che richiede tecniche di “marketing esperienziale” fortemente coinvolgenti e caratterizzate dalla continua ricerca di esperienze nuove e indimenticabili da offrire all’ utente. É anche importante ricordare che SL é un fenomeno tipicamente “Web 2.0”, dove gli utenti vogliono essere non solo “consumatori” ma anche “creatori”. Questo non é stato ancora compreso da tutti.

Second Life si sta rivelando un intorno ideale per l’ educazione e la formazione grazie alla forte interattivitá e alla disponibilitá della voce e di strumenti che permettono di imitare e migliorare le tecniche educative tradizionali. Un’ iniziativa interessante dedicata all’ insegnamento delle lingue in SL é descritta in questo comunicato stampa.

Posted by G.P. on 10/21 at 06:21 PM
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Saturday 20 - transhumanist meetings in Second Life

Very important day in the history of transhumanism in the Metaverse, with two interesting parallel meetings in Second Life.

On uvvy island there was a meeting to revive the WTA activities in Second Life: new focus on location and type of activities. About 20 people attended. Some new managers and “animators” have been recruited with the task of organizing frequent meetings, talks, seminars and social events. Note that this is not a closed club, anyone can join. Look for the “World Transhumanist Association” group in Second Life and join. The website of the WTA Chapter in Second Life will be updated with news and announcements of new events. We really miss Charles (OneUp) and Manoj, I hope they will be back.

In the image above, taken before the meeting, I am in the uvvy pub “Fish and Prims” with Transhumanist Queen Natasha, who has been introduced to the pleasures of voice chat in Second Life, and Khannea who will take an important role as manager and animator of transhumanist activities in Second Life. Natasha told me that MAX may consider joining SL! Max, I really look forward to seeing you in SL, and there will be plenty of volunteers to help you mastering the most arcane parts of the SL interface. I think Second Life is an ideal workspace for the global transhumanist community.

After the meeting on uvvy island everyone moved to the other meeting organized by Sophrosyne Stenvaag in the Diversionarium: Beyond Bionics: Transhumanism and Virtual Worlds - a *spirited* discussion of what’s next for humans and technology.

I had some arguments with Sophrosyne’s crowd in the past, mainly about “immersionism” vs. “augmentationism” and voice in SL, that for me is just another useful tool and for most of them is a unwelcome intrusion of RL in SL that destroys the dream of living in VR world as a Digital Person. As most reasonable persons do, we just agree to disagree on this point. I must say that besides arguments on specifics I am very sympathetic with the aspirations of Digital Persons. I think in 2007 Second Life is waaaaay to primitive to be taken seriously as a parallel reality, but technology, as it usually does, will improve fast. As soon as that happens people will upload parts of their personalities to VR worlds and live there as conscious Digital Persons, like transhumanist DP Extropia Dasilva (close to the center in the picture below).

Digital Persons, uploading and the nature of consciousness were among the many topics discussed. Very interesting, I look forward to attending other similar events. The discussion was based on text-chat - it is very difficult to use voice in a crowded SL environment where everyone talks at the same time (voice is perfect for small groups), and some DP prefer not using voice anyway. This kind of meeting is a vary fast brainstorming and one has to go back to the chat history to read things again. My network link crashed halfway, but see the extended text (More… below) for partial transcripts of both meetings.

More...

Posted by G.P. on 10/21 at 07:46 AM
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Two (!!!) transhumanist meetings tomorrow in Second Life

From the tt list: We’re trying to revive the WTA activities in Second Life. There will be a meeting on planned new focus on location and type of activities. It would be nice to see a few new avatars there. Location and time: WTA SL meeting on uvvy, (tomorrow) Saturday 20th October 1:00 PM PDT(to find it, do a search for uvvy, an teleport to uvvy island).

On the same day and hour, there is another interesting meeting organized by Sophrosyne Stenvaag: Beyond Bionics: Transhumanism and Virtual Worlds

Come join us for a *spirited* discussion of what’s next for humans and
technology! Don’t miss this one, people - it’s going to be *legendary*!

Saturday October 17, 1-3:30 SLT, The Diversionarium

Invited panelists include:

Giulio Perhaps: Giulio Prisco of the World Transhumanist Association
Extropia DaSilva: Transhumanist and essayist
dandellion Kimban: blogger and digital philosopher
Alexander Burgess: blogger and digital philosopher
Esteban Moody: blogger and digital philosopher
Argent Bury: blogger and digital philosopher

Perhaps we should merge the two meetings, what do you people think? Answer here, on the tt list or Sophrosyne Stenvaag’s blog.

Posted by G.P. on 10/19 at 03:28 PM
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Web 2.0, Work 2.0 and Life 2.0

I am writing this with Flock: it saves time. The Flock “social browser” launched version 1.0 (beta) today. It comes with built-in plugins for many Web 2.0 applications like Youtube, del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook. Web 2.0 is about “connecting persons” and “online participation”, but another important thing is that the technologies used by Web 2.0 applications (Ajax etc.) permit doing things faster. Sometimes the difference between being able to do something in one minute or five is the difference between doing it or not - there are always other pressing things to do.

I am on most professional social networks, for example Linkedin, Xing and Viadeo, but recently I am using Facebook also for professional contacts. Facebook is simply better as a software application and permits doing things faster. Now that Facebook is integrated in the browser I will be using it even more. Several other people I know who are mainly interested in social networks for their professional life are switching from professional networks to Facebook.

I have been thinking that an interesting side effect, at least for always-on people, will be blurring the line between personal and professional identities. Some business people will need time to get used to seeing a virtual teddy-bear, heart or birthday cake on the “professional” page of a business contact, but I find it refreshing (and a time saver). Once we used to carefully maintain different online identities and persona, but perhaps Web 2.0 means linking persons instead than partial personalities. A person is more complex than a family identity or a business identity, the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts, and who has the time to maintain different online personas anyway. Is this Work 2.0? And Life 2.0 may be forthcoming: a much more interesting life merged with virtual realities, with senses improved by augmented realities and, soon, the possibility to modify and enhance ourselves.

Another application that I am using more and more frequently is ma.gnolia - a next generation online bookmark manager. Simple, fast and integrated with the browser. It can also be integrated in Facebook (look for the ma.gnolia application) and external website. I have integrated my ma.gnolia bookmarks page in this blog.

Posted by G.P. on 10/19 at 02:41 PM
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Flock

I have started using Flock - a next generation browser coupled with social bookmarking sites, blogs, Facebook etc. The first release 1.0 will be out in a few weeks. This looks like a great time saver. This is the first blog post I write from Flock.

Posted by G.P. on 10/16 at 02:27 PM
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CINUM 2007 - Digital Civilizations

I am back from CINUM 2007 in Margaux, where 20 international experts (designers of the future) and 100 international decision-makers gathered and worked together based on 4 scenarios for the future of Digital Civilizations. Digital in a wide sense: we discussed several issues related to many emergent technologies and their current, possible and desirable impact on society. As last year, this was a very interesting, dense, challenging and fruitful workshop. This was the last year of the 3-years CINUM project - I look forward to seeing the final report and the plan for CINUM followup actions.

The 4 scenarios had been elaborated by the organizers before the workshop, based on current trends: the more and more pressing environmental problems, the perceived inability to cope with global issues, the acceleration of technology development, the many examples of spontaneous organization enabled by networks, the North-South divide, the (inevitable?) conflicts between management and freedom, the (inevitable?) conflicts between globalization and regionalization, etc.

I wish to thank the two main organizers Marcel Desvergne and Daniel Kaplan (in the picture above). I also wish to thank Hervé le Guyader, Jean-François Laplume and Thierry Ulmet, and apologize to Hervé and Thierry for often confusing their names.

Will we manage to find solutions before 2030? If no, we have 1 - Collapse: current trends continue and become worse. terrorism, economic crisis, environmental catastrophes, fragmentation of power, protectionism and restrictions on movement, emergence of local communities. If yes, we may have 2 - Imperialism: some nations (guess) manage to impose their views on others, and enforce a more sustainable development phase. This new phase of history might be characterized by rational decision making on a planetary scale, in which case we have a 3 - New enlightenment under a benevolent (?) strong governance. Alternatively, it might be shaped my market forces with 4 - 100,000 Flowers blooming in a less controlled way. The maturity of the scenario making work done by the organizers is shown by the fact that none of the scenarios is entirely “good” or “bad”. In fact, even the first scenario (Collapse) has some attractive features and some participants considered it as the least bad. My own list? I guess 4, 1, 3, 2.

Last year I gave a talk about transhumanism. This year, transhumanist excelsior Anders Sandberg gave a talk on human enhancement. Anders’ talk was relatively sober and “restrained” in the sense that he stopepd before covering the most “exotic” and potentially controversial ideas of transhumanists. Of course, the most radical ideas were there below the surface for those who wanted to discuss them.

On the basis of the 4 scenarios, the participants were divided in groups and explored the scenarios in more depth, with the objective of extracting relevant challenges and, after a vote, choosing 7 important challenges to be retained as the final output of CINUM. The challenge produced by the working group led by Hervé, in which Anders and I participated with many other persons each with a different philosophical position, was “Defining an ethics for human augmentation” (my suggestion to use the more frequently used “enhancement” in the English formulation was rejected because the group felt that “augmentation” is more clear). I was quite pleased to see that this challenge was the one most voted by the audience. This does not necessarily mean that most participants think that human augmentation is a good thing, and I am sure some of the participants who voted for this challenge think that human augmentation is a bad thing that should be prevented by an ethical framework. But it does mean that more and more people are persuaded that human augmentation, or enhancement, is one of the big issues of our time. The importance of the issue is expressed by Daniel in the videoclip below.

Click to play video

The other 6 challenges are focused on environmental issues (giving everyone the means to measure her or his environmental impact, developing a global “catastrophe plan"), improving the interaction between remote people by developing means to reperesent a wider range of sensorial inputs electronically, and “wikizing” education and politics (linking institutions and networks in a complex world, raising the global level of knowledge, giving space to dissent - I liked this one, especially in its first formulation as “encouraging disorder and messiness”, and voted for it).

Some points that I consider important: of course environmental issues played an important role in the discussion. These issues are terribly important and everyone should, in my opinion, do her or his best to understand, measure and minimize her or his environmental impact. At the same time, there are also other important issues. This is why I resist proposals to enforce “environmental correctness” by near-dictatorial means like it is sadly the case today for political correctness. I think low environmental impact is a very useful measure of how a person contributes to a better world, but it cannot and should not be the only measure. In other words, an ecologically correct serial killer may be ecologically correct, but is still a serial killer. In general, I do not like the forced separation between natural and artificial, often used in the sense that natural is good and artificial is bad. We are a part of nature as much as any endangered species and, unPC as it may be, we are _more_ important than other parts of nature. At least from our point of view, which is the only one that matters. On another issue, I was very pleased to see a certain dissatisfaction with the established concentration of power in the hands of old nation states, which are demonstrating their inability to deal with pressing problems on a global geopolitical scale, and a certain feeling that smaller communities based on territory (regions) or ideology (distributed communities) may be able to do better.

Posted by G.P. on 10/08 at 05:15 AM
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Google Earth and Second Life

There are again rumors on Google’s plans in the metaverse. According to the last rumors Google Earth might become a metaverse where users can fly and walk with their avatars and meet other people as if Google Earth were Second Life. This Google metaverse might be integrated with a social network, perhaps an evolution of Orkut with new components developed by the project Socialstream - a powerful aggregator of all information posted to Orkut, Facebook, Myspace etc. and “the mother of all social networking platforms”. Now this begins to look very interesting - the huge popularity and the wide range of practical applications of Google Earth may enable a new phase of fast growth of the metaverse industry.

Click to play video (blip.tv)

Taking advantage of the very accurate scale and proportions of Assisi in Second Life, I have made this video composition that simulates a user flying in Google Earth and entering the virtual Assisi in Second Life. This is, of course, a fake, but it suggests the idea that someday we may be able to seamlessly enter Second Life sims from Google Earth, in other words using SL as high level of detail of GE for selected locations. Of course, this does not make sense for Second Life sims that are not meant as reconstructions of real places. Google Earth is a mirror world instead of a fantasy world, and must remain true to the georeferenced reality of our planet. So, even if Google builds a massively multiuser virtual world on Google Earth, and even if it is technically much better than SL (with Google’s track record and resources this is certainly a possibility), there will still be a need for Second Life as a fantasy world, especially for those who prefer to keep their real and virtual identities separate.

But many users see the metaverse as a productivity and business tools, and some high quality reconstructions of real places exist in Second Life. Assisi, in the image above, is certainly one of them. We can imagine a Google Earth mashup with a quality-controlled directory of the best reconstructions of real places in Second Life. On a descriptive level it can be done with the existing tools that permit annotating Google Earth and Google Maps with pictures, text, twitters etc. Of course the really interesting thing would be actually entering a SL sim from GE. This can be done easily by launching Second Life from a SLURL embedded in a GE annotation - I think probably somebody is building a thematic directory of, for example, accurate reconstructions of historic or architectural landmarks in SL with pictures, text and links to SLURLs. Such thematic layers would permit SL users navigating Second Life with Google Earth or Google Maps. Of course the native SL map would still be used to navigate the fantasy part of SL.

It would be more convenient for users to enter in Second Life without having to launch a separate viewer. GE and SL are both CPU and graphics intensive applications and running both can be too much for older computers. Since the SL client’s source code is available, it would be feasible to integrate a “light Second Life client”, perhaps one with full navigation, chat and voice features but without inventory management and world editing features, in GE itself. There have been experiments on light SL clients that run in a browser, so why not in GE.

And of course there is the possibility that Google will develop a native metaverse within Google Earth. Sketchup users are already uploading 3D models of buildings to Google Earth - what is missing is a massively multiuser world of avatars. The image composition above shows my Second Life avatar flying over a virtual Madrid in Google Earth, with some of the characteristic landmarks of the city. The best publicly available description of the technical issues involved is How Google Earth [Really] Works by Avi Bar-Zeev. He is one of the founders of Keyhole, the company that launched the Keyhole viewer of high resolution satellite data, that became GE after Keyhole was bought by Google). He has also contributed to Second Life and other VR worlds, and his blog Reality Prime is one of the best references on GE, SL and online VR in general. See for example his The Word on Snow Crash and Google Earth.

There are already prototype systems where users, represented by avatars, can fly in Google Earth and meet each other. In the image above, two Unype users are meeting in a virtual Paris in Google Earth. The Unype applications permit Facebook users meeting each other in GE, and Skype users talking to each other in GE. The avatars in Unype are crude, like the 3D models curerntly available in GE, but this will change once 3D modelers and animation developers start working at them. So, Unype is a good preview of things to come. There are also multiuser videogames for the GE platform under development (see also the old website). In the meantime, I will go play with the Flight Simulator in Google Earth.

Posted by G.P. on 10/02 at 07:05 AM
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