Rapture

Recently I went on a long and strange adventure in my other, dirtier, more scandalous life. I dragged my avatar "Murders Nitely" adorned in a Robosapien value-offer from Freebie Beach over to chill with my good friend and the well renowned Legendary Camel (he's a legend after all) in the equivalent of Sony Ericsson's Second Life, the company's own island designed to promote their products. More on that later though- I'd rather talk about visiting Dell's island. Click the link to be magically shunted straight there (provided you've got Second Life installed.) Dell's island is actually one of the best looking locations I've seen so far, that is to say it beats out the Freebie Island, Freebie Planet, Freebie World, and Free Freebies that I've visited. Although ISTania helped direct me to this wonderful place, Dell also held a Second-Life (Second Life?) version of a press release, supporting its "metaverse" endeavor in RL as well.
Speaking of Neal Stephenson, the man who fleshed out the idea of a virtual environment, I'd suggest the readers out there check out The Diamond Age, which I've recently finished up and highly recommend. Wikipedia says it's being made into a miniseries on the SciFi channel, so I'd read it before SciFi's nonexistent budget ruins it irreversibly.
ANYWAY. DELL. Dell developed for Second Life apparently to keep up with its policy of innovation and direct customer interaction. I believe their foray into the metaverse, as they refer to it, may live up to this ideal during their information sessions and SL events, but I did not witness much direct customer interaction while visiting the island. While I found an avatar representing some member of Dell's team, he would not respond (frankly I hope he was doing something else at 9 on a Friday night.) However, there is no doubting the effort put into creating the entire island. Several auditorium-like spaces exist, extravagant and modern by SL standards (not saying much :c ) the purpose of which, I assume, is to facilitate the larger events Dell holds. These places are well designed, having plenty of stadium seating and "gorgeous," huge screens. Dell has a couple of cafes and "souvenir shops" (I grabbed a sweet backpack from one) as well as a Dell Museum, showcasing their history. Dell makes navigation simpler on their island by placing easy-to-find teleports and maps around the place, including a sweet 3D miniature replica. Also constructed are extremely strange monorail-esque transparent "pods" which require the users to curl up into the fetal position. Having changed into my fashionable business costume by now, I felt slightly degraded using these ridiculously out of place machines.
Dell Island's more practical features include a factory, lovingly built, where you can construct and even buy Dell PCs. There is also a complete walkthrough of an enormous XPS machine. However, Dell could afford to put more information in this tour, as impressive as it was, didn't inform me why the XPS would make a good machine. If anything it exaggerated its bulkiness in my mind.
If I had to point out any frustrating things besides the SL engine, I'd just say the lack of people with which to interact, actually not a fault of Dell at all on a Friday night. I'd like to attend a Dell event to fully judge Dell's island.
Looking back at Sony Ericsson, it's easy to see which company spent more effort. Dell's island is not only richer in primitives, but also more themed towards its product. Sony Ericsson does a good job of presenting its cell phones in grainy 3D and including some fun music-related scripting events, but the rest of its island is mostly show. However, me and Legendary Camel did enjoy some fun time together on the beach, cuddling on a beach chair. I took a screenshot but can't find it :c.I did find the inclusion of a beach chair with positions denoted to be for a male and a female to be offensive, since the male was assumed to be lying down with the female on top. Evidently I was the female. I think this sort of thing is unprofessional and does not convey any cell-phone related message. In fact the whole pretty beach area seems more like a tech demo for the company's SL architect, with unfinished touches such as a singular clownfish sprite hanging out in the 12 foot tall surf. Sony Ericsson needs to refocus its island to be more like Dell's well-thought out and thoroughly Dell island.

Anyway, all of you go buy or borrow from me The Diamond Age. I'll be blogging about it soon I think. Now back to RL, and thank god because the texture resolution there is awesome.

So, The Diamond Age. Lots of cool nano/information technology hypotheses. At one point a character Hackworth becomes part of a "computer" himself by way of nanotechnology. I'll let Wikipedia summarize:

Upon his arrival in North America, he had been led to an underwater system of tunnels, the abode of the "Drummers," a society whose life consists of drugged trances accompanied by drumbeats. The nano-particles that induce the ecstatic trances actually carry bits of information among the individual Drummer's brains to form an immense network of human thinking capacity that—-if used to such purpose—-would exceed the capabilities of any existing computer system.

Basically these people have nanites attached to their brains that transmit information to local Drummers and influence the person's actions. In this way the people form a network. Inside their veins run other nanites that themselves perform computer-like calculations via rod logic, each one technically a supercomputer. These allow the human network to run computations alongside their brain's own uniquely organic ones. The result is one huge computer not only with immense computational power but also the approach of a nonsynthetic organism. In the story, the "social network" is used to find the enormous prime numbers used as the keys in decryption. Take that, SRA.

Anyway, relevance. Web 2.0, among many things, touts its ability to place the work behind a web site upon the shoulders of its users. The way I see it, there are two basic types of web sites: those with static and those with dynamic content (duh.) The general trend has been away from companies producing the dynamic content, the reason for people to come back to a site again, and towards making those very same users do the work. Tagging, in example. Now of course we do not have the technology to combine human minds as we do in networked computing, nanites and nanites that can interface with our brains being years ahead. I'm not even sure if people would volunteer for that sort of thing. Tagging resembles more the processes of archiving and upkeep that plague corporations so.

Now relevance for realz. Second Life is enormous, being over 80 square miles in size as of late 2006. No corporation could set out to manufacture such an environment. No sane corporation I guess I want to say. It's Second Life's reliance upon its citizens that makes it a viable metaverse. Annnnd that's where I'll leave off, because the next post is going to be just as big. Hopefully I'll wrap my thoughts up.

Continued from previous article

Anyways, there is apparently a group called the Metaverse Roadmap Project that holds summits a couple times a year towards the realization of Stephenson's own metaverse (think I've already linked to it on wikipedia.) If you could, go check out their site. They have a lengthy 50 page document entailing the process needed to produce a viable metaverse. Studied areas include social, technological and economic trends that might produce an environment in which a metaverse could thrive to an enormous extent. There are ways the public (i.e. us) can contribute to the effort, among other things. Most informative, I found, was the overview.

The key here are the four different levels on which a metaverse could be implemented: Virtual Reality, Mirror Worlds, Augmented Reality, and Lifelogging. Augmented Reality is the one I'm interested in, the one that ties into last week's post, but I'll review them all for your sake.

Virtual Reality: A completely digital world, in which all action is governed either by programming or user input. This reality is separate and unique to RL. Best used to convey information not grounded in reality. The metaverse is most akin to this level, although the metaverse took into account in some fashion the next example by throwing users into the simulation based upon their access location. Examples: Second Life, There, Metaverse.

Mirror Worlds: RL digitized. Items in RL represented in code, compiled into a likeness of our own environment scaled locally or even globally. Serves as a way to explore RL without moving, or to gather information before travel. Examples: Google Earth, Google Maps. Certain islands in Second Life.

Augmented Reality: Layering onto RL features of VR. I'll go in depth in a second. Examples: Some prototype projects, a few military concepts, HUDs in video games. Rudimentally, GPS systems.

Lifelogging: Transferring RL features into a digital realm. Hard to explain, read the link for lengthier discussion. Examples: Podcasting, Flickr. Rudimentally, blogging.

Why focus on augmented reality? It has the greatest potential user base. It's not the average person that wants to submerge themselves within VR, and it's not convenient to do so either. Mirror worlds see enough use but are limited in contextual inference (they don't adapt to aid you in utilizing their services.) Lifelogging seems more for the obsessive and/or egotistical.

Let me sort of paint a picture of what the ideal implementation of AR, to me, would be. I know the article goes over a lot of this, but I sort of thought this up before reading the Roadmap's suggested implementation, so I wasn't aware what they had/hadn't thought of.
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So, a user has to go shopping for the day. They dress and as per routine throw their Cellphone/PDA into their pocket, slip on their AR Oakleys and hop in the car. Before they exit their driveway, they synch up the AROs with the CPDA (acronymz plz,) scroll quickly through their favorite addresses as in any GPS system and queue up the mall's location. Laid atop their vision rests an unobtrusive yet plainly visible path to follow. They turn their head to start the engine and the path rotates out of view. The AROs contain several key parts: A GPS system, probably more accurate/faster in the future, a 3D gyroscopic compass, relaying their head's angular coordinates to the CPDA, an accurate laser, invisible to the naked eye, bouncing itself off the nearest object in line of sight to determine its distance, and a projector beaming the image of the path onto the AROs' lenses. This should be fairly easy to follow- it's simple sci-fi stuff so far.

So the user follows the GPS-esque path to the mall, turning off distracting location tags (probably called loctags or something cool) while driving. Once parked, however, the user turns them back on, locks the car, and glances at the pop-up hovering over it, an icon resembling a vehicle with an arrow pointing down. The car, containing a GPS itself, has marked itself down on the user's CPDA for future reference. Crossing the parking lot, the user notes a loctag denoting a restaurant they haven't heard of. However, it's marked with a star; this indicates that those who reviewed restaurants similarly to the user reviewed this one highly. The user glances at it and punches a button on their CPDA. The laser, GPS and gyroscopes work together to loctag this as a landmark. The user, if they had more time, could delineate it a future destination, describe the location and upload it to the mirror world database(MWD), or block it from appearing in the AROs again.

Inside the mall a sleazy loctag ad, slipped through the MWD's security, beckons. The user takes a moment to block it and report the abuse. An Info icon beckons, the familiar encircled i resting above a large touchscreen display. The user approaches and waits the second for the Info kiosk to recognize their CPDA. A directory materializes on the screen and the user presses against the stores they wish to visit. In the bottom right of the AROs the store names flash quickly and fade, while directional arrows appear, colorcoded, indicating their locations. The user changes the display mode to Possible Interest only, and the myriad of loctags cluttering the screen fade, leaving only those starred.

During the walk, the user encounters a few other gargoyles, easily recognizable, their real names, or in most cases their metanames, hovering above their heads with a Gargoyle icon. The other shopgoers, for the most part, bear no indicators, but those carrying CPDAs without AROs, though technically not gargoyles. occasionally allow an identifier to hover above themselves. The user stops to correct a loctag; these work as flexibly as a wiki, although many loctags in corporate locations are sponsored and read-only. Simple information, like inbox checkups, weather, and schedule, are flipped through on the AROs as the user progresses. The electronics store he first enters is one of a few to adopt the new Quick Response codes (read the article, Japan uses these guys on public posters, which are read instantaneously by the right type of camera as data.) Of course these aren't the old 2D type; the store is broadcasting the locations of items in three dimensions to the user's CPDA. Law-abiding broadcasts can be set to have automatic access to a CPDA; security works like any other firewall. After shopping, the user queues up their car's location, marks down the restaurant as the next waypoint, and is on their way.
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Long-winded, I know, and full of acronyms. FoA. I hope I got across some of the ideas I can see happening with a proper augmented reality implementation. My interest in seeing these come to fruition stems thusly:
1. Technology is ripe; although a bit bulky, every aspect of this scenario could be realized with current technology. That means that, provided with the right resources, this could be a product to come out of the IST program at PSU.
2. The economic situation wants for it; the iPhone's success as a life tool shows how eager the middle class populace could adopt a more useful reality.
3. The sociological condition could permit it; the connectivity of the web proves it. Several proven social technologies that foreshadow the AR's implementation:
a. Tagging. Flickr, blogs, everywhere you see tagging, you see a social computer digesting large amounts of information and reducing it to user--that is, human--relative terms. What greater piece of information could there be to digest than the entire expanse of the earth itself?
b. Google Earth. Landmark maps, Google has shown, may be compiled simply through user input. With a world map that isn't constant, though, the users must create the map as well. A corporation cannot do the job itself.
c. Wikipedia. The obvious one, the ultimate proof that human collaboration can categorize with great efficiency given a convenient way to do so.

I know, lists, right? Sorry, but they help get things across. I find it curious that the reasons I see AR happening coincide with the trends that Metaverse Roadmap has been studying.

Social Computing. Augmented Reality. Social Networking. It's not the internet, it's not a virtual world, it may not even constitute the real world anymore. But I'd love to see them all coincide, to live with the efficiency my imaginary user does. Man, I'm going to feel dumb if someone's talked about this somewhere else. In all probability, they have. Fortunately that just makes it more likely that eventually we'll see something like this happen.

I'd love to be one of those who help it along.

Head on over here. TED's actually a pretty cool conference, so if you browse around you might find more than just this one demo that interests you. Anyway, watch the video, the Seadragon stuff is cool but not the big picture. Photosynth stands to make Minority Report-esque fiction become reality.

Basically, it uses the entire Flickr photo database as reference sheets to "draw" a 3D object. The more photographs tagged toward the specified object, the more accurately Photosynth performs.

I bring this up for two reasons. One, this program presents an example of a mirror world; the 3D models created retain the loctags users had placed specifically on their photos. Photosynth users can then find out details about real-life objects using these tags. Secondly, it represents a perfect combination of social computing and computer processing. Humans accomplish the task of capturing and identifying images, something no computer could do without prior knowledge of the photos' subjects. The computer easily handles the monumental--at least it would be for a human--process of combining all the pictures returned. Each part does something the other can't--working just how I'd like AR to work.

Want to try Photosynth for yourself? Right after the link.

Portal, best game ever, everyone knows it. Mentioning it because of an interview I came across awhile back. If you're like me at all you'll find it pretty interesting to read; it discusses the tribulations of an often overlooked component of the video game creation process- the writer. Video games are often defined by their evocative plots and it falls on these characters to play with the users' emotions properly. Takes more than a great writer; it takes a video game player himself. Bioware launched an ad awhile back for a job position they're trying to fill. Take a look at some of the requirements- it's hard to remember that one person wrote all of the dialogue for a game as expansive as KotOR or Mass Effect (Highly recommend this BTW.)

Anyway, for anyone interested in the gaming industry and writing as well, check this stuff out.