I stopped by NYU’s Tisch School of Arts, tonight to check out the ITP Spring Show 2008. I enjoyed myself and recommend you check it out tomorrow night (the last night) if you are in the neighborhood. I left the venue thinking highly of TischITP and its students. It was a mix of interactive projects including hardware projects, software projects and the combination of the two. There was an impressive number of projects on display and it looked like DIY heaven, with prototypes sporting wires and exposed circuit board all over. It was great. Creativity was bursting all over the place.

Alternate hardware interfaces for games were popular. There was a stick figure flash fighting game that used stick figure dolls as the interface. There was also an ankle bracelet and a shoe insert that could be used to detect motion, giving way to dancing games. There were all kinds other input devices that used cameras, musical instruments, or low cost sensors. Plenty of those interfaces were used to create music too!

Perhaps the project that wins the “Most Relevant to Readers of this Blog” award was GoQuest. GoQuest provides children with watches that detect their heart rate. “When a child performs a set amount of daily physical activity, an energy meter on their wristband begins to fill and their wristband begins to light up. The state of the child’s virtual character or avatar on their wristband changes in response to their physical activity. When a child fills up their avatars energy meter they can then wireless send this information to the online game environment.” I love the idea of rewarding kids in virtual worlds for physical activity in the real world.

I also enjoyed Hana-Hana, which is a toy flower connected to your pc that responds when your friends water it online or thru txt messaging. “The Physical HanaHana toys show you how your friends care about you in the most direct and playful way. The HanaHana toy flower change their movement and color depend on what kind of animation that your friends sent to you. The flower will gradually dim out and droop if no one take care of it. However, you can take care your own flower by touch it genteelly, and it will revive and glowing again!”

Here’s the official ITP Spring Show info:

ITP Spring Show 2008
Monday, May 12 and Tuesday, May 13
from 5 to 9pm at ITP

A two-day festival of interactive sight, sound and technology from the student artists and innovators at ITP.

An oversized Greenwich Village loft houses the computer labs, rotating exhibitions, and production workshops that are ITP — the Interactive Telecommunications Program. Founded in 1979 as the first graduate education program in alternative media, ITP has grown into a living community of technologists, theorists, engineers, designers, and artists uniquely dedicated to pushing the boundaries of interactivity in the real and digital worlds. A hands-on approach to experimentation, production and risk-taking make this hi-tech fun house a creative home not only to its 230 students, but also to an extended network of the technology industry’s most daring and prolific practitioners.

Interactive Telecommunications Program
Kanbar Institute of Film and Television
Tisch School of the Arts
New York University
721 Broadway, 4th Floor, South Elevators
New York NY 10003

This week, Intel opened up an exciting new campaign in Second Life: their virtual Sunflower field. Second Life residents are invited to plant a sunflower on Intel island. The sunflower displays the avatars name and grows over time. For each sunflower planted Intel will donate $1 USD to the Conservation International Foundation (up to $10,000 USD).

The first week has been great. A large number of residents have already stopped by to plant their sunflowers and some have taken it upon themselves to spread the message throughout the grid. You may be thinking… why a sunflower? From Intel’s site:

“The sunflower is nature’s own metaphor for resource stewardship and environmental renewal. As it reaches toward the sun, each blossom draws lead and other metals from the surrounding earth, leaving the soil healthier and more fertile for future growth.

At Intel, we’ve followed the sunflower’s example with ground-breaking 45 nanometer Hafnium-based High-k metal gate transistor technology that eliminates lead from the semiconductor manufacturing process, and will soon remove halogen as well. To celebrate, we’ve been spreading sunflowers throughout the real world. Now we’re taking our green thumbs—and hopefully yours—to the Second Life world.”

Join those of us, voting with our attention on Intel’s island. If the cause is not enough, every sunflower you plant, enters you into a Sweepstakes to win a new Gateway laptop. You can find out more at Counting Sheep.

Also check out Nexeus Fatale’s take on the promotion.

Just as I am packing up my place in Brooklyn for a big move out west (to Manhattan), Brooklyn Is Watching has popped onto my radar. Brooklyn Is Watching is a cross-reality art exhibit being shown at Jack The Pelican in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I have not had a chance to see it in person at Jack The Pelican but it appears to be very similar to the Destroy Television art show at the Lit Lounge last year. I’m a big fan of crossing, unifying and smashing the realities around us. Check out the Brooklyn is Watching site for more.

GayWired.Com writes about The L Word in Second Life for their first installment of Lesbian Gaming. I don’t usually reblog articles about Electric Sheep projects but this article captures the core of what we were trying to do when we designed the project. Second Life’s biggest strength is in communities. When Showtime asked for our opinions about which show they should do a Second Life project around I answered with one question…. “What show has the strongest Internet community?” Dunbar’s number shows that strong communities are small (150 people). When they begin to grow bigger than 150, they often splinter into a number of sub-communities, often with the same core values and interest. In this case… The L Word and a lifestyle choice. From the article:

So far The L Word in Second Life experiment seems to be working. What was at first just a pretty, but empty corner of the game is now populated by a growing crowd of virtual visitors. Events at the L Word dance club and ampitheater are increasingly packed—and during a live concert or a celebrity visit, the island is now so overloaded that sometimes you can spend half an hour just trying to get in. Players that only weeks ago trotted around in horrid spiky newbie hair and flat, oddly colored skins are now evolving slowly into sexy, L-Word-esque butch and femme divas. Strangers who shyly shouted “Hi” as they crash-landed into the island are now laughing over virtual coffee with new friends, creating and hosting their own events, and exploring the realms of virtual love.

One of the most delightful aspects of The L Word in Second Life is the sheer diversity of avatar looks among the ladies who attend events. Unlike many locations in SL, The L Word island plays host to female avatars of all shapes, sizes and styles—instead of being dominated purely by Barbie-doll types with cleavage ready to explode out onto the floor at any moment. Though, of course, most of The L Word girls aren’t going to object to a bit of curvaceous booty swaying over the dance floor in a tight-cut gown or two (we love you femmes!).

For those looking for fun gals to hang out with in game, groups like The Lesbian Mafia (several members are featured in the images in this article) have sprung up for players interested in socializing with like minded folks. Mafia members (women only) gather to play Russian roulette, mud wrestle, go bowling, play virtual poker, dance—and whatever else the girls happen to feel like doing. The Mafia has even built its own headquarters for events and hanging out. The Mafia has hundreds of members and continues to grow rapidly—and it is only one of several groups to spin up out of The L Word in Second Life phenom.

I recently read Cory Ondrejka’s paper titled Collapsing Geography Second Life, Innovation, and the Future of National Power from the Summer 2007 issue of MIT’s Innovations journal. I read it twice and think it is thought provoking and brilliant. I put this paper on my list of must-read papers for anyone interested in the Metaverse. Second Life still has a long way to go before it becomes a true open global Metaverse technology, but corporations and residents are prototyping the Metaverse’s applications within Second Life.

The paper has a heavy focus on innovation, real-time collaboration and the implications of shattering the constraints of geography. It strikes a good balance between current practices and big vision. It is also full of great citations useful to anyone working in this space. For example:

“The pseudonymity of virtual worlds makes it even easier to ask questions. This was demonstrated at Harvard’s “CyberOne” law class, where students were given the choice of attending class in the real or virtual world.[101] When students began preferentially attending the virtual classroom, the professors surveyed them. They discovered even incredibly gifted students preferred asking questions in a virtual environment. [102]”

Another favorite passages of mine, full of useful citations:

“People are more likely to trust interactions with avatars [82] than less embodied forms.[83] This is an important idea, for it means that systems emerging within virtual worlds can generate more influence between members than similar systems created on the web.[84] An outcome of this trust advantage can be seen in early research around changing opinions through virtual collaboration.[85 ] In particular, evidence suggests that opinion change between collaborating avatars mimics opinion change seen in real-world exchange programs.[86] ”

Utility aside, I found the sections on innovation and how virtual worlds can help the process of innovation to be thought-provoking. While Cory used examples from the Second Life resident population, I immediately started thinking of ways for large organizations to take advantage of virtual worlds for innovation. I hope to blog more about that in the coming weeks. I’ll leave you with a short peak at what is inside and encourage you to give the paper a read for yourself.

“FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION… IT IS A REQUIREMENT

Entrepreneurs fail early and fail often. Any study of successful inventions or businesses describes the missteps along the way to success.[70] Whether a creator is able to recover and learn from these mistakes is the critical question. There are costs related to risk and failure, but virtual worlds provide several methods of reducing them.

Two have already been discussed: pseudonymity and the need for vastly less investment capital than in the real world. For both of these, less activation energy is required to cross the chasm from idea to execution. When inspiration strikes within a virtual world, all the necessary tools are available for immediate exploration. No factories need be built, no inventory chain created. Instead, ideas are able to flow directly into practice.

Of course, many of those ideas will not succeed. That is OK! Attempts at innovation will be full of dead ends, missteps, and bad ideas. Unfortunately, innovation is generally not spoken about as a random walk. Instead,focus shifts to innovation being tied to people,spending money,or some shortage of ideas.[71]”

Citations mentioned above:

The first version of the OnRez Viewer, which was released around the CSI:NY Virtual Experience, was purposely CSI:NY centric. The splash page showed CSI:NY branding and the pop-up web page showed you current events regarding the CSI:NY Virtual Experience. The Electric Sheep Company has recently released a general purpose OnRez Viewer. One of the differences from the original version is a featured called “The Loop”.

The Loop is a web page formatted for the OnRez viewer that acts as a guide to Second Life. Second Life is such a large place these days, sometimes it seems difficult to find great content. The Loop highlights some of the great content and experiences within SL.

The Loop is not just for the OnRez Viewer. You can check it out in any browser and subscribe to the RSS feed. Do you have great content you think should be featured in The Loop? Drop us a line here.

I love street art. I have been reading Marc Schiller’s Wooster Collective long before I had met him. New York based artist, WK, is one of the many talented artists that have been featured on the Wooster Collective.

I was pleased to come across this post titled, Virtual WK, this week. An astute Wooster Collective reader submitted the following:

“so i hurt my knee a few months ago and i couldnt do much other than get on the dot com. i saw second life in an episode of CSI and decided to check it out after my lady showed me it was actually real. well the other night i was wandering around this place called midian city and looked over to one of the walls.

low and behold, wk interact.”

I love when my various interests come together like that.

Ok, admit it… you don’t want to run into this guy in a dark alley… well you probably don’t want to run into any guy wearing no shirt, a cowboy hat and a speedo in a dark alley (or anywhere).

The widget above and the widget below are part of a social networking project we have been working with the WWE on. Both widgets were created on the yourminis platform which allows you to embed it into facebook, myspace and just about any other website that allows you to embed things.

I really enjoy working with the WWE. They are fun, have a great sense of humor (the widget above is hilarious) and have awesome content. I loved the WWE when I was a kid. I remember crowding into my cousin’s house and watching the first 3 Wrestlemanias. Having been exposed to it again for this project, I’ve fallen back in love with it. I think the entertainment and the execution of their properties is brilliant. These widget promote the Royal Rumble. 30 Superstars enter the ring and only 1 is left standing. The winner gets a shot at the WWE World Champion during Wrestlemania.

Click on and play with these widgets and let me know what your WWE Superstar looks like. While your at it, rate the DailyGraze Superstar above and help me become the top Superstar on the Internet!

Recently, many of my fellow Sheep have been thinking about more advanced collaboration tools for virtual worlds. Collaboration tools consistently rise to the top of the most important applications for the Metaverse during our brainstorming sessions. Some of us have been looking at Forterra Systems for collaboration, while Becky and I have done some initial design work on meeting tools for Second Life. On that note, I read two interesting things about meeting and collaborations in virtual worlds today. First is Trevor Smith’s post, Events Around Events, on the Transmutable blog. Transmutable has built Tomorrow Space, a web-based virtual meeting and collaboration space. Tomorrow Space is built on the Ogoglio technology which seems to be shaping up nicely. Tomorrow Space allows you to rent a meeting space on the web for $5.99/day.

I then stumbled upon Professor Piet Hut’s paper titled Virtual Laboratories and Virtual Worlds by way of UgoTrade. Professor Hut documents his experiences using Qwaq as a meeting and collaboration space. Hut notes:

“I realized how different this type of medium of communication is from anything I had tried before, whether telephone or email or instant messaging or shared screens. There was a sense of presence together with others that was far more powerful and engaging than I had expected. I quickly realized the great potential of these worlds for remote collaboration on research projects.”

I recommend reading Virtual Laboratories and Virtual Worlds to anyone interested in virtual collaboration. I also recommend checking out Tomorrow Spaces, to get an (easy to use) peak at the direction your future conference calls are heading.

There was quite a buzz in the Second Life blogosphere in October about the 400+ sims The Electric Sheep Company and CBS had available on the Second Life Grid for the CSI:NY Virtual Experience. There was also a lot of speculation on what it meant when we initially cut the number of sims to 200. What wasn’t well covered was Second Life and the Slashdot Effect.

Load balancing in Second Life is an expensive and sometimes complicated effort. Sims are static and persistent. They run on the servers regardless of the number of resident visiting them and it takes significant lead time to replicate and spin up a new sim. There is no load-balancing, so users have to study the map to find an available sim that is not filled to capacity. ESC included a load-balancing solution into the CSI:NY version of the OnRez Viewer, effectively placing new users on available sims. However, determining the total number of sims remains a manual process.

In essence, this means if you are going to have heavy promotion of an SL project, you want to make sure you have many more sims than you expect to need. We have seen the demand that 30-second spots have created for the Virtual MTV properties and The L Word in Second Life, so we were prepared for the spots on CSI:NY. You have to bite the bullet and over-allocate sims for the project because the most frustrating user experience is not being able to get into the world at all! This is the Slashdot effect at work. Many more people will attempt to access the world during the first week of promotion than the second. The numbers drop as time goes on but the long-tail remains. There are still people registering for CSI:NY in SL each day.

The load-balancing exercise begins again in February. The episode is scheduled to air again on 2/27/08, and the project team will make sure there are enough sims to satisfy the renewed demand… Slashdot effect and all.

These load balancing issues have long been solved by the web community by dynamically allocating new servers on demand and using load balancing software to direct users to a server with capacity. This capability is going to be necessary to create a cost effective Metaverse with a great end-user experience. With the continued progress of OpenSim and the eventual open sourcing of the Second Life grid architecture, I am looking forward to this getting solved.