Metaverse Technology

New Website!

2007-02-05T18:17:00.000-08:00

I am happy to announce that we have finished our new website and I am moving the blog. We have all kinds of information and resources at the new site: white papers, forums, knowledge base wiki, product info, recent news, and of course our blog. Please come join us as we continue to explore the imerging i3D.

WWW.METAVERSETECH.COM/wordpress/

The Truth of the Matter

2007-01-24T09:23:00.000-08:00

Today I found referenced on Slashdot an article in which the author compared Second Life to a Pyramid Scheme. At first I wanted to dismiss the premise outright. I mean, the cited source was Valleywag, which is slightly better then a supermarket tabloid, but the author promised ‘financial analysis’ of their conclusion. So I read on, and tracked the article back to the full version written by Randolph Harrison. Now I have never heard of Mr. Harrison before, but anyone who has a dual MBA from UC Berkley and Columbia in NYC deserves a careful review. Unfortunately, I have to say that I am disappointed with his characterization of Second Life. I did not find any of his criticisms untrue, but just surprising in the significance that he associated with them. So I have pulled a few of them out for our own review.

The first problem we encountered was one of counterparty risk. Yes, you are absolutely correct. Right now Second Life is the wild west of commerce. Just because you can reach it within minutes of logging into your computer does not make it any safer then the emerging markets of faraway places. I have heard of stories of manufacturing plant managers in China running one location for one employer, while they are redirecting shipments of materials down the street to the facility that they themselves have started up. Things are improving, just as they will in Second Life, but I hear CDs are still pretty cheap on the streets of Beijing. Volatile disruptive markets are messy, if they were already regulated to death there would be little potential for explosive growth. Especially exploring what Mr. Harrison calls “the appearance of a virtual ‘securities and exchange commission’, virtual banks, virtual currency exchanges, and even virtual venture capitalists and REITS.” He himself points out that these institutions are run by individuals and not Linden Labs. Not to be glib, but do you also buy stock from spam email links that litter you email?

Although he eventually concedes that despite this risk factor he was able to make a good return on his investment, he was unable to remove at one time significant amount of the capital gained.

Enter the second problem, the L$ exchange markets are effectively rigged. In a nutshell Mr. Harrison was put off by the fact that the exchange system effectively prevented him from removing more then a few thousand US dollars at a single clip. Thank goodness it does. This is an incredible new developing market, and requires significant influx of cash to fuel its rapid growth. Now I am for open markets, and the article points out that the exchange “is actually not a virtual currency exchange market so much as it is an open auction”, but his problems sound like a free market self regulating effect to me. The rate system prevents destabilizing and totally destructive transactions larger then the market can handle at this point.

I think that there is potential for all of Mr. Harrison’s criticisms to be resolved in the future, and Second Life has the capacity to grow to meet his expectations, but it is just beginning. If you look at the statistics provided by Linden Labs, there are less the a hundred individuals making more the $10,000 US a month. Now that number looks like it is doubling every month, but it is still relatively small. In the end, all we can do is wait and see. I, myself, am not waiting on the sidelines. You can find me and mine setting up shop in Big Mushamush region of tomorrows 3D Internet. See you all there, eventually. :-)

Ads in Second Life

2007-01-10T23:04:00.000-08:00

To many of the big companies entering into Second Life, their entire presence in the 3D world is a form of advertisement. I assume that was a common mindset when the Internet first came about a decade ago. Everyone could have a web page, and it was like a 24/7 virtual billboard. It took a few years for the web to develop into something more functional then information delivery only, and eventually the concept of advertisement as a viable revenue source developed. Don’t get me wrong, email ads and annoying banners have been a way of life for the 2D virtual world since almost the beginning, but as a source of revenue it took a little while. It wasn’t until targeted ads with the backbone of AdSense and AdWords, courtesy of the Google empire, that the Internet maximized the ad model.

Now consider Second Life again. We have the Linden run classified system, a primary method of finding anything in SL, and we have several developing ad models more directly present in-world. I have seen networked billboards that let anyone pay to display on the network, while the landlord realizes a piece of the revenue. I have seen ad space sharing, similar to the banner link trading of the 2D web, and the often seen standalone, occasionally hideous storefront sign. My question to you is: Are targeted ads with a AdSense/AdWords effectiveness possible in a 3D environment such as Second Life?

Well, my answer is maybe. From a technical perspective one of the first problems is the concept of targeted. It is much harder to garner useful information from the current 3D environment of SL then it is for Google to keyword search the webpage you are browsing. You could use the type of store or establishment that the avatar is in if someone would qualify that information for you in a meaningful way. You could query the description of items that the avatar is wearing or carrying, if only scripters and builders would bother to fill those in all the time.

I think that the person that comes up with the right solution might just build their own empire one day.

3D Internet

2007-01-09T18:58:00.000-08:00

Second Life is a 3D version of the Internet. At least that is how I have come to describe it to those who ask. You start saying things such as “it’s like an online game, but it is not a game” and you have resigned yourself to an hour of blank stares from reasonably intelligent people. So I tell them it is what the Internet is going to be. I hope that I am right about Second Life being it, but weather or not SL survives intact the tremendous growth spurt that is starting, they have forever changed what is possible. There is no going back!

The 3D virtual world is upon us, and we should embrace it or be pushed aside. Now to be clear, I am not saying that the 2D web is going anywhere. Radio did not die when TV arrived, it simple maximized upon things that it did best. And in the same fashion, text and images and video are vital forms of 2D communication that will only be enhanced by their new 3D home, while the 2D framework will still play to its best abilities.

You might ask how am I sure were all going 3D, or say that you don’t think that you will ever make the jump. And first I would say, that’s what my grandmother said about the Internet for the past decade. But this year she did all of her Christmas shopping on Amazon. Then I would tell you that I know it is coming for two reasons. 1) The technology is finally here. Bandwidth, graphics processing, general computing power, massive parallel network competency, it is all here like a perfect storm. 2) 3D tickles the human brain in ways that 2D never will. A recent study in SL showed that people controlled their avatars, in reference to things such as standing distances and other interpersonal communication measures, in a similar fashion to real life. They acted unconsciously in some ways as if their avatar was actually their real body. Think on that one for a minute.

Second Life goes Open Source

2007-01-08T20:44:00.000-08:00

Well the big news of the day is that Second Life open sourced its client side viewer under the GNU GPL standard. Complete with a snazzy developers wiki and a lot of audaciousness (their word, not mine), the Lindens have made a giant leap forward in guaranteeing the success of the 3D internet. They have talked about this path many times, claiming that it has been an integral part of their dream from the beginning, but I would have loved to be at the board meeting when Phillip Rosedale explained to his investors that he was actually serious about it! Just to see the look on their faces. Really, how many VC sign up to make history rather then money? I might be wrong, and there is a lot to be said about them to this point, but WOW.

I of course, like any application developer paying any attention, am fanatically happy about the situation! We have just been given the keys to the kingdom, and we are ready. I think the analogy the Lindens made to the open release of Mosaic, web browser whose open source release by Netscape pulsed throughout the net, is totally accurate. All of the interactive applications that we at Metaverse Technology have been developing, in spite of the total lack of client side access, have now just been set free. Imagine the web with just HTML, without Flash and QuickTime plug-in, without Java support, and now AJAX. That is the Second Life of yesterday, and as for tomorrow, you will never believe the possibilities!

Second Life Resources

2006-11-23T11:31:00.000-08:00

I was doing some research and I thought that it might be interesting to everyone. I am intentionally leaving out the real estate companies because they are outside the scope of my interest. Other then that, I think I have covered many of the major players. Please let me know if you think I have left anyone out.

The Electric Sheep Company

http://www.electricsheepcompany.com

The have about thirty employees and are most likely the biggest player in SL. They have handled many high profile projects. They run

http://www.slboutique.com/

one of the two main SL retail websites, they sponsor

http://www.3pointd.com/

, and are in good with the Lindens.

SLEXCHAGE

http://www.slexchange.com

They are the biggest SL retail website, and they handle currency exchange. These guys are the powerhouse of SL retail, and 90% of our current sales go through this site.

Infinite Vision Media

http://infinitevisionmedia.com

These guys are newer but the got the Space Flight Museum and now the Dell account, so they are coming up. They get good press and they have serious talent and experience in Drew Stein, one of the partners of the company.

Here is a great blogpost from them on marketing in SL.

http://infinitevisionmedia.blogspot.com/2006/06/avatar-based-marketing.html

Rivers Run Red

http://www.riversrunred.com/

London based, big money, existed before Second Life. I see these guys all over the place. The website is uber slick, and you should check out their full media kits and other materials. If I had big VC these are the guys I would hire.

Millions of Us

http://millionsofus.com

Need to learn more about this company, They have the most corporate deals with the biggest main stream companies, and they have been covered by the big news outlets more then anyone else.

Linden Lab

http://lindenlab.com/

It is always good to stay up on the founders, and this is different from

www.secondlife.com.

Check out the press release sections and the white papers they published when they first started.

Crayon

http://www.crayonville.com/

Not sure what I think about these people yet. They have money, but they botched there debut in SL by claiming they were the first company to launch in SL.

Here is a list of SL news sources.

http://secondlife.reuters.com/

http://www.secondlifeherald.com/

http://nwn.blogs.com/

http://www.slquery.com/

http://www.metaversemessenger.com/

http://www.thekonstrukt.com/

http://www.metaversesessions.com/ (podcast)

http://slbusinessmag.com/edition/ (The most professional by far. I would read all there back issues.)

http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/

http://blog.secondstyle.com/ (Lots of traffic, but not as relevant to us.)

http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/C90/

http://history.secondserver.net/index.php/Main_Page

http://secondlife.com/newsletter/2006_11/

I keep a running list of articles where SL made it into the mainstream.

http://www.metaversetech.com/postnuke/html/index.php?name=News&catid=1&topic=&allstories=1

Here is a list of Forums.

http://forums.secondlife.com/ (Main Linden Labs hosted)

http://www.sluniverse.com/forums/

http://sl-forums.com/

http://slhomepage.com/forums/index.php

http://secondresident.com/phpBB2/index.php

http://slprofiles.com/forum/default.asp

Metaverse, Not SL only.

http://adverlab.blogspot.com/

http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/

SL Grid Issues and the Future

2006-10-14T08:57:00.000-07:00

I woke up early this morning to begin working in Second Life, as I have done for about six months now since Metaverse Technology opened our headquarters there, to find that the grid is once again down. I spent about twenty minutes reading through then Linden blog, and the 323 comments that had been posted by the time I got to the end, and realized that this would be a good time to address all of these grid closures.

If you haven’t been following the story so far, let me catch you up. Second Life is a 3D virtual environment created and maintained by the residents, or at least that is the tag line. In many regards it is true. You can build 3D objects, from houses to cars to anything you can visualize, and endow these objects with functionality through a basic script programming language. One of the main draws of SL(Second Life) is that the virtual economy has a direct exchange rate to RL(Real Life) currency. Lindens to dollars, about 280 to 1 on today’s market exchange.

The Lindens, representatives from Linden Labs which is the parent company of Second Life, really try to let you do your own thing. That has been one of the problems this last month. With such a spirit of openness, including the recent removal of the credit card requirement for registration, the grid has been subject to recent attacks. Although that is not what is causing the grid closure today, and we’ll get to that in a moment, hackers have been responsible for at least three serious attacks this month, all causing grid closures. Basically they create some type of self replicating, self dispersing, grey goo in an attempt to overwhelm the servers. Either they are getting better at it, or the Lindens are slowing down, because the successful attacks are getting more frequent.

These aren’t the only problems that we are seeing on the grid. Spam attacks where objects repeatedly and continuously attempt to direct you to a website from with SL, Linden released patches that don’t operate as expected, and sporadic problems that can’t be associated with a single source. Today’s outage is due to a permission exploit, that could allow someone other then the owner to gain access to an object or a script. As a growing virtual economy, the permission system is the only intellectual property protection available, and therefore its integrity is crucial to SL success. It has been a rough month for all involved.

So what do most SL residence think about these issues? It really is difficult to say. As in any community the most vocal residents are often the most polarized. (I am generalizing as there are always exceptions and I am sure you are one of them.) The forums and blog comments are filled with the continuous flame wars on the nature of the Lindens, Saints vs. Demons. I’m not sure if any of that is helpful to the process, but it is good for communities to have outlets that are relatively benign. I’m sure the Lindens watch these outlets, but I certainly hope they don’t make business decisions because of them. The unfortunate problem is that it doesn’t matter what the current user base thinks of the problems. I know that sounds harsh, but listen to me for a minute.

For whatever reason, SL already has us hooked. We are the early adopters, and although many of us can’t count or stay in years yet, we do have an edge on the hundreds of million potential residents to come. If a brand new SL from another company came out tomorrow most of us wouldn’t change, but what we need to think about are the people that haven’t made the choice yet.

Second Life is at a crucial stage in its existence. RL media attention is getting fierce. I don’t think that we have gone a week without SL being in a major reputable RL publication or feed, and Wired has had an article every month for quite a while. Major corporations are beginning to take interest, and yes that comes with its own problems but usually means were going to have the luxury of arguing about it for a lot longer. My favorite barometric of SL spreading to the masses is how easy is it to explain SL to others. No it’s not just a game exactly, yes it is a MMORG sort of, lindens are a real currency, no it’s not ebay. The truth of the matter is that the next 12 months will very likely determine the long term success or failure of Second Life. It will either continue it’s existence as a quaint little virtual experience, whose numbers are kept small by these mitigating factors, or it will explode into millions and millions of residents with a virtual economy that will give federal governments around the world indigestion.

I don’t think you have to wonder which option I place my vote on, but the cold hard truth is that this is up to the Lindens. I’m not saying that they can just wake up one day and say, oh maybe we would like to succeed. Or that even if they do everything right, we are all going to make it to the promise land. What I am saying is that if they don’t do something more we are certainly not going to make it.

I think that the Lindens have done, and are doing an amazing job. The complexity and scaling of such an endeavor is unimaginable. The commitment to openness means that certain problems will always have to be dealt with, and they are pushing the limits is realms that haven’t been explored before. Without the Lindens we would be having this conversation. Having said that, they have to do more, and they have to do it soon.

There has to be a better way to repel malicious grid attacks. I don’t think going back to credit card registration is the solution, but perhaps some type of targeted response is necessary. I certainly don’t profess to have a understanding of the millions of lines of code, that I have never seen, required to run SL, but there has to be a tiered response capability. If the Lindens declare a grid attack, all non-verified users and their objects are shutdown immediately. The next step would be residents with less then six months are also locked down until the attack is over. There has to be something.

The issue that I think the Lindens have the most control over is the update process and the permission exploits. If you have too, slow down the update process. If it means that the grid is going to be off again on again for days after every update, the new features are not worth the hassle. Test longer. I don’t know what to say, there is a reason why IT people don’t like Microsoft.

In the end what are you going to do? Second Life is the closest thing to the Metaverse currently in existence, and we are terribly excited about the possibilities. We are here to stay, and will help in any way that we can.

AI in Second Life, Chabot Evolution

2006-10-06T18:40:00.000-07:00

If you though that George from Jabberwacky was cool, wait until you see the chatbots in Second Life. They display facial expressions and other forms of nonverbal communication, they can navigate and interact with their virtual environment through script and sensors, all while carrying on the same natural language conversation used by web based chatbots.

George that I mentioned earlier has gained recognition for winning the 2005 Loebner prize for being the most advanced artificial intelligence on the planet. The Loebner prize is based on the Turing Test, don’t worry we’ll get to that in a moment, and there seems to be a heated contest between Richard Wallace’s A.L.I.C.E. and Rollo Carpenter’s George for the title. Although Carpenter’s winning entry this year was named Joan. Still, these men have devoted amazing research and time into developing chatbots to compete in this test. What is interesting to me, and what I think these gentlemen have figured out, is that the Turing Test is not about producing human level intelligence. It is about fooling human level intelligence into not noticing that they are discoursing with a program that is not as smart as them.

What do I mean by that you might ask. Combing through AIML, Artificial Intelligence Markup Language which is an amazing program concept in and of itself, it becomes apparent that there are only so many decision trees that you can account for in a limited space. Even when, as discussed in the literature at the A.L.I.C.E. foundation’s website, many conversations lead to the same branches, it is the random quirkiness of human interaction that determine our ability to pass in what is primarily a highly evolved society of sensory apparatus. Much of our energy consumption is used to support that grey goop sitting on your neck, and much of that is devoted to silly things like communication, social interaction(yes it is social even if it is just online), and the root of all intelligence – abstraction. To get back to the point, the best chatbots use subtle types of distraction when the conversation goes beyond the boundaries of there main decision trees to direct things back to a manageable point. They throw off-hand comments, or ask seemingly random questions to pull you back into the illusion. It is a great tactic, because it is one that human’s employ frequently, and it can be mistaken for the quirkiness of intelligence. Also it is good for a few laughs, because let me tell you, those bots can kick out some zingers when your not expecting it. But what does this all mean for our search for intelligence. I’m not sure that is the point of the exercise.

Alan Turing set out very explicit terms in his 1950 paper "Computing machinery and intelligence" to find something that could imitate a humans conversation so well that you couldn’t tell the difference. Fake, deceive, pull one over. The test is to mislead a human judge into thinking the computer is the human in a three person conversation. At the time he suggested that a teletype be used to limit the test to linguistic capabilities, because the technology at the time was insufficient to bring other factors such as an audible voice into the equation.

So this brings us finally to the thing I really want to talk about, chatbots in Second Life. If you haven’t heard about Second Life, I’m sorry. Put the WOW down for a minute, check out what’s going on, because the potential with SL is the closest thing we have seen to the Metaverse, by a long shot. Second Life is a 3D world created and maintained by the residents. Stop the presses! The users, the masses, the inmates, are running the asylum. Objects are created, and I talking about amazing 3D renderings of whole worlds, and endowed with awesome functionality through a very straight foreword scripting language.

Chatbots, using the llHttpRequest function, are beginning to show up in Second Life. People are interested in them to add interaction to there casino or dance hall. Serve as salesbots in their stores, bartenders in there clubs, and educational institutes are looking towards them as information providers and basic instructors. What makes me intrigued is there ability to expand the concept of the Turning test. Turning chose to limit the concept at the time to text based communication, because it would be too hard otherwise. I see his point, but I think we are missing something. Yes, trying to mimic voice patterns that express emotion is incredibly hard. Adding body movement in a 3D environment just seems like making the test harder. But so much is added with the ability to include nonverbal communication. That subtle some what random shift of the human body with whom we are conversing reassures us is ways we don’t consciously recognize. Things like posture and other hints like facial expressions provide enrichment that is lacking in text limited conversations.

Not to mention that amazing potential of chatbots that can easily draw upon environmental information, as well as control that same environment as well. Using scripts the chatbots can access location and status of objects and avatars around them, and access any and all functions we can think to add. For example, I can conceive of bots that can control video feeds, manipulate object size, location, or function. Bounce unruly guests, and fetch needed tools.

The addition of sensory information, and environmental interaction, greatly enhance the capabilities of AI in ways that we hope to see with robotics here in our first life over the next few decades. It adds depth that web based chatbots will never accomplish. It could go a long way in fooling you into thinking it might be controlled by human level intelligence, and isn’t that what we all are trying to do. Okay, maybe not the human part, but certainly the intelligence.

Kitt Replica that actually Talks!

2006-09-22T19:50:00.000-07:00

It looks like Kitt, it talks like Kitt, it even answers to the name Kitt! But I'm sure for reasons of an undue legal nature, it is not Kitt. What it is though is a Second Life incarnation of the most famous talking car in history. Seriously, name another talking car. A famous one. "Welcome to On Star, how may I help you ..." does NOT count.
Featuring an AIML based chatbot script, it has been trained to respond with an amazing array of specially tailored answers to fit it's persona.
Check out MetaverseTech.com for a video of it in action. Or size it up at SL Botique

Better yet, if you have a Second Life account, goto Metaverse Technology's virtual Headquarters.

SL Botique

2006-09-10T11:11:00.000-07:00

Metaverse Technology offers its first products on SL Boutique!

Check out the Chatbot and Greeter One offering.

Second Life you have to See

2006-09-06T19:39:00.000-07:00

If you can find the time,

SL Stock exchange, weak now but has potential.

METAVERSE STOCK EXCHANGE

http://www.slsolutions.org/markets.php?id=1

SL messaging to your phone

http://www.slwho.com/

SL database interface and hosting

http://www.sldatabase.com/

The Power of Second Life

2006-09-06T19:13:00.000-07:00

As broadband access and greater computing power continues to become more common place, it is easy to predict that the Internet will continue its trend towards richer media content. In the spirit of Web 2.0 we could also say that much of this content will be user created. Taking into account these facts, it is not unreasonable to think that constructs such as Second Life, defined by its Linden Lab creators as a “3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents”, are the first taste of a more immersive web. Second Life itself has many of the key elements in place for this transition to take place; straightforward commerce system (you could even solve the larger micro-payment problem with Linden Dollars), relatively easy to use GUI for 3-D object creation, and an evolving scripting language.

The key element that has been missing is the seamless interaction with the existing 2-D architecture of the World Wide Web. The Lindens themselves are aware of this problem, and making great strides to overcome this obstacle. Their implementation of the Http Request function in their scripting language significantly increase the power of greater web interaction, and the current development of HTML on a primitive (it is what they call basic objects) will smooth out the process. Once the functionality and power of this greater access is realized, once you can shop as easily in Second Life for products that you might browse on Amazon or EBay, the real difference in potential can be appreciated. Items for sale, especially those with interesting dimensions or functionality, can be more completely modeled in a 3-D environment. The interaction and ‘feel’ of the merchandise can hashed out in ways that even streaming video can not accomplish. Of course, nothing is going to replace the human perception experienced when actually test driving a new car or the smell of the flowers you might be ordering, but the sensory experience can be enhanced beyond its current status. And if the overhead to learning this new environment is low, and you can still do everything that you did before, the change over cost to the general consumer is insignificant compared to the improved results.

The increased linkage with the existing architecture will also allow access to the distributed functionality currently available. Contact with external databases and web script processing improve the applications within Second Life without overstraining the in-world grid. The power of the Metaverse will be realized.

Metaverse Tech Launches Second Life Headquarters

2006-09-06T18:50:00.000-07:00

It might not look like much now, but they are on there way. Metaverse Technology recently unveiled the Beta version of their Second Life chatbot, an AIML implementation within the 3D environment. It will be a great platform for the study of artificial intelligence and a useful tool for commerce.

Isn't he cool? You should see him in action!