Learned in Early Collaborative World

In 2001 I worked with a small group designing a collaborative virtual world call "iLands". The project was to map web sites into buildings sharing virtual iLands with other, similar web sites. The thesis was that people's natural ability to navigate physical space would assist in locating and using web informational resources. Each building would have collaborative, networking and social spaces like lobbies and hallways, libraries, meeting rooms, and auditoriums. The technology choice was based on a light-weight client--user interface in Flash which, at the time, limited the dimensionality to "2.5D"--motion and depth along diagonals. The perspective was a "god view".

Profiles: As we explored the implications of this scenario, we soon realized that people need a reason to interact and we added profiles. The profile envisioned was a combination of anything the user wanted to share with others (perhaps their city and country, or some of their interests) and things the user did in public (their history--time spent on iLands, in buildings or in presentations; their questions or publications) tracked automatically by the enviroment. We made parts of the profile accessible by a simple user action and other parts automatically matched with others in the same room or building so common interests or history could be pointed out to the user. And if two profiles correlated highly they could also be used to provide "collaborative filtering" suggestions of other things to do, buildings to visit, presentations at attend.

Public Spaces: We added public spaces (settings where avatars could move around and cluster seemed to be important) for people to interact and multiple conversations could occur simultaneously. With the technology available, we used text "talking" and show talk in cartoon-like balloons near the speaker. They would blossom forth when text was received and slowly fade. We had contemplated fading dependent upon avatar's distance from the conversation but technological limitation limited us to the god view.


Meetings: Meetings were another challenge. Multiple avatars could be talking and all could take part. We decided to have a scrollable record of the conversation--assuming there was only one conversation for the meeting. There was also a white board for sharing materials in a mutually viewable space. Files and other materials for the meeting could be stored until needed in local file cabinets.

Presentations: A large auditorium for presentations was another opportunity to tune the interface for the intended interactions. The main dialog was one to many but questions from the audience were also permitted. Power point presentations appeared on a screen in the front of the hall. We contemplated that additional people may want to view the presentation after it was made. So presentations were recorded. Part of the interest in attending a presentation is interacting with other attending, so we permitted profiles to be queried and matched. Now if the presentation was attended after the fact, via the recording, the same functionality could be provided...making a "living" presentation. Of course, dialog with past attendees or with the presenter may not continue synchronously but we're all used to asynchronous communication via email, delayed instant messaging and phone messages.

Advancing the Software Applications "Stack"

In the beginning there was computer hardware and applications software had to call the hardware directly to perform every operation required. There was no hierarchical stack of software to leverage. Soon thereafter two levels of the applications stack evolved basic input/output system (BIOS) that connected software commands to the hardware for reading and writing bites, and the operating system (OS) to provide basic software services as reusable code that could be needed by many applications and wouldn't have to be written for each. These basic services are standardized (separately for each operating systems) so applications can count on them being available. And operating systems have grown from small layer on top of BIOS to massive code libraries.

Now we had a couple of decades of experience in widespread computer use. A few "basic" applications are almost ubiquitous: word processor, spreadsheet, presentation graphics, email, browser, calendar, designer/layout and filing/database. And many other applications use these basic applications as building blocks. What if we were to standardized these software adding to the applications stack? Then computers would be purchased with those basic application built-in and new application could be made much smaller counting on those being available. The operating system would no longer matter, only this new basic applications layer would become important to the user.

Why Virtual Worlds Are Important

Yesterday I had to justify my interest in virtual worlds such as ICE6d. I explained that it started with my belief in the coming technological singularity--that accelerating technological advances foretell of human intelligence augmentation that will rapidly progress from doubling to exponential increases and of strong artificial intelligence becoming probable based on increasing computing hardware and software and on ever finer exploration of our brains.

We already use some primitive examples of augmentation as cell phones, googling and GPS navigation. But a major barrier has been the user interface. We've stayed facing the real world where the interface isn't well integrated.

An alternative? Face into the virtual world where informational access is built into the environment. All the separate interfaces to multiple augmentation devices and services can then merge into one.

My justification is helping to move humanity forward, to be ready to use accelerating technologies; to use augmentations; to merge with strong artificial intelligences as they arise. And along the way to collaborate better with each other as we share out one home world.

Integrative, Collaborative Environment in Six Dimensions I

The "Integrative, Collaborative Environment in Six Dimensions", ICE6d, is being developed as a business training and operations platform. First, to explain the terminology:

• ICE6d--simple acronym but real world ice has only been identified in 14 forms 3/06 (Physics)
  
• Integrative--ICE6d should be able to represent, manipulate and extract information from legacy "silo" software applications
• Collaborative--ICE6d's main function is to permit many people to use it to facilitate their interaction with each other and with their productivity tools
  
• Environment--ICE6d is a virtual world where people, software and real world objects can be represented, manipulated and interact

ICE6d's six dimensions are:

• Spatial (3)--the normal x,y,z position and alpha, beta, delta orientation with respect to the x,y,z axises
• Temporal--to the real world constant rate forward, ICE6d adds reverse, variable rate, recording, playback and revision (versioning interventions)
• Informational--a dimension or layer for almost infinite information that can be represented, typically objects with at least position and description, first order breakdown:
  
• Substructure--objects like terrain, weather, lakes and others attributes of the natural real world
  
• Infrastructure--objects like pipes, buildings and others mostly with fixed position and man-made
  
• Resources--objects that can be used to perform a function like trucks, radios and others mostly that are movable
  
• People--object representations (avatars) of the users and others that are computer automated
  
• Social--a dimension or services for communications among avatars (via text, audio, image and/or video) and for interaction with resource objects

ICE6d can be thought of as a viewer of information along these six dimensions (like an advanced browser); or as a communications media (like an advanced video phone with shared white board); or as a social networking tool (like Second Life)...it's all these and more by their synergism.

Since ICE6d is a new environment for almost all of the intended users it needs to have minimal barriers to testing, a short learning curve to first benefits, and some delight and fun in it's use. To get started you need:

1. Enrollment to establish the user's representation (as an avatar) in the environment can be reduced to a simple (fun) process entering (iteratively):
   
1. web cam or other facial picture (a la Digimask )
   
2. body specs (height, weight, age, sex)
3. clothing preferences (business dress, business causal, sporting)
4. fidelity or how closely you want the avatar to look like you (from caricature to realistic within the resolution).
   

1. Commands can start off as hierarchical menu items with shortcuts presented after use becomes familiar or the user may designate their own macros (even gestures) for such actions as:
1. Moving--forward (walk, run, stop), turn, fly (up, down, forward), sit/stand, raise/lower (hand/arm), clap hands, wave
2. Viewing--perspective ("guardian angel", first-person, close-up, god), magnification)
   
3. Actions upon other objects--select/touch, pick up/drop, open/close, push/pull, put-on/take-off, cut/break/shatter, eat, drink
   
2. Communications in most virtual worlds are text-based but typing can be a barrier in itself and it limits expressiveness.
   Voice-based systems using VOIP are now on the verge of roll out. Part of real world communications is carried by expressions and gestures. These could be picked up by web cam and encoded as automatic avatar commands.

( To be continued.)

"Encyclopedia of Earth" Published Online

"Encyclopedia of Earth" is a comprehensive encyclopedia being collaboratively written by the world's leading experts that addresses all aspects of the Earth's natural systems and their interactions with society. It's sponsored by National Council for Science and the Environment and the Environmental Information Coalition. It's home page has featured articles and authors and provides search and browsing capabilities.

Now, the public site for the "Encyclopedia of Earth" is now up at http://www.eoearth.org/ . About 200 articles have been reviewed, approved and published and another ~1,000 await review. They have ~200 authors and ~80 editors approved and most of them are still working on it. This week, they will be stepping up the recruitment of new authors and editors and the production on articles. A major 'public' launch of the Encyclopedia of Earth with a few thousand articles is probably 1-2 months away. If you have the expertise, you can sign up on site.
This is both a major new environment resource and proof-of-concept for a new system for authoring and vetting scientific information. The authoring-vetting system uses a private wiki open only to approved authors with review and approval by domain-expert stewards.

Global Warming

Yesterday I finished reading "The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth" by Tim Flannery and attended a Book Club meeting of the National Capital Region Chapter of the World Future Society where it was discussed. The book was very readable but not in the same league as "Inconvenient Truth" by Al Gore. It did point out many more facts in much greater depth. Two were of special interest to me. That the oceans were once about 300 feet higher; so I quickly Googled my home's elevation, 345', and now can plan to sell future "beach front" property. And that during the 1970s global warming was masked by aerosols. But we were actively cutting back on aerosol emissions subsequently making global warming more pronounced. Now some mitigation proposals include purposefully adding aerosols to reflect away sunlight.

From an article in today’s Washington Post: “Reuel Shinnar and Francesco Citro, two chemical engineers at the Clean Fuels Institute at the City College of New York, published a paper in the current issue of the journal Science…” They estimated for a cost of $200 billion a year the US could reduce the use of fossil fuels by 70% within the next 30 years. The problem is getting the government to start paying for it.

With the will, there is a way. What about using an escalating “neutral” tax to jump start the commitment? If there were political will, we could establish a schedule of increasing carbon taxes that businesses could plan on and the marketplace optimize for. And the revenues collected could be redistributed on a per-capita basis to strongly offset their impacts on the lower economic rungs.

Photo Album Update

In the first post I mentioned my work developing a photo album but didn't show the current implementation nor mention that albums were available. So here is the update. The albums are provided by Cyber Services which developed the database backend and host the service. The service uploads your original and provides multiple sizes for optimizing display speed. The newest implementation was designed to be non-intrusive and subtile. A large photo is shown centrally while thumbnails are available by mouse on the right. The thumbnail photos scroll quadratically with mouse position from the center and the photo number is displayed. Selection of the thumbnail brings up the full image. Along the bottom there are buttons for a slide show and the photo caption with pop up comments. Multiple categories are supported with loading in the background. Various tools are provided for email notification when pictures are added, for uploading or emailing photos, for adding comments, and for administrating the album. Finally, a search box permits finding pictures or special slide shows by key words. Go take a look for yourself and try your own album.

Economics, Environment and Displays

After yesterday's introductory post about me, I thought a few "insights" were in order. The word “insight” is used as in “concept”, “perception”, “notion”, “conjecture” …you get the idea, anything but well supported theses or facts. So on to the economics, environment and displays.

Insight: While discussing terrorism and immigration, it occurred to me that economics may be the basic cause...not, I'm sure, a very original thought. A quick Google search found Gross World Product, 1950-2004 where the doubling time for the GWP was seen to be 15 years after 1950, 18 years after 1965, and 20+ years after 1983...not a very healthy trend! Of course the per capita GWP was substantially worse, doubling in 40+ years. So, on the average, people could look forward to a life time before their wealth doubled.

Think what the world may be like if the doubling time were 10 years, or the 1-2 year doubling time of technology? If rising tides were shared, would we all not have too much to lose for terrorism or emigration to be so central to our lives? How could we bootstrap a dramatically shorter DWP doubling time? The rising educated and middle class in China and India certainly will double world production, probably even within this ten year period. But how can this new wealth penetrate to where the problems are? What if we were to try a system of transfer payments? Let's put money into the dens of terrorists and spawning ground for emigrants; let’s pay them so they can buy goods and services. So they too can become invested in the system and have too much to lose.

Is such an insight beyond belief or simple economics? Economics is devoted to optimum allocation of scarce resources. But what if resources were not scarce? Accelerating technology (a common theme we’ll come back to time and time again) leads to such a short doubling time and to many of the goods and services we will associate with wealth. Digital "products" can be infinitely copied so there can only be artificially created scarcities. So, if much of our wealth were based on technology and digital goods, we all can be wealthy! We'll return to this theme.

Insight: While we’re on the subject of digital products, let’s jump all the way--into digital worlds and the environment. Many of our environmental concerns have their roots in our living in the “real world “. We move around massive amounts of atoms to do even the simplest things and this costs in energy and physical resources and produces pollution (entropy). Many people are exploring a better way--moving many facets of their lives into digital or virtual worlds. Most of these worlds are themed online games where players found other players and much of their play became centered on living-type activities. A few worlds were open to modification and evolution by “players” and become rich places to live and work. One such world is Second Life (mentioned previously) where life goes on day by day for hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and for hundreds of thousands of US dollars worth of transactions. This will be a main and continuing theme.

Insight: Many smaller, cheaper displays may make a great inexpensive display wall or surround.

Display walls have multiple LCD panels closely abbuting to form multiple images on any subset of panels or one large display, as shown from Septre . Multiple displays are also used to construct surrounds like shown by DigitalTigers or 9XMedia .

Now if these were built from standard LCDs such as an "Acer AL1906AB / 19" / 8ms / 500:1 / SXGA 1280 x 1024 / Black / LCD Monitor ... incorporating the latest LCD technology...$159.99" they would cost under $1000 instead of over two to three times as much. The specific Acer LCD seems to have ½“ bezel so if the bezel can be removed the inter-LCD gap could be about ¼”. If 17” 1280x1024 LCDs were used, the resolution would be about 100ppi at a cost that should be about $100 per panel. Windows XP Professonal already supports up to 10 display controllers and many display controllers can handle four displays. So it would seem possible to construct a wall 40 displays for about $4,000 and control it with 10 controller boards at perhaps $3-500 each. On a smaller scale, a 6 display surround could be under $2,000.

Introduction

To start out I thought it would be best to have a little introduction about me and my background. As I've noted in my profile, I consider myself a technologist. And I have the credentials, a PhD in Physics and 40 years working in varied computer applications. Some of my more interesting projects have been in the fields of environment, future forecasting, education, space industrialization, computer-human interface, and emergency response.


A few of my more recent projects are:

Global Environmental Network
C oncept: Solutions to global environmental problems will require the public and decision-makers to understand relevant science. GEN pulls together environmental research, and translates and disseminates it online.
Pe rsonal contribution: Design and programming of demonstration global environmental displays. Developed Flash 3D tiled rotating globe with zoom, pan and multiple levels for data. Integrated data from NOAA global weather simulations, NASA satellites and worldwide disaster reporting into easy-to-explore interface with popup briefs and multi-level windowed links. Worked with academic researchers, government agencies and NGOs to plan project and lead in authoring diverse team proposals.


EzOn Online Photo Album

C onc ept: A Web service for uploading and displaying photos had potential but poor esthetic experience. Flash Actionscript was evolving into a browser-based programming language for a far superior user interface.
Pe rsonal contribution: Mastered successive generations of Actionscript as it went from simple animation tool to full object-oriented language with rich event handling, dynamic messaging and client-server support. Designed, coded and tested multiple generations of interface prototypes and two commercial releases.

iLands
C oncept: Navigation on the Web is artificial; there are no “places” on the Web. Web sites could be mapped to buildings and similar sites clustered in themed “islands”. The revenue model would be based on real estate.
Personal contribution: Participated in startup and contributed to concept and design, business plan and presentations. Specifically, developed benefits of the virtual environment in terms of social interaction, archiving activities, identity development and inquiry, and mixing synchronous and asynchronous communications.

Most recently my interests have focused on the "Singularity" where accelerating technology becomes our dominant forcing function and virtual (reality) environments such as Second Life, Multiverse and Croquet. The later is a potential response to environmental, resource and economic limits to growth.

Where this blog will go shall unfold day by day. Some of the things I hope to have time for include insights, mine and others, in many of the above fields, such as virtual environments for business in general and emergency response in specific, an inexpensive immersive display system concept, and a possible economic solution for terrorism and emigration.