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.